God

As for the cause of one who fails to choose the better part, God is not to blame.

"And you, speak to all the wise in understanding, whom I have filled with the spirit of perception.

Behold, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with a divine spirit of wisdom and understanding and knowledge in every work, to devise and to be master-builder, to work gold and silver and bronze, the blue and the purple and the scarlet, and the stone-cutting and the carpentry of wood, to work in all manner of work.

I pray, then, that the Lord Himself, touching your heart by His unspeakable power, may make light in your soul through good thoughts, so that you may have from within yourself the sources of consolation.

At the very beginning of the day, to hasten to prayer, and to honour the Creator with hymns and songs;

But our affairs are not unforeseen by Providence, since we have learned in the Gospel that not even a sparrow falls without the will of our Father.

Natural right is the deictate of right reason, shewing the moral turpitude, or moral necessity, of any act from its agreement or disagreement with a rational nature, and consequently that such an act is either forbidden or commanded by God, the author of nature.

The very meaning of the words divine voluntary right, shows that it springs from the divine will, by which it is distinguished from natural law, which, it has already been observed, is called divine also.

Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself.

"If you wish to learn who my Master is, it is the Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of those who reign and Lord of those who rule, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, who is glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

but I know and confess one God, glorified in three persons — the Father, I mean, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit — yet in one nature and essence, in one glory and kingdom undivided.

' Now one of the aforesaid angelic powers, a leader of one host, having in himself no trace whatever of natural evil from the Creator, but having come into being for good, by his own free choice turned from the good to the evil, and was lifted up in madness, wishing to rise against the Master and God.

God made man the most excellent of animals and made the tongue the most excellent organ in him, appointing it an interpreter of what lies hidden within, a clear declaration of what minds and insights have gathered, and a discriminator between truth and falsehood.

And you, O vizier (wazīr) — may God sustain you with His enabling grace — are in an office whose sides face different ways:

Praise be to God for the guidance and direction He has given, and thanks be to Him for the enabling and the setting straight He has granted.

A vizier who of all men has the first claim upon exaltation — so the Lord of the Throne has granted him of bounty all that best became him.

and although He (exalted be He) has upheld him with holy attributes and human perfections, with celestial powers and angelic settled dispositions (malakāt), so that he sees what is good for the kingdom in the mirror of his own judgement, with the eye of inspiration and of divine enabling, as though he were looking upon the unseen from behind a thin curtain — yet a multiplying of lights upon obscur …

who favoured man above the rest of creation with preponderant intellect and righteous works, that he might discern the outcomes of prudence and draw taut the courses of resolve, and who enabled him to climb the ascents of perfection and to adorn himself with sound deeds, so that he might be lit by the light of success and given drink in the shade of prosperity.

Even now, the god of Marcion, who opposes marriage, how can he seem a lover of little ones, whose whole cause is marriage?

Which of these suits your Christ, Marcion, to the desert of confusion?

To be sure, the most mild god threatens, since he neither judges nor grows angry!

And Dāwud said, “When then shall I come and look upon Your face” (2) [7] — and the Creator, the Exalted, is not a body, so likewise the one who looks upon Him (3), and that is the soul.

and it (2) is of the composition of the revered father Mār Ghrīghūriyūs Ibn al-ʻIbrī (3) — may God illumine his tomb.

Set us aright by Your light, O Possessor of the great Throne (4);

It is best to suffer what you cannot mend, and to attend without murmuring upon God, by whose authorship all things come to pass;

He had a mind perfect and brought to the height of itself, above which there is nothing save the mind of God, of whom a part has flowed down even into this mortal breast.

It was so ordained by that founder of the world, who laid down for us the laws of living, that we should be sound, not dainty.

One contest having already been decided against Hermogenes, as we said before — since we claim that the soul is from the breath of God, not from matter, being fortified there too by the inerasable rule of the divine determination, ‘And God breathed the breath of life into the face of man, and man became a living soul,’ assuredly from the breath of God — about this nothing more need be turned over.

For some wish there to be in it another natural substance, namely spirit, as though to live were one thing, which comes from the soul, and to breathe another, which is done by the spirit.

’ For he, against the faith of Scripture itself, turns breath into spirit, so that — since it is incredible that the Spirit of God should come into transgression and then into judgment — the soul should rather be believed to be from matter than from the Spirit of God.

Praise be to God, who gives shape to phantom bodies and light to the spirits (ʿarwāḥ), who cleaves the breaths of morning and creates the souls (anfus) of the dawn.

that the faculty of growth was at work in childhood while the faculty of generation was not at work at that time, so the Wise One ordained that the generative faculty should work for a time while the faculty of growth lies idle.

For I had seen a book on the soul (nafs) by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī — may God have mercy on him — whose bulk exceeded twenty quires, and it had been my resolve to write a commentary and exposition upon it, so that what I wrote would be somewhat larger than it;

when I had finished the refining of the epistle entitled al-Zawrāʼ — which comprises select portions of the realities and the cream of the subtleties, and which is among the singular things of the age, since it contains secrets whose veil had not been drawn back until now, indeed virgins 'whom no man nor jinn has touched before them,' and which was summary and knotty, its recalcitrant passages res …

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Among them is the manner of the encompassing, by the knowledge of the First, exalted be He, of the past and the future and the present, in a manner that transcends and is hallowed

Since happiness is the lost thing the human species goes seeking, and man is worthy of pursuing it so that his life shall not be squandered away between care and grief, delusion and fancies, sicknesses and pains, expansion and constriction, hardship and ease, poverty and wealth, honour and abasement — all of which, the moment he enters his grave, becomes a tale of what once was — it is a duty upon …

otherwise the creation of these things would be idle play, and that does not befit the Wise.

and your body, which is served in all these worlds, is made subservient to your spirit (rūḥ), and your spirit is made subservient to the service of its Originator.

