←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

Section 10 of 10

Divine Life and the Concluding Synthesis

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal answers the oldest objection to a living God — that change implies imperfection — by distinguishing serial change driven by lack from divine duration, which is self-revelation rather than self-improvement. The lecture then closes by handing off from philosophy to religion: philosophy sees Reality from a distance, but intimacy with it requires prayer.

This is the closing section of Lecture II — and it is a closing in two senses. It concludes the metaphysical argument that has been building across the entire lecture, and it opens the door to what comes next: the move from philosophy to religion, from thought to prayer.

The section addresses a problem that everything preceding it has created. Iqbal has argued across Sections 4–9 that time is real, that duration is creative, that the Ultimate Reality is an Ego whose life is continuous self-unfolding. But this immediately raises the oldest theological objection to attributing life to God: life, as we know it, involves change; change implies movement from imperfection toward something better (or worse); and imperfection is incompatible with divine perfection. If God lives, God changes; if God changes, God is imperfect; if God is imperfect, God is not God. This is the dilemma that led the Spanish Muslim theologian Ibn Ḥazm to hesitate even to call God 'living' except as a Qur'anic designation — not because it describes God's actual condition but because God Himself chose the word.

Iqbal's solution turns on the distinction between two kinds of change that the entire lecture has been constructing. Serial change — the kind we experience as desire, pursuit, failure, and attainment — is indeed a mark of imperfection, because it involves a self that lacks something and strives to acquire it against an obstructing environment. But serial change is not the only form of life. Beneath it lies true duration: creative activity that is wholly self-determined, not reactive, not driven by lack, not striving toward an external goal. The Ultimate Ego exists in pure duration. His change is not the pursuit of an ideal but the 'unfailing realization of the infinite creative possibilities of His being which retains its wholeness throughout the entire process.' Divine life is self-revelation, not self-improvement. God's 'not-yet' is not failure waiting to happen; it is inexhaustible creativity waiting to express itself.

The section then shifts from the nature of God to the mode of access. The entire lecture has been an exercise in philosophy — the intellectual apprehension of Reality through argument, evidence, and conceptual analysis. Iqbal honours this enterprise but insists on its incompleteness. Philosophy sees Reality 'from a distance.' It produces a concept that reduces variety to system — and this is valuable, but it is not intimacy. Religion seeks what philosophy cannot provide: not a concept of the Real but a relationship with it. The transition from philosophy to religion is the transition from thought to prayer. The final phrase of the section — 'one of the last words on the lips of the Prophet of Islam' — is not a decorative flourish but a precise structural move: it points the reader forward to Lecture III ('The Conception of God and the Meaning of Prayer') and signals that the philosophical test, however necessary, is not the final word. The Ultimate Reality that philosophy demonstrates must be lived with, and the mode of living with it is prayer.

For Tadreej, this section is the hinge between the project's intellectual work and its ultimate aspiration. The Seven Capacities — critical reasoning, quantitative fluency, institutional literacy, epistemic confidence, normative reasoning, interpretive reasoning, philosophical grounding — are philosophical instruments. They belong to the mode of apprehension that this section describes as 'seeing Reality from a distance.' But they are not ends in themselves. They exist to produce people capable of the deeper move: from analysis to intimacy, from system to worship, from concept to prayer. The section's closing gesture — handing off from the philosopher to the Prophet — is the gesture that Tadreej must learn to make: building intellectual rigour not as a substitute for spiritual depth but as its precondition.

Original text

But the question you are likely to ask is — ‘Can change be predicated of the Ultimate Ego?’ We, as human beings, are functionally related to an independent world-process. The conditions of our life are mainly external to us. The only kind of life known to us is desire, pursuit, failure, or attainment — a continuous change from one situation to another. From our point of view life is change, and change is essentially imperfection. At the same time, since our conscious experience is the only point of departure for all knowledge, we cannot avoid the limitation of interpreting facts in the light of our own inner experience. An anthropomorphic conception is especially unavoidable in the apprehension of life; for life can be apprehended from within only. As the poet N&amacr;⋅ir ‘Al&imacr; of Sirhind imagines the idol saying to the Brahmin:

