Mohammad Iqbal’s brilliant exploration of the beauty and majesty of the Islamic religious vision not only expresses the soul of the people of Pakistan, but stands as a beacon for all religious visions, wherever they may be. Even more, his determination to respond with vigor and creativity to the great challenges to human meaning in our times, and to do so not by compromising the religious vision, but precisely by plumbing in faith its richness, is a most appropriate example for all. Indeed, if there be truth in the common-place that the first millennium was focused upon God and the second upon man, then Iqbal may be the harbinger our new millennium, pointing the way to a vision that reunites both.

But how can the past give birth to the future; in particular, how can earlier human vision, especially that of a person who has passed from this life, generate new insights deep enough to help elucidate what both transcends human life and makes it possible?

One thinks immediately that this might be done by adding from other traditions or subsequent times. But there is danger in this of constructing an odd creature, recalling the definition of the camel as a horse made by a committee. True growth may be catalyzed from without, but it must emerge from within, from the home, the hearth and the heart. Here a story, my story, might help to suggest how this could be true of the thought of Mohammad Iqbal.

In recent years it has become the custom to tell one’s story as a way of shedding light upon the vital sources of one’s insight and inspiration, what one values, and what one is really about in one’s life. My story in philosophy is one of coming home by leaving home; hopefully it might help in reconstructing Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

As a young man I left homeland in order to undertake my education in the premier Catholic university, the Gregorian in Rome. There, the Jesuits labored mightily for the mystical number of seven years to introduce me to the philosophy and theology of the Graeco-Roman Christian tradition, reading Augustine in the light of Plato and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae in the light of Aristotle. This is one of the great traditions of religious thought; it is the one in which I was born as a philosopher and which I have always been grateful to know and to savor.

My doctorate in philosophy was a first step outward to the work of the Protestant Christian philosopher-theologian, Paul Tillich. I then remained to teach metaphysics and philosophy of religion at the Catholic University of America. These courses followed the Aristotelian model, beginning from the world and reasoning to God after the pattern of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Thomas’ "five ways" to resolve the question: Does God exist?

After some twelve years (another mystical number) it was time to step out of the Western Christian tradition as a whole. At the University of Madras I was most graciously received by Prof. T.N.P. Mahadevan who, with personal conviction and passionate commitment, introduced me to the Hindu metaphysical tradition, especially the non-dualist (advaita) tradition of the great Shankara. This was a second decisive experience for me and one which, with the help of Prof. Balasubramaniam and other in Madras and elsewhere in India, I have renewed and extended whenever possible.

Suddenly, as with Marx’s process of standing Hegel on his head, I found that my reading of Thomas’ five ways to the existence of God was being inverted and, to my surprise, that it was thereby deepened and corrected. Reading the Sutras enabled me to grasp that the deeper sense of Thomas’ "ways" was not to deduce the infinite from the finite (a real contradiction in terms), but to reconnect all such things to the source of their being and meaning. The five ways were incisive arguments that from whatever point of view — origin, level of perfection, or goal — God alone is self-explanatory. All else takes their origin from him, manifests his divine life, and searches for its fulfillment in transcending itself toward others and ultimately toward Him. Human life is thereby freed from egoistic self-enclosure and its corollary, mutual conflict. Instead, life is essentially open to, and reflects, that infinity of being and meaning in which all else is grounded.

The long road to the other side of the world had brought me finally home to the foundational truth of my own philosophical tradition. This experience provides the theme here, namely, leaving home in order to return enriched, and not so much by what is found elsewhere, but especially by the deeper meaning one is enabled thereby to draw out of one’s own tradition. This recalls the history of Abraham, our common father in faith. Here, I would like to investigate the possibilities of such an approach for the thought of Mohammad Iqbal, following broadly his three stages: (a) faith or belief, (b) thought or rational understanding, and (c) personal discovery and assimilation.

This paper will attempt to suggest three ways in which Iqbal’s thesis might be supplemented: first, from the point of view of an archeology of religious thought in support of his conviction that thought is natively religious; second, by elements from systematic philosophy with a view to understanding which the meaning this religious insight gives to human life; third, by drawing upon a phenomenology of religious consciousness to see how assimilation of this insight might open new ways of creating human comity for the millennium now dawning.

To follow this evolution it should be noted that for life in any human society as a grouping of persons there is a basic need to understand oneself and one’s relation to others. It should not be thought that these are necessarily two questions, rather than one. They will be diversely formalized in the history of philosophy, but prior to any such formalization, indeed prior even to the capacity to formalize this as a speculative problem, some mode of lived empathy rather than antipathy must be possible. Plato later worked out formally and in detail that the unity of the multiple is possible only on the basis of something that is one, but the history of human life manifests that present in the awareness of the early peoples and according to their mode of awareness there always has been some one reality in terms of which they understood all to be related.

Totemic Thought (see Chapter II below)

Moreover, the totem, in turn, was not simply one animal among others, but was in a sense limitless: no matter how many persons were born to the tribe the potentiality or resources of the totem was never exhausted — without limit there was always room for one more. Further, the totem was shown special respect, such as not being sold, used for food or other utilitarian purposes which would make it subservient to the individual members of the tribe or clan. Whereas other things might be said to be possessed and used, the totem was the subject of direct predication: one might say that he had a horse or other animal, but only of the totem would one say that he is, e.g., lion.

