A Sufi author was able to write without hesitation that the supreme state, compared to which every other state is but a veil (hijab) and remotion (bu'd), consists in there no longer being any place in consciousness for any created thing; in saying this he is not speaking of ecstasy, but intends to describe the habitual state of man—as if this did not ruin the very notion of the human being or the creature as such and as if any saint, beginning with the Prophet himself, had ever shown an example of such sublimity, which in fact is as impossible as it is unnecessary. This sublimity nonetheless offers an “ideal” image, which in its fashion is most suggestive of union with God; this we concede in taking account of a temperament that is sensitive to this type of hyperbolism. It seems to us, however, that it would have been more realistic to say: when a man absents himself from the world for God, God makes Himself present in the world for man; but even if he were the greatest saint, a man does not cease to perceive things; he does not see God in their place, but sees them “in God”, and they communicate to him “something of God”.
Another example of excessive dialectic is the following, and we have already referred to it: a certain Sufi affirms that everything is good since everything that exists is willed by God, and he feels obliged to conclude that evil is only a matter of perspective. The author of this thesis and his partisans are right to say that everything is good through pure existence and the positive qualities superimposed upon it,1 but not to subjectivize evil—not to fail in seeing that evil results from the distance necessitated by cosmogonic radiation and manifests the privation of the good precisely, thus marking the absence of the Sovereign Good. We have seen above that a certain kind of monism thinks it can subjectivize evil not only in the case of creatures but even in the case of God: evil, it is said, is what God does not like; this is logic in reverse and is explained by a pious concern not to make divine attitudes depend on external causes and al ways to leave the initiative or primum mobile to the Divinity, as if it were not sufficient to state that there are phenomena contrary to the divine Prototype—not in their ontological necessity but in their simple phenomenality—and that God is opposed to them on the plane where this opposition has a meaning.
On a completely different level, but in the same category of excessive speculations, is the following example: when the patriarch Joseph made himself known to his brothers and the brothers prostrated themselves before him, he remembered his prophetic dream—the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowing down before him2—and he made this remark, according to the Koran: “This is the interpretation of my dream of old that my Lord hath made real”; now quoting this impeccable passage in his Fusus (the chapter Kalimah Yusufiyah), Ibn Arabi thinks it necessary to introduce the hadīth: “People are asleep (during their lives), and when they die they wake up”; in other words he takes the opportunity to declare that Joseph did not know this truth, and he does so in order to conclude that Muhammad was wiser: “See then”—he says to the reader—“how excellent are the knowledge and rank of Muhammad!” Question: how can one believe for an instant that Joseph, having the quality of Prophet, did not know that earthly life is a dream and death an awakening? And even if he did not have this quality, how can one prove by referring to the quoted words—which concern a particular fact and not a principle—that he did not know the truth expressed by the hadīth in question? Moreover, a Vedantist might make the point—without any Sufi rushing to exalt his “knowledge” or “rank”—that the beyond is likewise but a dream and awakening is only in the Absolute or again that the jivan- mukta has realized this supreme awakening without having had to pass through bodily death, which is therefore not the condition sine qua non of ultimate awakening. Finally, if the realization of Joseph’s dream is not the hom age of his brothers, what then is it and how does Ibn Arabi envisage a realization of this dream in the beyond? This is not even to mention the fact that, according to the Koran, it is God Himself who taught Joseph the interpretation of dreams.3
One may think that in writing these lines of the Fusus Ibn Arabi wished to acquit himself of a duty of piety to ward the Prophet—to speak well of him, to miss no opportunity of doing so, even to the detriment of other Messengers. When reading passages of this kind, one must in fact take into account the following principle of Muslim piety: it is morally beautiful to seize every opportunity to speak well of the Prophet in whatever way possible, though on condition that one does not say he is the son of God; hence when speaking of other Messengers, it is not a question of defining them, but solely a question of making use of their names to buttress the scale of values proper to Islam. All the same one has a right to expect a more nuanced and objective perspective in an esoteric context.
In a similar vein—not as far as we know in Ibn Arabi but in his favorite disciple, Sadr al-Din Qun yawi—we find reference to the following story, traces of which are also to be found in Attar, in his Mantiq al-Tayr as well as his Elahi Nameh: Christ, at the moment of his ascension, was stopped at the threshold of the fourth Heaven by angels; they examined him and, having found a pin in his clothing, prevented him from ascending further, or according to another version they prevented him from so doing until he rid himself of the pin. We assume that in its fundamental intention this extravagant story is directed at Christian theology insofar as it divinizes Jesus and reduces God to a Trinity—insofar as it “Christifies” God, if one prefers—but in fact the story implicates the very person of Christ, and there is little likelihood the average reader will guess the polemical intention we have mentioned by way of hypothesis, which would constitute an attenuating circumstance, dogmatic oppositions being what they are.4 In this same category, one in which storytelling is deprived of a sense of proportion as well as a sense of the ridiculous and where poverty of imagination is readily combined with exaggeration, we find in Attar, Qunyawi, and other authors an anecdote about the Archangel Gabriel, who, seeking to accompany the Prophet on the “Night Journey” right up to God, was stopped by the scissors of the “no” (la) of the Shahadah, which cut a hundred thousand feathers from his wings,5 nly the Prophet having the right and capacity to proceed to the end.
