Notes
These were Moshe Idel (Jewish mysticism), Michael Sells (Islamic mysticism), and McGinn himself (Christian mysticism).
As McGinn explains, the unio mystica should be understood primarily as a “term of art”, “a modern creation largely popularized by students of religion”, which enables it to have “a useful, if limited, function” (McGinn 1996a, pp. 185–86). Although occasionally used by patristic authors, “it was actually very rarely used for more than a millennium (c. 500–1550), despite how often mystics spoke of being united with God. The qualifier ‘mystical’ (mysticus), whose Christian usage goes back to the second century CE, kept its etymological sense of ‘secret/hidden’, and was used to describe the inner, invisible, aspects of Christian life and practice, especially the spiritual meaning of scripture, its sensus mysticus” (McGinn 2020, pp. 404–21). The term seems to have become more popular in the nineteenth century (like “mysticism” itself) (Schmidt 2003), through the academic study of mysticism more than the writings of the mystics themselves.
As McGinn writes, “We are under no illusion that we have settled all the issues related to the mystery of mystical union. Indeed, we hope that mystical union (if that is even the best term) will appear richer, more complex, and more mysterious to the reader after finishing these essays than at the outset” (McGinn 1996b, pp. vii–ix at viii–ix).
As Michael Sells explains, the meaning of “God” has been understood in radically different ways even within a single language—for instance, an Arab Christian and Muslim understanding of Allāh. In Islamic Studies scholarship, “God” has been keyed to a rich and diverse set of terms found in Islamic and Sufi theology—Allāh, al-Ḥaqq, al-Raḥmān, etc. These words, when translated as “God”, lose much of the meaning intended by Sufi authors (Sells 1996b, pp. 163–73 at 164–66). A different set of meanings developed by Muslim “Neoplatonists” writing in Arabic is lost when the Qurʾānic Names “al-Aḥad” (the “One-Only”) and “al-Wāḥid” (the “One-All”) are not rendered effectively, nuances that have been expertly conveyed in the translations of William C. Chittick (Chittick 2023, pp. 1–19 at 8; 1992, pp. 179–209 at 179–81, 185, 187, 202).
As Richard King points out in his study on the “mystification” of the “Orient”, “We should be aware of the sense in which the study of religion can have iatrogenic consequences for the purported object of its study…. Here I am using the term metaphorically to highlight the sense in which religious studies as a cognitive discipline may actually distort or reduce that which it is claiming to investigate and explain” (King 1999, p. 42). King’s approach has been extended by Boaz Huss, who explains how that the emergence of the category of “Jewish mysticism” has shaped modern perceptions of the Kabbalah (Huss 2020).
As Wendy Doniger writes, “In this age of multinationalism and the politics of individual ethnic and religious groups, of identity politics and minority politics, to assume that two phenomena from different cultures are ‘the same’ in any significant way is regarded as demeaning to the individualism of each, a reflection of the old racist, colonialist attitude that ‘all wogs look alike’” (Doniger 2000, pp. 63–74 at 64). As Gloria Maité Hernández explains, the anxiety over post-colonial backlash has had the positive consequence of protecting traditions from “false representations and orientalist agendas” (Hernández 2021, p. 177).
That is, without consideration of the ability of those traditions to change the very parameters of scholarship in mysticism, nor any special concern over the manner in which they might enact and effect such a change.
As Doniger explains, comparison fails when analysts presume to “stand outside (presumably, above) phenomena from different cultures and to equate them” (Doniger 2000, p. 64). It also faces criticism when it fails to attend sufficiently to difference, as Benjamin Ray and Kimberly Patton observe: “comparison in the human sciences has been problematic and unscientific and lacking in any specific rules. It contains a kind of ‘magic,’ [J. Z. Smith] asserts, like Frazer’s idea of homeopathic magic, ‘for, as practiced by scholarship, comparison has been chiefly an affair of the recollection of similarity …. The procedure is homeopathic …. The issue of difference has been all but forgotten.’…” (Patton and Ray 2000b, pp. 1–19 at 3–4).
Ann Taves and Egil Asprem have recently urged scholars of religion to shift their concern from “religions” to “worldviews”, a shift that is perhaps less likely to prejudice investigations into the writings of “theologians” or “mystics”. “Worldview” also highlights the coherence of the particular form of rationality presented by a given historical subject or subjectivity (Taves 2020). By seeking to understand each culturally and linguistically specific form of “rationality” (or “worldview”) on its own terms, scholars reduce the risk of inadvertently misrepresenting them.
I mean the direct line of authors and commentators connected to Ibn ʿArabī’s most influential student and disciple Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), sometimes discussed in the secondary literature as the School of Ibn ʿArabī (Chittick 1996).
Moreover, there are notable differences between the three authors on specific points, as I show below.
Destructive when dialogue is not sincere. Marianne Moyaert has shown some of the ways Christian frameworks for inter-religious dialogue effectively instrumentalized other traditions (turning them also into “religions”) to generate discussion and debate that mostly furthered the interests of those who developed the frameworks (Moyaert 2013, pp. 64–86 at 81).
As Edward Howells explains, if the “reality” that the mystic “experiences” may be designated by the word “God”, theorists of mysticism cannot be satisfied with an account that begins and ends with “mystical experience”. Since the “notion of ‘God’ entails a creator who is both universally present and present everywhere equally, so that experience does not easily divide into different kinds where God is more or less present” (Howells 2020, pp. 45–64 at 45). Problematizing James’s “marks” of religious experience, Howell explains that “To tell one experience of God from another—to say which are ‘mystical’ and which are not—requires not just certain ‘marks’ of experience but an understanding of how God relates to the world in the first place, and further distinctions concerning the ways that God might be present in human experience” (Howells 2020, p. 45).
My understanding of the mystical consciousness (as a non-specialist of Christian mysticism) draws from Bernard McGinn’s “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal” (2008), Sebastian Moore’s “Consciousness” (1957), and Louis Roy’s Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers (2003). All three authors tend to write ambiguously (not systematically) on this topic. I have therefore generalized from their more systematic statements. The theory of the mystical consciousness that I attribute to “McGinn et al.” throughout this paper is therefore a generalized account.
I borrow these expressions from Chapter 5 of Roy’s Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers (2003) entitled “Eckhart: When Human Consciousness Becomes Divine Consciousness”. In alluding to the identity between “human” and “divine” consciousness, Roy points to Eckhart’s “mystification” of an Aristotelian scientific claim pertaining to the act of vision. As Eckhart says, when his eye falls upon some wood, in the act of perception, “the wood is my eye”. Vision/perception therefore serves as a useful image of “mystical identity” (McGinn’s unitas indistinctionis) (Roy 2003, p. 85).
