In my previous planned and on-topic post, the “Where We Are Coming from and Where We Are Going to: 6” of August 23, I distinguished between two distinct, as I was then thinking, understandings, of the nature of God, the human, and the relation of the human to God, as two distinct potential metaphysical foundations for gnosticism.
One of the two understandings, I said, is contained in the thesis that I have identified (in the June 28th, 2009, post, “Nasr’s Gnosis and ‘Theomonism’”) as theomonism, the thesis that the divine being is the one and only real being. In “Where We Are Coming from and Where We Are Going to: 6” I offered the following argument against that thesis, an argument the validity of which is quite evident and the soundness of which is, if not quite as quite evident, immediately adjacent to being so.
1. If there is anything that is in any way other than the one and only divine being (if such latter there indeed is), then the one and only divine being is not the only being.
2. There is something that is in some way other than the one and only divine being (I offer my own being as evidence; you can offer yours).
3. Therefore, the one and only divine being is not the only being.
It follows that, since it is false, the thesis of theomonism cannot serve as a basis for the doctrine of gnosticism.
I closed “Where We Are Coming from and Where We Are Going to: 6” by saying that in the post that ended up being the present one I would “take a look at the other of the two distinct understandings … as a second potential metaphysical foundation for gnosticism, different [from theomonism] but also figuring prominently in The Garden of Truth.” This understanding, encapsulated in the title of today’s post, “The Mutual ‘Inness’ of the Human and the Divine,” can be put a bit more explicitly as: God is in us and we are in God.
Nasr’s statement of the thesis of the mutual “inness” of the human and the divine is contained in a sequence of three densely packed paragraphs (The Garden of Truth, pp. 5-6). In the first of these three paragraphs, we read:
[Sufism] provides, within the spiritual universe of the Islamic tradition, the light necessary to illuminate the dark corners of our soul and the keys to open the doors to the hidden recesses of our being so that we can journey within and know ourselves, this knowledge leading ultimately to the knowledge of God, who resides in our heart/center.
By journeying within ourselves, we journey to God, who resides in, and therefore is in, our “heart/center.”
The next paragraph distinguishes between the being in God which we both have eternally had and even now have and the created being which we also have now. It reads:
Not only were we created by God, but we have the root of our existence here and now in Him. When we bore witness to His Lordship as mentioned in the Quranic verse, “Am I not your Lord?” the world and all that is in it were not as yet created. Even now we have our pre-eternal existence in the Divine Presence, and we have made an eternal covenant with God, which remains valid beyond the contingencies of our earthly life and beyond the realm of space and time in which we now find ourselves.
That is, we have been and are in God.
Besides introducing two other key themes, that of a “fall” and that of our having “become forgetful beings,” the next paragraph confirms both of the beings in, ours in God (“our reality in God”) and God’s in us (“God, who resides at the depths of our being”).
The answer to the question “who are we?”is related in a principial manner to our ultimate reality in God, a reality that we have now forgotten as a result of the fall from our original and primordial state and the subsequent decay in the human condition caused by the downward flow of time. We have become forgetful beings, no longer knowing who we are and therefore what our purpose is in this life. But our reality in God, who resides at the depths of our being, is still there. We need to awaken to this reality and to realize our true identity, that is, to know who we really are.
Now to the point of the present post and the reason why I have had second thoughts about holding that the thesis of the mutual “inness” is distinct from that of theomonism: if by “in” is meant “entirely in” and if the sense in which the one is in the other is the same as the sense in which the other is in the one, then if there is an existent a and an existent b such that a is in b and b is in a, then a and b must be at least co-extensive. And the thesis that the human, in its true identity, is at least co-extensive with the divine is consistent with, indeed implied by, the theomonist thesis.
It seems to me that both the theomonist thesis that only the divine is real and thus that, if we are real, we are identical with the divine and the thesis of mutual “inness,” such that we and God are at least co-extensive, provide all too simple answers to the question of how humans can enjoy an immediate and direct knowledge of the divine, the “beatific vision,” in this life. If identity or co-extensiveness were sufficient conditions of knowledge, then the coffee cup to which I have turned so frequently this morning would know itself.
In the next planned and on-topic post, I will have something to say about the “fall” and our having “become forgetful beings” that Nasr speaks about.
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The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition
