Mullā Ṣadrā’s Arrivers in the Heart (al-Wāridāt al-Qalbiyya)

It is increasingly difficult after Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) to differentiate the aims of the Sufis from those of the philosophers. Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) offers a fine example of a thinker who synthesized the Sufi and philosophical methodologies in his voluminous writings. In Arrivers in the Heart he combines the precision of philosophical reasoning with the recognition (maʿrifa) of God and self that was central to the concerns of the Sufi teachers. In forty “effusions” (fayḍ) of mostly rhymed prose, he provides epitomes of many of the themes that he addresses in his long books. These include the concept and reality of existence, the Divine Essence and Attributes, God’s omniscience, theodicy, eschatology, the worlds of the cosmos, spiritual psychology, divine and human love, disciplining the soul, and the nature of human perfection.

“And We Shall See Him Face to Face”: A Trinitarian Analysis of the Beatific Vision

A traditional account of the beatific vision has focused attention on our vision of the divine essence. However, little attention has been paid to the trinitarian aspects of the vision. This article proposes a trinitarian account of the beatific vision drawing on the work of Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran and the so-called four-point hypothesis. It concludes that, so conceived, the beatific vision is analogous to an exchange of wedding vows.

İSKÂT-I İZÂFÂT TEVHÎDİ-II

“At-tawheedu isqāt al-idhāfāt”, which is a definition of tawheed, that states “tawheed is to deny the attributes” is a concept of tawheed belonging to high mysticism. One of the evaluations made about the tawheed of “isqāt al-idhāfāt” attributed to Junaid Baghdadi, is that it is the tawheed of true tawheed and havâssu'l-havâss. Isqāt al-idhāfāt tawheed is also presented as a benchmark, which is an important criterion of true tawheed in sufi literature. The fact that havâssu'l-havâss is a definition of tawheed is sufficient evidence to express its difficulty. It is for this reason that it is said that “ isqāt al-idhāfāt, which is the perfection of tawheed, is one of the intensified and difficult tasks of arbāb-i tahqīq”. When the isqāt al-idhāfāt tawheed is evaluated within the framework of the Sunni mysticism and unity of existing paradigms, some interpretation differences arise. This definition of tawheed has been mentioned a lot in the verse and prose texts of classical Turkish literature. When isqāt al-idhāfāt tawheed, (which has different interpretations), is used for human beings and other creatures, it does not give a real effect to bad thoughts, causes, and reduces the existence of creatures to the level of imagination and does not give them the rank of real existence (wujud-u-genuki); When used for the divine essence, it is based on the concept of Ahadiyet. As far as it is known, Farid al-Din Attar was the first person to use the term “isqāt al-idhāfāt” in poetry. Attar uses the term isqāt al-idhāfāt in Asrār-nāmeh's tawheed ode with the phrase “که التوحید اسقاط الإضافات / Ki al-tawheedu isqāt al-idhāfāt”. This usage has been quoted by both Persian literature poets and classical Turkish literature poets. The concepts of tajrīd, tefrīd, abandonment and unity of tawheed-i misākī have a very close connection with the concept of isqāt al-idhāfāt. Key Words: Tawheed (Monotheism), Tajrīd, Oneness, Abandoning, Ahadiyet

Divine Revelation in Islam

The paramount form of divine revelation (waḥy) in Islam is the Qur’ān. Appropriate investigations show that revelation in Islam is onto-theological, and it is closely tied to the manifold modes of addressing the connection and distinction between the divine essence and its attributes (al-dhāt wa’l-ṣifāt). Such onto-theology is mediated via variegated methods of literal exegesis (tafsīr) and allegorical hermeneutics (ta’wīl) of Scripture, as impacted by the reception and assimilation of inherited narrations about the Prophetic sayings (ḥadīth) and biography (sīra) in relegated traditions, and as these were oriented by various theories and manners of praxis in jurisprudence, theology, mysticism, and philosophy. The approach to the question of revelation is, moreover, set within experiential and situated realms of concrete everydayness, which evoke various emotive dispositions in mood and affective comportments on the part of a Muslim believer (mu’min) in the confessional public expression of faith. This state of affairs is underpinned by a sense in which Islam is pictured as being a unified corpus by its majoritarian orthodoxy, with what this entails in terms of doctrinal leanings, and modes of quotidian social interactions, as guided or dictated by legal and jurisprudential frameworks, which are themselves grounded on differential modes of interpreting Scripture. Revelation is as such a phenomenon that can be grasped through the prism and perspective from within which Scripture is disclosed in terms of accrued doctrinal leanings and sectarian traditions, which historically constituted the diverse aspects of the credal understanding of the Islamic pluralist corpus.

