Apophatic Theology as Antidote to Nihilism

translate by Matthew Evans-Cockle

Paper presented in Teheran 20th October 1977 During a conference

organized by the Iranian Centre for the Study of Civilizations Entitled:
Does the Impact of Western Thought Allow for the Possibility of Real
Dialogue between Civilizations.

The following paper is here reproduced with the generous permission of

Berg International who published a complete synopsis of the conference in
1979.

I. Where, how and when does dialogue occur?

To begin with we need to explain how our topic fits in with the general
theme of this conference, that is, whether the global impact of western
thought allows for real dialogue between civilizations. This preliminary
explanation calls for a threefold approach: where, how and when does
dialogue occur?

1. To begin with: have there been precedents to a dialogue between

civilizations? In fact, civilization is an abstract term. Civilizations
themselves (as universals ) cannot enter into dialogue. It is only the
messengers, speaking in the name of their civilizations, who can be the
real partners in a dialogue. And it is in this sense that I understand the
adjective real appended to the word dialogue in the stated topic of our
conference.

Considering the question in this manner we must keep in mind, as

precedents, the great translation projects that have been undertaken over
the centuries. In particular we should retain the following, in chronological
order :
a) The translations from Sanskrit into Chinese (in the 2nd century two
Arsacide princes translate the Sukhavati, the founding text of the Pure
Land school of Buddhism.)
b) The translations from Greek into Pehlevi towards the end of the
Sassanid period in Iran.
c) The translations from Arabic into Latin during the first centuries of Islam,
with the
interference of Hebrew and Arabic philosophical texts.
d) The translations from Sanskrit into Persian during the 16th century
stimulated by the
generous reforms of Shah Akbar.

In light of these examples, we may find reason for optimism in the increase
in translations being undertaken today. But to what extent would such
optimism be legitimate? Let us begin by properly acknowledging the
passionate interest that the Western world has shown for archeological
explorations ever since the 19th century, for the resurrection of dead cities,
for the updating of manuscript collections containing the secrets of
philosophical and religious systems. The Western mind has obeyed a
certain research oriented imperative which can by no means be considered
an obstacle to dialogue, and which betrays the presence of entirely other
preoccupations than those of the materialism with which it is somewhat too
summarily imputed. This ongoing research, or quest, entails an aptitude
for questioning accepted fact upon contact with newly discovered modes of
thought. But to what extent has this activity been reciprocal? Has there
been, in the Eastern world, a similar interest in the great spiritual traditions
of the West? I cant claim that there has, and that is why, in the absence of
any real dialogue, we have remained at the stage of monologue.

Certainly, it is a question of shared responsibilities. But since a dialogue is

an exchange between persons , for there to be dialogue the respective
status of the persons involved must have something in common. A
dialogue takes place between you and me . You and I both
need to have assumed a like responsibility, each for his or her own
personal fate. Simply by putting the question of the person in this way, we
have already taken a great step towards understanding the subject that I
am proposing.

2) For there to be real dialogue, everything depends upon the situation

of the partners concerned. What is implied by our conferences topic
proposal is the practical fait-accompli of the disappearance of traditional
civilizations under the impact of what we broadly refer to as nihilism. It is
essentially a question of metaphysical nihilism, proceeding from radical
agnosticism, from the refusal to recognize any reality beyond the
horizon of empiricism and rational certitudes. And so we are asking: can
there be real dialogue between partners when one party has
succumbed to this nihilism, while the other party has effectively and
efficiently resisted it?

There are frequent meetings these days among specialists in the applied
sciences, frequent conferences on technology. Immediately the question
arises: is technology sufficient in itself to fulfill and account for the concept
of civilization? Does this concept not imply a secret, invisible force which
must be called spiritual, that determines the content and the finality of the
concept, and thus transcends the premises laid down by technology as
such? If the concept does not imply such a driving force, then we may
simply adapt ourselves to the general leveling of persons and even to their
absence; ultimately well-regulated computers would suffice. But, if the
concept implies something else, it is then the status of the partners
persons that is in question, meaning that which and that for which only the
human person, in his or her inalienable spiritual individuality, may reply. In
the absence of this, in the absence of this, the very thing that renders
primacy possible [the primacy of that One for whom one might speak or
second, as a messenger], we find ourselves faced with agnostic nihilism:
there is noone left to speak of.

3. This is where my topic fits in. I am not the first to have made the
observation that the socio-political systems spilling out from the West
across the whole planet, are the secularization of earlier theological
systems. To say as much already implies acknowledging that the plenary
concept of the West cannot be purely and simply identified with this
secularization alone. It also involves acknowledging that this process is not
a particularly Western phenomenon, for now the Eastern world has itself
fallen prey to what we call Westernization . This is why, more than ever
before, the contrast between East and West can have no real
meaning elsewhere than at the metaphysical level, the very same level at
which it has been situated by Iranian philosophers ever since Avicenna and
Suhravardi.

At this level the contrast is no longer of the order of ethnicity nor is it

geographical, historical or juridical. The essential contrast appears as that
between sacralization and secularization. By sacralization we mean the
[heraldic] sign, recognized by a subtle interior sense, announcing the
presence of a sacrosanct and transcendent world (lam al-qods) within the
phenomena and appearances of this world. And so let us be on our guard:
the secularization in question is a secularization aiming at the destruction of
the metaphysical plane. Its contrary, therefore, is in no way the
sacralization of social and political institutions, for, quite precisely, the
sacralization of those institutions can involve the profanation of the sacred
(its materialization). Reciprocally, the secularization of institutions can lead
quite simply, as the result of a fatal mix-up, to their pseudo-sacralization. I
would hope that our young Eastern colleagues always remain perfectly
conscious of this paradox. There was, for example, the phenomenon that
characterizes the history of Western religion: the phenomenon of the
Church. The separation of Church and State, where it happens, clearly
consummates the desacralization and the secularization of public life. But
to the very extent that this desacralization proceeds from the negation of
any and all metaphysical perspective -- of any other world -- to this
same extent the secularized human institutions can henceforth be
reinvested with a new pseudo-sacrality. The successor to the Church
phenomenon is quite simply the Totalitarian State.

Sacralization and secularization are phenomena that take place and have
their place not primarily in the world of external forms, but first and foremost
in the internal world of the human soul. The human being projects the
modalities of its inner being outwards to constitute the phenomenal world in
which it works out its liberty or servitude. Nihilism arises when human
beings lose the conscious awareness of their personal responsibility for this
bond [this connection between the modalities of the inner self and the
appearance of the outer world] and proclaim (be it with desperation or with
cynicism) those ways closed that they themselves have barred.

The crossing over from the theological to the sociological occurs when the
social takes the place of the theos. Horrified of being qualified as catering
to theology, philosophy has made itself the harried servant of sociology.
Unfortunately, sociology is [a dead end] incapable of offering philosophy
the outcome reserved for it by the double modality of theology. By double
modality of theology we mean apophatic or negative theology (tanzh in
Arabic and Persian) and affirmative or cataphatic theology. (We will come
back to an elucidation of these two concepts shortly.) What is at issue with
respect to the nihil of nihilism depends upon ones decisions as to the
relationship between these two [theological] modalities: what one decides
in terms of the precedence of one or the other, and whether one accepts
the absence of one or the other. Cultural nihilism is no more than the
socialized aspect of an unfortunate or failed resolution of this dialectic in
which the primacy of apophatic theology is abolished. This leaves the
dogmas, purported absolute by positive or affirmative theology, vacillating
as though deprived of both foundation and justification.

Whats more, this outcome drags along with it the fate of the person, a
destiny that is postulated by the idea of the real existence of the human
person, and thereby the destinies of persons in general, of the eventual
partners of a dialogue that is neither unreal nor unrealistic but true. It is for
this reason that I am here proposing negative theology as an antidote to
nihilism.

Here, I believe, we are at the very heart of the question as I understand it.
To properly come to grips with this question we must begin by examining
the two notions of personalism and nihilism. I will do this in the margins,
so to speak, of a recent article that was written by one of our eminent
French colleagues --an Indianist Philosoper-- denouncing Western
personalism as the very cause of nihilism.

Im afraid that the misunderstanding couldnt be more complete. Because,

altogether on the contrary, we see in impersonalism, --in the failure, in the
cancelling out, in the alienation of the person -- both the cause and end
result of nihilism. The question is all the more serious in that, ultimately, the
concept at stake is fundamental to all three of the Abrahamic religions.

