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Part One · Chapter Fifty — What It Means to Believe
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Know, O you who examine this treatise of mine, that belief is not the meaning that is uttered, but the meaning that is conceived in the soul when it asserts that it is so, in accordance with what was conceived. If you are one of those who are satisfied with correct opinions, or opinions you suppose to be correct, by narrating them in speech without having truly conceived them and genuinely believed them — let alone by seeking certainty concerning them — then this is very easy, just as you find many of the foolish who memorize credal formulas without conceiving any meaning for them whatsoever.
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But if you are one whose aspiration reaches toward ascending to this high level — the level of speculative inquiry — and toward attaining certainty that God is one with a true unity, such that no composition whatever is found in Him nor any possible mode of division under any aspect, then know that He, exalted be He, has no essential attribute under any circumstances whatsoever; and just as it is impossible for Him to be a body, so too is it impossible for Him to possess an essential attribute.
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As for one who believes He is one yet possessed of multiple attributes — he has said He is one in his utterance, yet believed Him multiple in his thought. This resembles the saying of the Christians that He is one but three, and the three are one; so likewise the saying of one who says He is one but possessed of multiple attributes, and that He and His attributes are one — with the removal of corporeality and with the belief in pure simplicity, our aim and inquiry was only about what we say, not about what we believe. For there is no belief except after conception, because belief is the affirmation of what has been conceived as obtaining outside the mind in accordance with how it was conceived in the mind. And if, along with this belief, there arises the sense that the contrary of this belief is impossible under any aspect whatsoever, and there is found in the mind no place to resist this belief, and no capacity to imagine its contrary — then this is certainty.
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And when you strip yourself of passions and habits, and are a person of understanding, and reflect upon what I say in these chapters that are to come concerning the negation of attributes, you will necessarily arrive at this certainty — and you will then be among those who truly conceive the oneness of God, not among those who say it with their mouth while conceiving no meaning for it, belonging to the category of those of whom it was said, 'Thou art near in their mouth but far from their mind' (Jer 12:2). Rather, a person should belong to the category of those who conceive truth and apprehend it even if they do not give voice to it — as the sages instructed: it was said to them, 'Speak in your hearts upon your beds and be silent, Selah' (Ps 4:5).