Know that the negative attributes of God are the true attributes: they do not include any incorrect notions or any deficiency whatever in reference to God, while positive attributes imply polytheism (shirk شرك), and are inadequate …

Maimonides acknowledges that negative attributes are similar to positive attributes in the sense that “they necessarily circumscribe the object to some extent”. However, he argues that they are different from positive attributes because “the positive attributes … describe a portion of what we desire to know: either some part of its essence or some of its accidents; the negative attributes do not tell us what the essence of something is, except indirectly”.

Attributes are the means by which we grasp the essence of something. But since God doesn’t have an essence the way other things do — his essence is identical with his existence — he cannot have any positive attributes. For other things, ‘existence’ is an attribute superadded to their essence; but for the entity that is existence per se, the question of an essence to which attributes are added does not arise at all. Still less does God have a compound essence which could have been made up of constituent elements; and even less is it possible for God to be the locus of accidents. In other words, God is neither mahall al-araad (the locus of accidents محل الأعراض) nor mahall al-ausaf (the locus of attributes محل الأوصاف).

The negative attributes, however, are those which are necessary to direct the mind to the truths which we must believe concerning God; for, on the one hand, they do not imply any plurality, and, on the other, they convey to man the highest possible knowledge of God.

The knowledge of God can therefore be approached through a process of step-by-step elimination;

  1. there is an entity which cannot not exist, i.e., it necessarily exists (this is the Avicennan formula for proving the existence of God, in which a Necessary Being causes existence in other, possible beings)
  2. this being is not like the four elements of sublunary matter (earth, air, fire, water); “we therefore say that it is living, expressing thereby that it is not dead”
  3. this being is not like the stuff of the heavens, either (which in the mediaeval worldview were living, material beings) and so we say it is incorporeal
  4. this being is not like the intellect (al-aql العقل, which in the mediaeval worldview was considered living and immaterial) because unlike the intellect this being does not owe its existence to any cause, and so we call it the first (qadim قديم)
  5. we notice that this entity’s process of causing-being is not like heating process of fire or the illuminating process of the sun; thus, we learn that God is potent, knolwedgeable, and willful (qadir, ‘alim, murid قادر و عالم و مريد), by which we mean that he is not feeble, ignorant, hasty or careless (laysa bi’aajiz wa la jahil wa la zahil wa la muhmil ليس بعاجز و لا جاهل و لا ذاهل و لا مهمل). For each of these negative attributes, Maimonides shows how it leads to specific knolwedge about God.

Maimonides ends this chapter with praise of God in which he starts out with a metaphor:

[God’s] relation to the universe is that of a steersman to a boat;

but he then corrects himself, and adds:

and even this is not a real relation, a real simile, but serves only to convey to us the idea that God rules the universe; that is, that He gives it duration, and preserves its necessary arrangement.

He concedes that, in fact, we can actually say very little about God at all; acknowledging the insufficient-ness of language to truly describe God, he writes:

Praised be He, in whose essence’s contemplation our comprehension and knowledge prove insufficient; in the examination of His works, how they necessarily result from His will, our knowledge proves to be ignorance; and in the endeavor to extol him with attributes, all our attempts at eloquent speech are mere weakness and discounting!

فسبحان من إذا لا حظت العقول ذاته عاد إدراكها تقصيرا و إذا لحظت لزوم أفعاله عن إرادته عاد علمها جهلا و إذا رامت الألسن تعظيمه بأوصاف عادت كل بلاغته عيا و تقصيرا