Therefore there is nothing in true, essential existence but one single absolute essence, in which there is no multiplicity except by the multiplicity of its considerations, and in which there is no qualification in any respect whatever;

— Therefore there is nothing there but one single existence, individual and real, in which there is no qualification in any respect whatever;

for if there were two necessary beings, each of them would be distinguished from the other — otherwise it would be identical with it — and its distinction could only be by a qualification not present in the other, so that it would be qualified and therefore contingent, which is absurd.

The Arabian peninsula shone with the light of the Arabian Prophet — God bless him and his household and give them peace — and Islam appeared, its foundation the profession of the unity of the True Originator and the declaring of Him free of every incapacity and defect.

He said in his well-known treatise, *The Golden Epistle*, which he composed for Alexander the King, and which ʻĪsā ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nafīsī turned into Arabic, that the consensus, ancient and modern, is borne out, that the subsistence of every thing and its fixity are from God — exalted and mighty is He;

their doctrine is the origination of matter by a real origination — that is, matter is, for them, brought out of sheer nothingness by a hidden eternal power whose secret has not been disclosed to this day.

For men worthy of him through the innocence of their righteousness, who knew God and could make him known, he sent forth from the beginning into the world, flooded with the divine Spirit, to proclaim that there is one only God, who founded the universe, who fashioned man from the clay (for this is the true Prometheus), who ordered the world by fixed dispositions and ends of time;

and thereafter what signs of his majesty in judgment he has put forth through rains, through fires;

But that we might approach him more fully and more deeply, both himself and his dispositions and his will, he added the instrument of literature, for any who might wish to inquire about God, and, having inquired, to find him, and, having found him, to believe, and, having believed, to serve him.

For each man, cast down or moved from the standing of the hope he had received in the Creator, is easily turned aside to suspecting, even of his own accord, an author of another hope.

I will therefore pursue my purpose, if only I am able to claim for the flesh as much as He bestowed who made it — even then glorying that that little thing, slime, came into the hands of God, whatever those hands are, blessed enough though only by their touch.

This useless and trifling little body, which they do not even shrink from calling an evil — though it had been the work of angels (as Menander and Marcus would have it), though it were the construction of some fiery angel as well (as Apelles teaches) — would suffice, by the patronage of a second divinity, to establish the authority of the flesh.

in them there is a finicking over-nicety (*tanaṭṭuʻ*) and a surplus of refinement, which leads to this — that the reciter who articulates precisely remains with his whole ambition turned toward the observance of the letters and toward the finicking over their articulation, so that this occupies him away from pondering the meanings of the Book of God Most High, and turns him aside from humility (*k …

rather the use of audition is that he may transmit — and this, by God, is for other than God Most High.

For it is incumbent upon the judge and the mufti that he keep God Most High before his eyes and go slowly in giving judgement by way of following authority (*taqlīd*), and above all in the spilling of blood;

as indeed is generally recognized, since we speak of the gods as blessed and happy, and also blessed is the term that we apply to the most godlike men;

it strikes us as absurd that the gods should be referred to our standards, and this is what praising them amounts to, since praise, as we said, involves a reference of its object to something else.

Indeed it seems that Eudoxus took a good line in advocating the claims of pleasure to the prize of highest excellence, when he held that the fact that pleasure, though a good, is not praised, is an indication that it is superior to the things we praise, as God and the Good are, because they are the standards to which everything else is referred.

Even among the motives which incite men to acts of religion, the invisible Legislator has ordained rewards and punishments.

If this were the true standard, the smallest irreverence to the divine Being ought to be punished with infinitely more severity, than the assassination of a monarch.

I do not, by any means, speak of the justice of God, which is of another kind, and refers immediately to rewards and punishments in a life to come.

Let the prophetic voice come forward as our witness, accordant with truth, pitying those who are worn down by ignorance and folly:

the second and other, in this their error, that they reckon as existing the things that are not, and call gods these things that do not truly exist — nay, do not exist at all, but have got only the name.

Not as a teacher to disciples, nor as a master to servants, nor as God to men, but "as a gentle father he admonishes his sons.

and that the verse “and they have set up a kinship between Him and the jinn” is a pointer to the saying of Quraysh that the angels are the daughters of God.

We ask Him, exalted be He, to favour us with the illumination of hearts, and to bring us in among His servants who believe in the things unseen.

so I cleared a span of time, which made it possible for me to carry out the excavation of the profitable volumes, the old of them and the new, until, when the survey and the exhaustive search were complete for me, I gathered its scattered pieces from dozens of compositions, and there came out an essay that had taken in the transmitted legacies of those by whose guidance one is guided among the men …

The gods, being immortal, are not vexed that throughout so long an age they must always bear with men so many and so worthless;

For everything that befalls is akin either to God or to man, and is neither new nor hard to handle, but familiar and easy to work upon.

For there is one universe out of all, and one God pervading all, and one substance, and one law, one reason common to all intelligent beings, and one truth — if indeed there is also one perfection of beings that are of one kind and partake of the same reason.

Diligently does Scripture support us, which has distinguished both names for him and shown each in its own time.

for had he had power at all, as God, over Matter, which he knew to be evil, he would first have converted it to good, as Lord and good, so as thus to use what was good, not what was evil.

For if within the Lord that which was out of him and in him was not without beginning — namely his own Wisdom, born and founded thence, from the time when it began to be stirred in the mind of God for the disposing of the works of the world — much more is it impossible that anything which was outside the Lord was without beginning.