  As we have already seen, following a Plotinian notion of divine transcendence alongside an Aristotelian sense of God as a fully actualized Intellect, Maimonides and his Islamic predecessors and contemporaries describe God as an absolutely pure and undivided unity, and as a perfected, fully actualized Intellect (in this latter way prima facie deviating from Plotinus’ own sense of God as “above being” and “beyond intellect”). The notion of God as Intellect, rooted in Aristotle's own works, contrasts intellects which are less perfected with those which are more (or, in the case of God, fully) perfected in terms of lesser and greater degrees of actuality: while a lesser intellect is characterized at any given time by some degree of not-yet-actualized-potentiality (which is to say, it doesn't yet know everything), the intellect of God alone—being in a constant and unchanging state of complete knowledge—is described as being entirely devoid of unactualized potencies, residing always in a state of pure actualization.