Insight Editions · No. 139
Logos and Revelation: Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics
Robert J. Dobie
Robert J. Dobie compares Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart, examining how Qur’anic and Christian revelation shape their accounts of the Logos, intellect, and mystical union.
A study guide to Logos and Revelation: Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics by Robert J. Dobie. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Robert J. Dobie's Logos and Revelation: Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics (Catholic University of America Press, 2009) reads the greatest mystic of Islam and the greatest mystic of medieval Latin Christianity side by side. Its claim is that neither can be understood apart from a revealed scripture and a way of reading it that seeks its inner meaning: the union of the soul with God through the divine Logos.
In one sentence: for Dobie, the mystical is not a private experience beyond reason but the complete conformity of the intellect or heart to the divine Word, so that Ibn Arabi's Universal Man and Eckhart's Nobleman converge not despite their grounding in the Qur'an and the Gospel but because of it.
A comparative study built on close readings: for Ibn Arabi chiefly the Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam) and the Meccan Openings (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya), with commentators such as al-Qaysari and modern readers such as Chittick, Corbin, Izutsu and Affifi; for Eckhart the Latin commentaries on Genesis, Exodus and John, the Parisian Questions, the Counsels on Discernment and the German sermons. The four parts move through revelation, existence, intellect and the perfected human being.
Readers who know one of the two mystics and want a disciplined comparison with the other. Students of comparative religion will find a sustained argument against reading mysticism as a common core beneath all traditions. Students of medieval philosophy will find the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian vocabulary of being, analogy and intellect put to work in exegesis.
The argument at a glance
| Part | Book chapter | Main question |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction; Part I preface | Why must mysticism be understood through revelation and its interpretation? |
| Part 2 | 1. Ibn Arabi on revelation | How does the Qur'an disclose the Real, and how is it read? |
| Part 3 | 2. Eckhart on revelation | How can Scripture, philosophy and nature teach one truth? |
| Part 4 | 3. Ibn Arabi on existence | How is creation a self-disclosure of the One? |
| Part 5 | 4. Eckhart on existence | How is God distinct from all things by his very indistinction? |
| Part 6 | 5. Ibn Arabi on intellect | How do reason, imagination and heart know God? |
| Part 7 | 6. Eckhart on intellect | Why is God understanding before he is existence? |
| Part 8 | 7. The Universal Man in Ibn Arabi | Who is the human being in whom God sees himself? |
| Part 9 | 8. The Nobleman in Meister Eckhart | What does letting-go make of the soul? |
| Part 10 | Conclusion | How are the mystical paths one, and how are they different? |
Each pair of parts is best read together, the Ibn Arabi chapter first, since the book is arranged that way and the Eckhart chapters often look back. Parts 6 and 7 on intellect are the most technical. Parts 8 and 9 gather the whole argument into two portraits of the perfected human being, and the Conclusion states plainly where the author sees agreement and where he insists on difference.
Part 1. What Is the "Mystical"?
The Introduction states the two theses that carry the whole book. First, the mystical is not a system beside religion but a way of reading revealed scripture from the inside, so it is always embodied in one tradition. Second, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart are "orthodox" mystics who aim to show the identity of the God of revelation with the God "beyond God". The short preface to Part I then sets out what revelation means for both writers.
1.1 The mystical as a way of reading
Dobie begins with a claim about words. If one looks closely at Muhyaddin Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart, one does not find "mysticism" as a noun, a practice running parallel to the religious tradition, but a "mystical" way of appropriating that tradition. From its Greek root the mystical is the hidden or inner sense of Scripture. For both writers this inner sense is the sense that applies universally to the inner life of each soul. As far as we can tell, both were "simply trying to develop a deeper and living appropriation of their faith as conveyed to them by their revealed scriptures."
The mystical is therefore the uncovering, indeed recovery, of the original sense of Scripture, so that the soul may come to think and act out of it. That inner sense is "nothing other than the divine Word or Logos itself." To uncover it is to allow God to unite with the soul and transform it in its very substance. Mysticism does not float in a "pure experience" of a private kind. If there is a common core to mystical thought, the author holds, it can be found only in and through the traditions that give it life.
Reflection of this kind cannot dispense with revelation, because it recognizes that God cannot be captured in a concept. The author states this as the assertion he will argue throughout the book.
1.2 Thinking back to the revelation of being
What both writers do, Dobie says, is think back "not to being as such, but to the primal revelation of being." Eckhart points out that the Gospel of John does not say "In the beginning was being" but "In the beginning was the Word (Logos)." Our finite minds cannot capture being; they must be captured by it. This is not a retreat into irrationalism. It recognizes that all creatures, insofar as they exist, are intelligible, and that when the mind is conformed to them they are causes of truth.
Norris Clarke supplies the formula the author builds on: "Being itself is for intelligence." Its fulfilment requires that it be unveiled, "revealed ( = remove the veil: revelation) to mind." Any medieval scholar, Christian or Muslim, would add that being is for intelligence because being has within itself a primal Logos that is expressed in every being.
The whole goal of the mystical project is to listen to this primal Logos. For both writers it has spoken to human beings directly: for Ibn Arabi in the Qur'an, for Eckhart in the Person of Christ. It had to, because human beings tend to close themselves off from the revealed nature of being and become "stuck" on beings, or worse, on their own concepts about beings.
Following William Chittick, the author contrasts two attitudes. Taqlid is the "blind imitation" of what others have said or thought without experiencing its truth. It attracts because it gives a sense of power over the world. Tahqiq, from the causative form of haqq, "truth", means "to make real", "to make true". The mystic is the one who realizes the handed-down truths by having their nature unveiled to him or her, and for that the finite self must be let go.
The mystical project is thus to know God "as self-revealed and self-revealing Logos." The primal Word is always spoken by God. We live in truth only to the degree that we fall silent and let God's Word speak through us: "in the end, it is not we who speak, but rather we who are spoken." Self-understanding cannot begin with reflection on oneself, since as soon as one tries to grasp oneself in a concept, one's "I" has retreated behind the reflection. One finds oneself only in the Word of revelation, as God knows, sees and loves us. Hence the radical fana' (extinction) of the Sufi and the abgeschiedenheit or gelassenheit (detachment, letting-be) of Eckhart. Medieval mystical writing "assumes no fixed and abiding 'self'" as the locus of truth; its whole effort is to de-center the self.
1.3 Scholem's three stages
Gershom Scholem, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, gave the reminder that "there is no mysticism as such, there is only the mysticism of a particular religious system, Christian, Islamic, Jewish mysticism and so on." Mystical thought is always embedded in an interpretive tradition with legal or liturgical aspects. Personal experience is central, but it is experience of, in and through the revealed text.
Scholem's schema of religious development (which, the author notes, owes much to Hegel) runs in three stages:
| Stage | Scholem's description | Relation of God and man |
|---|---|---|
| Mythical | "Nature is the scene of man's relation to God" | Primal unity; gods walk the earth |
| Classical or revealed | "the creation of a vast abyss" between God and Man | God transcendent, revealed in history and law |
| Romantic (mystical) | Strives "to bring back the old unity which religion has destroyed, but on a new plane" | Unity restored in the soul while transcendence is kept |
The mystical is thus secondary for Scholem: it does not return to myth but reads the scriptures of the second stage in a new way, as a dual movement, from without into history and from within the heart back to God. For the mystic, in Scholem's words, "instead of the one act of Revelation, there is a constant repetition of this act." Revelation is transcendent because it breaks through the mind's categories, and for that very reason it is also the immanent ground of the soul's self-understanding. The "inner" revelation, Dobie writes, is nothing but the "outer" revelation "become the lived ground of the soul's being, thinking, and acting."
1.4 Not gnostics
Both writers distinguish "God the Creator" from "God as He is in Himself". Eckhart speaks of the Godhead (gottheit, deitas) "beyond God", beyond all distinctions, even those of the Trinity. Ibn Arabi distinguishes God in himself, the Real (al-haqq), from God as Lord (rabb) of creation. Such distinctions have led many to confuse them with gnostics, who oppose an evil Creator to a good God beyond the world. Scholem says this is not so for "orthodox" mystics: Kabbalism "is not dualistic", and "all the energy of 'orthodox' Kabbalistic speculation is bent to the task of escaping from dualistic consequences."
The thrust of orthodox mystics, Jewish, Christian or Muslim, is to show the identity between the God of revelation and the God beyond God. In Maritain's phrase, revelation distinguishes in order to unite. That is the second major thesis of the book. Both men also belong to a community: Eckhart's mystical reading of Scripture occurred almost always in a liturgical context, and Ibn Arabi's hermeneutics is firmly situated within the study and application of Islamic law.
- The mystical is the hermeneutical appropriation of a revealed text inside a tradition; there is no mysticism "as such".
- Ibn Arabi and Eckhart are orthodox mystics whose distinction between God as Creator and God in himself serves to show their identity, not to oppose them.
1.5 The antinomies of mysticism
The author hopes to reverse a trend of twentieth-century scholarship that sought a core of characteristics common to all mystical experience and built taxonomies to classify it. Such schemes leave in too much or leave out too much, and they run into logical difficulties he calls the "antinomies of mysticism".
One example: is mystical experience purely contextual, shaped by the mind's structures and by culture, or a "pure consciousness event" beyond them? If mystical experience is hermeneutical, the debate is moot. It is contextual because it arises inside a tradition and its text; there can be no empty pure experience because the living Word of God is both content and subject of it. Yet it is not purely contextual either, because Ibn Arabi or Eckhart experiences the text as that which "breaks through", "dissolves" or "shatters" received notions. Revelation breaks through the "hard shell" of cultural, intellectual and above all linguistic convention. In both writers, he argues, it is not metaphysics that cuts revelation down to size but revelation that alters every philosophical category.
The root of the modern confusion is the Cartesian assumption of a self-contained, self-transparent subject. Followed through, Descartes makes only a "pure consciousness event" count as authentic mystical knowledge, while Kant makes all mystical experience contextual. Both miss the point. Human beings are embodied spirits who experience the world as a world of meaningful things, things with their own logoi that point beyond themselves. Experience is essential to the two mystics, but it does not "belong" to the subject. Their goal is not to lead the soul to new, discrete experiences, "but to lead it to a new way of experiencing the world and the self in and through God."
Hence there are always two poles: subjective inner experience and the objective content of revelation. Vladimir Lossky puts it for the Eastern Church: "There is, therefore, no Christian mysticism without theology; but, above all, there is no theology without mysticism." The author applies this, mutatis mutandis, to Ibn Arabi's relation to Islamic theology and law. Mystical exegesis is always a "participatory exegesis", whose purpose is that the reader participate in the realities revealed. Following Matthew Levering, Dobie notes that all medieval exegesis was participatory until the coming of nominalism in the fourteenth century, so the two mystics are not radically different from the main streams of their traditions.
1.6 Why these two
Both were thinkers of great power whose influence extended widely and often covertly. Ibn Arabi earned the name al-Shaykh al-akbar, "the greatest master", and his works spawned many schools of Sufism, and much controversy. Eckhart influenced Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Nicholas of Cusa and, through them, John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila.
The deeper reason is that both seem to defend the very proposition the author wishes to refute: that the mystical is independent of or opposed to religious tradition. Several of Eckhart's propositions were condemned in a papal bull published a year after his death, although Eckhart himself was never condemned as a heretic, being prepared to abjure anything found heretical. Ibn Arabi escaped such entanglements, probably because he was more discreet, but his posthumous reputation became bitterly disputed, as Alexander Knysh shows. The author holds that in each case the reputation is undeserved: their readings are "decidedly orthodox and conservative in character." Eckhart's thought is not opposed to Thomistic teaching but an extension and application of it.
Their convergence does not show that they "rose above" their traditions. On the contrary, it is "precisely in entering into the depths of their traditions that we find points of convergence." There is no univocal meaning to "the mystical"; there are analogous manifestations that refer to a single divine origin. That is why mystical readings exist at all: the divine "cannot be grasped by the human mind empirically or conceptually, but only analogically."
1.7 Not a facile universalism
Are all paths then equal? Neither writer thought so. Ibn Arabi, in the Interpreter of Desires (Tarjuman al-ashwaq), speaks of his religion as the "religion of love", yet he sees the Law of Muhammad as the fulfilment of all earlier manifestations, and he thought its strictures should be applied with utmost rigor to the dhimmi communities. The author cites his letter to Kayka'us, sultan of Konya, which complains of "the sound of bells" and asks that Christians build no new churches or repair old ones. Dobie notes that these provisions were not out of the ordinary for the time, and that Ibn Arabi was probably thinking of Spain, where the Christian kingdoms were driving the Muslims out. Still, the letter should put us on guard against attributing to him "a facile religious universalism."
Eckhart says nothing explicit about other religions or about Islam. It is safe to suppose he had no doubt that Christ is the fulfilment of all revelation; with Fernand Brunner, the author holds that Eckhart "is no radical". Had he reflected on Islam, he would most likely, like his colleagues, have thought it a Christian heresy.
Does such contextualism leave no basis for dialogue? No. To reject a universal core of experience is not to reject universalism as such: "If mystical reflection and experience point to any universal core, it is to the transcendent Deity given in revelation rather than to any human mode of thought or experience."
1.8 Revelation: the preface to Part I
For medieval mystics the authority of the sacred text was unquestioned, yet obedience did not stifle inquiry. Both held that human reason, though capax veritatis, is liable to confuse its own finite formulations with infinite Truth. Reason needs an unveiling. "Revelation" in its original sense is an uncovering, a pulling away of a veil (velatio). The veil is twofold: the finitude of creatures, which cannot reveal God's infinity, and the finitude of the human mind, which cannot think beyond its concepts. The second is the greater obstacle for both writers.
| General revelation | Specific revelation |
|---|---|
| Creation itself: everything reveals in a finite way what God is | The Bible or the Qur'an: a direct address about God's nature and commands |
| Illuminates every mind, even the atheist's | Lets the soul know God as God and creatures and concepts as finite |
| So general it is easily missed: "The fish does not know as water the water in which it swims." | The key: "special revelation is the key to the meaning of general revelation" |
Revelation in turn needs reason. Both writers (Ibn Arabi implicitly, Eckhart explicitly) use philosophy and even physics to unlock the inner meaning of the text. Unlike Averroes, Ibn Arabi's older Andalusian contemporary, they do not simply say that reason and revelation amount to the same principles. They use philosophical categories to unlock an inner meaning that is at once the meaning of the text and the meaning of the concept itself. For Eckhart, Aristotle's physics become analogies for the union of the soul with God.
Henry Corbin adds a paradox: prophetic revelation is closed, "but precisely because it is closed, it implies openness of prophetic hermeneutics, of the ta'wīl, or intelligentia spiritualis." Ibn Arabi gives great weight to the imagination, which Corbin says can "guide, anticipate and mold sense perception". Dobie calls this use the "analogical imagination": it discloses meanings related to material images that transcend them at the same time.
Eckhart, for his part, follows the early Fathers as described by Robert Lewis Wilken. For the Greeks God was the conclusion of an argument; for Christian thinkers God was the starting point, and "Now one reasoned from Christ to other things, not from other things to Christ." Understanding comes by entering the revealed object itself. One cannot step outside God to know God; one must enter into his Word.
Without the revealed text there is no mystical consciousness, and only in their application to that text do the categories of philosophy reveal their lived origin in the soul's quest for God. Each of the four Parts that follow sets Ibn Arabi beside Eckhart on one theme: revelation, existence, intellect, and the universal or noble man.
Part 2. "His Character Was the Qur'an": Ibn Arabi and Revelation
Chapter 1 argues that Ibn Arabi's thought is an extended commentary on the Qur'an and the hadith, and that its key is the "analogical imagination". Creation is like a dream that needs interpreting; creatures are shadows of the divine Light; and the saint is one in whom the Qur'an has become nature, as it was the Prophet's character.
2.1 A thought inseparable from the Book
The author's starting point: we can view Ibn Arabi's thought, however speculative it looks, "as nothing but an extended commentary on the letter and spirit of that holy book". His defender Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi pointed out the paradox faced by jurists who wanted his books burned. As Chodkiewicz relates it, if they leave the countless Qur'anic quotations in the books, "they end up burning the word of God"; if they erase them first, "then the works to be burned are no longer those of Ibn 'Arabi, for the Qur'an is such an integral part of them."
His thinking is therefore neither a system separable from revelation nor a search for extraordinary experience. Discursive reasoning reaches only regions of reality classed into genera and species. Reality as such can only be hinted at in images and symbols with a surplus of meaning, which carries reason to an "opening" (futuh) onto the Real, in which it is the Real that reveals itself to reason.
Like the Platonists, Ibn Arabi sees sensible being as lying between absolute existence, which cannot not be, and sheer nothingness. Creatures both are and are not. The main source here is the Fusus al-hikam or Bezels of Wisdom, a shorter and denser work than the immense Futuhat al-makkiyya ("Meccan Revelation"), which translated "would probably run to some thirty quarto volumes". Written late, the Bezels reflect his mature thought and have been the favourite subject of commentary. The author notes that catalogs list some seven hundred works, of which even a half or a third would still be a vast corpus, most of it unedited.
2.2 The world as a dream
For the Shaykh the existence of the world is analogous to a dream: it has some existence in the dreamer's mind but, compared with waking, only an ephemeral reality. The author insists on the word "analogous". This is an analogy of proportionality: as a reflection in water is to its object, or a dream to the dreamer, so is the creature to its Creator. The intermediate world of dreams, a Platonic metaxu between material and spiritual, gives an entry into the status of creation, but only through analogy.
The world is then made of symbols of true existence, the Real (al-haqq), God. Calling it dreamlike means, as Chittick notes, that it needs interpretation like a dream. The commentator Dawud al-Qaysari says that the meaning of revelation is found in the faculty of imagination, the ability to strike similitudes for what transcends reason. Early Sufis from Hakim al-Tirmidhi on distinguished "gnosis" (ma'rifa), the deeper knowledge of the inner meaning of the law, from "wisdom" (hikma), knowledge of the outer law. In a proper hermeneutics of the Qur'an, "understanding is becoming what one ultimately is in the Real."
2.3 Joseph: the wisdom of light
Joseph, the great interpreter of dreams in Bible and Qur'an, is for Ibn Arabi the interpreter par excellence. The light of this wisdom "extends over the plane of the Imagination, which is the first principle of revelation according to the people of Providence." Citing what A'ishah said about the conditions of revelation, he quotes the hadith "Men sleep and when they die they shall awake", and adds that the Prophet's whole earthly life was of this kind, "a dream within a dream."
Joseph and Muhammad are analogous. Joseph interprets dreams as dreams; Muhammad, as seal of the prophets, interprets creation as a dream. This matches two senses of imagination: the relative sense of private fantasy, and the ontological sense of the created world itself, midway between God's eternal Being and nothingness. Even in the first sense images are not pure fantasy; they have some independence from the dreamer. Creation is "a sort of 'objective imagination'", independent of our control. The greatness of a prophet lies in expressing eternal truths in symbolic form, accessible to most people and able to awaken in the elect few a unitative self-awareness beyond discursive reason.
The "light" is the Platonic intelligible light, developed in Islam by al-Ghazali in the Mishkat al-anwar. For al-Ghazali divine light is "real" and visible light is a "metaphor" for it. The forms of things both reveal and hide the light; lacking existence of their own, they are "dark".
2.4 Creatures as shadows
Creatures in themselves are shadows cast by the divine Light. Ibn Arabi writes that the Cosmos is in relation to the Reality "as a shadow is to that which casts the shadow, for it is the shadow of God". What the shadow falls on is the latent essences of contingent beings. "It is by His Name, the Light, that it is perceived." Shadows tend to be black, he notes, and "If the source of the shadow is white, the shadow itself is still so [i.e., black]." The essences "are not luminous, being nonexistent, albeit latent. They may not be described as existing because existence is light."
Following Izutsu and al-Qashani, the shadow falls not on the world directly but on the archetypes or fixed entities (al-a'yan al-thabita), which are not the world but the "locus of the appearance of the world." The emanation of light is constant and one; its reception varies with the "surface". The author notes a difficulty: if God casts the light and the fixed entities receive the shadow, what casts the shadow? God is both source of light and the object from which shadows are cast, and Ibn Arabi does not explain the relation between these two modes.
From the creature's side God is also darkness, because creaturely essences cannot bear his light. Hence the hadith Ibn Arabi loves: "God has seventy veils of light and darkness; were He to lift them, the august glories of His face would burn up everyone whose eyesight perceived Him." God is known in one way and unknown in another: "Insofar as He has a shadow, He is known, but insofar as the form of the one casting the shadow is not perceived in the shadow, the Reality is not known."
The world and God are one, their duality only relative to the creature. In Ibn Arabi's words, "In respect of its unity as the shadow [of God], it is the Reality, being the One, the Unique, but in respect of the multiplicity of its forms it is the Cosmos". Creatures are thus ambiguous, manifesting God's power and covering it over, which is why general revelation, however magnificent, is inadequate for a full knowledge of God and his commands.
2.5 Colored glass
The cosmos "is but a fantasy (mutawahm)" in the sense that it is not separate and self-sufficient; only God is. Creatures in themselves are "brute facts" without truth and must be read as symbols. Ibn Arabi compares the self to colored glass that tints a colorless light. If you say the light is green "because of the green glass, you would be right as viewing the situation through your senses", and if you say it is colorless, "you would also be right as viewing the situation through sound intellectual reasoning." Hence: "the locus is identical with the light, and the locus is other than it."
The saint is the locus where the light shines with least refraction. Al-Qaysari explains that God is more manifest in the power of perception than in what it perceives. And the criterion for this "transparency" is the Qur'an and the Law. James Morris says Ibn Arabi's understanding of the Qur'an "could be simply described as a 'theology of trans-parition' (transparaître)." The Shaykh says it directly: "know that you are an imagination, as is all that you regard as other than yourself an imagination."
Even the divine Names reveal and conceal. Each Name is God, the Named, and also what is distinguished from other Names: "the Forgiving is not [in this sense] the Manifest or the Unmanifest, nor is the First the Last." Even Allah, the greatest Name, implies a relation to creation and so a duality. In himself God is "independent of the worlds"; in respect of the Names he demands the cosmos. The Names are a barzakh or isthmus linking God and the cosmos; for Claude Addas they are "the shadow of God, the rays of His Essence", neither the sun nor other than it.
Being is one; multiplicity belongs to imagination: "There is naught in Being but is implicit in the divine Unity, and there is naught in the Imagination but is implicit in [Cosmic] multiplicity." Commenting on Surat al-Ikhlas, Ibn Arabi writes: "We, for our part, beget and are begotten, we depend on him and we compete one with another." Only the human being can share either in God's necessary existence or in the creature's contingent existence; it all depends on how he relates himself to God.
2.6 Existence as finding
Wujud comes from the root w-j-d, "finding". Chittick notes that wajib al-wujud, "Necessary Being", may also be rendered "necessary finding" or "necessary awareness": "God finds Himself and cannot not find Himself." The Verifiers are "the People of Unveiling and Finding (ahl al-kashf wa'l-wujūd)". To exist is to be self-aware, but that awareness cannot come from the finite self. Chittick again: "we come to find our own existence through listening to the Divine Speech, which is 'Be!'" To find God is to be found by God. Instead of ascribing meaning to existence, "the meaning of existence finds us and in-scribes itself in us" through the Qur'an.
So our "true names are God's names". The Shaykh: "our [true] names are God's Names, since all depends on Him. At the same time our essential selves are His shadow. He is at once our identity and not our identity." Secondary causes matter, since through them God reveals himself, but they are also veils. In Eckhart's scholastic terms God is both innominabile and omninominabile, unnamable and all-namable. "The eyes of the common people fall only upon the properties of the things, but the eyes of those who have the opening of unveiling fall only upon the Real in the things."
2.7 Isaac and the ram
In the chapter on Isaac, Ibn Arabi asks how a ram can stand for a prophet. The answer is that animals, plants and minerals often signify divine qualities more purely than human beings. His poem: "No creation is higher than the stone, and after it the plant, / In a certain sense and according to certain measures." And of Adam: "he is bound by intelligence, / Thought, and the garland of faith."
Well before Pico della Mirandola, the Shaykh saw the human position as ambiguous. The human being is a microcosm, potentially the most perfect reflection of God, yet by vice and ingratitude usually the least. Bound by reason's finite categories, he tends to take what he can grasp as "god". In a passage the author quotes, "the flight of an eagle expresses the meanings of freedom and elevation in a more direct, simple, obvious, and unambiguous manner than does a person we know who has these as qualities of soul." With Louis Dupré, the power of a symbol lies "in a particular ability to disclose a transcendent presence, not in a presumed similarity with that reality."
Abraham's mistake was literalism: "it was a ram that appeared in the form of Abraham's son in the dream, while Abraham believed what he saw [at face value]." Note the reversal, Dobie says: it is the son that represents the ram. The symbolic form belongs to the waking world, which is the true dream. The prophet and saint see the world as a mundus imaginalis, neither wholly sensible nor wholly intelligible, the barzakh that separates and unites spirit and matter. This is not Plato's world of Ideas but Plato's metaxu of the Symposium, and not a separate layer of being, but what relates creation to uncreated Existence.
2.8 Ta'bir: crossing over
Understanding the world is therefore interpretation, ta'bir, "dream interpretation": "Interpretation (ta'bīr) means to pass from the form of what one sees to something beyond it." The root means "to cross". Its relative ta'wil means "to return, to take back, and to take back to the origin." Interpretation crosses the isthmus from visible to hidden. It needs high and sophisticated reasoning, but it is not allegory, which merely fits images into preconceived categories. Corbin: a symbol "is never 'explained' once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again, just as a musical score is never deciphered once and for all, but calls for ever new execution."
| Approach | What it does with an image | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Literalism (Abraham) | Takes the form at face value | Misses the meaning |
| Allegory (reason alone) | Reduces it to a concept | God abstracted out of creation |
| Ta'bir / ta'wil | Crosses from form to its root meaning | Meaning enacted in the interpreter |
Ibn Arabi's rule: if a vision of the Reality takes a form unacceptable to reason, interpret it "in accordance with a doctrinal [mashrū'] concept of the Reality"; "If, however, reason does not reject it, we accept it as we see it". His poem: "If you say, 'This is the Reality,' you have spoken the truth, / If 'something other,' you are interpreting ('abir)." God is the original interpreter, ever "unfolding His Reality to creation." Chodkiewicz adds that, given Arabic polysemy, "rigorous fidelity to the letter of Revelation does not exclude but, on the contrary, it implies a multiplicity of interpretations."
The philosophers' error is to seek disengagement from matter: "This—I mean disengagement from matter—is an affair that is rationally conceivable, but not witnessed. The considerative thinkers have no greater mistake than this, but they are not aware of their mistake." Chittick sums up: reason is needed for God's incomparability, but "Without images, God's similarity could never be grasped." Al-Qaysari notes that reason, declaring God exclusively incomparable, cannot recognize him in the poor, the hungry and the weak, as in the hadith modeled on Matthew 25. The "God of the philosophers" is a mere idea.
2.9 The Law is the reality
Chodkiewicz states the principle: "the Law is not the cloak or the symbol of h.aqīqa, of a hidden truth that might be reached by transgression. It is the h.aqīqa." Reading revelation is also creative. Corbin: "The active Imagination guides, anticipates, molds sense perception; that is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs." Ibn Arabi ascribes an almost magical power to the realized sage, but its deeper sense is the ability to perceive eternal meaning in temporal things. Only God can symbolize himself; but as Dupré says, "Symbols do not signify because they are thought to be revealed, but they are selected to reveal because they are endowed with a natural significance."
Only "one who has the Qur'an in his soul" knows of what he speaks. This is why Ibn Arabi was "a stickler" for the Law despite his broad view of other revelations. Chodkiewicz: "It is not the man who inhabits the Qur'an; it is the Qur'an that dwells within the man". Hence the hadith on which the chapter is named: asked about the Prophet's character, A'isha answered, "His character was the Koran". Ibn Arabi comments: "If a person in the community of the Messenger of God desires to see him, let him look upon the Koran."
A passage the author quotes sums up: "Rational operations have an indispensable function, because without them, God’s incomparability cannot be understood". Philosophy and theology are useful "so long as they do not become the exclusive source of knowledge." "But imaginal understanding is also necessary, and revealed texts are full of images. Without images, God’s similarity could never be grasped."
2.10 The Book carries the knower
The rule for visions follows from Abraham's dream. Where a vision presents the Reality "in a form unacceptable to the reason", Ibn Arabi writes, "we must interpret that form in accordance with a doctrinal [mashrū’] concept of the Reality, either from the standpoint of the recipient of the vision or the context or both. If, however, reason does not reject it, we accept it as we see it, even as we shall see the Reality in the Hereafter." Scripture whose plain sense offends reason reveals an inward dimension of the Law, bearing on the state (hal) of the interpreter or on its place among the images. Reason would reduce such images to allegory, but God is manifest in them and cannot be reduced to our categories.
The discrimination between servant and Lord is "the loftiest discrimination." This is why, despite his broad view of the relative validity of other revelations, Ibn Arabi was, in the author's phrase, "a stickler in the observance of Islamic law" for Muslims. Michel Chodkiewicz: "Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrine is not simply a meditation on the Qur’an. It is so organically linked to him that the two are really inseparable." And further: "It is in the Qur’an that the voyage is made that leads man back to his original status, to his divine similitude." For the Shaykh it is not so much the person who assimilates the Qur'an as the Qur'an that assimilates the person. Only one "whose essential self is a united totality [qur’an]" will know what he means.
The goal is neither an extraordinary experience nor an abstract metaphysics but "the complete assimilation of the self to the Word of God". This takes rigorous rational analysis, a creative imagination, and above all a humility that knows "we as creatures are nothing but shadows of the divine Light." The chapter's closing poem: "So be the servant of a Lord, not Lord of a servant, / Lest you fall into Hell Fire."
Part 3. "Revelatio proprie est apud intellectum": Eckhart and the Birth of the Word
Chapter 2 shows that every one of Eckhart's works, the German sermons included, is a commentary on Scripture, and that for him philosophy finds its truth only when applied to the sacred text. The center of his exegesis is the birth of the Son in the ground of the soul. The chapter closes by setting Eckhart beside Ibn Arabi: different scriptures, different goals, and yet a close analogue in method.
3.1 Exegesis as philosophy
For Eckhart all real human thought is "nothing but a response to the primal Word or Logos". In Scripture we find the ultimate truths of God and of all the sciences, which are subordinate to theology. The author quotes the judgment that "Eckhart believed that mystical consciousness was fundamentally hermeneutical; that is, it is achieved in the act of hearing, interpreting, and preaching the Bible." McGinn notes that his exegesis cannot be separated from his preaching: putting the words of Scripture into action is the completion of the hermeneutic act.
Yet the project is also genuinely philosophical. Eckhart wants to show that Aristotle's categories reach the fullness of their truth only in relation to the soul's ascent to God. His thought offers "a sophisticated critique of philosophical reason" by showing that its categories are as much in need of interpretation as Scripture. Without existential transformation, the Word becomes one more category like those in Aristotle, and philosophy remains "cut off from vivifying Truth."
The center is the birth of the Son in the soul. Interpretation aims at cracking the "outer shell" of the text to reveal its "hidden marrow", and that is the process of the inner birth. This birth "is not a mere experience among other experiences" but a new way of structuring experience, in which the soul lets God be in himself and in all things. Eckhart thereby carries forward the Augustinian tradition of illumination.
