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Logos & Revelation: Ibn 'Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics

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'Logos and Revelation' by Robert Dobie takes the mystico-metaphysical thought of the two premiere sages of Christianity and Islam--Meister Eckhart and Ibn 'Arabi--and weaves them into a masterful treatise which is at once academic and mystical. Dobie has composed what might outwardly be seen as an authoritatve academic study of two venerable sages, but what could inwardly be seen as a statement concerning the nature of things. There exists an underlying universality in the orientation of this work, and this is evinced by the serious and equal treatment of sages from two different traditions, not under the presumed authority of the secular but within the paradigm of the sacred, and in this underlying universality the work joins that corpus of writings that exposit what could be thought of as universal metaphysics (though it must be said that Dobie does distinguish his approach from that of a Frithjof Schuon, the distinction is, in our mind, of peripheral significance), though this is to speak of it only from its doctrinal and conceptual aspirations; indeed the sages never tire of asserting the incomeasurability between the robe of language and the realities behind the folds of those robes. Our author is most interested in presenting the epistemological dimensions of these sages and it is here where the work can be considered most relevant to the modern/post-modern world and its epistemological--hence philosophical--paralysis. For moderns and their 'post-modern' offspring cognition is reducible to the sensorial, be it discurisive reason as is the case with moderns or sentimentalism as is the case with post-moderns. For ancient man, and indeed for the mystically inclined medieval man cognition was still rooted in God's act of knowing. For them our cognitive act is crowned by a direct and apriori form of knowledge which is sometimes referred to as intuition or intellection, and this vertical, immediate and qualitative mode of cognition is the basis for all indirect, horizontal, quantitative and analytical modes of cognition; in a word the higher manner of knowing prefigures, orients and breathes meaning into the lower manner of knowing, and this higher manner is ultimately God's own attribute, His Logos. C. S. Lewis summarizes the situation nicely when he wrote: "We are enjoying intellectus when we "just see" a self-evident truth; we are exercising ratio when we proceed step by step to prove a truth that is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply "seen" would be the life of an intelligetia, an angel. A life of unmitigated ratio where nothing was simply "seen" and all had to be proved, would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident. Man's mental life is spent laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentia that constitute intellectus."

Revelations are the objective counterweight to this inner revelation and so represent something in the way of God's outstretched hand. This brings us to Dobie's interest in the sage's hermeneutical strategies, though it must be stressed that for both sages there is no human invention or ingenuity at play here, instead their hermeneutics are an integral part of the revelatory phenomena itself. Both Ibn 'Arabi and Meister Eckhart were utterly devoted to the revealed words of God represented in their respective scriptures and were as far removed from the homeless new-age pseudo-mystic as can be imagined. That said, they also didn't give way to the often stultifying and rationalistic hermeneutics of the purely dogmatic theologians, instead they understood that scripture was but revealed allusions to a Reality that both transcends and underlies the manifest order of thing. They cut into the body of scripture and "plumbed its depths" to return with a revivifying commentarial exposition which marked an almost second birth for their respective religious traditions. The hermeneutical approach of our sages is one wherein the goal is 'union' between the individuated soul and God, a 'union' that already ontologically precedes our 'separation', but one that nonetheless prevails despite our fallen condition. Now the linchpin of this approach is the Logos, God's creative and expressive Word, which both existentiates the world and radiates goodness throughout the soul, for as St. Augustine said, it is in the nature of the Good to give of itself--bonum est diffusivum sui. It is for us, on the basis of the presence of the Logos within us, to return to God via the revealed Logos, and this could be considered the basic framework within which our sages approach their religious traditions. Our author is at home in both Ibn 'Arabi and Meister Eckhart's vast corpus of writings and moves dexterously between the often elusive and nuanced points of doctrine with the comfortability and familiarity of an adept. Dobie concludes by proposing a general approach to comparative religion based upon their epistemological and hermeneutical perspectives which is very reassuring. One feels safe in saying that 'Logos and Revelation' is a sufficient, indeed exemplary, introduction to Meister Eckhart and Ibn 'Arabi as well as being a storehouse for quintessential metaphysics. One hopes and prays to see more from Dobie and more works styled on this approach.