Yet we may also be invited to think of originating freedom more as spontaneity than as choice, and especially in the case of the One who is the sole source of all, for there would as yet be nothing to “choose between.” So other religious thinkers in these traditions could also be enticed to explore the emanation model as a way of articulating the one God without postulating another item over against the universe that God creates.  For if the logical overtones of emanation lead to necessity, the anthropomorphic resonance of “making” leads one to think of a God poised over against the world, so that the totality of all-that-is would contain two items: God and the universe. We have already seen, however, that faith in God’s unity does not assert that there is one God out there so much as it directs us to God as unitary source of all-that-is. Plotinus, the Neoplatonic philosopher, was compelled to say that this One was “beyond being,” as a way of insisting on the unalloyed unity of the One, whereas Thomas Aquinas preferred to identify the divine essence with existing it self. That formula also met the needs of Moses Maimonides and of al-Ghazali (who adapted it from the thought of Ibn-Sina [Avicenna], so that all three religious traditions that aver the free creation of the universe also adapted the metaphysical wisdom of the Greeks to assert the connection of Creator with creation.

Yet they employed that metaphysics in such a way as to assert the “distinction” as well. Indeed, reconciling these dual requirements of connection and of distinction fairly defines the “doctrine of God.” We can see this quite clearly if we think that there must be something in terms of which God and the universe can both be understood, yet if there were such a thing, then there would be something other than the source of all that links that source with all-that-is. So whatever the connection is between God and the universe, it must come from God’s creating activity. That reminder runs usefully counter to our native propensity to conceive God as parallel to or over against the universe;  however, once we have insisted on God’s being the sufficient source for all-that-is, then we need to assert “the distinction” of God from what God causes-to-be, since one might easily conclude that the world was but another appearance of the divine—-or other crudely monistic articulations.  “Connection” and “distinction” here function parallel to theologians’ use of “immanence” and “transcendence”: the One who creates all-that-is must by that very fact transcend the universe that it originates, yet since all-that-is comes from it, that same One must be present to all-that-is, and immediately so, hence immanent to creation.

When this unique relation was expressed by the image of emanation, the teaching of the three religious traditions on creation looked very much like a form of explanation, since the resolution of the multiplicity of beings in the universe into a unitary source showed the elegance of a deductive system. In this respect, the emanation scheme worked out by al-Farabi and adopted by Ibn-Sina differed but little from that of Plotinus. Yet the Islamic philosophers at least intended to offer a model for the Qur’an’s insistence on the origination of all things from a Creator, while Plotinus was not responding to the demands of a revelation but to the inner impulse of reason. Plotinus sought to secure the transcendence of the One, moreover, by removing from it all attributes whatsoever—-indeed, by placing it “beyond being.” In al-Farabi’s hands, the simplicity of the One was secured by identifying essence (dhat) with existing (wujud) in it alone. On both of these schemes, however, it was inevitable that the relation of the One with all that emanates from it should be considered more natural than intentional. If creating the universe is a free act, it could only be seen as pure spontaneity, yet at such a remove from experience and ordinary grammar, “pure spontaneity” could be read either as a “necessary overflow” or as a free (or intentional) action. And when the language of emanation remains so ambiguous, what is in jeopardy is the “distinction” of the One from all that emanates from it.

In contrast, the image of making seemed quite anthropomorphic and was in fact tied to Plato’s picture (in the Timaeus) of the Demiurge who crafts things out of preexisting matter according to heavenly archetypes. So a Creator who is a maker does not need to be the sole source from which all-that-is comes; there can be something already there for such a one to fashion. Nonetheless, religious thinkers beholden either to the Hebrew Scriptures or to the Qur’an found it more workable to remove the anthropomorphic residue from the Creator/maker picture than to accept the implication of “necessary outflow” that easily accompanied emanation. (There has always been a minority voice on the other side, however, and one often associated with the more mystical strains of each tradition—-see note 6.) Aquinas’ strategy is illuminating here: by removing any hint of pre-existent matter, he was able in one fell swoop to insist that creation is an action that does not involve change, since there is nothing that perdures through it, and that, hence, no process accompanies it. So the image of maker is radically transformed. All that is left is the intentional character, and that was the very reason for preferring making to emanating.

What is illustrative here is the way in which Scriptures and philosophical schemes interact to develop a virtual consensus in formulating a religious doctrine. No single statement of the Scriptures decides the issue, but a series of constraints offer cumulative criteria for preferring one formulation rather than another. Since no scheme can be expected to articulate matters adequately, however, alternative formulations remain possible, provided one can show that they too meet those same constraints. A further advantage of the image of making lies in its power to distance the doctrine of creation from expectations that it provide an explanation of origins. For asserting an intentional producer of all-that-is suffuses the universe with meaning without requiring that features of the world display their divine origin. If there is no natural (or necessary) connection between the source and what is originated, no specific traces need be found, and God is free to shape creation to meet divine concerns, as in giving the Torah or handing down the Qur’an. In fact, for both al-Ghazali and Maimonides, it is this fact that makes them decide against the model of speculative knowing embodied in emanation and in favor of the model of practical reason that making suggests.  So we can see how a community’s experience with revelation tends to shape its teaching about creation, thereby reminding us that the doctrine of creation envisages far more than origins: the very meaning and destiny of the universe are at stake.

