Tajalliyat E Hikmat Pdf

[Francisca Noggles]

1whose disappearance brings on a catastrophe of the Spirit, where we have by no means yet taken the measure of all the consequences. It is essentially a median and mediating power, in the same way that the universe to which it is regulated and to which it gives access, is a median and mediating universe, an intermediate world between the sensible and the intellectual (intelligible), an intermediate world without which articulation between sensible and intellectual (intelligible) is definitely blocked. And then pseudo-dilemmas pullulate in the shadows, every escape or resolution closed to them.

Neither the active nor the agent Imagination is thus in any sense an organ for the secretion of the imaginary, the unreal, the mythic, or the fictive. For this reason we absolutely had to find a term to differentiate radically the intermediate world of the Imagination, such as we find it presented to the minds of our Iranian metaphysicians, from the merely imaginary. The Latin language came to our assistance, and the expression mundus imaginalis is the literal equivalent of the Arabic 'alam al-mithal, al-alam al-mithali, in French the "monde imaginal" a key-term over which we hesitated at the time of the first edition of this book. (The Latin terms have the advantage of fixing the thematic forms and guarding them from hazardous or arbitrary translations. We shall make plentiful use of them here.) In so far as it has not been named and specified, a world cannot rise into Being and Knowledge (Connaitre). This key-term, mundus imaginalis, commands the complete network of notions appropriate to the precise level of Being and Knowledge which it connotes: imaginative perception, imaginative knowledge, imaginative consciousness. While we encounter in other philosophies or systems a distrust of the Image, a degradation of all that properly belongs to the Imagination, the mundus imaginalis is its exaltation, because it is the link in whose absence the schema of the worlds is put out of joint.

As for the function of the mundus imaginalis and the Imaginal Forms, it is defined by their median and mediating situation between the intellectual and sensible worlds. On the one hand it immaterialises the Sensible Forms, on the other it "imaginalises" the Intellectual Forms to which it gives shape and dimension. The imaginal world creates symbols on the one hand from the Sensible Forms, on the other from the Intellectual Forms. It is this median situation which imposes on the imaginative faculty a discipline which would be unthinkable where it had been degraded into "fantasy," secreting only the imaginary, the unreal, and capable of every kind of extravagance. Here there is the same total difference already recognised and clearly remarked by Paracelsus between the imaginatio vera (Imagination in the true sense) and "Phantasy."

In order that the former should not degenerate into the latter, precisely this discipline, which is inconceivable if the imaginative power, the active Imagination, is exiled from the scheme of Being and Knowledge, is required. Such a discipline would not be capable of involving the interest of an imagination reduced to the role of folle du logis or inspired fool, but it is inherent in a median and mediating faculty whose ambiguity consists of its being able to put itself at the service of that

One takes the decisive step in the metaphysic of the imaginal and the Imagination when one admits with Molla Sadra Shirazi that the imaginative power is a purely spiritual faculty independent of the physical organism and consequently surviving it. We shall see in the course of the texts translated here that it is the formative power of the subtle body or imaginal body (jism mithali), indeed this subtle body itself, forever inseparable from the soul, that is from the moi-esprit, from the spiritual individuality. It is thus as well to forget all that the Peripatetic philosophers or others have been able to say about it, when they speak of it as being like a bodily faculty and perishing with the organic body whose ordinance it follows.

The immateriality of the imaginative power was already fully affirmed by Ibn 'Arabi when he differentiated between the absolute imaginal Forms, that is to say such as subsist in the Malakut, and the "captive" imaginal Forms, that is, those immanent in the imaginative consciousness of man in this world. The former are in the world of the Soul (me) or Malakut, epiphanies or theophanies, that is to say, imaginal manifestations of the pure Intellectual Forms of the Jabarut. The latter are in their turn manifestations of the imaginal Forms of the Malakut or world of the Soul to man's imaginative consciousness. It is therefore perfectly exact here to speak of metaphysical Images. Now these cannot be received unless by a spiritual organ. The solidarity and interdependence between the active Imagination defined as a spiritual faculty and the necessity of the mundus imaginalis as an intermediate world respond to the need of a conception which considers the worlds and the forms of Being as so many theophanies (tajalliyat ilahiya).

