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The
Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer (continued)
The word ‘knowledge’,
as applied to the finite ego, always means discursive knowledge - a temporal
process which moves round a veritable ‘other’, supposed to exist per
se and confronting the knowing ego. In this sense knowledge, even if we
extend it to the point of omniscience, must always remain relative to its confronting
‘other’, and cannot, therefore, be predicated of the Ultimate Ego
who, being all-inclusive, cannot be conceived as having a perspective like the
finite ego. The universe, as we have seen before, is not an ‘other’
existing per se in opposition to God. It is only when we look at the
act of creation as a specific event in the life-history of God that the universe
appears as an independent ‘other’. From the standpoint of the all-inclusive
Ego there is no ‘other’. In Him thought and deed, the act of knowing
and the act of creating, are identical. It may be argued that the ego, whether
finite or infinite, is inconceivable without a confronting non-ego, and if there
is nothing outside the Ultimate Ego, the Ultimate Ego cannot be conceived as
an ego. The answer to this argument is that logical negations are of no use
in forming a positive concept which must be based on the character of Reality
as revealed in experience. Our criticism of experience reveals the Ultimate
Reality to be a rationally directed life which, in view of our experience of
life, cannot be conceived except as an organic whole, a something closely knit
together and possessing a central point of reference.39 This being
the character of life, the ultimate life can be conceived only as an ego. Knowledge,
in the sense of discursive knowledge, however infinite, cannot, therefore, be
predicated of an ego who knows, and, at the same time, forms the ground of the
object known. Unfortunately, language does not help us here. We possess no word
to express the kind of knowledge which is also creative of its object. The alternative
concept of Divine knowledge is omniscience in the sense of a single indivisible
act of perception which makes God immediately aware of the entire sweep of history,
regarded as an order of specific events, in an eternal ‘now’. This
is how Jal«luddân Daw«nâ, ‘Ir«qâ, and Professor Royce in our own times
conceived God’s knowledge.40 There is an element of truth in
this conception. But it suggests a closed universe, a fixed futurity, a predetermined,
unalterable order of specific events which, like a superior fate, has once for
all determined the directions of God’s creative activity. In fact, Divine
knowledge regarded as a kind of passive omniscience is nothing more than the
inert void of pre-Einsteinian physics, which confers a semblance of unity on
things by holding them together, a sort of mirror passively reflecting the details
of an already finished structure of things which the finite consciousness reflects
in fragments only. Divine knowledge must be conceived as a living creative activity
to which the objects that appear to exist in their own right are organically
related. By conceiving God’s knowledge as a kind of reflecting mirror,
we no doubt save His fore-knowledge of future events; but it is obvious that
we do so at the expense of His freedom. The future certainly pre-exists in the
organic whole of God’s creative life, but it pre-exists as an open possibility,
not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines. An illustration will
perhaps help us in understanding what I mean. Suppose, as sometimes happens
in the history of human thought, a fruitful idea with a great inner wealth of
applications emerges into the light of your consciousness. You are immediately
aware of the idea as a complex whole; but the intellectual working out of its
numerous bearings is a matter of time. Intuitively all the possibilities of
the idea are present in your mind. If a specific possibility, as such, is not
intellectually known to you at a certain moment of time, it is not because your
knowledge is defective, but because there is yet no possibility to become known.
The idea reveals the possibilities of its application with advancing experience,
and sometimes it takes more than one generation of thinkers before these possibilities
are exhausted. Nor is it possible, on the view of Divine knowledge as a kind
of passive omniscience, to reach the idea of a creator. If history is regarded
merely as a gradually revealed photo of a predetermined order of events, then
there is no room in it for novelty and initiation. Consequently, we can attach
no meaning to the word ‘creation’, which has a meaning for us only
in view of our own capacity for original action. The truth is that the whole
theological controversy relating to predestination is due to pure speculation
with no eye on the spontaneity of life, which is a fact of actual experience.
No doubt, the emergence of egos endowed with the power of spontaneous and hence
unforeseeable action is, in a sense, a limitation on the freedom of the all-inclusive
Ego. But this limitation is not externally imposed. It is born out of His own
creative freedom whereby He has chosen finite egos to be participators of His
life, power, and freedom.
But how, it may be asked,
is it possible to reconcile limitation with Omnipotence? The word ‘limitation’
need not frighten us. The Qur’«n has no liking for abstract universals.