3.2 Truth is one
Eckhart's basic premise is that truth is one, because God, the prima veritas, is one. He shares it with Aquinas, and both take it from a Neoplatonic tradition in which perfections must be united in the One. His axiom from the general prologue to the Opus tripartitum: "What is divided in the inferior is always one and undivided in the superior." Hence he can say that "Moses, Christ, and the philosopher teach the same thing." He adds that their teaching is not of equal value: the philosopher's is probable, Moses's worthy of belief, Christ's truth in all its certainty.
Theology and philosophy differ not in content but in mode of appropriation. Truth can be appropriated as an abstract objective truth, as a revealed Law to be fulfilled, or as a truth lived in the particularity of the subject. Eckhart's interest is the third, without losing the other two.
The human intellect, as Aquinas showed, knows only by composing and dividing judgments, and so breaks the divine unity into many attributes. In his Commentary on Exodus, where Maimonides's influence is strong, Eckhart answers the "knotty and famous question" whether the distinction of attributes is in God: "It is certain that the distinction of divine attributes, for example, power, wisdom, goodness, and the like, is totally on the side of the intellect". Creatures, being "from the One but below the One", fall into number and distinction, which is "guilt, fault, and defect in existence and unity." Quoting Avicebron's Fountain of Life: "All difference is below the One".
Here Eckhart sides against Aquinas, who allowed analogical predication of perfections, and with Maimonides, for whom any predication from creatures to God is equivocal. The upshot is that human reason is helpless to know God apart from revelation. Eckhart is no irrational enthusiast: reason keeps an essential role, but works properly only "under the tutelage of Scripture". The goal of talk about God is not description but a new mode of existing in God, possible only when the intellect has been stripped of preconceptions.
3.3 Sciences, parables and the literal sense
In the prologue to his Book of the Parables of Genesis, Eckhart says the diversity of sciences was created with the soul and has no correlate in God, and cites the philosophers of the Academy for it. The plurality of sciences is a "falling away" from unity; reason divides reality into regions and turns what is known into an object, although, as Aristotle showed, all knowing is a unity of knower and known. This identity "has been completely forgotten in modern times." The remedy is to present truth under parables, which stimulate interpretation. Even Plato, Eckhart notes, used myths for divine, natural and ethical questions.
From God's oneness Eckhart concludes: "God is the author of Sacred Scripture (deus autem auctor sacrae scripturae)". Hence "every true sense is a literal sense." He does not think he is going beyond the literal sense when he reads philosophically; he is uncovering the more literal sense, the mind of God. McGinn draws the radical consequence: "the exegete has become the text", and "the mystical interpreter has become one with, that is, indistinct from God, the author of the Bible."
By contemporary standards Eckhart seems cavalier. He offers many interpretations of a passage, implies that the more the better, and holds that any passage may explain any other regardless of context: "all these passages can be explained in their proper places from this one, just as it is now explained through them." He sought the timeless meaning, because only that can be appropriated in the soul's ground. A purely historical-critical reading, valuable as a propaedeutic, would make the meaning wholly conditioned by past facts and so unavailable to any living appropriation. "A more absurd situation could not be imagined for a mystical writer like Eckhart."
God is both transcendent cause and immanent ground. In the Commentary on Wisdom his transcendence is defined by his immanence. The formula, from a sermon examined later: "God is in all things. The more he is in things, the more he is outside things; the more within, the more outside; the more outside, the more within."
3.4 Metaphysics hidden in Scripture
At the start of the Commentary on John, Eckhart says he will explain Scripture "through the help of the natural arguments of the philosophers." The traffic runs both ways: the truths of natural principles "are well intimated for him 'who has ears to hear' (Mt 13:43) in the very words of sacred scripture". The metaphysician's task is the theologian's. Metaphysics seeks not efficient or final causes, which belong to physics, but formal, ideal causes, a Platonic orientation from Albertus Magnus: "the metaphysician who considers the entity of things proves nothing through exterior causes, that is, efficient and final causes."
Aquinas held that in this life we cannot know things in the divine ideas. Eckhart argues that Scripture, revealing the primal ratio, holds the key to knowing things in their divine ideas. The truths of metaphysics and physics lie under the "husk" of parables. In a German sermon: "if you want to get at the kernel you must break the shell." Christ is the ratio rationum: "No one can be thought to understand the scriptures who does not know how to find its hidden marrow—Christ, the Truth." Under the parables lie "the keys to metaphysics, physics and ethics", and "the most sacred emanation of the divine Persons."
Scripture reveals the transcendentals, "existence, unity, truth, and goodness", which cut across all categories and so cannot be derived from creatures: "knowledge of God and cognition of divine things is not received from things outside of us but in accordance with revelation." The Trinity belongs here because the emanation of persons is the formal basis of the Son's birth in the soul. Plotinus's principle applies: "The demonstrations that we make concerning the Principle are, at the same time, the means by which we elevate ourselves to It." To strip the husk is "not to consume the kernel but to be consumed by it." Eckhart is, in McGinn's phrase, "an apophatic exegete."
| Old Testament | Gospel of John |
|---|---|
| God as creator: efficient and final cause | "the gospel contemplates being qua being" |
| God somehow divided off from creation | God as formal cause, transcendent and immanent |
| "Physics" | Metaphysics fulfilled in Christ, the formal logos of creation |
Following Lossky, Eckhart seeks in the abditum mentis of Augustine the ipsum esse of Thomas. In the first Parisian Question: "The Evangelist did not say: 'In the beginning was being, and God was being' but rather he said, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.'" Prior to our understanding of being is the revelation of being in the Word, an openness or clearing, to use Heidegger's term, in which beings can appear.
3.5 Praedica Verbum
Eckhart's aim is to reinsert the categories of speculation into their origin in the soul's union with God, and so make that union actual. Speculative thought and revelation "deconstruct" each other to reveal the unity of truth beneath both. The sermon Praedica Verbum, on 2 Timothy 4:2 and Saint Dominic, paraphrases: "Speak the word, speak it externally, speak it forth, bring it forth, give birth to the Word!" It continues: "It is a marvelous thing that something flows out yet remains within."
God is like a word that communicates its meaning to all hearers yet remains what it is. Of creatures only humans and angels can "hear" God fully, since they are present to themselves. "Everything that is past, everything that is present, and everything that is future God creates in the innermost of the soul." And: "The Father gives birth to his Son in the innermost of the soul and gives birth to you with his onlybegotten Son, not less." All of this happens in the eternal Now, known only in the innermost soul, which alone abstracts from every here and now.
Eckhart reads Psalm 61: "God spoke one thing, and I heard two", that is, God and creatures. "People imagine that God only became man there [in Palestine]. This is not true. God has just as much become man here [in the soul] as there". Such understanding needs a soul "totally detached and elevated above all things." Detachment itself is made possible by God's freedom, by grace, but there is in the soul a ground, the "superior intellect", that "seizes God in the simplicity of his essence." This power "seizes God in his nudity" and for it "nothing is hidden."
3.6 Physics as the principles of the spiritual life
Aristotle's "natural place" appears in the treatise On Detachment: "Now God's natural place is unity and purity, and that comes from detachment. Therefore God must of necessity give himself to a heart that has detachment." The author insists that Eckhart does not merely illustrate spiritual principles by physics. The principles of the spiritual life are the principles of physics and of all sciences. The union of mover and moved, or knower and known, is a species and imitation of the soul's union with God: "the intellect and the intelligible object, though two in potency, are one in act."
Philosophical activity cut off from this root is "a sort of alienated knowing", abstract and depersonalized, and therefore "a-theistic in the root sense of 'without God.'" Any true self-knowing that aims at detachment is inherently theistic. In his Paris sermon for Saint Augustine, Eckhart lists the physicus, the mathematicus and the "ethicus sive theologus": ethics and theology are interchangeable, because talk about God finds its truth only in a way of life.
3.7 The just man
The just man "seeks nothing in his works", treats all creatures equally, is "equal to nothing", and works "without a why". Since God is justice, "God is justice. Therefore, whoever is in justice is in God and is God." The just man is one in nature with justice yet distinct, since justice gives birth to him. Justice cannot be known by abstraction, only in detached, loving action, in a kenosis that puts one at the other's disposal. The just man stands to justice as the word to its idea.
In this working, "working and becoming are one": the soul's becoming is one with God's unchanging Being. We appropriate this only through Christ, who in the Incarnation is the identity of Being and becoming. The author's note adds that Eckhart conceives the union as a "verbal" unity, a unity of act, and so avoids monism.
3.8 Revelation fulfilled in the intellect
The chapter's title comes from a Latin sermon: "revelation finds its fulfillment properly speaking in intellect or, even more, in the essence of the soul". There follows the line: "To be God, however, is to be naked without any veil (Esse autem deus esse nudum sine velamine est)." God's very existence is his self-revelation. Revelation is not something from without but a birth within, by virtue of the soul's potentially infinite intellectual nature. It is not subjective, because God reveals himself as the Word itself; "it is we who are addressed by revelation".
Communicability is as constitutive of God as transcendence. Eckhart dismisses learned priests who say Christ revealed only what is needed for salvation: "Why did God become man? So that I might be born the same." The purpose of revelation is ontological: to make us over by grace into God.
3.9 Two scriptures, two goals
Both mystics are thoroughly exegetical. Does it matter that they read different scriptures? It does. Their goals differ:
| Eckhart | Ibn Arabi | |
|---|---|---|
| Center of the mystical sense | Christ, the divine Logos | The "wisdoms" (hikam) of the prophets, completed by Muhammad |
| Method | Detachment, stripping away of images | Assimilation through the analogical imagination |
| Goal | Birth of the Son in the ground; the "nobleman" (edele Mensch) | The Universal Man (al-insan al-kamil) |
| Underlying drama | Regeneration from a fallen nature | Return to the primal Adamic nature (fitra) |
Marshall Hodgson sums up the contrast: for Christians the world is "first corrupted with Adam, thenceforth to be patiently redeemed by a loving God", while Muslims "have seen the world as the proper sphere of Adam's vice-regency". The central event for Christians is "Christ's crucifixion and resurrection"; for Muslims "the descent and preaching of the Qur'an, which most decisively evokes a sense of God's majesty".
For Ibn Arabi the imaginal world, ontologically distinct, mediates sense and abstract ideas, connecting daily duties of the Law with philosophy, as al-Ghazali tried to show in the Revivification of the Religious Sciences. In Eckhart there is no explicit imaginal world. Corbin laments its disappearance in Christianity after the suppression of Montanism, which in his view made the Incarnation "a 'purely historical event.'" Here, the author says, Corbin "misses the mark": one cannot read the Nicene Creed and think the eternal Son ignored. Eckhart sees the Incarnation as both historical and eternal, which is why the Son can be reborn in any soul. Christ performs the function of the mundus imaginalis: he materializes the spiritual and spiritualizes the material. Eckhart's stripping of images is "a form of analogical imagination in reverse—a sort of de-imagination", demanded by the regenerative task of Christianity. He lacks the concept of the barzakh but "he does have it in deed."
3.10 Being qua being in Exodus
In the opening pages of the Commentary on John Eckhart again defines metaphysics as an inquiry into the rationes prior to all things, what the intellect grasps "in its intrinsic principles". He works with the scholastic distinction between concepts abstracted from sensible things and the divine ideas (rationes divinae) identical with God's substance. The abstracted concept approaches the idea but never equals it, because the created copy "falls infinitely short of its ideal exemplar." Lossky points out that Eckhart takes Aristotle's definition of metaphysics, the study of "being qua being", in a new direction: he finds it explained most clearly in Exodus, where God says sum qui sum. Being qua being is God, the self-reflexive act of being that returns upon itself, and it comes to dwell in the soul through Christ.
The change this works is pictured in fire: "The fire changes anything into itself that is put into it and this takes on fire’s own nature. The wood does not change the fire into itself, but the fire changes the wood into itself. So are we changed into God, that we shall know him as he is." A note, drawing on Schürmann and on Bernard Welte's "Eckhart as Aristotelian", explains that this is a "verbal" unity of action, like the single actuality shared by mover and moved, not a merging into one substance, which is how Eckhart avoids monism.
The holy text is, for both, "both absolutely necessary and absolutely irrelevant": necessary because mystical realization is nothing but the enactment of its hidden sense, irrelevant insofar as that enactment is inward and not in the exterior text. The two are not separate moments; the text is part of the very content of the enactment. The more inward the enactment, the more transcendent the sense becomes, and neither writer ever reaches a "pure experience" uncolored by his scripture.
Part 4. "You Are He and You Are Not He": Ibn Arabi's Dialectic
The preface to Part II asks why neither mystic offers proofs of God's existence, and answers that God for them is dialectical: never an object, both most transcendent and most immanent. Chapter 3 follows this dialectic through two chapters of the Bezels. Noah teaches transcendence, which taken alone becomes a limit; Hud teaches the unity that the knower sees "with two eyes".
4.1 Why no proofs?
Michael Polanyi's "tacit knowledge" and Augustine's paradox of time (we know what it is until we try to say it) frame the problem of existence: it is clear until we talk about it. We reach it only by analogy, and both mystics have a heightened sense of the analogical nature of all things. Yet reason needs revelation even to know creatures as analogues of a divine Being. Any metaphysics "worth its salt" must begin with the revealed text.
Modern readers may be struck that neither writer argues for God's existence. Eckhart's prologues contain what look like proofs, but on inspection they are "not quite what they seem." The easy answer, that medieval believers simply took God for granted, is in the author's view wrong. Both knew the long tradition of proofs. They lack them because what they reflect on is deeper: "God" cannot be the object of any proof, since for Ibn Arabi the Real (al-haqq) is God, and for Eckhart existence (esse) is God.
The dialectic is a matter of logical rigor. Absolute transcendence demands immanence, because what makes God transcendent is that he sustains all that is; true immanence implies transcendence, because what is inmost in things escapes being a "this" or "that". To assert only transcendence marks God off from creatures and so limits him; to assert only immanence limits him to the sum of creatures. For Eckhart, God's distinction from creatures lies "precisely in his indistinction from all things". Proofs are useful and true in their place, but here superfluous, since both ground their teaching on living contact with God mediated by scripture.
4.2 Reason and unveiling
The chapter opens with a passage from the Futuhat: "Know that, before his prophecy, no prophet ever knew God through rational consideration, and it is not proper for any prophet to do so." True wisdom is the intellect's "opening" (futuh), what Ibn Arabi calls unveiling, kashf. The highest wisdom ends in perplexity (hayra), in which the knower, in Socratic fashion, knows what he does not know. All creatures are "both He and not He", so any rigorous speech about God must use paradox. His dialectic "seems designed to lead to perplexity, to a 'holy confusion' or 'learned ignorance,'" and this is probably what bewildered his contemporaries and many shari'a-based scholars after him.
4.3 Noah: the wisdom of exaltation
Each chapter of the Fusus names the "wisdom" of a prophet, the manifestation of a divine name. Noah's is "The Wisdom of Exaltation [sabbūh.īyya] in the Word of Noah": tanzih, incomparability. Sura 71 shows Noah sent to an idolatrous people to proclaim God's distinction from their idols. Yet tanzih alone, without its opposite tashbih (similarity, immanence), "can itself become a form of idolatry." Ibn Arabi does not soften this: "he who asserts that God is [purely] transcendent is either a fool or a rogue, even if he is a professed believer."
Al-Qashani pushes further. One who "purifies" God of bodily attributes unconsciously assimilates him to spiritual beings; and one who purifies him of limitation limits him with non-limitation, "while in truth God is 'purified' from (i.e., transcends) the fetters of both 'limitation' and 'non-limitation.' He is absolutely absolute". God is "rich", in need of nothing; the creature is "poor", needing another for its existence and its limits.
