Theology Centered on the Necessity by Essence: The Second Stage of the Way of Truthful Ones

Farabi, for the first time, spoke of the possibility to recognize God’s epithets and actions by contemplating on the necessity of existence and its requirements. Ibn Sina and, later, Mulla Sadra dealt with the method noted by Farabi with a more comprehensive and more precise look, calling it the “way of the truthful ones”. This method, as defined by Ibn Sina and Mulla Sadra, is divided into two stages. The first stage is proving the Necessary Being by Essence through an existence-centered argument, called the argument of the truthful ones. The second stage is recognizing God’s epithets and actions by contemplating on His being Necessary in Essence and its requirements that we have called, here, “theology centered on the necessity by essence”. In the present article, we have organized the second stage in five steps as follows: Unity, Oneness, general look at God’s epithets, identifying the instances of epithets, and the nature of God’s action. We, then, have shown the centrality of “necessity of existence” in the five axes to prove the possibility of this type of theology.