Among exegetes there is an incurable breed who al ways know better and always insist upon dotting the i’s—in short, who always know everything. When the Koran tells us that God, seeing Abraham thrown into the flames, gives them the order “Be cold”, the exegetes in question know better what actually occurred: the Archangel Gabriel brought a celestial tunic, which protected Abraham against the fire. And when, three generations later, Joseph sent his tunic to his father, who had become blind and who recovered his sight upon contact with the garment, our commentators know better: it was not Jo seph’s tunic but Abraham’s, inherited by Joseph—as if the tunic of Joseph, prophet and patriarch, would not have sufficed to bring about the miracle and as if the symbolism of the story did not require that Jacob, having become blind because of his having wept for Joseph, should be healed by Joseph precisely, and as if Joseph could have inherited something as precious as Abraham’s tunic when, with the exception of Benjamin, he was the youngest of eight brothers, and what brothers! It is just as improbable that they, upon throwing Joseph naked into the well, should have let him keep the miraculous tunic6 and that the slave merchants and later the Egyptians should have left it with him. Be that as it may, the Koran relates without any ambiguity these words of Joseph: “Take this my tunic; apply it to my father’s face; he will recover his sight”—“my tunic” and not “Abraham’s tunic”.7 Without being a pedant or perfectionist one may conclude that an interpretation, though it may have the function of completing a statement that is elliptical at the literal level, does not on the contrary have the right to seek to correct and contradict a perfectly clear and sufficient text.
Still in the realm of pious one-sidedness and disproportion, though on a less blameworthy scale, tradition or legend attributes acts of goodness to the Prophet—not by inventing them but by presenting them as principles and remaining silent about complementary features8—that would in any circumstance have been impracticable, not so much for the Prophet as for the people who would have benefited from them and who could not all have been saints capable of bearing such solicitude without abusing it. What the chroniclers seem to forget is that a kindness must be proportioned to those who receive it, or conversely that the virtue of those who receive it must be proportioned to the kindness; that a sense of proportion, according to the Koran itself, is just as much a virtue as generosity; and that it is a mistake, to say the least, to attribute qualities to a man—or rather the application of qualities—that are foreign to God, which shows precisely that they are the products of a moral idealism and not concrete modes of acting.
Admittedly, the efforts and virtues of Muslims in general and Sufis in particular would be inexplicable with out the eminent virtues of the Prophet; Islam itself would be inexplicable without them. We must nonetheless recognize that the traditional stories give only a general idea of these virtues with any certainty and moreover that they suggest to the Christian reader—even if he brings no ill will to the subject—an impression of unreality, for which he cannot be blamed, and this is because of the inconsistencies in these accounts as much as their quite unnecessary use of hyperbole, objectively speaking.9
The desire to attribute the height of all possible perfections to the Prophet—almost automatically and often to him alone—impedes in many cases the definition or de scription of real qualities: thus when we are told that the Prophet left behind him the two worlds with all their pleasures and that he was thus the greatest of ascetics—he to whom “women and perfumes” were made “lovable”—his tory gives us no element to corroborate this portrait, or to corroborate it with strength and precision, where as it does show us with certainty that there was no trace of pettiness in the Prophet’s character.10 If we were told on the contrary, in reference to the principle of a nature sanctified in advance,11 that the Prophet was a priori detached from things because he encountered through them their prefigurations in divinis—in which case the question of asceticism does not arise—we would have no difficulty in accepting such a proposition, since we know that what is in question here is a possibility proper to the nature of the Messengers from Heaven.12
We have more than once had occasion to quote this formulation by a Church Father: “God became man that man might become God”—and to paraphrase it thus in Vedantic terms: “Atma became Maya that Maya might be come Atma”; or in Buddhist terms: “Nirvana became Samsara that Samsara might become Nirvana.” With regard to the personality of the Prophet as an “avataric” phenomenon, we could say: the Logos became “average man” that average man might become the Logos; we offer this para phrase as a key and in connection with what we said above without its being necessary, we hope, to explain it in a detailed manner or justify the terms.
But let us return to the question of moral qualities: Ashari and others, in the name of the Islam of which they seek to be spokesmen, demand a maximum of virtues on the basis of a metaphysical, or simply logical, minimum of intelligibility of God; in other words they present an image of God that makes the effort to be virtuous as difficult as possible. In short they replace logic by threats even more than by enticement, which in the final analysis does wrong to both God and man.
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According to the Asharite thesis, to which we have al ready referred, evil comes from God in the same way as good; God created men and made rules for them, but He was not obliged to do either; moreover He can impose obligations on men that they are incapable of carrying out; He can punish a creature who has not sinned and without owing him any compensation, for He “doeth what He will”: He owes nothing to man and therefore owes him no goodness; He has no obligation.13 Still according to the same thesis, the knowledge of God, which is incumbent on man, results from divine Law and not from intelligence; the same applies to the obedience man owes to God: intelligence exists only for drawing practical consequences from divine commands. It seems to be forgotten that man, whose privilege of vertical stature and speech is not for nothing, was created “in the image of God”, that God created him in order to have an interlocutor and not a slave limited to carrying out divine commands and contravening them when God should so decide. This amounts to saying that Ashari confuses metaphysics with morality, or even with immorality in certain cases: he does not see that God, having created man so as to have a “valid interlocutor”, “wishes to owe” something to man, or else He would not have created him;14 and this is entirely independent of the fact that man, insofar as he is a simple contingency, is nothing with regard to the Absolute, as is the whole world. In short, Asharism denies that God is free to realize the possibility of a reciprocity between Himself and a creature; thus it denies, always in the name of an ill-conceived divine freedom, the immanent logic of natural laws. What we might call the “ontological immoralism” of Ashari arises from a religious anthropomorphism grappling with the disconcerting complexity of Maya: it comes from attributing the divergent effects of divine Radiation to one single divine subjectivity—divergent effects, but perfectly compatible when one recalls that Maya is rooted in the principial order, whence a certain diversity in this order itself.15 But in a world in which everyone wants to be king it was perhaps better from the theological point of view to say—even in a monstrous fashion—that God is the Master than not to say it at all.
No doubt there are grounds for scandal in theological blunderings, but fundamentally no more so than in the formal divergences of the religions: not of course in the simple fact of their plurality, for one readily accepts the diversity of crystals or flowers, but in their flagrant contradictions and reciprocal anathemas. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not”: in addition to their immediate sense these words also apply to every Revelation insofar as it is not grasped in all its dimensions by the collectivity—we do not say the few—a collectivity whose spokesmen are the theologians precisely. Religion is to a large extent in the hands of “psychics”, not “pneumatics”; in descending, the Word adapts itself to the needs of “sinners” more than to those of the “righteous”;16 the collective soul collaborates in the outward covering of the Revelation owing to the fact that this soul is the Revelation’s plane of resonance.
