Antinous

My personal and somewhat tangential experience with Christianity has been less than satisfactory. Some of those who have operated under the name of that religion have been amongst the most violent people I have known. It is for this reason that this website is amusing. Is it fact? I don’t know. But it certainly makes Christianity out to be a product of a rather long and rather debauched party. Note the mention of Antinous here, and elsewhere on the site.

Antinous as Christ?

Gosh! Where a random blog will take you. Having seen on Wikipedia a connection between Rumi and Ibn al-`Arabi, I recalled reading about the latter in Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. This is a great book. The title makes it sound like it might not be suited for those without affinity with religion. However, this is not the case. It is just a great discussion of the way the idea of God has been represented over the millennia. I myself don’t have that much interest in religion, except as an entertaining speculation and a field for imaginative play.

Anyhow the blog has momentarily stepped into difficult terrain. In the first place I have included a little about Islam. For myself, I know very little about Islam, so I leave it to others to do the talking. But one thing I do know is that in the West at this time it is not exactly high on many people’s lists of favourite things. Secondly, and more problematically, the long quote from Karen Armstrong, below, discusses the mesmerisation of two great minds (Dante and Ibn al-`Arabi) with a beauty they found in two young girls.

Well, let’s just get it over with, and say that such a discussion in no way should be taken as an endorsement for activities which damage the young, and which are illegal where I live, and most likely where you live too. Ibn al-`Arabi’s and Dante’s fascination was confined strictly to the spiritual (that’s the whole point), which makes this post not quite as problematic as it might otherwise be. However, now that the subject has moved into this area, sometime soon I am likely to put up a post about Hadrian and Antinous. In today’s terms there was nothing at all innocent about that affair. Hadrian would have got 20 years in the slammer.

An interesting thing about all three instances, however, is their association with religion. The key ingredient is beauty.

Ibn al-`Arabi [1165-1240]

Note here some question over the correct rendering of his name. I have followed Armstrong.

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Karen Armstrong, in A History of God (London: Vintage, 1999), writes:

‘[270] [Ibn al-Arabi‘s] life we can, perhaps, see as a symbol of the parting of the ways between East and West. His father was a friend of Ibn Rushd, who was very impressed by the piety of the young boy on the one occasion that they met. During a severe illness, Ibn al-Arabi was converted to Sufism, however, and at the age of thirty he left Europe for the Middle East. He made the hajj and spent two years training and meditating at the Kabah but eventually settled at Malatya on the Euphrates. Frequently called Sheikh al-Akbah, the Great Master, he profoundly affected the Muslim conception of God but his thought did not influence the West, which imagined that Islamic philosophy had ended with Ibn Rushd. Western Christendom would embrace Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian God, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently, for the imaginative God of the Mystics.

Ibn al-`Arabi mosque, Damascus.

In 1201, while making the circumambulations around the Kabah, Ibn al-Arabi had a vision which had a profound and lasting effect upon him: he had seen a young girl, named Nizam, surrounded by a heavenly aura and he realised that she was an incarnation of Sofia, the divine Wisdom. This epiphany made him realise that it would be impossible for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of philosophy. Falsafah emphasised the utter transcendence of al-Lah and reminded us that nothing could resemble him. How could we love such an alien Being? Yet we can love the God we see in his creatures: “if you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for he is the Beautiful Being,” he explained in the Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Mecca Revelations). “Thus in all its aspects, the object of love is God alone.” The Shahadah [and here] reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah. Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see God himself but we can see him as he has chosen to reveal himself in such creatures as Nizam, who inspire love in our hearts. Indeed, the mystic had a duty to create his own epiphanies for himself in order to see a girl like [271] Nizam as she really was. Love was essentially a yearning for something that remains absent; that is why so much of our human love remains disappointing. Nizam had become “the object of my Quest and my hope, the virgin most pure”. As he explained in the prelude to The Diwan, a collection of love poems:

In the verses I have composed for the present book, I never cease to allude to the divine inspirations, the spiritual visitations, the correspondences [of our world] with the world of Angelic Intelligences. In this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life and because this girl knew exactly what I was referring to.

The creative imagination had transformed Nizam into an avatar of God.’

Alessandro Botticelli Portrait of Dante c.1495

[Armstrong continued:] ‘Some 80 years later, the young Dante Alighieri [1265-1321] had a similar experience in Florence when he saw Beatrice Portinari. As soon as he caught sight of her, he felt his spirit tremble violently and seemed to hear it cry: “behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.” From that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired a mastery “owing to the power which my imagination gave him”. Beatrice remained the image of divine love for Dante and in The Divine Comedy, he shows how this brought him, through an imaginary journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, to a vision of God. Dante’s poem had been inspired by Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven; certainly his view of the creative imagination was similar to that of Ibn al-Arabi. Dante argued that it was not true that the imaginativa simply combined images derived from perception of the mundane world, as Aristotle had maintained; it was in part an inspiration from God:

O fantasy (imaginativa), that reav’st us oft away
So from ourselves that we remain distraught,
Deaf though a thousand trumpets round us bray.
[272] What moves thee when the senses show thee naught?
Light moves thee, formed in Heaven, by will maybe
Of Him who sends it down, or else self-wrought.

Throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb up Mount Purgatory to the earthly paradise, where Beatrice upbraids him for seeing her physical being as an end in itself: instead, he should have seen her as a symbol or an avatar that pointed him away from the world to God. There are scarcely any physical descriptions in Paradise; even the blessed souls are elusive, reminding us that no human personality can become the final object of human yearning. Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence of God, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting a cold portrait of God in the Paradiso but the abstraction reminds us that ultimately we know nothing at all about him.

Sandro Botticelli, Purgatorio XXXII (detail), ca. 1480-95

Ibn al-Arabi was also convinced that the imagination was a God-given faculty. When a mystic created an epiphany for himself, he was bringing to birth here below a reality that existed more perfectly in the realm of archetypes. When we saw the divine in other people, we were making an imaginative effort to uncover the true reality: “God made the creatures like veils,” he explained, “He who knows them as such is led back to Him, but he who takes them as real is barred from His presence.” Thus - as seemed to be the way of Sufism - what started as a highly personalised spirituality, centring on a human being, led Ibn al-Arabi to a transpersonal conception of God….

Ibn al-Arabi did not believe that the God he knew had an objective existence. Even though he was a skilled metaphysician, he did not believe that God’s existence could be proved by logic. He liked to call himself a disciple of Khidr, a name given to the mysterious figure who appears in the Koran as the spiritual director of Moses, who brought the external Law to the Israelites. God had given Khidr a special knowledge of himself so Moses begs him for instruction, but Khidr tells him that he will not be able to put up with this, since it lies outside his own religious experience. It was no good trying to understand religious ‘information’ that we had not experienced ourselves.’

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Karen Armstrong is a respected writer on religion. More about her here.

Donnie Darko

Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?

Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?