Consequently we need to examine the following :

1). Which concept of the person is one professing when one denounces it
as the cause of nihilism ? In other words, what do we mean when we speak
of personalism and of nihilism?
2). It seems to me that the reason for this accusation being levelled against
personalism is the fact of ones having lost sight of what the Abrahamic
tradition, in its ensemble (and therefore not only in the West), has
conceived of as negative or apophatic theology. In other words, what do we
mean when we speak of apophatic theology and personalism? Having
once sketched out this opposition we shall be able to discern just where the
nihilism truly lies.

3). Subsequently we will be able to oppose a rival reality principle to the

scientific conceptualism that is bound up with nihilism. On this subject our
traditional Iranian philosophers, and chiefly among these Moll Sadr
Shrz (1050/1640), will have a lot to tell us.

II. Personalism and Nihilism

The article to which we are referring --which is well written and offers a
great deal of food for thought, even and especially if we are regrettably in
disagreement with its diagnostic-- was written by our colleague and friend,
the eminent comparative philosopher Professor George Vallin. If he were to
find that I have missed his point, together we should have no trouble
clearing up the misunderstanding. The articles title is The Tragic and the
West Considered in the Light of Asian Non-Dualism. The paradox is as
follows: whereas for ourselves metaphysical nihilism and moral nihilism are
concomitant with the dissolution of the person, for our colleague the source
of nihilism would, on the contrary, lie in the very notion of the person, and
essentially therefore in the notion of spiritual individuality. Our colleagues
argument proceeds from anthropology to theology, establishing a
connection between the idea of the personal self and the idea of a personal
God in order to denounce them both as the very rise of nihilism. As stated a
moment ago: the gravity of this position is that it puts on trial the
anthropology and theology of the three great Abrahamic religions and along
with them the Greek and Iranian spiritual worlds, each of these being a
citadel to the personhood of the gods and human beings. The contrast
between East and West has largely become a thing of the past, but not so
the fate of those persons who are the partners of a dialogue. The latter
problem remains and demands all the more urgently to be addressed. To
this end, we propose the following analysis.

1. Anthropology. The leitmotiv which serves as starting point for the

article in question (and which is announced in its title) is an argument we
find formulated in a book written some dozen years ago by J.M.
Domenach: The return of the Tragic. Therein we read: It is significant that
the tragic, this essential category of human existence, marks European
culture and none other (2). The author of our article sets to justifying this
affirmation by showing that wherever the fundamental presuppositions of
Western culture are lacking, the apparition of the tragic is properly
inconceivable. As far as we can see, however, this amounts to saying that
one cannot properly speak of the tragic as an essential category of human
existence. We learn that, if the idea of the tragic is one of the defining traits
of our Western philosophy this is because it is essentially a philosophy that
postulates the individual. The following passages are both the most dense
and the most trenchant. According to G. Vallin:That which appears to
constitute the permanent ideology of Western man, is the belief in the
reality of the individual, or the identification of reality with individuality, in
opposition to the fundamental ideology of traditional Asia, such as it may be
observed in the doctrines of the non-dualist Vedanta, Taoism or
Mahayanna Buddhism. (3).

We are being asked to consider that for Oriental humanity the real is
identified with the Universal or the Supraformal. But we must then ask
ourselves: how can human thought express itself with regards to a
Supraformal other than in negative terms? We are given the well known
phrase tat tvam asi, as signifiying, the suprapersonal Absolute, you, (the
ego) you are this as well. Which leaves intact the question of just how the
ego referred to is still an ego when it is equated with the Suprapersonal. In
other words, how is it I who have the power to say I am identical to that,
to the suprapersonal Absolute, when the idea of the real human being is
given as opposed to that of the ego? Is it the real human being, or is it the
illusory ego that declares: I am that? Does it suffice to say: I am that, for
the ego to cease to be illusory?

Our colleague explains that, on this point, the negativity implied by ego in
the common or exoteric sense of ego is not original but derivative.
Derivative to the extent that this negativity has as its origin the [Selfs] belief
in the reality of this ego, a belief which is the very obnubilation [or clouding
over] of the essential identity of the Self and of the suprapersonal
Absolute. And for this, the Self is itself responsible. The text reads as
follows: The individual is in one sense responsible for his or her own
individuation, for etched in the heart of his or her being is the permanent
possibility of rediscovering the universal or infinite dimension of Being,
from which, in reality, he or she has never been separated(4). In other
words: the individual is guilty of existing, guilty of his or her own existence.
This is, quite frankly, an extremely disturbing proposition and it allows one
to foresee the moment when the individual will be forced to rid him or
herself of this guilt, but no longer with the aim of recuperating the
universal or infinite dimension. The torn state of separation of all
existence, culminating in the tearing asunder of death would, we are told,
only be experienced as such if we [mistakenly] identify the real human
being with the ego. In Buddhist terms, the existence of the ego is identical
to suffering, and the Being of the ego is identical to the void. But a
Westerner, without having to be a philosopher or a gnostic either, would
ask him or herself: what if the opposite were true? What if the origin of
suffering was the mutilation of spiritual individuality? And what if it was this
mutilation alone that justified considering the ego as an illusion? What if the
most essential thing was not, in fact, the restoration of the ego to its original
plenitude? Confronted by the tragedy of the mutilation of the person, we
would by no means respond by an acceptance of emptiness, but rather join
in combat with the sons of Light against the powers of darkness, finding our
answer in the entire Zoroastrian ethos of ancient Iran.

Clearly, we can now see that what is at issue here is what has traditionally
been referred to in philosophy as the principle of individuation . Once
more citing our article: We know that the dominant ontology and
anthropology of Western humanity are centred quite precisely upon the
invincible affirmation of the reality of the ego (in all its forms) and of the
reality of individual forms in general. This belief seems to us to be
correlative to a mutilation of being , because it has its origin and essence
in negativity or the principle of individuation identified with the reality
principle . Here again, the adoption of such a position appears to us a
very serious matter. Such a decision is marked, indeed stained, by the
same confusion denounced by our Iranian metaphysicians of the
Avicennian tradition,(5) to whit, the confusing of the transcendental unity of
Being or Existence (wahdat al wojud) with an impossible, contradictory and
illusory unity of existents or existent being(s) (mawjud, latin ens). These
Avicennian metaphysicians vigorously denounced this same confusion
committed by the practitioners of a particular brand of Sufism, one that
would occupy precisely the position defined by Georges Vallin as belonging
to Oriental humanity. On the other hand, on this point our Iranian
philosophers are in agreement with the metaphysics of Being professed by
the great neoplatonist, Proclus : [I am referring to] the connection or
relationship between the Henad of Henads and the Henads that lend their
unicity to the multiplicity of singular existents that they pose in the act of
being by making each in its turn one being, [or, by investing each in turn
with its own singularity]. For Being can only be existent within the
multiplicity of individual beings. To affirm the reality of individual forms is
therefore in no way a mutilation of Being, but is on the contrary its
revelation and fulfilment. To confound the order of Being with the order of
existents [or existent being(s)] is a fatal confusion. The principle of
individuation is a positioning and positing of the existent. If one sees in this
nothing but negativity then one has set ones course towards metaphysical
catastrophe.

I dont believe one may simply say that this principle of individuation
dominates all of Western thought from Aristotle to Sartre (6), for this
principle has been interpreted in two manners so different from each other
that each interpretation entails irreducible consequences. Formulated in
terms of heliomorphism, the question is as follows: is the principle of
individuation matter, or is it form? If it is matter, then the spiritual
individuality, the form, the idea of a being, is perhaps merely illusory. If it is
the form, then the form is the spiritual individuality itself, and is
imperishable and inalienable. It may be called Fravarti (Persian forhar) in
the Avesta, Neshama in the Jewish Kabala, ayn thbita (eternal hexeity)
for Ibn Arabi, and Perfect Nature (al-tib al-tmm) for both Suhravardi and
those in the Hermetic tradition of Islamic theosophy, etc.