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But let us return to the pious excesses of language that seem to be authorized—or not prevented—by the point of view of faith: Ghazzali, who elsewhere criticizes the excesses of fear, relates in his 'Ihya—whether rightly or wrongly—that Abu Bakr would have preferred to be a bird rather than a man because of his fear of the Judgment; that Omar for the same reason would have preferred to be a piece of straw; that Hasan al-Basri would have considered himself lucky if he could receive the assurance he would escape from hell after being there for a thousand years; that tens of thousands of people would have died of fright after having heard a sermon by David on hell; and other stories of this kind. What can one conclude from these extravagances? Their demerit lies not only in the exaggeration itself, but also in the isolation of this exaggeration, an isolation believed to render them more striking and more fully efficacious—one does not wish to adulterate the mystery of terror—though logically it makes them either all the more hopeless or all the more improbable. As a matter of fact these shock-images manifest at one and the same time three values: the sense of the absolute, moral idealism, and indignation at the spectacle of worldly heedlessness. Even so they are incompatible with gnosis and are incoherent when referring to the state of soul of a saint; if this state of soul is ephemeral, one ought to say so at once. Let us recall that Ghazzali was a Sufi and not one of the least; otherwise we would have no reason for drawing attention to these things.
One may be surprised that in Islam the perspective of fear, which in its most extreme formulations—when these are accepted at face value—removes practically all meaning from existence, is not opposed to marriage nor in particular to polygamy, as if there were no logical and moral connection between fear and penance,17 a connection Muslims nonetheless understand very well when it comes to fasting. For Islam nothing is contrary to fear except what diverts us from God de jure or de facto; now Sufis, while admitting that marriage may include this danger, envisage in the first place the sacred character of sexuality—its quality of Platonic anamnesis in particular, which “causes a desire for paradise”—so that sexual pleasure appears to them as at least neutral with regard to fear of the Judgment and as something related to trust and hope. Independently of this aspect of things, they look on conjugal life in a practical and social respect, hence with a view to procreation; finally, they see in it a means of escaping from that distracting preoccupation which is the “goad of the flesh”: sexual pleasure being for them something spiritually neutral—and harmful only when it is sought for itself, in which case it becomes “animal” and separates one from God18—they see no rea son to expose themselves needlessly to the torment of the sexual instinct and the distracting preoccupation it involves. Some will object that this way of looking at things opens the door to every form of concupiscence, especially the sin of gluttony, for if there is no limit to sexuality there can be none to other satisfactions of the senses; this is false, for eating too much causes illness, de gradation, and ugliness, which is not the case with the conjugal life of healthy people, and in this in equality is proof that the two domains are not com parable, except precisely when they are both reduced to animality. Be that as it may, the Muslim “ascetic” (zahid) flees the world, riches, ambitions, comfort, pleasures, food considered to be superfluous, even sleep—everything save woman,19 which does not prevent him from disparaging her on occasion; we put it this way in order to make the point that, as an Arab dialectician, he will say “woman” and not “some women”—even though he might happen to be circumspect—so that logically he puts himself in the wrong even if he is right a thousand times over.
It goes without saying that a sexual mysticism, which by definition reveals the universality and immanence of Beatitude and thus of Mercy, is incompatible with an accentuation on the fear of hell; now neither Islam in general nor Sufism in particular is founded on this perspective, but they necessarily permit its affirmation either incidentally or occasionally. In any event, if hell is a concrete and quasi-uncontrollable danger even for the holiest of men—some thing Islam does not teach but certain extravagances seem to suggest, a danger that would drive all other men to despair—everyone would have to become a hermit, and there could be no question either of marrying or even of eating beyond the minimum necessary to prevent us from dying of hunger;20 this is perhaps a truism, but in fact Sufi authors have not always been consistent in their manner of presenting—explicitly or implicitly—the compatibility between the fear of God and sexual life.21
Having spoken of fear, we must now say something about the point of view of trust, which on the one hand compensates in a complementary way for that of fear and on the other hand nullifies the excessively absolute expressions of the latter; in any case the legitimate viewpoint of fear like wise nullifies the possible excesses of the perspective of trust. Trust is no more levity or temerity than is fear dramatics or discouragement.
God created sinners so He could forgive them, Ghazzali tells us: even if the quantity of one’s sins should stretch to heaven, God will forgive the believer who both hopes and asks for forgiveness, the idea of hell being “the whip that chases believers toward Paradise”. According to Ali, to despair of Mercy is a greater sin on the part of the sinner than all his other sins put together. But there is not only the argument of repentance, trust, and Mercy; there is also that of the graces inherent in the sacramental formulas: above all the Shahadah, which effaces sins and leads to Paradise, then the formulas of praise, which cause sins to be forgiven even though they may be as “numerous as the waves on the ocean”.22 No doubt this perspective re-establishes equilibrium in the general doctrine, but even so it does not abolish the excesses of the contrary perspective.23
There is no symmetry between Goodness and Rigor as such, for the first is ontologically more real than the second; but in practice there is a symmetry between them with regard to the generality of pious men, and even asymmetry in favor of Rigor in connection with some men or some aspect of human nature. Islam teaches nothing else, but it does so by means of an isolating dialectic, both accentuating and discontinuous, which seems characteristic of it as a result of a certain side of the Arab character.
As for the inconsistency of Sufi morals, it is sometimes more apparent than real, for it can be the effect of an ellipsism concealing specific intentions; in fact Sufism has a thoroughgoing casuistry at its disposal, which is largely able to compensate, depending on the case, for the presence of a simplistic moralism and which secretly brings us back into an esoteric climate.
