  The three elements of this approach existed before Crescas in the writings of different thinkers, but no one had put them all together. In Crescas’s opinion, humans cannot understand the true essence of God, and nor can they speak of him but negatively (like the opinion of Maimonides). But according to Crescas, there is another kind of attribute: those that are relative to the divine essence. These attributes do not describe the divine essence, but they do describe things that always accompany the divine essence, in much the same way a flame accompanies a live coal. These attributes have the same essence as human attributes, but they are infinite in both number and strength.  With this position Crescas pulls together the Aristotelian anti-Maimonidean opinion of Gersonides, Duns Scotus’s Franciscan critique of Aquinas’s understanding of Aristotle, and the Neo-Platonic opinion of Abner in his formulation of a new anti-Aristotelian critique of Maimonides (Sadik 2011).