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

it would be a condition for the existence of the agent itself, and therefore
every agent would be a body. ;
All this the Ash’arites neither admit nor deny. But when the philosophers
tell them that an essence to which such an attribute is ascribed must be a
body, they answer: `Such an attribute is ascribed by you to the soul and
yet, according to you, the soul is not a body. ‘ This is the limit to which
dialectical arguments in this question can be carried. But the
demonstrations are in the works of the ancients which they wrote about
this science, and especially in the books of Aristotle, not in the statements
of Avicenna about this problem and of other thinkers belonging to Islam, if
anything is to be found in them on this question. For their metaphysical
theories are pure presumptions, since they proceed from common, not
particular, notions, i. e. notions which are extraneous to the nature of the
inquiry.
And as to Ghazali’s words:
I say:
The series of efficient causes comes to an end for the
attribute at the same time as for the essence, since the
attribute has an agent no more than the essence has, still
the essence provided with this attribute does not cease to
exist, although neither itself nor its attribute has a cause.
This is a statement which is not accepted by their opponents, the
philosophers; on the contrary, they affirm that it is a condition of the First
Agent that it should not receive an attribute, because reception indicates
matter and it is therefore not possible to assume as the final term of the
causal series an agent of any description whatsoever, but only an agent
which has absolutely no agent, and to which no attribute-from which it
would follow that it had an agent-can be ascribed. For the assumption of
the existence of an attribute of the First Agent existing in a receptive
cause which would be a condition for its existence is thought by the
philosophers to be impossible. Indeed, anything for the existence of which
there is a condition can only be connected with this condition through an
external cause, for a thing cannot itself be the cause of its connexion with
the condition of its existence, just as it cannot be the cause of its own
existence. For the conditioned, if it were not connected with its condition,
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