Were Ibn Arabi, Jili, and other theoreticians of Sufism philosophers? Yes and no, depending on the meaning given to this word.
According to Pythagoras, wisdom is a priori the knowledge of the stellar world and all that is situated above us, sophia being the wisdom of the gods and philosophia that of men. For Heraclitus the philosopher is one who applies himself to knowledge of the profound nature of things, whereas for Plato philosophy is knowledge of the Immutable and the Ideas, and for Aristotle it is knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences derived from them. In addition philosophy implies for all the Ancients moral conformity to wisdom: he alone is wise, sophos, who lives wisely. In this particular and precise sense, the wisdom of Solomon is philosophy; it is to live according to the nature of things on the basis of piety—the “fear of God”—for the sake of what is essential and liberating.
All this shows that the word “philosopher” itself has nothing restrictive about it, to say the least, and that one cannot legitimately impute to this word any of the vexing associations of ideas it may elicit; usage applies this word to all thinkers, including eminent metaphysicians—some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets—so that one would like to reserve it for sages and simply use the term “rationalists” for profane thinkers. It is nonetheless legitimate to take into account a misuse of language that has become conventional, for un questionably the terms “philosophy” and “philosopher” have been seriously compromised by ancient and modern sophists; in fact the major disadvantage of these terms is that they imply conventionally that the norm for the mind is reasoning pure and simple,1 in the absence not only of intellection but of indispensable objective data. Admittedly one is neither ignorant nor rationalistic just because one is a logician, but one is both if one is a logician and nothing more.2
In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely”, as far as possible without presuppositions, which is precisely impossible; on the other hand gnosis, or philosophy in the proper and original sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone. What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposite reasons: that the rationalist draws his inspiration if necessary from a pre-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way he deems to be “free”—falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth; and likewise mutatis mutandis that the gnostic—in the orthodox sense of the term—bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth or the Essence, which by definition escapes formal constraints. Or again: whether the gnostic “thinks” what he has “seen” with the “eye of the heart” or whether on the contrary he obtains his “vision” thanks to the intervention—preliminary and provisional but in no way efficient—of a thought, which then takes on the role of occasional cause, is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth or its quasi-supernatural springing forth in the spirit.
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The reduction of the notion of intellectuality to that of simple rationality often has its cause in the prejudice of a school: Saint Thomas is an empiricist, which means that he reduces the cause of all nontheological knowledge to sensible perceptions in order to be able to underestimate the human mind to the advantage of Scripture—because this allows him, in other words, to attribute to Revelation alone the glory of “supernatural” knowledge. And Ghazzali inveighs against the “philosophers” because he wishes to reserve for the Sufis a monopoly of spiritual knowledge, as if faith and piety, combined with intellectual gifts and grace—all the Arab philosophers were believers—did not provide a sufficient basis for pure intellection.
According to Ibn Arabi, the “philosopher”—which for him practically means the skeptic—is incapable of knowing universal causality except by observing causations in the outer world and drawing from his observations the conclusions that impose themselves on his sense of logic. According to another Sufi, Ibn al-Arif, intellectual knowledge is merely an “indication” pointing to God: the philosopher knows God only by way of a “conclusion”; his knowledge has content only “with a view to God” and not “by God”, as does that of the mystic. But this distinguo is valid only if we assimilate all philosophy to unmitigated rationalism and forget moreover that in the doctrinaire mystics there is an obvious element of rationality. In short, the term “philosopher” in current speech signifies nothing other than the fact of expounding a doctrine while respecting the laws of logic, which are those of language and common sense, without which we would not be human; to practice philosophy is first and foremost to think, whatever the reasons that rightly or wrongly incite us to do so. But it is also more especially and according to the best of the Greeks to express by means of reason certainties “seen” or “lived” by the immanent Intellect, as we have remarked above; now the explanation necessarily takes on the character imposed on it by the laws of thought and language.