Thus, when our colleague writes that for him nihilism seems to originate
in the enthroning of the principle of individuation or the metaphysical
sanctification of the ego . That the tragic fate of the West seems to us to
consist in the progressive discovery of the consequences of this
sanctification coinciding with the fundamental Prometheanism of Western
humanity. That the Westerner is essentially tragic because his or her
negativity is original and not derivative. (7) Then, truth be told, what
springs spontaneously to mind is a radically antithetical position. The tragic
is not particular to Western humanity, because the tragic, indeed tragedy, is
the human being itself. There is a Promethean tragic, but there is also an
Ohrmazdean tragic (the invasion of Ahrimn), each one differing from the
other in both their [underlying] nature and in the signs [they reveal].(8) The
tragic does not consist in an individuation professed as initial to, and
thereafter the governing principle of, all existents -- whether in the spiritual
or in the material world -- but in the fall or the catastrophe that drew the
spiritual individualities pre-existent to this world into the mle of its
dramatic consequences. And it is this that is described by the dramatic
cosmogonies common to all the Abrahamic gnoses as well as to Iranian
gnosis (Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism) and to the Platonic mysteries.

Individuation in this case is therefore not a secondary derivation. It is

effectively initial or primary, arising with the ontogenesis of Being. It is not
the principle of individuation that is the tragic. The tragic is that which
mutilates this principle: that which paralyses it, betrays it, caricatures it. If it
is the principle of individuation that differentiates Western from traditional
Asiatic humanity, we must say that we do not quite understand how our
colleague Georges Vallin can denounce the Far-East of today as
participating in the cultural arena of our now globalized Western civilization.
For, as far as we can tell, the cultural milieu of the Far-East today does not
particularly distinguish itself by the recognition of the rights of the individual
ego (9). Or perhaps this same recognition is not the characteristic sign of
Western humanity, nor of the Western culture that has come to have a
worldwide impact. If this worldwide Western influence is accompanied by
the downfall of the rights of the individual, how can one characterize the
West as sanctifying the individual? Or perhaps, it is a question of
something else in addition to the Western influence. Or perhaps, Western
thought is not what we have been told that it is. We are thus placed at the
heart of the theme of our conference. For how can we conceive of a
dialogue without first being in agreement upon its fundamental premises?
In such a case, there would only be confrontation or a dialogue between
deaf parties. I am trying to bring us towards the requisite conditions of a
dialogue between partners who are partners of a dialogue because
partners of a like destiny.
The principle of individuation is so essential that, supposing this principle
constitutive of the tragic itself, the tragic would not only be a marking
characteristic of the West, but of all the spiritual universes whose fiery-eyed
gnoses have attempted to penetrate the mystery preceding the descent of
humanity into this world. In fact, the meaning of the principle of
individuation is such that our philosopher colleague --pursuing the thrust of
the argument that led him to denounce the identification of the real with the
individual as being the source of nihilism-- by passing from anthropology to
theology, will equally denounce the Judeo-Christian conception of a
personal God as responsible for the theological nihilism that has
proclaimed the death of God. But again, --and above all given that the
earlier denunciation of the principle of individuation seemed to entail losing
sight of that which the narrative gnoseological cosmogonies have
described -- it seems to us in this instance that that which in the ensemble
of gnoses and Abrahamic theosophies is called negative theology, is being
deliberately passed by in silence. It would, however, be grave in the
extreme to lose sight of it.

2. Theology Here in fact we detect the tacit presupposition which allows

one to affirm the essential connection between the idea of the personal
God and the negativity of the self conceived of as original. Conceived of as
inherent to the very idea of the self which would be the ultimate form of the
activity of negation. Therefore, this negativity would be the primordial
source of primordial nihilism (to a certain extent an Urnihilismus).
Altogether on the contrary, we hold that this negativity is in no way original,
in no way inherent to the self. We hold that the tragic is such that is should
be understood in connection with the advent of a negativity which is the
present condition of the ego: the condition that is that of the egos existence
in this world and the result of a catastrophe. This has been expressed by all
gnoseological narrative anthropogonies and psychogonies. It is not the ego
that is the tragedy, but its mutilation compensated by a sickly inflation, in
brief by its descent into this world. We see the same idea expressed in
the sentiment of exile so strongly felt in Jewish and Muslim theosophy. The
disproportion lies between what the soul, or ego, is at present, and that
which, intimating its own pre-existential origin, it feels itself called to be.
This protestation, this sense of disproportion, comes through the mystical
epics even better than through the philosophical systems. (For there is no
common measure when it comes to comparing ones actual state to that
which one is called to be.) It is always the same tragedy that the mystical
epics and theosophies have told. But this adventure, this tragedy of the
soul, that takes place in the world of the Soul, would be inconceivable if it
was not also a divine adventure, or rather intra-divine, one that takes place
and has its place in divinity. It is precisely this that is the aim and theatre of
operations of apophatic theology, and the reason for which the personal
God still holds us in regard, which is to say still concerns us, now and
forever.

What this means is that the divine person, the personal form of the
personal God, is not itself the original Absolute; it is rather the eternal result
of an eternal process within the divine. But as it results eternally from an
eternal process, it is both derivative and original. If one meditates upon this
secret, one may come to understand that personalism is in no way the
source of nihilism. It is on the contrary the loss of this personalism, the
failure and aborting of the person that nihilates the persons ontogenesis.
Eo ipso, the transpersonal cannot be conceived of by human thought as
being ontologically superior to the personal form of the divinity and the
human self.

If such were the case, however, then when confronted by the question of
the origin of Evil, it would appear sufficient to reduce the problem to a
simple choice: either the myth of Greek tragedy inclined towards
exonerating an innocent humanity; or Judeo-Christian monotheism inclined
towards exonerating an innocent God --to the extent that it would be the
free will of humanity alone, created by God, that would be at the origin of
Evil. (10) Perhaps things present themselves in this manner in a purely
exoteric monotheism. But it is precisely apophatic theology, developing into
theosophy, which outstrips and displaces the problem posed in such
exoteric terms. It all seems, unfortunately, as though the representative
[that G. Villon offers us] speaking on behalf of traditional Asiatic humanity
had envisaged confronting nothing more than the position held by
affirmative exoteric theology. Such a theology, because deprived of the
safeguard of negative or apophatic theology, is incapable of even an inkling
of the fundamental idea that makes of the personal God and his/her
follower partners in battle; heroes confronting one and the same tragedy
together, a tragedy of which the origin and the stakes involved do not
consist in their respective person being negativities to resolve and resorb,
but on the contrary constitute a positivity to be conquered.

It seems therefore that to the thesis of the culpability of the ego as such, --
that the ego is guilty of existing and that individuation appears as a
wrong to the extent that we are referred to the suprapersonal dimension
of the Self of which the ego would ultimately be distinct only in an illusory
mode (11)-- we have no choice but to oppose a double antithesis: the
culpability does not lie in the existence of the ego ; it is in the failure that
mutilates and paralyses it. The culpability lies therefore in that which is in
reality the loss of the ego, loss that translates itself most often by an avid
and monstrous inflation. The illusion is not in the illusory differentiation of
the ego with respect to the transpersonal Absolute, but in the egos being
cancelled out by being equated with this Absolute. And to the argument
suggesting that the tragic is only possible for the human being who
remains faithful to the famous Greek measure --that is to say the vision of
the human being locked within his or her finitude, the human who identifies
him or herself with the limits that constitute their humanity, which is to say
[who identifies] with the ego-- (12) we must, to the contrary, declare that it
is the crossing of this threshold which appears, in the gnoseological epics,
to have unleashed the anterior catastrophe that determined the existence
of this world. A catastrophe resulting in the limits of a self mutilated and
paralysed in, and by its existence in, this world. These limits are those of its
captivity and its exile, and not the limits that eternally determine its being in
itself, its monadic unity. The fall and [subsequent] liberation are the grand
acts of this tragedy. But liberation does not mean abolition. To free the
individual being, is to restore his or her individuality to its full and authentic
monadicity. It is to restore its truth, not at all to denounce this individuality
as illusory.

We are now in a position to be [re]oriented in a direction altogether different

from that which, envisaging the person and personalism from the point of
view of an Asiatic non-dualism, denounced them as entailing a form of
nihilism. We are stating, on the contrary, that it is incumbent upon the very
concept of the person to counter nihilism, so that the partners of a
dialogue may be real persons, and not the shadows of a suprapersonal
Self, whose individuality would be no more than an illusion.

