Affirmative attributes can be …

  1. a definition
  2. part of a definition
  3. something different from its true eseence (kharij ‘an haqiqatih خارج عن حقيقته), i.e., a quality. These can be of four kinds:
    1. intellectual or moral qualities
    2. physical qualities
    3. passive qualities or emotions
    4. qualities resulting from quantity
  4. express the relation of that object to something else
  5. describe existent actions of the object

For each of these five possibilities, Maimonides painstakingly examines whether or not we can admit attributes of that kind to God. His judgements are:

  1. “it is a well-known principle, received by all the philosophers who are precise in their statements (Atay has النظار المحصلين), that no definition can be given of God.”
  2. “all agree that this kind of description is inappropriate in reference to God; for if we were to speak of a portion of His essence, we hsould consider His essence to be a compound.
  3. According to Maimonides, qualities of this kind are not admissible for God because “quality, in its most general sense, is an accident. If God could be described in this way, He would be the substratum of accidents (mahall al-a’rad محل الأعراض)”. He then examines each of the four kinds of qualities:
    1. intellectual or moral qualities: e.g., someone could be described by their profession (e.g., carpenter) or by their characteristics (‘one who shrinks from sin’). These qualities may be great or small, good or bad; Maimonides is not prepared to admit any of them whatsover. Significantly, the example he gives here includes one of the 99 names of God in Islam: “… nor does it make a difference whether we say ‘sin-fearing’ (al-‘afif العفيف) or ‘merciful’ (al-raheem الرحيم)”
    2. God is not corporeal, so physical qualities are out of the question.
    3. God “is not affected by external influences, and therefore does not possess any quality resulting from emotion”.
    4. God is not a quantity, so he cannot have qualities like ‘long’, ‘short’, ‘large’, ‘small’, etc.
  4. Relational attributes (to time, to space, or to some other entity) seem, at first to be more readily admissable for God than do the preceding attributes, because these “do not necessarily imply plurality or change in the essence of the object described”; Person A could be the father of person B and the friend of person C, and this does not change the unity of person A. However, Maimonides is not willing to admit these sorts of attributes for God, either. “It is quite clear that there is no relation between God and time or space (al-zaman wal-makan الزمان والمكان)”.
    • Relation to time is inadmissible because “time is an accident connected with motion”, and he has already established that for God there is no motion, since only material bodies are subject to motion;
    • relation to space is inadissible because, again, only material bodies take up space and God is not material. This much is clear without much exposition,
    • “but what we have to investigate and to examine is this: whether some real relation exists between God and any of the substances created by Him, by which He could be described? (هل بينه تعالى و بين شيء من مخلوقاته من الجواهر نسبة ما حقيقية فيوصف بها ؟)” Clearly, for Maimonides the important question is whether God admits any description at all, and attributes of the fourth kind seem at first glance to be the most likely candidates for being the basis of a description of God, i.e., perhaps we can describe God using his relationship to the created beings? According to Maimonides, this might seem plausible but the answer is still no; because “God has absolute existence, while all other beings have only possible existence (هو تعالى واجب الوجود و ما سواه ممكن الوجود), as we shall show”. He then gives several examples to explain this point.
      • “it is impossible to imagine a relation between intellect and sight, although, as we believe, the same kind of existence is common to both [i.e., possible/contingent existence]. How, then, could a relation be imagined between any creature and God, who has nothing in common with any other being; for even the term existence is applied to Him and other things, according to our opinion, only by way of pure homonymity”
      • Maimonides sets up a taxonomy of things by using the categories of ‘kind’ and ‘class’, where ‘kind’ is akin to ‘species’ and ‘class’ akin to ‘genus’. He then states that relations are only possible between two things of the same kind, and if two things belong to the same class but different kinds, then no relation is admissible. The example he gives here is when you compare different intensities of two different colors. Both red and green belong to the same class: colour, but they are different kinds of colors. Hence — says Maimonides — we cannot compare ‘the intensity of this red’ with ‘the intensity of that green’.
      • For things that don’t even share a class; it is clear “even to a man of ordinary Intellect” that no relation can exist between “a hundred cubits and the heat of pepper … or between wisdom and sweetness”, etc. “How, then, could there be any relation between God and His creatures, considering the important difference between them in respect to true existence, the greatest of all differences”.
  5. As long as by ‘actions’ we mean actions that have been performed, not the capacity for actions, Maimonides believes that the fifth kind of attribute can indeed be admitted for God. When we say, e.g., that person A did action B, this is a kind of ‘attribute’ which leaves the essence of the described thing completely unchanged, and therefore, “is appropriate to be employed in describing the Creator”. He is careful to caution, however, that we must not think that there is a plurality of capacities within God from which he does different types of actions; “on the contrary, all the actions of God emanate from His essence”.

Thus, God does not have a plurality of attributes, or any attributes at all; instead, he has (or rather, performs) a plurality of actions which — despite being multifaceted and varied — follow from his unitary essence.