If you insist only on His transcendence, you restrict Him.
And if you insist only on His immanence you limit Him.
If you maintain both aspects you are right,
An Imam and a master in the spiritual sciences.
...
You are not He and you are He and
You see Him in the essences of things both boundless and limited.
The author: "A better and more concise statement of the dialectical nature of Ibn 'Arabi's idea of God can perhaps not be found."
4.4 Self and Lord; spirit and body
The hadith Ibn Arabi loved, "Who [truly] knows himself knows his Lord", is read with Qur'an 41:53, "We will show them our signs on the horizons... and in yourselves". "You are in relation to Him as your physical body is to you. He is in relation to you as the spirit governing your physical form." The body is human only as manifesting the spirit, or it would be a statue called human by equivocation, as Aristotle's "rational animal" shows. The cosmos, likewise, "is [necessarily] implicit in the definition of the Divinity". But the inner human self is not identical with the divine; it is itself an outer manifestation of the Real, which is "the observer hidden in every act of consciousness." Every creature praises God as the tongue of the outer man praises the inner man who governs it.
4.5 Qur'an and Furqan
Noah's message was imperfect: he called his people to worship God only as transcendent, and the Qur'an corrects this. Ibn Arabi plays on two names of revelation:
| Furqan | Qur'an |
|---|---|
| Root faraqa, to divide, discriminate | Read from qarana, to join |
| Noah's message: discriminate God from idols | Muhammad's message: God transcendent and immanent at once |
| A part: "a chapter of the Qur'an" | "The whole truth is a conjunction" |
Noah "summoned his people by night", appealing to their intellects, "and by day", appealing to their senses, "But he did not unite the two as in the verse There is none like unto Him." So the people recoiled, in a sense justifiably. Izutsu describes the inner game: Noah outwardly reproaches them "but inwardly he praises them", while they know, if not consciously, that pure monotheism means worshipping "the One God in all the concrete forms of the world". Real tanzih, Izutsu says, "consists in man's peeping through the things and events of this world into the grand figure of the One God beyond them... It is a tanzīh which comprises in itself tashbīh." Hence knowledge of the Real needs the concrete imagery of the Qur'an.
A pure knowledge of God as an object is impossible: "Whoever imagines that he sees the Reality Himself has no gnosis; he has gnosis who knows that it is his own essential self he sees." Corbin: authentic mystic wisdom is "that of the soul which knows itself as a theophany". The summons is "not a summons to His Ipseity", but to him in respect of his Names.
4.6 The circle of perplexity
God is both absolute object and absolute subject. "He encompasses us, and in every direction the 'behind' of us belongs to Him." We cannot see him "because our faces are turned toward the center point of the encompassing circumference... It is our kiblah". And: "The cosmos is between the center point and the encompassing circumference... It directs us away from Him toward Him. The affair is a circle."
The knower's thought moves in a circle around God as Pole (qutb). This is not opposed to the Qur'an's straight path but its fulfilment. Its opposite is the mustatil, "drawn-out, linear, stretched, presumptuous, arrogant". Hence the Prophet's prayer, "Lord, increase me in my perplexity of You." For Ibn Arabi, the one who experiences perplexity "is ceaselessly centered on the Pole [God], while he who follows the 'long' path [to a distant God] is always turning aside". Izutsu: "the 'perplexity' is nothing other than the impression produced on our minds by the observation of the simultaneous existence of contradictories." We usually think perplexity starts inquiry and reason removes it; here it is reason's certainty that is the starting point a perplexity must remove.
4.7 Hud: the unity seen with two eyes
The chapter on Hud opens: "The Straight Path of God is not hidden, / But manifest universally." Al-Qaysari explains that the knower apprehends the Truth and only surmises the creature, while most people apprehend the creature and surmise God. Hence Mercy precedes Wrath: as error presupposes truth, wrath presupposes the mercy by which all things exist. "The gnostic calls on God with spiritual perception, while he who is not a gnostic calls on Him in ignorance and bound by a tradition." Chittick: "existence and knowledge are two names for the same reality". The Futuhat: "In Him we are equal— / As He sees me, I see Him." And: "there is no Knower save He; so who are you?"
Reason can be "meddlesome" (fudul), covering the direct apprehension of the Real. It is not to be cast aside, but a higher intellection is needed, and that is self-knowledge. Chittick: "the greatest of veils, even greater than the quest for objectivity, is the self that knows." God "is the essential Self of things. He conceals it by otherness, which is you [as being not He]." It is not "I" who acts but the Real in me. Ibn Arabi says the prophet Hud himself disclosed this to him in Cordoba in the Hegira year 586, and Muhammad completes it in the hadith in which God is the hearing by which his servant hears. But God becomes the gnostic's seeing only insofar as the gnostic assimilates the language and thought of the Qur'an.
"The first limitation [to which He subjects Himself] is 'The Dark Cloud having no air above or beneath it.'" Then he establishes himself on the Throne, descends to the lower heaven, is with us wherever we are, and finally "is, in essence, us." Even "There is none like unto Him" is a limitation, "the Absolute being [in a sense] limited by His Own Absoluteness." The author concludes: the very transcendence of God makes his immanence possible, and his unknowability makes him knowable.
"He is the observer in the observer and the observed in the observed; the Cosmos is His Form and He is the governing Spirit of the Cosmos, which is the Great Man [Macrocosm]." To know the small man is to know the Great Man. Ibn Arabi prefers to call God the necessary condition of the world rather than its first cause. The relation is nonreciprocal: the creature's relation to God is real, God's to the creature is not, and from the divine side the creature is best called imaginal, an image with no being apart from God.
4.8 The Breath of the All-Merciful
Creation is the Breath of the All-Merciful. In Arabic, breath and soul (nafs) share a word; creatures are as insubstantial as breath yet are words articulated by divine speech. There are as many names of God as creatures, and for every person a Name that is his or her "Lord". The Bezels distinguish three viewers: "He who sees the Reality from His standpoint, in Him by Him is a gnostic. He who sees the Reality from His standpoint, in Him, but with himself as the seer, is not a gnostic. He who does not see the Reality in this way, but expects to see Him by himself, is ignorant."
| Knower | Says | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| Second (more ignorant) | "God is a creature" | Immanence only |
| First | "God is the Truth" | Better, not perfect |
| Third, the realized knower | "God, as pure existence, is both the Truth and the creature" | Both, without loss of either |
4.9 The god of belief and the color of the cup
Most people have an individual concept of their Lord and recognize him only in that form: "One who believes [in the ordinary way] believes only in a deity he has created himself, since a deity in 'beliefs' is a [mental] construction." God discloses himself according to each one's preparedness. So Ibn Arabi urges: "be completely and utterly receptive to all doctrinal forms, for God, Most High, is too All-embracing and Great to be confined within one creed rather than another". The knower sees the oneness of being at the root of all religions; yet he does not cease to be a Muslim, for the straight path of the shari'a leads to that oneness.
Junayd, asked about knowledge and the knower, replied: "The water takes on the color of its cup." Ibn Arabi comments: "you will never judge your object of knowledge except by yourself, since you will never know anything but yourself." The knower does not see water apart from any color; he knows the difference between the color and the water. When he has surrendered completely in servanthood ('ubudiyya), "he no longer contemplates the glass of water but drinks from it", as al-Ghazali describes tasting in the Deliverance from Error.
This requires fana': "no one sees Him nondelimited by existences except him who is destitute, him from whose witnessing all forms have disappeared." The practical form of the dialectic is that extinction from creatures (fana' 'an) corresponds to tanzih, and subsistence in God (baqa' bi) to tashbih. "So ignorance is an essential attribute of the servant, and the whole cosmos is a servant. But knowledge is an essential attribute of God."
4.11 The poorest of all
The god of ordinary belief is a construction: "In general, most men have, perforce, an individual concept [belief] of their Lord, which they ascribe to Him and in which they seek Him." When the Reality appears in another form "they deny Him, flee from Him and treat Him improperly, while at the same time imagining that they are acting toward Him fittingly." Indeed, "One who believes [in the ordinary way] believes only in a deity he has created himself". Most people, the author adds, worship gods of their own making, even within monotheism.
The realized knower sees all things as names of God, and so is poor toward everything: "Hence, none is poorer toward the cosmos than the perfect man, since he witnesses it subjected to himself." When the self passes away, the Truth (al-haqq) of the Real is unconcealed, but the knower does not see the Essence as such, nor become God; he knows himself as a theophany. Michael Sells, quoted in a note, links the resulting bewilderment to the union hadith: "Bewilderment results from the union of subject and object implicit in the ‘union hadith’". Al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error is cited for the same point: the Real is to be tasted, not reasoned about.
How does the knower sustain this seeing with two eyes? Always through the Qur'an. Noah's chapter shows the Qur'an joining tanzih and tashbih; Hud's shows God's self-limitation known only through its imaginal world. When Ibn Arabi says the gnostic "transcends all religious traditions", he means through the Qur'an, not despite it. He is very far from preaching a "bloodless and abstract" universalism: only in "a concrete and full-blooded engagement" with the Qur'an's symbols does a lived unity of religions emerge.
Part 5. "Unum est indistinctum": Eckhart's Dialectical Theology
Chapter 4 reads the prologues to Eckhart's unfinished Opus tripartitum. Their thesis, Esse est Deus, yields the paradox that Being is at once everything and nothing; God is distinct from creatures by his very indistinction. The chapter then follows the "negation of negation", the image of the wreath and the wine, and the German word isticheit, "is-ness", and closes by comparing the two mystics' dialectics of existence.
5.1 The Tripartite Work
Eckhart combined two roles we now think opposed: spiritual master and university theologian. His existential insights rest on elaborate scholastic scaffolding. The Opus tripartitum was to have three parts:
| Part | Model | Example of its content |
|---|---|---|
| Opus propositionum, work of propositions | Axiomatic, like Proclus's Elements of Theology | Esse est Deus, "to be is God" |
| Opus quaestionum, work of questions | Aquinas's Summa Theologiae; some one thousand disputed questions | Ut Deus sit?, "Does God exist?" |
| Opus expositionum, work of commentaries | Commentaries on every book of the Bible, and sermons | "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" |
For Eckhart the Lebemeister, the principle becomes a lived truth only when applied to a specific scriptural passage. He says his students urged him to the work; he did not finish it. We have two prologues, commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, Wisdom and John, sermons on Ecclesiastes, and many Latin and German sermons. A note reports that Loris Sturlese has shown the prologues to be early, roughly contemporary with the Parisian Questions, so a sharp contrast between the two is "questionable, at best".
The central paradox, shared with Ibn Arabi: "Being, as being, is everything, for otherwise nothing else would exist; but at the same time, Being is not anything in particular, because no thing is Being as such." Being is at once everything and nothing.
5.2 The transcendentals
The first treatises of the planned work concern the transcendentals: "The first treatise is about existence and being and its opposite, which is nothing. The second, about unity and the one and its opposite, which is many." Truth and goodness follow. These termini generales must not be imagined after the manner of accidents: "Existence itself, and the terms convertible with it, are not added to things as though posterior to them; on the contrary they are prior to every aspect of things."
To call a book red adds no perfection; to call it true (known by an intellect) or good (desired by a will) does. "All things exist from existence itself, and through it and in it; for what is different from existence is not or is nothing." What is most common refers necessarily to what is most separate: existence itself, more "particular" and "real" than any finite creature. Creatures add nothing to our knowledge of God; the inferior is known through the superior, not the reverse. All the creature can do is point, "just as a wreath hung outside a tavern points to the wine that is served inside."
5.3 One means indistinct
"Est igitur sciendum quod li unum idem est quod indistinctum"; "It must therefore be known that the one is the same as that which is indistinct." In the Commentary on Wisdom on "Et cum sit una, omnia potest" (Ws 7:27), Eckhart takes "Deus unus est" to mean "something deeper" (altius aliquid) than that there is numerically one God. That reading is the most superficial. It is "of the nature of God" to be indistinct, because he is infinite and determined to no genus. God is distinct from creatures by this very indistinction.
Here Eckhart follows Thomas, who says God's being is individuated "through itself, because it is being subsistent in itself", but reverses his starting point, beginning from the transcendent One. God's indistinction is not lack but "exuberant goodness": "saying that God is one is to say that God is indistinct from all things, which is the property of the highest and first existence and its overflowing goodness (bonitas exuberans)."
The logic is simple: "God is existence. It is clear that existence is indistinct from everything which exists and that nothing exists or can exist that is distinct and separated from existence." Augustine says it in prayer: "'You were with me and I was not with you.' 'You were with me,' because God is indistinct from all things; 'I was not with you,' because I am distinct and something created".
- The eye and color. What has no color is more distinct from colored things than white is from black. The eye, which in medieval thought has no color, is most distinct from colors and for that very reason receives all of them, and so is indistinct from them.
- Principle and principled. "Nothing is further from something than its opposite. But God and the creature are opposed as the One and Unnumbered is opposed to number". The point is completely distinct from the line, yet nothing is so indistinct from it, since it is the line's beginning.
The summary formula: "Everything which is distinguished by indistinction is the more distinct the more indistinct it is". "For God is a sea of infinite substance, and consequently indistinct, as Damascene says." God, distinct in indistinction, is therefore eminently an individual. Goris notes the "identification of being with indistinction." We call God "existence" as indistinct from all things, and "One" as distinct from all by that indistinction.
In the Commentary on Exodus the pair becomes similar and dissimilar: "nothing is as equally dissimilar and similar to anything else as God and the creature are dissimilar and similar in the same degree." God is foreign (alienus) to no being. Of six reasons, the first three are "strikingly similar" to arguments in the Bezels: "Existence, however, is foreign to no being. One to whom existence is foreign is nothing"; "The infinite is foreign to no being, but only to nothing"; "Indistinction belongs properly to God, distinction to creatures." Every creature, as distinct and other than esse, is foreign, because alienum means "from another".
5.4 Existence is God
"Existence is God. This proposition is evident: first, because if existence is something different from God himself, God neither exists nor is he a god." Either God would lie outside existence and not be, or receive it from another and not be God. God is what has existence per se; all else has it ab alio. Fire can alter wood but cannot give existence to it; only God gives existence absolutely. From this thesis, Eckhart argues, God's existence is evident.
All other beings are analogical, as diet causes and urine signifies health, both ordered to the health in the animal. "Analogates have nothing of the form (according to which they are analogically ordered) rooted in positive fashion in themselves." Hence the creature "always 'eats' as something produced and created, but it always hungers because it is always from another and not in itself." Remove the creaturely mode, or rather realize its nothingness, "and one is left with God in the naked purity of his existence."
5.5 Negation of negation
Ordinary predication treats the subject as primary: in "The rose is red" the rose comes before red. Not so with existence. In "The rose exists" the rose must inhere in existence. Eckhart therefore says "We must speak and judge differently of being and this being". When I say "This is a man or stone", "I do not predicate existence"; when I say "A rose is red", I affirm only "the natural connection of terms." Existence or "is" is "the copula of the predicate with the subject."
| Proposition type | Example | What "is" does |
|---|---|---|
| Tertium adiacens ("is" lies third) | "Martin is a man"; "A rose is red" | Binds predicate to subject; true even if Martin never existed |
| Secundum adiacens ("is" lies second) | "Socrates is" | Predicates existence; never properly said of creatures |
| "Existence is God" | Eckhart's thesis | The copula itself becomes the subject; its only proper predicate is God |
What ordinary speech takes as positive is negative. Every creature, as a "this", denies that it is any other. Nothing can be denied to existence itself, and so "nothing can be denied to the being itself which is God except the negation of negation of all existence. This is why unity, which is the negation of negation, is most closely related to being." In a German sermon: "But God has a negation of negation; he is one and negates everything else, for outside of God is nothing." The formula stresses God's preconceptual nature: being and its convertibles are the first concepts that "fall" under the intellect, so God is presupposed in all our thinking.
Knowledge of God comes by stripping predicates away. We must pray to be free even of conventional notions of "God". Sermon 21: "If I say God is good, this adds something [to him]. One is a negation of negation and a denial of denial." "All creatures have negation in themselves; one creature denies that it is the other creature." The negation of negation is "the purest form of affirmation, and the fullness of the term affirmed." In the Exodus commentary: "The negation of negation is the purest and fullest affirmation—'I am who am'." God is omninominabile as ground of everything, innominabile as nothing in particular. And since God cannot enter thought as a positive concept, "God reveals himself positively to us only in sacred Scripture." That is why the commentaries were to be the capstone of the whole work.
5.6 "He came into His own"
Eckhart applies the transcendentals to John 1:11: "nothing is so much its own as a being's act of existence or a creature's creator. But God is existence itself and is also the creator." Existence, the One, the True and the Good are God's own; "In the case of everything that is below the First these four things are 'guests and strangers' (Eph 2:19); with God they are 'members of the household.'" Abstracted from creatures, these terms are empty; but in Christ "being, the one, the true, and the good come to dwell among us" in a person.
"And His own received Him not" means, beyond rejection on the cross, that "neither things that exist nor things that are one, true or good possess their being, unity, truth and goodness from themselves". "It does not belong to what is distinct to receive what is indistinct." The more we possess something of our own, the farther we are from what is most intimate. When God "assumed a created nature and was made man, it was as if he came to what is proper from the height of what is common." It is not that metaphysics gives the meaning of Christ; Christ gives the meaning of the transcendentals.
5.7 The wreath and the wine
From the Commentary on Ecclesiasticus: the univocal, the equivocal and the analogous differ. Analogous things are distinguished "according to the modes [of being]" of one simple thing. "Urine is said to be 'healthy' only because it signifies the health, the same in number, which is in the animal, just as a circular wreath which has nothing of wine in it [signifies] wine." God and creatures cannot be equivocal, since nothing exists outside God's existence, nor univocal, as two species of one genus.
| Relation | Would mean | Why rejected |
|---|---|---|
| Equivocal | God and creatures exist independently | Nothing exists outside existence itself |
| Univocal | Same genus, different species (deer and moose) | God is in no genus |
| Analogical | One existence, signified by creatures | Accepted: the creature is a sign, like the tavern wreath |
The author extends the image: the wreath invites the traveler in to drink; the creature invites the soul to drink the divine existence in its own ground. The passage comments on Ecclesiasticus 24:29, "They that eat me, shall yet hunger: and they that drink me, shall yet thirst." The more the creature drinks of the divine, the more it thirsts, because its need is as inexhaustible as God's infinity.
5.8 Isticheit
The German isticheit, "is-ness", turns the copula "is" into a noun to point to the primordial existence every predication presupposes. In the sermon Renovamini spiritu, the mind is "a store or a coffer of spiritual forms or formal images", and resembles God not by having images but by pouring them forth. "But if all images are detached from the soul, and it contemplates only the Simple One, then the soul's naked being finds the naked, formless being of the divine unity". As spirit the soul is renewed, but "when it is an image of God and as nameless as God, then no renewal happens to it, but only eternity, as in God."
Going beyond God "as three" is not a denial of the Trinity, the author insists; Trinitarian theology is how the soul appropriates revelation. Eckhart's negative theology is radical: "If I say: 'God is a being' (Got is ein wesen), it is not true". We must "not chatter about God", for "if you can understand anything about him, it in no way belongs to him." The obstacle is my "mine-ness" taken as absolute; I am a negation that must be negated in a lived negatio negationis.
The detached soul no longer thinks of itself as "this person" and lives out of its pure, undivided humanity, loving all things equally. Sermon 46: "Man is an accident of nature. Therefore, abandon everything that is accident in you and preserve yourself as free, undivided human nature." "That you are not a certain person, it is the not which differentiates you from this person. If you want to be without distinction, rid yourself of not (nihte)." This existential negation of negation happens only by receiving Christ in the ground, by his indwelling presence more than his historical example.
5.9 The two dialectics compared
Abstracted from revelation, these dialectics would be "the juggling of abstract ideas, dialectical fireworks." For Ibn Arabi the Qur'an joins transcendence and immanence; for Eckhart, Christ, whose grace also effects the coincidentia oppositorum. The knowledge that results is practical and existential, a lived basis of action and thought.
| Ibn Arabi | Eckhart | |
|---|---|---|
| What unites the opposites | The Qur'an's message of tawhid | Christ, the Incarnate Word |
| Self-understanding | Theophany: outward form of the hidden Real | Ground and birth |
| Status of creation | Imaginal, a divine and creative dream | Nothing in itself; analogical sign |
| Where eternity meets time | In a Book | In a Person |
The Incarnation is again analogous to Ibn Arabi's world of imagination. For Eckhart the revealed text is finally transcended as Christ becomes the substance of the soul, and the dialectic is the patristic formula: God became man so that man might become God.
5.10 Signs, and the intellect where time meets eternity
Creatures "signify existence, even though they in and of themselves have nothing of existence either essentially or really." As signs they exist in some way, and only as signs. Having no existence in themselves they are utterly distinct from God; insofar as they do exist they are utterly indistinct from him. "This is the heart of Eckhart’s dialectical theology." The author compares Ibn Arabi's claim that God's absoluteness would not be absolute if it did not include its own limitation in creatures.
Scripture puts the abstraction of the transcendentals back into the lived experience of the soul. "For it is in the intellect, which abstracts from the hic et nunc, that the eternal enters into the flow of time." Left to itself the intellect stays among the eternal abstractions of metaphysics; turned toward Scripture, it sees them born in the soul's temporal life. "God is no stranger to us because ultimately our very is-ness is God’s isness". On the Islamic side, the realized knower who has assimilated the Qur'an finds that it is not he who "carries" the book: "it is the book that “carries” or absorbs the knower."
"Transcendence became immanence, so that immanence might become transcendent". The mystical path, Christian or Muslim, is "the way of pure interiority", reaching the innermost ground of human being, and it is effected by understanding oneself and creation through the sacred text.
Part 6. Ibn Arabi and the Mirror of the Intellect
The preface to Part III contrasts reason, which relates everything to itself, with intellect, which reflects truth as a pure mirror. Chapter 5 reads two chapters of the Bezels. The chapter on Seth treats sainthood and self-knowledge through the image of the mirror; the chapter on Shu'aib treats the heart, the organ that fluctuates with God's never-repeated self-disclosures.
6.1 Reason becomes intellect
The preface sets the theme. The Sufi saint understands how his created nature distorts his reception of God's gifts, and in that very understanding rises above it, becoming "a pure mirror in and through which God is reflected." He sees with the "heart", and his whole being "beats" to the rhythm of divine manifestations. What conforms him is the Qur'an, "as a key to its proper lock."
For Eckhart the goal is not to have an image of God but to be the image of God. An image has no being of its own; "Its essence is through and through relational." Intellectuality is fulfilled in perfect conformity of knower and known, and this, for Eckhart, is the true sense of imagination: "actually to become an image qua image." Hence the necessity of exegesis for both: revelation pulls the soul out of itself and calls it to subsist in the Logos. "Left to its own devices, reason becomes egocentric".
6.2 Not a philosopher
Ibn Arabi never saw himself as doing falsafa. He sought the unveiling of the Real through a unitative intellection he sometimes calls gnosis (ma'rifa); the author calls it "meta-philosophy". Claude Addas puts his view: the only true philosopher is the one who perfects knowledge by contemplation, and his model is "the 'divine Plato' (Aflat.ūn al-ilāhi). The rest—those who rely only on their intellect ('aql)—will never grasp any more than a minuscule part of the truth."
Reason ('aql) divides objects into classes, as Aristotle taught, and separates knower from known. Yet even for Aristotle knowing unites them formally: "when I know the stone, I am the stone insofar as I have in my intellect the form of the stone". Islam discusses this, Izutsu explains, as ittihad al-'alim wa-al-ma'lum, the "unification of the knower and the known": "For differentiation or distinction means distance, and distance in cognitive relationship means ignorance." Reason thus has an inherent drive toward unitative knowledge, which Ibn Arabi calls knowledge of the heart (qalb). To know God one must first know oneself, and that self-knowledge comes not by rational thought but by ascetic detachment. True intellectuality is attained only in sainthood.
6.3 Seth: sainthood and destiny
Seth, son of Adam, is the first manifestation of the Adamic principle, the Universal Man. As the word of "expiration", he is its emanation into the inner man, in Neoplatonic terms the transcendent Intellect (nous). The chapter on Adam concerns God seeing himself in the mirror of creation; the chapter on Seth concerns the human being seeing himself in the divine mirror. The saints, "friends" of God, know because they realize this inner principle by two movements: detachment through fana' and "remaining" (baqa') in the inner meaning of the Law. So intellectuality cannot be separated from sainthood, nor sainthood from prophecy and the Law.
The chapter begins with divine gifts and two kinds of askers: those who ask according to what they know is determined by their fixed entity (qadar), and those who ask for what they desire without regard to it. Qadar is like a Platonic idea but designates a particular, the unique essence of a thing, a destiny "measured out" not by arbitrary decree but according to the creature's pre-existing nature. Only the first kind know themselves a priori; the second learn their qadar "after the fact".
The form (sura) of a thing makes it manifest in space and time; its meaning (ma'na) is what that form intends, unmanifest in itself. Mercy is not a spatial quality but appears through the forms of a mother and child: "Mercy is a meaning expressed through these formal entities." Green has a form on the spectrum and a supersensible meaning. Each prophet is the form of a meaning of the divine Essence, Muhammad the most perfect; the saint recovers the inner meaning of the prophets' outer forms, and the "seal of the saints" that of the "seal of the prophets".
In the Laws of the prophets the saint finds the meaning of his own existence. Such a one, Ibn Arabi says, "in respect of his knowledge of himself, knows himself as God knows him, since the object [of knowledge] is the same in both cases." This needs utter "poverty" (iftiqar), detachment from creatures and their supposed causal effects.
6.4 The mirror
God is the mirror in which the saint sees his immutable identity. A mirror becomes more invisible the more perfect it is, and God is seen only as the mirror is polished by a prophet's law. "Thus, the recipient sees nothing other than his own form in the mirror of the Reality. He does not see the Reality Itself, which is not possible". "The analogy of a mirror is the closest and most faithful one for a vision of a divine Self-revelation."
The saint "both sees his form and does not see his form." Ibn Arabi likes to quote Abu Bakr: "To realize that one cannot know [God] is to know." What makes the matter subtle is that the saint's whole qadar is itself an image on the surface of the Real, and the true observer of the image is God. The prophets are bezels in which the stones of the saints are set. Prophecy ends; sainthood does not: "the office of apostle and prophet [by prophet I mean the bringer of Sacred Law] comes to an end, while Sainthood never ceases." Chodkiewicz: "Sufism and sainthood are inseparable."
6.5 The Seal of the Saints
On the basis of a dream in which he completed the wall of prophethood and sainthood in the Meccan sanctuary with two bricks, silver for prophethood and gold for sainthood, Ibn Arabi claimed to be the Seal of the Saints, as Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets. "Needless to say, this is a remarkable and bold claim!" Muhammad, last in time, is first in principle: "I was a prophet when Adam was between the water and the clay." "In the same way the Seal of Saints was a saint 'when Adam was between the water and the clay'". The author notes that the seal of the saints is a controversial topic in Islamic thought.
Prophecy is the outer, efficient cause of realization; sainthood its inner, final cause. This does not touch Muhammad's primacy, since he combined both. The gnostic takes on the opposites of the Source: "He knows and does not know, he is aware and he is not aware, he perceives and yet does not perceive." Chodkiewicz: the saint is both "close" (qarib) and "far" (ba'id). Proximity comes with a "total de-creation of what has been created", and is twofold: "The walī, close to God, is not wholly a walī unless he is also close to created being." Like the tree "whose root is firm and whose branches are in the heavens", the saint forms the isthmus (barzakh) of the "two seas".
The mirror refracts: "something big appears small in a small mirror, long in a long mirror, and moving in a moving mirror", and usually right reflects left. The creature inverts the divine Essence, its perfection lying in its poverty. The "meanings" of the prophets let the saint learn how he refracts God, until he sees "right as right", since "it is only from the tree of his own self that he will garner the fruits of his knowledge." Burckhardt adds that the self hides the divine yet also manifests it, as an image manifests the presence of a mirror.
6.6 Fana' and baqa'
True intellectuality is linked with fana', which polishes the mirror of the heart. Izutsu: the saint "transforms himself, so to speak, into the 'inside' of the Absolute, and from there sees the reality of all things by 'immediate tasting.'" This is not nihilism. As Chittick and Corbin point out, fana' is always 'an (from), baqa' always bi (through). The Futuhat: one who cannot know things by his faculties "should strive in acts of obedience (t.ā'āt) until the Real is his hearing, his seeing, and all his faculties", and "there is no escape from following authority." Without the authority of Scripture and the saints, reason could not break out of its categories. The heart sits in judgment over reason as reason over the senses.
6.7 Shu'aib: the heart
Chittick: "Knowledge can be acquired through reflection, unveiling, or scripture." When the soul knows by reflection, the mode is reason; when it knows directly from God, the heart. "There are not two different entities known as 'reason' and 'heart,' though there is a real difference between the modalities of knowing." "'Aql, as shown by its root meaning, is that which limits the free and ties down the unconstricted. Qalb means fluctuation".
| Reason ('aql) | Heart (qalb) |
|---|---|
| Knows by reflection | Knows by unveiling, directly from God |
| Delimits and binds ("that which limits the free") | Lets go of restrictions; fluctuates with each self-disclosure |
| Divides being into classes | Open to being as such; "none knows God but God" |
| Presupposes the senses | Presupposes reason, yet judges it |
The heart here is not the physical organ, nor mainly the organ of love, but of gnosis, with Qur'anic roots as the organ of discernment. Because the Absolute is not limited even by absoluteness, it must manifest itself continuously, with no form repeated. Nettler draws the consequence: "The absolute must, then, be reduced to the conditional in order for it to be knowable to the conditional world." Creatures give no positive knowledge of God, but manifest him as forms manifest meanings.
The root qalaba means "to fluctuate, to turn over". Al-Bistami: "Were the Throne and all it comprises to be placed one hundred million times in the corner of the gnostic's Heart, he would not be aware of it." Junayd: "When the contingent is linked with the eternal there is nothing left of it."
"the Heart of the gnostic or the Perfect Man is as the setting of the stone of the ring, conforming to it in every way, being circular, square, or any other shape according to the shape of the stone itself, for the setting conforms to the stone and not otherwise." Against those who say God appears according to the servant's predisposition, Ibn Arabi answers that "the servant is manifest to the Reality according to the form in which the Reality manifests Himself to him." The predisposition itself comes from an "unseen" essential self-manifestation.
The Bezels is thus "a kind of phenomenology" of God's manifestations in the wisdoms of the prophets, as realized by the saints, who return outer form to inner meaning.
6.8 Himma
A poem in the chapter: "Who is here and what there? / Who is here is what is there." "There is but one Essence, / The light of the Essence being also darkness." And: "only he knows what we say / Who is possessed of spiritual power [himma]." Himma, zeal or ardor, links knowledge with love: only the impassioned lover gives himself wholly to the play of the beloved's appearances. As Corbin points out, himma is creative. On Qur'an 50:37, "Surely in that is a reminder for him who has a heart", Ibn Arabi notes it does not say "for him who has intellect", because "the intellect restricts and seeks to define the truth within a particular qualification". It is "not a reminder to the intellectuals and mongers of doctrinal formulations who contradict one another and denounce each other". Idols of belief "have no helpers" because they are lifeless products of reason.
Ibn Arabi links Shu'aib with tasha''ub, "ramifications" or "branching out": the knower sees the one root in all the branches. Al-Qaysari compares him to one who sees the ocean in drops of water and the seed in the tree.
6.9 Against kalam
The Mu'tazilites, for Ibn Arabi, were bound by the "knots" (al-'uqud) of rational belief, stressing an abstract transcendence. The Ash'arites did not see that the whole universe is accidents of the one substance, God. None of the scholars have reached knowledge of the self "except those theosophists among the messengers and the Sufis." The Gordian knot of belief needs "the sword of gnosis":
"As for those to whom the higher worlds are disclosed, they see that God is manifest in every Breath and that no [particular] Self-manifestation is repeated. They also see that every Self-manifestation at once provides a [new] creation and annihilates another."
Every creature undergoes fana' and baqa' at every moment; "The only difference between the Sufi and other creatures is that the Sufi undergoes this process with explicit awareness." The saint whose fana' is complete does not, strictly speaking, know God but is the "place" where knowledge of God occurs.
6.10 Reason, heart and the knots of belief
"Reason" and "heart" are not two opposed organs. Though distinct, they overlap: as reason presupposes sense perception yet judges, the heart presupposes reason yet knows by unitative intuition. The heart here is not the organ of love so much as "an “organ” of gnosis or self-realization", rooted in the Qur'an's heart as an organ of discernment. Chittick notes that the heart fluctuates with the divine disclosures, while reason binds them to its concepts.
Because nothing, the heart included, can stand outside being to observe it as an object, the heart is the place where being is disclosed to itself, and the saint knows God "from the inside", in and through God. The knower who knows himself in this way knows his Lord, "for He created him in His image, indeed, He is his very identity and reality. None of the scholars, therefore, have attained to knowledge of the self and its reality, except those theosophists among the messengers and the Sufis."
The abstractions of the theologians and philosophers are overcome by spiritual praxis, not more reasoning. Through remembrance of God and recitation of the Qur'an the mirror of the intellect is polished. The chapter ends with Ibn Arabi on "rust": "It is nothing but the forms that are disclosed in the mirror of the heart and that God does not call the servant to see. These forms can be polished from the mirror through remembrance of God and recitation of the Koran."
Part 7. "Deus est intelligere": Detachment and Intellect in Eckhart
Chapter 6 joins two ends of Eckhart's work: the scholastic Parisian Questions, where God exists because he understands, and the German treatise On Detachment, where the empty heart compels God to come to it. Detachment turns out to be the practical name for the intellect's own separation from all created being. The chapter's last section compares the mirror of Ibn Arabi with Eckhart's image.
7.1 A detached spirit
A sermon opens the question: "the same knowledge in which God knows himself is the knowledge of every detached spirit and nothing else." Abgeschiedenheit, detachment, usually means nonattachment and equanimity, a practical virtue. But it translates the Latin abstractus and separatio of the scholastic works, the terms for the intellect's own operations. The author's aim is to show that the ethical side of intellect is essential to its speculative function, and that the revealed text is a precondition of its full unfolding.
| First abstraction | Second, "metaphysical" abstraction |
|---|---|
| Strips material conditions from sensible things | Strips what is finite from creatures |
| Yields the immaterial form or essence | Yields existence itself, the subject of metaphysics |
| Common to Aquinas and Eckhart | Eckhart's addition; the same as the praxis of detachment |
From the Commentary on John: intellect "abstracts from the here and now and, according to its own nature, has nothing in common with anything". Then: "Be, therefore, like [intellect]: humble, that is, subject to God, separated from time and space, not mixed with anything and having nothing in common with nothing: [by doing this] you come to God and God comes to you." Eckhart links homo, man, with humilis, of the ground or dirt, while "man is man by virtue of his intellect and reason." The contradiction dissolves: by humility and detachment the human being receives the divine Intellect. "Detachment is nothing other than receiving the revealed Word of God in the ground of one's soul."
7.2 On Detachment
Eckhart says he searched "in many writings by the pagan teachers and by the prophets of the Old and New Law" for the best virtue, and found "no other virtue better than a pure detachment from all things; because all other virtues have some regard for created things, but detachment is free from all created things." The author draws three points: detachment makes us resemble the image we were in God before creation; it is not a virtue in Aristotle's sense, perfecting a finite essence, but perfects the soul in relation to existence itself; and it is the fruit of reading Scripture and the philosophers.
"Detachment is so close to nothingness that there is nothing so subtle that it can be apprehended by detachment, except God alone." Thomas's principle, "whatever is received must be received in the mode of the receiver", means the soul must receive God "without any mode". "Whoever wants this or that wants to be something, but detachment wants to be nothing at all." So detachment ranks above love and humility, which still regard "something".
The soul does not cease to be a creature. Eckhart distinguishes the outer man, the psycho-physical composite, from the inner man, the ground untouched by the senses: "the outer man may be active whilst the inner man remains wholly free and immovable." The inner man is the hinge, the outer man the swinging door.
The detached soul does not "become" God; it empties itself of attachment to its own existence so as to "let God be God."
7.3 The Parisian Questions
The second question asks whether an angel's understanding is the same as its existence. Eckhart approves his predecessors' argument: existence is neither a transient action, which goes outward, nor an immanent action like understanding, which is unlimited; "Existence, on the contrary, is limited and determined to a genus and species." Thomas notes that understanding has infinity absolutely, sensation relatively. Eckhart adds: "I have other ways of proving this." From Aristotle (and Anaxagoras): "The intellect, as an intellect, is none of the things it knows: it must be 'unmixed with anything,'" as sight must be colorless. "If the intellect, therefore, insofar as it is intellect, is nothing, it follows that neither is understanding some existence."
The qualifier "insofar as" (in tantum quam) matters: as a power of the soul, intellect is "some being". In its essence it is separate from all existence in genera and species, a more Neoplatonic and Albertian view than Aquinas held. The cognitive likeness "represents it better if it is not a being than if it were a being." It is not an accident, since it has an object but not a subject; it is in the soul "not as in a subject but as in a place". Nor is the good found in intellect, any more than in mathematical entities. Hence intellect abstracts from here and now: "Existence is measured not by time but by eternity".
7.4 God exists because he understands
The first question asks whether existence and understanding are the same in God. Eckhart first repeats Thomas's yes, then goes further: "I declare that it is not my present opinion that God understands because he exists, but rather that he exists because he understands. God is an intellect and understanding, and his understanding itself is the ground of his existence." This accords with John: not "In the beginning was being" but "In the beginning was the Word". Intellect is prior to being, and so revelation is prior to metaphysics.
Eckhart knew he was parting from Thomas, for whom ipsum esse contains every perfection, understanding included. He draws on Henry of Ghent and Albert the Great, for whom existence is what "stands out" (ex-sistere) from ideal being, and on the Book of Causes: "the first of created beings is existence." "As soon as we come to existence we come to a creature." Dietrich of Freiburg's scheme, with the emanation of intellect prior to that of existence, is also in the background.
Considered abstractly, being is conceptually prior; considered in the order of participation and return to God, understanding is prior, since a being that lives and understands "gathers" more of existence into self-reflection. The human intellect, potentially all things, is the microcosm through which creation returns. Following Dionysius, what is formally in an effect is not formally in its cause: "Now all creatures are formally beings; hence God will not be formally a being." "Therefore existence is not in God but purity of existence." The author reads "purity of existence" in both senses, existence's purity and purity from existence. "So also I deny existence itself and suchlike of God so that he may be the cause of all existence and pre-contain all things."
As intellect the soul stands, as it were, "inside" the Godhead. From the Parables of Genesis: the name "existence" (existentia) "indicates a sort of 'standing outside' (extrastantia)." Creatures receive existence analogically; but as "word" one stands inside God, univocally. So "Deus est intelligere" does not conflict with "Esse est Deus": the first says something about God, the second about existence.
7.5 Bullitio and ebullitio
Eckhart's intellect is inseparable from the Trinity. He distinguishes two emanations:
| Bullitio, "boiling up" | Ebullitio, "boiling over" | |
|---|---|---|
| What | The inner emanation of the Persons | The giving of existence to creatures |
| God as | "personal notion" | good |
| Grace | Second grace, for intellectual beings only: "a return to God himself" | First grace, existence for all: "a departure from God" |
| Order | Prior, "cause and exemplar" | Posterior |
The worry about "emanation" is that it denies God's freedom and creation from nothing. Eckhart, like Aquinas, means that being streams from God as efficient and final cause, not as stuff; and because the inner emanation of Persons makes God sufficient to himself, he creates out of love, not necessity. On "I am who am", the repetition indicates "a 'boiling' or giving birth to itself—glowing into itself, and melting and boiling in and into itself". In God emanation and return are one movement; only those whose love is pure, and therefore purely intellectual, share in it. "Pure intellectuality and pure love are not only compatible but also logically necessitate each other."
7.6 The metaphysics of the image
The bullitio is a purely formal emanation of the Word, and so the proper subject of metaphysics, which concerns formal causes only. "The image then is an emanation from the depths in silence, excluding everything that comes from without." "An image insofar as it is an image receives nothing of its own from the subject in which it exists, but receives its whole existence from the object it images." Christ is by nature "the imagination of the Father" in this sense, no phantom but sharing most fully in the living Godhead. What Christ is by nature the soul becomes by grace: "just as when many mirrors held up to a person's face and countenance are all informed by the same one face, so too each and every just person is completely and perfectly justified by the same justice."
So the soul repeats the pattern: as the Word "boils up" within, it "boils over" in detached and selfless love. "For it is necessary for something first to 'boil' itself totally and then finally to 'boil over'". How does one become a metaphysician of the highest order? By listening to the Gospel in utter interior silence. On Wisdom, "For when quiet silence kept all things... your Almighty Word leapt down from heaven", Eckhart writes that silence is necessary "so that God the Son may be born in us by coming into our mind."
7.7 The wax tablet and the one eye
Thomas concluded that knowledge of God is impossible in this life, since we know only in our own mode. Eckhart concludes the opposite: through detachment the soul can subsist "without any mode" (ane wise) and receive God in God's mode. "God does not work alike in every man's heart; he works as he finds willingness and receptivity." Hence: "I praise detachment above all love. First because the best thing about love is that it compels me to love God, yet detachment compels God to love me."
"If I want to write on a wax tablet, it does not matter how fine the words may be that are written on the tablet, they still hinder me from writing on it." So "if God is to write on my heart up in the highest place, everything that can be called this or that must come out of my heart". The author notes that "detached intellect" is something of a pleonasm, and that the soul is the place where God writes his revealed Word: the more God's Word writes itself on the soul, the more the soul rises to pure intellect.
Thomas, in De ente et essentia, ranks the human intellect lowest among intellects because it is pure potency. For Eckhart this is exactly the condition for knowing God: as unlimited in potency as God is in act. The famous sermon passage: "The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye and one seeing, one knowing and one loving." Between God and the soul there is, as in Aristotle's account of motion, "one activity for both." Detachment "has no object." From In hoc apparuit: "Where the creature stops, there God begins to be." "As soon as the image comes in, God and all his divinity have to give way. But as the image goes out, God goes in."
7.8 Mirror and image compared
For both, intellectuality is an interior revelation that raises reason to intellect, and the revealed text is "the objectified deposit of inner intellectuality". For Ibn Arabi, Islam's "submission" deepens into a will and reason that "fluctuates" with the divine manifestations; through "the very music of the Qur'an" the knower "becomes like a vibrating string in harmony with the divine symphony of creation." Intellectuality is sainthood; and, in a phrase the author quotes, "the negation of the negation means pure affirmation: the removal of illusion results in the self-revelation of the Real." The heart passes through the imaginal world to the "station of no station".
For Eckhart, a Christocentric reading makes the mystical theology one of the ground: emptiness and birth, silence and the speaking of the Word. The detached soul stands no longer in the ebullitio of analogically differentiated being but "in univocal unity with the Godhead."
| Ibn Arabi | Eckhart | |
|---|---|---|
| Image | The heart as polished mirror | The soul as image, wax tablet, womb |
| Faculty | Heart (qalb) that fluctuates | Intellect "without mode" |
| Means | Fana', remembrance, recitation of the Qur'an | Detachment, silence, hearing the Gospel |
| Summit | "Station of no station" | Univocal share in the bullitio |
7.9 Metaphysics as the science of the image
"Note that an image properly speaking is a simple formal emanation that transmits the whole pure naked essence." The metaphysician considers it apart from the efficient and final causes studied by natural scientists. "The image then is an emanation from the depths in silence, excluding everything that comes from without." So "the image properly speaking exists only in what is living, intellectual, and uncreated", and "the image has the character of a birth, an offspring, and a son". For Eckhart, metaphysics is "the mystical science of the image". Its object is not created things but the Logos of creation, the Word of the Gospels, and knowing it means rebirth as an adopted son.
Normally "whatever is known is known in the mode of the knower", and the intellect knows the difference between the thing and its mode. With God this fails: we can know him only in a created mode, and so our intellect reduces the uncreated to created images. On the Islamic side the author restates the parallel: without the prophetic laws reason stays locked in an assertion of transcendence (tanzih); with them "reason finds the lived inner meaning of its own categories and concepts."
Despite different texts, the two approaches "amount practically to the emptying of the soul of all created images and attachments so that it might rise to the level of intellect, where it is united to God as image to its exemplar." Both see intellection as inseparable from the internalizing hermeneutics of their scriptures, describing the same realization "in unique, irreducible, but nevertheless analogous ways."
Part 8. The Universal Man in Ibn Arabi
The preface to Part IV presents the Universal Man and the Nobleman as the culmination of both mystics: a believer for whom God is no longer an object but the ground of knowing, loving and working. Chapter 7 reads the first and last chapters of the Bezels. The Word of Adam is creation's mirror and God's "pupil"; the Word of Muhammad is its return, unfolded through the hadith of the three things made beloved: women, perfume and prayer.
8.1 Friends, not slaves
In both writers the divine Logos becomes the inner logos of a person's being. Eckhart calls the Nobleman an "ad-verb" to the divine Word (Verbum): oriented to it and only inflecting it in a creaturely mode. Realization is the restoration of our primal humanity, our "Adamic nature". Human nature lies on the border of matter and spirit; its distinction, Ibn Arabi says, is to have no distinction, no fixed essence, and Eckhart echoes this in the intellect "empty" and "free". For Eckhart only Christ is the incarnate Word, but the nobleman gives birth to Christ within; for Ibn Arabi the perfect man embodies the "Mohammedan Word" (kalima muhammadiyya).
The realized believer is no longer a serf but a "friend": for Ibn Arabi no longer an 'abd but a wali. Such a one lives not only for the "God of belief" but in the hidden God. Both writers therefore use male and female imagery: the Universal Man reconciles active and passive. A note adds that "universality" captures more of al-insan al-kamil than "perfection": "Perhaps the best translation for kāmil is 'comprehensive.'"
8.2 An ocean without a shore
From the Futuhat: "The root of existence of knowledge of God is knowledge of self." And: "In the view of those who know the self, the self is an ocean without a shore, so knowledge of it has no end." Hence the knower's prayer, "My Lord, increase me in knowledge!" For Ibn Arabi, and later al-Jili, a mediating link is needed between the individual and the transcendent Essence: the Universal Man, the principle of creation that is also the immanent essence of human existence. Burckhardt: "Universal Man is not really distinct from God; he is like the face of God in his creatures."
He corresponds to the First Intellect (nous) of the Neoplatonists. Nasr: "The microcosm and the macrocosm face each other as two mirrors in each of which the other is reflected, while both 'echo' in themselves their common prototype, who is the Universal Man." The prophets' "words" in the Bezels are facets of this Logos, but two frame the book: Adam in the first chapter, Muhammad in the last.