It always fixes its gaze on the concrete which the theory of Relativity has
only recently taught modern philosophy to see. All activity, creational or otherwise,
is a kind of limitation without which it is impossible to conceive God as a
concrete operative Ego. Omnipotence, abstractly conceived, is merely a blind,
capricious power without limits. The Qur’«n has a clear and definite conception
of Nature as a cosmos of mutually related forces.41 It, therefore,
views Divine omnipotence as intimately related to Divine wisdom, and finds the
infinite power of God revealed, not in the arbitrary and the capricious, but
in the recurrent, the regular, and the orderly. At the same time, the Qur’«n
conceives God as ‘holding all goodness in His hands’.42
If, then, the rationally directed Divine will is good, a very serious problem
arises. The course of evolution, as revealed by modern science, involves almost
universal suffering and wrongdoing. No doubt, wrongdoing is confined to man
only. But the fact of pain is almost universal, thought it is equally true that
men can suffer and have suffered the most excruciating pain for the sake of
what they have believed to be good. Thus the two facts of moral and physical
evil stand out prominent in the life of Nature. Nor can the relativity of evil
and the presence of forces that tend to transmute it be a source of consolation
to us; for, in spite of all this relativity and transmutation, there is something
terribly positive about it. How is it, then, possible to reconcile the goodness
and omnipotence of God with the immense volume of evil in His creation? This
painful problem is really the crux of Theism. No modern writer has put it more
accurately than Naumann in his Briefe Ü ber Religion. ‘We possess’,
he says:
‘a knowledge of the
world which teaches us a God of power and strength, who sends out life and death
as simultaneously as shadow and light, and a revelation, a faith as to salvation
which declares the same God to be father. The following of the world-God produces
the morality of the struggle for existence, and the service of the Father of
Jesus Christ produces the morality of compassion. And yet they are not two gods,
but one God. Somehow or other, their arms intertwine. Only no mortal can say
where and how this occurs.’43
To the optimist Browning
all is well with the world;44 to the pessimist Schopenhauer the world
is one perpetual winter wherein a blind will expresses itself in an infinite
variety of living things which bemoan their emergence for a moment and then
disappear for ever.45 The issue thus raised between optimism and
pessimism cannot be finally decided at the present stage of our knowledge of
the universe. Our intellectual constitution is such that we can take only a
piecemeal view of things. We cannot understand the full import of the great
cosmic forces which work havoc, and at the same time sustain and amplify life.
The teaching of the Qur’«n, which believes in the possibility of improvement
in the behaviour of man and his control over natural forces, is neither optimism
nor pessimism. It is meliorism, which recognizes a growing universe and is animated
by the hope of man’s eventual victory over evil.
But the clue to a better
understanding of our difficulty is given in the legend relating to what is called
the Fall of Man. In this legend the Qur’«n partly retains the ancient symbols,
but the legend is materially transformed with a view to put an entirely fresh
meaning into it. The Quranic method of complete or partial transformation of
legends in order to besoul them with new ideas, and thus to adapt them to the
advancing spirit of time, is an important point which has nearly always been
overlooked both by Muslim and non-Muslim students of Islam. The object of the
Qur’«n in dealing with these legends is seldom historical; it nearly always
aims at giving them a universal moral or philosophical import. And it achieves
this object by omitting the names of persons and localities which tend to limit
the meaning of a legend by giving it the colour of a specific historical event,
and also by deleting details which appear to belong to a different order of
feeling. This is not an uncommon method of dealing with legends. It is common
in non-religious literature. An instance in point is the legend of Faust,46
to which the touch of Goethe’s genius has given a wholly new meaning.
Turning to the legend of
the Fall we find it in a variety of forms in the literatures of the ancient
world. It is, indeed, impossible to demarcate the stages of its growth, and
to set out clearly the various human motives which must have worked in its slow
transformation. But confining ourselves to the Semitic form of the myth, it
is highly probable that it arose out of the primitive man’s desire to explain
to himself the infinite misery of his plight in an uncongenial environment,
which abounded in disease and death and obstructed him on all sides in his endeavour
to maintain himself. Having no control over the forces of Nature, a pessimistic
view of life was perfectly natural to him. Thus, in an old Babylonian inscription,
we find the serpent (phallic symbol), the tree, and the woman offering an apple
(symbol of virginity) to the man. The meaning of the myth is clear - the fall
of man from a supposed state of bliss was due to the original sexual act of
the human pair. The way in which the Qur’«n handles this legend becomes
clear when we compare it with the narration of the Book of Genesis.47
The remarkable points of difference between the Quranic and the Biblical narrations
suggest unmistakably the purpose of the Quranic narration.
