Maqrizi refers to the Mu`tazilites as seizing with avidity on the books of the philosophers, and certainly now new difficulties begin to appear as well as the two great problems which had been prominent at the beginning of the second century--the eternity of the Qur´an and the question of free will. The new difficulties were especially concerned with the qualities of God and, later, with the Qur´anic promise of the beatific vision. The problem of the qualities of God is very closely parallel to the earlier difficulty as to the eternity of the Qur´an, indeed it appears as an enlargement of it. Christian theologians educated in the methods of Greek philosophy had already debated this matter, and in their hands it had taken the form of the question, “how many, and what, attributes are compatible with the unity of God?” If God’s wisdom, whether expressed in the Qur´an or not expressed, were eternal there was something which God possessed, and consequently something other than God which was equal to him in eternity and was not created by him, so that it could not be said that God was alone and that all other things proceeded from him as their cause as the eternal quality always was side by side with God, and so Wasil b. `Ata declared “he who affirms an eternal quality beside God, affirms two gods.” But this applies equally to all qualities, justice, mercy, etc., and, as was suggested by the study of Aristotle, all the categories, all that could be predicated of God as subject, were either created by God and so were not essential and eternal attributes, or else were external things equal with God.