Izutsu: the Reality of Muhammad "is the unifying principle of all archetypes", "the Absolute as the universal Consciousness." Adamic man is the man of faith (iman), reflecting God virtually; the Muhammadan man actualizes what in faith is implicit.
8.3 The Word of Adam: the polished mirror
Adam contains the "wisdom of divinity"; the human being is, in Burckhardt's phrase, a "qualitative 'abridgement' of the great cosmic 'book.'" God could not know himself without this reflection: "The Reality wanted to see the essences of His Most Beautiful Names or, to put it another way, to see His own Essence, in an all-inclusive object". "For the seeing of a thing, itself by itself, is not the same as its seeing itself in another, as it were in a mirror". Adam's otherness is annulled in his very reflection, so there are never two "things", God and Adam.
The cosmos was first "like an unpolished mirror", the image being that of a medieval metal mirror needing constant polishing. "Adam was the very principle of reflection for that mirror and the spirit of that form", while the angels were faculties of the cosmic form, the Great Man (al-insan al-kabir), each veiled by itself. Izutsu: the "polishing" is the "consciousness" of Man. "Man is in this sense the Imago Dei." Adam's superiority to the angels lies not only in intellect but in his lack of any determinate being; in him "existence precedes essence".
To exist is to be found or known (mawjud serves for both), and Adam mediates the "finding" of creatures. "The angels do not enjoy the comprehensiveness of Adam", and "Adam enshrines divine Names the angels have no part in". Al-Qaysari: Adam receives all degrees of being without himself being a degree.
8.4 Neither light nor darkness
The Futuhat: "The Real is sheer Light; while the impossible is sheer darkness... Creation is the barzakh (isthmus) between Light and darkness... In himself, man is neither light nor darkness, since he is neither existent nor non-existent." The human being can choose to face light or darkness, to "exist" or merely "be". Unlike Plato's forms, universals exist only as relating the Essence to creatures, and Adam cannot imitate God in one thing only, self-subsistent existence. The originated "should conform to all the Names and attributes of the cause [origin], except that of Self-sufficient Being". God is "rich in himself" (ghani bi-nafsihi), the creature "poor" (faqir).
So Adam is also the least of creatures, with no "known station", and alone able to erase the divine trace in himself. Yet his poverty is his nobility. The Universal Man pays no regard to customs or institutions, even becoming one of the "People of Blame", of whom the Futuhat says: "They look at things with the same eye with which God looks at things. They never confuse realities." "If we witness Him we witness ourselves, and when He sees us He looks on Himself."
Al-Jili, in The Universal Man, states the paradox: "thou art, then, simultaneously manifested and hidden from thyself." Ignorance conditions the highest knowledge. Hence the twofold movement: receptivity to all the divine Qualities and annihilation of the ego.
8.5 Two hands and the Regency
"God unites the polarity of qualities only in Adam, to confer a distinction on him." God asks Lucifer, "What prevents you from prostrating to one whom I have created with my two hands?" The two hands are the Cosmos and the Reality. Lucifer, the author says, stands for "the positivist or analytical impulse" that breaks things down and denies their unity. "In short, the Regency is fitting only for the Universal Man." God says "I am his hearing and his sight," and not, "I am his eye and his ear," to distinguish the imperceptible form from the perceptible.
Affifi asked "some seventy years ago" whether the Perfect Man is perfect in being or in knowledge, and judged that Ibn Arabi "does not make the distinction between these two questions clear." The author answers, "with all respect due to Affifi", that for the Shaykh being and knowledge are "flip sides of the same coin": to realize one's oneness with God is truly to be an illuminated theophany.
8.6 The Word of Muhammad: three things beloved
The Word of Muhammad is "the wisdom of singularity because he is the most perfect creation of this humankind, for which reason the whole affair [of creation] begins and ends with him." These "words" must be distinguished from the historical Prophet. The chapter is an exegesis of a hadith: "Three things have been made beloved to me in this world of yours: women, perfume and solace in prayer."
| Beloved thing | Gender of the Arabic word | Union it signifies | Relates man to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Women | Feminine "in reality" | Active and passive | His universal created matrix, Universal Nature |
| Perfume (tib) | Masculine | Disinterested love of all creatures | Fellow creatures, horizontally |
| Prayer | Feminine "substantively" | Union with God | His Creator, vertically |
Women. Women come first because "man's knowledge of himself comes before his knowledge of his Lord". "Women were made beloved to him and he had great affection for them because the whole always is drawn toward its part." God yearns for union as man for woman, which parallels the principle that divine perfection must manifest itself in created imperfection. Ibn Arabi cites at the outset of the Bezels the hadith of the "hidden treasure that wished to be known." Woman appears in man's image, "Thus we have a ternary, God, man, and woman, the man yearning for his Lord Who is his origin, as woman yearns for man." The contemplation of the Reality in woman "is the most complete and perfect, because in this way he contemplates the Reality in both active and passive mode". And: "Contemplation of the Reality without formal support is not possible".
Grammar. The hadith uses the feminine "three" though perfume is masculine, breaking the usual rule. So the Universal Man stands "between two feminine entities, the one substantively feminine, the other feminine in reality".
Perfume. The realized knower treats all creation with equanimity. Of garlic Muhammad said, "It is a bush whose odor I detest"; he did not say "I detest it." Affifi: "Nothing is evil: all that is is good." The prime virtue of the gnostic is "to love all creatures without distinction", as God shines existence on good and bad alike. The knower is good because he has no defined essence, abiding at the "station of no station". Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz, asked how he knew God, replied, "Through the fact that He brings opposites together".
8.7 Prayer and the god of belief
At the height of prayer God prays through the knower. This is ihsan: "pray to God as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He surely sees you." With a pause in the Arabic (lam takun: tarahu), the phrase reads "if thou are not, thou seest Him." Izutsu: dhikr "is rather synonymous with mystical 'self-annihilation' in God." Ibn Arabi: "he who is not present with His Lord in prayer, neither hearing nor seeing Him, is not really praying at all". Prayer is always revealed prayer, through the Qur'an. The teacher of the "Unity of Existence" enjoins prayer because prayer posits duality only to overcome it.
When God prays, he does so as "the Last", the God "the servant creates in himself (in his Heart), whether by his reason or through traditional learning. This is the 'God of belief'". Praise of that god "is self-praise." Well before Feuerbach, the author notes, the Shaykh saw that people worship images of themselves. As "the First", God is the subject of prayer, prior to it. Going through the Fatiha, Ibn Arabi shows God praying it as well as the human being. The gods of belief are "relatively absolute": relative to the creature, yet to be submitted to absolutely.
8.8 Consciousness and Universal Nature
Izutsu's reading of the polished mirror deserves its full weight: "All beings other than Man only reflect, each one of them, singly, one aspect of the Absolute." Together they form a whole, and "the universe, certainly, is “one,” but, since the universe lacks consciousness, it does not constitute real unity." Man "not only synthesizes all the forms of the Divine self-manifestation which are scattered over the world of Being, but also is conscious of this whole." Al-Qaysari adds that truth is reflected according to the quality of the mirror, so there is no absolute reflection of God in any creature as creature. And the breathing of the spirit into Adam is "nothing other than the coming into operation of the undifferentiated form’s [innate] disposition to receive the inexhaustible overflowing of Self-revelation".
Woman comes first in the hadith because she represents the primordial, passive "universal nature", logically prior to every other polarity. "In relation to him they [women] are as the Universal Nature is to God in which He revealed the forms of the Cosmos". She stands for the divine Eros, root of duality in creation and means of overcoming it, and Universal Nature is itself the product of the "breath" of the Merciful. Of man and woman: "the man feels a deep longing for her, as something yearns for itself, while she feels longing for him as one longs for that place to which one belongs." The longing is mutual even between God and man, as in the verses the author quotes: "The Beloved longs to see me, / And I long even more to see Him".
Unlike the angels, human beings gather into themselves the spiritual and the material, the manifest and the nonmanifest. In a passage the author quotes: "Man gathers together in himself all the things of the universe in the sense that he is a synthesis of the non-material realities of the individual things. The Universal Man is an epitome of the Macrocosm only in this particular sense." This universality cannot become an object of thought, since it is the precondition of all thought. Love and the desire to see his own image are the first motives of creation, which is why the Bezels begins from the "hidden treasure that wished to be known"; perceiving this love, the Prophet could rise through his love for women to a unitative love for God.
Knowing culminates in tasting. From the chapter on Abraham: "You are His nourishment as bestowing the contents of His Self-Knowledge, while He is yours as bestowing existence". God and the knower nourish each other. As Corbin says, it is not to "God in general" that the knower returns but to the most particular and concrete Reality.
Part 9. The Nobleman in Meister Eckhart
By becoming flesh, the Logos ennobled humanity: we are no longer serfs on God's manor but sons and noblemen by adoption, who need only claim the inheritance by listening to the Word and giving birth to it in the ground of the soul. Chapter 8 follows Eckhart from the early Counsels on Discernment through the Strasbourg sermon Of the Nobleman to the virgin who is a wife and the sermon on the poor in spirit.
9.1 Letting-go in the Counsels
A true Nobleman attains by grace a sovereign "letting-go" (gelâzenheit) of all created things, a vassal to no man, angel or thing. Nobility is first a metaphysical status, not a social one. Marie Anne Vannier: "the nobleman is freely not the Man that has attained perfection, but rather, one who lives fully in God." By grace he is what Christ is by nature: fully God and fully human. The theme belongs to Eckhart's late preaching in Strasbourg, an attempt to bring his mystical teaching to the people, but the sermon Of the Nobleman reuses themes from one of his earliest works, the Counsels on Discernment (c. 1290s), talks given to young Dominicans while he was vicar of Thuringia.
In the Counsels, letting-go is the opposite of self-will. "An empty spirit is one that is confused by nothing, attached to nothing, has not attached its best to any fixed way of acting, and has no concern whatever in anything for its own gain". The key is loss of self: "Truly, if a man renounced (lieze) a kingdom or the whole world but held on to himself, he would not have renounced anything". Kurt Ruh speaks of an "Ethics of Being": goodness and justice are participations in God's own, "substantial" to the released soul, not possessions. This is the lived side of the thesis Esse est Deus.
"This is indeed a fair exchange and an honest deal: By as much as you go out in forsaking all things, by so much, neither less nor more, does God go in, with all that is his, as you entirely forsake everything that is yours."
Rites, penances and moral codes are necessary but not sufficient: "We ought not to think of building holiness upon action; we ought to build it upon a way of being, for it is not what we do that makes us holy, but we ought to make holy what we do." Here the scholastic principle actio sequitur esse is applied to the spiritual life. Ruh notes that Eckhart cares less about repressing a sinful nature than about the status of the "I". "Take a look at yourself (Nim dîn selbes wâr), and whenever you find yourself, deny yourself. That is the best of all."
9.2 A God who is present
Eckhart does not even want God as an object of constant contemplation: "A man ought not to have a God who is just a product of his thought, nor should he be satisfied with that, because if the thought vanished, God too would vanish. But one ought to have a God who is present, a God who is far above the notions of men and of all created things." Thoughts of God are human creations; to take them for God is idolatry. This presence is not the "present-to-hand" object that Heidegger criticizes, but the enveloping ground of every act: a man must be "penetrated (durchgangen) with the divine presence (gegenwerticheit)", yet "at the beginning there must be attentiveness and a careful formation within himself, like a schoolboy setting himself to learn."
Released into freedom, the soul is released into love, and love brings a knowledge higher than any angelic illumination: "What makes him so certain is that he loves God in all his creatures without any distinction." Even "if God himself were to deny him, he would not mistrust; for love cannot mistrust". Activity is not abandoned: "People ought to learn to be free of their works as they perform them." And: "A man should accustom himself to seeking and wanting nothing for himself in anything, and to finding and accepting God in everything."
Will is twofold, "accidental" and "determining, creative, habitual"; only God's will is essential, and surrendering ours to it lifts us out of past and future. The point of letting-go is to let God be God.
9.3 A nobleman went out
The sermon takes its lead from Luke 19:12: "A noble man went out into a far country to obtain for himself a kingdom and returned." Eckhart: "And in these words much of Holy Scripture is touched upon." The author draws three points: the nobility of human nature, conformed by intellect to all being; its attainment of the divine only by grace; and above all that this is the marrow of Scripture, which is itself the vehicle by which the Nobleman is made actual.
| Outer man | Inner man |
|---|---|
| Turned toward sensible things; "falls from itself" into creation | Turned toward God alone |
| Caught in the "snares and weeds" of the field | A seed God has sown, never wholly destroyed |
| "the bad tree that can never produce good fruit" | Grows into works of love and righteousness |
| Body and world as such are still good | Final stage: "free of images", a child of God |
The sermon begins: "whoever knows himself knows all created things, because all created things are either body or spirit." Of the seed, Eckhart cites Origen: "it will glow and shine, gleam and burn, and it will never cease to turn toward God." Six stages lead from outer to inner man, ending "for the end of the inner man and of the new man is eternal life."
"If a master craftsman makes figures out of wood or stone, he does not introduce the figure into the wood, but he cuts away the fragments that had hidden and concealed the figure; he gives nothing to the wood, rather he takes away from it, cutting away its surface and removing its rough covering, and then what had lain hidden beneath shines out."
So man "must go out of every image and out of himself and out of everything", "if he wishes to and shall receive the Son, and become son in the bosom and heart of the Father." The "far country" is the inner man, where no image stands between soul and God. "Every kind of medium is alien to God." Eckhart repeats the etymology the author calls "(probably fanciful)" of homo from humilis, "earth": man's poverty is his nobility. "Thus he who is such a man is 'a nobleman,' indeed neither less nor more."
9.4 Being white
Which makes us more blessed: to be united to God, or to know that we are? Eckhart answers that blessedness lies first in direct union, where the soul "knows nothing there except being and God." To know oneself as contemplating God is already "a going out and return to the starting point; for no one knows himself as being white except the man who is in fact white." "But 'white' is far inferior to, more external than 'being white.' The wall is something very different from the foundation on which the wall is built."
In knowing creatures, the form in the mind is higher than in the thing; in knowing God the order is reversed. Knowledge must be rooted in being, and we exist in God by subsisting in Christ, the fundamentum cognitionis, not an object of cognition but its ground. Hence the hermeneutic circle: we know Christ through Scripture and interpret Scripture rightly by living it.
The natural and divine orders mirror each other: "Nature forms the man from the child and hen from the egg, but God makes the man before the child and the hen before the egg." Actuality is prior to potentiality; the Word first speaks to us before we make sense of it. Eckhart grants that the blessed man does know that he knows God, "and yet God forbid that my blessedness should consist in that." "God's contemplating and our contemplating are wholly separate and different from one another."
9.5 The virgin who is a wife
Like Ibn Arabi, Eckhart expresses the dialectic of emptiness and fullness in feminine images. The author argues these symbols are no more arbitrary than the modern habit of treating the biological meaning as the "real" one; their truth lies in the change they work in one who understands. Eckhart renders Luke 10:38 freely as "Our Lord Jesus Christ went up into a little town, and was received by a virgin who was a wife."
"'Virgin' is as much as to say a person who is free of all alien images, as free as he was when he was not." This does not mean a blank mind but images held without possessiveness, and it does not exclude works.
"For if a man were to be a virgin forever, no fruit would come from him. If he is to become fruitful, he must of necessity be a wife. 'Wife' is the noblest word one can apply to the soul, much nobler than 'virgin.'"
Against his age's preference for the virginal, Eckhart finds in the pair the unity of contemplative and active life, clerical and lay. The wife bears fruit "from the noblest ground of all", the ground where the Father bears his Word. "And I have often said that there is a power in the soul that touches neither time nor flesh." There "the now in which I am talking" is the same as the now of the first and last man; the "end times" lie in the ground of the soul.