This interrelation of explanatory schemes with religious traditions, including practices of worship and of formation in community, was interrupted by the pretensions of an enlightened West to a manner of doing theology more akin in meaning to that of the Greeks: rational reflection on the universe. Religious differences became a scandal to educated persons, who were at once repelled by the religious wars and attracted by Descartes’s dream of a universal reason that would ground beliefs about God and the universe not in faith but in the very deliverances of reason. This confidence in “natural theology” took a different form in England than on the Continent, but for the history of theology the parallels are more telling than the differences.  The search for grounds for faith in a universal reason led to the reinvention of philosophy and even of metaphysics as disciplines independent of insights gained from faith, since they were to provide it the warrant of intellectual respectability. And if reason can discover the whence and the whither of the universe, “sciences of the human” will not be far behind. The next step, then, was into social theories, each of which offered such normative deliverances on the scope of human existence that they became virtual substitutes for theological discourse. A telling history of sociological theory cast in this mold has been written by John Milbank, where the argument reminds us that any pretension to articulate the aims and goals of human existence must perforce present itself as a theology; the names Durkheim, Weber, Hegel, and Kant stand paramount in the drama Milbank stages.

In the case of the cosmologies offered in the name of pure reason, as well as the anthropologies undergirding a new practical reason, however, faith was disbarred from an initiating or intellectually validating role, so it became incumbent on theologians to align their discourse with that of social theory in order to gain legitimacy. Enter the phenomenon known as liberal theology, with the resulting polarities within the churches between those intent on preserving orthodoxy and those desirous of adapting to the modern world. Part of what today’s postmodern optic brings to such matters is the legitimacy of a faith-perspective, so that the insights gained from participation in a particular community of faith once more become relevant to human discourse about God, the universe, and the destiny of human beings. One of the signal advantages of this shift in the intellectual valence of the knowledge that comes to us by faith has been an opening to worlds vastly more extensive than the presumptively superior European one in which the “enlightened” discussions took place. This setting leads us beyond familiar theological analyses of the discussion about God in the West to an appropriate reconstruction of the doctrine.

As Western Christianity made its peace with the Enlightenment, in one way or another, at an intellectual level, most of humanity continued to seek tangible symbols, and many of them alien to Christianity. Yet those who had made their peace with Enlightenment reason found themselves confronted with the threatening spectacle of other Gods—-not just other “gods”—- in the shape of YHWH and Allah. Threatening, since the God of reason owed its ethical superiority, at least ancestrally, to Christian revelation, so theologian and philosopher alike simply presumed Judaism to be passé, intellectually as well as theologically. (The “reformed” movement in Judaism was in large part motivated, in its search for an ethical core to Jewish teaching, by this pervasive judgment. If such a core were to be the substance of Judaism, then no unwelcome particularity would remain except in the residue of ritual.) Islam represented but the exotic fringe of the known world, once the “discoveries” had allowed Europe to bypass the Muslim heartland in search of the pleasures of life. A few hardy travelers composed haunting adventure tales, while “the Turk” became a feared yet fascinating figure. Yet none of this led to any desire to understand Islam, about which enlightened Europeans remained even less instructed than their medieval forebears, who had at least exploited Islamic scientific and philosophical culture.

Thus while the presumptive (even if now defunct) hegemony of Christianity in the West vitiated anything more than curiosity regarding the religious teaching of Jews or Muslims, the possible presence of other ways to God, and so in effect other Gods, offered a potential threat to religious believer and secular believer alike. Secular Westerners believed in the superiority of that ancestral Christian hegemony no less than their religious counterparts, and what proved threatening to each was both the fact that there might be another God (for secular thinkers respected the power of symbol even when they had evacuated the reality) and the “relativism” which that possibility entailed for them. Indeed relativism seems to be an even more powerful bugbear for secular than for religious thinkers since it threatens the intellectual counterpart of the presumptive Eurocentrism that shaped their shared convictions. Moreover, out beyond the respectable boundaries of monotheism, in the “Far East,” lay Hindu and Buddhist worlds of belief and practices, which were regarded less as theological contenders than as cultural fascinations. So long as the Eurocentric presumptions of Enlightenment rationality were in league with Christian doctrinal superiority, the threat remained quite latent, since if one could still believe anything at all, one would certainly be a Christian believer. However, as the universality of Western reason became suspect, and some Christians began to wonder aloud about there possibly being other ways to God, perhaps even as part of God’s own “dispensation,” the specter of relativism would become more palpable.

