Ahanu
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Continued from above:
The two human subjects, the outward or empirical and the inward or intellective,correspond analogically to the two aspects of the Divine Subject, the ontological or personal and the supra-ontological or impersonal; in man, as in divinis, duality is perceptible, or is actualized, only in relation to the element Mâyâ. (In Sufism, the key-notion of Mâyâ is expressed through the terms hijâb, “veil”, and tajallî, “unveiling” or“revelation”.)
Or again, to return to the ternary corpus, anima, spiritus: these three subjectivities respectively reflect the three hypostases—if indeed this term applies here—Existence, Being, Beyond-Being; just as God is not “absolutely Absolute” except as Beyond-Being, so man is not absolutely himself except in the Intellect; whereas the empirical ego nourishes itself with phenomena, the intellective ego burns them and tends toward the Essence.
There could never be any symmetry between the relative and the Absolute; as a result, if there is clearly no such thing as the absolutely relative, there is nonetheless a “relatively absolute”, and this is Being as creator, revealer, and saviour, who is absolute for the world, but not for the Essence: “Beyond-Being” or “Non-Being”.
If God were the Absolute in every respect and without any hypostatic restriction, there could be no contact between Him and the world, and the world would not even exist; for in order to be able to create, speak, and act, it is necessary that God Himself make Himself “world” in some fashion, and He does so through the ontological self-limitation that gives rise to the “personal God”, the world itself being the most extreme and hence the most relative of self-limitations. Pantheism would be right in its own way if it could restrict itself to this aspect without denying transcendence.
This point is telling for me (bold emphasis mine), and highlights a significant 'metaphysical error' or 'limitation' with regard to Christian doctrine and the Abrahamic Traditions generally.
In the face of the paradoxical complexity of the metaphysical Real, the situation of theologies can be summarized as follows: first of all, there is the axiom that God is theAbsolute since nothing can be greater than He; next, there is the logical evidence that there is in God something relative; finally, the conclusion is drawn that since God is the Absolute, what is relative in appearance cannot be other than absolute; the fact that this is contrary to logic proves that logic cannot reach God, who is “mystery” (Christianity) and who “does as He wills” (Islam). Now we have seen that the solution of the problem rests upon two points: objectively, the Absolute is susceptible of gradation, unless one wishes to cease discussing it; subjectively, it is not logic that is at fault, but the opacity of our axioms and the rigidity of our reasonings. Certainly, God “does as He wills”, but that is because we cannot discern all of His motives on the phenomenal plane; certainly, He is a“mystery”, but this is because of the inexhaustibility of His Subjectivity, the only one that is, in the last analysis, and that becomes clear to us only inasmuch as it whelms us in its light.
Schuon makes a distinction between the absolutely Absolute (Beyond-Being) and the relatively Absolute (Being, the Creator God). For him creation is seen as a result of God making Himself "world" through self-limitation. This implies the Absolute cannot interact without restricting itself. We are leaving the doors flung wide open for God's incarnation now.
What would Shaykh Ahmad have to say about this? Based on the little I have read, Schuon's idea of the world as a limitation of the Absolute might be seen as similar to the concept of "tashkīk" (gradation of being) by Mulla Sadra. Shaykh Ahmad rejects this concept, arguing it ultimately leads to panentheism (God in everything) or pantheism (God is everything). This creates difficulties when applied to God because it risks the difficulty of not seeing any line between God and creation.
For Shaykh Ahmad there's no need for self-limitation for God to create since creation exists as a separate realm within the divine act. While creation is a separate realm, it reflects God's actions and names. Through this God interacts with creation and sustains it. Think about the sun and its rays. The sun remains separate, but its light interacts with the world. Schuon might argue that even God's actions and names, if interacting with creation, suggest a limitation on the absolute transcendence of the absolutely Absolute. This is where Shaykh Ahmad's universes of discourse come in.
Schuon's view operates within a single universe of discourse where absolute transcendence seems incompatible with creation. Shaykh Ahmad's topos of cognizance allows for a transcendent unity where God encompasses both aspects without any self-limitation. For example, "God is Near and Not Near" can be true simultaneously. For proof of this type of discourse, one can look at the world of mathematics.
"In mathematical objective logic (category theory) it is well known that the law of excluded middle (“Either A is the case or not-A is the case”) does not generally hold in a mathematical topos. Furthermore, in a universe fundamentally characterized by continuity, not discontinuity, it is also the case that the law of excluded middle does not hold. Contradictory opposites are not always jointly exhaustive. It is actually amazing that the existential Illuminationists did not discover this, given the continuous-field nature of their ontology of existence. Furthermore, there are also universes of discourse (in the context of formal systems of logic) where some contradictions can be true."
In short, the Qur'an refutes Schuon by simply stating "It begets not, nor is it begotten" (Q 112.3). This aligns with God's essence being "utterly sanctified from any attribute of causation," to use the words of the Bab, so the Qur'an, Shaykh Ahmad, and the Bab contradict Schuon's idea of the relatively Absolute God as the direct cause of creation. The Bab states that "He has fashioned the Will from nothingness, through Itself, and ordained it to be the Cause of all that is other than It." This suggests God doesn't need to limit himself to create. He creates through his will, which acts as a separate cause.
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