The totem then was the unique limitless reality in terms of which all particular people and things had their identity and interrelation. It was the sacred center of individual and community life in terms of which all had meaning and cohesion. It made possible the sense of both personal dignity and interpersonal relations, which were the most important aspects of human life. This it did with a sense of direct immediacy that would be echoed, but never repeated, in subsequent stages of more formally religious thought.

Whether this be seen as religious or proto-religious, what it shows is that religion is not something added to a secular universe, but the basic and essential insight of even the simplest forms of human community. The issue then is not whether there be room for religion alongside public life or how to protect one from the other, but how religion functions as the root of human meaning and community.

Mythic Thought (see Chapter III below)

Such a reality could no longer be stated in terms corresponding to the external senses, but needed instead to be figured by the imagination. The terms drawn originally from the senses now were reconfigured in forms that expressed life above humankind and which stood as the principle of human life. Such higher principles, as the more knowing and having a greater power of will, would be personal; and as transcendent persons, they would be gods.

It would be incorrect then to consider this, as did Freud and Marx, to be simply a projection of human characteristics. On the contrary, the development of the ability to think in terms shaped by the imagination released human appreciation of the principle of life from the limitations of animals, birds and other natural entities available to the external senses and allowed the transcendence of the principle of unity to be expressed in a more effective manner. This was not to create the sense of transcendence; rather it allowed the unique and essential foundation of human meaning of which Iqbal spoke to find new expression in terms of the evolving capabilities of human consciousness.

The order of the parts of the universe is the following. The first to appear was Chaos: "Verily at the first Chaos came to be." Then came earth: "but next wide-bosomed Earth the ever sure foundation of all," and starry Heaven: "Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself." From Earth, generally in unison with Heaven, were born Oceanus and the various races of Cyclopes and gods, from whom, in turn, were born still other gods such as Zeus and the races of men.

The understanding of the unity of reality expressed by this poem is the very opposite of a random gathering of totally disparate, limited and equally original units. On the contrary, the relation between the gods, and hence between the parts of nature they bespeak is expressed in terms of procreation. Hence, every reality is appreciated as related positively to all others in its genetic sequence.

This relatedness of things does not depend upon a later and arbitrary decision, but is equally original with their very reality; indeed, it is their reality. Neither is it something which involves only certain aspects of the components of the universe: it extends to their total actuality. This includes actions: Rhea, for example, appeals to her parents for protection from the acts of her husband, Cronus, against his children. Hence, the understanding which the poem conveys is that of a unity or relation which is the original reality of things and on which their distinctive character and actions depend.

This unity is understood to be by nature prior to diversity for it appears through a genetic structure in which each god proceeds from the union of an earlier pair of gods, while all such pairs are descendents of the one original pair, Earth and Heaven. Further, the procreation of the gods proceeds from each of these pairs precisely as united in love, under the unitive power of Eros who is equally original with heaven and earth.

From what has been said we can conclude that unity pervades and precedes gods and men. All is traced back to Earth and Heaven as the original pair from whose union, under the impetus of Eros, all is generated. But what is the relation between Heaven and Earth? This question is at the root of the issue of unity as expressed in mythic terms. It promises to be able to take us to a still deeper and more properly religious understanding if we return to the text and use the proper etymological tools.

For its intelligibility, this implies: (a) that an undifferentiated unity precedes the gap, and (b) that by opening or division the first contrasting realities, namely, Heaven and Earth, were constituted. That is, on the basis of the gap one boundary, Heaven, is differ-entiated from the other boundary, Earth: by the gap the boundaries identically are both constituted and differentiated as contraries. As all else are derivatives of Chaos, Earth and Heaven in the manner noted above, it can be concluded that the entire differentiated universe is derivative of an original undifferentiated unity which preceded Chaos.

It would be premature, however, to ask of the mythic mind whether this derivation took place by material or efficient causality; that question must await the development of philosophy. But the original reality itself is not differentiated; it is an undivided unity. As such it is without name, for the names we give reflect our sense perceptions which concern not what is constant and homogenous, but the differentiated bases of the various sense stimuli. What is undifferentiated is not only unspoken in fact, but unspeakable in principle by the language of myth which depends essentially upon the imagination.

Nonetheless, though it is unspeakable by the mythic mind itself, reflection can uncover or reveal something of that undifferentiated reality which the Theogony implies. We have, for instance, noted its reality and unity. This lack of differentiation is not a deficiency, but a fullness of reality and meaning from which all particulars and contraries are derived. It is unspeakable because not bounded, limited and related after the fashion of one imaged contrary to another. This is the transcendent fullness that is at the heart of the Hindu advaita or nondual philosophy; it is also the total infinite to which Iqbal referred as that which makes finite thinking possible.

It is the source of that which is seen and spoken in our language which is based in the imagination and which Hindu thought refers to as the world of names and forms. Further, it is the source, not only whence the differentiated realities are derived, but of the coming forth itself of these realities. This is reflected in two significant manners. First positively, Eros, which itself is said to come from chaos, is the power which joins together in procreative union the pairs of gods, thereby reflecting the dynamic, manifestive and sharing character of the undifferentiated reality.

Negatively, this is indicated also by the acts which the Theogony describes as evil. For example, it says that "Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing", namely, hiding away his children in a secret place of Earth as soon as each was born, and not allowing them to come into the light. Cronus is termed "a wretch" for swallowing his children. In each case evil is described as impeding the process by which new realities are brought into existence. This implies that its opposite, the good, involves essentially bringing forth the real. The undifferentiated unity is the origin of the multiple and differentiated; in terms we shall encounter below, it is participative.

