As a follow up to my post # 118 and to add to the typology we discussed, allow me to present to you:
Gnostic religiosity
Describing the difference between the lover’s approach to God as opposed to the scholar’s, Hussein Bin Mansur Hallaj would say: " The Beloved is laden with allures, not secrets". And with his unerring grace, Mowlana attributed both these qualities to the Benevolent Creator and said:
The tongue speaks of its secrets and allures
Or depicts the sky as its heavenly robes
Robe? Every thread and fibre is made of gold
The more you cover it, the more it glows
In gnostic religiosity, there is no talk of the allures of God and his prophets; that is the business of the experiential believer. Here, it is all a question of His secrets; not secrets in the sense of myths, but secrets as rational problems and puzzles that one must grapple with like a mental wrestler. Here one finds a theoretical rationality which is sensitive to the appropriateness of a reason to a claim, not just a practical rationality that is concerned about the appropriateness of a means to an end. If we identify pragmatic religiosity by its dogmatism, gnostic religiosity can be identified by a sense of rational wonder and, by the same token, experiential religiosity by certainty. Hence, on entering the realm of gnosticism, dogma is exchanged for doubt and wonder, and, as dogmatism is left behind, the road is paved for entering the realm of certainty. Rationality always brings along two sturdy companions: one is the tireless raising of whys and wherefores and maybe sos and maybe nots, and the other is a relentless individuality. No rational thinker ever stops posing questions and destroying and rebuilding ceaselessly. And no two rational thinkers are ever the same. It is emotion that drowns people en masse and formlessly in a sea of excitation.
This is not the domain of rationality. Rationality both allows its followers independence and individuality and endorses these qualities; it deems these attributes to belong to rational thinkers by right. In the pragmatic religiosity of the general masses, all believers practice their religiosity in the same manner, and their beliefs and actions are very similar. But, on stepping into the realm of gnosticism, individual religiosity and religious individualism enter in. Every rational thinker has their own conception of religion, that is, their own understanding of God, the Prophet, revelation, joy, wretchedness, sin and obedience; an understanding that belongs to that believer alone, results from their own reflections and is subjected to constant questioning and revision.
This is why gnostic religiosity is unstable and in a state of flux. The religiosity of the masses has the stability of paralysis. This same kind of constancy and uniformity cannot be expected from gnostic religiosity. Rational storms will inevitably stir and rouse the ocean of religious belief and knowledge; swimming in these tempestuous waters represents the skill and excellence of and even life itself to the gnostic believer. All this examining, reexamining, rediscovering, doubting and pondering is the essence of worship to the gnostic, while sin would amount to submitting uncritically to beliefs, succumbing to popular vulgarities, following superstitions and famous personalities, and refusing to engage in doubt and reflection. And the believer’s joy lies in the excellence of his theoretical skills.
Theologians and exegisists are two of the prominent representatives of this category. This religiosity is reasoned (as opposed to causal), investigative, reflective, based on choice and free will, wondrous, theological, non-mythical, non-clerical, individualistic, critical, fluctuating and non-imitative.
Here God appears in the form of a great rational secret and, awed by His Splendor, His servants seek to unravel the secret. And the Prophet is like a great teacher and philosopher who has conveyed his lessons in the most intense form, while believers are like his students and novices who strive for a rational understanding of his words, and nonbelievers are like ungrateful pupils or like ignorant people who are incapable of even recognising their own ignorance.
Thus the Prophet’s target is also perceived differently. Here, his target is believers’ minds, not their emotions. And believers become followers of his school to the extent that they can find rational fulfilment. The Prophet’s task is to teach and to pledge their betterment, not to demand and compel, and the believer’s task is rational - not physical or emotional - acceptance and submission.
There is no role for the clergy in this religiosity, since it is not founded on myths and rituals, and it has no place for emulation. It is on good terms with religious pluralism, because individual religiosity and religious individualism are synonymous with a plurality of conceptions and interpretations. It cannot be turned into an ideology because it has no time for dogmatism and official interpretations, or for simplistic views of the world, human beings and history. It is basically inclined towards the truth, not towards movement or an identity.
