The difference is that in the Arabic Plotinus...

The difference is that in the Arabic Plotinus, pure being is not the outcome of a thought experiment, but is God Himself, the First Originator who is equated with Plotinus's One and hence is also said to be the cause of Intellect.

That the author of the Plotinian paraphrase should call God "being alone" has occasioned comment elsewhere.18 The historical and philosophical importance of the claim is heightened by the fact that it is contrary to Plotinus's statements that the One is, in the words of Plato's Republic , epekeina tês ousias , "beyond being."19 Now, it is tempting to take the claim that God is being alone or "being itself" as tantamount to the claim that God is pure actuality, as Aristotle holds in the Metaphysics .

Such later medieval writers as Ibn Sina and Thomas Aquinas explicitly take this over from Aristotle. Nor is such an understanding of God as actuality foreign to the Arabic Plotinus, since we find there a remarkable passage where the author writes that God "is the thing existing truly in act.

Nay rather, He is pure act" ( huwa al-shay' al-ka'in bi-'l-fi'l haqqan, bal huwa al-fi'l al-mahd ).20 While this passage does most likely represent an Aristotelian influence on the Plotinus paraphrase, it is an isolated example of that influence.

(The thought that God is actuality may also account for al-Kindi's frequent descriptions of God as an "Agent" or the "First Agent."21 ) It is much more frequent to find the paraphrase calling God "being alone" because of His lack of attributes.22 Thus when the author says in passage (B) and elsewhere that God is anniyya faqat , he seems above all to have in mind God's absolute simplicity, and His resulting lack of attributes.

It is likely that this concern with simplicity and the exclusion of attributes is related to contemporaneous debates over divine attributes (si fat ), which already raged in the ninth century, when the Arabic Plotinus was composed.23 It is significant for our understanding of passage (A) that we find the same conception of God in the Liber de Causis .

In Proposition 4, the author of that paraphrase writes that God is "the pure being, the One, the True, in whom there is no multiplicity in any way" ( al-anniyya mahda, al-wahid, al-haqq, alladhilaysa fihi [End Page 301] kathra min al-jihat al-ashkhas ). As in the Arabic Plotinus, God is nothing but being, because He is simple.