Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

I say:
separate from matter is possible in its essence and
necessary of existence through another, and the possibility
of non-existence is a kind of badness and imperfection, and
nothing is absolutely free from badness except the First, and
He is the absolute good and He possesses the utmost
splendour and beauty; further, He is the beloved, whether
anyone else loves Him or not, as He is the knower and the
known, whether anyone else knows Him or not. And all
these concepts refer to His essence and to His perception
and to His knowledge of His essence, and the knowledge of
His essence is His very essence, for He is pure intellect, and
all this leads back to one single notion.
This is the way to set forth their doctrine, and these
things can be divided into that which may be believed (but
we shall show that according to their own principles they
must regard it as untrue) and into that which may not be
believed (and we shall show its falsehood). We shall now
return to the five classes of plurality and to their claim to
deny them, and shall show their inability to establish their
proof, and shall treat each question separately.
The greater part of what he mentions in his description of the
philosophical theories about God as being one, notwithstanding the
plurality of attributes ascribed to Him, he has stated accurately, and we
shall not argue with him about it, with the exception of his statement that
to Him the designation of ‘intellect’ is a negation; for this is not true-on the
contrary it is the most special appellation for His essence according to the
Peripatetics, in contrast to Plato’s opinion that the intellect is not the First
Principle and that intellect cannot be attributed to the First Principle? Nor
is his statement that in the separate intellects there is potency, nonexistence,
and badness a philosophical theory. But we shall now return to
his refutations in these five questions.
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