Some will object that the simple believer, who under stands nothing of philosophy, can derive much more from scriptural symbols than does the philosopher with his definitions, abstractions, classifications, and categories—an unjust reproach, for in the first place theorizing thought does not exclude supra-rational intuition, which is completely obvious, and in the second place it does not pretend to provide by itself anything that it cannot offer by virtue of its nature. What it can offer may be of immense value, or else it would be necessary to suppress all doctrines; Platonic anamnesis can have doctrinal concepts as its occasional cause as well as symbols provided by art or virgin nature. If in intellectual speculation there is a human danger of rationalism and thus—at least in principle—of skepticism and material ism, mystical speculation for its part includes, with the same reservation, a danger of excesses or even of rambling and incoherence, whatever may be said by esoterizing zealots who take pleasure in question-begging and sublimizing euphemisms.
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We must say a few words here in defense of the Arab philosophers, who have been accused among other things of confusing Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. We believe on the contrary that they had the merit of integrating these great Greeks in one and the same synthesis, for what interested them was not systems but truth as such. We shall no doubt run counter to certain esoterist prejudices if we say that metaphysically orthodox philosophy—that of the Middle Ages as well as antiquity—is derived from sapiential esoterism, whether intrinsically by its truth or extrinsically in relation to the simplifications of theology; it is “thinking”, if one will, but not ratiocination in the void. If it is objected that the errors one may find in some philosophers who overall are orthodox prove the non-esoteric and consequently profane nature of all philosophy, this argument can be turned against theology and the mystical or gnostic doctrines, for in these sectors erroneous speculations can also be found on the margin of real inspirations.
To give a concrete example, we shall mention the fol lowing case, which in any event is interesting in itself and apart from any question of terminology: the Arab philosophers rightly accept the eternity of the world, for, as they say, God cannot create at a given moment without put ting Himself in contradiction with His very nature and thus without absurdity;3 most ingeniously Ghazzali replies—and others have repeated the same argument—that there is no “before” with regard to creation, that time “was” created with, for, and in the world. Now this argument is invalid since it is unilateral: for though it safeguards the transcendence, absolute freedom, and timelessness of the Creator with regard to creation, it does not explain the temporality of this creation, which is to say that it does not take account of the temporal limitation of a unique world projected into the void of non-time, a limitation that involves God since He is its cause and it exists in relation to His eternity;4 the very nature of duration demands a beginning. The solution of the problem is that the co-eternity of the world is not that of our “actual” world—which of necessity had an origin and will have an end; rather this co-eternity consists in the necessity of successive worlds: God being what He is—with His absolute Necessity and absolute Freedom—He necessarily cannot not create, but He is free in the modes of creation, which never repeat themselves since God is infinite. The whole difficulty comes from the fact that Semites en visage only one world, namely ours, whereas the non-Semiticized Aryans either accept an indefinite series of creations—this is the Hindu doctrine of cosmic cycles—or else envisage the world as a necessary manifestation of the divine Nature and not as a contingent and particular phenomenon. In this confrontation between two theses, the theological and the philosophical, it is the philosophers and not the theologians—even if they were Sufis like Ghazzali—who are right; and if doctrinal esoterism is the explanation of problems posed but not clarified by faith, we do not see why those philosophers who provide this explanation thanks to intellection—for reasoning pure and simple would not succeed in doing so, and it is moreover metaphysical truth that proves the worth of the intuition corresponding to it—do not have the same merit as recognized esoterists, especially since, to para phrase Saint Paul, one cannot testify to great truths except by the Holy Spirit.
For theologians, to say that the world is “without beginning” amounts to saying that it is eternal a se— this is why they reject the idea—whereas for philosophers it means that it is eternal ab alio, for it is God who lends it eternity. Now an eternity that is lent is a completely different thing from eternity in itself, and it is precisely for this reason that the world is both eternal and temporal: eternal as a series of creations or a creative rhythm and temporal by the fact that each link in this flux has a beginning and end. It is universal Manifestation as such that is co-eternal with God because it is a necessary expression of His eternal Nature—the sun being unable to abstain from shining—but eternity cannot be reduced to a given contingent phase of this divine Manifestation. Manifestation is “co-eternal”, which is to say that it is not eternal in the same way as the sole Essence; and this is why it is periodically interrupted and totally reabsorbed into the Principle, to such an extent that it is both existent and nonexistent and does not enjoy a plenary and so to speak “continuous” reality like the Eternal itself. To say that the world is “co-eternal” nevertheless means that it is necessary as an aspect of the Principle, that it is therefore “something of God”, which is al ready indicated by the term “Manifestation”; and it is precisely this truth theologians refuse to accept—for obvious reasons, since in their eyes it abolishes the difference between creature and Creator.5
The world’s “co-eternity” with God evokes the universal Materia of Empedocles and Ibn Masarrah, which is none other than the Logos as Substance ('ama' = “cloud” or haba' = “dust”):6 it is not creation as such that is co-eternal with the Creator; it is the creative virtuality, which comprises—according to these doctrines—four fundamental, formative principles. These are, symbolically speaking, “Fire”, “Air”, “Water”, “Earth”,7 which recall the three principial determinations (guna s) included in Prakriti: Sattva, Rajas, Tamas, the difference in number indicating a secondary difference in perspective.8
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Regarding the confrontation between Sufis and philosophers, the following remark must be made: if Ghazzali had limited himself to asserting that there is no possible esoteric realization without an initiation and corresponding method and that philosophers in general demand neither,9 we would have no reason to reproach him; but his criticism is leveled at philosophy as such—that is, it is situated above all on the doctrinal and epistemological plane. In fact the Hellenizing philosophy here in question is neutral from the initiatic point of view, given that its intention is to provide an exposition of truth and nothing else; particular opinions—such as those of rationalism properly so called—do not enter into the definition of philosophy.10 Be that as it may, the Ghazzalian ostracism makes us think of those theologians of old who sought to oppose the “vain wisdom of the world” with “tears of repentance”, but who finally did not refrain from constructing systems of their own and who in doing so could not manage without the help of the Greeks, to whom nevertheless they denied the assistance of the “Holy Spirit” and therefore any supernatural quality.
Sufis do not wish to be philosophers—that is understood; and they are right if they mean by this that their starting point is not doubt and that their certainties are not rational conclusions. But we do not at all see why when they reason wrongly they would do so in a manner different from philosophers, nor why a philosopher when he conceives a truth whose transcendent and axiomatic nature he recognizes would do so in a manner different from the Sufis.
It was not as a gnostic but as a “thinker” that Ibn Arabi treated the question of evil, explaining it by subjectivity and relativity with an entirely Pyrrhoniclogic. What is serious is that in abolishing evil, practically speaking—since it is reduced to a subjective point of view—one abolishes good with the same stroke, whether this was the intention or not; and in particular one abolishes beauty by depriving love of its content, whereas it is precisely upon their reality and necessary connection that Ibn Arabi’s doctrine insists. It is beauty that determines love, not conversely: the beautiful is not what we love and be cause we love it, but what by its objective value obliges us to love it; we love the beautiful because it is beautiful even if we lack judgment, which does not invalidate the principle of the nor mal relationship between object and subject. Likewise, the fact that one may love because of an inward beauty and in spite of an outward ugliness or that love may be mixed with compassion or other indirect motives cannot invalidate the nature either of beauty or love.
On the contrary, it is as a gnostic that Ibn Arabi responded to the question of freedom; every creature does what it wills because every creature is basically what it wills to be: in other words, because a possibility is what it is and not something else. Freedom in the last analysis coincides with possibility, and this moreover is attested to by the Koranic story of the initial pact between human souls and God; destiny is therefore what the creature wills by his nature and thus by his possibility. One may wonder which we should admire more here: the gnostic who penetrated the mystery or the philosopher who knew how to make it explicit.
But if a man does what he is or if he is what he does, why strive to become better and why pray to this end? Be cause there is a distinction between substance and accident: demerits as well as merits come from either one or the other without man being able to know from which they come, unless he is a “pneumatic”, who is aware of his substantial reality, an ascending reality on account of its conformity to the Spirit (Pneuma). “Whoso knoweth his soul knoweth his Lord”; but even then the effort belongs to man and the knowledge to God; in other words it suffices that we strive while being aware that God knows us. It suffices us to know we are free in and through our movement toward God, our movement toward our “Self”.
