In this chapter, Maimonides explains to the reader that philosophers (Huseyin Atay’s Arabic has ahl al-ilm أهل العلم) often have to prove things that would be manifestly obvious to people “if man had been left in his primitive state”. But due to the corrupting influence of false notions, it is sometimes necessary to give proofs for these self-evident truths. As an example, he states that Aristotle found it necessary to give a proof even for the existence of motion.

“To the same class belongs the rejection of essential attributes in reference to God (nafi al-sifaat al-zatiyah ‘an Allah ta’aala نفي الصفات الذاتية عن الله تعالى),” he says. There are two possibilities for attributes:

  • either it is inherent in the object to which it is ascribed” — in which case, would denote the essence of the object.
    • this could either be a tautology, e.g., “man is man”
    • or this could be an explanation of a name, e.g., “man is a speaking animal”.
  • or it is not inherent in the object, in which case it is something different from the object described; in this case it is an accident (‘ard عرض).

According to Maimonides, there is no getting away from the fact that assigning attributes to God means admitting accidents: something “superadded to the essence”. Further, he claims that the logical consequence of considering God to have multiplee attributes is to claim “the existence of many eternal beings”. But his strict monotheism stipulates that

There cannot be any belief in the unity of God except by admitting that He is one simple substance, without any composition or plurality of elements: one from whatever side you view it, and by whatever test you examine it: not divisible into two parts in any way and by any cause, nor capable of any form of plurality either objectively or subjectively…

The remainder of the chapter is a scathing critique of those who would get out of this conundrum by claiming that “the attributes of God are neither His essence nor anything extraneous to His essence”. This is a logical impossibility, and Maimonides is scornful of those who wouuld hold this position (presumably in order to justify their belief in attributes): “Such things are only said; they exist only in words, not in thought, much less in reality … Or is there a mean between existence and non-existence, or between the identity and non-identity of two things?”

His diagnosis of why people fall into this rather grave doctrinal error is once again the tendency to literally interpret Scripture, to which people are inclined because their imagination leads them astray. To admit that God is “one simple substance” (the correct theological position) would be to admit the existence of something that no human has ever actually encountered. And because “every existing material thing is necessarily imagined as a certain substance possessing several attributes”, people find it hard to grasp the idea of a truly Indivisible and Unitary God. And since “the torah speaks in the language of Man”, “The adherence to the literal sense of the text of Holy Writ is the source of all this error”.