A believer in simple being holds that a subject must be...

A believer in simple being holds that a subject must be distinct from its predicate, as al-Kindi is distinct from his rationality. The insight behind the notion of being as unlimited is that if the subject is identical with the predicate, then predication need not imply multiplicity. In the divine case, we may say that "God is just" and "God is wise," but He is not three things (justice, wisdom, and the subject of justice and wisdom). Rather, God, His justice, and His wisdom are all identical.

God will still be simple, if "simple" means not multiple, but He will not be simple in the stricter sense of lacking all attributes. [End Page 305] However, there are good reasons for supposing that al-Kindi, as well as the authors of the Neoplatonic translations we have considered, usually supposed that a subject must be distinct from its predicate, so that being must lack all predicates if it is to be simple.

This comes out most obviously in the final surviving section of FP, where al-Kindi argues at length that nothing can be predicated of God. After systematically showing that every kind of predicate is incompatible with the divine unity, he concludes: "therefore [God] is only and purely unity ( wahda faqat mahd ), I mean nothing other than unity" (FP 160.16-17 [RJ 95.13-14]).

Similarly, the most explicit statement on divine predication in the Arabic Neoplatonic texts is the thoroughly negative one in Liber de Causis , Proposition 5. Further consideration of passage (C) above yields the same result. Here al-Kindi not only says that being is the subject of predication, but also that the predicate can change while the subject remains. This makes clear that being, the subject, is not identical to the predicate.

Rather, we saw that as "the first bearer of predication" being in itself lacks predicates, after the fashion of Aristotelian matter. Likewise, passage (A) from the Liber de Causis envisions "only being" as the result of removing predicates, not as a richer principle that implicitly contains or is identical to all predicates.

Thus the passages considered so far presuppose that subject and predicate are distinct, and draw the conclusion that being (in the case of both God and created things) is simple in the sense of lacking attributes. Yet we will now see that al-Kindi does have a notion of being that includes complexity and attributes. This "complex" being is appropriate only to created things, and presupposes "simple" being. Previous…