He then said, “By you I take, by you I give; through you comes reward, and upon you is punishment.” In this way He assigned to it those four categories.

According to them, it is from the Intellect that the whole of the upper and lower worlds has emanated. Yet the word “intellect” in the ḥadith—whether that report be authentic or weak—means, in the parlance of the prophets and messengers, the human intellect: an accidental quality inhering in a person, a property that subsists in him, not an autonomous substance that exists on its own.

By contrast, in the language of these philosophers the intellect is a self-subsisting substance. As for the “celestial soul,” they hold two opinions about it: most of them say it is an accident resident in the celestial sphere, while others—among them Ibn Sīnā—maintain that it is itself an independent substance. A full discussion of these matters is laid out elsewhere.

What concerns us here is that these Christians claim there is a subtle substance distinct from the gross one, illustrating this by the soul, the intellect, and light; yet they have advanced no proof for any of it, nor is there any evidence for it in the revealed scriptures. Neither the celestial soul nor the ten intellects is affirmed by any divine book.