The little that we have just said should put us on the road to developing and
deepening our understanding of apophatic theology. It should also allow us
to reject the argument that would make of Abrahamic monotheism --that is
to say Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism-- another form of the tragic
inherent in the culture of the West that sanctifies the ego and the
individual. We have just countered certain nihilizing arguments that have
their prolongation in another [of Villons] theses, to the effect that the
ultimate stage of this tragedy is the enthroning of a personal Absolute in
place of the suprapersonal Absolute. Apophatic theology has precisely the
virtue of preserving us from any and all confusion between the Absolute
and the personal God, between the indetermination of the former and the
necessity of the latter. Consequently, there where our colleague --
presenting himself as spokesperson for Asiatic non-dualism-- denounced
the living personal God of Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism as the first
step in the death of God (13), one must invert the sense of this nihilitude,
putting it right side up. We are being told that this first death of God would
have been brought about by the confusion consisting of the equation of the
Absolute and the Personal God. Granted, this closely resembles the work
of an affirmative dogmatic theology of the Church, entirely exoteric,
deprived of --or depriving itself of-- the safeguard of apophatic theology.
Perhaps it is precisely this aspect of the official theology that our friend
Georges Vallin is envisaging. In that case, we would agree with him.
However, what about that theosophical theology that is founded by an
apophatic theology establishing precisely the differentiation between the
Absolute and the Personal God? In fact, it is a theology deprived of
theosophy that deliberates upon an absent God, the object of a sort of
impotent nostalgia belonging to a troubled conscience.,as our philosopher
colleague rightly says (14) referring specifically to Pascal, Kierkegaard, Karl
Barth. But we would have liked him to have envisaged and it seems
impossible to us that, secretly at least, he did not so envisage that which
we are envisaging here, and which would have permitted him to refer,
along with us, to a Jean Scot Erigne, a Jacob Boehme an Ibn Arab an
Isaac Louria etc.

In fact, the absolute is not the primary and primordial aspect we habitually
refer to by that term. It is a past participle that presupposes a nomen
agentis, the absolvens that absolves it and makes of it the absolutum. If the
absolvens absolves the absolute of all determination, there still remains to
absolve the absolute of this very same indetermination. This remark could
well prevent many a misunderstanding. Contrary to the thesis that the
advent of the personal God of the religions of the Book --of the three
Abrahamic groups-- constitutes the first death of God, I would declare that
the act of exorcising this death of God does not consist in erasing the
personal God before the suprapersonal Absolute. It consists rather in
understanding that the auto-generation of the personal God --engendering
itself from the Absolute, absolving itself of the indetermination of this
Absolute-- is not the death but the eternal birth of God. A reversal, without
any doubt, of the phenomenological analysis. For Georges Vallin
modernity would be the second death of God or at least the event
following upon the second death of God. It would consist in the human
ego, having forever lost sight of its own fundamental negativity, entering
into an active process of totalization, a totalization that would lead to the
hegemony of the principle of individuation. And so, he says, history is
divinised and the human being collectivised.

We are sure that our friend Georges Vallin will understand when we admit
to having a certain amount of difficulty in following his proposed analysis. It
seems to us that for humanity to be collectivized, this must necessarily
involve a crumbling at all levels of the ramparts of the person and of the
individual monad. It is precisely when the ego as such is denounced as an
illusion, that we have difficulty seeing how it might resist collectivization,
even if this illusion is defined for us in reference to a suprapersonal Self!
And for history to be divinized, the agents that make this history and the
events that compose this history must be seen within a unique dimension.
They must be seen within a uni-dimensionality, passing by way of the
nihilism that rejects the transcendental dimension of the person (of each
and every respective person), because this nihilism perceives this
transcendent dimension as the manifestation of a rival reality principle.

In what respect is apophatic theology the safeguard of the person against

nihilism? How does it safeguard both the human person and the divine
person? Corollary to this point, how does apophatic theology make of the
safeguarded person the very safeguard against nihilism? What difference is
there, henceforth, between the epiphany of the person eternally born from
the Urgrund, and the dogmatic affirmation of the divine person, an
affirmation that has not undergone its apophatic trial and/or verification?

III. Apophatic Theology and Personalism

When we speak of affirmative or cataphatic theology we mean thereby a

theology that, deliberating upon the concept of God, affirms all the
attributes (of essence, operation and of perfection) that seem appropriate
to the concept of divinity. Any and all human attributes are sublimated to
the utmost limit. This is what we call the via eminentiae. This path,
however, does no more than sublimate creatural attributes in order to
confer them upon the divinity. Monotheism is in danger of succumbing to
the very idolatry that it elsewhere denounces. Negative or apophatic
theology, in order to radically avoid this danger of assimilation (tashbh) of
the divine to the creatural, denies any attribute to the divinity and expresses
itself with respect to the latter only in negative terms: this is the tanzh, the
via negationis. It is, par excellence the path chosen in Shiite Islam, as
much by the Ismailis (15) as by the Duodeciman Shiites. I am thinking of
the prone pronounced in Merv by the eighth Imam, Al-Reza, and admirably
commented by Qz Sad Qomm, I am thinking of the School of Rajab Ali
Tabrz, of the Shaykhi school of Shaykh Ahmad Ahs (16) etc. In our
Western tradition, it is Jacob Boehme who, it seems to me, is most
representative. I will therefore refer essentially to Boehme in order to
simplify the explanation of just what this is all about.

Any metaphysical doctrine that attempts a total explanation of the universe,

will find itself confronted by the necessity of making something out of
nothing, or rather of making everything come out of nothing (17). The initial
principle from which the world emerges --a principle that must also explain
this world-- cannot be anything contained within the world. Yet it must
simultaneously possess everything needed to explain both the essence
and existence of the world and that which it contains. This principle,
therefore, cannot be identical to Being nor a part of Being, since it is Being
that it must explain. In this light, it is the negation of Being; in relation to the
things of this world and to thought, therefore, it is absolutely indeterminate.
This Absolute is a nihility. But on the other hand it must possess a relation
to the things that flow forth from it, it must possess a certain similitude with
those things for which it is the source. This initial principle, as Alexander
Koyr well analyzed, must therefore be, at the same time, everything and
nothing. It is with this stage as their starting point that the two theologies
constitute themselves: the negative (apophatic) and the affirmative
(cataphatic), the via negationis (tanzh) and the via emnientiae.

There is thus initially a double nihility, a double nihil, and subsequently a

double aspect of nihilism: the one being to a certain extent positive, the
other pure negativity. There is a nihil a quo omnia fiunt, a nihility from which
all things come. This is the nihility of the divine Absolute, superior to being
and to thought. And there is a nihil a quo nihil fit, a nihility from which
nothing comes and into which everything tends to fall back in abysm, a
nihility therefore inferior to being and to thought. I am afraid that when we
speak of nihilism we too often lose sight of the difference between the two
nihil
The Neo-Platonist tradition in the three branches of the Abrahamic
tradition, as well as in the Greek world, would tend to give priority to the
apophatic path, subordinating the affirmative cataphatic path to the latter:
just as Being finds itself subordinated to the Absolute. We alluded to this
very fact a moment ago. Without this priority being accorded to the
apophatic (to that nihil from which everything proceeds) one does nothing
but pile creatural attributes upon the divinity (and this is nihil from which
nothing proceeds). And so monotheism perishes in its triumph,
degenerates into the idolatry that it fiercely wished to avoid. This was the
fate of affirmative theologies when they cut themselves off and isolated
themselves from the strong-hold of apophatic theology, and it is their fate
which seemed to us legitimately targeted by George Vallins critique. But
negative theology is not instating an Absolute into which everything must
be made to go and be swallowed up (that is nihilism), but an Absolute from
which, on the contrary, one must make everything emerge and which
maintains in being all that it makes exist. In short, exoteric monotheism
understands this constitutivity of the Being that is unique as though it were
the unity of existents; we have already drawn attention to this fatal
confusion. But the relation between existence and existents [between
Being and existent beings], between the undetermined Absolute and the
personal God, is not to be characterized by a nihility to be resorbed into the
Absolute, of a multiplicity of beings to be confounded with and lost in the
unity of being, but rather by the very positivity of which the Absolute is the
principle and the source (18). It is in this sense that the esoteric
theosophies in Islam, and particularly that of Ibn Arabi, have understood
the famous hadith I was a hidden Treasure. I loved to be known. I created
the world in order to become known. The nihilism that degrades the
positive value of the personal God amounts to forbidding that the Hidden
Treasure (the undetermined Absolute) manifest itself through [a process of]
self-determination, to forbidding that being exist in the plurality of existents.