McGinn has discussed the mystical consciousness in connection with the writings of Eckhart, Cusa, and St. John of the Cross; Roy has incorporated the writings of Eckhart; and Moore, the most poetic of the three, cites from Eckhart and St. Augustine.
The mystic’s consciousness continually “unites” with (and separates from) “God”, its center moving between the two poles of “uniting” and “identity”.
As Moore writes, “Consciousness has no object, but it has an end. I mean, that the process of becoming more conscious is going somewhere. Not towards an object that I shall one day discover, but towards a completeness of itself” (S. Moore 1957, p. 311). Thus, consciousness is “not something that comes to us, but something we come to. Things happen to us, but we happen on consciousness” (S. Moore 1957, p. 312).
Some specialists have decried the inordinate attention paid in modern and post-modern times to “apophasis”. As David Albertson writes, “Apophatic mysticism promises to clear away idolatrous speech about God and often promotes an ideal of imageless contemplation…. But then how should we understand its contrary, cataphatic mysticism? Does the positivity of cataphasis possess its own legitimacy, or should it always be superseded? We ought not to oppose the two traditions as if they were competitors, but neither should we fail to notice when one is elevated above the other” (Albertson 2020, pp. 347–68 at 348).
I am forced to use this construction since “ontology” and “epistemology” have been decoupled in many of the relevant modern frameworks and discussions. “Being” and “knowing” (or “consciousness”) are intimately connected in the writings of Ibn ʿArabī and his followers, as I show throughout this paper (see n. 29 and n. 37 below).
For this tradition, “ethics” must be objectively grounded in “ontology”, and more specifically in the “deiform nature” of human beings. See, for instance, William Chittick’s “Marātib al-taqwā: Saʿīd al-Dīn Farghānī on the Ontology of Ethics” (Chittick 2022).
As McGinn explains, the “religious consciousness” begins with the gift of love and faith. Christian mystics likewise regard what McGinn calls the mystical consciousness as a gift of God’s love or grace (McGinn 2008, pp. 49–53, 61 n. 29, 62 n. 33).
Roy wishes to explain statements pertaining to mystical identity in two sections of his chapter on Eckhart—“Is the soul equated with God?” and “The soul’s breakthrough to the Godhead?” (Roy 2003, pp. 85–93). Likewise, McGinn wishes to explain the statements of St. John of the Cross and Eckhart who believe “that the inner faculties must be emptied and put to rest so that God can work directly from within” (McGinn 2008, p. 58).
In what follows, I discuss ideas presented by Ibn ʿArabī; his chief student, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī; Qūnawī’s students Saʿīd al-Dīn Farghānī (d. 699/1300) and Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī (d. 688/1289); the second-generation student of Qūnawī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī (d. 730-736/1329-1335); and the student of Kāshānī, Dāwūd Qayṣarī (d. 748/1347). All were highly influential teachers and masters of this tradition, who developed its perspectives in different directions.
These are (1) the language of love poetry, (2) Quranic and scholastic theological language, (3) Quranic and Sufi theoretical language relating to the ascent through the heavenly spheres, (4) Sufi dialogues of union (between speaker and listener), and (5) Sufi and philosophical language related to the perfect/complete human being.
Joseph Bell and Lois Giffen (Giffen 1971; Bell 1979) have collected medieval Arabic treatments of human–human love. The more recent studies of Binyamin Abrahamov and William Chittick have emphasized writings on “mystical love” (Chittick 2013; Abrahamov 2003). For an updated discussion of both kinds of literature in a later historical period, see Khaled El-Rouayheb’s Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500–1800 (El-Rouayheb 2005).
Muslim litterateurs (udabāʾ) and religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) discussed several types of union. This included physical/sensory union—the furtive glance, embrace, light kissing, the sucking of tongues, and sexual intercourse—as well as non-physical union. Like the Ḥanbalī scholar Abū ʾl-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200) many held that the sensory pleasure pertaining to physical union was secondary to (less valuable than) its spiritual meaning (Bell 1979, pp. 11–45 at 32–34, 43). As for non-physical union, a common position was the one taken by the philosopher and ḥadīth transmitter, Aḥmad ibn al-Ṭayyib al-Sarakhsī (d. 286/899), who held that the strongest union between human beings was the uniting of wills (Giffen 1971, pp. 5–8).
“The Real” (al-Ḥaqq) is one of the Qurʾānic Names of God. It is often paired with “creation” (al-khalq). Depending on the context, it may be translated “The Truth” or “The Real-Truth”. This word reveals the close connection between “ontology” and “epistemology” (“Being” and “Consciousness”) in the minds of many Muslim theologians and Sufi-philosophers.
As Sachiko Murata and William Chittick explain, “the workaday concept of God cannot do justice to a religion that uses its own idea of God as the absolute center from which everything else is judged” (Murata 1994, p. 58). The word Allāh in Arabic was sometimes described by theologians as a proper name, in which case it actually has no equivalent in English—just as the proper name “London” cannot be translated with the help of other descriptive words into another language.
The terms were not restricted to God. According to this scheme, human beings also possess an essence, attributes, and acts. The essence refers to the thing in itself (e.g., God in Himself), the attributes explain what sort of thing it is (the Quran and ḥadīth typically describe God through His Names/Attributes), and the acts explain what the thing does. “Dhāt” is originally a pronoun meaning “possessor of”. Thus, if theologians and Sufi thinkers understood God as al-Dhāt (the Essence), what they meant was that He is “possessor of” the Attributes and Acts. The Essence is simply what is named by al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (the “Most Beautiful Names”), Itself beyond the meanings intended by each of them separately (Murata 1994, pp. 58–78).
al-Wujūd min ḥaythu huwa huwa (Being per se) and Nondelimited Real-True Being (al-Wujūd al-Ḥaqq al-Muṭlaq) were expressions for “God” used by ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī and Dāwūd Qayṣarī (d. 748/1347) (Qayṣarī 2020, pp. 25–26; Kāshānī 1385, p. 97).
Ibn ʿArabī often uses “The Real” in a way that is close to the current sense of “Ultimate Reality” (Chittick 1989, p. 49).
The Muslim philosopher Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) wrote that the Necessary Being is “Real by Itself (ḥaqq bi-nafsihi) constantly (dāʾiman)”, while the possible being is “real through something else” (ḥaqq bi-ghayrihi), which means everything besides the Necessary Being is “unreal by itself” (bāṭil bi-nafsihi) (Chittick 2022, p. 139 n. 1; Avicenna 2005, pp. 38–39).
al-Wājid (the “Finder”) and al-Mawjūd (the “Found”) are active and passive participles of Wujūd. What they indicated was that God is perfectly “finding” and “found” in Himself, lacking nothing, and comprehending everything. Everything is perfectly present to Him, and He cannot “lose” nor “be lost” in the way human beings can (the name “loser” [fāqid] being the opposite of “finder”) (Gimaret 1988, pp. 133–36 (mawjūd), 224–26 (wājid); Ghazālī 2007, p. 130). Thus, to use the expression popularized by Ibn Sīnā, His “being a finder and found” is “necessary” (wājib) (Chittick 1989, p. 212).
