Where Reason Stops and the Heart Begins

Ibn Arabi takes serious issue with reason as the vehicle of engaging with and understanding the divine Law. This presents a central threat to Al-Farabi’s political program that takes God as Nous, the divine Law of the polis to be ordered in view of what is rational and defines freedom as the rational autonomy of citizens. For Ibn Arabi however, reason is an “affliction” God has tested humans with, that has afforded them the capacity of “felicity or wretchedness”, as opposed to revealed divine Law which is removed from error (206). Ibn Arabi clarifies that the real danger of reason is in the “strangest error which has appeared on Earth”, the error being subordinating the intellect to its faculty of reason. The intellect in itself is a center of judgment for Ibn Arabi, a “force without limits” infinitely receptive to instruction. Once it castrates itself in subordination to the conclusions of its rational faculty, however, the intellect becomes enchained. Freedom from its rational faculty reorients the intellect towards a different source of knowledge, the Heart (269). This practice of re-orienting the intellect towards the knowledge of the heat is a “long journey”, in which a knower tastes “anew at each moment” and acknowledges that Truth will never be attained as an end in-itself, for “knowledge has neither limit nor end” (278).

Nevertheless, Muslim scholars of Sufism and philosophy have often noted the remarkable similarities and imagined agreements between Ibn Arabi’s works, and Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and even Zoroastrianism (207). Ibn Arabi acknowledges the works of philosophers and the outcomes of their rational inquiries as fruitful even if uttered by a philosopher with “no religion” (208). Rather Ibn Arabi views reason as “limited”, affording the likes of philosophers, the Mu’tazilites and Ash’arites partial knowledge of God that is correct in some cases, and contradictory to revealed Prophecy in others. While non-muslim scholars have sometimes presented Ibn Arabi as a philosopher in his own right, his methods of inquiry differed greatly from what most would consider philosophical methods. Traditional philosophy relies on the rational intellect (‘aql) and logic (mantiq), Ibn Arabi’s wisdom and knowledge rises from “divine effusion” (al-fayd al-ilâhî) and unveilings (futûhat). Ibn Arabi opposed reason or dialectics as the first tool of inquiry, rather than disavowing it completely to non-sufis (). Rather, direct experience, rightly aimed intuitions developed through the proper akhlaq, or character of Heart, was more adequate for determining the divine Law. The experience of the unicity that occurs in the natural world can hardly be constructed or initiated by ways of reason or dialectic without fragmenting the unity of the Truth that occurs naturally beyond the intellect. For those reasons, the rational tools of humankind remain great tools for transcribing, reconstructing or mapping out the experience of the Living Spirit, or the narrative contents of the divine Law. The intellect then, becomes a necessary bridge between Sufis and Non-Sufis, or a person’s understanding of the divine Law and the will the communicate it. The Sufis often describe the heart as drunkenness (sukr) and the intellect as lucidity. In order to produce knowledge acceptable by the law and “accessible to reason”, what is experienced in the heart must be digested, investigated and translated by the intellect (279).

Unlike the knowledge of animals which Arabi takes to be instinctive, the knowledge of humans must be acquired (266). The intellect in Arabi’s view is void of any substance or knowledge, its simple nature allows it only to direct its awareness, and affirm or deny the information each of the faculties supplies it. This center of judgment oversees the operations of each of the interdependent faculties (quwaa) available to it: reason, imagination, representation, memory, and the senses. In this respective order of dependability, each of the faculties, with reason atop the hierarchy and the senses at the bottom, is dependent on the operations of the faculties below it. While reason is dependent on the materials originally supplied to it by the senses, the senses require no other faculty to produce impressions of the world (267) In Ibn Arabi’s Illuminations he states that none of the five faculties are capable of apprehending God directly. The senses don’t register God empirically, the imagination cannot construct a model based on what its ill-equipped “senses relay to it.” The faculty of reason (quwwa mufakkira) can’t reflect on things it neither has a relation to nor can be found within itself. Reflective knowledge of the Real that stands apart from empirical reality is impossible if there exists “no relation between God and His creatures.” That relation in ‘Arabi divine effusion exists by means of Spirit, while for Al-Farabi this function is fulfilled by the Active Intellect. Our memories for Arabi, can’t recall the Face of God after they have been enjoined with a body. As a result, without a “mix of religious matter”, thoughts and intellect that departs from an already revealed text, Ibn Arabi takes reason to be inadequate in supplying direct knowledge of God (268). In this sense, Ibn Arabi limits the capacities of the rational intellect to “knowledge of the existence of God, knowledge of His Unicity, and knowledge of what is obligatory” (268). Ibn Arabi concludes that a follower of the Path of the divine Law must abandon reason as the source of knowledge for the intellect when it comes to divine matters (269). 

