One group denied that the believers would see their Lord, as was the position of the Jahmiyyah among the Mu‘tazilah and others.
Others affirmed the vision: either the vision described by the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, as affirmed by Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamā‘ah; or a vision they interpreted as an increase in unveiling or knowledge, or as occurring through a sixth sense. Such views were held by Dirār ibn ‘Amr and groups of speculative theologians who claimed to defend Ahl al-Sunnah on the question of the vision, even though what they affirm is of the kind denied by the Mu‘tazilah and the Dirāriyyah. Their disagreement with one another is verbal, whereas their disagreement with Ahl al-Sunnah is substantive. Thus Bishr and others like him interpreted the vision in much the same way as these people.
The point here is that some who affirm the vision denied that the believer would find bliss in the very act of seeing his Lord. They argued that there is no affinity between the temporally originated and the eternal. This was stated by the scholar Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwaynī in al-Risālah al-Nizāmiyyah (The Nizāmiyyah Epistle), and by Abū al-Wafā’ ibn ‘Aqīl in some of his books. It is related that Ibn ‘Aqīl heard a man say:
“I ask You for the delight of looking upon Your Face.”
He replied:
“You there! Suppose that He has a Face: does He have a Face that one can delight in looking upon?”
Abū al-Ma‘ālī stated that Allah creates bliss for them through certain created things, coinciding with the vision. As for finding bliss in the vision itself, he denied it, and counted this among the secrets of divine oneness.