In addition to “finding” and “being”, the word wujūd can be translated as “existence”. “Finding” and “being” suggest perfection and completeness more than “existence”, which suggests rather a bare or naked fact without qualities. In the nuances of this Arabic root, we observe again how “ontology” and “epistemology” are united in Ibn ʿArabī’s perspective.
As Chittick writes, “In each unique thing, the Real Being discloses a unique face of its infinite reality while remaining One and Unique in itself. We, on the other hand, remain forever ourselves in our own realities, forever other than the Real Being, while we simultaneously remain conjoined with the Real Being inasmuch as we find and are found” (Chittick 2004, pp. 27–28 n. 5).
As Chittick writes, “God’s Self-disclosure appears in two modes—ontological and cognitive, or as existence and as knowledge…. We need to keep in mind that wujūd or Being/existence means also ‘finding’. It is a subjective experience as much as an objective occurrence. God’s ‘Being’ is identical with His knowledge, that is, His self-consciousness” (Chittick 1989, p. 212).
Roy seems prepared to ground his theory of the mystical consciousness in an understanding of God as “Pure Being” (esse)—McGinn sometimes does as well—but both fall short of making this connection clear. Roy admits that Eckhart sometimes takes God as esse “on a restricted sense” and “sometimes an unrestricted sense”, which allows him to affirm the apparently contradictory propositions that “God exists” (i.e., He is a “thing”) and “God does not exist” (i.e., He is “no-thing”) (Roy 2003, pp. 72–74, 79–80, 86–87; McGinn 2008, p. 54). Nevertheless, both seem reluctant to consider Eckhart’s understanding of God (as Being, esse) as the ground (grunde) of the “divinized” soul’s awareness, or something like “Real-True Consciousness” (McGinn 2008, pp. 51, 53–55, 59; Roy 2003, p. 75). Moore, for his part, wishes to take seriously Eckhart’s position that “all things pass from their existence into their being” (S. Moore 1957, p. 318), but he does not connect “being” to “consciousness”.
McGinn admits that the mystic is somehow able to make “true judgments about the world” (McGinn 2008, p. 47), presumably about God as well. This means it is possible to inquire about the mystic’s objectivity and seek an explanation for it.
As McGinn observes, Roy was uninterested in the God of theology and was rather intent on removing from his theory of mystical consciousness any sense of an “object-like content” (McGinn 2008, p. 53). Roy states (apparently with Eckhart) that all understandings of God that take him as “the origin of creatures” are “provisional” or “limited viewpoints” and must be left behind. Rather, God must be apprehended as “no-thing” (niht), “neither this nor that that one can speak of” (Roy 2003, pp. 80, 89, 124–25). This position seems to invalidate the “relative truth” of every conception or imagining of God found in the writings of mystics, including Eckhart himself. For Ibn ʿArabī, there must be an objective ground to positive thinking about God (i.e., the “God of theology”). Real-True Being/Consciousness (al-Wujūd al-Ḥaqq) (i.e., the “God beyond theology”) is that ground.
To explain what he means that the things of the world are non-existent (maʿdūm), Ibn ʿArabī sometimes resorts to the symbolism of light. God is named “Light” (Nūr) (Q. 24:35) because light is “luminous in itself”, and “illuminates other things”. If Real-True Being/Consciousness is Light, everything in the world is “light” (being) and “not-light” (non-existence). It is “light” (being) because it is a ray radiated from Light. It is “not light” (non-existence) because it is not the Light (Chittick 1989, pp. 6–8). Thus, the things in the world (in themselves, or their eternal “realties”) reside in the darkness of non-existence.
Ibn ʿArabī claims to have coined this expression. If he did, his inspiration was at least partly Qurʾānic, since the Qurʾān often refers to God as “Outwardly Manifest” (al-Ẓāhir) and “Non-Manifest” (al-Bāṭīn) (Chittick 1989, pp. 89–91).
What it means for a Name or Attribute to be displayed through a “property” (ḥukm) or “trace” (athar) is a subtle issue. The Names and Attributes summarize what can be known about God (e.g., that He is “Living”, or “Knowing”). The Names also establish a bridge between God and the world. This means that the names used by human beings to describe things in the world (e.g., that they are “alive” or “knowing”) have their roots in the divine order (Chittick 1989, p. 33). Since the Qurʾān affirms that God taught human beings “all of the names” (Q. 2:30), human beings display traces of the Names and Attributes as well. This is why, for instance, the virtuous traits of character (makārim al-akhlāq) discussed by Sufi teachers are expressed as divine character traits in the expression “become characterized by the character traits of God” (takhallaqū bi-akhlāq Allāh) (Chittick 1989, pp. 21–22). Human beings can be called “forms” of God because they display His Name “Formgiver” (al-Muṣawwir) and the Qurʾān relates that God formed them and made their forms beautiful (Q. 40:64).
The “reality” (ḥaqīqa) and “root” (aṣl) are part of Ibn ʿArabī’s basic terminology. Everything in this world has a “root” in the non-manifest order (Chittick 1989, pp. 37–38). A “reality” is related to the Essence since God is the “Real” (al-Ḥaqq) and the “Reality of realities” (Ḥaqīqat al-ḥaqāʾiq) (Chittick 1989, pp. 134–39). The Reality of realities thus denotes the Essence insofar as it assumes relationships with the things of the world before their creation. The created thing’s non-manifest root is its reality, which is also the “lord” that rules over it in this world. The thing that becomes manifest in this world is then the “servant” or “vassal” of its non-manifest “lord”. Ibn ʿArabī often says that “the realities never change”, which means that the existence of things in the world veils the true situation. Existence undergoes transformation, transmutation, and corruption.