Finally, it can now be seen that all the progeny, that is, all parts of the universe and all humans, are born into the unity of a family. This traces its origin, not to a pair of ultimately alien realities and certainly not to human chaos as conflict, but to the undifferentiated Unity. Just as there is no autogenesis, there is no unrelated reality or aspect of reality. It would seem, then, that verses 118-128 of the hymn imply a reality which is one, undifferentiated and therefore unspeakable, but productive of the multiple and therefore generous and sharing. For the Greek mythic mind then, beings are more one than many, more related than divided, more complementary than contrasting.

As a transformation of the earlier totemic structure, mythic understanding continues the basic totemic insight regarding the related character of all things predicated upon a unity and fullness of meaning. By thinking in terms of the gods, however, myth is able to add a number of important factors. First, quantitatively the myth can integrate, not only a certain tribe or number of tribes, but the entire universe. Second, qualitatively it can take account of such intentional realities as purpose and fidelity. Third, while implying the unitive principle which had been expressed with shocking directness in totemic thought ("I am lion"), it adds the connotation of its unspeakable and undifferentiated, but generous, character.

Metaphysics (see Chapter V below)

But that had never been the root human issue. Totemic and mythic thought were not merely ways of understanding and working with nature, although they did that as well. Fundamentally they concerned the metaphysical and religious issues of what it meant to be, the divine and transcendent basis of life, and the religious terms in which it needed to be lived in time. After the work of others in conceptualizing the physical and mathematical orders, Parmenides was able to take up the most basic questions of life and being in properly intellectual metaphysical terms.

Speaking still in a mythic language, the Proemium of Parmenides’ famous poem described a scene in which he was awakened by goddesses and sent in a chariot drawn by a faithful mare along the arching highway that spans all things. In this process he moved from obscurity to light, from opinion to truth. There, the gates were opened by the goddess, Justice, as guardian of true judgements and he was directed to examine all things in order to discern the truth.

The chariot then moves along the highway of being and the procedure is analogous at the two subsequent forks in the road where the signposts tempt one to consider being as changing and multiple, respectively. Each of these, Parmenides reasons, would again place nonbeing within being itself, thereby destroying its very character as being. Nonbeing is contained in the notion of change, inasmuch as a changing being is no longer what it had been and not yet what it will become. But for such nonbeing to pertain to the essence of being would destroy being. When, however, nonbeing is removed then being emerges as unchanging. Similarly, nonbeing is essential to the notion of multiplicity, inasmuch as this requires that one being not be the other. When, however, nonbeing is removed what emerges is one. These then are the characteristics of being: it is infinite and eternal, unchanging and one.

Being itself then transcends the multiple and changing world in which we live: it is in a manner more perfect than could possibly be appreciated in the graphic terms of the internal senses of imagination which defined the nature of human capabilities in the stage of myth.

In this way Parmenides discerned the necessity of Absolute, eternal and unchanging being — whatever be said of anything else. Neither being nor thought makes sense if being is the same as nonbeing, for then to do, say or be anything would be the same as not doing, not saying or not being. As the real is irreducible to nothing and being is irreducible to nonbeing — as it must be if there is any thing or any meaning whatsoever — then being must have about it the self-sufficiency expressed by Parmenides’ notion of the absolute One.

The issue then is not how the notion of the divine entered human thought; it has always been there, for without that which is One and Absolute in the sense of infinite and self-sufficient man and nature would be at odds; humankind would lack social cohesion; indeed, thinking would be the same as not thinking, just as being would be the same as nonbeing.

From the above archeology of human thought in its totemic, mythic and first philosophical stages it can be concluded with Iqbal that it has been religious insight regarding the Absolute which has made finite thinking possible. Leaving home and going deeply into the past thus brings us home to reconstruct the deep truth of faith regarding knowledge, namely, not only that it can also be about religion, but that in essence thought itself is the religious reconstitution of all in God: this is what knowledge most fundamentally is.

There are two implications of this archeology which I would like to note here. The first concerns the relation of a people to the message of a prophet. As the basis of the human self-understanding of the different cultures is essentially religious, a divine revelation through a great prophet comes not as alien and conflictual, but as a special divine help to appreciate, purify and strengthen a culture. The message of the prophet evokes the divine life which lies within; it enables each people to plunge more deeply into the infinite ground of their cultural traditions and to bring out more of its meaning for their life. Indeed, confidence (etymologically rooted in "faith" — con-fidence) and commitment to one’s tradition as grounded in the infinite means precisely expecting it to have even more to say then a people has yet articulated. In this light, the Prophet’s voice is a call to delve anew into one’s tradition, to bring out more of its meaning for one’s times and to live this more fully. This is a voice to which one can respond fully and freely.

In this sense I would take issue with Iqbal’s seemingly overly Darwinian description of the first period of religious life as

(see Part II below)

There is another implication of arriving at Iqbal’s sense of the essentially religious character of thought through an archeology of human thinking. This relates to his concern to protect religion against the tendency of analytic rationality to reduce the mind to its empirical content and to bind it to the material, or at least to what could clearly and distinctly be conceived by the human mind. Iqbal’s approach was to show the limited character of such a view, not only in terms of its objects, but especially as a description of thought itself. He did this by majestically describing the broad (religious) reaches of the mind. For this he reinterpreted time, light and freedom in ways that echoed the thought of his contemporaries, Bergson, Whitehead, Alexander, Royce and Einstein, whose thought he much enriched with the cultural resources of the Islamic tradition. This is a special power and grace of his thought.

