My favourite kind of Islam is the Neoplatonic kind, for obvious reasons (at least if you have been following me for some time). Schuon’s version was (and still is) one of the best of monotheist Neoplatonism, at least in my opinion, and abstracted from whatever failures he undoubtedly had. However, although I had once flirted with Islam, particularly of this type, that door closed as soon as I accepted the formal framework of platonic polytheism, which is inimical to most of Islam, even more than it is to Christianity. Of the three Abrahamic religions, it is most compatible with Judaism (not that it is necessary for Jews to care either way).
However, it is in Islamic quarters that some of the most creative Islamic understandings of religious pluralism for monotheists have emerged. Corbin’s “The Paradox of Monotheism” is one such work. This is not going to be a review of it. Instead, I am using it as a touch point for many traditionalist or traditionalist-adjacent ideas about polytheism – the more positive ones – in order to untangle the core of their pluralism and will use Schuon’s own essay on a particular Sufi myth as a way to work out the implications.
I
Indeed, I have already written about the formal aspects of the untangling of even the most expansive neoplatonic perennialist pluralism I found in Schuon, and it applies to Corbin also. What I want to do is give a speculative example of the way even Islam itself can be reconfigured using this frame, using some myths. To recap, there is a contradiction within the Islamic Neoplatonism that sees Allah as “the One” or “Unity itself” as beyond even the highest being, insofar as, being prior to the negative distinction native to Being and beings, it cannot be an exclusive object:
This is quite clear in Schuon, who says that “Indeed, the 'servant' (abd) as such can never cease to be the servant; consequently he can never become the 'Lord' (Rabb). The 'servant-Lord' polarity is irreducible by its very nature”. While, as “things”, as “beings”, the “Servant” reduces to “the Lord”, insofar as that is the ontological source of his “being”, the Unity of “Beyond Being” does not reduce all things in this fashion. Indeed, for Schuon, despite the language he uses at times for symbolic purposes, “Beyond Being” is not on any hierarchy of Being or beings. That is what it means to be Beyond Being. However, the reversion and subordination of the Servant to the Lord is important in establishing the servant itself. It is such that through the subordination of the Servant ontologically, the servant’s Self is established beyond all ontological hierarchies. This is his other name for “Beyond Being”, “the Self”.
…
These implications show quite simple results: Through the reasoning of cause and effect applied to unity, we see that Cause (Unity) and Effects (Unities) are indistinguishable. They collapse into each other. The “Self” is in fact each Self, and each Self includes and is the unity of all other-selves without mediation and without sameness of identity. Unity as such is Unities as such. Because they are “Beyond Being”, they cannot reduce to the same self or be negatively distinguished. Because they are Unities, they must “contain” each other (and all the infinite Cosmoi) in the manner of Unity beyond being. In Proclus’ words, Unity and Unities are “Connascent”, thus all we ascribe to “Unity” we ascribe to each unity, including (for the more in-depth Neoplatonists reading) “imparticipability” and “ineffability”.
This shows, through Schuon, how we can derive the equivalent of Proclus’ Henads, which at least one traditionalist has unfortunately called “ad hoc”. Here, we see how the Self can name the individuality of the elements of a system inexhaustible by even the highest ontological principle of said system. Here we see how to counter Guenon’s statement that “The conception of a 'plurality of infinites' is absurd because these 'infinities' would mutually limit each other, and so in reality none of them would be infinite”. For if the first principle is above the sameness and difference of Being, then it is not beholden to that logic. Guenon, and Schuon in many places, still uncritically apply ontological logic to realities that are prior to the ontological. What is the experiential evidence for the kinds of entities we are describing here as Henads? The answer is quite simply, persons, especially divine persons, Gods. With this way of viewing “Self”, we can see Schuon’s words differently when he says “the Self has no complementary opposite; It is pure Subject, that is to say It is its own Object at once unique and infinite, and innumerable on the plane of a certain diversifying relativity.” For each Self is unique. This is not a negative uniqueness of beings qua beings, divided from each other, but the positive uniqueness of each person as the unity of all that is, including other persons. Each individual is the “singularity” from which all Being bursts forth, and within this lies the seeds of a reorganization of Schuon’s understanding of “Being” along these more “Polytheist lines”[1]
To be more explicit about this in Islam, it would mean that along Schuon’s reasoning, following it to the end, there is the possibility of a polytheist Islam, where one possible line of reasoning would lead to treating the term Allah in the same way the Greeks thought of “Theos”, as referring to any God, and the Tawhid as referring to the unity peculiar to Godhood as such. Of course, one could simply affirm that Allah is the proper name of one absolute God among many in a polycentric way, that would be an interesting tradition in its own right, but I want to retain some of the ambiguity to the name Allah that leads the perennialists to see in it a unity of Gods in their own “paradoxical fashion”.