I have just quoted Ibn Arabi whose mystical theosophy is centred upon this
differentiation between the undetermined and unknowable Absolute, the
Absconditum, and the Rabb, the personal Lord, the Deus revelatus, the
only God of whom the human being can speak, because he or she is the
latters correlative term. It is the same in Ismaili theosophy, for which the
name Al-Lah is ascribed to the First Intellect of the pleroma. We are
reminded here of the relation between En-Sof and the ten Sephiroth, of
Metatron and of the Cherubim on the Throne of Jewish gnosis, as well as
of all the great protestant mystics: Sebastian Franck, Valentin Weigel (19),
etc. since for one and all it is only in relation to us, to the creature, that the
deity appears as force, power, will, action, etc.

The Absolutely undetermined does not become the determined Deus

revelatus, demanded by the via positionis, except in relation to the
creature: except in that this Deus revelatus is its creator. The Absolute
must therefore emerge from its absoluity [or state of absolute
absolvency], to instate a creature for whom it is the personal God, such that
the personal God is not at all the original [and originating] negativity which
we heard denounced earlier as the first death of God. It is, altogether on
the contrary, the divine birth, arising in this passage from the Absolute to
the person. If one asks: why this emergence? Why the choice of this
correlation of the Creator with the created-being? The best answer is still to
be found in the exemplary work of Jacob Boehme: because it contains the
secret of his Quest, his immense oeuvre is the personal response to this
question -- and there can be nothing other than a personal answer.

In effect, Boehmes entire theology is an analysis of the conditions of the

possibility of the absolute person , which is to say absolved of the
indetermination of the original Absolute, of the Absconditum. As we said
above: the Absolute, being absolved of all determination, there remains
ultimately to absolve it of this indetermination. Koyrs great merit was in
being one of the rare individuals to understand the aspect that differentiates
Boehme from so many of his forerunners whose pitfalls he spares us an
essential quality, because his exemplary case helps us to perceive what is
at issue in the theme that I have proposed [ie. apophatic theology as
antidote to nihilism], and through this theme the conditions of a [true]
dialogue.

What Boehme believes before all doctrine, what he is searching for, that
which all his [own] doctrine is meant to justify, is that God is a personal
Being, and much more, that he is a person, a living person, conscious of
himself, a person possessing agency, a perfect person (20). Let us take
proper note of the words: what he is searching for. The personal God is
not [simply] given to begin with. He is met at the end of a Quest (like that of
the Quest for the Holy Grail). There is therefore no confusion between the
Absolute and the personal God, a confusion that [it was suggested] would
have been committed by Western personalism and which was denounced
as we have seen, as the source of nihilism and abettor of the death of
God. This Quest is in contrast with two symmetrical nihilisms: that of an
affirmative (cataphatic) theology immediately erecting its dogma as
absolute in itself, beyond which there would be nothing to search for; and
that of negative apophatic theology that would aspire only to the
indetermination of the Absolute thereby losing sight of the fact that the
latter is the nihil a quo omnia procedunt (the Hidden Treasure of the hadith
cited above). In both instances we have theology without theophany.

And it is from this very point that we can discern two permanent attitudes --
present over the centuries and right up to our days-- that are typified
respectively in the mystical doctrine of Meister Eckhardt (14th century) and
in the mystical theosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) (21) To observe
these two exemplary cases is to put ourselves in a position to overcome
the pitfalls of nihilism.

With the one as with the other, there is, certainly, the profound sense of the
mystical Divinity as undetermined Absolute, immobile and unchanging in its
eternity. But, from that point on, the two masters diverge. For a Meister
Eckhardt, the Deitas (Gottheit) transcends the personal God and it is the
latter that one must pass beyond, because it is correlative to the human
soul of the world, to the creature. The personal God is thus but a step upon
the mystical path, because this personal God is affected by limitation and
by negativity, by non-being and by becoming. It becomes and un-becomes
(22). (Er wird und entwird) The Eckhardtian soul thus attempts to liberate
itself in order to escape from the very limits of being, from the nihil of
finitude, from everything and anything that could fix it in place or time. It
needs therefore, to escape from itself in order to plunge into the abyss of
divinity, an Abgrund of which, by definition, it could never attain [or sound]
the bottom (Grund). The conception and attitude of Jacob Boehme are
something else entirely. Boehme searches for liberation within the
affirmation of the self, in the realization of the true Self of his eternal idea.
It is this that is designated by the very concept of ayn thbita by Ibn Arabi
and all those that he inspired in the domain of Islamic theosophy.

So, we find that everything is inverted: it is not the personal God who is a
step towards the Deitas, that is, towards the undetermined Absolute. It is
on the contrary this Absolute that is a step towards the generation, the
eternal birth [and birthing] of the personal God. Jacob Boehme also
declares: Er wird und entwird, but by this he does not mean the nihilating
nihil, voiding the personal God. On the contrary, he is designating the nihil
of the Absolute differentiating itself in its aspiration to reveal itself, to
determine itself (the hidden Treasure!) in a single Nunc aeternitatis (ewiges
Nu). There is thus an intra-divine history --not a History in the ordinary
sense of the word, but an a-temporal History-- eternally accomplished and
eternally beginning, thus simultaneously and eternally whole (simul tota) in
all forms and at all stages of its auto-generation as personal God. The latter
contains in itself all difference () He is in movement and movement is in
him. The determination that the person entails is thus not original in this
instance; [the person] is no longer struck with nihilitude, but is a conquest
of and by the nihil of the original indetermination. It was this original
indetermination that, as we have seen, was the initially fundamental yet
paradoxical determination of the Absolute.

What we must understand and take advantage of is as follows. In

describing the conditions that make it possible for the absolute person to be
the triumph and conquest of the primordial nihil (conditions that form the
entire structure of the divine organism), Boehme describes eo ipso the
route by which God has passed and passes eternally in order to engender
himself and constitute himself[A movement of] eternally successive
phases since eternally simultaneous with the divine life: stages of his
interior development (23). This eternal intra-divine history of the eternal
generation of the personal God is then the archetype that the human soul
exemplifies in order to accede to the rank of person. For the personal form
of being is the highest, because it accomplishes the realization that is self
revelation. Indeed, being does not realize [or discover] itself nor manifest
[or appear to] itself except by determining itself and by manifesting itself
[which is to say, by accepting the limitation constitutive of aspects or
qualities through which to appear and be known] (24). And it is these same
relations that are expressed within the vocabulary of our Iranian
philosophers by terms such as zohr (manifestation), tajall elh
(theophany), mazhar (theophanic form), tashakhkhos (individuation). We
are setting forth an entire program of comparative philosophy simply by
pronouncing these terms.

[This program of comparative philosophy] also provides us with the strategy

necessary to confront the nihil a quo nihil fit --which is to say nihilism plain
and simple-- which presents itself these days under the laicized form of
agnosticism or totalitarian collectivism. Personalism is not only the vocation
of the West; it is not only the Greek world, it is also the Iranian world, and it
is the entire spiritual universe of the religions of the Book. It is the rampart
against all negative and nihilating forces. To search for the origins and the
causes of the failures and the shortcomings of this personalism, however,
would take us too far afield in the present context.
To sum up, I cited the example of our Jacob Boehme as exemplary of
those for whom the supreme goal of the human Quest in this world is not
the Ens nullo modo determinatum (even if this entirely undetermined
being is presented as the ideal of traditional Asia). On the contrary, it is
the Ens determinatum omni modo (the entirely determined being) that is
the goal of this Quest. Outside of this there is noone left to speak of.
Dialogue will only take place between shadows. That is the very meaning
of the topic I have proposed here: of negative theology as antidote to
nihilism, because this negative theology authenticates the eternal birth of
the person. The essential for the human being does not lie in self-
annihilation through fusion in the divine, or in the collectivity that is its
illusory laicization, it does not lie in abandoning that which defines one as a
person and instates one in being. On the contrary, it is in the realization of
that which is the most profound and the most personal that the human
being fulfils his or her essential function, a theophanic function: to express
God, to be the theophore, the God-bearer.

The contrast that puts us in the position to choose may be expressed by

the two Latin formulas that we owe to Boehmes great interpreter, Franz
von Baader: To the thesis: Omnis determination est negatio (all
determination is negation, this is the thesis that sees personalism as the
source of nihilism), Boehme implicitly opposes the belief: Omnis
determinatio est positio (all determination is position that is, simultaneously
positing and situating (25). Everything that we have tried to show here
today is recapitulated in the contrast between these two perspectives. So,
whether we assume responsibility for the past or for the future, either way
we are capable of confronting the question: where is nihilism?