But he gives voice to infinitely richer domains of thought grounded in the divine. Thus the divine appears as it were dimly as the background of every limited human encounter; human life becomes theonomous and can be seen in its transcendent significance. For Iqbal, when related to their infinite ground, science and technology become concrete manifestations and articulations of the meaning of God in time.

But as he warms to this subject in his Reconstruction Iqbal edges ever closer to that mystical vision of Hallaj in which all is so suffused with divine light and meaning that man and nature seem almost divine. Iqbal reacts against any identification of the two and with the full force of the Islamic tradition of fidelity would answer: ‘Never; there is but one God and no other!’

In this lies the contemporary drama of Islam as of all religious visions, for man today is intent upon an answer to the question of "how he is to be understood?" Note this is not the question of how God could create our world of finite beings. The answer to that question is hidden in divine love which we can seek to acknowledge (as we shall suggest below), but never to understand in itself: such understanding is the divine life itself. Rather, the question is how, in the light of this revelation of God’s love, we can overcome the hubris by which the human ego claims to be absolute, and yet understand the reality of the human person as having the autonomy required for the responsibility and creativity required in order to survive and flourish — and to play his role in the echatology of the Qu’ran. How can men and women come truly alive so as to recognize themselves fully as images of God, yet not be God; and moreover how in the image of their creator, can they undertake a creative exercise of their proper freedom and responsibility?

This is a point of high metaphysics on which I would like to suggest a way to carry forward Iqbal’s work after the image of leaving in order to return.

Here one could wonder whether the Islamo-Greek tradition was abandoned just a bit too soon, for in the Christian tradition of scholarship Aquinas’s religious response was imminent, and would enable the Greek tradition to evolve into modern thought. In view of this a project of reconstruction in Islam could take particular interest in the work of Thomas Aquinas as part of its effort to discover how Islam can be truly at home in modern times and creative in modern terms. Any such insights would, in turn, be of great interest to other religious traditions, all of which are struggling with this issue each in its own way.

Hermeneutics tells us that in approaching an issue we need a question in order to focus our attention and be able to draw new insight. Iqbal provides the questions we should ask for the project of religious reconstruction; they concern existence and its implication for creation and the religious sense of man.

Existence and the Reconstruction of Being in God

(see Chapter V below)

Iqbal sees as key to religious reconstruction the overcoming the relatively passive sense of reality found in the formal order characteristic of the Platonic strain of thought, and also reflected in modern rationalism. In that light limited realities passively replicate the archetypal forms or ideas, but add nothing new; finite reality is drained of its vitality and reduced to a shadow. Instead, Iqbal calls for a return to the active character of reality. This suggests that we look in the early Christian Fathers for the emergence of being as existence. It was indeed this which characterized the thought of Thomas and gave it such prestige in Christian circles

Although Greek philosophy grew out of an intensive mythic sense of life in which all was a reflection of the will of the gods, it nonetheless presupposed matter always to have existed. As a result, the focus of its attention and concern was upon the forms by which matter was determined to be of one type rather than another. For Aristotle, physical or material things in the process of change from one form to another were the most manifest realities and his philosophizing began therefrom. This approach to philosophy beginning from sense encounters with physical beings corresponded well to our human nature as mind and body, and could be extended to the recognition of divine life. But Iqbal wants more; for him "it is in fact the presence of the total infinite in the movement of knowledge that makes finite thinking possible." The Greek philosophical awareness of what it meant to be real would need considerable enrichment in order to appreciate the foundational significance for human though of its grounding in a fully transcendent and infinite Being.

One might follow the progression of this deepening awareness of being by reflecting upon the experience of being totally absorbed in the particularities of one’s job, business, farm or studies — the prices, the colors, the chemicals — and then encountering an imminent danger of death, the loss of a loved one or the birth of a child. At the moment of death, as at the moment of birth, the entire atmosphere and range of preoccupations in a hospital room shifts dramatically, being suddenly transformed from tactical adjustments for limited objectives to confronting existence, in sorrow or in joy, in terms that plunge to the center of the whole range of meaning. (This can be stated in social terms as well — see Chapter IX below.) Such was the effect upon philosophy when the awareness of being developed from attention to merely this or that kind of reality, to focus upon the act of existence in contrast to non-existence, and hence to human life in all its dimensions and, indeed, to life divine.

Cornelio Fabro goes further. He suggests that this deepened metaphysical sense of being in the early Christian ages not only opened the possibility for an enriched sense of freedom, but itself was catalyzed by the new sense of freedom proclaimed in the religious message. That message focused not upon Plato’s imagery of the sun at the mouth of the cave from which external enlightenment might be derived, but upon the eternal Word or Logos through and according to which all things received their existence and which enlightened their consciousness life.

