If they say:
(Those attributes and judgments do not belong to the category of acts. We maintain (1) the necessity of prior nonexistence only in the case of acts.
We reply: Matters of such magnitude cannot be made to rest on mere terminology. Grant that whatever is not preceded by nonexistence is not called an act. Nevertheless, it has been established that whatever, considered in itself, is possible in existence may derive from an efficient cause that exists eternally alongside its effect. Once this is intelligible, one cannot claim that it is impossible in certain instances—unless, of course, one merely refuses to apply the term “act”; but that yields no significant benefit.) (2)
It may be said:
This argument may be answered (3) in several ways:
First: His statement, “That which is necessarily existent in itself cannot be more than one”—[if] (4) what he means is that there cannot be more than one God, one Lord, one Creator, one object of worship, one Living One, one Self-Sustaining One, one Eternal Refuge, one self-subsistent being, or the like—then this is correct.
But that does not entail that He has no attributes inseparable from His essence, without which His essence cannot be realized; nor that the Necessary Existent should not be (5) that very essence which necessarily entails those attributes. What is meant by His being necessarily existent is that He exists in Himself and that nonexistence is impossible for Him in every respect. He has no agent, nor anything whatsoever termed an efficient cause. Accordingly, His attributes are included in what this designation denotes; they are not intrinsically possible in existence, for they are