The Mystical

The question of whether Dante was a mystic depends very much on one’s understanding of mysticism. Making use of a broad conception of mysticism as the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the life-transforming effect of an immediate consciousness of God, this chapter argues that Dante can be seen as a mystic. In the Letter to Cangrande Dante claims that he wrote the Paradiso on the basis of an ineffable vision of the divine essence similar to that of the rapture of the Apostle Paul. An analysis of key sections of the Commedia, especially in the Paradiso, bears out this claim and shows that the poet makes use of many of the major themes of mysticism (purification, the relation of knowing and loving, vision, union, etc.) in crafting the great work that was designed to help lead humans from the misery of sin to the state of blessedness.

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ПОНЯТИЯ «СОЦИУМ» В РУССКОЙ ЖИВОПИСИ БЫТОВОГО ЖАНРА XIX ВЕКА

The aim of the study is to reveal the ways of representing the concept of “society” in the works of the genre art in the Russian painting of the 1860-1870s. The research is carried out using the method of philosophical and art history analysis of works of fine art. The main object of the study is the painting “Rural procession on Easter” by Vasiliy G. Perov. The study describes the specific features of the genre art in the Russian painting of the 19th century. The research shows how works of the genre art realize their didactive and educating functions. A theoretical analysis of the concepts of “everyday life”, “being”, “society” made it possible to conclude how genre painting of the 19th century models both an ideal person who is in co-existence with the absolute spirit, and a person who is far from the ideal. In the research the authors reveal two worldview models that developed in Russian painting in the 1860-1870s: a model of a perfect human being and a model of a person who is mired in everyday life. The study proves that the latter human model is represented in index signs of characters that worship only material values. The study investigates the versatility of the pictorial model of the Russian society, represented not only as a community absorbed in the routine of the everyday life, but also as a group of people whose life is elevated upwards to the true existence. The research has resulted in the typology of characters of paintings of the genre art, where the type of the character depends on the model of the society represented by the work of art. In its conclusion the study discloses two models of representing the society in Russian painting of the genre art in the 19th century. According to the first model, the everyday principle acts as an absorber of being. The second model represents a society in which everyday life manifests true existence, in harmony with nature and filled with the divine essence.

Walter Burley on divine Ideas

This paper focuses on the theory of divine ideas of Walter Burley (1275-1347). The medieval common theory of divine ideas, developed by Augustine, was intended to provide an answer to the question of the order and intelligibility of the world. The world is rationally organized since God created it according to the models existing eternally in his mind. Augustine's theory, however, left open problems such as reconciling the principle of God's unity with the plurality of ideas, the way in which ideas can or cannot be said to be eternal, their ontological status. Medieval authors discussed such questions until at least the late 14th century. By resorting to the semantic tool of connotation, Burley explains both in what way ‘idea' can signify the divine essence as much as the creatures (thereby reconciling the principle of God's unity with the multiplicity of ideas), and in what sense we can say that God has thought them from eternity, without slipping into a necessitarian view that undermines the principle of divine freedom. Moreover, by envisaging the objective mode of being as the only mode of being of ideas, he explains in what way they truly differ from one another on the basis of their different conceptual contents

A Multi-Perspective Approach to “Spiritual India”

The fundamental idea of all Indian philosophy is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is a being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life, and body there is a spirit and self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme absolute originating and supporting all that is transient, a one eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original, and sempiternal divinity or divine essence, consciousness, force, and bliss is the fount and continent and inhabitant of things. Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware eternity and this conscious eternal. But this truth of being was not seized by the Indian mind only as a philosophical speculation, a theological dogma, an abstraction contemplated by the intelligence. This chapter indicates the central characteristics of Indian culture as it has grown from its beginning to its present positions.