“…the delight of gazing upon Your Face and the longing to meet You, without harmful adversity or misguiding trial.” Reported by al-Nasāʾī and others.

The point, then, is that the soul does not reach perfection through mere knowledge of God if that knowledge is not accompanied by love for Him, worship of Him, and the like. Indeed, it can never be sound or complete unless it loves God and worships Him.

Moreover, even were one to suppose that its perfection lay in knowledge alone, that knowledge could never be limited to some indeterminate existence and abstract universals that subsist only in the mind. Yet these are precisely the “intellectual objects” that certain philosophers regard as the soul’s perfection—especially Ibn Sīnā and his followers, who claim that particular, concrete entities can only be apprehended by a body or by a power residing in a body. Since, in their view, the soul is not such a power, it cannot apprehend any of the particulars that exist outside the mind. On this basis they deny that the Creator, exalted be He, knows the concrete particulars—what they call “individuals.” For them He knows only an abstract, universal reality, and the same would hold for the soul. It is obvious, however, that external existents are not universals, so knowledge of such undifferentiated universals, stripped of all specification, cannot be knowledge of anything real outside the mind. Such knowledge is therefore not the true knowledge sought as an end in itself; genuine knowledge, the knowledge that must be sought first and foremost, is knowledge of the external realities that subsist in their own right.

Further, the knowledge through which the soul attains perfection must include knowledge of God Himself. Yet these people do not know God; they know only a formless existence that subsists in the intellect alone, not in external reality. For that reason they made acts of worship nothing more than a means of refining morals, building their entire scheme upon that premise.