 Ibn ‘Arabî does in fact refer to God as a thing in one passage of an early work, and this has caught the attention of several observers, because he mentions there “the third thing”, a notion that seems to throw light on his whole approach (Takeshita 1982, Bashier 2004). At first he seems to be talking in the standard Avicennan language of necessity and possibility, but then he brings up the notion of barzakh to explain how these two can be interrelated. Things, he says, can be divided into three sorts. The first sort is qualified by wujûd in its very essence, and this is the Necessary Being, God, who is nondelimited in existence (mutlaq al-wujûd) and who bestows existence on all things. The second sort is existent (mawjûd) through God, namely delimited existence (al-wujûd al-muqayyad), which is the cosmos, everything other than God. “As for the Third Thing”, he writes: