Part 10 (2/2)
He says that immanence implies disparity of being; G.o.d is not immanent because He is Himself the existence. Eternal existence is the other self of G.o.d, it is the light through which He sees Himself. As the originator of an idea is existent in that idea, so G.o.d is present in nature. The difference between G.o.d and man, as one may say, is that His ideas materialise themselves, ours do not. It will be remembered here that Hegel would use the same line of argument in freeing himself from the accusation of Pantheism.
[163:1] This would seem very much like the idea of the phenomenal Brahma of the Vedanta. The Personal Creator or the Praj.a.pati of the Vedanta makes the third step of the Absolute Being or the Noumenal Brahma. Al-Jili seems to admit two kinds of Brahma--with or without qualities like the Samkara and Badarayana. To him the process of creation is essentially a lowering of the Absolute Thought, which is Asat, in so far as it is absolute, and Sat, in so far as it is manifested and hence limited. Notwithstanding this Absolute Monism, he inclines to a view similar to that of Ramanuja. He seems to admit the reality of the individual soul and seems to imply, unlike Samkara, that Iswara and His wors.h.i.+p are necessary even after the attainment of the Higher Knowledge.
The attribute of Mercy is closely connected with the attribute of Providence. He defines it as the sum of all that existence stands in need of. Plants are supplied with water through the force of this name.
The natural philosopher would express the same thing differently; he would speak of the same phenomena as resulting from the activity of a certain force of nature; Al-Jili would call it a manifestation of Providence; but, unlike the natural philosopher, he would not advocate the unknowability of that force. He would say that there is nothing behind it, it is the Absolute Being itself.
We have now finished all the essential names and attributes of G.o.d, and proceed to examine the nature of what existed before all things. The Arabian Prophet, says Al-Jili, was once questioned about the place of G.o.d before creation. He said that G.o.d, before the creation, existed in ”'Ama” (Blindness). It is the nature of this Blindness or primal darkness which we now proceed to examine. The investigation is particularly interesting, because the word translated into modern phraseology would be ”_The Unconsciousness_”. This single word impresses upon us the foresightedness with which he antic.i.p.ates metaphysical doctrines of modern Germany. He says that the Unconsciousness is the reality of all realities; it is the Pure Being without any descending movement; it is free from the attributes of G.o.d and creation; it does not stand in need of any name or quality, because it is beyond the sphere of relation. It is distinguished from the Absolute Oneness because the latter name is applied to the Pure Being in its process of coming down towards manifestation. It should, however, be remembered that when we speak of the priority of G.o.d and posteriority of creation, our words must not be understood as implying time; for there can be no duration of time or separateness between G.o.d and His creation. Time, continuity in s.p.a.ce and time, are themselves creations, and how can piece of creation intervene between G.o.d and His creation. Hence our words before, after, where, whence, etc., in this sphere of thought, should not be construed to imply time or s.p.a.ce. The real thing is beyond the grasp of human conceptions; no category of material existence can be applicable to it; because, as Kant would say, the laws of phenomena cannot be spoken of as obtaining in the sphere of noumena.
We have already noticed that man in his progress towards perfection has three stages: the first is the meditation of the name which the author calls the illumination of names. He remarks that ”When G.o.d illuminates a certain man by the light of His names, the man is destroyed under the dazzling splendour of that name; and ”when thou calleth G.o.d, the call is responded to by the man”. The effect of this illumination would be, in Schopenhauer's language, the destruction of the individual will, yet it must not be confounded with physical death; because the individual goes on living and moving like the spinning wheel, as Kapila would say, after he has become one with Prakriti. It is here that the individual cries out in pantheistic mood:--She was I and I was she and there was none to separate us.”[167:1]
[167:1] Insan al-Kamil, Vol. I, p. 40.
The second stage of the spiritual training is what he calls the illumination of the Attribute. This illumination makes the perfect man receive the attributes of G.o.d in their real nature in proportion to the power of receptivity possessed by him--a fact which cla.s.sifies men according to the magnitude of this light resulting from the illumination. Some men receive illumination from the divine attribute of Life, and thus partic.i.p.ate in the soul of the Universe. The effect of this light is soaring in the air, walking on water, changing the magnitude of things (as Christ so often did). In this wise the perfect man receives illumination from all the Divine attributes, crosses the sphere of the name and the attribute, and steps into the domain of the Essence--Absolute Existence.
As we have already seen, the Absolute Being, when it leaves its absoluteness, has three voyages to undergo, each voyage being a process of particularisation of the bare universality of the Absolute Essence.
Each of these three movements appears under a new Essential Name which has its own peculiar illuminating effect upon the human soul. Here is the end of our author's spiritual ethics; _man has become perfect_, he has amalgamated himself with the Absolute Being, or _has learnt what Hegel calls The Absolute Philosophy_. ”He becomes the paragon of perfection, the object of wors.h.i.+p, the preserver of the Universe”.[169:1] He is the point where Man-ness and G.o.d-ness become one, and result in the birth of the G.o.d-man.
[169:1] Insan al-Kamil, Vol. I, p. 48.
How the perfect man reaches this height of spiritual development, the author does not tell us; but he says that at every stage he has a peculiar experience in which there is not even a trace of doubt or agitation. The instrument of this experience is what he calls the _Qalb_ (heart), a word very difficult of definition. He gives a very mystical diagram of the Qalb, and explains it by saying that it is the eye which sees the names, the attributes and the Absolute Being successively. It owes its existence to a mysterious combination of soul and mind; and becomes by its very nature the organ for the recognition of the ultimate realities of existence. All that the ”heart”, or the source of what the Vedanta calls the Higher Knowledge, reveals is not seen by the individual as something separate from and heterogeneous to himself; what is shown to him through this agency is his own reality, his own deep being. This characteristic of the agency differentiates it from the intellect, the object of which is always different and separate from the individual exercising that faculty. But the spiritual experience, according to the ?ufis of this school, is not permanent; moments of spiritual vision, says Matthew Arnold,[170:1] cannot be at our command.
The G.o.d-man is he who has known the mystery of his own being, who has realised himself as G.o.d-man; but when that particular spiritual realisation is over man is man and G.o.d is G.o.d. Had the experience been permanent, a great moral force would have been lost and society overturned.
[170:1] ”We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides”.
Let us now sum up Al-Jili's _Doctrine of the Trinity_. We have seen the three movements of the Absolute Being, or the first three categories of Pure Being; we have also seen that the third movement is attended with external manifestation, which is the self-diremption of the Essence into G.o.d and man. This separation makes a gap which is filled by the perfect man, who shares in both the Divine and the human attributes. He holds that the perfect man is the preserver of the Universe; hence in his view, the appearance of the perfect man is a necessary condition for the continuation of nature. It is easy, therefore, to understand that in the G.o.d-man, the Absolute Being which has left its absoluteness, returns into itself; and, but for the G.o.d-man, it could not have done so; for then there would have been no nature, and consequently no light through which G.o.d could have seen Himself. The light through the agency of which G.o.d sees Himself is due to the principle of difference in the nature of the Absolute Being itself. He recognises this principle in the following verses:--
If you say that G.o.d is one, you are right; but if you say that He is two, this is also true.
If you say no, but He is three, you are right, for this is the real nature of man.[171:1]
[171:1] Insan al-Kamil, Vol. I, p. 8.
The _perfect man_, then, is the joining link. On the one hand he receives illumination from all the Essential names, on the other hand all Divine attributes reappear in him. These attributes are:--
1. Independent life or existence.
2. Knowledge which is a form of life, as he proves from a verse from the Qur'an.
3. Will--the principle of particularisation, or the manifestation of Being. He defines it as the illumination of the knowledge of G.o.d according to the requirements of the Essence; hence it is a particular form of knowledge. It has nine manifestations, all of which are different names for love; the last is the love in which the lover and the beloved, the knower and the known merge into each other, and become identical. This form of love, he says, is the Absolute Essence; as Christianity teaches, G.o.d is love. He guards, here, against the error of looking upon the individual act of will as uncaused. Only the act of the universal will is uncaused; hence he implies the Hegelian Doctrine of Freedom, and holds that the acts of man are both free and determined.
4. Power, which expresses itself in self-diremption i.e. creation. He controverts S_h_aik_h_ Mu?y al-Din ibn 'Arabi's position that the Universe existed before the creation in the knowledge of G.o.d. He says, this would imply that G.o.d did not create it out of nothing, and holds that the Universe, before its existence as an idea, existed in the self of G.o.d.
5. The word or the reflected being. Every possibility is the word of G.o.d; hence nature is the materialisation of the word of G.o.d. It has different names--The tangible word, The sum of the realities of man, The arrangement of the Divinity, The spread of Oneness, The expression of the Unknown, The phases of Beauty, The trace of names and attributes, and the object of G.o.d's knowledge.
6. The Power of hearing the inaudible.
7. The Power of seeing the invisible.
8. Beauty--that which seems least beautiful in nature (the reflected beauty) is in its real existence, beauty. Evil is only relative, it has no real existence; sin is merely a relative deformity.
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