‘Thou hast made me after Thine own image! After all what hast Thou seen beyond Thyself?’⁴⁶

It was the fear of conceiving Divine life after the image of human life that the Spanish Muslim theologian Ibn &Hstrok;azm hesitated to predicate life of God, and ingeniously suggested that God should be described as living, not because He is living in the sense of our experience of life, but only because He is so described in the Qur’an. Confining himself to the surface of our conscious experience and ignoring its deeper phases, Ibn &Hstrok;azm must have taken life as a serial change, a succession of attitudes towards an obstructing environment. Serial change is obviously a mark of imperfection; and, if we confine ourselves to this view of change, the difficulty of reconciling Divine perfection with Divine life becomes insuperable. Ibn &Hstrok;azm must have felt that the perfection of God can be retained only at the cost of His life.⁴⁷

There is, however, a way out of the difficulty. The Absolute Ego, as we have seen, is the whole of Reality. He is not so situated as to take a perspective view of an alien universe; consequently, the phases of His life are wholly determined from within. Change, therefore, in the sense of a movement from an imperfect to a relatively perfect state, or vice versa, is obviously inapplicable to His life. But change in this sense is not the only possible form of life. A deeper insight into our conscious experience shows that beneath the appearance of serial duration there is true duration. The Ultimate Ego exists in pure duration wherein change ceases to be a succession of varying attitudes, and reveals its true character as continuous creation, ‘untouched by weariness’⁴⁸and unseizable ‘by slumber or sleep’.⁴⁹ To conceive the Ultimate Ego as changeless in this sense of change is to conceive Him as utter inaction, a motiveless, stagnant neutrality, an absolute nothing. To the Creative Self change cannot mean imperfection. The perfection of the Creative Self consists, not in a mechanistically conceived immobility, as Aristotle might have led Ibn &Hstrok;azm to think. It consists in the vaster basis of His creative activity and the infinite scope of His creative vision. God’s life is self-revelation, not the pursuit of an ideal to be reached. The ‘not-yet’ of man does mean pursuit and may mean failure; the ‘not-yet’ of God means unfailing realization of the infinite creative possibilities of His being which retains its wholeness throughout the entire process.

In the Endless, self-repeating / flows for evermore The Same. / Myriad arches, springing, meeting, / hold at rest the mighty frame. / Streams from all things love of living, / grandest star and humblest clod. / All the straining, all the striving / is eternal peace in God.⁵⁰ (GOETHE)

Thus a comprehensive philosophical criticism of all the facts of experience on its efficient as well as appreciative side brings us to the conclusion that the Ultimate Reality is a rationally directed creative life. To interpret this life as an ego is not to fashion God after the image of man. It is only to accept the simple fact of experience that life is not a formless fluid, but an organizing principle of unity, a synthetic activity which holds together and focalizes the dispersing dispositions of the living organism for a constructive purpose. The operation of thought which is essentially symbolic in character veils the true nature of life, and can picture it only as a kind of universal current flowing through all things. The result of an intellectual view of life, therefore, is necessarily pantheistic. But we have a first-hand knowledge of the appreciative aspect of life from within. Intuition reveals life as a centralizing ego. This knowledge, however imperfect as giving us only a point of departure, is a direct revelation of the ultimate nature of Reality. Thus the facts of experience justify the inference that the ultimate nature of Reality is spiritual, and must be conceived as an ego. But the aspiration of religion soars higher than that of philosophy. Philosophy is an intellectual view of things; and, as such, does not care to go beyond a concept which can reduce all the rich variety of experience to a system. It sees Reality from a distance as it were. Religion seeks a closer contact with Reality. The one is theory; the other is living experience, association, intimacy. In order to achieve this intimacy thought must rise higher than itself, and find its fulfilment in an attitude of mind which religion describes as prayer — one of the last words on the lips of the Prophet of Islam.

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9. The Ultimate Ego and the Reality of Time

Original text

‘Thou hast made me after Thine own image! After all what hast Thou seen beyond Thyself?’⁴⁶