Yet the specter of relativism gains in stature and threat as a function of Enlightenment presuppositions about reason and truth, for they presume a normative set of rational criteria available to all, over against which any claim to other sets of criteria is utterly unsettling. That is what we mean by relativism; that there are no longer any operative norms across human discourse; so power or even violence will have to arbitrate. However, like earlier debates over natural law, there may be other ways of thinking about those criteria that are not so laden with specific beliefs but that have to do with the fact that believers formed in quite diverse traditions can discourse with one another. Once the idol of pure reason has been shattered, and we can learn to accept diverse ways of arriving at conclusions, we will also find that we can employ the skills learned in our tradition to follow reasoning in another. Traditions, in other words, may indeed be relative to one another in ways that can prove mutually fruitful rather than isolating. Those traditions that prove to be so will be those that avail themselves of human reason in their development, and the patterns of stress and strain in their evolution will display their capacity for exploiting the resources of reason.  In short, relativism gives way before the fact that all inquiry takes place within a tradition, and the specter that it evoked turns out to be the shadow of our faith in pure reason, that is, in the possibility of human inquiry outside of any tradition.

So the discovery of reason that every inquiry employs presuppositions that cannot themselves be rationally justified opens the way to self-knowledge on the part of Enlightenment philosophy itself, which can then take its place among the traditions.  Once that has been accomplished, the specter of relativism dissolves in the face of developing the skills needed to negotiate among traditions, which can be accomplished because the traditions can be seen to be related one to another. Because we have become accustomed to associating faith with tradition, we must then renounce the normative Enlightenment view that represented faith as an addendum to the human condition. For if that view itself reflects a tradition whose account can be rendered in historical terms (like a reaction to the devastating religious wars in Europe), then it too will have a recognizable convictional basis, and faith will once more emerge as part of a shared human legacy. Then the intellectual task, on the part of reason operative in any tradition that survives the test of time, becomes one of learning how such traditions develop and how one might learn from the other. Reason, in other words, becomes a functional notion, displayed in practices that cut across traditional boundaries, rather than expressing a set of substantive beliefs that must be adhered to in those very terms before discourse can be undertaken. Rationality will then show itself in practices that can be followed and understood by persons operating in similar fashion from different grounding convictions.

What those persons have in common is the need to talk about what they believe. Here emerges the analogy with debates about natural law: what is so shared and common as to be dubbed “natural” are not necessarily substantive norms regarding human actions so much as the demand that any normative “law” must express itself in a coherent discourse. That very activity, which displays the fruitfulness of human ingenuity, also contains operative parameters whose function can be tracked by astute participant-observers who recognize analogies across traditions of inquiry, as Socrates’ assembling linguistic reminders for Thrasymachus made him abandon his projected discourse without Socrates’ having to exert any force at all (Republic bk. 1). Those reminders have to do with the possibility of any discourse at all and so governed the tradition Thrasymachus was defending as well as the totally opposed one that Socrates had set out to elaborate. Book 1 of the Republic does not defend Socrates’ own position so much as display the terms for any debate. One may, of course, go on to imbed those terms in a much larger framework, as Plato does in the subsequent books of the Republic, but the exchange with Thrasymachus can stand on its own as displaying the coherence of the very practice that makes the rest possible. We will need to elaborate that coherence into a “philosophy” because practice alone seldom offers a persuasive display of its own cogency. These reflections, however, should remind us that the elaboration is secondary, and there may even be many such, yet they will be able to be elucidated relative to one another. The fact and the possibility of dialogue begin to emerge as the shape that reason takes in our pluralistic age. We can gain perspective on that task by employing some salient examples from Christianity as it faced a pagan world as well as from the history of Islam.

