GOD: THE REALITY TO SERVE, LOVE AND KNOW

In the Islamic tradition it is with this sentence meaning “In the Name of God-The All Good, the Compassionate” that all legitimate daily acts commence and surely I could not begin a conference on God without beginning with this statement which is also the profoundest commentary upon the Divine Nature as it relates to not only humanity but also to the whole of creation. The two Divine Names al-Raḥmān and al-Raḥīm are both derived from the root r. ḥ. m. that is also the root of the word raḥīm meaning womb similar to the word rehem for womb in Hebrew which belongs to the same linguistic family as Arabic. The world and we amidst it are born from the womb of the Divine Mercy without which we would not even exist. The very substance of cosmic reality is the “Breathe of the Compassionate” (nafas al-Raḥmān) as the Sufis assert and to mention God’s Names, Raḥmān and Raḥīm, is to be reminded of that Mercy from which we have issued forth, in which we live whether aware or not of our real natures and to which we ultimately return if we remember who we are and accept that great “trust of faith” to which we must consent by our free will as human beings.

From the point of view of traditional teachings the relation between the Divine Source and creation rooted in this Mercy is a relation that transcends time and becoming time being nothing but one of the conditions of our terrestrial mode of existence. God at 2000, the title of this conference, should not for one moment imply a temporal condition set upon that meta-historical relation. What is much more important to realize than what we comprehend by “God at 2000” is the truth that the world at 2000 like every other world at whatever moment of time it might be is a reflection of a meta-temporal reality and is rooted in that reality whatever might be our passing understanding of things. Perhaps rather than speaking of God at 2000 one should speak of the world at 2000 “in” God, for multiplicity is at every moment mysteriously plunged in Him.

The organizers of this conference have asked the speakers to speak of God from an experiential and “personal” point of view which is usually not my preference. I would have rather spoken of God in a manner which transcends the personal idiosyncrasies of individual existence. Nevertheless, having accepted the invitation to speak in this important conference at the beginning of the new Christian millennium about the most important of all subjects, I am obliged to begin by saying something about my background and education in as much as they are related to my understanding of the subject at hand. But my purpose most of all is to write a few humble words about God from the point of view of the Islamic tradition to which I belong.

I was born and brought up in a Muslim family in Persia from which I hail originally. My family ambience was one in which the reality of Islam was very strong and the dimension of transcendence and the reality of God was felt and experienced everywhere. My childhood years were inseparable from the constant observation of the sacred rites of the daily prayers and the ever present chanting of the Qur’an, which for Muslims is the verbatim revelation of God and His very Word. Not only my maternal family hailed from a long line of famous religious scholars or ‘ulama’, but my father in addition to being a great scholar and thinker was also devoted to Sufism, the inner or mystical dimension of Islam. Sufism is the heart of the Islamic revelation although today unfortunately some in the West seek to divorce it from Islam and propagate it in a diluted fashion which is far from its authentic reality.

I remember that at the very young age of five or six, in addition to memorizing certain verses and chapters of the Qur’an, I was guided by my parents to learn and memorize some of the poems of the greatest Persian Sufi poets such as Rūmī and Ḥāfiẓ. With in their incredible spiritual depth, these poems often sang of the unity of religious truth, of the universality of religion, of crossing religious frontiers. They constituted my first lessons in what has now come to be known as religious dialogue and they planted within my mind and soul the seed of a tree which was to grow in later years and become an important axis of my soul and a central concern of my mind. I will just quote one poem from memory by the supreme troubadour of love both human and divine in the Persian language, Ḥāfiẓ, a poem which I had already known before the age of ten. Its imperfect translation is as follows:

In love there is no difference between the Christian monastery and the temple of the Magi,

I was brought up in such a tradition and I have never left it. At a very young age an intimacy was created in my soul with the Divine Reality, the Reality which was and remains for me at once all-encompassing and all-caring, universal and yet source of particular sacred forms, all loving and yet awesome. The reality of the divine tremendum, the Majesty of God, has always been combined in my understanding of God with His Love and Mercy and of course His Beauty, the Divine Names of Majesty (al-Jalāl) and Beauty (al-Jamāl) complementing each other perfectly in the Islamic perspective. There are verses of the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam, which speak of God as the utterly Other, the Transcendent, the Beyond, as that which has no like and Islam, like Judaism, emphasizes the Oneness of God above all else. And yet there are other verses of the Qur’an which speak of the intimacy of God with us, of His Love, one of His Names being al-Wudūd which means precisely Love and of course as already mentioned the Qur’an speaks of the Mercy of God which “embraceth all things”. The Qur’an states that God is closer to man than his jugular vein, of the fact that wheresoever we turn “there is the Face of God.” In a profound sense the journey of the soul to God is an oscillation between these two poles of majesty and beauty, farness and nearness, a movement both horizontal and vertical without which no spiritual journey would be complete. Awareness of these two aspects of the Divine Reality and the proper orientation of our soul and in fact the whole of our being accordingly is necessary in order for us to realize the Divine Origin of our existence, to fulfil the purpose of our journey here on earth and to smell the fragrance of the Divine Reality. God is both transcendent and imminent and we must realize both of these dimensions but it is also necessary to add that there is no possibility of the realization of the Immanent without that of the Transcendent.

Returning to my personal life, I was sent to the West to continue my studies when I was quite young, being therefore plucked from the protective ambience of Persia and my family before my mental outlook was completely formed. Coming to America did not, however, mean immediate immersion in a secular ambience. Before going to M.I.T. I underwent the second part of my secondary education at the Peddie School in New Jersey, a Baptist school where despite being a Muslim I had to attend church every Sunday. That experience came to complement my later intellectual study of Christianity and was precious despite the strangeness of its form. The flame of the love for Christ inculcated in the hearts of Muslims in general and emphasized in my own upbringing in particular was strengthened although I continued of course to view Christ as the greatest prophet before the Prophet of Islam and not as an incarnation which Islam, basing itself in its understanding of God on the Absolute Itself rather than Its manifestation, rejects. The great love for ‘Īsa ibn Maryam, that is Jesus son of Mary as the Qur’an calls him, has abided in my heart to this day and in fact has deepened on the basis of that early existential encounter with Christianity as well as much later study and meditation.

