and to draw aspirations and thoughts toward itself is that whose subject is the most exalted of subjects and whose aim is the noblest of aims. It is the foundation to which the religious sciences refer and on which divinely ordained laws rest. Upon it depend the world’s well-being and order, the loosening and binding of its affairs. The paths leading to it yield certainty, and the ways guiding toward it are conclusive.

This is the discipline known as dialectical theology, which examines the essence of the Necessary Existent, His attributes and acts, and all that pertains to Him. Since, moreover, we had established its foundations, refined its chapters, comprehended its meanings, clarified its structure, revealed its depths, uncovered its secrets, outstripped the earliest scholars in this field, attained the furthest reaches of the thought of earlier and later scholars, extracted from it the quintessence of intellectual insight, and separated the husk from the kernel, some of my companions asked me