Jeffrey Kripal foretells what he believes will be a revolutionary re-orientation in how human beings study the world and the human self founded on the realization (“the flip”) that consciousness is prior, primary, and irreducible. All human activity (including every achievement of human beings) has been accomplished within consciousness. The history of human activity is in fact nothing but the history of consciousness. This is opposed to the currently dominant view that matter is primary and human beings are little islands of consciousness in a sea of matter, which neuroscientific research will eventually be able to reduce to matter as well. Kripal writes, “That new coordination, I suggest, will come as contemporary neuroscience continues to fail, spectacularly, to explain consciousness through any materialistic model or causal mechanism and a new philosophy of mind begins to appear that understands consciousness (which is not to say ego, personality, or social self) as prior and primary and so irreducible to brain function or any other material mechanism. With this irreducibility of mind will come the new ascent of the humanities, which, after all, have always been about engaging and interpreting both the most banal and the most fantastic ways that consciousness is reflected and refracted through the cultural codes of human civilization—that is, through history, social practice, language, art, religion, literature, institution, law, thought, and, I dare add, science” (Kripal 2019, pp. 13–14). The story Kripal tells resonates with the thesis developed by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his 2003-4 Dudleian Lecture entitled “In the Beginning was Consciousness”. Nasr writes, “In traditional cosmologies Pure Consciousness, that is also Pure Being, descends, while remaining Itself transcendent vis à vis Its manifestations, through various levels of the cosmic hierarchy to reach the physical world whereas in the modern reductionist view things ascend from the primordial cosmic soup. Even if certain individual scientists believe that a conscious and intelligent Being brought about the Big Bang and originated the cosmos, consciousness plays no role in the so-called evolution of the cosmos from the early aggregate of molecules to the appearance of human beings on the planet. In the traditional world view, human beings have descended from a higher realm of being and consciousness, whereas according to the modernist perspective so prevalent in present day society, they have ascended from below. These are two diametrically opposed points of view, one based on the primacy of consciousness and the other on the primacy of unconscious and blind material agents, forces, and processes” (Nasr 2006, pp. 199–206 at 201).
McGinn and Roy identify at least four levels of “intentional consciousness”, although they do not clarify whether the mystical consciousness is part of this scheme or “above” it (and/or “within” it) (McGinn 2008, pp. 47–49; Roy 2003, pp. 39, 124–25). These levels point to the ways human beings “reach beyond ourselves” (Roy 2003, p. 125). Toward the end of his book, Roy tacitly admits that the consciousness that enables mystics to comport themselves correctly in this world is one “finite” determination of an “infinite consciousness” (Roy 2003, p. 128). In this, he perhaps gestures toward an ontological foundation to the mystical consciousness. For his part, Moore affirms that human beings experience more or less “intense” forms of consciousness. He writes, “One may, it seems, be more or less conscious. If we cannot look at consciousness itself, we can perhaps look at the more and less and so get an indirect line on what there is more and less of. You are more conscious now than you were in the small hours of this morning. The world has come back, as it comes back every morning. In this case, the return of consciousness is the return of the world: but there is another kind of increase in consciousness which is not a return of something that was here yesterday, of the all too familiar, but has something new about it” (S. Moore 1957, pp. 305–24 at 309). For their part, Ibn ʿArabī and his followers tended to speak of five “objective–subjective” “worlds” of being/consciousness: (1) sensory, (2) imaginal, (3) spiritual, and (4) divine, from the most metaphorical (majāzī) to the most real (ḥaqīqī). Human beings/selves occupy all four in such a way that the “human-divine form” (5) can be said to comprise a fifth (“all-gathering”, jāmiʿ) world (Chittick 1982b). I discuss “gathering” in Section 4 of this paper.
Sebastian Moore shows some awareness of the problem faced by theorists of the mystical consciousness. He writes, “The keyword… is consciousness. That word, as it is often used today, stands for an idea that I find quite fascinating—and this leads me to say what I want to do in this paper. It might have been expected that, having stated the artist’s problems, I should propose the theological solution of those problems. I’m afraid I shall not. I have a huge problem of my own as a theologian, which I suspect is analogous to the problems of the Christian artist. My problem is to wed successfully my theological knowledge and the idea of consciousness” (S. Moore 1957, p. 308).
As discussed above (n. 42), Roy was intent on removing from his account any sense of an “object-like content” (McGinn 2008, p. 53). For him, Eckhart’s breakthrough (durchbruch) to the Godhead was a movement toward an ineffable “God”. “Let us pray to God that we may be free of God” pointed to Eckhart’s desire to be liberated from the God of theology in his ascent to the ineffable “God” of “transcendent consciousness” (Roy 2003, pp. 89–90). Drawing from Robert Forman’s research on mysticism and consciousness, Roy affirms the existence of a “transcendent” self, who is no longer “conscious of” objects, but is only “conscious in” (Roy 2003, pp. xviii, xx, 32, 127–28). As the “self” begins to vanish, consciousness returns to its mysterious ground where “knowledge-by-identity” or “knowledge by acquaintance” reigns, and “knowledge about” is minimized or even abolished, including the ordinary distinctions between selves (self and other) (Forman 1999, pp. 131–32; Roy 2003, pp. 38–39). Nevertheless, Roy is forced to affirm that conventional distinctions will somehow persist. This suggests for him (see n. 48 above) that the transcendent level is one “finite” determination of “infinite consciousness” (Roy 2003, p. 128). In this—i.e., the desire to ontologize consciousness—Roy moves closer to the position laid out more self-consistently by Ibn ʿArabī and his followers.
Dāwūd Qayṣarī offered a useful distinction between the “concept” (mafhūm) of being (wujūd) and its “reality” (ḥaqīqa). All concepts of God are related to the “mental being” (wujūd dhihnī) of the individual, which is a manifestation in the intellect (ʿaql) of the situation as it actually is (nafs al-amr). Mental being, however, is still only a shadow of Being per se (al-Wujūd min ḥaythu huwa huwa) (Qayṣarī 2020, pp. 26, 29, 37, 51), hence the need to distinguish between “concept” and “reality”.
According to Ibn ʿArabī, God may be considered in respect to “Himself” (Dhāt) or in respect to “His Level”. Either He is “the Essence” or He is “the Divinity” (al-ulūha, al-ulūhiyya). The name Allāh applies to both, although the meanings differ. When Allāh refers to the Essence, it indicates that nothing positive can be said about God, who is “no specific thing”. When it refers to the Divinity, it indicates that all Names/Attributes are ascribed separately to Him (Chittick 1989, pp. 47, 49, 59–62, 66).
If the Essence is unknowable, our knowledge of God belongs to the level of the Names/Attributes (the Divinity). In fact, we only learn about the unknowability of the Essence through Names that “negate” or “strip away” (salb) Attributes. For instance, the “One-Only” (Aḥad) indicates that God is One in a way that negates the relationships He assumes with creatures (He is “transcendent”). (Chittick 2023, pp. 4, 8; 1989, pp. 9, 58, 109). By contrast, Names like “Knower”, “Seeing”, “Hearing”, and “Speaking” affirm (ithbāt) those relationships (He is “immanent”) (Chittick 2023, pp. 4, 10; 1989, p. 58).