It was also a Peddie that the gifts God had given me in the sciences and especially mathematics became manifest. I received some of the highest scores ever achieved in both local and national mathematics tests and so all my teachers advised me to become a scientist. I also felt enthusiastic about studying physics, the mother of modern sciences, and went to M.I.T. with great joy and expectation to discover the nature of physical reality. It took me many years and much more introspection to realize that what I wanted to be in reality was a physikos in the sense given to it by Parminedes, considered by many as the father of Western philosophy, a physikos being a person who sought to understand the nature of things in an ontological sense and not only in appearance. But while only a sophomore, I discovered that modern physics does not in fact deal with the nature of reality, even physical reality in itself, as I had thought. Much reading in the modern philosophy of science, most of it based on positivism, confirmed this fact for me. As I have written in my intellectual autobiography which is to appear in the Library of Living Philosophers [i] dedicated to my thought, it was a lecture and later a more personal meeting with Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, in Cambridge that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. He asserted that in fact physics deals only with pointer readings and mathematical structures and not with the nature of physical reality itself in the ontological sense.

After that encounter I decided to leave the field of science once and for all. But I decided to complete my degree before making a change. I remained therefore in the field of the sciences for a few more years, completing my bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics at M.I.T. and my master’s degree in geology and geophysics at Harvard. Meanwhile I was studying philosophy and the history of science parallel with my scientific studies and finally turned to them for my doctoral work. This whole experience of modern science and especially the positivistic philosophy of science being then propagated as well as the whole agnostic and to some extent atheistic climate in which I was studying provided a major challenge to my theocentric worldview. But being the type of person that I was, I could not leave any form of knowledge presented to me alone but had to study and seek its meaning and examine its claims.

For many years starting with my M.I.T. days I studied Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and other Western philosophers up to those of the contemporary period including Whitehead. Of course the immersion in the world of doubt cultivated by the mainstream of post-medieval European philosophy shook the framework of my intellectual world but it did not affect my faith in God nor that inner and intimate relationship with the Divine that I had experienced since childhood. Nevertheless, it created a major crisis within my mind and soul. I am in fact one of the first orientals to have faced such a crisis fully without succumbing to the tenets of modernism. My response, after some period of anguish, meditation, study and introspection, was in fact the total rejection of the whole adventure of Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism, in other words the very foundations of modernism. Since then my intellectual life has been dedicated to providing answers on the basis of traditional teachings, especially but not exclusively those of Islam, to the challenges posed by modernism and queries which arise from its rejection. I have sought to discuss the consequence of severing the link between reason and intellect in the sense used by a St. Thomas and the reduction of the latter to the former. I have dealt extensively with the consequences of the anthropomorphism prevalent in the West which absolutizes the terrestrial human state and makes earthly man “the measure of all things”. In this sense modern science is of course completely anthropomorphic since it is based solely on the human senses and human reason no matter how much it seeks to exclude man from a cosmology limited to the physical realm but extended to vast expanses of space and time.

At the moment of intellectual crisis when I was reading avidly Western philosophical works and also looking anywhere that I could for intellectual guidance which could re-establish for me the certitude upon which my whole outlook was based until my M.I.T. years, I discovered the works of the authors who are called the traditionalists or expositors of primordial wisdom and the perennial philosophy, foremost among them Renḥ Guḥnon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. These authors opened many doors for me and provided the crucial knowledge based on certainty which I was seeking. They also provided the in-depth criticism of the modern world which allowed me to see clearly the nature of that world and to formulate succinctly ideas concerning that world whose meaning had been still ambiguous and tentative in my mind until then. They presented pure metaphysical knowledge to which my mind was drawn like a moth to the candle. And they opened my eyes to the vast world which was both non-Islamic and non-Western, embracing both the Far East and Hindu India.

A. K. Coomaraswamy was perhaps the most outstanding and certainly the most authentic expositor of Hinduism and Buddhism in this country in the first part of the twentieth century. By what would appear as chance I came to meet his widow, he having passes away in 1947 some five years before. This meeting in turn gained for me access to the incomparable Coomaraswamy library in which I spent countless hours for several years reading about various traditions, especially Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism. Although art was not my field, as a result of the influence of the works of Coomaraswamy I took nearly every course on Hindu and Buddhist art at Harvard and met nearly every important person dealing with Oriental religions and art who came to Cambridge such as D.T. Suzuki. These studies and experiences had a great effect in reconfirming on an intellectual plane what I had already intuited as a young man, namely that the splendour of the Face of God is to be found in different religious climes.

Wherever I journeyed intellectually, if I found in that world a philosophy rooted in the Divine Reality, I felt at home there. I soon came to realize that my spiritual home is wherever the Divine resides no matter in what form It had manifested Itself or in what language It had said “I”. This realization was of course related in its intellectual aspect to the discovery of the perennial philosophy or the philosophia perennis which the traditional authors expounded and which became and remains my philosophical outlook. The perennial philosophy is based on a set of universal truths which its followers believe to lie at the heart of all authentic religions and traditional philosophies. One might in fact assert that there is but a single Truth spoken in different languages which constitute the various worlds of sacred form. Moreover, this oneness does not at all overlook differences on the formal plane nor the preciousness of each sacred form despite its difference from other forms. The perennial philosophy sees unity on the level of inner or transcendent reality and not on the formal plane nor does it ever confuse unity with uniformity. This discourse is of course not on comparative religion but on God. Nevertheless, it is necessary to point to this central issue because in the contemporary world others’ views of God can and often do affect our own views.

It was also during my years of formal university education that I embarked upon the spiritual path within the Sufi tradition. This is a matter about which I prefer not to speak publicly but for the sake of honesty it needs to be at least mentioned especially since the Sufi path has determined the conditions and provided the light and guidance for my life long quest for spiritual realization. Since my twenties, at the heart of my life has stood the quest for God and that quest has remained central throughout all my other activities from teaching and writings to founding or running academic, cultural and educational institutions. What I have to say about God is the fruit of not only the studies and the experiences briefly outlined, but above all of marching upon the Path which leads to Him. The result of following the Path is of course dependent not only on the efforts of the traveller upon the Path, but above all on Divine Grace and affirmation.

