Abstract
This paper highlights the contributions of three major Islamicists, Louis Massignon, Henry Corbin, and Frithjof Schuon, to the understanding of the Qur’ân. Their works point to the epistemologic primacy of the contemplative and esoteric dimensions of the Book. Its linguistic texture and modalities are here understood as expressing the very limits of language, the proportional reciprocity between the actualization of inner meaning and spiritual fruition, and its ultimate metaphysical substance. These principles and their spiritual consequences may constitute the best antidote to contemporary fundamentalist and modernist reductionism in scriptural hermeneutics.
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Notes
“Les ambassadeurs mystiques de l’islam,” in Numéro spécial sur les religions, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1998.
The Melkite church originated when bishops from the oriental churches, who were excommunicated in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, took side with Marcian, the Roman Emperor of the East. Following the reaffirmation of the union of the church with Rome in 1724 and the consequent division of the Melkite church into two branches, the “Melkite Catholic patriarch of Antioch and of All the East” was established.
This is told by Massignon himself in the brief notes that he wrote in the very evening of his audience with the Pope. In addition, the Pope asked Massignon how long he had been a Muslim, to which Massignon responded, in a characteristic fashion: “I was merely a sympathizer, after having become an unbeliever; I did not say the shahadah (the testimony of Islamic faith).” Cf. “Annexe D” in Massignon, Louis, Les trois prières d’Abraham, Paris: Le Cerf, 1997, p 192.
Corbin tells the story, which took place in 1927–1928, in the following terms: “I spoke to him of the reasons that had led me, as a philosopher, to undertake the study of Arabic…Then Massignon had an inspiration from Heaven. He had brought back from a trip to Iran a lithographed edition of Suhravardî’s major work, Hikmat al-Ishrâq…—Take it, he says, I believe there is something for you in this book.” Cf. Henry Corbin, Henry, L’Imâm caché, Paris: Editions de L’Herne, 2003, pp 219–220.
“(The metaphysical Reality of Prophecy) includes an exoteric dimension or a dimension ad extra, that is a manifestation of the person of the prophet, and an esoteric dimension manifested in the person of each of the Twelve Imâms who, as a whole, constitute a single and same essence…” Corbin, op. cit., p 31.
Born a Lutheran, Schuon entered the Catholic Church in his youth. Intellectually confirmed by René Guénon’s critique in his own early rejection of the modern world and experiencing a profound affinity with the metaphysical perspective of the Baghavad Gîtâ and Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta, he became a disciple of the Algerian Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawî, his entering Islam being prompted by his quest for an authentic initiation and for a religious framework consonant with his innate sense of universality and his inner rejection of the modern West. He was later on invested as a Sufi Shaykh himself, in the continuity of the spiritual lineage of the Shaykh al-‘Alawî, while expressing the esoteric dimension of this lineage in a decidedly more direct and supraconfessional way, remaining thereby faithful both to the traditional integrity of forms and to the primacy of their esoteric core and their universal horizon.
Schuon wrote in French and lived part of his early life in France while his cultural background and sensibility was primarily Germanic.
“Valeur de la parole humaine en tant que témoignage,” 1951, in Sur l’islam, Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 1995, p 77.
Ibid., p 56.
“One can only think a human ‘history’ — since the duration in which we live is oriented, by postulating a finalist structural continuity (against a fortuitous discontinuity); one can only write such a history by explaining linguistic facts phonologically (and not phonetically), and explaining psychic facts by means of a ‘psychology of form’ (against associationist empiricism). Historical finality must become ‘inwardly’ intelligible, for it concerns the person who extracts by herself the meaning of the common trial (and not the individual, i.e., a differentiated element who depends on the social group which remains its natural end.)” Ibid., p 55.
Ibid., p 55.
Ibid., p 12.
In grammar, the “communicative meaning…of tadmîn is to allow one word to indicate, or to convey, the import or meaning of two words…” Gully, Adrian, Grammar and Semantics in Medieval Arabic, London: Routledge, 1995, p 43.
