God’s divinity, they say, is greater and more perfect; for although existence is shared by all beings, the necessary existence is the most complete of all.

This form of shirk is actually worse than the shirk of the pagan Arabs. Those Arabs did associate intermediaries with God and would say, “They are our intercessors with God,” or, “We worship them only so that they may bring us nearer to God.” Yet in their minds divinity still implied worship, humble submission, and love. By contrast, these people—despite their grave association of created things with God—define divinization for us as nothing more than imitating the deity; it is not a matter of loving Him, worshipping Him, calling upon Him, or seeking from Him. Consequently, “gods” are not, in their view, limited to God alone, because imitation works on the principle that the lower imitates the higher, and the higher imitates what is above it, until the chain ends at the ultimate. Hence they call Him “the God of gods.”

For this reason they say: every celestial sphere moves in order to resemble its own intelligence; the orb of the moon moves to imitate the Tenth Intellect, and the ninth sphere moves to imitate the Eighth Intellect, and so on.

Along these lines Aristotle and his followers tried to prove God’s existence. They claimed that the heavens move in order to imitate Him, likening this to the way a beloved stirs the motions of a lover. Yet whereas the lover longs for the beloved’s very essence, the heavens, in their view, only desire to resemble God. It is like the imam whose movements guide those praying behind him, or a leader whose actions set his followers in motion. Through such reasoning they never established that God is the Lord of all worlds who created and originated them, nor that He is the God whom the servant loves, hopes in, and fears.