An excursion into mysticism: Plato and Ibn al-'Arabī on the knowledge of the relationship between sensible objects and intelligible Forms

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 77, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 499-519

  Bashier, Salman ^a  

^a BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV   (Israel)

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EID: 84880556982     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq200377427     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Ibn al-Arabī is considered one of the greatest of the Islamic Sūfī (mystical) thinkers. He was born in 1165 in medieval Spain (Andalusia). At an early age he experienced a vision that changed the course of his life. According to his own account, the news about his spiritual achievements in the mystical Way impressed the philosopher Averroes, who asked to meet with him. The philosopher asked the youth whether they (the people of illumination and divine inspiration) had found reality as the philosophers had found it. Ibn al-Arabī's answer (Yes/No) caused the philosopher great confusion (Futūhāt I 153-4). It is believed that Ibn al-Arabī was sixteen years old when this encounter took place. In the year 1202 he left for the East, whence he never returned. He went on journeying from city to city seeking spiritual learning and writing his works. He settled finally in Damascus in 1223, where he died in 1240. Ibn al-Arabī composed an astonishing number of works (300-400), the most important of which is The Meccan Revelations (al-Futūhāt al-Makkiyya).
2. William C. Chittick has translated, and commented on, chapters from this work and his effort has yielded two important books: The Sūfī Path of Knowledge (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989)
3. and The Self-Disclosure of God (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998).
4. Modern scholarship indicates that Ibn al-'Arabī was referred to as "Son of Plato", although some scholars claim that this was not one of the designations commonly applied to him. On his attitude toward philosophy, see Franz Rosenthal, "Ibn al-Arabī Between 'Philosophy' and 'Mysticism, '" Oriens 31(1988):1-35, esp. 4 and 12.
5. See Michael Morgan, "Plato and Greek Religion", The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 227-47, esp. 232, 235.
6. Seth Benardete, "On Plato's Symposium", in Platos Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete with commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 179-99, at 181.
7. All references to Plato's dialogues are based upon The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
8. See Parmenides, Parmenides of Elea, trans. David Gallop (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 73.
9. Seth Benardete, "On Heraclitus", Review of Metaphysics 53(2000):613-34, at 622.
10. Mitchell H. Miller, Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 45.
11. See Julius Moravcsik, Plato and Platonism: Platos Conception of Appearance and Reality in Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics, and its Modern Echoes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 130.
12. Hence, I think that Devereux is correct in saying that "the sequence of Parmenides' arguments reflects the development of Plato's thought about the relationship between Forms and their participants" (Daniel T. Devereux, "Separation and Immanence in Plato's Theory of Forms", in Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, ed. Gail Fine [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 192-214, at 213).
13. Cited from Burnet's The Phaedo of Plato in Alexander Nehamas, "The Imperfection of the Sensible World", in Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, 171-91, at 172.
14. This notion became one of the most significant notions in Nicholas of Cusa's doctrine of "learned ignorance." See Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1981), 52-3.
15. See Nehamas, "The Imperfection of the Sensible World", 180.
16. The movement on the Sufi Path is initiated by repentance and renunciation that consist of a constant struggle against the "lower self", since the lower self is the cause of blameworthy actions and base qualities. There was a group of Sufi that went to such great lengths in their attempt to show sincerity that they deliberately tried to bring the contempt or blame of the world upon themselves. Typical is the story of Jami: when a crowd of people gathered around him when he entered a town and started to applaud him, he urinated on the road so that they no longer believed that he was worthy of the high spiritual rank that they assigned to him. See Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: The University of Carolina Press, 1975), 112-3.
17. All references to Ibn al-Arabī's Futūhāt are based upon Muhyī al-Dīn Ibn al-Arabī, al-Futūhāt al-Makkiyya, 4 vols. (Cairo, 1911; reprinted, Beirut: Dār Sādr, 1968).
18. See Claude Addas, The Quest for the Red Sulphur, trans. Peter Kingsley (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993), 48.
19. See Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992), 55.
20. Chittick describes this second denotation in the following words: "As soon as we juxtapose God and the cosmos, we perceive a relationship between the two. The relationship may be expressed by saying that God created the cosmos, so He is its Creator (al-khāliq) and Author (al-bārī). He also made and originated the cosmos, so He is its Maker (al-sāni) and Originator (al-mubdi). By bringing the creatures into existence He shows mercy to all of them, so He is the All-merciful" (William C. Chittick, The Sūfī Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabī's Metaphysics of Imagination [Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989], 35).
21. See Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968), vol. 5, 2013, 2138.
22. A striking reminder of Heraclitus's following fragment, in which he characterizes god by pairs of opposites that are connected by automatic succession: "God is day night, winter summer, war peace" (G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 190).
23. See Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God, 3-4.
24. As Chittick points out, "there is no difference", according to Ibn al-'Arabī, "between the entity known in God's knowledge and the entity in the cosmos except that in the first case it is 'nonexistent' and in the second it is 'existent'" (Chittick, The Sūfī Path of Knowledge, 84).
25. Khadir (lit. "green") is considered a saint in the Sūfī tradition. He is endowed with special capacities such as turning dead land into green land. For an excellent interpretation of Ibn al-'Arabī's account of the Qur'ānic story of the encounter between Khadir and Moses, see Richard Netton, "Theophany as Paradox: Ibn 'Arabī's Account of al-Khadir in his Fusūs al-Hikam", Journal of the Muhyiddīn Ibn Arabī Society 11(1992):11-22.
26. See Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Meaning of the Holy Qur'ān (Beltsville, Md.: Amana Corporation, 1989), chap. 18, verses 60-82.
27. ('Abdullah Yusuf 'Alī, The Meaning of the Holy Qur'ān, chap. 16, verse 40).