I put my trust in our Lord al-Ḥākim, exalted beyond comprehension and nonexistence, and give thanks to His servant, the Qāʾim, Imam of the imams and Guardian of blessings. Majesty, praise, greatness, and glory belong to our Lord, who fulfills every promise made to the people of His unity, and before whose sovereign might every existent thing is brought to naught. He has made His unity a dignity for those who believe in and accept it, a support for those who rely upon it; He has made opposition to His Guardian an abasement for those who cling to it and a precipice for those who seek it. In every cycle He has established a road to His unity, and at the culmination of the cycles He has manifested through the Qāʾim the proof and demonstration of that unity. Praise corresponding to the perfection of His power and its manifestation, and to the enduring and repeated triumph of His cause.
I testify that there is no god but the exalted Lord, whose light and proof dazzle, and whose command and dominion prevail. His peace and honor rest upon the most excellent pure Intellect, the noblest elevated Light, and the purest devout person, in whom the Creator’s light of unity shines, who calls to Him in the world and points toward Him: the Imam of the pure community, the Qāʾim of the cycles when their period is complete.
Now then: a rational and virtuous person must use the discerning intellect to advise his own soul, casting aside whatever cannot be arranged according to wisdom and the order of tawḥīd. Someone who excuses his own desires and follows his passion is hardly likely to give good counsel to others. Everyone who possesses knowledge, religion, and understanding should therefore examine, with insight and sincerity, what the sages of religion have said, what the earlier guardians of religious law expressed in pointing toward unity, what the Imam's written discourse has indicated, what the honored gatherings have explained and preserved, and what the exalted commands have suggested. Thus the seeker may find the standard of truth and the believing student reach the reality of tawḥīd.
I say that the nations, despite their diverse beliefs and opposing purposes, acknowledge a Maker. They disagree about His attributes because their sciences have failed them in the search for His reality and because their minds have not distinguished between what is necessarily existent through itself and what is necessarily existent by its relation to another. This distinction is among the preliminaries by which the philosophers pointed to divine unity and transcendence; properly understood, it leads toward the reality that the discerning among them could infer.
By the kindness of the Guardian of Command and the favor of the Imam of the Age, I shall clarify the meaning of necessary existence through itself, and set out an argument that distinguishes the unlimited from the limited. I begin by addressing those trained in philosophical discipline and those who employ the methods of logic, using premises accepted among the early philosophers and bringing forward their conclusions. My object is to summon everyone to the unity of the Lord of all creatures.
The early philosophers, our pure elders, and the discerning members of the Call agreed that the most excellent and complete reward is to apprehend divine objects of knowledge and acquire demonstrable virtues. This is the highest happiness, the end for which a human being exists, and the final perfection of the soul. Once the soul attains it, it desires nothing beyond it; unlike wealth, which is sought for the pleasures and benefits that it brings, happiness in this sense is sought for its own sake, not as a means to something else. It is the soul's ultimate completion, admitting no further addition. In the terminology of the sages, the meaning that exists necessarily through itself, rather than through another, is the Intellect.
I say this to declare the Creator—mighty is His power—transcendent above both meanings. All things below this happiness, the Intellect, are objects of knowledge derived through their relation to it. If someone asks, “If the Intellect is not sought for the sake of anything else, how can the Creator's unity be perceived or apprehended?”, the answer is that Intellect is not sought for the sake of another intermediary between it and the intelligible objects of knowledge. It is their cause and the cause of caused things; but the unity of the Creator, exalted beyond perception and relation, is different. The true end of these objects of knowledge is to bring us to acknowledge our inability to comprehend Him, after first knowing the proofs that establish existence.
If these objects of knowledge were directly related to the Creator, they would involve Him in the mutual conditions of related terms. The existence of one related thing is established with that of the other, as son is related to father, father to son, servant to master, and master to servant. But to make the Creator dependent on the existence of objects of knowledge in this way would subject Him to an added relation. He is exalted beyond relatedness, resemblance, and limitation.
The disposition of every human mind, and the belief of all religions, agrees that divine objects of knowledge can be understood only through the Intellect and are related to it. Through it they become manifest in every age. From the standpoint of truth, the Intellect is a servant and possession, acknowledging its inability before our Lord al-Ḥākim throughout time. He has made it visible to the world and connected the knowledge of religions with it. The fabrications by which the sects have referred these matters to an absent nothingness are nearing dissolution, along with the snares of the accursed Iblīs and those who summon people to his cause.