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In excesses of the type “God suffices me” there is an attenuating circumstance favoring the polygamist—we need not return to the compatibility in principle between asceticism and sexual life—and it is the following: one must take account of a difference of dimension between the spiritual intention, which pertains to principles, and life in the world and among creatures, which is of a contingent order. The ascetic (zahid), while he is in the sacratum of prayer or contemplation, may af firm a single-minded idealism independent of human concessions, contrivances, and nuances, and he may later, outside this sacratum, live without contradiction or hypocrisy according to the laws of earthly life; the effects of contemplation will by themselves regulate and adapt his behavior in the world rather as a stone that falls into the water produces concentric circles. Excessively absolute declarations of spiritual intention would be unrealistic and hypocritical if the contemplative were not aware of the distinguo we have just explained and if he took his own words literally, which is something precisely that the Muslim zahid does not and cannot do.
This brings us back to the question—which we have discussed on other occasions—of the two spiritual subjectivities, one being that of the empirical individual, who can not sincerely desire a “union” beyond Paradise, and the other that of the spirit, which tends toward its own source and remains independent of every consideration of individual interest. Advaita Vedanta, which has nothing individualistic and therefore nothing agitated about it, considers only the second subjectivity and abandons the first to its destiny, as it were, by placing it in the hands of the divine Mother,24 whereas Sufism accentuates the first subjectivity though without being unaware of the second, sometimes mixing the two in a way that gives rise to a drama akin to that of Christian mysticism. And this is all the more paradoxical in that there is in Islam itself a marked element of serenity, of which the most general manifestation is resignation to the Will of Allāh and which finds liturgical expression in the celestial and divinely leveling mantle that is the call to prayer from the top of minarets; now this omnipresent serenity is related to gnosis in that it is derived fundamentally from the first Truth, hence from the One, which excludes all that is not it and includes all that through it is possible.
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Let us return once more to the question of moralistic or ascetical extravagances: attenuating circumstance, we have said, but not a total excuse. Doubtless the excess is accidental and not substantial; it is nonetheless blameworthy owing to the fact that the zahid is not alone but lives in a human society, which for its part has a certain right to understand him or at least not to be scandalized by him through no fault of its own; society would be at fault in this matter if its incomprehension were the result of its lukewarmness or worldliness, which is not the case for the pious persons of whom we are thinking here. In spite of the prejudice of certain esoterists, the mistrust of the ?ulama—who have a right to exist, as does the “letter” itself—is largely justified by the unintelligibility and paradoxical nature of certain speculations or ascetico-mystical expressions.
Attar relates the following incident in his “Chronicle of the Saints” (Tadhkirat al-Awliya): the serving maid of the famous Rabiah Adawiyyah was going to request an onion from a neighbor, but Rabiah forbade her, for she intended to ask for everything from God alone, wishing to accept nothing from men, whereupon a bird came and dropped an onion in her saucepan, but the saint did not accept it because, she said, it might have come from the demon. The doubtful nature of this story already appears in the fact that it circulates in an older and simpler version as well; but what interests us here is simply what is implied by the version Attar has not hesitated to offer us. There are in fact two important remarks to make: First, it is not normal for a man to ask God for what can or should be given him by men; one does not have the right to expect supernatural aid for things one normally obtains in a natural way. Second, one does not have the right to believe that a legitimate prayer can be answered by a demon or that the demon can respond to our legitimate trust in God; otherwise God would have no reason to fulfill our prayers or reward our trust, for He does not act to no purpose.25 It will be said that the hagiographer was thinking only of virtues and symbolism; this is obvious, but it does not satisfy every logical need or every sense of proportion.
When we read in “Sufis of Andalusia” (Ruh al-Quds) that the hero, having received a luxurious house from the reigning prince,26 ives it to the first beggar who arrives because he “has nothing else to give him”, we are in the midst of absurdity, and this in several respects, namely, with regard to the hero, the house, the prince, the beggar, the Law; it is clear that the aim of the story is to underscore emphatically—and perish all the rest—the disdain of things here-below and the sublimity of detachment and generosity. That conclusive facts considered in them selves and logic practiced without a moralizing hidden motive can be guarantors of truth and serve the doctrinal or moral intention to be expressed does not seem to impress itself on the attention of our pious authors, who balk at considering a thing in itself, hence “outside God”; it is therefore necessary to read them with patience, which one doubtless owes them in light of their excellent intentions and their love of God and sacred things.27
Very often Sufi authors, and religious authors in general, give us the impression of being as uninterest ed in the exactness of their facts as in the imperatives of logic, as if it were a question here of worldly things, only the landmarks of morals, mystical life, and theology seeming to hold their attention; in other words they seek to make them as striking as possible and believe they cannot achieve this effect except at the expense of objective detail or even common sense. In their minds the materiality of the facts seems to harm the expressivity of the symbol, whereas for the Westerner on the contrary this materiality supports the probability of the image and thus its instructive capacity; it is true that in this order of things everything is a question of appropriateness and degree. No doubt in certain cases the end justifies the means; this does not prevent the means from compromising the end in other cases, and this in our opinion is what occurs in the literary genre we are thinking of here. In this connection it is necessary to point out above all the misuse of apologues and the habitual confusion, born of a tendency to exaggeration, between the real and imaginary.28
We could adduce in this context the fact that the Aryan, to the extent he is an observer and a philosopher, has a tendency to describe things as they are, whereas the Semite, who is a moralist, readily presents them as they ought to be according to his pious sentiment; he transcends them by sublimizing them before having had time to extract the arguments comprised in their nature. This tendency obviously does not prevent him from being a philosopher when he wants to be, but we are speaking here of the most immediate and most general predispositions; the abuse of apologues and quantitative images incontestably bears witness to this, especially in the case of the Arabs, although such excesses can be found in every religious climate, the same psychological causes readily giving rise to the same effects.29
We have just contrasted the Oriental cult of the “symbol” with the Western cult of the “fact”; now if the first can give rise to abuses, it is only too obvious—and history proves it abundantly—that the same is true, and a fortiori, of the second tendency, and this is not only as a result of Aristotle and in the scientific domain, but even on the religious plane. From the beginning Catholics have had attacks of “pious skepticism” that they confuse with realism, and this in private spirituality as well as theology;30 this intermittent temptation has permitted an increasing infiltration of the profane spirit right up to the triumph of modernism, hence of the “world” and “man”—all this with the help of the creative and innovating obsession of the Europeans, in regard to which the Biblical stability and holy monotony of Islam play the role of divine warnings. Islam has been accused of “sterilizing” an entire sector of humanity, of having “arrested” history; it is one of the most useful things it could do.