We thus find ourselves in the presence of a number of philosophers who refuse indifferently a philosophy or a theology which lacks the element of theophany. Sohravardi and all the Ishraquiyun who follow him have always considered the "Perfect Sage" as being the Sage who gathers to himself equally the highest philosophical knowledge and the mystical experience modelled on the visionary experience of the Prophet, the night of the Miraj. Now the organ of visions, of whatever degree they may be, whether in the case of the philosophers or of the prophets, is neither the intellect nor the fleshly eyes, but the fire of that imaginatio vera of which the Burning Bush is for Sohravardi the type. In the sensible form it is then the Imaginal Form itself which is from the very first and at one and the same time the pierceived form and the organ of visionary perception. The Theophanic Forms are in their essence Imaginal Forms.

This is to say that the mundus imaginalis is the place, and consequently the world, where not only the visions of the prophets, the visions of the mystics, the visionary events which each human soul traverses at the time of his exitus from this world, the events of the lesser Resurrection and of the Greater Resurrection "take place" and have their "place," but also the gestes of the mystical epics, the symbolic acts of all the rituals of initiation, liturgies in general with all their symbols, the "composition of the ground" in various methods of prayer (oraison), the spiritual filiations whose authenticity is not within the competence of documents and archives, and equally the esoteric process us of the Alchemical Work, in connection with which the First Imam of the Shi'ites was able

3 to say "Alchemy is the sister of Prophecy." Finally the "Biographies of Archangels" are by their nature imaginal history, since everything in them happens in the Malakut. Thus, if one deprives all this of its proper place which is the mundus imaginalis, and of its proper organ of perception which is the active Imagination, nothing of it has a "place" any more, and consequently no longer "takes place." It is no longer anything but imaginary and fictive.

With the loss of the imaginatio vera and of the mundus imaginalis nihilism and agnosticism begin. This is why we said a few lines above that we ought to forget here all that the Aristotelians and similar philosophers have said of the Imagination when they treat it as a bodily faculty. It is just this that makes the efforts of certain among the Jewish and Islamic philosophers to construct a philosophic theory of Prophecy pathetic. In truth, they do not extricate themselves from the difficulty. Either the prophet is assimilated to the philosopher or the philosopher does not know what to make of Prophecy. On the other hand the conjunction is effected without difficulty by those of our philosophers who were persuaded that their confreres, starting with the ancient Greek Sages as well as those of ancient Persia, derived their higher knowledge from the Niche aux lumieres of Prophecy (Mishkazt al-nobowwat). It is precisely here that Philosopher and Prophet unite in one single vocation.

As the name of Hegel has just been uttered, now is the right moment in our preface to give the actual meaning of our leitmotifs for western philosophy. When the mystical theosophists represented in this book experience and affirm the necessity of the intermediate world, of an intermediary between the sensory and the intellectual, their position is exactly that of Jacob Boehme. Between the

4 intellectual and the sensible, or expressed more precisely still, between the transcendent and hidden Deity, the Deitas abscondita, and the world of man, Boehme places an intermediary which he calls the sacred Element, a "spiritual corporeity" which represents the Dwelling, the Divine Presence, for our world. This Dwelling is Wisdom itself, Sophia. This Presence js the Shekhina of the Kabbalists. It is the imaginal locus of an entirely spiritual incarnation, for all eternity anterior to that Incarnation which exoteric religion places in history, that history which for Shi'ites, theosophists and Ismailis is nothing but the metaphor of the True Reality.

Either way it is the idea of Theophany which is dominant, making itself evident by its own nature and of necessity between the intellectual and the sensible, and what is denoted as Sophia, as the "Soul of the World," is at the same time the imaginal locus and the organ of this Theophany. It is at once the necessary mediatrix, the Deus revelatus, between pure Divinity, for ever concealed, beyond our reach, and man's world. This is what we have in another place called the "paradox of monotheism" and it is a constant theme in all those doctrines in the "religions of the book" which are in one way or another related to the Kabbala. Equally in Jewish mysticism the Hassidim have established a triple differentiation: there is the unknowable God, there is the place of the emanation of the Glory, which is the "countenance on high" and which even the Angels do not know; lastly there is the manifested Glory, the "countenance beneath," the only one we can contemplate. This "countenance beneath" is the Angel Metatron as "Angel of the Countenance" who is equally the Presence, the Sophia, the Soul of the World.

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