Its particular form of worship is thought and one can enter into dialogue with its religious personalities without having to praise and revere them unquestioningly. It conceives of moral virtues as things that help the individual arrive at a better and more advanced understanding of error. It considers the worst forms of villainy to be dishonesty and duplicity and deception and pride and arrogance and mischievous cunning and pretentiousness and irrationality.
Gnostic believers are per force multi-sourced and their religious understanding recedes and advances in keeping with the contractions and expansions of their minds. This type of religiosity has been scorned by both pragmatic and experiential believers. When Shariati spoke of "philosophers as history’s fatheads ", he revealed the nature of his own religiosity. Mowlana Jalaleddin Rumi, for his part, likened the cunning displayed by theologians and gnostics to a diver’s derring-do under the sea that proves more dangerous than beneficial:
A cunning diver swims under the sea
He’ll not last long and will drown eventually
Love is like a ship for the fortunate few
Salvation is likely and the dangers are few
Ghazzali, too, scorned the science of theology and said that it led to pride, prevented people from struggling against their baser instincts, created the illusion of certainty while engendering doubt, and represented a contrived development that had not existed during the time of the Prophet.
The first two moral points must be resolved rigorously and diligently. The third point must be conceded and accepted, but it must not be seen as an ill or a vice because the oar of logic and reasoning cannot steer the mind to the shore of peace. There, waves and turbulence are the rule and calm the exception.
As to the fourth point, it calls for an explanation: the science of theology belongs to the age of consolidation, not to the time when religion was being founded and the age of the Prophet when the furnace of revelation was ablaze and when the presence of the Prophet’s glowing personality meant that there was no need for any theological mind to try to shed light on things or to grapple with problems. The age of the Prophet cannot be compared with other ages, nor can uniform rulings be made about the two. Theologians came on the scene in order to study the words of the Prophet with reverence for knowledge (rather than with
servile reverence for any person), and to lay the foundations for exploring other-worldly teachings from a great distance, compelled by the separation in time and the needs and questions of a later age, proceeding on the basis of the reasoning and culture of their own time. They thus succeeded in nurturing the science of theology like an embryo in the womb and then entrusted it to future generations as the legitimate child of religious history. This has been the historical destiny of and the course taken by every religion; it is not the brainchild of heretics and deviationist.
In gnostic religiosity, the more robust is the rope of criticism, the more narrow is the thread of servile reverence, and it is this very robustness and narrowness that provokes the sneers of the scornful. The main characteristic of this type of religiosity is that the personality of the leader is in abeyance and it is his teaching instead of his person that serves as the candle brightening the lives of believers. And, since the emphasis is on approaching that teaching through rationality and logic, the independence of the words from the speaker and the teaching from the teacher becomes clearer and more prominent. Here, reason assists the leader rather than the leader assisting reason. This is precisely something that neither pragmatic nor experiential believers like or tolerate, since they both lay rationality, humanity’s greatest blessing, like a sacrificial offering before the feet of the master and beloved:
How can anyone speak of rationality while the Prophet is in the world?
Bow down and place rationality at the Prophet’s feet
Say: God, I’m at Your Orders, Your Order is all I need
Surrender rationality like an offering to a friend
You’ll find endless rationality if you just gaze at heaven
Gnostic religiosity, which is like a rational form of existence to the believer who has no motive or aim in discovering other than discovery, opens the way for the mind to discover independent, non-religious concepts. Hence, theologians must be seen as the first harbingers of the modern world among believers. Thus, although this type of investigative, probing, critical, learned, theological, non-sanctified, anti-mythical, pensive, argumentative, non-emulative, gnostic religiosity is not in keeping with the unwavering faith of the masses and the loving certainty of the few, it can, nonetheless, be seen as a respectable and independent kind of creed in its own right, for no type of religiosity is a measure of the truth or falsity of any other. This religiosity is a sapling that grows in a tremor-prone land. Those who are born in this terrain choose to make their homes here while others choose other, different ways. Fakhreddin Razi and Mohammad Hossein Tabataba’i can be identified as two of the distinguished champions of this realm.