The primary opposition in the classical scenario was that between God and “the gods.” It is originally a Hebrew opposition, so it was presumed among Christians, yet forcefully reiterated by Muslims. The opposition turns on what Robert Sokolowski has dubbed “the distinction” of God from the world: the insistence that God has no need of the universe to complete what it is to be God; that there is no way of moving by logic alone from divinity to world, and so a fortiori, the world cannot be conceived as a part of God.  These stipulations are taken to be grammatical reminders mirroring the metaphysical status of God, by contrast with “the gods,” who represent a higher (and usually the highest) portion of the universe. It is usual to describe the relation between this God and the universe as free: that is, the universe cannot be said to derive from divinity as conclusions can be regarded as drawing out the virtualities of a logical premise. This need not imply an absolute beginning; such a spontaneous origination could well be everlasting and so (loosely speaking) “co-eternal” with God. Yet originated the universe must be, on this account of divinity, and in such a way as not to imply that it “completes” or “fills out” the divine Creator. So it is that the correlative terms “Creator,” “creature,” and “creation” have assumed the full-blooded sense that they have, especially for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Logically speaking, then, the very notions of God and universe must be parsed in terms of one another. The God who is Creator will differ from the One that necessarily emanates the universe as part of what it means to be that One. And the universes will differ as well, as Ibn-Sina reminded us when he did not hesitate to suffuse the world with the same quality of necessity that realizes it: the logic of the emanation scheme, modeled on logical derivation, pervades his system, while a free Creator can have several kinds of relation to the universe spontaneously originated. The affirmation of creation, then, by contrast to an emanation scheme, will be compatible with diverse theologies or manners of elucidating that “distinction” of God from God’s world. Some of these may even veer close to a kind of “monism” that eviscerates the distinction itself, but that will be for the respective traditions to discern. By a curious inverse logic, Hindu thought allows for “theologies” creationist in tone even when Hindu Scriptures are not so insistent on “the distinction.” Hinduism seems to celebrate such diversity, softening the opposition between God and “the gods” as well, while tolerating “theologies” from monist to creationist. So this tradition will contain within itself the very debates that Jews, Christians, or Muslims would invariably strike up with Hindus. Monitoring those debates would help test our contention that the notions of God and universe must be parsed in terms of each other and would probably prove more fruitful than trading polemics about “logics”—-Western and Eastern. Once again, the intellectual promise comes from understanding that such traditions are indeed relative one to another and that those who discover that fact have not thereby assumed a higher plane from which to peruse them all neutrally, but are rather reaching out from their own tradition to appreciate analogies with another, and thereby recognizing blind spots in their own as well.

It is a simple epistemological corollary of God’s “distinction” from the world that such a One is unknowable: that is, not one of the items in the world. A sane epistemology will normally presuppose that our range of knowing is coextensive with the kinds of beings we are in such a way as to deflate pretensions to knowledge about things quite beyond us. That range cannot be equated with “our experience,” however, and not simply because the term “experience” is notoriously protean. It is rather that our knowledge must extend to things presupposed to our experiencing anything at all, which might be called the “structures” of our experience. In fact, our greatest joys in discovery can come in domains like mathematics, where the elegance of an otherwise indiscernible “structure” is communicated to us. Yet the test of our grasp will certainly be our ability to communicate that discovery to others, so the limits of knowledge will reflect the kind of beings we are, in the sense of what can be communicated among us. Medievals like Thomas Aquinas used the scaffolding of the emanation scheme to depict our place in the universe as linking spiritual with material realms, thereby designating the “proper object” of human beings to be “the quiddity of material things,” where our intellectual (spiritual) capacity to ask “What is that?” focused us on the “quiddity,” while our bodily constitution linked us directly with “that” by pointing to it. Though little of that scaffolding may remain with us, the double orientation perdures in epistemology, however naturalist it may purport to be.
So the origin-of-all will be accessible only through the relation linking it with all-that-is, since it is not itself a member of that set—-however paradoxical that may sound. Again, the philosophical attractiveness of the emanation scheme flows from its modeling that relation on logical deduction, thereby connecting the One with all the rest in a fashion otherwise available to us. But that also made it suspect to religious believers whose revelations accentuated “the distinction,” for the first principle from which a set of conclusions may be derived is not itself adequately distinct from that deductive chain. So a Creator from whom all-that-is freely originates cannot be cast as the One from which all-that-is emanates in logical array. It is no less one, of course, yet such a One will have to be in a manner specifically distinct from the manner in which all-that-is exists. As noted above, Plotinus, in an effort to escape these logical constraints, insisted that the One was “beyond being,” while subsuming the polarity necessary/free under the transcendent expression “spontaneous,” so that it remains a nice question (as we shall see) whether his One is adequately distinct from the universe it spontaneously emanates. His phrase “beyond being,” however, certainly intends to secure the semantic and epistemological distinction just noted. So the relation linking the origin-of-all to all-that-is will not be accessible to us; in fact, it must expressly be one that transcends relations among items in the world.