Massignon, Louis, Testimonies and Reflections, selected and introduced by Herbert Mason, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989, p 70.
Massignon, Les trois prières d’Abraham, p 85.
This anagogic meaning, one of the four meanings assigned to the Bible in Christian hermeneutics, is both an evidence of the divine origin of the Book and the seed of Islamic mysticism.
Ibid., p 89.
History of Islamic Philosophy, London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1993, p 1. Histoire de la philosophie islamique, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, p 14.
Ibid.
“La situation vécue est essentiellement une situation herméneutique, c’est-à-dire la situation où pour le croyant éclôt le sens vrai, lequel du même coup rend son existence vraie. Cette vérité du sens, corrélative de la vérité de l’être, vérité qui est réelle, réalité qui est vraie, c’est tout cela qui s’exprime dans un des termes-clefs du vocabulaire philosophique: le mot haqîqat.” Ibid.
“(The literal sense) is the containant, the basis, and the protection to such a degree that in the absence of this natural literal sense, the celestial sense and the spiritual sense would not be the Word, but would be like spirit and life without body, or like a temple with many sanctuaries and a Holy of Holies at its center, but lacking a roof and walls, so that the temple would be exposed to the depredations of thieves and wild beast.” Henry Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Society, 1995, p 61.
‘…l’ésotérique (bâtin), la profondeur cachée du Qorân, est cette Vraie Réalité, le Verbe divin, qui subsiste éternellement avec et par l’Ipséité divine, et qui se manifeste dans le corps de la lettre et du sens littéral, comme l’image dans un miroir.’ En islam iranien, III, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, p.225.
Ibid., p 231.
Creative Imagination in the Sûfism of Ibn ‘Arabî, translated from the French by Ralph Manheim, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969, p 211.
This is linked by Corbin to the anathema against Montanus and his followers. The Montanists were an ecstatic Christian movement of the second century, first known as Phrygians. The movement was founded by Montanus himself and two prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla. Tertullian was the most famous Montanist. The ecstatic and prophetic nature of Montanism represented a challenge to the fledgling magisterium Church, whence the final excommunication of Montanus and his followers.
Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, p 11.
Ibid., p 17.
Cf. Peters, F. E., Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, p 123.
“…the uncreated Quran – the Logos – is the Divine Intellect, which crystallizes in the form of the earthly Quran and answers objectively to that other immanent and subjective revelation which is the human intellect.” Understanding Islam, Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 1998, p 57.
“God’s revelation in the Quran distinguishes (faraqa) right from wrong and also differentiates (faraqa) the Muslims from the unscriptured and from the recipients of earlier revelations.” Qur'an's Self-Image, Daniel Madigan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p 127.
This is particularly the case in Sufism, veil and quintessence, in which he debunks some of the confessional exaggerations and abuses of Islamic exegesis.
“When approaching Scripture, one should always pay the greatest attention to rabbinical and cabalistic commentaries and – in Christianity – to the patristic and mystical commentaries; then will it be seen how the word-for-word meaning practically never suffices by itself and how apparent naiveties, inconsistencies and contradictions resolve themselves in a dimension of profundity for which one must possess the key.” Lights on the Ancient Worlds, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005, p 115.
“Pure intellect is the ‘immanent Quran’; the uncreated Quran – the Logos – is the Divine Intellect, which crystallizes in the form of the earthly Quran and answers objectively to that other immanent and subjective revelation which is the human intellect.” Understanding Islam, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1998, p 57.
In Kabbalah, the Torah is considered as the first creation of God and, as such, the intelligible design of the whole cosmos. The Divine Name, which is with God, encapsulates its whole reality. The essence of the Torah is the Name.
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Laude, P. Reading the Quran: The Lessons of the Ambassadors of Mystical Islam. SOPHIA 46, 147–162 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0019-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0019-2