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Some might take the view that the theological or philosophical framework of an idea that is at once true and fundmental—an idea such as ontological monism (wahdat al-wujud)—is of little importance, even if this framework leaves much to be desired; it is true that in Islam—inasmuch as it is a world of dogma and faith—the important thing is “what” one explains and not “how” one explains it. For the “what” is divine, hence absolute, whereas the “how” is human, hence contingent and provisional; here is the whole opposition between faith and reasoning or between Rev elation and thinking. Seen from this angle, weak or even aberrant explanations of indisputable truths represent nothing other than apologetic intentions in the interest of faith; it is not these that count, but the idea they are supposed to make accessible; according to this “intellectual morality”, whatever serves the truth is true.
In conformity with the tendencies of Islamic piety in particular and the Semitic monotheistic perspective in general, the Muslim—if not Hellenized by vocation—does not seek to be a “philosopher”, that is, a man who “doubts” and thinks “outside God”, outside faith and grace; he therefore expects everything from inspiration since everything has come to him from Revelation; he has no wish to be a Prometheus. Thus it can happen that a quasi-stereotypical zeal takes precedence over logic, the latter being the ancilla theologiae, whence sometimes an exorbitant demand to ex tract from absurdity the elixir of truth, a truth that conveys a right intention nourished by the treasures of Revelation.31
It is most fortunate that the choice between a credulous and undisciplined language of “faith” and a skeptical and pedantic language of “reason”, or between a language that is absurd but efficacious and another that is logical but inoperative, is not the only alternative.32 It is nonetheless between these two poles or excesses that the human mind seems to vacillate, something for which neither a healthy faith, which is lucid, nor a healthy intellection, which is pious, is directly responsible.33
In a completely different category from the overflowing imagery of an unbridled fideism are phenomena—described in mystical books—pertaining to what we could call an objectivizing symbolist inspiration, which is drawn from the archetypes of the collective religious mind and because of which spiritual intuitions assume objective and sensible forms; in other words inward contacts with heavenly realities become outward experiences as a result of a mechanism that is proper to every religious cosmos and comparable to individual imagination, although operating in the physical world by projecting into it phenomena-symbols.34 For this there is both an objective and a subjective condition: the first is a very powerful subtle aura that envelopes and nourishes a religious world, at least as long as it is sufficiently homogeneous; the second is an appropriate receptivity on the part of men—a certain “naiveté”, which is nonetheless entirely capable of a “discerning of spirits”—this too being incompatible with the enfeebling and “congealing” of a world become impious. The or der of phenomena we have in mind here does not pertain to the miraculous, properly speaking, since the celestial intervention therein is only indirect; but it is not a question of personal fantasies since the phenomena are outward even though their forms are precisely determined by the style of the collective religious mind. It is thus that one can explain the shower of somewhat gratuitous, though not legendary, marvels that occurred during periods of great mystical fervor and within unfissured religious worlds: the partition between the material and the subtle softens, and the psychic is objectified; we might also say that the psycho-spiritual is exteriorized to the extent the believing mentality is interiorized.
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Compared with fideists or inspirationists, who are little concerned with coherence, the case of the Greek sophists and scientists and their successors presents exactly the opposite excess: logic on the one hand and phenomena on the other are sufficient in themselves and are therefore used as if they were cut off from their roots, whence the philosophical, scientific, and cultural monstrosities that made, and make, the modern world. And since in every work the essential content or reason for being takes precedence over expression and accident, it is obviously necessary to prefer a faulty expression of the truth to a dialectic that is brilliant but aberrant as a result of its content; one would like to apologize for having to mention this.
What this means—and we are not afraid of repeating our selves—is the following: just as there may be perfectly formulated arguments on the part of profane thinkers, so conversely the writings of a given gnostic may contain intellections that are badly expressed and even compromised by feeble arguments, but whose function nonetheless is to act as their support; now one owes it to the underlying truth to discern it to the very extent it is lofty and decisive even if in its contingent formulation there are elements of error that disfigure it, though without rendering it unusable—rather as one owes one’s parents a favorable consideration even when they err through excess of zeal.