If the relation that relates God to the universe cannot itself be characterized, neither of course can God—-at least in any way that might amount to a description. In that sense, then, in which God cannot be described as an object in our epistemological “world,” God must be said to be unknowable. Yet that need not mean that we can know nothing at all about the source-of-all, for we do know that God answers to that formula. (It is, in fact, the “verbal definition” with which Aquinas begins his treatment of God in the Summa Theologiae.) This fact has led thinkers in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions to insist that we may then attribute to God what we assess to be perfections in the world—-with the proviso, however, that such attributions to divinity cannot be understood to be in God in the same manner in which they are in us, since this One must be in a unique fashion that sets it off from all-that-is. In fact, we may rightly attribute what we deem to be perfections to God only if we understand that their manner of being in divinity is quite unlike their manner of being among us. For that assures that we are attributing the perfection itself, as it were, bereft of the particular manner in which we encounter it. Astute readers will recognize immediately that we are hardly privy to the “perfection itself,” so there is an unknowing in the very act by which we may be said to know anything about God! So be it; yet we can offer some clues: what can only be said concretely in our sphere (“Socrates is just”) will be said of God both in that way (“God is just”) and abstractly as well (“God is justice”). In fact, to be accurate in predicating such things of divinity, one must understand that they will only be said in one way if they can also be said in the other way as well. That semantic rule reminds us that God does not merely happen to be just but is just as the source of justice is just. It stands to reason that we cannot fully know what that would be like, as our very use of “just” demands that the norm outstrip our current conception, for we need to be able to ask whether justice as we conceive it is indeed just.
Yet such attributions can and must be said truly to be in God, if we are to consistently affirm that the Creator is the source of all being and of all worth. These attributions, however, will be in God not as something “added to” God but as part of what it means to be God. Their manner of being in God must cohere with God’s own manner of being, which we saw had to be utterly different from that of all-else-that-is, lest God belong to what God creates. We have noted that Plotinus’ way of expressing that difference was to insist that the One is “beyond being”; Aquinas’ preferred way was to note that in God alone what-God-is is identical with God’s existing—-a formula already employed by Maimonides and al-Ghazali as well, and hence apposite for all three traditions. Here again we have a formula that could never be mistaken for a description of anything in our world but that can and must be said to be true of the God who is the origin-of-all. It is formulas like these that allow us to assert of God that God is unknowable: that is, we can know enough by what they state to insist that such a One cannot be located within the world of objects familiar to us, nor indeed as an object in any imaginable world. Yet we can make such statements only because of the link we have taken as our starting point, that God is the source-of-all, without thereby pretending to be able to characterize that link in terms familiar to us all of this apparent contortion becomes germane to our topic—-God and religious pluralism—-precisely because there are limits to pluralism, and they are set by the demands shared by these religious traditions regarding the meaning of the term “God.” God, here understood, is contrasted with “the gods,” and if we wish to establish linkage with Hindu tradition, we are speaking of that One from which all-that-is emanates. If such a One, for Hindus, is not so radically opposed to “the gods” as it is for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, we will nonetheless be permitted to establish the analogies we can with that subset of Hindu assertions about divinity that reflects commonalities with our discourse. With Buddhists, however, who cannot subscribe to this metaphysics at all, the challenge is more radical, which pushes Christian theologians into a much starker form of the unknowability of God, one closer to Karl Barth’s famous totaliter aliter.

Interestingly enough, however, it is not “alien” religious traditions that threaten to undermine the distinction of God from the world so much as those Christian theologies that seek to reduce the distance between God and creatures, as they find the metaphysical corollaries we have seen associated with the source-of-all to present a quite inaccessible divinity. This presentation has tried to meet their concerns by highlighting a feature of Christian theology that has until recently been left all too implicit: creation. If creation is the spontaneous action of the One from whom all comes, then it is the primary “grace” or gift. Yet Christian theology has been content to treat it as a mere given, so adopting an effectively pagan stance toward the universe. (That stance, epitomized by Aristotle, treats the universe as the given context in which all else takes place and so one that need not itself require any explanation.) A concatenation of three reasons offers a plausible historical account of this situation, beginning with the liturgical replacement of the Sabbath by the day of the Lord, which in effect invited the community of believers to let redemption eclipse creation. A rabbinic understanding of the Sabbath, rooted in the Genesis account, had it that God created the world in a well-ordered fashion but left it to human beings to perfect. The point of the Sabbath rest, however, was our penchant to presume that we had made it as well, so long as we were busy perfecting it. So we were forbidden to take part in those sorts of activities that contribute to culture on the Sabbath, thus inviting us to recognize how the world went on without us and so offering us the opening to return praise to its Creator.