IV. Where is Nihilism?

To this question we can now answer that nihilism is not to be found in the
principle of individuation denounced earlier. This principle is, on the
contrary, the rampart against nihilism, on condition that it directs itself
towards the integral ego, not the ego that our bad habits qualify as
normal. In other words: nihilism appears to us in the very alienation of the
principle of individuation. This, because all determination, far from being
negativity, is positive; because the personal form of Being is the latters
supreme determination, and because it is the latters supreme revelation.
Thus everything that tends to abolish this [personal form of Being],
constitutes either a threat of or a symptom of nihilism. And this menace can
conceal itself behind forms that seem different while being fundamentally
identical. I mean to say that the character that Dostoevsky named the
Grand Inquisitor disposes of a great number of uniforms to choose from.
On the other hand, we are warned to be on our guard, for example, in the
following lines of a psychologist cited by Theodore Roszack, telling us that
integrity or real mental health entails, one way or another, the dissolution
of the normal ego, of the false self cunningly adapted to our socially
alienated reality; the emergence of internal archetypes, [that are the]
mediators of divine power, the end or full term of this death consisting in a
rebirth and a recreation of a new functioning of the ego, wherein the self no
longer betrays but rather serves the divine.(26).
Let us accord their proper weight to each of these very dense lines. They
have the character of an initiatic instruction, inviting us first of all to die with
respect to an ego mutilated by an alienated social reality, and then
conducting us to the new birth of a regenerated self, invested with a divine
function that henceforth it has the power to withstand and fulfil. From this
point on we are justified in posing the capital question: What is the
person? This question is implicit these days in much research that appears
disordinate, because desperate, but which is in fact ordinated upon [or built
upon and organized around] the presentiment that the decisive secret,
which is the hidden value of personal consciousness, is not to be found, for
example, in some kind of class consciousness, but in a consciousness of
the consciousness revealing the latters secret. [Or, put in more visual and
traditional terms, the hidden value of personal consciousness is to be found
in the Hidden Treasures relationship to and knowledge of the creature that
it has created and by whom it is known.]

I had the privilege, last May, of participating in a conference at the Institute

of Philosophy at the University of Tours, which had as its theme The
Human and the Angel. Simply pronouncing such a theme these days
sounds like a challenge directed towards common opinion and received
ideas. Indeed, it is because it is a challenge that such a theme contains
and conceals precisely that secret path upon which one may find the
answer to the question I am now posing: What is the person? On this
path, it is to our Iranian philosophers --to whom I have long owed a great
deal-- that I will appeal in showing how the answer to this question appears
to me, and finally how I see the message of Iranian philosophy as it applies
to our present conference.
I find this answer by referring to a concept that is fundamental to the
anthropology of pre-Islamic Zoroastrian Iran, that of the Fravarti (the correct
pronunciation of that which is written fravashi ; and in Persian forhar). In
Zoroastrianism the word designates the celestial archetype of each being
of light --their superior Self, their guardian Angel. This celestial archetype
belongs to their very being because it is each ones singular celestial
counter-part. The concept is so fundamental to Zoroastrian personalism --
as the very law of being-- that Ohrmazd himself, his Archangels
(Amahraspandn) and all the Angel-Gods (Izad, cf. the Dii-Angeli that we
find in Proclus) also have their respective fravartis (27). It is this fravarti that
gives the person his or her true dimension. A human person is a person
only by virtue of this celestial, archetypal, angelic dimension. This angelic
dimension is the celestial pole without which the terrestrial pole of its
human dimension is completely depolarised, reduced to vagabondage and
perdition. The drama then, would be the loss of this pole, the loss of this
celestial dimension, because the entire fate or destiny of the person is
engaged in this drama.

And it is precisely there that we must strike at the Western drama of our
day, a West that encompasses vast Oriental regions, precisely at the point
marked by the theme of our conference.

We must call an assembly and rally around this ancient concept from
Zoroastrian Iran, for, under different names, we find the equivalent just
about everywhere, as much in the Abrahamic world as in the Greek world. I
can only supply a few simple indicative reminders in the present context
(28) We find the functional equivalent in the Hermetic Perfect Nature (al-
tib al-tmm) so essential in the philosophy of Suhravard and admirably
explained by Abl Barakt Baghdd. It is also the notion of the Witness in
the Heavens, of the Shaykh al-ghayb, secret personal guide, that we find
in Najmoddn Kobr, Semmnn, Aziz Nasaf. It is the form of light that,
during initiation, conjoins itself to the adept in Ismailism, a precise
reminiscence of Manicheanism (cf. the Paraclete or Angel of the prophet
Mani). The idea may also be represented by the image of the subtle body,
or the aetherial spiritual body, or by the image of the celestial garment (the
song of the Pearl from the Acts of Thomas), or by that of the Tselem (form)
in the Jewish Kabalah that recapitulates the rest. It is the celestial Self that
is implied in the formula to see ones self, to know ones self. Because
the form is the primordial Form of the human being, the supreme
archetypal Image according to which the human being was created. It is the
mirror in which God or rather the Angel of God, the Angel of the Face (29)
appears to visionaries. The answer given to the prophet of Islam was: you
will not see me, lan tarn (Quran 7/139), and yet we have his testimony: I
saw my lord (raito rabbi) in the most beautiful of forms (30).

The integral Ego, the integral person, is this unusambo, is this dualitude.
The monadological conception of each human monad as mundus
concentratus presupposes this double accommodation of the Angel and
the Human, for in order to be integral it must contain both a pole in the
celestial world and a pole in the terrestrial world. This is what, still to this
day, the Iranian philosophers of the Avicennian tradition designate by the
term alam aqli, a term that was translated into latin as saeculum
intelligibile. With spiritual individuality at its summit, the saeculum
intelligibile is a spiritual world in itself, an Ain, the Avicennian term
significantly reviving the Gnostic designation of Eons (Ains), [that are the]
spiritual entities of gnosis (31). Thus then, the integral Ego tends
progressively towards being an Ens omni modo determinatum, a radical
inversion of the step-by-step process seeking identification with the
undetermined Absolute. This simple reminder of Boehmes position suffices
to indicate where the threat of nihilism may be seen to arise.

Clearly, this menace arises precisely there where the spiritual,

transcendent, angelic dimension of the person disappears. With the
disappearance of the Fravarti who gives the person, without any
institutional intermediary, his or her dimension beyond the confines of this
world. It is when this dimension, which is the supreme principle of
individuation, disappears, that the invasion of nihilism begins. Now is not
the time nor is this the place to embark on a history of this situation. It
started a long time ago. It is the history of the human being deprived of
fravarti. And without any doubt --because the Zoroastrians are the ones
who had the force to look the principle of active nihilitude, the horrible
Ahrman right in the face-- it is of this same menace of that they had had
the intimation while meditating upon the invasion of the luminous
Ohrmazdian creation by the negativity of Ahrman. Ohrmazd summoned all
the fravartis to his aid; without their help he could not have defended the
ramparts of the Heavens. This is a significant and telling characteristic of
ancient Zoroastrian Iranian thought: the menace is so terrifying that the
God of Light needs the help of all of his own. Henceforth a pact of chivalric
solidarity binds together the Lord of Wisdom (Mazda) and all the celestial
chivalry. They are partners in one and the same battle. We find the idea of
this same chivalric pact in the mystical solidarity of the Rabb and the
marbb, of the Lord and his vassal, in Ibn Arabi, and wherever else the
idea of the fotovvat, in Persian javnmard (spiritual chivalry), appears.

So then, what happens when the celestial dimension of the person --that
dimension that constitutes the very being and supreme individuation of the
person-- disappears?

What happens is the rupture of the pact of reciprocal engagement.

Subsequently, the entire relation between God and the human being is
altered. Their solidarity is broken. They no longer answer for one another,
in the same battle. They draw themselves up in confrontation as master
and slave. One of the two must disappear. Prometheanism would have
stolen the sacred Fire by force, whereas in Mazdeism humans were the
guardians of this sacred Fire that the celestial powers had given into their
keeping. And this Prometheanism, to So long as it serves its ends, this
Prometheanism will adopt every form possible of the Grand Inquisitor. To
think by ones self, to work properly ones self according to ones own
initiative, to freely dare the Promethean adventure, is a task that many
humans would prefer to avoid. And so the Grand Inquisitor takes it in
charge in their stead, on condition that they renounce being themselves. It
shall not be allowed to the human being to comport anything innate.
Everything that it is, it would have received and acquired from its
environment, from the all-powerful pedagogy that takes it in charge (32).
How to be ones self when the self is annihilated (33)? And so it is that
nihilitude swallows itself up in a desacralized world. How can the human
being, in the absence of his or her own proper [singular] --and henceforth
annihilated-- person, possibly encounter [and countenance] a God
personalizing itself for him or for her? Nothing is left but to pray to this God
of the [undetermined unmodulated] exister to exist.

