Abstract

Having provided a critique of Asha’rite and Mu’tazilite approaches to God’s attributes, philosophical and theological literature usually claim that Shiite philosophers and theologians regard attributes of perfection as equal to God’s necessary divine essence. A study of the works written by Shiite thinkers, however, indicates considerable difference in the way the unity among the attributes and the essence is regarded. One of such theories pertains to “the conceptual sequence of God’s true attributes,” which has been presented quite explicitly and without a shadow of a doubt by a few authorities in the field such as Avicenna and Sheikh Ahsaee. Having briefly studied the renowned theory of “the unity of attributes and the essence” as seen by Shiite theologians as well as the conceptual and implicational basics involved, this article shall first analyze the factors hindering the acceptance of such points of view by Avicenna and Sheikh Ahsaee and then examines the statements made by these two thinkers in regard to the absence of conceptual differences between God’s essential attributes. Two presumptions of the people holding the theory are as follows: one is the more general quality of the concept "attribute" indistinction to the concept of accident which distinguishes the believers from those believing in negating the attributes, and the second is the principle of the impossibility of abstractness of the different concepts from the simple truth preventing the adoption of the conceptual distinction of the attributes in the realm of divine nature.