McGinn avers that mystics make “true judgments about the nature of reality” (see n. 41 above), which should include judgments about the God of theology. Unfortunately, he seems to understand this “true” judgment only as an “inverse insight” (a knowledge gained by loss). The mystical doctrine of “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) accounts for the mystic’s true judgment that God is in fact “no-thing”. The “uniting” mystic simply comes to learn the limits of his knowledge about God (McGinn 2008, pp. 53, 56). But how does McGinn explain the correctness of this judgment (its objective foundation)? He only states that it is the consequence of “the special gift of God’s love” (McGinn 2008, pp. 49–50), which is no explanation at all.
As Michael Sells explains, when Eckhart prays to “now” be “free of God”, he does not intend to introduce a “scholastic” distinction between “God Himself” and “God in creatures”, thereby negating the “God in creatures”. In fact, he asserts that God is in creatures as well as beyond creatures. If “before”, the discussion was of the “God in creatures”, “now” it is of “God Himself”. The “God in creatures” is affirmed at one level, and negated at another level. Since the “God in creatures” rejoins “God Himself” in the negative movement, both are valid, each in its place (Sells 2011, pp. 1, 10, 188–89, 190–92).
According to Ibn ʿArabī, every concept and/or image of God held and professed by an individual represents a specific “knotting” or “coloration” within Being/Consciousness (Chittick 1994a, pp. 138–41; 1989, pp. 335–41). The relative truth of each “knot of belief” has its foundation in Real-True Being/Consciousness. The judgments a person has about God (his “God of beliefs”) become truer the more he advances toward Real-True Being/Consciousness. So long as consciousness remains an “individual, in-this-world, human consciousness”, even while accessing “imaginal”, “spiritual”, and “divine” consciousness, it will continue to form concepts and images about God. For a thorough treatment of this topic, see chapter 9 (“Diversity of Belief”, esp. pp. 138–41 and 152–55) in William Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity (Chittick 1994a, pp. 137–60). If Ibn ʿArabī identifies God (the Essence) as the Real-Truth (al-Ḥaqq), the God of theology would include what he calls “the Real through whom Creation takes place” (al-Ḥaqq al-makhlūq bihi) (Chittick 1989, pp. 125, 132–34), or “the Real created in beliefs” (al-Ḥaqq al-makhlūq fī ʾl-iʿtiqādāt) (Chittick 1994a, p. 150; Ibn al-ʿArabī 1911, p. IV 386.17).
The two expressions—“relative” (nisbī) and “real/true” (ḥaqīqī)—were useful to Saʿīd al-Dīn Farghānī (Chittick 1999, pp. 203–17 at 208–12). If the “heart” (qalb, fuʾād) is understood as the place where God discloses Himself to believers, then a heart for which the description of “oneness” (waḥdā) has overcome that of “manyness” (kathra) will be receptive to a “truer” knotting of belief (see n. 68 below) (Murata 1992, pp. 311–13); for its oneness has become “true/real” (ḥaqīqī) and its manyness “relative” (nisbī). As for “nondelimitation in beliefs”, Ibn ʿArabī writes, “If God were to take people to account for error, He would take every possessor of belief to account. Every believer has delimited his lord with his intellect (ʿaql) and consideration (naẓar) and has thereby restricted Him (qayyadahu wa ḥaṣarahu). But nothing is worthy for God except Nondelimitation (wa lā yanbaghī li-Llāh illā ʾl-iṭlāq)“ (Chittick 1994a, p. 153; Ibn al-ʿArabī 1911, p. III 309.30).
On these correlative terms, see Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Chittick 1989, pp. 16, 19, 43, 49, 61, 89, 91, 96, 132–33, 164, 173, 196, 214, 216).
Ibn ʿArabī frequently reminds his readers that “the Self-disclosures are never repeated” (lā takrār fī ʾl-tajallī). He identifies the Essence as the ultimate source of transformation, transmutation, and corruption in this world. As the Qurʾān declares, “Every day He is upon some task (shaʾn)” (Q. 55:29). Here, “He” refers to the Essence, and “Day” refers to the present moment, the ever-recurring temporal locus of a new Self-disclosure (Chittick 1989, pp. 18, 96, 103).
This is related to the comprehensive and multi-dimensional way in which human beings display the Names/Attributes.
On the distinction between “animal human beings” and “perfect human beings”, see Chittick and Murata (Chittick 1994a, pp. 23, 36, 38, 155; Murata 1992, p. 305). Ibn ʿArabī makes the point, pace the Muslim philosopher Ibn Sīnā, that the human being is not defined by his rationality (the Aristotleian “rational animal”, ḥayawān nāṭiq in Arabic), but rather “by the divine form” (Ibn al-ʿArabī 1911, p. III 154.19). Qūnawī also explains that “animal men (al-unāsī al-ḥayawāniyyūn) are the forms of…that human-divine reality in respect of outward manifestation” (Chittick 1992, p. 189). Perfect human beings, on the other hand, actualize the human–divine reality at all levels (outward and inward, visible and hidden).
Ibn ʿArabī discusses this complex topic in his remarks on the meaning of “Adam”. This name refers both to the first prophet/first perfect human being and to the inner reality of every human being (its potential to actualize the human-divine form). Ibn ʿArabī describes Adam as an “all-gathering created entity” (al-kawn al-jāmiʿ). This means that he possesses a “form” (ṣūra) in this lower world whose “meaning” (maʿnā) is Allāh in the higher world. Since Allāh is the all-gathering name (al-ism al-jāmiʿ), “Adam and his children” are the only loci of manifestation in this world that comprehensively display (potentially or actually) the meanings of all the Names/Attributes in a proper balance (Chittick 1982a, pp. 30–93 at 37–38, 45; Ibn al-ʿArabī 1966, p. 48; 1980, p. 50).
Kāshānī writes, “The Reality of realities is the One-Only Essence (al-dhāt al-aḥadiyya) that gathers together all realities. It is called the Presence of Gathering (ḥaḍrat al-jamʿ) and the Presence of Being (ḥaḍrat al-wujūd)” (Chittick 2023, p. 5 n. 7).
The “Hidden Treasure” is an allusion to the infinite relationships or “regards” that the Essence assumes with the possible things. These relationships are summarized by the Names and Attributes. “Hidden Treasure” comes from a saying that Sufis attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad. According this Prophetic ḥadīth in which God speaks in the first person, “I was a Hidden Treasure, so I loved to be known. Hence I created the creatures that I might be known.” (ʿIrāqī 1982, p. 10; Chittick 1989, p. 391 n. 14).
“One-Onliness” (aḥadiyya) points to the “transcendence” of the Essence, since it negates all “regards” or possible relationships with things, whereas “One-Allness” (wāḥidiyya) points to the “immanence” of the Essence, and affirms every possible relationship with things (Chittick 2023, pp. 8, 11–12; ʿIrāqī 1982, p. 10). The word “thing” (shayʾ, ashyāʾ) in Islamic/Arabic philosophical discourses—one of the “indefinites” (min ankar al-nakīrāt)—is applicable to anything but God (Chittick 1989, pp. 12, 88).
