that is beyond their understanding without its becoming a source of trial for some of them.” For this reason, someone asked Zirr ibn Hubaysh about Ibn Masʿūd’s account describing Gabriel as having six hundred wings, but he would not relate it to him, fearing that his mind could not bear it and he would therefore reject it. Such cases are common among human beings: their powers of perception are too weak to grasp something great and majestic—not because conception and imagination cannot accommodate such things, but because of a greatness the like of which they are unaccustomed to conceiving.

The inability of created beings to see the Lord in this world belongs to this category: it is not because seeing Him is impossible, [but] because they lack the capacity in this life. It is not, however, the case that human beings, through their faculties of conception and imagination, reject the possibility that one created body differs from another and that the two cannot be alike. How, then, could they reject, through conception and imagination, the possibility that the Creator is unlike creation, even though conception and imagination cannot conceive of anything existent except as a body or something subsisting in a body?

The forty-fifth argument:

Bodies have something in common