The Principles and Arguments for the Denial of Divine Attributes in the Imāmīte Theology

The denial of Divine Attributes is evidently mentioned in the narrations of Ahl al-Bayt (a) and is accepted by most Imāmīte theologians in Imāmīte theological schools. Nevertheless, this stance is today criticized and denied based on philosophical principles – especially those of transcendental theosophy. In this paper, the principles and arguments related to the denial of Divine Attributes are identified and extracted from Imāmīte theological texts of various theological schools. Then, it is shown that this teaching has its specific rational and theological principles. These principles and arguments are the doctrine of the unity of divine essence (with three readings, namely negation of plurality, negation of composition, and negation of similarity), unity of description and attribute, impossibility of describing the essence, impossibility of limitation, createdness of the attribute and the attributed, and the doctrine of creation. In line with what we said, numerous narrations about the denial of attributes support this viewpoint.