ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Before Essence and Existence An Objection: Unlimited Being It might be objected that I am ascribing a remarkably impoverished view of God and being to al-Kindi. Why think, this objector might say, that simple being has to exclude attributes, instead of containing them all implicitly?

We might suppose that, on the contrary, God is the fullness of Being, containing all things as a unity within Himself, so that in a sense He has all attributes rather than none. His proper effect would still be created being, which like God would virtually contain all predicates until it became specified as a certain sort of thing.

Perhaps, then, we should talk of God as "unlimited" being rather than "simple" being: as the Principle and Cause of all things, God would in fact have all the attributes as a simultaneous unity, much in the manner of Plotinian nous . Our imaginary objector would find support in the Neoplatonic paraphrases cited above.

The Arabic Plotinus entertains the notion that God must possess the same attributes as His effects, but in a more eminent way, rather than excluding all attributes.33 In a discussion of God as cause of the virtues, the author also suggests that God's being is identical with the divine attributes: [End Page 304] ThA IX.71 [B 130.9-10]: The virtues are in the First Cause in the manner of a cause.

Not that it is in the position of a receptacle for the virtues; rather its entirety is a being ( anniyya ) that is all the virtues. Here the emphasis on God's not being a "receptacle" ( wi'a ') for the virtues is intended to stress that there is no distinction between God and the virtues.

Even prior to al-Kindi's translation circle, a similar position was taken by the Kalam thinker Abu 'l-Hudhayl, who is said to have claimed that "[God] is knowing in an act of knowing that is He and is powerful in a power of efficient causality that is He and is living in a life that is He."34 We can illustrate the difference between "simple" and "unlimited" being by distinguishing two ways in which a subject can relate to its predicate.

Take, for example, the statements "al-Kindi is rational" and "al-Kindi is the first Arabic philosopher." In the former, the subject and predicate are distinct, so that al-Kindi is not the same thing as his rationality, whereas in the latter the subject is being identified with the predicate.35 If we apply this to the case of God we have the difference between simple and unlimited being.