All the forms of imperious agnosticism and of the agnostic imperative will
then mark the triumph of nihilism: the reality of being limited uniquely to
the empirical world, the truth of knowledge limited to sense perception and
to the abstract laws of the understanding. In short, all that the notion of the
world entails reduced to the so-called scientific and objective plane, and
consequently the reality of events limited to the events of empirical History,
in such a way that there is no longer any way out of the myth or history
dilemma, because we are no longer capable of intimating the existence of
events in the Heavens. We were saying earlier that all our reigning
ideologies are the laicizing of theological systems having perished in their
triumph. We mean thereby that the divine Incarnation has transformed itself
into social or socio-political Incarnation. Subsequently, it is the very idea of
this Incarnation that manifests the gravity of its consequences. The official
dogma could not stabilize the paradoxical equilibrium between human and
divine nature. There needed, either for the human element to abolish the
divine, or for the divine to volatilize the human. Monophysitism
accomplished the latter and we may say that the phenomenon of
socialization and the totalitarianism that it leads to are naught but
Monophysitism running against the grain (34).

These are all consequences of the failure or the disappearance of

personalism of that personalism that we have heard denounced as
fomenter of nihilism. Quite the opposite. Indeed, we must reestablish or
reactivateAnd so we must draw up, or simply set back upon its feet, which
is to say reactivate, a rival reality principle to this nihilizing reality, which is
to say a rival to nihilism plain and simple.

Up to here

V. Towards a Reality Principle Rival to Nihilism

We will find this principle precisely by starting from the dialogue that the
double dimension of the integral person both presupposes and instates
between its celestial and terrestrial poles, or, in Iranian terms, between the
Fravarti (or Angel) and the Soul. Since it is the rupture of this bipolarity that
allows the nihilitude of the nihil to return on the offensive, we must instate
or restore a reality principle that renders this reversal impossible, a reversal
that is just as fatal when the personal God is confounded with and lost in
the undetermined Absolute, as when the latter is secularized at the level of
social Incarnation.

The mystery of mysteries (ghayb al-ghoyb in Ismailism and in Islamic

gnosis) is manifestativum sui. As we have already seen (in the writings of
Boehme and Ibn Arabi) by its very essence the latter tends towards its own
auto-manifestation. The idea of this manifestation presupposes eo ipso the
second term: the one to whom it manifests itself. There is therefore eo ipso
correlation between this auto-generation leading the divine Absolute to
manifest itself as personal God, this intra-divine History and the History of
the soul tearing itself away from exterior oppression and pressures so that
its eternal Idea --which is the very secret of its unique personhood-- may
finally emerge. There is correlation between divine birth and the birth of the
soul for whom the divine birth occurs. This correlation thus connects the
two terms in an interdependence, a reciprocal solidarity, such that neither
one can continue to exist without the other For one of the terms to
disappear entails the other falling prey to the nihil. There is correlation
between the death of God and the death of the human person. We have
spoken of a pact of chivalric solidarity, the original idea of which comes
from the celestial chivalry of ancient Zoroastrian Iran. But then what order
of truth and what order of reality, that is to say what form of knowledge,
does the perception of this bipolarity presuppose, and in which region of
the world of Being does it take place and have its place?

The propositions dictated by a cataphatic theology that have not passed

through the trial of apophatic theology, as well as those dictated by
sociology having substituted itself for theology, (philosophy remaining the
servant of sociology after having passed as the servant of theology) have
the form we designate as dogmas. This means that they are proven
propositions, that are established once and for all and that, consequently,
impose themselves with authority uniformly upon each and every one. The
dogmatists leave no place for real dialogue, but only for confrontation.

On the other hand, because the truths perceived as constitutive of this

connection (between the God manifesting itself as a person (biblically : the
Angel of the Face) and the person that the personal God promotes to the
rank of a person by virtue of this revelation) are unique in each instance,
this connection is in no way dogmatic but fundamentally existential. It
cannot express itself as a dogma , but only as a dokma. The two terms
derive from the same Greek verb doko, signifiying both to appear, or to
show as, and to believe, to admit. The dokma marks the link of
interdependence between the form of that which manifests itself and the
one for whom it manifests. It is this correlation that is the very meaning of
the term doksis. Unfortunately, it is from this term that the routine
accumulated by centuries of the history of Western dogmas has drawn the
term docetism, synonym of phantasmatic, unreal, appearance.
Consequently, the original primary meaning must be restored: what we
mean by docetism is in fact the theological critique, or rather theosophical
critique, of religious knowledge. A critique which, reflecting upon that which
is visible for the believer but invisible for the non-believer, examines and
investigates the very nature and causes of this visibility. Nature and causes
that necessarily entail the [revelatory] event taking place neither in the
world of sense perception nor in the abstract world of the understanding.
This event occurs within and consists of the correlation between the form
and the experience of manifestation. We are therefore in need of another
world to safeguard the ontological standing of this relation which is neither
a logical, nor a conceptual, nor a dogmatic relation. It is a theophanic
relation that constitutes a visionary realism wherein appearance becomes
apparition.

It is this same intermediary world that has, for centuries now, preoccupied
so many of our Iranian philosophers, from Suhravardi (who died in 1191) to
Moll Sadr Shrz (who died in 1640) and right up to the present days
(Sayyed Jalloddn Ashtyn). It is the intermediary world between the
world of the Aql (the world of the pure Intelligences) and the world of sense
perception, and which is designated as alm al-mithl, the world of the
Image --not the image perceived by the senses, but the metaphysical
image. This is why, in my books, I have translated this term, alm al-
mithl, after the Latin mundus imaginalis, by the term imaginal world, in
order to properly differentiate it from the imaginary that we identify with the
unreal. Without such a differentiation we would fall back into the abyss of
agnosticism from which the imaginal world, on the contrary, must preserve
us. This world where bodies become spiritualized and where the Spirits
take body is essentially the world of subtle bodies, a spiritually aetherial
world, freed from the laws of corruptible matter that apply to this world, but
not from those of the spatial dimension (that of mathematical solids). For
[the imaginal world is] in eminent possession of all the qualitative richness
of the sensible world, but in an incorruptible state. This intermediary world
is where visionary events, the visions of the prophets and the mystics (the
eschatological events) take place. Without this intermediary world, these
events no longer have their place. The mundus imaginalis is the path by
which we may free ourselves from the literalism to which the religions of
the Book have always been inclined to succumb. It is the ontological level
at which the spiritual meaning of the revelations becomes the literal
meaning, because it is at this level that we attain a sacramental perception
or a sacramental consciousness of beings and of things. By this I mean a
consciousness of their theophanic function, because [the mundus
imaginalis] preserves us from confusing an icon, precisely a metaphysical
image, with an idol. In the absence of this intermediary world we remain
sentenced to incarceration in the uni-dimensional history of empirical
events. The events in the Heavens (divine birth and birth of the soul, for
example) no longer regard us, for we have turned our [inner] eyes away
from them.
Thus, I would tend to see all the regions of thought and of conscience that
have succumbed to a Cartesian dualism (opposing the world of thought to
the world of quantifiable space) from which they can no longer free
themselves as the most glaring symptoms of the nihilism to which we have
fallen prey in this day and age. The hold that this perspective may take on
us renders the conception of a spiritual body, of spiritual matter, so difficult,
if not impossible, that the timid attempts made some time ago by William
James, and more vigorously later by Bergson, provoked in their time a
considerable degree of agitation (35). At the very most the ethnologists
spoke of such conceptions as primitive. In fact it is not a question of a
conception that is primitive in the ethnological sense, but rather
ontologically primordial. I believe that much has changed since then. In
addition to the increase in research in this frontier science that we call the
psy domain, philosophy has for its part increased its attempts to escape
from the Cartesian dilemma.