1. The Qur’«n omits
the serpent and the rib-story altogether. The former omission is obviously meant
to free the story from its phallic setting and its original suggestion of a
pessimistic view of life. The latter omission is meant to suggest that the purpose
of the Quranic narration is not historical, as in the case of the Old Testament,
which gives us an account of the origin of the first human pair by way of a
prelude to the history of Israel. Indeed, in the verses which deal with the
origin of man as a living being, the Qur’«n uses the words Bashar
or Ins«n, not ÿdam, which it reserves for man in his capacity of God’s
vicegerent on earth.48 The purpose of the Qur’«n is further
secured by the omission of proper names mentioned in the Biblical narration
- Adam and Eve.49 The word Adam is retained and used more as a concept
than as the name of a concrete human individual. This use of the word is not
without authority in the Qur’«n itself. The following verse is clear on
the point:
‘We created you; then
fashioned you; then said We to the angels, "prostrate yourself unto Adam"
(7:11).
2. The Qur’«n splits
up the legend into two distinct episodes– the one relating to what it describes
simply as ‘the tree’50 and the other relating to the ‘tree
of eternity’ and the ‘kingdom that faileth not’.51
The first episode is mentioned in the 7th and the second in the 20th Sërah of
the Qur’«n. According to the Qur’«n, Adam and his wife, led astray
by Satan whose function is to create doubts in the minds of men, tasted the
fruit of both the trees, whereas according to the Old Testament man was driven
out of the Garden of Eden immediately after his first act of disobedience, and
God placed, at the eastern side of the garden, angels and a flaming sword, turning
on all sides, to keep the way to the tree of life.52
3. The Old Testament curses
the earth for Adam’s act of disobedience;53 the Qur’«n
declares the earth to be the ‘dwelling place’ of man and a ‘source
of profit’ to him54 for the possession of which he ought to
be grateful to God. ‘And We have established you on the earth and given
you therein the supports of life. How little do ye give thanks!’ (7:10).55
Nor is there any reason to suppose that the word Jannat (Garden) as used
here means the supersensual paradise from which man is supposed to have fallen
on this earth. According to the Qur’«n, man is not a stranger on this earth.
‘And We have caused you to grow from the earth’, says the Qur’«n.56
The Jannat, mentioned in the legend, cannot mean the eternal abode of
the righteous. In the sense of the eternal abode of the righteous, Jannat
is described by the Qur’«n to be the place ‘wherein the righteous
will pass to one another the cup which shall engender no light discourse, no
motive to sin’.57 It is further described to be the place ‘wherein
no weariness shall reach the righteous, nor forth from it shall they be cast’.58
In the Jannat mentioned in the legend, however, the very first event
that took place was man’s sin of disobedience followed by his expulsion.
In fact, the Qur’«n itself explains the meaning of the word as used in
its own narration. In the second episode of the legend the garden is described
as a place ‘where there is neither hunger, nor thirst, neither heat nor
nakedness’.59 I am, therefore, inclined to think that the Jannat
in the Quranic narration is the conception of a primitive state in which man
is practically unrelated to his environment and consequently does not feel the
sting of human wants the birth of which alone marks the beginning of human culture.
Thus we see that the Quranic
legend of the Fall has nothing to do with the first appearance of man on this
planet. Its purpose is rather to indicate man’s rise from a primitive state
of instinctive appetite to the conscious possession of a free self, capable
of doubt and disobedience. The Fall does not mean any moral depravity; it is
man’s transition from simple consciousness to the first flash of self-consciousness,
a kind of waking from the dream of nature with a throb of personal causality
in one’s own being. Nor does the Qur’«n regard the earth as a torture-hall
where an elementally wicked humanity is imprisoned for an original act of sin.
Man’s first act of disobedience was also his first act of free choice;
and that is why, according to the Quranic narration, Adam’s first transgression
was forgiven.60 Now goodness is not a matter of compulsion; it is
the self’s free surrender to the moral ideal and arises out of a willing
co-operation of free egos. A being whose movements are wholly determined like
a machine cannot produce goodness. Freedom is thus a condition of goodness.
But to permit the emergence of a finite ego who has the power to choose, after
considering the relative values of several courses of action open to him, is
really to take a great risk; for the freedom to choose good involves also the
freedom to choose what is the opposite of good. That God has taken this risk
shows His immense faith in man; it is for man now to justify this faith. Perhaps
such a risk alone makes it possible to test and develop the potentialities of
a being who was created of the ‘goodliest fabric’ and then ‘brought
down to be the lowest of the low’.61 As the Qur’«n says:
‘And for trial will We test you with evil and with good’ (21:35).62
Good and evil, therefore, though opposites, must fall within the same whole.
There is no such thing as an isolated fact; for facts are systematic wholes
the elements of which must be understood by mutual reference. Logical judgement
separates the elements of a fact only to reveal their interdependence.
Page [1,
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[See
Notes]
Date/Time Last Modified: 6/18/2002 8:03:17 AM
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