Suhrawardî’s philosophy of lights

The Iranian sûfî Shahâb ad-Dîn Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardî is a fascinating philosophical figure. Having read his Allegorical Treatises and his Shape of Light, I still feel very far from beginning to grasp the core of his meaning. His biography is fascinating. At first a rather straight-laced Aristotelian in the model of Avicenna, Suhrawardî turned instead to a more Platonic-influenced mysticism after a dream in which he was told by Aristotle that the Islamic philosophers he followed did not grasp even ‘one part in a thousand’ of the knowledge held by the sûfiyyah. He founded his own school of mystical philosophy called ‘Illuminationism’. Given that he held in the highest esteem the martyred sûfî Mansûr e-Hallâj (whose sayings led him to be convicted and executed as a heretic), it is unsurprising that Suhrawardî himself met a similar fate to Hallâj: he was executed at the age of thirty-eight, at the behest of the conservative Sunnî ulama for supposedly cultivating an esoteric and heretical form of Shî’ite theology.

Suhrawardî’s universe is completely suffused with sublimities: divine light, love, spiritual freedom. The formally-Platonic influences on Suhrawardî are apparent in these writings, but they do not stifle him. He even considers the crudest forms of matter to be expressions of divine light – light which filters down even to the lowest and most humble things in the material world. (There is something remarkably Gregorian about this.) Suhrawardî is also insistent on the distinctions of various lights – he is not a simple pantheist in his thinking. But this very principle of spiritual freedom, this personal approach to the differentiation of lights, necessitates a kind of hierarchy in his thinking. (Suhrawardî was executed as a radical, but, good mediæval Platonist that he was, he has a classical-conservative streak.)

The illuminations of matter, of space and time per se, are (and here we meet the echoes of Plotinus) the furthest extent of the emanations of the divine light, almost to the point of total dissipation. And yet, Suhrawardî assures us, ‘matter enlightened by intelligence and the soul may point to its essence’. There is nothing of Gnosticism to be found here: matter not only matters (and is a ‘shape of light’ in itself), but it is good because the awareness of higher lights, of the love of Allâh, is only possible through the human mind’s real and necessary relationship to matter.

From here, Suhrawardî begins speaking of two (partially-Platonised) Aristotelian categories: the necessary and the possible, the knowledge of which is imparted from an awareness of material causes. Reflection on the relationship between necessity and possibility, in turn, leads matter to reflect back upon its own nature as light and to turn back toward the Source of Divine light. ‘Two things cannot be necessary at the same time.’ The comprehension of the Source of light brings the soul to an awareness of the various ‘Plotinian’ gradations in the emanation of all forms of light from Allâh, the One (Self-Existent and Necessary), the first of which is Intelligence.

In turn, on the other side, the soul’s awareness progresses through stages – from the concern with material satisfactions and wants, to the self-reproach of the conscience, to obedience, to inward peace, to satisfaction with the right, and impelled further to closeness to the Divine, and from thence to purification. Above and beyond all this, the power that impels closeness and purification, is the Holy Ghost, for which Suhrawardî uses the unusual (for an Islamic thinker) name of Farkilit instead of the more common Rûh al-Qudus. Intriguingly, Suhrawardî’s Farsi transliteration of the Greek Christian term παράκλητος, and his apparent refusal to translate the with the usual Arabic gloss of ‘Ahmad’ (from περικλυτος), places him far closer to a Christian understanding of God than most other Muslim commentators – including the authors of the footnotes to the edition of Shape of Light that I was reading, who prefer the more standard Islamic interpretation.

Suhrawardî concludes his commentary with a layered understanding of human knowledge of the Divine light, starting with a knowledge of natural law – or rather, Divine law as drawn from observation of matter (sharî‘ah), then progressing along a path (tarîqah) by means of intuitive knowledge (ma‘rifah) and finally achieving the inward truth (haqîqah) which is otherwise inaccessible. The Shape of Light concludes with a sparkling metaphor in which he likens the Divine light to water which flows from a great wellspring, which ‘all receive in accordance with their need’.

Suhrawardî’s Allegorical Treatises are far harder to break into than The Shape of Light; they consist of a number of highly-symbolic and mythopœic anecdotes, often couched in the form of fables, that are meant to carry the esoteric and intuitive knowledge that he was attempting to impart to his students. These treatises are interesting in particular, because they take up the Platonic interest in myth as a vehicle for the transmission of personal, intuited truths. And they look directly to the font which Plato himself, and certain of his successors like Plutarch, preferred and indicated in his own Dialogues (particularly the Gorgias, the Phædo and the Republic): to wit, Persian mythology. For this reason in particular, Suhrawardî’s philosophy was apparently taken up by Gujarati Parsees in the early 17^th century.

In general, these myths are meant to guide one to realisations of intellectual truths which lie hidden from the senses; throughout the Treatises, Suhrawardî repeatedly uses the image of a bird bound in a leather sack and trapped in a cage by a king, or by hunters. Again, though, he stops well shy of Gnosticism; he is not a foe of the world of sense-perceptions and he does not regard the people who still rely on the senses as his enemies. However, he is not blind to the enmity, torture and death that those who know the truth will incur if they speak directly of what they know – even if these tortures and death are of no ultimate concern to the one who truly has the knowledge he claims. These myths lie somewhere between Æsop and Plato’s Socrates. The couching of his knowledge in mythopœic terms affords him some degree of plausible deniability in the face of those who would see shut him up permanently – though, like Socrates, clearly that wasn’t first and foremost in his mind. Suhrawardî’s foremost concern was that folk be able to see themselves, and not to be blinded or driven by perversity into deeper darkness.

Suhrawardî is a Shî‘a Muslim and not a crypto-Christian, of course, but the brief flashes of congruence (somewhat, but as shown, not wholly through his Platonism) with a Christian worldview are too tempting and too beautiful to ignore. His treatment of the Holy Ghost as Spirit and as Light, the sight of prophets rather than one specific prophet or angel, and his direct quotations without commentary from the Gospel according to Saint John fall into this category. These may indeed be broader sûfî tendencies of which I’m only beginning to become aware. Fr Elie, my Antiochian priest in Pawtucket, was particularly intrigued by the potentials of the life and sayings of Mansûr e-Hallâj. But, whether one takes him as a representative of this broader tradition or as a unique philosophical innovator within that tradition, Suhrawardî is nonetheless well worth taking seriously. He presents us with a challenging religious ressourcement of a certain classical-Platonist preoccupation with myth and its power to provoke people to transcend themselves. This preoccupation, coming through the pen of an Iranian Muslim, is one which (in an age of resurgent paganisms, sæcular hero-worship and Jordan Peterson YouTube seminars) needs to be more robustly met from within a specifically-Christian ambit.

EDIT: A reader of the blog, Daniel S, kindly notes that Suhrawardî is not a Shî‘a Muslim but is instead reliably considered to be a Sunnî sûfî belonging to the Shâfi‘î school of jurisprudence. My apologies for the error.