rather than its negation.

We have taken this exhaustive division as an example in the question of the Beatific Vision, for that issue is among the most intricate of rational problems and the least amenable to a limited division—yet even there it is possible to confine the alternatives. How much easier, then, in matters less complex.

Accordingly, should one argue by analogy, saying: “Existing created beings can be seen; therefore the Creator is even more entitled to the possibility of being seen, for the factor that validates vision in creatures is a property shared by both Creator and creature and is not exclusive to the creature. Since this common property necessitates the soundness of vision, the soundness of vision with respect to the Creator is established.”

That shared validating property, however, is not to be taken as mere existence, as al-Ashʿarī and those who follow him—such as Qāḍī Abū Bakr and a group of Ḥanbalīs and others, including Qāḍī Abū Yaʿlā—maintain. Rather, it should be identified as self-subsistence, in line with Ibn Kullāb and other affirmers of the Vision among the Ḥanbalīs and the like, such as Abū al-Ḥasan al-Zāghūnī; or else one may leave the validating factor unspecified, content simply to posit some undetermined common ground.