As an alternative to reason, Ibn Arabi describes a different process of knowledge acquisition led by the heart. The Heart is described as a barzakh, a “link, bridge or isthmus” (Murata 1992, 310), a formless form, or a living void, this barzakh is used to describe different spaces of in-betweenness that Chittick describes as the space that “stands between and separates two other things yet combines the attributes of both” (1989,14). Every open Heart, through the barzakh, “encompasses the Real” for ‘Arabi ([fusūs] 125). This emptiness is where our being is enjoined with a substrate of Spirit that connects all Hearts to one another, and to the Light of the Real’s self-disclosure in material reality. The barzakh is also used to describe the middle ground between existence and non-existence, between life and death where each soul is instructed of the world to come and of “each kind of form” that we will come to experience in our lives (102). While this void at the center of every Heart seems empty at first glance, Ibn ‘Arabi assures that with sufficient patience, and love, we realize that this emptiness is in fact “like openings in the covering of the lamp of Being” as Mahumud Shabistari puts it. Through them, our Heart lets through the Light of Reality just as it lets through the Love of Friends, this void not only allows us to connect to all other living hearts through this medium of loving spirit, but it is also the birthplace of reality in Ibn Arabi’s cosmology.  

This process of refining the Heart to better reflect or let through the Light of the Real, involves cultivating a perceptive attitude, towards the Beloved, and requires the development of “all Sufi qualities, from patience (sabr) to love (mahabba)” as well as detachment and hope (277). This process is a transformation, or more aptly a reorientation of our cognitive faculties towards the mandates of the heart rather than reason (264-265). Traditionally, the five faculties serve the intellect. Ibn Arabi’s conception of positive freedom, if he were to have formulated one as the Falasifa did in the form of rational autonomy through pedagogical-political programs, would instead have been aimed at developing the polity’s capacity to investigate and interact with creation with Love. In Arabi’s epistemology as Souad Hakim the translator of this excerpt put it, action is changed into knowledge, devotion into understanding, and the logic of the intellect is substituted for the “logic of the heart” (265). Both Al-Farabi and Ibn Arabi’s legislators are charged with the purpose of seeking “the face of God” (87). The face of God for the Falasifa, however, is taken to mean the rational order that structures the cosmos. For Ibn Arabi, this means seeking the self-disclosure of the governing spirit that breathes material creation into life, out in the world (105). All living beings, even material artifacts retain a “form of life” in that their very existence (wujûd) participates in the self-disclosures (tajallî) and glorification of God. Not only do mountains and rivers, rocks, and bronze statues contain a form of life, but they also benefit from the attributes “intrinsic to existence”, they are knowing and desiring of God (94). A person who embarks on the spiritual path of the divine Law “perceives the intrinsic [and divine] life which is found in all bodies” rather than only bodies filled with a rational soul. The primary difference between these two faces, is that God is not only an underlying principle of the geometry or harmony in the Ibn Arabi’s experience of the world, but also an active and Loving participant in the productivity of nature and the internal and social lives of its inhabitants. The goal of Ibn Arabi’s interpretation of the divine Law is to facilitate the path that leads inhabitants to the experience of this loving Spirit in all other living beings and existents. God, the spirit of the cosmos, is, whether we are aware of the origin of the life force animating us or not, the hearing and sight of the cosmos, and ours. When a servant recognizes the spirit animating them and their faculties as the very same spirit animating the cosmos, this station of consciousness is reached.