For Ibn ʿArabī, cosmic existence as a whole represents a differentiated (mufaṣṣal) locus of manifestation of all of the Names and Attributes, while human beings, living within cosmic existence, each represents a summated (mujmal) locus of manifestation of all the Names and Attributes (Chittick 1982a, pp. 37–38).
As Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “In the beginning” refers both to the distant past as well as the present moment, which is an “eternal now” (Nasr 2006, p. 199). In a similar way, Sebastian Moore writes, “In the beginning was the Word, the word wholly meaningful, wholly within silence. This is true now. It means ‘this is not the starting point’. How much of our lives is based on the opposite assumption, that ‘in the beginning was the [mundane] situation’” (S. Moore 1957, p. 319).
In general, “gathering” signifies a coordination of manyness through the achievement of an overpowering oneness. Dispersion, by contrast, signifies the domination of oneness by a differentiating manyness. In gathering, the description of oneness becomes true/real (ḥaqīqī), dominating over the description of manyness, which thus becomes relative (nisbī) (see n. 57 above).
Sufi theorists explained in their teachings that human beings can only aspire to a “mystical consciousness” because Being/Consciousness had first descended and “condescended to” the human being/consciousness.
The words “voyage” (sayr) and “journey” (safar) were near synonyms in discussions about “wayfaring” (sulūk). Ibn ʿArabī seems to have limited the journeys to three (Aboueleze 2007, pp. 185–95 at 187). His early followers added a fourth. See William Chittick’s “Farghānī and Waḥdat al-Wujūd and the Four Journeys” (Chittick, forthcoming).
A number of Sufi theorists located “gathering” (jamʿ) among the final stations of being/consciousness’s voyage of ascent. ʿAbd Allāh Anṣārī (d. 481/1088), in his description of the one hundred stations of the voyagers, placed “gathering” at the 99th station, while calling it “the furthest station of the wayfarers” (ghāyat maqāmāt al-sālikīn). (Anṣārī al-Harawī 1966, p. 46). Saʿīd al-Dīn Farghānī and other followers of Ibn ʿArabī named the stations achieved at the end of the third and fourth journeys the “gathering of gathering” (jamʿ al-jamʿ) and “one-onliness of gathering” (aḥadiyyat al-jamʿ). For an extensive discussion of “gathering”, see Chittick’s “Farghānī and Waḥdat al-Wujūd and the Four Journeys” (Chittick, forthcoming). For a summary, see his commentary on “Flash VI” of the Divine Flashes (Lamaʿāt) of ʿIrāqī (ʿIrāqī 1982, pp. 137–38).
According to Farghānī, the wayfarer begins to witness Divine Self-disclosures at the beginning of the first journey, which is partly what defines it as a journey in the first place. At this early stage, the mystical consciousness has begun to emerge, as Farghānī explains in his commentary on the first line of the Poem of the Wayfaring (Naẓm al-sulūk) by Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1234): “My eye’s hand poured me the strong wine of love, my cup her/Her face, majestic beyond beauty”. According to Farghānī, this line describes the wayfarer’s witnessing of the Divine Self-disclosure in the locus of manifestation of a beautiful human face, which is classified as a Self-disclosure pertaining to the Divine Act (fiʿl) (Farghānī 2007, pp. 147, 149–50).
Among the three theorists, Louis Roy was most preoccupied with self-negation. He insists that God must be found as “no-thing” within the nothingness of the empty self, “whenever the operations of its faculties are interrupted” (Roy 2003, p. 80). It was perhaps Roy’s interest in dialogue with Zen Buddhism that caused him to be so preoccupied with “emptiness”. McGinn and Moore are less concerned with the “emptiness” of unbecoming, though they too acknowledge the self-negation involved in apophasis. McGinn affirms the teachings of at least two mystics—John of the Cross and Eckhart—whereby the “inner faculties must be emptied and put to rest so that God can work directly within them” (McGinn 2008, p. 58). Moore follows Aldous Huxley in claiming that “education should be addressed primarily to ‘the not self’: when harmony has been established with this massive silent partner, the powers of the self are quickened in an amazing way” (S. Moore 1957, p. 306). He writes further, “In realizing ‘not-this’, I have stepped back from being thus filled with things, from ‘this’” (S. Moore 1957, p. 319).
McGinn and Moore give greater credence to the “self-realization” of the “divinized soul”. For McGinn, every intentional act of the mystic is somehow intertwined with the divine presence (the “God-self” of Teresa, Eckhart, and Ignatius) (McGinn 2008, pp. 47, 50–51, 53). Moore writes, “Consciousness… has no object, it is simply the delight and strength of self-hood…. I mean, that the process of becoming more conscious is going somewhere… towards a completeness of itself” (S. Moore 1957, p. 311).
If “Allāh” names the Essence, it is because (like every proper noun) it does not specify an attribute. In this way, it is like (for instance) the name “Boston”, which does not point to a meaning that would identify every town named “Boston”. Dhāt is a “pronoun of allusion”, which means the Essence is just that which is alluded to by every Name/Attribute or Act.
As Qūnawī explains, when Being/Consciousness descended the levels, it gradually left the world of luminosity (nūrāniyya) and simpleness (basāṭa), entering into darkness (ẓulmāniyya) and compositeness (tarkīb). The return voyage of being/consciousness must, therefore, be an ascent of “unbecoming” or “decomposition” (miʿrāj al-taḥlīl). The wayfarer on this voyage obeys the Command to “deliver the trusts back to their owners” (Q. 4:58). He “discards” (for instance) the “elemental” part he acquired on the descent back to the world of elements. Nevertheless, the return voyage must also comprise an aspect of composition (tarkīb), since the wayfarer continues to have an “elemental existence” while he lives (Chittick 1992, pp. 194–95).
These complementary terms were often discussed by Sufi theorists. Stability/ableness tended to be seen as a higher station, although Ibn ʿArabī reverses the hierarchy, noting that coloration/variegation corresponds to the actual situation. God, in His Self-disclosure, constantly transforms Himself in/through the forms of the world (Chittick 1989, p. 108).
As Sufi theorists often insist, any perception, tasting (dhawq), or witnessing (shuhūd) of a Divine Self-disclosure, however magnificent or sublime, is not an encounter with the Real-Truth Itself. The early Sufi of Baghdad Junayd (d. 298/910) said, “the water takes on the color of the cup.” This means the witnessing of the wayfarer is only in accordance with his preparedness (istiʿdād) (Chittick 2020, pp. 134–56 at 141–42). Understanding this point will help to prevent the voyager from placing too much value in experiences. The writings of Sufi theorists are in general agreement with the current consensus that “it is fundamentally misconceived to think of the mystical life as based upon the cultivation and interpretation of special episodes or states of consciousness, whether or not different in kind from other types of experience” (P. Moore 2005, p. 6356).
