So said Ibn Arabi (full name: Abû ‘Abdallâh Muhammad ibn ‘Alî ibn al-‘Arabî al-Tâ’î al-Hâtimî), the greatest of all Islamic philosophers.
When a mere lad of 15 (in 1180 CE), he was taken by his father to meet the great Aristotelian Islamic philosopher (and friend of his father) Averroes. Ibn Arabi explained to the great man the limits of rational perception -- an event taken by at least one philosopher as one symbolic of the philosophical parting of the ways between Islam and the West.
Furthermore -- so sayeth the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy --
"In his view, ‘aql or reason, a word that derives from the same root as ‘iqâl, fetter, can only delimit, define, and analyze. It perceives difference and distinction, and quickly grasps the divine transcendence and incomparability. In contrast, properly disciplined imagination has the capacity to perceive God's self-disclosure in all Three Books. The symbolic and mythic language of scripture, like the constantly shifting and never-repeated self-disclosures that are cosmos and soul, cannot be interpreted away with reason's strictures. What Corbin calls “creative imagination” (a term that does not have an exact equivalent in Ibn ‘Arabî's vocabulary) must complement rational perception."
Ibn Arabi's thinking braided profound imaginative and mystical insight with impeccable reason. Hence, as with the visionary wisdom of the Torah, he saw the Arabic alphabet (which has 28 letters) as comprising the building blocks of reality, which had no distinct reality apart from God. God speaks reality into being and renews it with every breath. Therefore, all things undergo constant change, except for the Necessary Being, the Prime Mover, the Divine Being of Ibn Arabi's thought.
"The heart, which in itself is unitary consciousness, must become attuned to its own fluctuation, at one beat seeing God's incomparability with the eye of reason, at the next seeing his similarity with the eye of imagination. Its two visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture, al-qur’ân, “that which brings together”, and al-furqân, 'that which differentiates.'"
So, Ibn Arabi is saying, our heart is the bivalvular organ that constantly renews and challenges our two-dimensional perspective -- now rational, now imaginative. Our job -- and the job of Scripture -- is to both elucidate and differentiate between the rational and the imaginative, so that we, too, can see the world through both these apertures.
I'm seeing the headwaters of all Western religious thought running through the great minds of Islam and Judaism. They're all talking about the same thing. The best of them are frighteningly clear thinkers who think with, or through, their heart, their mind, their heart . . .
I suppose we'll get to Christianity, eventually.
--T.A.