The hour has thus come when, better than simply comparing, we can
combine the convergent efforts of a Jacob Boehme and a Moll Sadr
Shrz, by instoring a metaphysics of the active Imagination as organ of
the intermediary world of subtle bodies and spiritual matter, quarta
dimensio. The intensification of the acts of the exister, as professed in the
metaphysic of Sadr Shrz, raises the status of the body to the state of a
spiritual body, or even a divine body (jism ilh). The organ of this
transmutation, of this generation of the spiritual body is, in the writings of
Boehme as in those of Moll Sadr, the power of the imaginatrix [or the
power of the creative imagination], which is the magical faculty par
excellence (Imago-Magia) because it is the soul itself animated by its
Perfect Nature, its celestial pole. And so, while the disenchantment
(Entzauberung) of a world reduced to a utilitarian positivity, without an end
term in the beyond, appears to us as one of the destructive aspects of
nihilism, we can still see where the ramparts may be raised to counter this
nihilism.

I have spoken at such great length, in my books, about the metaphysics of

the Imaginal and of the intermediary world, which appears to me to be an
essential element of the current message of Iranian philosophy, that I
cannot add anything here. (36). I would have to give a whole other lecture.
In summing up then, I do not wish to recapitulate my entire presentation,
but simply to recall the following points.

The theme of our conference called into question the consequences of the
impact of the West upon the possibility of dialogue with the so-called
traditional civilizations. In my analysis I attempted to draw out the primary
phenomenon, such that it would permit us to displace the culpability that is
imputed to the West: accused of being responsible for a materialism to
which the spiritualism of the East would be opposed. I meant to suggest
that this culpability does not spring forth from the very essence of the
Western identity, but from a betrayal with respect to precisely that which
constitutes this essence. Today the opposition between East and West, in
the geographical or ethnic sense of the words has been left behind. For
neither that which we call spiritualism nor that which we call materialism
is an inalienable monopoly. Otherwise, how would what we call the
westernization of the East even be possible? Is it a certainty that the West
is responsible for this westernization? Or is it not rather the East itself that
is responsible? In brief, here we are, Easterners and Westerners, faced
with the same problems. Henceforth the words East and West will have
to take on a whole other meaning than their geographical, political or ethnic
meanings for if a pamphleteer of our day and age could write Rome is no
longer in Rome, it may well be that the East is no longer in the East. We
are speaking here of the East or Orient in the metaphysical sense of the
word, as it is understood by the Iranian philosophers in the tradition of
Avicenna and Suhravard. Their Orient is the spiritual world (alam-qods)
the celestial pole upon which, as we said, the integrality of the human
person depends. Those who lose [and lose track of] this pole are the
vagabonds of a [Western or] Occidental world which is the very opposite of
the metaphysical Orient, regardless of whether, geographically, they are
Oriental or Occidental.

It is the question of the very possibility of dialogue that is at issue here: do

we want to make our way together to the rediscovery of that celestial pole
that gives the human person his or her integral dimension? A dialogue, in
the real sense of the word, is only possible between persons having the
same aspiration towards the same spiritual dimension (which is altogether
different from belonging to the same generation, for example). Teachings
like those of Jacob Boehme show us this integral dimension of the human
person. The same aspiration, because, in fact, this integral dimension of
the human being does not yet exist. It can only come to term at the end of a
long process which, far from redirecting us towards an illusory identification
with a suprapersonal Absolute, accomplishes in itself the process by which
the Absolute, the Absconditum, engendered itself as divine Person. For the
Absolute has no Face; only the Person has a Face permitting the face to
face encounter, and it is in this face to face that the pact of chivalric
solidarity is made.

It is an aberration to drag that which we call the Absolute into the

vicissitudes of human destiny. On the other hand, the personal God and his
devoted follower have appeared to us as partners in one and the same
destiny. Thus, the personal God, that could not die except through the
betrayal of its (co-)respondant, gives its true meaning to the human
adventure. And this is the profound truth contained in a notion that is
common currency amongst those (the adherents of an intrepid spiritualism
found in the West) known as the Mormons: That which you are, God was.
That which God is, you will be. In this sense, we would not only be the
partners of a dialogue. We would be the dialogue itself.

1) Article written by Georges Vallin (Professor at the University of Nancy) in

Revue philosophique , 277-288, Paris, July-September 1975, as well as
his more recent article : Pourquoi le non dualisme asiatique ? (Elments
pour une thorie de la philosophie compare) Ibid. n.2, pp. 157-175, 1978.

3)Ibid, p. 276. The italics are the authors own.

5)Notably Sayyed Ahmad Alav Ispahn and Hosayn Tonkbon. See S.J.
Ashtyn and H. Corbin, Anthologie des philosophes iranienne depuis le
XVIIe sicle jusqu nos jours, tome II (Bibliothque Iranienne, vol. 19).
Teheran-Paris, 1975, p. 7-31 and 77-90 of the French language section
see also our study of [the paradox of monotheism] Le paradoxe du
monothisme, in Eranos-Jahrbuch 45-1976.

8)For the believer who profoundly lives the Iranian conception of Light, the
Prometheus myth is felt to be a grotesque perversion of the reality of
things. See our study: Ralisme et symbolisme des couleurs en
cosmologie shite, in Eranos-Jahrbuch , p. 170 sq, 41-1972. See also
Jean Brun, Sisyphe, enfant de Promthe, in Eranos-Jahrbuch 46-
1977.

15)See in particular the (Persian) treaty by Ab Yaqb Sejestn, Kashf al-

Mahjb (Le Dvoilement des choses caches) an Ismaili text of the IVth
century Hegire. Edited by Henry Corbin (Bibliothque Iranienne, vol. 1)
Teheran-Paris, 1949. The author pursues a rigorous dialectic of double
negativity: non-being and non non-being. God is not-in-time and not-not-in-
time; not-in-space and not-not-in-space, etc. See also, by the same author
Le Livre des Sources (Kitb al Yanb), Arabic text edited and translated in
our Trilogie Ismalienne (Bibliothque Iranienne, vol.9), Teheran-Paris
1961. See the index s.v. tawhd.

16)See H. Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituals et philosophiques,

Paris, Gallimard, 1971-1972, tome IV index on Qz Sad Qomm, several
chapters deal with the the Shaykhie School in this same volume. On Rajab
Al Tabrzi, see our Anthologie des philosophes iraniens (supra note 5)
tome I, p.98-116 of the French section, as well as our Philosophie iranienne
et philosophie compare, Teheran, Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977,
Paris, Buchet/Chastel.
17) Cf. Alexandre Koyr, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme, Paris 1929, a
monumental study as valuable today as when it was first written and which
we follow closely here. See pages 303-305 sq.

18)See our study of [the paradox of monotheism] Le paradoxe du

monothisme, previously cited (note 5) a more ample development of
which is to be found in our study of the [necessity of angelology] Ncessit
de langlologie (Conference at the Tours Institute of Philosophy, May
1977), in Les Cahiers de lhermtisme.

21)Koyr distinctly highlights the contrast in a brief analysis, ibid., p.316,

note 2.

22)After Koyrs apt translation.

25)It is to Koyr that we owe this welcome interposition of the Latin

formulas of Fr. Von Baader which recapitulate the entire question.

27)See our two studies previously cited in note 18.

28)See the index at the back of our Avicenne et le Rcit visionnaire, Terre
cleste et corps de resurrection, En Islam iranien, LArchange
empourpr, etc. See also Gershom Scholem, Von der mystischen Gestalt
der Gottheit, Frankfurt am M., 1973, p. 249
29)On the Angel of the Face , see the final section of our study
Ncssit de langlologie (previously cited note 18).

30)See our LImagination cratrice dans le soufisme dIbn Arab, 2nd ed.,
Paris, Flammarion, 1977, the entire chapter (together with the texts that are
to be found translated in the footnotes) on the Form of God (srat al-
Haqq) [the Sourat of Truth].

31)See our Philosophie iranienne et philosophie compare (previously

cited, note 16) index s.v. lam aql.

32)Have certain people not already gone so far as to claim that

chromosomes are a fascist invention!

33)See Alexandre Zinoviev, Les hauteurs bantes, Lausanne, LAge

dhomme, 1977.

34)See our Ncessit de langlologie (previously cited, note 18), the entire
chapter on the Christos Angelos.

35)Of which A. Koyr reminds us. Op. cit., p.113, note 3.

36) See En Islam iranien... tome IV index s.v. ; LArchange empourpr,

recueil de quinze traits et rcits mystiques de Sohravard, traduits du
persan et de larabe et comments par H. Corbin, [The Crimson Archangel,
a collection of fifteen treaties and mystical tales translated from Persian
and Arabic and with commentary by H. Corbin] Paris, Fayard, 1976, index
s.v., as well as the index of our work on Ibn Arabi (previously cited, note
30).