He, then, is not in need of any of the four causes.
The Status of His Exalted Attributes as Necessary in Existence
As for His very attributes, they have no agent, no efficient cause, no final cause, and no formal cause. Hence they are necessary in existence—“Necessary Existent” in the strict sense—if that expression is confined to any of these meanings.
If, however, “Necessary Existent” is taken more broadly so as to include whatever has no locus in which it subsists, then under that definition the attributes are not necessary; they are contingent, while the Essence entails them and is the locus in which they inhere.
Should someone object, “This would require the Essence to be both agent and recipient, and that is impossible,” we answer: both premises are unfounded. The fact that the Essence entails an attribute that subsists in it does not entail that the Essence brings that attribute into being. Indeed, it is impossible for the essence of a contingent thing to be the efficient cause of an attribute inseparable from it—so how could that be said of the Lord of all worlds? It is impossible that the Lord be the producer of what is inseparable from Him, even were it something distinct from Him like the celestial sphere; how then could He be the producer of an attribute inherently bound to Him?
If they insist on calling this entailment “action” and claim that in this respect He is an agent, we reply: we do not concede that one and the same thing cannot be both agent and recipient in this or any other respect.
Should they invoke their familiar argument against composition, they cannot use it as a premise within the very proof, for that would be sheer question-begging—employing the point at issue as evidence for itself under another guise. When they deny composition in the Necessary Existent on the basis of premises that include “The One cannot be both agent and recipient,” and then ground that premise on the assertion that the Necessary is uncompounded, they make each claim depend on the other; thus neither is actually established.
Moreover, the proof that establishes the Necessary Existent simultaneously establishes an Agent, an Originator of all contingent beings. Such an Originator cannot be a mere attribute inhering in something else, for in that case the subject endowed with the attribute—not the attribute itself—would be the true agent. Therefore the Necessary Existent attested by His signs is not