It is therefore clear that what exists necessarily through itself is the guiding, standing Imam, who is supported by the ranks that serve him. These ranks are related to him and point toward the truth of the Worshipped One. Our Lord, exalted is His glory, transcends their connections, determinations, and descriptions; He abides in the majesty of divinity and the sovereignty of indivisible unity.
I say further that the peoples of the world acknowledge that divine unity requires the removal of every attribute and limitation. Such negations apply intelligibly only to something that exists. The Creator, exalted is His greatness, must be affirmed as existent, yet no one attains knowledge of His unity without rejecting attributes and bounds. The very universality of the summons toward Him is proof enough: the Call points to the reality of unity, declares Him one, proclaims His transcendence, and invites all creation toward Him.
If the Creator were nonexistent, every party would be equal in its claims of transcendence and abstraction. There would be no gradation of knowledge through genuine unity, and thus no grounds for reward and punishment. Likewise, if He existed in some form altogether unlike His creatures, or appeared to them with a form immediately befitting the greatness of His divinity, no one would doubt Him. The difference between people would disappear and with it reward and punishment. Rather, He is existent for the knowing friends who recognize Him, and as though nonexistent to their heedless opponents.
One who imagines seeing the One to whom he points merely looks at his own image, like someone staring at a polished iron mirror. Each time he looks afresh he finds only himself and returns with weary, frustrated sight. The Imam's written word says, “Eyes do not perceive Him, while He perceives eyes.” If He did not exist and eyes did not perceive Him, this would be no wonder at all; the declaration would be foolish, since anyone could tell another that he cannot see what does not exist. It must mean that He exists but cannot be encompassed by sight. Indeed the very intellects of human beings are incapable of encompassing the One who originated them; they falter before the representation or comprehension of their Creator. How then could His creatures and their passing properties attain His sacred majesty?
Every subtle spiritual origination and every gross material creature is incapable of creating another of its own kind. The Universal Intellect cannot originate another Intellect equal to itself; none of the embodied beings can create another being out of nothing as it is. Every reason acknowledges that its own power falls short of this. But it is possible for the Creator to manifest His existence in a form resembling that which He originated and created: nothing renders Him incapable of it. His unity indicates this, while His justice establishes the proof for His creatures and guides them by making His blessing accessible. These logical premises and rational demonstrations answer the philosophers who reject religion and weaken the objections of negligent people.
Those who profess belief in the imamate of the Creator and affirm the authority of the sacred gatherings have already heard words sufficient to silence their doubts. The Imam said, in effect, that the persons of the Speakers disappeared while the persons of those who sent them remained, and that the persons of the sent ones vanished from ordinary sight while the meanings of those who sent them became visible. The point is the manifestation, in this age, of the meanings once concealed under the persons and cycles of earlier messengers.
Our Lord also revealed a sign concerning this present age and the breaking of the fast of tawḥīd, in the year four hundred and four. The saying announces that the fasting period has passed and the festival is approaching. Yet how many sinners persist in their deeds without coming to repentance!
In the two-hundred-and-fortieth gathering read by Mālik ibn Saʿīd, people are warned not to despise the “orphans” assigned to the women, whose rights had been withheld—an image interpreted as the proofs of the concealed imams who await the lifting of precautionary concealment. Under the earlier wisdom, concealment belonged to the period of danger, while open proclamation and victory were promised for the period of manifestation. They hope to extinguish divine light, but the Creator will manifest His truth.
I witnessed a debate with a deceiver who had learned from a caller falsely claiming knowledge, or from an aged shaykh repeating the same error. He spoke extensively of the soul's return, claiming that at the resurrection the soul would exist separately and be united only with its objects of knowledge. His strongest argument, borrowed from his teacher, was that the soul acts independently during dreams and therefore has no need to unite with bodies in its final return.
A young Unitarian replied to him: “May God correct you! You have missed the truth. Do you not know that someone born without sight has no image of visible objects during waking life and cannot dream their visible shapes later in life? A soul in sleep pictures what it has perceived through the bodily form with which it is joined. Its images reflect objects previously received through the senses. It does not independently produce those images from nothing.” The shaykh's claim that dreaming proves the soul's separation from the body is therefore overturned. The youth's argument establishes that the soul's future return is not outside its union with bodies.
Some contemporary philosophers who repeat the theories of the ancients declare the heavenly spheres, with their governing powers, superior to earthly bodies. This judgment appears in their books and teachings. Yet the same philosophers describe those spheres as constrained, compelled to move, and acting without knowledge. How can they then call those bodies superior without contradicting themselves?
