  While Ibn Gabirol's quest towards the Neoplatonic Return centers, as we have seen, on the pursuit of truth and goodness, it also includes an attempt to know the unknowable God. In laying out the kinds of truth that the human soul must aim to acquire, the Fons Vitae speaks of “the knowledge of all things according to what they are” (Fons Vitae 1.4, p. 6, lines 13–14), and most of all of the knowledge of the First Essence [Latin, essentia prima, Arabic, adh-dhât al-’ûlâ, as evidenced in some of the extant Arabic fragments of the Fons Vitae; see Pines 1958/77 and Fenton 1976] that sustains and moves all things. While we are asked to know God—understood by Ibn Gabirol in tripart terms as a hidden First Essence and as an active, manifesting Will and Wisdom—we are cautioned a few lines later that it is impossible to truly know the First Essence, and that we can only aspire to know the things which He makes and sustains (Fons Vitae 1.4, p. 6, lines 19–22). As it relates to Ibn Gabirol's more general characterization of God in the Fons Vitae in tripart terms as an essential hidden reality and an active manifesting Will and Wisdom, we might say that for Ibn Gabirol, we can only know God through the manifestation of his Will and Wisdom in the ordered structure of existents in the universe (i.e. through the things which He makes and sustains, and in particular, through the wisdom revealed by them).