There is a well-known Taoist saying according to which, “Those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know”. This saying refers not only to the ineffable nature of veritable esoterism about which the sage must keep silent, keeping his mouth shut which is what the root of the world mysticism precisely signifies. But it also refers to the ineffability of the supreme knowledge of God to which others in this conference have also referred. All that we can say about God is little in relation to what cannot be uttered about Him because certain truths cannot be contained in human language and can be transmitted only by either symbols or through silence itself combined with what the Sufis call indication or ishārah. The most eloquent discourse on God leads ultimately to silence and the silent and yet so eloquent Divine Presence is itself the most powerful means of conveying the reality of God.

Since several participants of this conference have taken recourse in the ancient art of story telling, it is perhaps not inappropriate to recount here a personal story that concerns very much the issue at hand. In 1971 when I was living in Iran, I made a journey to southern India, my many earlier trips having been to the north. Since I was going to Madras, I asked for arrangements to be made for me to meet the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, at that time one of the supreme spiritual figures of India who was in the direct lineage of the great Shankara and who resided near Madras. He was a venerable sage who moved about with a large retinue like a king but who lived at the same time in extreme simplicity. On the day of the appointment I was driven to Kanchi and taken to a wonderful orchard in the middle of which they had placed a beautiful carpet for me to sit on. Wearing traditional Islamic dress, I sat cross-legged on the carpet awaiting the coming of the great Hindu master. After a few minutes he entered the orchard holding the staff of a sannyāsin. He came to within some ten yards of me and then squatted on the ground without his staff touching the earth. He had a disciple with him who greeted me on behalf of the master who, according to him, was observing a fast of silence. Being an untouchable from the point of view of Hindu law, which I of course honoured greatly, I could not come closer to the Hindu master nor could he to me. And so we looked each other in the eye for several minutes in utter silence. Then he smiled and made some signs with his hands to his disciple who then said to me, “The master says that he wishes to tell his Persian friend (that is, myself), how happy he is that the understanding of the reality of God in Advaita and Sufism is the same.” Here was a discourse on God at the highest level carried out in silence and also the most profound religious dialogue I have ever carried out with the representative of another religion although not a single word was exchanged between us.

Those who claim to speak about God must always respect this principial silence, which must even penetrate into our speech. We come from silence and return to it. We are like waves of the sea, which issue from the calm waters of the sea and ultimately return to that infinite calm and quietude. This having been said, it is necessary to state also that it was by the Word that all things were created and that our speech which is a divine gift has the power to express in some ways the highest realities which the heart/intelligence is capable of knowing. The classical theological and philosophical principle of adequation also holds true for language. Human language is capable of expressing truths about the Divine; otherwise there would be no sacred scripture.

With both these principles in mind, namely, the primacy of silence and the power of language to express supernal realities, I wish now to say a few words about God from the metaphysical and spiritual points of view especially in the context of my own tradition which is Islam and as I have learned through both personal spiritual experience and the study of works pertaining to metaphysics and theology from not only Islam but many different religious climes. Furthermore, it needs to be emphasized that the experience by various humanities of the Divine Reality is not tainted by time but transcends temporarily. It is therefore a living reality today as it was yesterday and is the heritage of all humanity, of all human beings beckoned to the call of the Spirit, to whichever branch of the human family they might belong.

Let me begin with the basic distinction made in Islam between three modes as well as stages of approach to God, namely, fear, love and knowledge of Him. Man’s relation to God falls under these categories and they also constitute the stages that the person on the spiritual path must traverse to reach the supreme goal of Divine Proximity. There is in fact an aspect of simultaneity as well as temporal success in the spiritual life of the individual as far as the three great stations of fear, love and knowledge are concerned to which classical Islamic texts refer as al-makhāfah, al-maḥabbah and al-ma‘rifah. There is something in man that must fear God, but the fear of God is not the same negative emotion as the fear of His creatures. As the famous Islamic theologian and Sufi al-Ghazzālī has said, when man fears one of God’s creatures, he runs away from it but when man fears God he runs towards Him. It is this reverential fear that is essential to the spiritual life and which is mentioned so often in the Bible and the Qur’an. The saying of St. Paul, “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” has its exact Islamic equivalence. Our egos must shrivel before the Divine Majesty and something in us must contract and die before we can expand spiritually speaking. It is this fear of God’s Majesty that expresses itself in religion as service to God, and the performance of actions pleasing to Him. It is in fact because service is related to the plane of action that it can be associated with the station of reverential fear.

The attitude of service in this sense is closely related to that of surrender. God has given us free will and surrender means to submit our will to His freely and not by coercion, a surrender which is so difficult and yet when one succeeds so sweet. There is a moment when we will all have to surrender to God and that is the moment of death which is beyond our will. Blessed is the person who can experience that moment now through the exercise of his free will rather than by necessity. This is the secret of the saying of the Prophet of Islam, “Die before your die” to which the Sufis adds, “so that you will not die when the moment of ordinary death arrives”. It is interesting to note that the same idea and in practically the same words is expressed by the German mystical poet Angelus Silesius whom some authorities such as A. M. Schimmel believe to have been influenced by Sufism. The dying before one dies refers of course to spiritual or initiatic death based on perfect surrender to the Divine Will, an idea which is to be found also in other mystical traditions such as those of Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism and mutatis mutandis even in a non-theistic climate such as that of Buddhism.

To be able to surrender one’s will to God turns even trials and tribulations of life into sweet victory. It is, however, very difficult to achieve because God has given us freedom and wants us to surrender this will on the basis of both fear and love of Him. This existential situation in which we find ourselves demonstrates in fact the grandeur of the human state and the consequence of our being created in “His image”. We share in some way in both God’s necessity and freedom and surrender means to give up this relative freedom before that Absolute Necessity which is God.

In Arabic the very word Islam means both surrender and peace which issues from it. All other creatures are in a sense muslim in that they are surrendered by their nature to Him and cannot rebel because they have no free will. In the context of the Qur’anic revelation, the word islām is used not only in the sense of the religion brought by the Prophet and not only the surrender of all creatures to God. It also means surrender to God within any religious context in general. That is why Abraham, the father of Semitic monotheism, is called specifically Muslim in the Qur’an and in that sense islām is the generic term for all authentic religion whatever its formal structure might be. From another point of view it can be said that there are three levels of meaning to the term muslim: the first refers to all creatures save man which are by nature surrendered to God; the second to those who have accepted the Qur’anic revelation and are called muslim in the ordinary sense of the word; and the third to the saint who is in perfect surrender to God and who is therefore the complement of the cosmic order except that his surrender is conscious and those of other creatures by nature and constraint. Surrender for man is so significant precisely because of the gift of free will which is also the element within the soul which makes possible the committing of acts of evil as well as acts of goodness.

The surrender to God is of course also related to love which follows the fear of God and is along with knowledge the grand path for spiritual realization. Many Western authors have written over the centuries that Islam is based only on the conception of God as judge and is deprived of the understanding of the love of God. That is one of the reasons why in the past so many in the West who studied Sufism and saw therein the great emphasis upon the love of God concluded that Sufism must have come from a non-Islamic source. They had perhaps forgotten that one of God’s ninety-nine sacred Names is, as already mentioned, al-Wudūd meaning Love. The Prophet of Islam was also called Ḥabīb meaning lover and Sufi poets such as Rūmī and Ḥāfiẓ often refer to God as the Beloved. Moreover, a saint in Islam is called wali Allah, literally the friend of God or sometimes ‘āshiq meaning lover of God. All of these terms are common in everyday Islamic parlance.

In any case in Islamic spirituality there is no possibility of the love of God without the realization of His Majesty and transcendence and without the fear and surrender which that Transcendent and Majestic Reality requires of us. The love of God must be such that all other love is dissolved in it. The spiritual person cannot love anything outside of Divine Love and all love for him or her is a reflection of that ultimate Love. In fact ultimately all love is God’s Love for His own theophany within us and within His creation. We are but the channels for that greatest love which is that of God for that which ultimately is nothing but Himself.

Finally, there is the knowledge of God which is existentially based on both fear and love of Him although not dependent in its essence upon them. For a person to know God in a realized sense requires his possession of the attitude of both fear and love combined with faith (īmān), while principial knowledge in itself depends from the human side on the heart/intellect alone, the heart which is the instrument of noesis or intellection, in its original sense, of the divine realities. Needless to say, the light and grace emanating from the Divine and faith from the human side are also absolutely necessary for the attainment of realized knowledge. Unfortunately in contemporary language knowledge has become equated with only the conceptual, rational and empirical and is depleted of its sacred nature so that many are ambivalent as to its usage in relation to God. My series of Gifford Lectures, Knowledge and the Sacred, was in fact devoted to the question of the resacralization of knowledge in the context of the contemporary West. In Islam, as in nearly all other traditions, the acquiring of knowledge is itself a sacred activity and knowledge is inseparable from the sacred. To know is ultimately to know God. The ground of the intellect is the Divine and so is its ultimate goal. We can know nothing in essence without knowing the Divine Reality manifested in it and traditionally speaking all authentic knowledge leads to the knowledge of the One, the end of all knowledge. This kind of knowledge is not conceptual knowledge but what Islamic philosophers call knowledge by presence. It is not rationalistic knowledge although reason itself is a ray of the Divine Intellect. It is ultimately knowledge by means of the divine spark within us, a spark which itself issues from the Divine Light. As in the case of love so in the case of knowledge, and even more so, knowledge of God is in the deepest sense the knowledge by God of Himself through us in whose heart He has placed the light of the Divine Intellect. That is why in Islam the “knower of God” or the gnostic in its original sense is called al-‘ārif bi ’Llah, the knower by God.

Before the secularisation of knowledge in the West during the Renaissance and the 17th century and in fact before the rise of nominalism in the late Middle Ages, which marked the swan song of medieval Christian philosophy, such a view was also held by the sapiential Christian mystics. With Descartes knowledge became bound to the radical separation of subject and object or bifurcation and the desacralization of both poles involved in the act of knowing. Today in the West, whether one speaks of philosophy, science, anthropology or even much of theology, one operates, whether it be consciously or unconsciously, within the framework of Cartesian bifurcation and therefore in the context of a desacralized conception of knowledge. But it is not this kind of knowledge of which I speak when addressing the question of the knowledge of God. Principial knowledge transcends miraculously the dichotomy of subject and object. This kind of knowledge is based on the unity of knowledge and being, of the ultimately sacred subject and the ultimately sacred object. This unity is impossible to reach through mere conceptualisation which is based by definition on the imposition of the mental concept between the knower and the known.

The hierarchy of fear and service, or action, love and knowledge of a metaphysical nature leads to vision of the Divine Reality and makes possible assertions about God which are non-temporal and are as true in the year 2000 as they were in 1000 and will be so a millennium from now. The first assertion that can be made on the basis of realization of the Divine is that the Ultimate Reality or God is one. This truth emphasized so much by Judaism and Islam may appear to some to be a pleonasm, an obvious fact not in need of being emphasized over and over again. But this assertion is more profound than simply the statement of there being only one Judge sitting on His Throne in Heaven rather than two. Such a meaning is of course there and is on its own level very important. It can prevent many a simple soul from falling in error. But there are many more profound levels of inner meaning involved in such a confirmation. Let us remember that oneness implies also integration. The word tawḥīd or oneness/unity which is the alpha and omega of Islam means at once the state of being one, with all the metaphysical meanings that it has above and beyond the numerical significances of oneness and the act of making into one or integration. The statement about the oneness of God is not only about Him. It is also about the inter-relation of all things and the integration of all things including ourselves into the Centre where the One “resides”. Without the oneness of the Origin of creation, there would not exist that inner sympatheia between all things, that inner bond which binds us not only to God but also by virtue of that relationship to each other and to all of creation. That there is a universe is the result of the oneness of the Divine Principle while all harmony in the universe in all its different levels is nothing but the reflection of unity in the domain of multiplicity. The oneness of God also means ultimately that there is but one Being and that all existence issues forth from that original source.

The implication of God’s oneness is also that we also have to be one. Fallen man, removed from that primordial norm in which God created him, is like a house divided unto itself and as Christ has said such a house cannot stand. We usually do not act from a single centre nor are our minds in a state of concentration. Rather than being mindful and concentrated, we are usually mentally scattered while our emotions pull us in different directions and our actions are not based on harmony. When we attest to the oneness of God, we do not immediately gain knowledge of what that oneness means, that tawḥīd whose highest meaning is known to God alone. But we do realize that we must lead an integrated life rooted in a divine norm that makes possible the integration of our whole being including our thought, emotions and actions. This is the first major consequence of tawḥīd. The second is the realization of unity within all of creation and awareness of the interrelatedness of all that exists from the lowly dust to the highest stars in heaven. The third and highest is to realize that there is ultimately but a single Reality whose gradations and manifestations constitute the realms of multiplicity.

All traditional cosmologies are based on this principle of interrelation between all things and the dependence of all things on the One, principles that modern Western man has neglected for several centuries and now only speaks of wholeness and integration because of the environmental catastrophes brought about thanks to the segmented view of reality that has been dominant in the West since the Renaissance. Here in Oregon with its magnificent trees, the debate that goes on about cutting or preserving forests is there precisely because for some forty thousand years before the coming of the white man, Native Americans lived in these forests on the basis of a religion and worldview which emphasized in the strongest terms the link between all beings and the sacred quality of nature. Had the cosmology based on the interrelation of all things not existed among them, the trees would have been cut long ago and there would not even be a problem to debate today. In recent years integral studies and holistic philosophies have become popular in certain circles. Interest in such philosophies is in fact due to the need to rediscover that forgotten unity encompassing all creatures, the unity that flows from what Islam calls tawḥīd, the principle which it places at the centre of its perspective. This doctrine, far from being a pleonasm, is cardinal in that it determines who we are, where we are, where we are going and what our relation should be to other creatures while on this terrestrial journey. From tawḥīd flow consequences of the utmost importance for all men and women whether of yesterday, today or tomorrow and teachings which are especially pertinent in the present situation in which contemporary humanity finds itself.

Let it also be added here that although some Christian theologians in their defence of the Trinity oppose the Jewish and Islamic emphasis upon Unity and there are Muslims who believe that Christian Trinitarian doctrine is the negation of tawḥīd, if the matter be studied inwardly and in greater depth, one will realize that metaphysically speaking Trinity does not negate Unity. That is why for centuries Catholics have repeated in their formation of the credo the phrase credo in unum deum. Whatever is said of the oneness of the Divine Principle in Islam in fact applies to other traditional and orthodox religions even though some do not emphasize the doctrine of Divine Oneness as much as do Jews and Muslims.

In addition to being one or in Islam the One, al-Aḥad, the Divine Reality also possesses other attributes about which one can speak in a positive manner provided the symbolic quality of language—symbol being understood here in its traditional sense and not as sign or metaphor—is preserved and language is not reduced to purely logical and operation definitions as in so much of modern Anglo-Saxon philosophy. First of all God is absolute. This term is of course shunned in all relativistic philosophies which claim that there is no absolute and that everything is relative except of course the statement made by such relativists which is then taken to be absolute. But such criticisms are irrelevant from the point of view of traditional metaphysics and I continue to use the term absolute according to the teachings of the perennial philosophy to which I adhere philosophically.

The God who spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai, who addressed Christ in the desert and whom the Prophet of Islam encountered during his nocturnal ascent (al-mi‘rāj) is absolute. Metaphysically absoluteness in this highest sense means that God is completely and totally Himself, excluded all that is other than Him and bears no division within Himself. There is nothing in God that is not completely there in the metaphysical sense. In the non-theistic world of Buddhism this quality of absoluteness corresponds to “suchness”. Moreover, God is also infinite in the sense that all possibility, all that is possible is already contained in the Divine Reality. There is a metaphysical question concerning the relation between potentiality and possibility since both words come from the same Latin root and because God is pure actuality possessing no potentiality whatsoever. Unfortunately, I cannot delve into this question here. For the purpose of the present discussion it is enough to state that while God is pure actuality from the point of view of being, He contains within Himself the root of all things and is the treasury containing all the possibilities which have been or will be manifested in the cosmos, to use the language of Islamic metaphysics. God is infinite and what can be called the All-Possibility. The doctrine of Divine Infinitude is an esoteric one not usually discussed in ordinary theological texts but it certainly exists in Western sources as well especially in the Kabbala and among certain Christian mystics. And finally God is the Perfect Good, as Plato would say, tَ Agathon, or Perfection (kamāl) as mentioned in so many Islamic sources. To know God is to know that He is absolute, infinite and the perfect good, to use the formulation which goes back to Frithjof Schuon. From this principial knowledge flow many tributaries which water the garden of human existence and provide the most profound meaning for various aspects of human life and thought.

The first consequence of this knowledge is the realization that the distinctions between genders far from being accidental have their roots in the Divine Reality Itself. The duality which manifests itself in the masculine and the feminine in the human, animal and vegetative life and in other ways in the non-animate world, including for example polarity in magnetism or positive and negative charges in electricity, has its roots in the Divine Nature. The masculine has its source in the Divine as absolute and the feminine in the Divine as infinite which is also the interior and inward aspect of the Divinity. It is interesting to note that in Islam while God as the creator and revealer is seen to have a masculine character, the non-manifesting aspect of the Divinity is seen as having a feminine character, the Divine Essence Itself in Arabic being al-Dhāt which is grammatically feminine. Also while the masculine aspect of the Divinity is associated with justice, rigor and majesty related to the Divine Name al-Jalāl or Majesty, the feminine aspect is associated with mercy and generosity and is related to the Divine Name al-Jamāl or Beauty. The name for Divine Mercy Itself al-Raḥmah is in feminine form and since Arabic is a language in which gender is clearly defined in both nouns and verbs, it is easy to see in the Qur’anic description of God at once the masculine and feminine dimensions of the Divinity as well as the reality that the message of the Qur’an is addressed to both sexes and concerns them equally.