 Much like Plato’s reservations in his 7th Letter against the immediate apperception of the divine principles as opposed to the arduous labor of familiarizing one’self with these principles, Arabi understands knowledge acquired through struggle to be more dependable; the struggle however is a spiritual one as opposed to a reflective labor. While both inquirers might reach the same understanding, ‘Arabi affords the knower through spiritual struggle the added benefit of insight or foresight (basîra) and certainty (yaqeen). This 'yaqeen' is a peculiar concept, because it implies that the knowledge gained is not a concept one can cognize as an intelligible that is hovering on a Platonic plane distinct from sensory reality, but rather it becomes an integral aspect of how a knower engages and experiences reality with the certainty of this or that divine principle as existent independently of a knower's current acknowledgment or conceptualization of the concept (210). Reason for Arabi is ill-equipped to provide such certainty. Ibn Arab notes that some travelers “reach the Reality in the first step” of the Sharia’s path, the objective of the path, however, is to see the Reality, God, in all the facets and inhabitants of creation. The means through which you reach the Light, will determine how long you'll allow yourself to experience the Light of Reality. The highest form of knowledge acquisition for Arabi comes through refined akhlaq and taqwa, or ‘God-fearing’. Akhlaq, the internal harmony and character of a believer, and taqwa are crucial in a Sufi’s spiritual development; without them and the right practices that come with them, we may get a glimpse of the Light on a drunken lull, but unless we're consciously aware of the Light, seeking it and its properties in our everyday life, of how it interacts with the cosmos, how it animates us and the world around us, the people, animals and plants in it, we'll forget the Light just as soon as it brightened our eyes. Taqwa entails surrender to the judgment and authority of God over the knowledge we encounter, whether we like the answers to this knowledge or not. This form of inquiry ensures we are discoverers of some naturally occurring truth in the Reality of God rather than manufacturers of knowledge. Consequently, this facilitates one’s experience of the divine Law’s self-disclosure in the natural world that Arabi precludes of the rationalists and the Mu’tazilites in what he takes to be their belief that “no-one can see the Real” (210). Other champions of reason such as Ibn Arabi however, maintain that the theoretical-rational faculty can receive emenations from the Real through the Active Intellect. Access to these intellectual disclosures of the Real are not as universally accessible as the self-disclosures of the Spirit Ibn Arabi grants to living beings and artifacts alike. For Al-Farabi, only true philosophers have access to what is likened to the Light of the Sun through the illumination of the material intellect into an acquired one. The “vain”, “false” or “counterfeit” philosophers on the other hand, are those that “set out to study rhe theoretical sciences without being prepared for them.” The counterfeit just as the vain philosophers complete their education in the theoretical sciences necessary to be receptive to the Light, however neglect to put their knowledge to practice, to keep it alive and gather “fruit from it.” Al-Farabi compares this incremental process of diminishment to Plato’s “extinction of the fire [sun] of Heraclitus”  ([AH] 80). Receptivity to this ‘Light of the Real’ that Al-Farabi receives from the Active Intellect and Ibn Arabi from the Governing Spirit, both require the building of practices of the mind and of the hearts, respectively to remain cognizant and in living communion with the Light.

Al-Ghorab , Mahmoud, and Michael Tiernan. “Muhyiddin Ibn Al-’Arabi Amidst Religions (Adyân) and School of Thought (Madhâhib).” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein, Element Books, pp. 199–227.

Chittick , William  C. “Two Chapters from the Futûhât Al-Makkiyya .” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein Hirtenstein, Elements Books , Longmead, Shaftesbury , 1993, pp. 90–123.

Gril , Denis, and Michael Tiernan . “Adab and Revelation or One of the Foundations of the Hermeneutics of Ibn Arabi.” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein, Elements Books , pp. 228–263.

Hakim , Souad, and Michael Tiernan . “Knowledge of God in Ibn ’Arabi .” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirteinstein, Elements Books , pp. 264–290.