Before Essence and Existence

  1. 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 becamespecified 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 Plotiniannous .

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 isidentical 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. 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 isidentical 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.