—then, according to that convention, the soul would indeed be deemed a “body.”

[The Purpose of Using the Soul as an Analogy]

The point is that the soul, while it exists—living, knowledgeable, capable, hearing, seeing; rising and descending, going and coming, and the like—remains beyond the intellect’s ability to describe its manner of being or to define its reality. People have never witnessed anything comparable to it, and the essence of a thing can be grasped only by seeing it directly or by seeing something of its kind. If, therefore, the soul possesses these attributes without resembling the created entities we observe, then the Creator is even more deserving of being wholly distinct from His creation while still possessing the names and attributes that are His due. Indeed, rational minds are even less able to delimit or describe Him than they are to delimit or describe the soul.

Thus, if one who denies the soul’s attributes is deemed a stubborn negator, and one who likens it to what he observes among created things is deemed ignorant—attributing to it a form it does not have—while it