The Transcendence of the Divine

God is a transcendent being since His Sacred Essence is not subject to the ravages of time and space, He is an absolutely simple reality, in fact the Simplest Reality [Basit-al-haqiqa] in existence and is therefore devoid of all kinds of composition [tarkib] and duality [ithniyat] and is hence by virtue of this absolute simplicity [basatat] which is not a property additional to the Essence [zat] but is identical to the Essence [ain-e-zat] He cannot be material because everything that is material is composite and spatial-temporal as well; and because He is an immaterial being [mujarred], therefore He is also purely actual [filiyat-e-mehaz] or a pure actuality that is devoid of all traces of potentiality [quwat] because to assert the existence of any kind of potentiality in His Essence would be tantamount to affirming that He is a necessity-possibility complex [murakkab-e-wujub-wa-imkan] and hence essentially-contingent [mumkin-bil-zat] which is inadmissible. Therefore the philosophers state that He is an absolutely immutable Being that is eternally changeless because to admit change in the Necessary Being is to consider His Essence potential, composite, material and temporal etc.
Now since He is an immutable being and a pure actuality therefore His creative act is a single and simple one that did not come into existence after a prior non-existence or absence, as any such belief will give rise to all the above mentioned rational objections, and hence God's creative act is an eternal and simple act that emanates from His Essence flowing through or effusing through the realm of the intellect first and then the intermediate realm of the soul until it finally permeates the physical world, where this eternal act is manifested in an incremental or gradual manner in time and space because matter due to its remoteness from the source of being [mabda-e-wujud] lacks the capacity to absorb and manifest this eternal divine act instantaneously, therefore it manifests this act gradually, where one form [surat] is succeeded by another in a sequence.
When we pray to God and he fulfills our wishes, so we may say that from a philosophical point of view God both acts now in the present and does not acts now in the present, albeit in different respects because the aspect in which He acts now in the present, is not the same aspect in which He is being said not to be acting, and therefore there is no contradiction here. Therefore it be said that since God possesses divine foreknowledge which is identical to His Essence and is the knowledge of His Essence, through His Essence, by His Essence, and also of all other things [since he is the Cause of all], that He was aware of all our supplications since eternity via a simple knowing [Al-Ilm-al-Ijmali] and granted all our wishes in eternity through that one simple and eternal act of creation, and therefore it can be said that He is not acting in this respect; but at the same time that one simple act through which he grants the wishes of all is manifested in the material world gradually in a temporal sequence necessitated by substantial motion which is the very essence of matter, and therefore it is equally valid to say that He fulfills our wishes or acts now in the present because that simple and eternal act unfolds gradually for us here in time and space.

Comments

  1. Unknown19 March 2019 at 15:48

    Since he is the Cause of all, that He was aware of all our supplications since eternity via a simple knowing [Al-Ilm-al-Ijmali] and granted all our wishes in eternity through that one simple and eternal act of creation

    fascinating!

    ReplyDelete

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