To touch this eternal "now" is, for Eckhart, the mark of true intellectuality: from there the soul sees all things in the light of eternity. He calls the power a "spark" because it is higher than the soul, coming down into it like a spark thrown from a far larger fire, and no name fits it.
9.6 The little castle
The power is called a guard, a light, a spark, "But now I say that it is neither this nor that". "It is free of all names, it is bare of all forms, wholly empty and free, as God himself is empty and free." Man cannot look into it because it is the ground of his knowing and freedom; he enters it only as Christ is born there. It is the "little castle" or "little town" of the verse, so simple "that no power, no manner, not God himself may look at it." If God were to look in, "that must cost him all his divine names and the properties of his Persons".
The author reads this less radically than it sounds. God is always already free of "properties", which arise only in relation to creatures, and the apparent surpassing of the Trinity is a dialectical move: the oneness of God must bear fruit in the Trinity, and the Trinity presupposes the inner emptiness of the Godhead.
9.7 Poor in spirit
In Beati pauperes spiritu the poor person "wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing", "as free of his own created will as he was when he did not exist." "So long as you have a will to fulfill God's will, and a longing for God and for eternity, then you are not poor". Poverty here is ontological: the right comportment of the soul to existence. Such a soul no longer knows God as object, first cause or ground of beings.
"When I stood in my first cause (êrsten sache), I then had no 'God,' and then I was my own cause (sache mîn selbes)." "But when I went out from my own free will and received my created being, then I had a 'God,' for before there were any creatures, God was not 'God,' but he was what he was."
The God who is first cause is the God of the philosophers. The Middle High German sache means both "cause" and "matter of concern". Hence: "So therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of 'God' (wir gotes ledic werden)." This is not nihilism: "It is characteristic of creatures that they make something out of something, while it is characteristic of God that he makes something out of nothing." Nor is it pantheism, since a God only "within" would be an absolute subject, as wrong as an absolute object. The attitude is: "Let God perform what he will, and let man be free".
The author recalls Scholem's warning from the introduction: the temptation to oppose an "evil" creator to a "good" God beyond God. That is not Eckhart's, or Ibn Arabi's, intention. The creator God of revelation is the same God beyond all relation to creation, and Eckhart urges his listeners to enter more deeply into revelation, not to leave it.
The de-creative process is named with entbilden and entwerden, "un-form" and "unbecome": "You must un-form (entbildet) yourself in such a way that you may be transformed (überbildet) in God alone." "A great authority says that his breaking through is nobler than his flowing out; and that is true." In the flowing out all things say "God is"; in the breaking-through "I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally."
9.8 Without a why
The sermon opens not "Jesus said" but "Blessedness opened its mouth to wisdom": the released soul lets Wisdom speak through it, and that Wisdom is Christ. The Incarnation, the self-emptying of Philippians 2, is not a single past event; God always gives birth to his Son in each released soul, a "repetition" the author compares to Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
"Here God's ground is my ground, and my ground is God's ground. Here I live from what is my own, as God lives from what is his own. . . . It is out of this inner ground that you should perform all your works without asking, 'Why?'" Union does not absorb the person but grounds it. Creatures no longer have a goal outside themselves but subsist from, in and through God.
Eckhart's letting-go is a "logic of freedom", rooted only in a divine emptiness that is infinitely rich. In letting creatures be, God hides behind the act, which is why special revelation is needed: the Gospel says not "In the beginning was being" but "In the beginning was the Word". Christ born in the hidden ground makes union and knowledge of God possible.
Part 10. Conclusion: The Unity and Diversity of the Mystical Path
The conclusion opens with two sayings of Heraclitus and a passage from Benedict XVI on the God who is Logos. It gathers the four parts into one claim: neither mystic can be understood without a revelation and a hermeneutic seeking its inner meaning, the union of the soul with God. It then weighs the real differences between the Muslim and the Christian Logos and asks what this means for comparative religion.
10.1 To imagine God
For Eckhart the circle outside the tavern is the sign of the wine within; for Ibn Arabi the verses of the Qur'an, ayat, are also "signs" pointing to the meaning of all things. For both, the true nature of things is closed to the intellect without special revelation, and the hermeneutic is fulfilled only in union. The soul always remains a creature, yet as it realizes its nothingness it is made over into God through the Logos, as wood is turned into fire by fire.
The goal is thus "to imagine God" in Eckhart's literal sense: to be an image of God in one's whole intellect and being. The imagination is analogical when it recognizes the finitude with which the soul images God and so opens itself to God's infinity. As creature the human being relates to God analogically; as intellect, univocally. Mystical knowledge is not an encyclopedic grasp of the Bible or Qur'an; without inner conformity such knowledge is useless and can be dangerous when used with pride.
10.2 Logos and the "mystical"
For both, being is coterminous with its communication, which is why being is convertible with truth and goodness, the good that is "diffusive of itself". For Ibn Arabi God is al-haqq, the True, which can also mean "the Right". "To be is to be revealed and to be revealed is to be." In this the Logos of Eckhart and Ibn Arabi marks a radical rupture with the Greek Logos, the objective rational order knowable by reason alone.
| Ibn Arabi | Eckhart | |
|---|---|---|
| The Logos is | The "Muhammadan Word", uncreated principle of the Qur'an: a divine book | A Person, Jesus Christ, the "marrow" of Scripture |
| Human condition | Primal nature (fitra) obscured by custom and imitation (taqlid) | Union broken by original sin |
| Remedy | Return to the Adamic nature by the guidance of the book | A mediator fully God and fully human; rebirth of the Son in the soul |
| Where actualized | In the Universal Man and, in lesser degrees, the prophets and saints | In the Christian made a son by adoption |
| "Trans-traditional" element | A "Christian element": the Logos as primal Adam, though not a Person | An "Islamic element": the Godhead beyond distinctions, close to tawhid |
The affinities cannot be explained by borrowing: as far as is known, Eckhart had no knowledge of Ibn Arabi, nor Ibn Arabi of Christian theology. Each saw them merely as facets of the Truth. Such incorporation is legitimate only at the end of the path, for one who has followed a tradition fully; at the beginning it is "a muddled, superficial, and contrived syncretism." The traditions converge "not despite their complete and absolute grounding in their revealed texts", but because of it.
The shared Neoplatonic and Peripatetic categories produce only superficial likeness, for the pagan Logos lacks the notion of communication in which the human being is both distinguished from and united to its origin.
10.3 Mystical hermeneutics and comparative religion
Junayd's water takes the color of the cup: our knowledge of God is always colored by reason and tradition, and the "gods of belief" are relative approximations. Yet neither writer is a relativist. "To return to the metaphor of Junayd, the water is not the color of the cup, but it is necessary to have the cup in order to drink the water." From the Futuhat: "The road to felicity is set down by revealed religion, nothing else." Without the revealed text reason "cuts" reality down to its own size; revelation discloses the analogical nature of things.
The Universal Man or Nobleman realizes the Logos of his own tradition and, in doing so, also realizes its limits. This is explicit in Ibn Arabi and implicit in Eckhart, who prays to be free of "God". Al-Ghazali spoke of "giving life" to the tradition. Chittick paraphrases Ibn Arabi: "The revealed religions are diverse, because they cannot possibly not be diverse." And: "Since human dispositions are diverse, divine dispensations must also be diverse to take into account the diversity of these dispositions."
"God says, We never chastise, until We send forth a messenger. Note that He did not say, 'until We send forth a person.'" "Hence, this verse has within it a tremendous mercy, because of the diversity of human dispositions that lead to a diversity of views."
For Ibn Arabi the diversity of revelations flows from divine mercy, yet the universality of all religion is fulfilled only in the Qur'an, and the prophet is such by the Logos he bears. For Eckhart, in Christ person and Logos are identical; the diversity of revelation leads back to Christ, and it is "the death of the mystical imagination" to give oneself to the mere idea of the universality of religion rather than to the living Word.
What the two share, finally, is "an acute sense of hermeneutical reason that sees the transcendent in the immanent, the spiritual in the material, and the one in the many." Those who study them are better placed to see the "embodiedness" of divine Truth in texts and traditions, a Truth understood only by entering them imaginatively. Revelation or "unveiling" belongs to the Logos as Logos: in its general sense the Logos communicates being and goodness to all creatures; in its specific sense it communicates its own intellectual nature to intellectual creatures. The mystical path is therefore neither "inner" nor "outer", though the mystic brings out the inner sense of the text.
The mystical path is suprarational, not irrational; the Logos is known only as it reveals itself. The mystical is not a private "experience" but the opening of the subject onto the fullness of existence, so that in this sense all medieval Muslim and Christian philosophy and theology is "mystical". The lesson is "that we must hearken to the Logos in humble silence. For this Logos does not speak to human beings privately, but to all."
Who's Who
The people who matter for following the book, grouped by the role they play in its argument. The book prints very few dates: the two subjects' dates appear in its catalogue data, and two Beguine writers are dated in a note. Where no date is printed, none is given. Descriptions say what part each figure plays in the book, not who they were in general.
The two mystics
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Arabi (Muhyi al-Din), "the Shaykh" | 1165-1240 | Andalusian Sufi, author of the Bezels of Wisdom and the Meccan Openings; one of the book's two subjects, whose Universal Man is the Islamic pole of the comparison. |
| Meister Eckhart | d. 1327 | Dominican preacher and master of theology; the other subject, whose Latin commentaries and German sermons supply the Nobleman, letting-go and the birth of the Word in the soul. |
Modern readers the author relies on or answers
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| William Chittick | not given | Main guide to Ibn Arabi: taqlid and tahqiq, the transparent perfect human, the diversity of revealed religions. |
| Henry Corbin | not given | On the creative imagination and on revelation closed yet inexhaustible. |
| Toshihiko Izutsu | not given | On the archetypes, the Reality of Muhammad and the "polishing" of the mirror as human consciousness. |
| A. E. Affifi | not given | Asked whether the Perfect Man is perfect in being or knowledge; the author answers him. |
| Titus Burckhardt, Seyyed Hossein Nasr | not given | Describe the Universal Man as the face of God in creatures and the mirror of microcosm and macrocosm. |
| Bernard McGinn | not given | Leading guide to Eckhart's exegesis: "the exegete has become the text". |
| Kurt Ruh | not given | Calls Eckhart's teaching an "Ethics of Being". |
| Marie Anne Vannier | not given | Places the Nobleman theme in the Strasbourg period. |
| Reiner Schürmann | not given | On the detached intellect as the place of subsistent ideas. |
| Vladimir Lossky | not given | No Christian mysticism without theology; frames Eckhart's synthesis of Augustine and Thomas. |
| Gershom Scholem | not given | His three stages of religion open the book; his warning about Gnostic temptation returns in Chapter 8. |
| Robert Lewis Wilken | not given | On the early Fathers, for whom God was a person to be known rather than the conclusion of an argument. |
Synthesis
This closing section steps back from the chapters. It collects the book's main lessons, sets out the patterns that recur from one pair of chapters to the next, weighs the method, and shows how the parts connect. Everything here restates the book; the editor adds arrangement, not facts.
Ten takeaways
- Mysticism needs revelation. Neither Ibn Arabi nor Eckhart can be understood without a revealed scripture and a hermeneutic seeking its inner meaning. Mystical life is not a private ecstasy beside the tradition.
- The Logos is the hinge. For both, God is self-communicating; being is convertible with truth and goodness, and "to be is to be revealed". This marks a break with the Greek Logos as a rational order known by reason alone.
- Reason is used, then surpassed. Philosophy, logic and physics serve as tools for entering the text. Revelation corrects reason not with more reason but by transforming the knower.
- Dialectic, not system. Ibn Arabi's "He and not He" and Eckhart's God, distinct by his very indistinction, both refuse to make God one being among beings.
- Imagination is analogical. Ibn Arabi's creative imagination and Eckhart's images point beyond themselves; the goal is to "imagine God" by becoming his image.
- Intellect knows by becoming. Knowledge is union of knower and known; with God the order is reversed, so we know God only by existing in him.
- Emptiness bears fruit. Eckhart's virgin who is a wife and Ibn Arabi's feminine imagery express one law: the soul emptied of itself is filled with God.
- The perfected human is comprehensive. The Universal Man and the Nobleman have no fixed station; their poverty is their nobility.
- The god of belief is real but relative. Junayd's cup colors the water, yet one needs the cup to drink. Eckhart prays to be free of "God" for the same reason.
- Convergence comes through grounding. The traditions meet "because of", not despite, their grounding in their texts; incorporation of the other belongs at the end of the path, never the beginning.
Recurring patterns
| Theme | Ibn Arabi | Eckhart |
|---|---|---|
| Scripture | The Qur'an, whose verses are "signs" (ayat) | The Bible, with Christ as its "marrow" |
| Creation | Self-disclosure of the Real; shadow and mirror | Letting-go that releases ideas into existence |
| God beyond naming | The Essence beyond the Names | The Godhead beyond "God" |
| Faculty of union | The heart, receiving every form | The intellect, the spark, the little castle |
| Path | Realization (tahqiq) over imitation (taqlid) | Letting-go (gelâzenheit), breaking-through |
| Perfected human | Universal Man (al-insan al-kamil) | Nobleman (der edle mensch) |
| Decisive difference | Logos as uncreated Book; no incarnation | Logos as Person; incarnation and rebirth |
Questions the book raises
- How far can the parallel go? The author finds a "Christian element" in Ibn Arabi and an "Islamic element" in Eckhart, yet insists the Muslim Logos is not a Person. Readers will want to watch, chapter by chapter, where the parallel holds and where the author marks its limit.
- Is the Godhead beyond the Trinity? The little-castle passage seems to say so. The author reads it dialectically, as the emptiness that the fruitful Trinity presupposes; the text itself is bolder, and he admits as much.
- What counts as "mystical"? If all medieval philosophy and theology that seeks to conform the soul to God is "mystical", the word widens a great deal. The book accepts this consequence deliberately, against the modern search for a "mystical core".
- Who may compare? Incorporation of other traditions is said to belong only to one who has followed one's own tradition fully. The book does not say how a scholar, as opposed to a realized knower, should stand toward that rule.
Weighing the method
The strength of the book is its pairing: each Eckhart chapter answers the Ibn Arabi chapter before it, and the parallels are drawn from texts rather than asserted. The author is careful to name the differences, above all the Person of Christ against the uncreated Book, and to deny any historical borrowing. The cost of the method is that the comparison is mostly carried by modern interpreters on the Ibn Arabi side (Chittick, Corbin, Izutsu, Affifi), while the Eckhart chapters work more directly from his Latin and German. The author also writes as a Christian theologian, and his conclusion that Christ is the fullness of revelation for Eckhart is stated alongside Ibn Arabi's claim that all religion is fulfilled in the Qur'an, without trying to settle between them.
How the parts connect
Part 1 sets the problem: the "mystical" divorced from revelation. Parts 2 and 3 show how each reads scripture. Parts 4 and 5 show what that reading discloses about existence, Parts 6 and 7 about the knowing intellect. Parts 8 and 9 bring all three into one figure, the human being in whom revelation, existence and intellect coincide. Part 10 asks what that figure means for the relation between religions.
Paired structure recalled
| Pair | Ibn Arabi hinge | Eckhart hinge | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revelation | Character was the Qur'an; ta'bir | Birth of the Word in the intellect | Existence |
| You are He and you are not He | Unum est indistinctum | Intellect | Heart as polished mirror |
| Deus est intelligere; detachment | Human ideal | Universal Man | Nobleman; without a why |
Table. The four pairs that organize the book.
Glossary
Terms as the book uses them, written without diacritics in the editor's text. The meanings given are those the book gives or the sense in which it uses the term; they are not wider dictionary definitions, and the list is limited to words that matter for following the argument.
About this book
Logos and Revelation: Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics by Robert J. Dobie, 2009. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions