Logos and Revelation: Ibn 'Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics

Part II. Existence

93 part ii Existence We have all had experience of what the Hungarian chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”: a practical knowledge of “how to go about things” that we, however, cannot describe or explain in words. Saint Augustine gives an example of this sort of knowledge when he talks, in book 11 of his Confessions, about time. He notices the great paradox that as long as we do not talk about time, we know what it is, but as soon as we start trying to talk about it, we do not know what it is at all. This is also the great problem or paradox of talking about Being or Existence : as long as we do not talk about it, it seems to be something clear and obvious, but as soon as we start talking about Being or Existence, all of a sudden it becomes a topic fraught with obscurity . We can get at the meaning of existence, or of time or any other such thing, only by way of analogy. We say “existence” or “time” is like such and such, but in a limited or imperfect way. Mystical writers such as Ibn ‘Arabi and Meister Eckhart have a greatly heightened sense of the analogical nature of all things. All things reflect analogically their divine source insofar as they are all limited manifestations of God’s absolute Existence and the infinite knowledge and power that flow from that unbounded Existence. But any idea or concept of God himself will remain elusive. Even creatures are of no help here, because, though they are analogues of the divine Being, that to which they refer remains hidden or M 94 Existence obscure to human reason. For both Ibn ‘Arabi and Meister Eckhart, reason needs revelation in order not only to know what creatures may tell us about God but also, even more basically, to know creatures as analogues of a divine Being or absolute Existence. For them, therefore, any thinking upon the nature of existence as existence, i.e., any metaphysics worth its salt, must begin with reflection upon the text revealed by God himself. Only God himself can give us an adequate idea of who God is. To our limited intellects, this text is obscure, but it is, at least, something. Sacred Scripture gives the analogical key (or keys) to the inner meaning of all creatures, making them understandable in light of God’s own revelation of himself. Mystical thought and experience are, as I noted in the introduction , concerned first and foremost with making inwardly concrete and immanent in the soul the transcendent and absolute Existence of God. The soul cannot do this through thought or even through virtue alone, but only through a meditation upon the inner meanings of things given in the sacred text of his or her tradition. For the contemporary reader, what is perhaps most remarkable about the writing of mystical thinkers like Ibn ‘Arabi and Meister Eckhart is the lack of arguments or “proofs” of what the contemporary reader probably feels is most in need of demonstration: the existence of God. Such arguments are indeed lacking: in the general prologues to Eckhart’s Opus tripartitum , there are what appear to be “proofs” of God’s existence, which, upon closer inspection, are not quite what they seem. The initial temptation is to attribute this oversight simply to the fact that a pious Muslim or Christian of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries could not have thought otherwise. They simply take the existence of God for granted, unlike us more sophisticated moderns. This response seems, prima facie, plausible; but I want to argue that it would be wrong. In the first place, proofs or demonstrations of God’s existence were not unknown to either thinker: there was already in both the Muslim and Christian traditions a long history of giving proofs or demonstrations of God’s existence. Nor do Ibn ‘Arabi or Eckhart take the existence of God for granted, merely assuming it and then moving on to their “mystical speculations .” Their work lacks formal proofs of God’s existence because what they are reflecting upon and writing about is deeper. For Ibn ‘Arabi and Meister Eckhart, the notion of what is meant by “God” is thoroughly dialectical. In Existence 95 their way of thinking, “God” cannot be the “object” of any proof—indeed, God cannot be an object of any sort...