Much later, in the thirteenth century, Philip the Chancellor introduced a distinction that proved to be crucial to the assimilation of Aristotle: that of natural/supernatural. One of the corollaries of this distinction would identify “grace” with the “supernatural life” given in baptism, thus leaving people to surmise that whatever was natural must not be a gift but a given. This distinction became a bifurcation in the nineteenth century, when philosophers wrought a cleavage between nature and history, placing all redemption into history and leaving nature for science to explain. So it was, in fact, Christianity that impoverished its own self-understanding by a peculiar theological development. If recovering its roots in creation has become an ecological imperative, one of the side-effects of this movement has been to highlight Christian parallels with Judaism and with Islam regarding the free creation of the universe, as well as to recover classical modes of expressing “the distinction” of God from the world. Once we grasp the implications of the doctrine of free creation, we will not be tempted to conceive God over against the world, so that we will then be constrained to make such a one “more accessible;” rather, understanding God as the freely originating source of all-that-is, we will find in that gracious “transcendence” all the “immanence” we might need.  What must by its very nature not be an item in the world will nonetheless be known by its traces in a world originating from it. What remains crucial to such a scenario, however, is that the initiative rest with the free Creator, without whose self-revelation we could never have suspected ourselves to be so graced. Creation, by contrast with various theories of emanation, is itself a matter of revelation.
We have so far been showing how a doctrine of God must attend to the distinction of God from the world, a position reflected most clearly in those religious traditions that avow free creation. We have also seen how that avowal of creation secures the distinction in a way that does not threaten to alienate God from creatures, as more simple-minded parallel constructions of God and world invariably tend to do. Yet the act of creation remains inaccessible to us, so diverse philosophical attempts to articulate it will inevitably emerge. Contrasting these with the stark assertions associated with “the distinction” may help us cast some light on the way in which one’s understanding of God reflects one’s understanding of the world and of the Creator’s relation to it. As we shall see, much will turn on the contrast of necessary with free, which long characterized a debate between philosophers and religious thinkers. Asserting creation to be a free act of divinity seemed to allow divinity an arbitrary sovereignty over all things, so philosophers tended to adopt a relation they could understand: the necessity of logical derivation. Moreover, when explicating the manner in which God is free to create, religious thinkers often imported into divinity notions of choosing that seem quite anthropomorphic. So while the notion of creation as the primary gift of a gracious God is a precious legacy, especially of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, finding an idiom appropriate to explicate that relation remains a formidable intellectual task.

Two classical thinkers offer interesting test cases. One is ordinarily classified as a pagan; the other as a heterodox Muslim. Plotinus (205—70) lived in two environments inhabited by Jews and Christians—-Alexandria and later Rome—-but was never impressed with their “philosophy.” Yet his way of casting the relation of the One to all-that-is has largely come down to us in its particular assimilation by Augustine (354—430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225—74). Here we shall consider how his expression of that relation might well have proved amenable to such a recasting, yet in itself offered a formidable alternative to faith in a Creator. Ibn al-‘Arabi (1165—1240) was an Andalusian Sufi master who completed his immense corpus of writings in Damascus. His expressly mystical teaching, when separated from the context of spiritual discipline, has been read as a form of “existential monism” that focuses so intently on the sustaining presence of God to the world as to elide “the distinction.”  Other readers are less critical,  however, and the contrast with “orthodox Islam”  appears less stark in more recent studies of this “greatest master.”  While Ibn al-‘Arabi considered himself at the very heart of Islam, whatever his contemporary and posthumous critics might aver, Plotinus presented himself as a pagan, perhaps even as offering an alternative to Christianity. In any case, while Augustine found in his philosophy a serendipitous stepping-stone to faith, his friends who styled themselves “Platonists” presented their own lives as a viable alternative to Christianity. Yet in presenting Plotinus’ thought to our era one writer will note how “in some respects his position was similar to Philo’s.”  So each of these figures will provide fruitful contrasts with the received forms of those traditions with which we shall place them in conversation.

From the perspective sketched here of free creation, Plotinus has long been seen as the prime proponent of “necessary emanation” and as the one who provided the intellectual base for the Islamic emanation scheme elaborated by al-Farabi and introduced into Western thought by Ibn-Sina, often via Moses Maimonides’s influential Guide of the Perplexed.  More recent studies, however, place him in the context of Platonic theologies of the time and show how he moved beyond them to a fresh synthesis of philosophy and theology, one ripe “for its subsequent absorption into the Abrahamic theological world . . . , providing it with a rich philosophical vocabulary and an account of divine primordiality.”  As we have already noted, Plotinus was intent on articulating “the distinction”: “ [T]he One must be such that it depends on nothing distinct from itself and that everything distinct from itself is absolutely dependent upon the One.” It is this primary constraint that dictates a simple ontological constitution for the One, and “the One must be said to be beyond ‘being’ in order to be represented as simple and ultimate.” Moreover, since “what is most simple is also the productive source of all lower levels of reality,”  according to middle- and Neoplatonic axioms, the One will be productive of all-that-is. But how so: freely or necessarily?

That question is not so simple as it looks, for if our tendency to associate necessity with need seems to make that alternative unworthy of the One, so our propensity to link freedom with choosing makes that activity similarly beneath the dignity of the One, whose “will is in perfect conformity to its eternal activity.”  So while the One may have no choice about the matter, it is hardly constrained to create by something like a need, so in that sense we would be tempted to call its action “free.” A corollary to Plotinus’ insistence that the One is beyond being, however, may well be to place its action beyond our polarities of necessity or freedom. Yet what we know of all that comes from it makes us “confident that the energeia [activity] of the One does indeed result in production.”  While the extent to which this production is “personal” and so can be said to be a “gift” remains quite implicit for Plotinus, one may argue that “the personal is in a way already constitutive of the One as an inferred cause of being.”  Yet such a reading of Plotinus, which sees him as completing an explanation for the cosmos promised but never executed by Aristotle,  also suggests why Augustine will find this pagan scheme yearning for fulfillment in a more resolutely personal idiom: while “these books of the Platonists served to remind me to return to my own true self [and] prompted [me] to look for truth as something incorporeal, [nevertheless] their pages have not the mien of the true love of God” (Confessions 7.10, 20, 21). That judgment summarizes a chapter wherein Augustine cites Paul’s paean to “your grace [by which] he is enabled to walk upon the path that leads him closer to you, so that he may see you and hold you” (ibid., 7.21): an idiom in which one could hardly speak of or to Plotinus’ One. All this suggests that the freedom that Jews, Christians, and Muslims attribute to divine creation is not preoccupied with choice so much as with a particular divine initiative, reminding us once again that “free creation” is a matter of revelation rather than a philosophical inference and that each tradition’s understanding of it will be modeled on the pattern of revelation proper to it. Here is where our insistence on the fact that inquiries reflect a tradition of faith allows us to learn from each without attempting to colonize others in the name of a “unique” Christianity.

Ibn al-‘Arabi’s thought, when summarized, seems to display those features of theosophy that attempt to say what cannot be said: “[F]rom the perspective of Unity and multiplicity, the Divine Presence appears as a circle whose center is the Essence and whose full deployment is the acts in their multiple degrees and kind.”  Each of these acts is itself a manifestation of the activity of the One, according to the various perfections articulated in the “beautiful names of God.” So the dialectic between reality and its manifestation, imaged as the interplay of light and darkness, attests to the evanescent character of created being—- a kind of intermediate reality “that separates a known from an unknown,” a barzakh.  Light is the dominant image: the One is hidden from view in inaccessible light while whatever we can apprehend will be some admixture of light and darkness. The “distinction” between the One and all that depends on it for its existence, then, will be expressed as the difference between light that is pure and inaccessible and various adulterations of it. “Emanation” becomes a handy expression for the relation of the center to its successive peripheries, and the journey of all creatures during their lifetime reflects their inbuilt desire to return to the source from which they derive. This return is inscribed in every creature, but human beings are given the task of realizing their natures by free actions aimed at developing those character traits (akhlaq) that will manifest specific names of God.

What such summaries invariably miss is the movement where by this return to the source is also the realization of the virtualities implicit in existence bestowed, so that the difference between “unity of being” (wahdat al-wujud) and “unity of witnessing” (wahdat al-shuhud) is minimized in practice. In other words, one may be, at root, a manifestation of the divine and so think of oneself in terms that express a “unity of being,” yet that very unity remains to be realized in such a person, whose path of realization will involve all of the actions and trials that shape those “friends of God” whose lives give witness to divine unity as their vibrant source. What seems to matter most is the manner in which Ibn al-‘Arabi is read: whether as a metaphysician or as a master and guide. While his idiom is resolutely metaphysical, readers who are also potential novices (murid) will understand that they must supply the activities that the master’s writings presume to be taking place. Indeed, such a reading is the only one congruent with the metaphysics itself, for the manifestations of the One are not presented as passive “appearances” so much as loci of the divine activity’s emergence into existence. And “existence” here “defines our ‘location’ for all practical purposes: its most obvious characteristic is its ambiguous situation, half way between Being and non-existence, light and darkness, He and not-He.”  The last characterization of the One and all-that- is as He (huwa) and not-He (la-huwa) does express starkly “the distinction,” while “half-way between” seems to elide it.

Such is ever the expression of Ibn al-‘Arabi, which seems as well suited to express the sense of participation in the divine light that guides novices on their path as it is ill-suited to secure the integrity of their strivings. Yet one who is expending considerable energy on the ascent is unlikely to read one’s master in a “monistic” manner, so the difference in readers seems crucial to the task of interpretation here. A Western reader could be assisted by the ways in which Carl Jung is characteristically misread, perhaps most of all by those who call themselves Jungians. Jung himself is party to the misreading because he has such a penchant for flights of metaphysical expression, yet he also warns us that his writing is forged in the analytic encounter and ought to be heard always in reference to such a practice. In short, the key terms in his analyses find their focus in the interaction of analyst and client, and one unfamiliar with that “work” (which he explicitly likens to the “work” of alchemy) will be quite oblivious to the interior effort that any accurate use of such expressions involves.  So the theology and the metaphysics of Ibn al-‘Arabi will be doomed to misunderstanding on the part of Western readers whose own religious studies have not characteristically required so interior a response from their inquirers. Like Jung, however, he seems to be party to obtaining for himself the label of “existential monism,” for he cannot resist placing his directions in an idiom that will be read as a series of statements. Or put another way, his statements will not ordinarily be read as also embodying directions for seekers along the way precisely because of their declaratory mode of expression. Perhaps this explains why those engaged on the path salute him as “the greatest master” while other readers excoriate him as a danger to Islam. Again, it all turns on “the distinction” and how a tradition effectively secures it. The example of Ibn al-‘Arabi shows how religious writers can be read in different ways within a tradition and by its onlookers and how one might discriminate between two very different readings.

Our attempt to understand each of these writers underscores the way in which we are always hard-pressed, as creatures, to formulate that relation with the Creator that we avow to be constitutive of our very selves. We need some sort of philosophical scheme to articulate it, but no scheme will be up to the task. For we are attempting to speak of the One from whom all-that-is derives, and no metaphysical scheme can pretend to encompass more that all-that-is! So our reading of various attempts will have to be tempered by our prior realization that such a task will have to stretch human conceptualities beyond their proper limits. As I have suggested, it will be our respective faith communities that will give us the tolerance necessary to see that endeavor through and to respect the stretching that will have to take place.

I have tried to show how diverse religious traditions will exhibit in quite different fashion a fundamental feature of divinity, namely its “distinction” from the universe that is said to derive from it. This is clearest, of course, in those religious traditions that avow free creation of the world but will also manifest itself in others that do not. Indeed, theological variants that seem to elide the crucial difference of creature from Creator will emerge within those traditions that avow a free creation, but these may often be read as presupposing that “distinction” if we attend to the “depth grammar” of the statements made. This brief treatment also offers a way for theology today to exploit the diverse traditions that are becoming more relevant to its inquiries and capitalize on the fact that they can be read “relative to” one an other. Yet this cannot be done in the abstract, as the American experience with Jewish-Christian dialogue has already taught us. We need to step outside our presumptive certainties—-those of our own faith as well as those of a Western intellectual superiority that would minimize the truth claims of any religious tradition in the name of a radical pluralism. We must allow others the freedom to speak in their own voice, even when that voice threatens to eclipse our own. All religions will make totalizing claims; thence comes the sustaining passion of the convictions displayed. What the Enlightenment reacted against as fanaticism we can also recognize as sustaining human faiths. Genuine dialogue is a risky endeavor, for it requires that all participants forgo their own presumed superiority, yet the fruits appear abundantly worth the risks involved. Besides dissolving the abstract specter of relativism, a sustained practice of dialogue will invariably issue in an enhanced understanding of the reaches of our own faith—-often reaches hitherto unexplored and even unsuspected. Moreover, what emerges through such practice in the faith of Christians is a fresh appreciation of the trinitarian dimensions of their faith, dimensions often less explicit in Christian self-understanding than in the classic professions of faith. What manifests itself in the confidence with which Christians can invite and undertake dialogue is indeed the presence of the Holy Spirit, a presence that animates the community of believers and that seems intimated in other religious faiths as well.

This reference to the Holy Spirit is far more than honorific, however, for the practice of dialogue is unnerving as well as enhancing. Indeed, it can expand the horizons of our faith only in the measure that it threatens the formulations with which we have become accustomed. This is especially true for North Americans, who can so easily presume themselves and their faith to offer the paradigm of what it is to be human. Where our predecessors had characteristically to contend with the challenge of atheism, we confront the lure of other faiths. This fact presents theology with what Karl Rahner has dubbed a crisis, for we lack categories appropriate to contending with conflicting claims that all articulate divinity in a way that calls for a wholehearted faith-commitment.  Yet this impasse, which might cripple a philosopher, need not debilitate a person of inquiring faith, for one can presume that the illumination worked in allowing the formulations of our faith to be stretched in encounter with the faith of others will also unveil gaps in our self-understanding and in our understanding of divinity, gaps that will let “the Other” reveal itself that much better than our categories have permitted thus far.  Such a confidence is the very stuff of faith in the revealing Spirit and hence sounds the most distinctive note of Christian faith. Its outworking in dialogue among partners in diverse religious traditions can effect that signal trace of the Holy Spirit among us: friendship. Those who have experienced the fruit of interfaith dialogue have done so in a context in which discussion fueled by mutual respect becomes an exchange carried out in enhanced esteem of the faith-traditions manifested in the life and practice of one’s partners. And all that can take place because in the process people have become friends walking together in an inquiry that is as existential as it is intellectual and in which mutual needs and insights can be found strengthening one another.

Excerpt from the book, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) (Paperback) , Blackwell Publishers, 2004.  Chapter 13, pp. 193-216. Available from Amazon.com at   http://www.amazon.com/Faith-Freedom-Interfaith-Perspective-Contemporary/dp/1405121718/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-6939540-9698039?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183728998&sr=1-1

Notes are at:  http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/god_religious_pluralism_and_dialogic_encounter_notes/0014166