The perfect man, wrote a Sufi—and we spoke of this at the beginning of the present chapter—is one who is extinguished toward the world to the point of no longer seeing anything but God or one who only sees God to the point of no longer seeing the world. The Sufi did not realize this, for on the one hand it is not realizable and on the other hand, for this very reason, it does not have to be realized; this ideal nevertheless bears witness to a heroic tension in relation to the Divine, and this is what counts here; and it may even be that the Sufi did not seek to say any thing else, which brings us back to the problem of Oriental ellipsism.35 In any case someone might still object that the vision of the Principle alone is perfectly within the scope of the “pneumatic”; no doubt, but it does not exclude the simultaneous vision of objects—as is proven by the life of any Sufi or jivan-mukta, not to mention the Prophets and Avataras—just as the realization of the “Self” does not exclude an individuality liberated from concupiscence.36
In an entirely general manner it must be fully understood that we are not criticizing the incomprehensibility of many Sufi texts, which is inevitable in the absence of commentaries providing keys to this particular language; we would not dream of reproaching a Hallaj or Niffari for the obscurity of their expressions any more than we would dream of reproaching the Song of Songs for such obscurity. In the absence of keys it suffices us a priori to perceive the beauty, the grandeur, the profundity, the power of the language, its perfume of truth and majesty, and this is quite apart from the fact that the incomprehensibility cannot be total and that there are keys moreover that end up delivering their secrets, depending on their nature and our receptivity. The fact that keys of this kind should sometimes be combined with the weaknesses of which we have spoken is a completely different matter, which does not concern the keys in themselves or those who use them correctly and with the best of rights.37
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We believe we have alluded more than once to the mistrust shown by the fideists toward rational investigation in matters of faith; a classic example is Hanbalite fideism, which is resistant to all symbolic interpretation of Koranic images, even to the point of absurdity. According to this school it is necessary to take note of Koranic images that express a quality or attitude of God “without asking how”, hence without transposition, even in cases where the meaning results from the image itself, as for example when it is said that God is “Light” or that He is “seated” on a “Throne” or when the text speaks of the “Hand” of God. The fideists will say that it is the Koranic word itself which coincides ipso facto with its interpretation (ta'wil) and which thus implicitly constitutes it in a certain fashion, so that every explanation of the image becomes superfluous; we would reply that in this case the very notion of ta'wil loses all its meaning and that in reality the symbol-word suggests its intention by its very nature, the sufficient reason of the metaphor being precisely its capacity to transmit a meaning that is superimposed on the raw image and to transmit it without any possible doubt.38 This is not to say that the fideist point of view has no legitimacy in itself; it applies perfectly in cases where the image is mysterious and has to be assimilated in an almost Eucharistic manner, but not when it has no meaning outside of what it signifies by its obviously metaphorical character.39
The fact that Ibn Arabi should occasionally support the excessive fideism of the Hanbalites is all the more paradoxical in that he himself practices the most audacious interpretation;40 this interpretation seems to consist in reducing every Koranic verse to a statement concerned more or less directly with either the divine Essence or supreme Love, which is not only contrary to the immediate sense of the text, but to the very detriment of its coherence and obvious intention; one is entirely justified in being astonished at a procedure as unnecessary as it is paradoxical, since truth has other re sources, to say the least. One of the keys to this enigma seems to be the idea that Revelation presents us above all with words and that it is incumbent on sages to explain them even if this means meticulously seeking the most far-fetched etymology and at the risk of contradicting the literal meaning or contradicting it at least on the esoteric, or supposedly esoteric, level; now it seems to us obvious on the contrary that Revelation presents us above all with ideas, not isolated words or images cut off from their necessary context, and that this is the very reason for the existence of divine discourse. These ideas admittedly give rise to a variety of interpretations, but they nonetheless do not give us the authority to isolate each detail by sublimizing it out of its context to the detriment of logic and coherence, and above all to the detriment of the very intentions of the discourse.
Tafsir, “explanation”, is the “outward” (zahir), semantic, historical, and theological exegesis of the Koran; ta'wil, “interpretation”,41 s its “inward” (batin), symbolic, moral, mystical, mythological, metaphysical commentary. According to the Koran, “None knoweth its interpretation but God”; this means that man can know it only by divine inspiration, not by reasoning alone—though inspiration and reason are not mutually exclusive since the one can produce or actualize the other—and this opens the door to an inspirationism that is often problematical inasmuch as it is contemptuous of intelligence. Ta'wil comprises degrees: for example, when the Koran rejects the worship of idols, idols may mean—in addition to the literal sense—things to which we are unduly attached or these attachments themselves; but more profoundly they can also mean forms as such, including the constituent elements of religion and religion itself, in which case we are at the heart of esoterism, not of the “prolonging” but of the “transcending” kind, hence secret by its paradoxical and explosive nature. This is no doubt the source of the opinion—unacceptable in our view—that a word or phrase may “esoterically” have a meaning contrary to the one it has in itself or that this meaning may come to the fore when the word or phrase is applied to the divine nature, an opinion based on the idea that every Koranic expression must have a meaning that applies to God and the love of God, a meaning that is positive as a result of the application in question.42
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Another matter in this context of semi-esoterism is the frequent disproportion between means and end: in other words there are ascetical and disciplinary measures that make no sense except for passional men given to ambition and vanity, not to say pride, and therefore disqualified for gnosis; now it is precisely for the sake of gnosis that a certain “esoterism” imposes these measures on the most diverse men; that is, it imposes them on men who are qualified and thus who have no need of them as well as on men who have need of them and who by this very fact are not qualified.43 In saying this we are not losing sight of the fact that there is not only profane man but also man insofar as he carries in his soul the temptation to profanity, which requires or allows for disciplinary measures; but these measures precisely must be proportioned to the substance of the individual, even admitting that there is here no rigorous line of demarcation.
A Westerner who desires to follow an esoteric way would find it logical to inform himself first of all concerning the doctrine, then to inquire about the method, and finally to consider its general conditions; but the Muslim of esoteric inclination—and the attitude of the Cabalist is similar—undoubtedly has the opposite tendency: if one speaks to him about metaphysics, he will find it natural to re ply that one must begin at the beginning, namely, with pious exercises and all sorts of religious observances; metaphysics will be for later. He does not seem to realize that in the eyes of the Westerner, as also the Hindu,44 his is to deprive the pious practices of their sufficient rea son—not in themselves of course but in relation to knowledge—and to make the way almost unintelligible; and above all the Semitic zealot does not see that the understanding of doctrine cannot result from a moral and individualistic zeal, but that on the contrary it is there to in augurate a new dimension and to elucidate its nature and purpose. The moralistic attitude is blameworthy, of course, only because of its ignorance of the opposite viewpoint or because of its exaggeration, for in fact the doctrine does de serve on our part an element of reverential fear; even our own spirit does not belong to us, and we have full ac cess to it only to the extent we know this. If it is true that doctrine explains the meaning of devotion, it is equally true that devotion has a certain right to precede doctrine and that doctrine deserves this.