Thus the power of being bursts into time through creator and prophet:

- it directs the mind beyond the ideological poles of species and individual interests, and beyond issues of place or time as limited series or categories;

- it centers, instead, upon the unique reality of the person as a participation in the creative power of God, a being bursting into existence, who is and cannot be denied;

- it rejects being considered in any sense as nonbeing, or being treated as anything less than its full reality;

- it is a self or in Iqbal’s term an ‘ego’, affirming its own unique actuality and irreducible to any specific group identity; and

(see Chapter VI below)

The focus upon being as active had profound implications for the understanding of man in God. It had crucial importance first for the sense of the divine itself. In Plato’s more passive vision the divine as active would be situated below the idea of the Good or the One which were objects of contemplation. We saw how taking being in a more active sense allowed Aristotle to appreciate divine life as an active thinking on thinking.

Iqbal and the Islamic tradition rightly feared that this notion, as a product of human reasoning, would be essentially limited and limiting. This is his incisive and trenchant critique of the cosmological and other modes of reasoning to God. Certainly reasoning in terms of forms and categories would be subject to this critique, but as just noted being had come to be perceived rather in terms of existence, which is affirmation without negation and hence without limitation.

Nevertheless, Iqbal makes a key contribution to any appropriate reading of a systematic Christian philosophy by insisting that the notion of God is not a product of human reasoning. Rather, as seen above through the archeology of human knowledge, the absolute is there as the center of human life in its earliest totemic mode; it flowers as humankind develops the mythic mode of thought; and it is there from the beginning in Parmenides’ founding of Greek metaphysical thought. As notes Augustine in his dialectic of love: it is not we who first loved God, but He who first loved us: from him come life and light and love.

In this light, one need not fear that an affirmation of man whether by personal freedom or technological means will be detrimental to religion. Rather human life becomes the proclamation of God’s wisdom, power, love and providence. On this basis Thomas proceeds systematically to shed the requirement not only of an external agent intellect, but also of a special divine illumination for each act of reason, and of seeds of possibility for all new realizations — all of which were ways by which the earlier Christian-Platonism had attempted to preserve a role for God in human progress. Instead the human person is seen as sacrament of God, His sign and symbol, as creative vice regent and artist in and of this world. Thus, Thomas does not hesitate to affirm of the human person whatever is required in order that, properly according to his own nature and in his own name, the person be able to fulfill these roles in this world. This is the proper autonomy of the human in the divine; we might say that in this the human person comes truly home in God.

(see Chapter VI below)

The existential sense of being and its openness to the infinite has allowed more recently for a renewed appreciation of Thomas’ structure of participation by which human autonomy is an affirma-tion, rather than a derogation of God. In any limited being, its essence or nature constitutes by definition a limited and limiting capacity for existence: by it, the being is capable of this much existence, but of no more. Such an essence must then be distinct from the existence which, of itself, bespeaks only affirmation, not negation and limitation.

But such a being, whose nature or essence is not existence but only a capacity for existence, could not of itself or by its own nature justify its possession and exercise of existence. The Parme-nidean principle of noncontradiction will not countenance existence coming from non-existence, for then being would be reducible to non-being or nothing. Such beings, then, are dependent precisely for their existence, that is, precisely as beings or existents.

This dependence cannot be upon another limited being similarly composed of a distinct essence and existence, for such a being would be equally dependent; the multiplication of such dependencies even infinitely would multiply, rather than answer the question of how composite beings with a limiting essence have existence. Hence, limited composite beings must depend for their existence upon, or participate in, uncomposite being, that is, in a being whose essence or nature, rather than being distinct from and limiting its existence, is identically existence. This is Being Itself — the total infinite to which Iqbal refers as making finite being and thinking possible.

For his sense of participation some early Christian Church Fathers numbered Plato among the prophets. As clarified and enriched by Aristotle’s sense of being as active, by the Christian existential sense of being and by the work of his great medieval Islamic commentators, this metaphysics can provide the systematic clarification needed by Iqbal’s insights regarding religion in order that they be articulated in the increasingly structured physical and social environment in which we live. In the face of the dilemma of human hubris vs religious passivity in our days, this provides indispensable help in responding to the need of those devoted in faith. For it can aid them to understand better the relation of their increasingly complex life to God and assist them in living their faith in our times: in a word, it is crucial to coming home and being at home religiously in our times.

(see Chapter VIII below)

For Iqbal making man at home in the world might be a proper task for "metaphysics . . . a logically consistent view of the world with God as part of that view." But he sees another stage in which

Iqbal would probably be very interested in recent developments in phenomenology. For him

Hence the search into human subjectivity is really at the heart of Iqbal’s concern for the reconstruction of religion. He brilliantly rearticulated the Islamic vision in terms of the vitalism of his time as part of this century’s renewed discovery and appreciation of human subjectivity. It is necessary to follow the emergence of this attention and to elaborate the possibilities of the phenomenology to which it led in order to extend Iqbal’s work of religious reconstruction. This would liberate the human spirit from egoism, and bring it finally home — this time not only to self, but to others and to God.

At the beginning of this century, it appeared that the rationalist project of stating all in clear and distinct objective terms was close to completion. This was to be achieved in either the empirical terms of the positivist tradition of sense knowledge or in the formal and essentialist terms of the Kantian intellectual tradition. Whitehead writes that at the turn of the century, when with Bertrand Russell he went to the first World Congress of Philosophy in Paris, it seemed that, except for some details of application, the work of physics was essentially completed. To the contrary, however, the very attempt to finalize scientific knowledge with its most evolved concepts made manifest the radical insufficiency of the objectivist approach.

