The Relationship between God's Negative Attributes with His Expressibility in Avicenna and Allamah Helli's Thought

Several methods have long been proposed to talk about divine attributes, which are divided into two general negative and affirmative ones, each with its own subsets subdivisions. For example, negative method is divided into negation- silence method, negative-imperative method, and negative- affirmative method. The present paper seeks to review negative-affirmative method and its relationship with God's expressibility, because scholars have proposed different interpretations and meanings for the method, some of which contradict with God's inexpressibility. The question is what is Allamah Helli and Avicenna's view about the meaning of negative-affirmative method and its relationship with God's inexpressibility? In terms of divine essence and attributes, Avicenna restores God's necessary attributes to negations and relation and does not accept inexpressibility of divine attributes and essence. Allamah Helli believes in a certain restoration from affirmative to negative, recognizes affirmative attributes through negating their opposites, and restricts expressibility in attributes to their conditionality. Reviewing different meanings of negative-affirmative method from the view of such scholars as Avicenna and Allamah Helli, the paper explains the former's general view which holds that all divine attributes restore to negation and relation.