The absoluteness and infinitude of God also means that on the one hand God excludes all otherness, all relativity, all becoming and that on the other hand all creation is an externalisation of realities whose metaphysical roots are in God. Creation is in the deepest sense the self-determination and self-manifestation of God. Man should therefore live in such a way that he could at the same time be constantly aware of the reality of God as the Absolute and of the evanescence and evaporation of all existence before that immutable Reality and be conscious of the truth that all things, to the degree that they exist, issue from Him and have their roots sunk in the Infinite. In fact while God is absolutely beyond, all things are mysteriously plunged in God.

As for perfection and goodness, Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism the cardinal idea that goodness in itself belongs to God alone and that all good comes from God. Only the Good, that is God, is absolute goodness for as Christ said, “only my Father in Heaven is good”. This also explains why there is evil in the world. Since the world is not God, it cannot be absolutely good and this absence of goodness is what appears in the world of relativity as evil. Evil is the consequence of the existential separation from the source of all good, that is, the Good as such. As for why there should even be a world, the answer lies in the infinitude of the Divine Nature which by virtue of its infinity had to include all possibilities including the possibility of the negation of itself which is the world. Evil is the moral aspect of that separation from the Source which the world is by its nature. As Dante expressed it so beautifully in the Divine Comedy, evil is separation from God and the pain of hell is precisely the awareness of this separation from the source of all beauty and goodness.

The attainment of sapience or gnosis (ma‘rifah) also makes it possible to realize that God is at once transcendent and immanent, totally other and completely here. In the practical life of the spiritual seeker, there is a pendular motion between the consciousness of these two relations which are ultimately one. It is important to emphasize, however, in the context of the modern world in which so many seek the Divinity as immanent while rejecting the Transcendent, that there is no possibility of experiencing the Immanent before surrendering oneself totally to the Transcendent. The attempt to reach the Divine within without recourse to the Transcendent is one of the gravest errors of our times. Some think that they can reject traditional religions but through some self-realization centre become another St. Francis and see God everywhere. What a delusion to look for the sun in the bottom of a well. One must first cast one’s eyes to the heavens to behold the sun or at least to accept its reality and presence before being able to contemplate its reflection upon a lake. One must realize, to use the language of the Qur’an, that “there is nothing like unto Him” and that “His is greater” than anything that can be said about Him before being able to realize that he is near to man than his jugular vein. The life of the spiritual person is governed by the rhythm and pulse alternating between farness and nearness, transcendence and immanence but the metaphysical doctrine concerning God must of necessity include both dimensions.

In Islam it is not God who is veiled from us. It is we who are veiled from Him. In a sense it is not God who is the mystery; it is we. If we could only lift the veil over our eyes and realize who we are, we would realize God. That is why the Prophet said, “He who knoweth himself knoweth His Lord.” There are many Arabic and Persian poems rhapsodising about the mystery that while God is so close to us, we are so veiled and distant from Him. In the deepest sense we are veiled from God precisely because of His proximity to us. Since He is everywhere, we cannot perceive His Presence. If it were theoretically possible for Him to be separated from the reality we experience, we would realize that separation and absence. But until we have opened our spiritual eye, it is that ubiquitous Presence that we interpret blindly as “ordinary” existence equated by us with the absence of God.

Also God is at once personal and impersonal. Some Muslims do not wish to translate Allah as God for many reasons including Trinitarian associations with the term God used in ordinary English. But I am not one of them, for there is nothing essentially privative in the term God or for that matter Dieu in French or Gott in German if we remember its most universal and all embracing meaning which includes what a Meister Eckhart would call the Gottheit or the Godhead. In its most universal sense the term God in English is not bound completely to a Trinitarian relationship as seen specifically in Christian theology nor limited only to His personal aspect. God is both personal and impersonal as the Name Allāh signifies in Arabic. God has a Face turned towards us and His creation but that does not exhaust the Divine Reality. God loves His creation and we are able to address Him in our prayers, but He can also be contemplated as an infinitely extended placid sea upon which we fall gently as snowflakes, dissolving in that calm and peaceful water. God is Thou whom we address in our I-ness, but He is also the Infinite Reality beyond all duality, impersonal while possessing the Face turned toward His creation which we experience as the Divine Personal Reality.

Herein also lies the meeting point between the monotheistic conceptions of God and the non-personal and non-theistic conception of the Divinity in such religions as Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, not to speak of Shintoism and the primal religions. In these religions there is certainly the sense of the Sacred, the possibility of spiritual realization, religious ethics and even prayer but all within the context of the impersonal conception of the Divine. The Buddha nature, just to speak of Buddhism, or the state of nirvāna is the realization of the subject pole of the impersonal Divinity. To understand God as the personal as well as the impersonal is to reach a knowledge of the Divinity which is all embracing and which includes all different metaphysical and spiritual possibilities. To consider not only the Face of God, to use the Qur’anic terminology, but also the infinite reality of the Divine beyond the realm of being and existentiation is to take nothing away from the Glory of God. On the contrary it is to attest to the fullness of His majestic Reality.

In speaking of the knowledge of God, it is necessary to emphasize in the face of the scepticism and the secularisation of knowledge characteristic of the modern world, what is taken for granted in all traditional civilizations, namely that there is such as thing as the science of God which is in fact the supreme science. The meaning of the term theology which meant originally such a science has become so diluted in the West today that it is necessary to use another terminology to designate this highest of all sciences. I have tried to resuscitate the term scientia sacra in its Latin form in order to avoid the limitative connotations associated with the term science especially in the English language as it is used today. I have even written a book entitled The Need for a Sacred Science with the aim of creating a consciousness of the importance of sacred science whose highest form is precisely scientia sacra, the science of God or the Ultimate Reality.

