nor, in their view, is there any punishment external to the soul itself, and human beings will not rise from their graves. For them, supplication is nothing but the soul’s manipulation of the world’s prime matter; the recompense for righteous deeds is the state of rectitude that accrues to the soul; and the bliss experienced after death is simply the soul’s delight in the knowledge it has acquired. Yet their assertions teem with flaws, for they claim that man’s perfection lies in becoming a purely intelligible being, parallel to the existing cosmos, within whom the entire order of being is mirrored exactly as it is.

Next, they identify this with knowledge of “absolute being,” even though the absolute exists only in minds, not in external reality. They maintain that “first philosophy” is the science of being and its concomitants, so they divide being into Necessary and Possible, Substance and Accident, with substance further classified into five kinds and accident into nine kinds, and so forth. All of this concerns abstract universals that have no existence outside the intellect; it is not knowledge of the concrete realities that exist in the external world. None of it yields knowledge of God, His angels, or His prophets—indeed, not even of His heavens and His earth—for they regard information about these as belonging to natural philosophy, not to metaphysics.

They have thus gone astray on several fronts, among them their notion that the soul reaches perfection through knowledge alone and that the prescribed acts of worship serve only to refine character and train the soul so it may be ready for knowledge. This is categorically false, for the soul possesses two faculties: a cognitive faculty and a practical faculty—the capacity for perception, understanding, and beneficence, and the capacity for love, will, aspiration, and action. The soul’s perfection lies not merely in knowing its Lord, but in