The Qur’ānic Truth

“How is truth historical and how is history truth?” This is precisely the question that every gnostic (in the broadest sense of the word) is in a position to ask anyone who rejects the idea of gnosis in the name of historicity. Or rather, it is the question by which every gnostic challenge the a-gnostic position in advance that gives rise to the dilemma. Also, where, as in the esotericism of Islam, the spirit of gnosis has been perpetuated, with the idea of saving knowledge and the theophanies of the Pleroma, this perpetuation implies the absence or the defeat of what was designated above as “inflation of the historical consciousness”. It has long been a commonplace to oppose the “a-historical” spirit of Hellenism and the historicity implied by a religion of salvation; but in fact, it is this notion of historicity that is equivocal, for the great thing is that “temporality” is not synonymous with what we commonly understand by “historicity.

On this point, we shall see that the spirituality of Iranian Islam has precisely formulated the decisive distinction, and through it the intuition of its prophetic mysticism appears to us as having already solved in one fell swoop what is on the agenda of current philosophical preoccupations: there is a time other than the time of history, a real, sacred time, which is that of the events of the invisible world, of which the soul is the “locus” (cf. infra).

Since Hegel’s phenomenology, we are used to opposing Nature and History, History being the world of man. In fact, in the eyes of our hokamâ and ‘orafâ in Islam, Nature and History (what we call them) both belong to the world of becoming, both falling under the empire of physis. This is why historical time, which post-Hegelian philosophy opposes to the becoming of Nature, is in fact only a naturalization of time in the eyes of the theosophy of Shi’ism and Sufism, because it is inadequate to speak of a fall of the Spirit in time, meaning “in history”: it would be better to speak of the fall of time itself in history. Only then can we understand how the internalization of meaning marks a reversal of time.

Here, there is a key term in Arabic (also used in is the word hikâyat, which means a “story”, a “narrative”, and as such an “imitation”, a “repetition”, as if the art of the historian were essentially similar to the art of the mime. This is because in fact all history that takes place in this visible world is the imitation of events first accomplished in the soul, “in Heaven”, and this is why the place of hierohistory, that is to say of the gestures of sacred history, is not perceptible by the senses, because their meaning refers to another world. This intuition comes from the presentiment of these multiplied spaces, of these “octaves of universes” mentioned above (§ 2), and thus from the presentiment that the truth of any event must be grasped at the level of reality where this event really takes place (cf. all that will be said, finally, concerning the XIIe Imām). Only spiritual hermeneutics safeguards the truth of the ḥikāyat, the truth of the prophetic stories of the Bible and the Qur’ān, because it grasps the spiritual meaning at the level at which the event actually takes place, in the time that is proper to it, the time of metahistory. Whoever understands this will never feel the need to “demythologize” or “demythologize” the narratives of the Bible and the Qur’ān, because, if these narratives are not history (like the profane history of Julius Caesar, for example), they are not myth either.

And why then impute to Gnosis what is the opposite? Thus the Gnostic idea of redemption is accused of reducing the being of the believer to a datum of this world, while for the New Testament the being of the believer would remain outside this world. It is strange that the Gnostic idea of the Pleroma and the events of this Pleroma, the idea of the pre-existence of souls and the limit, the “cross” (Stavros) which separates the Pleroma from this world, are so misunderstood. The confusion is such that the same theology comes to attribute to mythical thought that which has nothing to do with it, and remains the property of rational dogmatic thought, namely the objectification of divine action on the plane of world events. We are told that the myth must be interpreted “existentially” and not cosmologically. But in what way does the second interpretation exclude the first? Is it to be hoped that if there were a little less ignorance of all that is called gnosis in general, its opponents would speak differently? In the meantime, the same a-gnostic theology is reduced to juxtaposing the event of the Cross of Calvary as being a historical fact, and the event of the Resurrection as not being one, because its only historical trace is the visions of the first disciples. This supreme example is also an admission of resignation, an admission of total impotence to conceive that the visions have the full reality of events — events whose reality, time and place are not those of profane history, but those which are proper to what our theosophists in Islam have designated as the eighth climate.

What is important to observe is that the hermeneutics of spiritual, inner, esoteric meaning is everywhere governed, among the spirituals of Christianity as well as those of Islam, by a triple constant:

(1) a rigorous law, the law of correspondences, i.e. the idea of a “symbolism of the worlds” (Tawāzon al-ʿAwālim, “counterbalancing” of the worlds, among the Ismāʿīlī), which presupposes the existence of these worlds and the plurality of the planes of reference, in short, the features which characterize the gnostic cosmologies.

(2) There is the idea that the celestial realities, pleromatics, which are expressed in the apparentiae reales (the Ẓāhir), are received each time according to the spiritual state of the man who perceives them.

(3) This idea that all the events observed or narrated as happening outside the soul are, by the transparency conferred on them by the law of correspondences, so many symbolic expressions of the inner events of the soul, and that the soul even becomes aware of its own events only thanks to this trans- parency of their symbols.).

And all this is as far from the allegorical method of the ancient exegetes, as from the allegory practiced for a very long time by the modern science of religions to “explain” the mythologies, These constants make it possible to fix a certain number of connections which are established, as soon as the conscience, freed from the chains of the material historicity which it has itself forged, opens to itself the way of the pro- phetic hermeneutic, in the same way that the “prophetic philosophy” frees from the ready-made data. There is a historical hermeneutics that escapes the dead weight of the “irreversible” past established by itself, only by imposing by authority a meaning to the history that it thematizes; and there is a prophetic hermeneutics that brings back, exalts the real, but still hidden history, to a plan that transcends toto caelo our material reality, our factual data and their material, positive or social evidences, which are for us, “moderns”, the privileged evidences. There is a historical truth and there is a prophetic truth; there is a historical meaning and there is a prophetic meaning; there is a historicization of events that are in themselves meta-historical, and to compensate and redeem this historicization, there is an internalization of external events. There is a continuous, quantitative and uniform cosmic time, external time measured by the movements of the stars, and there is an interior psycho-spiritual time, time proper to the events of the soul, purely qualitative and discontinuous time (of which the idea of tempus discretum in medieval angelology already formulates the presentiment.