Since the Renaissance, metaphysics in its authentic sense became more or less forgotten and soon relegated to a branch of rationalistic philosophy while gnosis, has continued to possess a negative connotation at least in the Western Christian milieu as a result of its association with the historic Christian heresy of Gnosticism, in contrast to Eastern Christianity where it remains a perfectly respectable and in fact central reality. A number of Catholic theologians such as de Lubac and von Baltazar have tried to resuscitate its positive meaning but the general anathema cast against it continues in many circles. That is why while using both the terms metaphysics and gnosis in their original meaning, I find it necessary also to emphasize the term scientia sacra. In every integral traditional civilization there is something that corresponds to philosophy, something to theology and something to what one can call metaphysics in its authentic sense or gnosis or theosophy. For example, in Islam one can observe clearly the presence of the schools of falsafah (philosophy), kalām (theology) and ma‘rifah/‘irfān (gnosis). The latter category has been forgotten or at least eclipsed in the West and it is precisely this category that concerns the science of God and what can be called scientia sacra.

In trying to approach God at the beginning of this new millennium it is this scientia sacra that must be taken seriously once again and it is knowledge that has to be re-sacralized. If this science of the Real were to be taken seriously and placed at the centre of our intellectual concerns, it would affect all realms of knowledge and how knowledge is envisaged and its formal teaching carried out in academic settings. Until that takes place, it is necessary to swim against the current and to point out to the reality of this supreme science which, when realized fully, transforms us completely and leads to our spiritual salvation and freedom from the bondage of ignorance.

Since we live in the world of change, it is also necessary to say something about the relation between God and the world of change and temporality. Now, the spiritual person in quest of God today is not usually interested in developing a philosophy of history of Hegel. Nevertheless, as a result of the historicism developed in the 18th and especially the 19th centuries in Europe and still dominating the current worldview of the West, many people with the urge to follow the path leading to God are confused between the manifestations of God in the spacio-termporal domain of reality and the Divine Reality Itself which transcends all becoming. God, while being immutable, is also the source of all that changes but the Divine Reality cannot be imprisoned in time. There is the tendency in the modern world to reduce everything to the historical and to reject as unreal everything which cannot be proven historically as this term is usually understood and on the basis of data of often limited nature. This view of things constituted the philosophical position called historicism which is a most dangerous intellectual perversion and which has done the greatest harm to religion in modern times. One can accept the significance of history without falling into the trap of historicism. That is why in fact I use when necessary the term historial as distinct from historical.

To accept historicism, either consciously or unconsciously, is to negate the permanent in favour of the transient as we see in this day and age when the transient has come to constitute practically the only reality which then seeks to replace the permanent in our mind and thought. Many today in fact worship “the times” as a divinity even if they are not aware of it. Already the 70’s are for many like the Pharonic period. Our present moment in history is alone significant, but paradoxically our insistence on an extreme form of historicism has led to the destruction of history itself. Post-modern man has come to “absolutize the transient”. We have come to take “our times” too seriously, losing our vision of the timeless and also the significance of our sacred history in which timeless values were manifested in the world of transience and impermanence. This attitude is a truly demonic perversion of the Sufi idea of being “the son of the moment” (ibn al-waqt), that is, living in the now which is the sole gate of access to the Eternal. The serious quest for God means taking a step away from this position which is based on a one-dimensional vision of reality. We must be able to remove ourselves from the stream of mere change and becoming in order to be able to gain a vision of the Immutable and the Eternal in Itself and also to be able to contemplate the immutable archetypal realities in the world of becoming.

Even in traditional societies this need was present and was fulfilled in different ways in various religions such as monasticism in Christianity and Buddhism, becoming a person outside of a caste or a sannyāsin in Hinduism, or withdrawing inwardly from the world while living in it as in Sufism and Jewish mysticism, that is in religions which do not accept the formal institution of monasticism. How much more is that true for today’s world when the world of transience has become so emptied of the sacred!

To come back to the question of the relation between God and the world of manifestation and our approach as beings living in time towards God, we must remember that we begin our journey as creatures possessing consciousness of things, objects, people, colours, forms, etc. around us, immersed as we are in multiplicity. Spiritual growth means usually the step-by-step realization that all things come from God and return to God and that all things manifest some aspect of the Divine Reality. I say “usually” because there are exceptional cases where by the Will of Heaven all of these truths are realized instantly as if one were struck by lightening. The realized sage sees God everywhere and everything for him or her is a symbol of a higher reality. Such a person realizes that not only sacred scriptures but also nature is a divine revelation, in fact God’s primordial revelation about which the Qur’an speaks so often. If one understands the Book of Genesis according to its inspired traditional commentaries, it points to the same truth. God not only revealed the Decalogue to Moses and the Qur’an to the Prophet, but He also revealed nature. In the deepest sense in fact religion is not only for man but for the whole of creation and as the Qur’an asserts, everything and not only man prays and praises God. If we only had eyes we could detect the message of God upon the face of all things. According to a ḥadīth (tradition) of the Prophet, “God has written the mark of beauty upon all things”. This saying is particularly important for the understanding of Islamic art but it also pertains to the whole of cosmic reality. If we cannot see the marks of beauty on the face of creatures, it is because our eyes have lost their original power of vision which Adam, the primordial man, possessed in paradise.

To see the manifestations of God everywhere imposes upon us two duties which are of particular significance in this day and age: the first to see the reality of God in religions other than our own and the second to be fully aware of the manifestations of God’s wisdom, power and presence in the world of nature.

For millennia, human beings lived in a homogeneous religious world of their own and did not have to delve into the reality of other religions although there were some exceptions such as the meeting of Islam and Hinduism in India or Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Muslim Spain, but even in these cases the truly spirited contacts and exchanges were between the few who belonged to the inner dimensions of their own tradition. In fact ordinary human beings are in fact created to live within a single religion in the same way that they are conscious of living within a single solar system although there are other suns in the firmament. To live any traditional and divinely inspired religion fully is to have lived religion as such. The destruction of the homogeneity of the religious ambience by modernism, has, however, created a new situation for those affected by the secularising forces of the modern world and yet seeking religious truth. Usually a medieval Christian or Muslim did not have to be existentially concerned with the “other” even if the “other” lived next door. And a Christian woman before modern times would not most likely have become influenced by what went on in Benares even is she travelled there as the young girl from Montana, that is Diana Eck, who is now professor of Hinduism at Harvard and has written with empathy about that religion, was when she went to study religion in that holy city.

This new spiritual and psychological reality imposed by the advent of modernism is one with which we now have to contend especially in the more modernized regions of the world. The challenge of penetrating seriously into other religious worlds religiously—and not as a philologist, anthropologist or historian—is in fact the most exciting intellectual challenge of today if this task be taken seriously and without loss of one’s religious moorings. It is in fact “the only new thing under the sun” although on a limited and also more esoteric level, it has had its historical precedence. To accept and respond to this challenge is to become aware of the ubiquitous nature of God’s Presence. It is to be able to see the other “Faces of God” which He has turned to human collectivities other than our own, thereby enabling each religious society to provide the means for its members to realize the goal, the telos, for which man was created.

As for our second duty and responsibility, it is to become fully aware of the presence of God in His non-human creation, of the sacred quality of nature. Anyone fully aware of the present state of affairs knows that if we do not change our current attitudes towards the natural world radically, nothing else in this world will matter in the long run because we will not be around much longer to concern ourselves with any issue. The environmental crisis cannot be solved by means of cosmetic actions. It requires a profound transformation of modern man’s understanding of who he is what the world of nature is, and what rights we have over nature. It makes all the difference in the world whether we see the majestic redwoods of the state or for that matter the still pristine forests of the Amazon or Borneo as sacred trusts which one must protect or simply as mere commodities from which we can benefit economically as so many in America and Europe come to consider nature and now thanks to the globalisation of secularism and consumerism more and more people do so in the rest of the world. To look upon the natural world and its riches as only economic resources is nothing but the formula for gradual suicide. One can in fact say that during this new century either modern economics will have to be re-interpreted within the matrix of ethics and environmental considerations or we will perish as a species.

Why have we come to such an unprecedented impasse? There are of course many secondary reasons, but the primary reason is that modern man has cut off the Hands of God from nature, creating a science from which the Divine Presence in nature is excluded. There are of course human beings in the modernized world who still believe in God but for the majority of them, their vision includes only God’s relation to humanity and excludes other creatures. But God is not only “our” God or at best the God of the whole of humanity. He is God for the whole of creation. The molluscs crawling on the sea, the birds flying in the air and the smallest fish swimming in the water are also God’s creatures. By what right then do we decimate and annihilate species every day?

The knowledge of God means an awareness of His Presence in nature and brings about the awe and respect which we must exercise towards this Presence. When St. Francis, now chosen as the patron saint of ecology, lived in Tuscany, he loved the birds and trees of his homeland while the beautiful countryside of Tuscany was not in danger of destruction. Therefore when he addressed the world of nature, he did not have to apply his love and knowledge of the Sacred Presence in creation to the formulation of a living theology and philosophy of nature according to which human beings should live. Today, however, anyone who speaks of God and at the same time has concern for humanity must also address himself to God’s creation and the necessity to protect nature not on the basis of mere sentimentality but on the firm ground of the knowledge of God in both Himself and His manifestations. This principial knowledge is not only the supreme goal of life but on the plane of outward application is extremely crucial to our very survival as human beings. We need to articulate a metaphysics of nature which must become the framework and guide for our attitudes and actions towards other creatures.

The goal of approaching God is to be illuminated by the light of that Sun which both illuminates and enlivens, which is the source of both that light which is liberating knowledge and that warmth which is the love that flows in the arteries of the universe and gives live to all things. It is furthermore, to see the Divine Presence everywhere and to hear the voice of the sacred not only in the B Minor Mass of Bach which I am sure many in the audience have experienced, but also in the song of birds, the chant of the whales and the thunderous sound of storms.

At the highest level to know God means to realize that only God is. The testimony of faith in Islam is Lā ilāha illa ’Llāh, meaning that there is no divinity but God. Each person understands this sacred assertion according to the level of his or her awareness and comprehension. But on the highest level it means that there is no reality but the Divine Reality. At the end of the road one realizes that we are not, the world is not, only God is and other things are nothing but the manifestations of this one eternal Reality.

There is a verse of the Qur’an (LVII; 3) which states, “He [God] is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward.” This outwardly enigmatic statement summarizes the whole truth about God and our relation to Him if we understand its meaning according to the inspired traditional commentaries. God is the First, or the alpha, which means that God is the Origin of all things and it is from Him that we have issued. God is also the Last, or the omega, and so He is our final end and not only we human beings but all creatures return to Him. Whether we like it or not, we must return to God. Our choice based on free will is how and in what condition we make this return journey. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī says that since we have to make this journey of return, why not walk upon the path of God with a smile and in submission to Him through the exercise of our free will rather than being pulled on the path by our hair while we kick and scream. In any case, the Divine Name, the Last, means that whether we like it or not our return is to God.

God is the Inward, the inner dimension from which all that is external issues forth. The spiritual life is in fact nothing other than the life of inwardness. The person who lives in the inward dimension of his being is also able to see all things with the eye of inwardness and therefore see the inner, spiritual face of things rather than only their outward form. What is most difficult to understand in this verse is, however, the assertion that God is also the Outward. This truth is in fact the most difficult to realize because one can ask if God is the Outward why then do we not see Him with the outward eye in the same way that we see each other. The truth of the matter, however, is that God is the light with which we see all things. How can we then ever expect to see with the eye the light which is itself the source of our vision? God as the Outward is everywhere but it needs the opening of the inner eye or the “eye of the heart”, as the Sufis would say, to perceive this reality.

We live in a world bound by these four essential Divine Attributes. We come from God; we return to God; God resides inwardly at the centre of our being; and the world itself is nothing but levels of Divine Presence which, however, is not perceivable as such save with the eye of inwardness. Happy is the person who before he is forced to open his eyes at the moment of death realizes this truth while in this life and with full possession of the gift of free will. Such a person will not but seek to serve, to love and to know God and through the realization thus gained be a true light to the world of service to both human beings and God’s other creatures, lover of the good and the beautiful and of all of God’s creation and locus of that unitive and illuminative knowledge of God which is the ultimate purpose of creation and the fountainhead of all wisdom.

[i] See “Intellectual autobiography of Seyyed Hossein Nasr”, in The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, (edited by Lewis Hahn et. al.) Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 2001, pp. 1-85.