For Heidegger the meaning of being and of life was unveiled in conscious human life (dasein) lived through time and therefore through history. Thus, human consciousness becomes the new focus of attention; the uncovering or "bringing into light" (the etymology of phenomenology) of the unfolding patterns and interrelations of being would open a new era of human awareness. Epistemology and metaphysics would develop in the very work of tracking the nature and direction of this process.

Thus, for Heidegger’s successor, Hans-Georg Gadamer, the task becomes that of uncovering how human persons, emerging in the culture of a family, neighborhood and people, exercise their freedom and weave their cultural tradition. This is not history as a mere compilation of whatever humankind does or makes, but culture as the fabric of human symbols and interrelations by which a human group unveils being in its time.

Iqbal provides needed direction here by pointing out that a religious outlook is not an external search for power and control susceptible of empirical investigation and pragmatic interpretation. Rather religion entails an inner attitude which takes us to the very roots of our being and even to its source.

This points us deeply into human subjectivity, but what is its ultimate meaning for life? Is this new focus upon human subjectivity but another chapter in Paradise Lost in which humankind attempts to seize its own destiny in a way that excludes God? Or does to interact more consciously mean to attack others more devastatingly, killing not only bodies but spirits as well? Is the new awareness of cultures to open new periods of persecution and cultural genocide; very concretely, "Can we get along" as peoples, cultures and civilizations?

One can begin with the person as a polyvalent unity operative on both the physical and non-physical levels. Though the various sciences analyze distinct dimensions, the person is not a construct of independent components, but an identity: one’s physical and the psychic realities are dimensions of oneself and of no other. Further, this identity is not the result of my personal development, but was had by me from my beginning; it is a given for each person. Hence, while I can grow indefinitely, act endlessly, and do and make innumerable things, the growth and the actions will be always my own; I am the same given or person who perdures through all the stages of my growth.

Unfortunately, this givenness is often taken in the sense of closure associated with the terms ‘datum’ or ‘data’, whether hypo-thetical or evidential. In the hypothetical sense, a given is a stipulation agreed upon by the relevant parties as the basis for a process of argumentation: Granted X, then Y. Such are the premises of an argument or the postulates in a mathematical demonstration. In the evidential sense, data are the direct and warranted observations of what actually is the case. In both these meanings the terms ‘given’ or ‘data’ direct the mind exclusively toward the future or consequent as one’s only concern. The use of the past participle of the verb stem (data) closes off any search toward the past so that when one given is broken down by an analysis new givens appear. One never gets behind some hypothetical or evidential given.

There are reasons to suspect that this humanism is not enough for the dynamic sense of a cultural heritage and the creative sense of harmony as cooperation with others. Without underestimating how much has been accomplished in terms of progress and praxis, the world-wide contemporary phenomenon of alienation, not only between cultures but from one’s own culture and people, suggests that something important has been forgotten.

Second, there is the too broadly experienced danger that in concrete affairs the concern to build the future in terms only of what has been conceived clearly and by all will be transformed, wittingly or unwittingly, into oppression of self-identity and destruction of integrative cultures both as civilizations and as centers of personal cultivation. Indeed, the charges of cultural oppression from so many parts of the world lead one to doubt that the humanist notion of the self-given and its accompanying ideals can transcend the dynamics of power and leave room for persons, their freedom and creativity, especially for those of other cultures.

(See Chapter VIII below)

It is time then to look again to the second meaning of ‘given’ and to follow the opening this provides toward the source as implied in the notion of gift. Above, we noted that self-identity and interpersonal relatedness are gifts (dona). We shall now look further into this in order to see what it suggests regarding the dynamic openness required for cooperation between persons and cultures.

First, one notes that as gift the given has an essentially gratuitous character. It is true that at times the object or service given could be repaid in cash or in kind. As indicated by the root of the term ‘commercial,’ however, such a transaction would be based on some merit (mereo) on the part of the receiver. This would destroy its nature as gift precisely because the given would not be based primarily in the freedom of the giver.

The same appears from an analysis of an exchange of presents. Presents cease to be gifts to the degree that they are given only because of the requirements of the social situation or only because of a claim implicit in what the other might have given me. Indeed, the sole way in which such presents can be redeemed as gifts is to make clear that their presentation is not something to which I feel obliged, but which I personally and freely want to do. As such then, a gift is based precisely upon the freedom of the giver; it is gratuitous.

There is striking symmetry here with the ‘given’ in the above sense of hypothesis or evidence. There, in the line of hypothetical and evidential reasoning there was a first, namely, that which is not explained, but upon which explanation is founded. Here there is also a first upon which the reality of the gift is founded and which is not to be traced to another reality. This symmetry makes what is distinctive of the gift stand out, namely, that the giving is not traced back further precisely because it is free or gratuitous. Once again, our reflections lead us in the direction of that which is self-sufficient, absolute and transcendent as the sole adequate source of the gift of being. Phenomenological reflection leads us home to what Iqbal intuited, namely, that only a total absolute makes possible anything finite, including our very selves.

The great traditions have insisted rightly both upon the oneness of the absolute reality and upon the lesser reality of the multiple: the multiple is not The Real, though neither is it totally non-reality. Anselm’s elaboration of the notion of privation contains a complementary clarification of the gratuitous character of beings as given or gifted. He extended this notion of privation to the situation of creation in which the whole being is gifted. In this case, there is no prior subject to which something is due; hence, there is no ground or even any acceptance. Anselm expressed this radically non-reciprocal nature of the gift — its lack of prior conditions — through the notion of absolute privation.

To what does this gift correspond on the part of the source? In a certain parallel to the antinomies of Kant which show when reason has strayed beyond its bounds, many from Plotinus to Leibniz and beyond have sought knowledge, not only of the gift and its origin, but of why it had to be given. The more they succeeded the less room was left for freedom on the part of the person whose very life is given or gift. Others attempted to understand freedom as a fall, only to find that what was thus understood was bereft of value and meaning and hence was of no significance to human life and its cultures. Rather, the radical non-reciprocity of human freedom must be rooted in an equally radical generosity on the part of its origin. No reason, either on the part of the given or on the part of its origin makes this gift necessary. The freedom of man is the reflection of the pure generosity by which he is given: if in general man is the image of God, then in particular human freedom is the image of God’s love.

At this point philosophy begins to gain that intimacy which Iqbal sees as characterizing religion. The intellect takes on that union which is more characteristic of a mystical state. One appreciates one’s freedom as given and responds freely and spontaneously. This enables one to respond in love to the love by which one’s heart has been given. This, in turn, evolves into generosity in the image of the outgoing love of one’s creator.

Yet in all this the metaphysics of existence keeps cause and effect distinct from one another so that one is not absorbed into the divine love by which one is given, but instead is affirmed as being in one’s own right and hence as a distinct, unique, generous and creative source in this world.

as Gratitude to God (see Chapter VIII below)

Understanding oneself as gift entails understanding oneself also as giving of oneself in openness to others. As noted below in Chapter IX, the sense of gift makes it possible to extend the notions of duty and harmony beyond concern for the well-being of those with whom I share and whose well-being is in a sense my own. The good is not only what contributes to my perfection, for I am not the center of meaning. Rather, being as received is essentially out-going.

This has two important implications for our topic. Where the Greeks’ focus upon their heritage had led to depreciating others as barbarians, the sense of oneself and of one’s culture as radically given or gifted provides a basic corrective. Knowing and valuing oneself and one’s culture as gifts implies more than merely reciprocating what the other does for me. It means, first, that others and their culture are to be respected simply because they too have been given or gifted by the one Transcendent source. This is an essential step which Gandhi, in calling outcasts by the name "harijans" or "children of God," urged us to take beyond the sense of pride or isolation in which we would see others in pejorative terms.

But mere respect may not be enough. The fact is that I and another, my people or culture and another, originate from, share in and proclaim the same "total absolute". That this creates not out of need, but out of love implies that the relation between cultures as integrating modes of human life is in principle one of complementarity and outreach. Hence, interchange as the effort to live this complementarity is far from being hopeless. In the pressing needs of our times only an intensification of cooperation between peoples can make available the needed immense stores of human experience and creativity. The positive virtue of love is our real basis for hope.

A second principle of interchange is to be found in the participated — the radically given or gifted — character of one’s being. As one does not first exist and then receive, but one’s very existence is a received existence or gift, to attempt to give back this gift, as in an exchange of presents, would be at once hopelessly too much and too little. On the one hand, to attempt to return in strict equivalence would be too much for it is our very self that we have received as gift. On the other hand, to think merely in terms of reciprocity would be to fall essentially short of my nature as one that is given, for to make a merely equivalent return would be to remain centered upon myself where I would cleverly trap, and then entomb, the creative power of being.

Rather, looking back I can see the futility of giving back, and in this find the fundamental importance of passing on the gift in the spirit in which it has been given. One’s nature as given calls for a creative generosity which reflects that of one’s source. Truly appropriate generosity lies in continuing the giving of which one has received through shaping one’s cultural tradition creatively in response to real present day needs. As these involve not only ourselves, but others, this means cooperating in kind with the creative gifts at the heart of other cultures so that all may be truly at home. This requires a vast expansion or breaking out of oneself as the only center of one’s concern. It means becoming appreciative and effectively concerned with the good of others and of other groups, with the promotion and vital growth of the next generation and of those to follow. Indeed, it means advancing Iqbal’s insight regarding religious thought one step further to a total harmony of humankind with nature which reflects the total absolute as the condition of possibility of all.

in Our Times (see Chapter X below)

The implications of such generosity are broad and at times surprisingly personal. First, true openness to others cannot be based upon a depreciation of oneself or of one’s own culture. Without appreciating one’s worth there would be nothing to share and no way to help, nor even the possibility of taking joy in the good of the other. Further, cultural interchange enables one to see that the elements of one’s life, which in isolation may have seemed to be merely local customs and purely repetitive in character, are more fundamentally modes in which one lives basic and essential human values. In meeting others and other cultures, one discovers the deeper meaning in one’s own everyday life.

This is more than mere discovery, however. One recognizes that in these transcendental values of life — truth and freedom, love and beauty — one participates in the dynamism of one’s origin and hence must share these values in turn. More exactly, one can come to realize that real reception of these transcendental gifts lies in sharing them in loving concern in order that others may realize them as well. This means passing on one’s own heritage not by replicating it in others, but by promoting what others and subsequent generations would freely become.

1. The Vedanta Sutras of Badarayana with commentary by Sankara, tran. by G. Thibaut (New York: Dover), I, 1, 2.

2. See the edition edited by M. Saeed Sheikh (Lahore, Pakis-tan: Iqbal Academy and Institute of Islamic Culture, 1989), pp. 4-5.