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In a certain respect the difference between philosophy, theology, and gnosis is total; in another respect it is relative. It is total when one understands by “philosophy” only rationalism, by “theology” only the explanation of religious teachings, and by gnosis only intuitive and intellective, thus supra-rational, knowledge; but the difference is only relative when one understands by “philosophy” the fact of thinking, by “theology” the fact of speaking dogmatically about God and religious things, and by gnosis the fact of presenting pure metaphysics, for then the categories interpenetrate. It is impossible to deny that the most illustrious Sufis, while being “gnostics” by definition, were at the same time to some extent theologians and to some extent philosophers or that the great theologians were to some extent philosophers and to some extent gnostics, the last word having to be understood in its proper and not sectarian meaning.
If we wish to retain the limitative, or even pejorative, sense of the word “philosopher”, we could say that gnosis or pure metaphysics starts with certainty, whereas philosophy on the contrary starts from doubt and serves to overcome it only with the means that are at its disposal and that are intended to be purely rational. But since neither the term “philosophy” as such nor the use that has always been made of it obliges us to accept only the restrictive sense of the word, we shall not censure too severely those who employ it in a wider sense than may seem opportune.11
Theory by definition is not an end in itself; it is only—and seeks only to be—a key for becoming conscious through the “heart”. If a taint of superficiality, insufficiency, and pretension is attached to the notion of “philosophy”, it is precisely because all too often—and indeed always in the case of the moderns—it is presented as being sufficient unto itself. “This is only philosophy”: we readily accept the use of this turn of phrase, but only on condition that one does not say, “Plato is only a philosopher”—Plato who knew that “beauty is the splendor of the true”, a beauty including or demanding all we are or can be.
When Plato maintains that the philosophos should think in dependently of common opinions, he is referring to intellection and not logic alone; whereas Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, maintains this while starting from systematic doubt, to such an extent that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism but also with skepticism. This is a major suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others as a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical “dogmatism”. The “Greek miracle” is in fact the substitution of reason for Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the Essence, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be—and in this case it would be related to the “Hin du miracle”—is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic log ic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites.
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The notion of philosophy, with its suggestion of human fallibility, evokes ipso facto the problem of infallibility and thereby the question of knowing whether man is condemned by his nature to be mistaken. The human mind, even when disciplined by a sacred tradition, remains exposed to many flaws; that these should be possible does not mean they are inevitable in principle; on the contrary they are the result of causes that are not at all mysterious. Doc trinal infallibility pertains to the realm of orthodoxy and authority, the first element being objective and the second subjective, each having a bearing that is either formal or non-formal, extrinsic or intrinsic, traditional or universal, depending on the case. This being so, it is not even difficult to be infallible when one knows one’s limits; it is enough not to speak of things of which one is ignorant, which presupposes that one knows that one is ignorant of them. This amounts to saying that infallibility is not only a matter of information and intellection, but also includes, and essentially so, a moral or psychological condition, without which even men who are in principle infallible become accidentally fallible. Let us add that it is not blameworthy to offer a plausible hypothesis on condition that it is not presented in the form of certitude ex cathedra.
In any case there is no infallibility that a priori en compasses all possible contingent domains; omniscience is not a human possibility. No one can be infallible with regard to unknown or insufficiently known phenomena; one may have an intuition for pure principles without having one for a given phenomenal order, that is, without being able to apply the principles spontaneously in a given domain. The importance of this possible incapacity diminishes to the extent that the phenomenal domain in question is secondary and where, on the contrary, the principles infallibly enunciated are essential. One must forgive small errors on the part of one who offers great truths—and it is these truths that determine how small or how great are the errors—whereas it would obviously be perverse to forgive great errors when they are accompanied by many small truths.12
Infallibility, in a sense by definition, pertains in one degree or another to the Holy Spirit in a way that may be extraordinary or ordinary, properly supernatural or quasi-natural; now in the religious domain the Holy Spirit adapts itself to the nature of man in the sense that it limits itself to preventing the victory of intrinsic heresies, a victory that would falsify the “divine form” that is the religion; for the upaya, the “salvific mirage”, is willed by Heaven, not by men.13