With regard to the lower moral disciplines presented as stages leading toward higher intellectual and spiritual results, the great question that arises is knowing whether metaphysical ideas act on the will of a given man or whether on the contrary they remain inoperative abstractions, that is, whether they unleash interiorizing and ascending acts of the will and affective dispositions of the same order. If this is the case, there is no need to seek to create a distaste in the person in question for a world that already hardly attracts him or for an ego that al ready has no more illusions or ambitions, at least not at the level that would justify coarse disciplines; it is pointless to impose attitudes on the “pneumatic” that are meaningless for him and that instead of humbling him in a salutary fashion can only bore and distract him. To think otherwise—though there are here many degrees to consider—is to place oneself outside esoterism and sapience, what ever the theories to which one thinks one can or must refer; it is to forget in particular that the “pneumatic” is the man in whom the sense of the sacred takes precedence over other tendencies, whereas in the case of the “psychic” it is the attraction of the world and the accentuation of the ego that take priority, without mentioning the “hylic” or “somatic”, who sees in sensory pleasure an end in itself. It is not a particularly high degree of intelligence that constitutes initiatic qualification; it is a sense of the sacred—or the degree of this sense—with all the moral and intellectual consequences it implies. The sense of the sacred draws one away from the world and at the same time transfigures it.
Whoever contemplates the divine Majesty assimilates something of it, and he does so in parallel with a consciousness of his own nothingness; this results more over from the fact, according to a famous hadīth, that God becomes “the eye with which he (the contemplative) sees and the hand with which he acts”, hence in the final analysis the heart through which he is. This amounts to saying that the sense of the sacred, in spite of its relationship with fear, does not imply ser vility any more than the sense of truth implies narrowness; esoterism is neither petty nor fanatical. “The soul is all that it knows,” as Aristotle said, and the highest function of man is the knowledge of God, which gives its imprint to everything legitimately human.
Conception, meditation, concentration, conformation; in other words, concept of Unity with its intrinsic and extrinsic mysteries;45 assimilating meditation and unitive concentration upon Unity and its mysteries; moral conformation to Unity, to its mysteries and demands: together with the appropriate traditional supports, these are the constituent elements of the Way. Moral conformation, we said: certainly every spirituality requires the intrinsic virtues as well as discipline in outward behavior and possibly a specific purgative asceticism; this follows from the intelligence as well as from the principle that “God is beautiful and He loveth beauty” (hadīth); but it has no connection with ambition and perfectionism, in short with attitudes that are lacking precisely in beauty as well as in intelligence.
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Philosophy is one thing, say the Sufis, and inspiration is another; the first comes from men and the second from God. In theory this is completely clear, but in practice what is the significance of the fact that a certain Sufi claims for a given book an inspiration coming from either God or the Prophet? In the first place there can be no question of attributing to mystical books the degree of inspiration of the Koran or Veda; but it is possible they are situated at the secondary degree of inspiration, the one Hindus designate by the term smriti, which is that of the Purana s, and there are still several other levels to be considered, whose significance is increasingly relative. Relativity of inspiration is connected to the mystery referred to in the saying, which is perhaps a hadīth: “The divergence of the learned (of God) is a blessing”—a mystery that also includes at the highest level the divinely foreseen divergences of the religions, though here relativity has another meaning and import. The divine Inspirer—or the “angel of inspiration” (malak al-ilham)—gives rise to many refractions in be coming subjectified: “water takes on the color of the vessel,” as Junayd said; even the great revelations must take account of the resources of a collective mentality, and they cannot avoid a certain amount of damage in “shining in the darkness”. However paradoxical it may seem, an intrinsically absolute conviction can have an extrinsically relative significance, but in this case there is obviously a different relationship; “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” said Christ in function of an inward absolute truth, which nonetheless does not prevent other religions from being valid in their turn independently of Christ, though on the basis of the same truth insofar as it is essential and thereby universal, not insofar as it assumes in the case of Christ a particular extrinsic significance personified precisely by Jesus.
Hallaj claimed an inspiration “equal to that of the Koran” for a few lines written by his hand, and this is why Junayd did not hesitate to curse him; a certain number of Sufis blamed or condemned Hallaj for his Ana 'l-Haqq (“I am the Truth” = God), and yet tradition finally accepted both Hallaj and Junayd and the Sufis in question. The fact that Ibn Arabi wrote under heavenly inspiration does not bind Islamic orthodoxy; it does not even bind Sufi orthodoxy, as is proven by the negative attitude of the Mawlawiyah regarding the Shaykh al-Akbar; and this is all the more plausible in that Sufism does not recognize any absolute authority in matters of metaphysics, whereas Vedantism recognizes itself in Gaudapada, Govindapada, and Shankaracharya. The undisputed authorities of Sufism—those of the first centuries—refer only to the ascetical and mystical method, not to a sapiential doctrine properly so called.
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If we note with great reluctance the lack of critical sense and other misdeeds of sentimentalism in many religious books whose level ought to exclude such weaknesses, it must be understood that we do not include in the notion of “sentimentalism” either the sense of beauty or love in itself, any more than we include in it contempt for things that are contemptible; sentimentalism does not consist in having sentiments, but in falsifying the truth as a result of them. To be a sentimentalist does not consist in knowing that two and two make four and at the same time loving something that deserves to be loved, but in persuading oneself that two and two make three or five simply because one desires to shower praise upon something one loves, rightly or wrongly, because one feels able in this way to corroborate or serve some idea one is fond of, or because one thinks that a given truth demands by way of consequence a given excess, whether positive or negative. In short it consists in introducing a quantitative and dynamic element—and an instigator of thoughtlessness—into the domain of the qualitative and the static and in being unaware that truth is beautiful in itself and not because of our zeal, and conversely that our zeal is beautiful only when it flows from truth.
A plausible explanation of the inconsistency one encounters in many Sufi writings is the fact that in certain cases the authors write when they are in a spiritual “state” (hal) and because they are in it; we have referred to this above. These states have empirically something quasi-absolute about them; a given state appears unconnected, therefore, with another and equally possible state. Now the authors see sources of inspiration in these states, and of course not without reason; they do not dream of re-reading their productions nor a fortiori of submitting them to the scrutiny of a critical intelligence that in their eyes is “profane” be cause it is not ecstatic and is therefore alien to the breath of the Spirit; they leave to the reader the task of fishing for pearls in the deepest and darkest waters. The Koran nonetheless says, “Approach not prayer when ye are intoxicated,” and this precept has many meanings, depending on levels and analogies.46
Islam as a whole has escaped that formidable pitfall which is the abuse of intelligence—which neither ancient Greece nor the modern West escaped—and this has enabled it to perpetuate the world of the Bible; but it has not escaped the opposite pitfall, which we have sufficiently de scribed in the course of this book and which is like a ransom of the intelligence for a victory over luciferism. According to an artificial dilemma, but one that is psychologically real for the Semitico-Western mentality, there is an antinomy between science and faith: the man who believes does not think, and the man who thinks does not believe; Islam is not unaware of this dilemma, but in its case faith curbed the insatiable curiosity of science.
In an ardently religious climate where faith is everything and where thought, considered conjectural by definition, amounts to little, one must expect the logic of lovers: everything good—however absurd—that one says about God, the Prophet, and sacred things is true, as if truth were guaranteed by the sublimity of the object; to reflect is then nearly a sin, for thinking appears like the manifestation of doubt and like unhealthy, even luciferian, curiosity. This is the point of view of bhakti, which is un aware—whether through inexperience or as a matter of principle—of the humble serenity of pure intellection, humble because impersonal and serene because conforming to That which is. All this doubtless seems like an over-simplification, but one must sometimes choose between the risk of simplifying things and the risk of not being able to say anything at all. Schematic distinguo s exist; they have their reason for being and no more exclude implicit compensations or nuances than the distant view of a landscape, necessary for revealing its principal features, excludes the details one observes when traveling through it.
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the fideistic and dialectical “naiveté”47 in question here remains completely independent of the eminent lucidity of the Arabs in matters of law, philosophy, science, art, and politics—independent in short of everything that constituted the prestige of their civilization during the whole of the Middle Ages.48 The fact is that in the Arab soul, which can jump from the most obstinate incredulity into the most simplistic credulity, an acute rationality op poses an overflowing enthusiasm that is either chivalric and erotic or religious and mystical, and this dilemma gives rise to opposite crystallizations as well as to diverse combinations.
When we speak of the “Arab soul”, we are not un aware that it was relatively diverse from pre-Islamic times in the sense that religious indifferentism was characteristic of the Arabs of the Center and the North whereas those of the South were distinguished by a rather contemplative temperament; but all of them were homogeneous regarding their qualities of nobility. The “Arab miracle”, the lightning-like expansion of Islam and the glories of medieval Islamic civilization, presupposes and includes a spirit of magnanimity whose roots are plunged in the pre-Islamic Bedouin mentality, a magnanimity that contributed—whatever the falsifiers of history may say—to the nearly unprecedented phenomenon of tolerance on the part of Muslim conquerors in the early centuries, hence at a time when the Arab influence was predominant in Islam. Bedouin magnanimity consisted essentially in “virility” (muruwah)—in the sense of the Latin word virtus—and “chivalry” (futuwwah), which included above all courage, generosity, and hospitality, the most precious, most fragile, and most specifically Arab trait—in the context of the Middle East—being the virtue of generosity.
In a completely general sense and independently of any racial or ethnic question, it must be said that there are gifts that exclude one another, not indeed in principle or in privileged cases, but among the majority of those who benefit from one kind or another; this seems to be the case with mystical intuition and reasoning. To take note of this fact, we must insist, does not mean one considers it a necessity; but this de facto incompatibility—which obviously includes many gradations—is something one is very much obliged to keep in mind, whatever explanation one seeks to give it.
In the same connection there is also another point to consider, and it is crucial: the key to many enigmas in the realm of spiritual thought is the fact that God requires of men that they be pious and virtuous, and not that they be intelligent; this provides the justification for a pious unintelligence, but is unconnected with gnosis and esoterism. Obviously God forbids men to make a bad use of their intelligence—persistent error being moreover in the will rather than in the mind—but He cannot blame them for not possessing an intelligence that was not given them. One is forced to admit—though in certain cases one hesitates to do so for fear of being disrespectful or ungracious—that unintelligence can set up house with piety, that it can even enter accidentally and sporadically into the realm of what should be wisdom; in any event one all too often forgets the blindingly obvious fact that it is better to fol low truth stupidly than to follow error intelligently, all the more so as truth in any case neutralizes unintelligence, at least to a certain extent, whereas error can only pervert and corrupt the mind. In a word, the world of passions is necessarily also that of stupidity—intelligence showing solidarity with this world by itself becoming stupidity—so that religion, condemned to the same servitude, cannot avoid a few venial sins, which though they are not of course “against the Spirit” are at least against intelligence.
Contrary to a certain sentimental prejudice, the Holy Spirit does not have the role of making up for a lack of intelligence or abolishing stupidity; it can make it inoffensive or limit the harm it may cause and also reduce it to silence, which it does above all by humility. The miracle of humility is precisely that it alone is able to trans mute unintelligence into intelligence to the extent this is possible; the humble man is intelligent by his very humility.
God requires from each man what each man can and must give; but from the intelligent man He also requires intelligence in the service of truth, for which it is made and through which it lives.49 In some people, more over, intelligence resides less in their words than in their being, less in their theology than in their sanctity; nonetheless the spiritual norm consists in an equilibrium between thought and virtue, between mind and beauty.
Intelligence is beautiful only when it does not destroy faith, and faith is beautiful only when it is not opposed to intelligence.