3. Ibid., p. 13.

4. This threefold structure followed both in Aquinas’ Commentary on Boethius’ work On the Trinity, qq. 3 and 5, and Descartes’ systematic procedure for placing under doubt all that arises from the three sources of knowledge until what is derived from each source could be certified as true. Aristotle’s dictum regarding humans as physical and spiritual held that there is nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses.

5. Indeed, one might define philosophy and science precisely as knowledge of the various aspects of reality in terms proper to human reason and hence expressive of the nature or existence of the things themselves.

6. L. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), ch. II.

7. Ibid., ch. XII. See also Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), ch. I; and G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The PreSocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1960), pp. 26-32.

8. Hesiod, Theogony (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953); also The Theogony, trans. Hugh G. Eyelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 89-99, 107-115.

9. Ibid., 11, 104ff.

10. Ibid. See also George F. McLean and Patrick J. Aspell, Ancient Western Philosophy: The Hellenic Emergence (New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1971).

11. Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philo-sophers (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 12-13.

12. Jaeger, p. 13 and Kirk and Raven, 26-32.

13. G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, ibid.

14. Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. by H.G. Evelyn-White (London: Heinemann, 1920), p. 86.

15. Kirk and Raven, loc.cit.

16. Xenophanes, fragments 11, 14-16 in George F. McLean and Patrick J. Aspell, Readings in Ancient Western Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 31.

17. Anaximander, fragments, see McLean and Aspell, pp. 22-28.

18. See McLean and Aspell, Ancient Western Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), ch. III.

19. Parmenides, fragments, see McLean and Aspell, Readings in Ancient Western Philosophy, pp. 39-44.

20. Fragment 8; see Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides: A Study of Word, Images, and Argument in the Fragments (New Haven: Yale, 1970).

21. Metaphysics, XII, 7, 1072 b 26-29.

22. Iqbal, p. 143.

23. Iqbal, pp. 4-5.

24. Iqbal, p. 123.

25. Isaias 27:13.

26. Iqbal, p. 3.

27. Iqbal, pp. 102-103, 113.

28. G. McLean, Plenitude and Participation: The Unity of Man in God (Madras: The University of Madras, 1978), pp. 53-57.

29. Aristotle had taken the compossibility of forms as a sufficient response to the scientific question of ‘whether it exists’. See Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Meta-physics; A Study in the Greek Background of Medieval Thought (Toronto: P.I.M.S., 1978).

30. Mortiner J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), I, 609.

31. John I:1-5, 8.

32. C. Fabro called the graded and related manner in which this is realized concretely an intensive notion of being. Cornelio Fabro, Participation et causalité selon S. Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Pub. Univ. de Louvain, 1961).

33. Cornelio Fabro, La nozione metafisica de partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Torino: Societá Ed. Internazionale, 1950), pp. 75-122.

34. Iqbal, pp. 25.

35. Fabro, La Nozione and Participation et causalité.

36. This, it would seem, may be better than saying as does Iqbal that "the true infinite does not exclude the finite; it embraces the finite without effacing its finitude." This would enable him also to escape the entanglements he finds in the so-called "cosmological argument." Indeed, the argumentation requires a metaphysical stage in order to have a positive conclusion. Iqbal, pp. 29-30.

37. Iqbal, p. 143.

38. Iqbal, pp. 48-49.

39. Tr. C.K. Ogden (London: Methuen, 1981).

40. (New York: Harper and Row).

41. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).

42. Brian Wicker, Culture and Theology (London: Sheed and Ward, 1966), pp. 68-88.

43. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

44. Documents of Vatican II, ed. W. Abbott (New York: New Century, 1974).

45. Iqbal, p. 61.

46. Maurice Nedoncelle, "Person and/or World as the Source of Religious Insight" in G. McLean, ed., Traces of God in a Secular Culture (New York: Alba House, 1973), pp. 187-210.

47. Kenneth L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 34-42. I am particularly indebted to this very thoughtful work for its suggestions. I draw here also upon my "Chinese-Western Cultural Interchange in the Future" delivered at the International Symposium on Chinese-Western Cultural Interchange in Commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of the Arrival of Matteo Ricci, S.J., in China (Taiwan: Fu Jen Univ., l983), pp. 457-72.

48. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, nos. 6-8 in F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1934), pp. 82-84. Schmitz, ibid.

49. A. S. Cua, Dimensions of Moral Creativity: Paradigms, Principles and Ideals (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1978), chaps. III-V.

50. W. Cenkner, The Hindu Personality in Education: Tagore, Gandhi and Aurobindo (Delhi: South Asia Books, 1976).

51. Parmenides, Fragment 2.

52. Schmitz, pp. 44-56.

53. Anselm, Monologium, cc. 8-9 in Anselm of Canterbury, eds. J. Hopkins and H. W. Richardson (Toronto: E. Mellen, 1975), I, pp. 15-18. See Schmitz, 30-34.

54. R. E. Allen, "Participation and Predication in Plato’s Middle Dialogues" in his Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics (London: Routledge, Keegan Paul, 1965), pp. 43-60.

55. Schmitz, pp. 84-86.

56. John Paul II, "Address at Puebla," Origins, VIII (n. 34, 1979), I, 4 and II, 41-46.