existence, because of divine expansiveness. There are only entities of likenesses that sense does not apprehend,[23] since it does not apprehend the difference between them—I mean between what ceases to exist and what is renewed. This is the theologians’ saying that an accident does not remain for two moments.
Since certainty has a scent of resisting divine overpowering, like patience, God’s people left being characterized by it, striving to produce it, and asking God for it. If it comes from God without effort by the servant, he accepts it out of courtesy toward God and does not return it to God, when God wills to make this servant a locus for this certainty’s existence. Its ruling in this locus is attachment to God in warding harm off from the servant. This is certainty’s asking[24] and its attachment to the Real’s side, not the servant’s attachment or asking.
(Certainty and the Locus in This Consideration)
Since the servant is a cause of the appearance of certainty’s entity, because certainty does not subsist through itself, the locus has done this certainty a favor that it wishes to repay. Certainty therefore asks its Creator, exalted is He, to lift harm from this locus, for certainty exists only to lift harm.
In the state of benefit, it has no ruling except concerning its continuation, not the benefit itself, for it is attained. If the servant imagines its removal, certainty asks God to continue its existence within its locus. To this extent there is leaving certainty: the servant does not object to certainty asking its Lord whatever it wills. He leaves it to do what it wishes, so
Notes
[23]
(«لحس» was corrected to «الحس», “sense,” according to the newer edition.)
[24]
(In this consideration the author assigns asking to the certainty subsisting in the servant, distinguishing the meaning’s ruling from its locus’s ruling. This is the basis of his interpretation of leaving certainty here.)
