The fifty-fifth point:

Those who affirm the pre-eternity of letters have put forward a view that is closer to sound reason than the claim of the advocates of one single eternal meaning—said to be both command and information. They state:

Sequencing and succession are of two kinds.

1. An existential, temporal ordering, like the relation of a son to his father or of today to yesterday; there is no doubt that such an order is impossible for the Eternal, Pre-existent One.

2. A real, essential ordering that is not temporal, such as the ordering of attributes in relation to the essence, of knowledge in relation to life, or of an effect in relation to the concurrent cause—if one allows for that. In these instances we grasp (1) an order, priority, and posteriority that belong to the very nature of the things, not to their existence in time.

This is comparable to imagining a mushaf (2) whose final section was written before its opening; one still knows that the beginning of a surah is essentially prior to its end, even though it was penned later.

They therefore contend that God’s speech—its letters as well as its meanings—is ordered in this essential manner, not by temporal order as occurs when reciters read aloud, arranging both meanings and words in time; and such ordering does not conflict with His pre-eternity.

It is indubitable that affirming a plurality of meanings corresponding to the plurality of letters, subjecting both to the same ruling, and asserting their pre-eternity in this fashion is closer to reason than declaring different realities to be one single meaning and then, by arbitrary fiat, differentiating between meaning and letter. For that would combine two disparate things by making them (3) one, while at the same time separating two things in respect of what they share.