Praise be unto God Who made our enemy Abbas Effendi to be among the stupid
786
ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ عَدُوئِنَا عَبَّاس أَفنَدي مِنَ ٱلْحُقَى
Praise be unto God who made our enemy Abbas Effendi to be among the stupid!
They said:
I understand the argumentation of Abbas Effendi against the Unity of Existence as such:
1. Knowledge is dependant on the existence of the thing the knowledge is about. In other words, ordinary knowledge is of relationary essence: the knowledge of something.
2. God is not dependent on His Creation; hence, the divine Knowledge also is independent of the creation.
3. From 1 and 2, it follows that there are two kinds of knowledge: divine and ordinary knowledge. Divine knowledge is independent of the existence of the subject, while ordinary knowledge is dependent on it.
4. From 3, it follows that what is emanating from God is not this world but rather an intermediary world of "the Kingdom" or "the Preexistent", which is the object of divine knowledge and is constituted by God's grace, and those rays are what appears in "the originated" or "creation" which constitutes our reality.
Hence, the concept of Unity of Existence is confined within the intermediary world of "the Preexistent".
I feel that this ontology is orthogonal rather than contradictory to the one of the Bayán; in the Bayán, the creation is identified with the realm of possibilities, that is, limited not by existence but by the natural laws. It is not clear how to relate that to the three worlds of Abbas Effendi (God, Kingdom, creation). I would say the the Bayánic concept of creation is something between the Kingdom and creation in the ontology of Abbas Effendi.
Overall, the core idea of Abbas Effendi seems to be similar to what is in Vahid V, Bab 17. Abbas Effendi pulls out a strawman in the form of an alleged wrong view by the Sufis and then corrects it to show his own intellect but he does not deny the Unity of Existence.
We say:
The schema that you lay out does not deny the Unity of Being eo ipse as Ibn Arabi lays it out in his Bezels of Wisdom. It is a mere re-articulation of it. This is the situation that Abbas Effendi does not really address.
1. Knowledge is of two kinds: intelligible and actual. The intelligibles are universals. Actual are the particulars. One is an archetype. The other is its instantiation of the archetype. I call one archetype (as celestial exemplar) with the other prototype (as terrestrial manifestation). Ibn Arabi calls the first "the immutable archetypal essences" (al-ay'an ath-thabita) "who have not whiffed from the taste of existence" (chapter of Enoch). These immutable archetypal essences are the universal objects of knowledge in the mind of God from pre-eternity. They are the Knower, the knowledge and the thing known as well as the archetypes of all that they instantiate as actual existence (wujud al-'ayniya).
2. All dependency arises on the plane of relations. The Primordial Essence and Absolute Existence (wujud al-mutlaq) is beyond all relations and so all dependencies. However, on the level of self-entification (ta'ayyun) - which is to say the God self-disclosing and emanating the universe - dependencies of relations arise because this is the plane of the Self-Disclosure of the Names and Attributes who are both God and not God simultaneously and whose spectrum of realities act in polar opposites to each other, like the Name 'the Expander' (al-basit) as opposed to the 'Contractor' (al-qabid) or the 'Merciful' (al-rahman) as opposed to the 'Wrathful' (qahhar), the Giver of Life (muhyi) and the Taker of Life (mumit), etc.
3. Creation is the plane of relations thus without a Creator there is no creation such that the "Creator" cannot be predicated as "Creator" without creation. There is thus a mutual dependency of relations between the two terms in logic and ontology, thus here there cannot be a Lord (rabb) without a vassal ('abd) or no god (ilah) without that which is engodded (maluh).
4. On the level of the Absolute Existence, there is no hierarchy and thus there is only God. To suggest otherwise, is to suggest a deficiency in God and thus dualism and so to reject Tawhid. Existence/Being (wujud) is the universal undefinable. Ibn Arabi characterizes this situation as,
ليس في الوجود ما سوى الله
There is nothing in existence except God.
Mulla Sadra articulates it as,
بسيط الحقيقة كل الاشياء وليس بشيء منها
The Simple Reality is all things but is not any of them.
This dictum sets out to prove God's knowledge of things before their creation at the level of the Essence with the following explanation:
When we observe specific existences such as the sky and the earth, we see that there is an existence like the sky, for instance. This existence has a limit, and from its limit, an essence is derived, which is the essence of the sky. Thus, three things are observed: the very existence, its limit, and the essence derived from the limit. Therefore, the observed breaks down into three:
1. The reality of existence.
2. The limit of that existence, which implies the absence of that level of the reality of existence confirmed for another level.
3. The essence derived from that limit, which forms the template for that specific existence.
Thus, the existent, after this breakdown, is composed of three things, but what actually exists is only the existence itself. As for the limit, it refers to the absence, just as the essence is also a non-existent matter but becomes existent through existence. Without it, it would have no existence.
Therefore, every existent is composed of these three elements: existence, non-existence, and a non-existent.
5. However, on the level of the infinite self-entifications of the Real (i.e. God) in Its infinite self-disclosures, it is these that produce the infinite relations, hierarchies, differences and gradations in Being that arise [Mulla Sadra uses the term tashkeek here to describe the situation]. This is what the basic scheme of the Unity of Being is about and not what Abbas Effendi says. Thus wahdat al-wujud is also not pantheism because there is no substance (jawhar/ousia) at issue here which is being claimed as indivisible because Being/Existence (wujud) is not substance. This was Spinoza's position in his Ethics and maybe some of the Avicennans who sometimes make substance and existence synonymous. But it is not what the Unity of Being is about or what any of its exponents have laid out regarding it. The Primal Point does not remotely disagree with this scheme at all because He articulates it in the Bayan using His own terminology as well as elsewhere. For all of his rants and name calling and demonization of Ibn Arabi, neither did Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i substantially shift to a different metaphysical schema either. He employs Ibn 'Arabi's own terminology constantly while claiming to refute him, which he doesn't really. Al-Awhad's is only a difference in emphases, like when describing God as "Lord of Being" (rabb al-wujud) which Ibn 'Arabi would wholeheartedly agree with. And so the outcome of Shaykhi metaphysics becomes nearly identical to the Akbarian (i.e. Ibn Arabi's) with differences only occurring in the emphases of the specific perspective and point of departure.
I have further described what Wahdat al-Wujud actually means, here https://wahidazal303.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-meaning-of-wahdat-al-wujud-unity-of.html
