Likewise with the celestial spheres, which they claim to be eternal and everlasting: each sphere is a determinate entity, and if one apprehends only universals, those spheres are not known at all.

Thus he gains no knowledge of the Necessary Existent, nor of the intellects, nor of any of the souls or the spheres—indeed, not even of the elements or the composites. Yet these, in their system, comprise the entire catalogue of existents. What knowledge, then, could possibly perfect the soul?

Third Aspect

The “divine science” they speak of is, in fact, knowledge of neither the Creator nor the creation.

Third: According to them, the highest discipline—what they call “first philosophy” and “supreme wisdom”—is the science of what lies beyond nature from the standpoint of demonstration, and of what is prior to nature from the standpoint of being. A number of them refer to it as “divine science.” Its subject-matter is absolute, universal being, which they divide into necessary and contingent, eternal and originated, substance and accident.

An objection raised by Ibn al-Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī and the author’s rebuttal:

One of the later Imāmī authors, in a work he entitled The Hidden Secrets in the Rational Sciences, posed the following question: “If the subject of that science is every existent, it should not inquire into the attributes that belong to every existent; but if its scope is narrower—such as the Necessary and the contingent—then it treats only a part of being.”

Division, he adds, is of two kinds: the division of a whole into its parts, and the division of a universal into its particular instances.