Unlike the Essence and the Names/Attributes, the Acts/acts are synonymous with the ambiguous domain of existent things. They represent the “creatures” of this world, which are Self-disclosures of God or manifestations of the Essence. In themselves, the creatures are non-existent (see n. 43 above) (Chittick 1989, pp. 11–12), but in the cosmos, their situation is ambiguous.
See n. 46 above.
The terms “property” and “trace” help to explain how a Name or Attribute is displayed in cosmic existence. The word “property” (ḥukm) stresses the authority that the Name/Attribute has in exercising influence over the states of a given locus of manifestation. The “trace” or “property” really belongs to—is “proper to”—the Name or Attribute from which it became established in cosmic existence (Chittick 1989, pp. 39–41). For instance, the “creature” displays the ruling authority of “Creator”.
Incomparability (tanzīh) and Similarity (tashbīh) name the two ways of gaining knowledge of God. Attributes that affirm God’s similarity to creatures (tashbīh)—e.g., “speech”, “sight”, “knowledge”—suggest that traces of those Attributes are displayed in cosmic existence and thus give news that God is “Outwardly Manifest” (Ẓāhir) (Chittick 1989, pp. 68–70). See also n. 53 above.
Qūnawī explained these stages of gathering in more explicitly Neoplatonic terms. As he describes, when the voyager’s being/consciousness becomes dominated by of one of the Names/Attributes, it moves away from “centrality” or “middleness” (wasaṭiyya, markaziyya). This voyager’s wayfaring will then be characterized by dispersion over gathering, by coloration over ableness, and by disequilibrium (inḥirāf) over equilibrium (iʿtidāl). By achieving “middleness”—the center point of the circle—the voyager gains the desired equilibrium (iʿtidāl) and stability/ableness (Chittick 1992, pp. 189–90).
As the Qurʾān affirms, “He is with you (maʿakum) wheresoever you are” (Q. 57:4). In connection with this verse, Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī (d. 555/1111) describes four levels of “those who affirm oneness (tawḥīd)”. Only the fourth and highest group of “unifiers” witnesses that “there is no more than one actor” (Chittick 2020, pp. 139–40). So long as he sees two in his own acts—God and himself—the unifier lacks perfect togetherness. He remains fixed in dispersion.
Farghānī discusses seven interiors in his discussion of the four journeys. His vision is based on traditional reports describing seven interiors of the Qurʾān or seven universal Names/Attributes of God. These correspond to the seven “root attributes” of the wayfarer (i.e., life, knowledge, desire, power, speech, hearing, seeing). Moreover, the differentiated structure of the self suggests that attributes like life, knowledge, desire, power, speech, etc., possess multiple interiors beyond the “ordinary” life, knowledge, desire, power, speech, etc., that most human beings know (Chittick, forthcoming).
For Ibn ʿArabī, the Name Lord (rabb) denotes the relationship the Essence assumes with creatures (n. 46 above). It alludes to the “root” of every created thing, which is the reality that lords over it in this world (Chittick 2023, p. 14). Most human beings do not open the doors to this reality, and thereby fail to recognize the Essence as their lord (Chittick 1989, pp. 310–12).
It is only possible to speak of “interiors” of the human being/self because human beings are “outer forms” (ṣuwar) whose “inner meaning” (maʿnā) is named by Allāh (the Essence). See n. 45 above.
Farghānī explains that the self’s recognition of itself on the ascending arc of the voyage is a recognition of its essence (dhāt) gained from its essence, its innermost reality, or highest level. This innermost interior of the self is identified with the One-Only Essence (Dhāt), which is this “all-gathering” self’s Lord (Chittick, forthcoming). See also n. 46, n. 71, and n. 89 above.
The Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) cites the mixture of water (māʾ) and milk (laban) as a suitable comparison for the kind of “divine–human” unification (ittiḥād) he observed in the doctrines of certain heretical groups (Muslim and non-Muslim) (e.g., Jacobite Christians). In this union, two realities appear to share the same existence (wujūd) (in this case, through the mixing of two substances), or their essences become confused (e.g., water becomes wine or milk). The heretical view Ibn Taymiyya attributes to Ibn ʿArabī and some of his followers is that God and human beings (two things of differing reality) are joined together by a single existence (wujūd) (Ibn Taymiyya 1974, p. 24; Knysh 1999, pp. 98, 100–105).
Ibn Taymiyya distinguished between those who professed “unification” (ittiḥād) or “incarnation” (ḥulūl) in one specific created being (e.g., the Prophet Jesus), and those who professed it more generally. He saw the establishment of water (māʾ) in a container (ināʾ) as a suitable comparison for the doctrine held by Nestorian Christians (Ibn Taymiyya 1974, p. 24).
The completion of the circle is often associated by members of the School of Ibn ʿArabī with the station of the Prophet Muḥammad. Farghānī refers to the station achieved by Muḥammad as “most-perfectness” (akmaliyya), whereas the limit of other extraordinary human beings is only perfection/completeness (kamāl) (Chittick 2023, p. 11). ʿIrāqī describes the station of most perfect human beings by the expression “two arcs’ lengths”, while that of Muḥammad is “or nearer”. These names come from the Qurʾānic description of the Prophet Muḥammad’s nocturnal ascent (miʿrāj) related in Q. 53:8-9 (“then drew near and suspended hung, two arcs’ length away, or nearer”) (ʿIrāqī 1982, pp. 98, 137–38, 141–42, 147–48, 154, 160).
See n. 46, n. 71, n. 89, n. 91 above on servant (ʿabd) and lord (rabb). To be the perfect servant (ʿabd kāmil) is to be the servant of the Essence. It is to achieve the gatheringness of the Prophet Muḥammad whose Lord is the Essence (Chittick 2023, pp. 11–18). For Sufi theorists, this is only a theoretical possibility, since only Muḥammad has achieved this station.
These two terms—ḥādith and qadīm—were used by Muslim philosophers and theologians in discussions about the temporal origination or eternity of the world. Here, they are better translated as “recently arrived” and “timeless”.
ʿIrāqī explains poetically how “union” was the case all along: “a sun shining through a thousand bits of glass; a ray of color through each one, beaming to plain sight. All of it one light, but a thousandfold in colors, so that difference appears between this one and that one.” This difference, however, is imagined (mutawahham). (ʿIrāqī 1982, p. 94; 1974, p. 23).