II
Butler has some interesting comments on the demiurge and the concept of “creatureliness”:
“The causality existing between Leibniz’s God and his creatures, their “creation,” would be understood by Proclus as relationship strictly within the intellect, and hence presupposing a certain initiation. That is to say, the relationship of creature to creator has a context for Proclus whereas it is absolute for Leibniz.”[2]
This extreme positioning of the demiurge has consequences that resembles a certain dynamic in ordinary monotheist theology:
“The demiurge must not only subordinate the deities co-emergent with him – a process which would have its historical limit in the reduction of originally independent deities to the status of created beings in the service of the demiurge (a process in itself never fully completed and rife with possibilities for the reconstitution of incommensurable differences within the momentarily unified field) – but must also tame the nameless chaos that is the cacophony of the Gods of the “others” – other tribes, other nations. As much as this dynamic resembles that intolerance of difference that is such an important constituent of human evil, we must not lay upon the Gods the burden of this resemblance. Rather, it would seem as if humans err in distorting the balance between Being and the divine, devoting the whole of their power to the totalizing program of world-constitution, as if there were in them no echo of an order prior to wholes. In this, ironically, they fail in their role as parts, for a part of an infima species, had it no reference at all to a higher order, an order, namely, of the individual qua individual, could only represent with respect to the form a potentially malignant aberration.”[3]
However, it is possible to extend this dynamic to entities prior to the demiurge, particularly the First Intellective Father, insofar as this position seeks to totalize its objects, as intellect for which “the idea is inseparable from the process of its constitution; hence an age of appropriation rather than production.”[4] For my purposes however, I would like to take Allah to mean any and all Gods, and to see the way this would affect the following myth Schuon explicates in his Dimensions of Islam.
III
“According to a teaching (hadith) of the Prophet, ‘the first of the things Allah created (that is to say: the first unmanifested Reality in the Divine tendency to manifestation, or the first Divine self-determination with a view to creation) is the Pen (Qalam) which He created of Light (Nur), and which is made of white pearl; its length is equal to the distance which is between the sky and the earth (the distance which separates them, that is to say: the incommensurability between formless—or supra-formal—and formal Manifestation). Then He created the Tablet (Lawh, or Lawh al-mahfuz, the ‘‘guarded Tablet”), and it is made of white pearl, and its surfaces are of red rubies; its length is equal to the distance which is between the sky and the earth, and its width stretches from the East to the West’ (it embraces all the possibilities of Manifestation)… Another tradition, reported by Ibn Abbas, says that ‘Allah created the Pen before He created the Creation, and He was on the Throne (Allah is on the Throne since a relativity is envisaged, the Throne signifying here, not formless manifestation, but the immutable Transcendence or the incommensurable ‘discontinuity’ of the Principle in relation to Its more or less relative aspects, so that this second proposition means that the ontological Principle remains unaffected by Its bi-polarization from which cosmic manifestation will proceed);1 and the Pen looked towards Him with a look of reverential fear (haybah) and burst open; and the Ink (Midäd, which represents the initial and undifferentiated possibility of manifestation, while the Letters —Hurüf—mark its indefinite differentiation) dropped from it’. The Divine Incommensurability being mirrored in the Pen,—Its existential self-determination—the latter could not contain within the limits of its determination the incommensurability of the Divine Indetermination, and translated the latter into differentiated mode; the Ink is thus the reflection of the All- Possibility—a reflection which, as such, could correspond only to the possibility of manifestation—and it will be transmuted by the Pen into indefinitely diverse existential possibilities. The All-Possibility is the totality of the Divine Names or Mysteries, and that is also the higher meaning of the Letters, which will then be conceived as inherent either in the supreme Essence (Dhät), and so in ‘Non-Being’, or in the Qualities (Sifat), and so in Being,! without prejudice to the fact that Being is ‘one’ ad intra as well as ad extra;? it is in this sense that the higher Letters (purely principial, each being Allah, but none being the others), are ‘mirrored’ in the Pen which, ‘being made of Light’, receives their reflection and ‘bursts open’ under the ‘pressure’ (symbolized by al-haybah, ‘fear’) of their incommensurability, to transcribe them in manifested, created, ‘broken’ mode. Ibn Abbas says that ‘the Pen burst open and the Ink flows from it until the Day of the Resurrection (Yaum al-Qiyämah, that is to say so long as the cycle of universal Manifestation “endures’’); and Allah commanded the Pen: Write! And the Pen replied: Lord, what shall I write? He said: Transcribe My Science of My Creation; all that will exist until the Day of the Resurrection (the totality of the possibilities of manifestation included in the divine Omniscience)’.! According to Sa‘id ibn Mansir, ‘the first thing that the Pen wrote was: in truth My Mercy precedeth My Wrath’… The Throne (‘ Arsh), being the first ‘creation’ after the Pen and the Tablet, and therefore the manifestation of the first word which is inscribed thereon,—and which is ‘Mercy’ (Rahmah),— corresponds to what the Hindu doctrine designates by the term Buddhi, which is the first of all manifestations, namely that of Brahma affirming Himself as universal Intellect; from this is will be apparent that the Pen and the Tablet, which precede the Throne ‘by fifty thousand years’, coincide respectively with the two principles which the Hindu doctrine calls Purusha and Prakriti, the two unmanifested poles of all manifestations.”[5]
Schuon himself knows that myth should be interpreted synchronically if one is to read it as eternal divine activity, and his interpretation is interesting. To distil what I need, he seems to identify the “Throne” with the “Spirit” (Al-Ruh) and identify both with the First universal Demiurge. Following through with two commitments – Allah as any and all Gods in supra-essential unity, and a Proclean framework of ontology – the triad of Pen, Tablet, and Throne could correspond to the Proclean Intellectual Fathers. Indeed, I think it’s an easy identification to make. The Pen is a tool for whom “the idea is inseparable from the process of its constitution”[6]. The Tablet is the space of “motion and rest” in which “the development of the powers of the Gods, which now take the form of the actions and reactions of Gods upon each other constitutive of mythic narrative.”[7] For the demiurge:
“The unity which the demiurge establishes in himself (estêsen en heautô) comes from the demiurge positing himself in relation to the unique cosmos which is the product of his formative activity and the unique (monogenes) paradigm which that cosmos explicates, a relationship in which he affirms or symbolizes his unity. The demiurge is the point at which the henadic and monadic registers, registers of internal and external unity respectively, are fastened, so to speak, to one another.”[8]
What better symbol for this than a Throne? The Spirit, as activity, is indeed the seat of the God whose activity extends to matter itself, something seen in the way in which the world formed by such a God is described as being in contact with his “footstool”:
“From the Footstool ‘Glory’ and ‘Mercy’ radiate as far as the earth, ‘Mercy’ prevailing over ‘Glory’”[9]
We might go further to explicate the various Angels (Mikael, Israfil, Izrael, Jubrail) as further Gods, but that will be for another post. What I wanted to demonstrate is the possibility of such an interpretation and the question of how far one might go in such an interpretation. Of course, I cannot change Islam, and indeed, I have no desire to. I just what to give the possibilities for anyone at the edges of its mythotopoi a framework for transfiguring what they have known into something befitting their re-centering.
Hail Mary
[1] Oluwaseyi Bello, “Moving On From Schuon,” Substack newsletter, A Play of Masks (blog), August 5, 2022, https://symmetria.substack.com/p/moving-on-from-schuon.
[2] Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003), https://henadology.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/dissertation-revised-copy1.doc., Pg 321-322
[3] Butler. Pg 344. Emphasis mine.
[4] “Endymions_bower | Tweets on Poseidon, the Kyklops, et Al.,” accessed March 4, 2023, https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/47541.html.
[5] Frithjof Schuon, Dimensions of Islam, 1985.
[6] “Endymions_bower | Tweets on Poseidon, the Kyklops, et Al.”
[7] Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus.” Pg 371
[8] Butler. Pg 373.
[9] Schuon, Dimensions of Islam. Pg 109.
This is so interesting and timely for me, as a Platonist who's invested in both polytheism and Sufism and a little conflicted about it. I was actually just trying to research this week whether the concept of the one that is not one carried over at all into the Muslim concept of al-wahid and/or al-ahad, and after running into a total brick wall about figuring that out (because I guess Muslim scholars don't want to talk about), yesterday I found both this and somebody sharing an English passage from Ibn Arabi's treatise on unity that included the statement "He is the One without oneness, the Singular without singularity." So, I guess it does? Also, I guess I probably need to get over my concern about fully understanding the historical context and read some Schuon.
My bro...how are you doing...I hope life is treating you well