Al-Hikmat al-muta'aliyyah fi al-asfar al-arba'ah, vol. 6

One of the extremely important issues in theology and divine philosophy is the relation between God's Attributes and His Pure Essence. As it is well-known, the Ash'arites believed that God's Attributes are added to His Essence, while the Mu'tazilites and Shi'ites believed that they are the same as His Essence.

One who says that God's Attributes are identical with His Pure Essence does not really mean that He has no attributes and is not, for example, the Knower and the Omnipotent. Rather, he means that God enjoys certain attributes; however, they are not different and inseparable from His Essence; they are identical with His Essence in terms of aspect, mode, and value.

As mentioned above, there is only one reality that has various manifestations and appearances, and we abstract them from this reality through mental deliberation and speculation. Then we call each of them an attribute, and what from which it has been abstracted essence. This differentiation and abstraction is only the job of the mind, which inevitably considers the essential and attributional to be separate from each other. Nevertheless, these attributes are the manifestations of the same essence, and these characteristics are clearly nothing but the characteristics and manifestations of the same essence that has appeared in this way.

The sixth volume of al-Asfar entails the third journey of the four-fold journeys and consists of six mawqifs about the relation between the Essence and Attributes of God. This book has been published with the edition, research, and Introduction by Dr. Ahmad Ahmadi under the supervision of Professor Seyyed Mohammed Khamenei, along with an index of cited verses, hadiths, poems, etc., in 631 pages by the Sadra Islamic Philosophy Institute.