I maintain that the natural human body is superior to constrained heavenly bodies. Rational virtues and divine sciences appear through the human form alone. Only through it can teaching and learning take place; the Intellect cannot distinguish without it, and the soul forms no representations except through it. The soul constantly takes the image of things it has encountered and reproduces the essential virtues according to what it has witnessed in conjunction with the body. Among visible beings, the human form is therefore the most excellent, and without it the divine sciences have no outward manifestation.
I have already established that no originated or created being possesses the power to originate another being identical with itself. Therefore the Creator may manifest His existence through a form like those He has created, since no incapacity constrains Him; true unity excludes attempts to bind Him by “what” and “how.”
Consider another demonstration. If the Creator made the earth, heavens, and their moving powers but left them without plants, offspring, and creatures, their order would be incomplete and fail its purpose. If He filled them with animals and plants but excluded the rational human creature, the completion would still be absent. With the appearance of the speaking, rational human being, equipped for intelligible discourse, the universe gains its completion and crown. Human beings are the most excellent of created forms because intellectual excellence appears through them, and the act of teaching, understanding, and worship reaches fulfillment through their faculties. This rational division is plain to people of learning and faith. I shall explain it. The completion of a thing is not the same in kind as its efficient maker. A maker does not necessarily resemble what he makes. Imagine an architect who conceives a building, determines its measurements, distributes the parts, orders the materials, and gives directions. A workman who carries out those directions is merely an instrument placed at the architect's disposal. The ordered form first present in the architect's mind is the source of the building's completion, while the laborer who builds it by prescribed motions does not resemble the intellectual pattern and has not himself designed it.
This distinction applies to things that come into being and perish through physical motion, and to heavenly bodies constrained in their motion, as well as to the more enduring forms of intellectual perfection visible in humankind. The perfecting principle of a thing is not identical in kind with its efficient instrument, and a mere efficient instrument cannot necessarily imitate the perfecting source. Plato, in the book associated with his pupil Timaeus, is cited as saying that the first cause does not act in the ordinary manner of an efficient maker: what perfects a thing is not of the same kind as what merely makes it, for the maker is not like what it produces, whereas the perfecting source may resemble what it perfects.
The sage then says that divinity is present in a part of the world—namely the human being, the living, rational, speaking creature—who resembles the higher principles through excellence, honor, and restraint, resembles Intellect in rational virtues, and resembles soul in life and movement. Once these principles reach completion in the “little world,” the human being, it becomes possible to understand that the Creator manifests within the world through the principle of perfection rather than through an instrument of compulsory mechanical production. This is presented as an argument for the Creator's unity and manifestation. Yet many professed philosophers have failed to recognize it or turn toward the Guardian through whom its true sense is made plain; instead they cling to books and private opinions, rejecting truth when they encounter it.
The possibilities for discussing the Creator's existence in relation to our world—not in relation to the incomprehensible essence of His divinity—fall into four classes. First, one might deny Him existence, attributes, limits, and description altogether. Then all parties would become equal in “transcending” an unexistent object; they would only be negating a nothing. Without an evident proof, assertions of superior transcendence would be empty. With no differences of attainment, there would be no reward and punishment, no wisdom, and no coherent purpose in created things. Far be this from God.
Second, one might say He exists in a form unlike every creature. But if His presence were self-evident to everyone, differences of knowledge would vanish, and the promised reward and punishment would become purposeless, once again negating wisdom. Far be this from God.
Third, one might suspend judgment and render the whole matter idle. This is contrary to the natural dispositions of reason, which attest to His reality and acknowledge it. Far be this from God.
Fourth: He exists in relation to His creatures and is among them through the grandeur of His wisdom, so that the just proof is established for all. Each Unitarian affirms His unity according to his knowledge and capacity, declaring Him transcendent according to the degree of learning, sincerity, perception, and effort he has attained. This preserves the actual differences between creatures and makes intelligible the rewards and punishments by which their knowledge is distinguished. Seeking learning is therefore an obligation upon every believing man and woman, because through it the degrees of excellence in tawḥīd are made plain and the deficiencies of negligence and ignorance are exposed.
When the sincere servant has attained the object of his quest, recognized the necessary truth, and reached what his Lord has made accessible, let him be satisfied and grateful for what he has received. Praise and glory belong to the victorious Lord for inspiring His unity and transcendence; thanks belong to His Guardian for strengthening, supporting, and awakening the seeker.
The epistle is complete. From the Guardian of Truth we seek pardon, forgiveness, and release from our shortcomings.