See n. 24 and n. 75 above. On the one hand, McGinn wishes to explain the teaching that the “inner faculties” must be silenced for God to work within (McGinn 2008, p. 58). He also wishes to accommodate the view of St. John of the Cross that those very same faculties are transformed by grace (McGinn 2008, pp. 57–59), and to affirm the “God-self” of Teresa, Eckhart, and Ignatius (McGinn 2008, pp. 47, 50–51, 53). I do not see how McGinn can self-consistently explain this situation without an “ontology of consciousness”—i.e., a theory explaining how the ordinary consciousness becomes integrated within (coordinated and harmonized by) the mystical consciousness, the expanded “self” now identifying with the higher level without this abolishing the lower. An ontology of consciousness explains how the two are united so long as the mystic is alive.
See n. 24, n. 75, and n. 76 above. Roy wishes to explain Eckhart’s teaching that “the faculties no longer operate”. He takes this to mean that the faculties are drawn “in to a unity”, sinking “into an oblivion”, with some, like memory and the senses, even becoming “inactive” (Roy 2003, pp. 75–77, 80). For Roy, the self must pass into “unawareness” for another set of operations to become active in the ground (grunde). I do not see how Roy can explain this situation without positing a more gathered consciousness into which the dispersed consciousness becomes integrated, the self now operating from the gathered level.
An Ibn ʿArabīan theory of the “mystical consciousness” will distinguish between “metaphorical” and “Real-True” consciousness. This distinction helps to explain the various “colorations” and “stabilities” achieved by the voyager in his ascent (miʿrāj). When the attributes of the metaphorical self/consciousness are annihilated (fānī), they are not lost in subsistence (baqāʾ). Rather, they are seen for what they are—loci of manifestation in which the Names and Attributes display themselves. The consciousness of the dispersed self has been integrated into and coordinated by the expanded consciousness of the more gathered self. At this higher level, the “timeless” Names/Attributes of Real-True Being/Consciousness have “subjugated” the “newly arrived” attributes belonging to the individual human being/consciousness.
See n. 94 above. ʿIrāqī’s point confirms the views of Nasr and Moore cited above (see n. 67). Followers of Ibn ʿArabī described all of Being/Consciousness as “a single circle divided by a line into two bow-shaped arcs” (ʿIrāqī 1982, p. 98; Chittick 1992, pp. 185–88). As ʿIrāqī explains, the line appears to exist (mī namāyad kih hast) from the vantage point of ordinary human consciousness, situated at the lower quadrant of the “rising” or “returning” arc (qaws-i ṣuʿūdī/ʿurūjī). There, it is like the line dividing light and shadow (nūr wa ẓulm). At the moment of “meeting”, this fine line vanishes, and the knower suddenly understands that the “timeless” and the “newly arrived” have never been separate. The line was only imagined (mutawahham) to exist (ʿIrāqī 1982, p. 98; 1974, p. 27). Still, though the “eternal” and the “temporal” have now collapsed into the “eternal moment”, and the wayfarer has overcome his metaphorical consciousness, he has not abandoned consciousness at the lower level. He only sees this level for what it is. Hence, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī remarks, “But wait! Even if the line is erased, the circle will still not appear as it did at first. The line’s effect (athar) will remain” (ʿIrāqī 1982, p. 98; 1974, p. 27).
As Qūnawī explains, although being/consciousness left the world of luminosity (nūrāniyya) and noncompositeness (basaṭiyya) and entered into darkness (ẓulmāniyya) and composition (tarkīb) in its descent, the voyager’s return to simpleness, or his ascent of decomposition (miʿrāj al-taḥlīl), also represents, in another sense, a voyage of “supra-formal composition” (tarkīb maʿnawī), since he never leaves the lower level, even as he returns the parts he acquired “back to their owners” (Chittick 1992, p. 195).
Peter Moore makes this one of the four requirements for any modern treatment of mysticism. He writes, “Any modern treatment of mysticism must satisfy two negative and two positive criteria. First, it must avoid reifying mysticism into some kind of uniform system or tradition standing outside the historical traditions of religion. Second, it must avoid making the forms or truths of the mysticism of any one tradition a touchstone for the evaluation of mysticism more generally. Third, it must take into account the global diversity of mysticism; it must embrace Nagarjuna as well as Teresa of Ávila, Isaac Luria as well as Shankara, Mirabai as well as Plotinus. Finally, it must take into account what may be called the four “dimensions” of mysticism: the experiential, the theoretical, the practical, and the social” (P. Moore 2005, p. 6356).
I borrow this expression from José Cabezón who explains how the academic study of religion has advanced by incorporating the perspectives of the subjects it first studies as objects. He writes, “…we are a long way from achieving theory parity. For example, it is hard for us even to conceive of the day when a “Theories of Religion” course might be taught with a substantial selection of readings from nonwestern sources, to take an example of something that some of us consider a sign of maturity in this regard. Still, there does seem to be movement in the direction of theory-pluralism, even if the limited experiments that we have engaged in are still dominated by a predominantly western agenda” (Cabezón 2006, pp. 21–38 at 31).
The construction of typologies (e.g., a mysticism of “uniting” and one of “identity”) is useful, as this paper has shown, but it risks becoming superficial and overly rigid. The 1996 study of McGinn, Idel, and colleagues revealed that the classifications of an earlier generation of scholars were too rigid. McGinn writes, “Rather than being easily classifiable by opposed types, most mystical texts feature an oscillation and interaction between two poles that need not be seen as expressing opposition” (McGinn 2005, p. 6335). A dialogical approach to mysticism is likely to challenge the rigidity of other classifications suggested by the following distinctions—e.g., dualist/non-dualist, theistic/non-theistic, and voluntaristic/gnostic forms of mysticism.
What I mean here, to leverage the insights of the comparative study of religion, is that scholarship operating principally from within the linguistic frame of a particular tradition and engaging in scholarly dialogue with others through “translation”, is less likely to fall prey to the charge of misrepresentation or distortion than an approach that makes comparison its primary modus operandi. This is because comparison proceeds by “magical” leaps involving “the ‘manipulation of differences’ across large gaps…” in order to observe and document similarities (Patton and Ray 2000b, pp. 1–19 at 3–4). The potential ill-effects of such an approach to cross-cultural dialogue have now been well-documented (Patton and Ray 2000a).
As Chittick explains, a good deal of Sufi literature explains how to discern between the sorts of ambiguous experiences—trances, visions, premonitions—connected only to the “imaginal” world from the more significant perceptions connected to the higher worlds. The disciplines of the Sufi path help wayfarers attune their understanding so that they can discern true from false (Chittick 2020, pp. 150–52). The study of “mystical practices”, including “contemplative discernment”, will surely enrich the hoped for dialogue between traditions. This topic has tended to receive less attention in academic studies of mysticism than the more exciting discussions about “experience”, or the more specialized discussions of “doctrines” (P. Moore 2005, p. 6357).
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