The genre of scholarly ethics, or ādāb, exploded in popularity in the eleventh century as the Islamic intellectual elite, or ulema, underwent rigorous training at institutions of learning across Persia and Central Asia. Transforming themselves from a loosely-affiliated group of litterateurs into a cadre of highly-trained urban professionals at these institutions, ulema used ādāb as an arena to debate the intellectual and dispositional attributes they believed set themselves apart from less scholarly Muslims. They reliably listed physical endurance, emotional resilience, and a precise power of recall as paramount among such scholarly attributes. Nonetheless, disagreements arose over whether these capacities were naturally endowed at birth or acquired through education. In this paper, I will investigate the Persian philologist, exegete, and ethicist Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī’s (d. 1108) discussion of this debate in his noted treatise of ādāb, "The Expedient Path toward the Noble Qualities of the Revealed Law". In this treatise al-Iṣfahānī offers a lexicon of ethical terms to help junior scholars distinguish traits within themselves that may be improved through education from natural endowments so deeply entrenched in their physical constitutions as to be fundamentally inalterable. The terms that he defines for this purpose include nature (ṭabī‘ah), disposition (gharīzah), demeanor (‘ādah), and characteristic (khalq). Parsing this lexicon will grant insight into how the ulema conceived of and expounded the physical bases of scholarly excellence in the era of their professional formation. Moreover, it will document the natural philosophical inflections al-Iṣfahānī gives these terms, noting where such inflections betray his sympathy for Māturīdī theological teachings about divine agency and human potential prevalent in Persia and Central Asia during his lifetime. Indeed, while al-Iṣfahānī’s influence over later medieval Islamic ethics is well understood, little information has been recovered about the substance of his theological positions. This paper will therefore explore how al-Iṣfahānī distilled the ethical thought of his day into an intuitive lexicon of scholarly attributes as well as present new evidence of his constructive engagement with the Māturīdī theological school in this seminal work of ādāb.