Ibn al-Arabi
"(All known things were borne by the First Intellect)
Know that the bearer of all known things, celestial and terrestial, is the Intellect which takes from Allah without intermediary. None of the knowledge of higher and lower being is hidden from it. The self's gnosis of things comes from His giving and generosity, and from His manifestation to it, His light and His purest overflowing. The Intellect learns from Allah and teaches the self. The self learns from the Intellect and action comes from it. This applies to all that knowledge of the Intellect connects to things below it. We are limited by "what is below it" in respect of the learning we mentioned. Be careful when you ponder, remembering that Allah said, "until We know" (47:31). He is the All-Knower, so recognise the proper ascriptions!"
Maimonides:
"Collect your thoughts and examine the matter carefully, for it is not to be understood as you at first sight think, but as you will find after due deliberation; namely, the intellect which was granted to man as the highest endowment, was bestowed on him before his disobedience. With reference to this gift the Bible states that "man was created in the form and likeness of God." On account of this gift of intellect man was addressed by God, and received His commandments, as it is said: "And the Lord God commanded Adam" (Gen. ii. 16)--for no commandments are given to the brute creation or to those who are devoid of understanding. Through the intellect man distinguishes between the true and the false. This faculty Adam possessed perfectly and completely. The right and the wrong are terms employed in the science of apparent truths (morals), not in that of necessary truths, as, e.g., it is not correct to say, in reference to the proposition "the heavens are spherical," it is "good" or to declare the assertion that "the earth is flat" to be "bad": but we say of the one it is true, of the other it is false. Similarly our language expresses the idea of true and false by the terms emet and sheker, of the morally right and the morally wrong, by tob and ra’. Thus it is the function of the intellect to discriminate between the true and the false--a distinction which is applicable to all objects of intellectual perception."
In the writing of both Ibn al-Arabi and Maimonides, intellect is the highest gift. One distinguishes the true from the false using this faculty. It is what makes humanity reach beyond the limited, into the Divine knowledge.
On one level, intellect appears to be a way to "see through" the world into its essence, seeing he connections and unity behind the apparent disunity and disconnection.
The intellect is a doorway by which one can learn knowledge which gets at the heart of reality.
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Video from the film Waris Shah: Ishq Da Waris:
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1 comment:
where do we put "being" into this? Aquinas, who never would have come onto the scene had the Arabic translations of Ibn Arabi and Maimonedes and others been making their way into Europe because the accompanied the new texts of Aristotle from the Muslim world at the time, made much of the three terms being, intellect and God. Is not correct to say that the Aristotelian basis to the thought world of the time (13th century) would meant that all three thinkers would have seen things in the same way, that is to say GOd is the first cause, and to have knowledge of causes and science is to undertake a study of God and God's world. The intellect is the mediator between the two of these in sense. no?
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