In this presentation, titled "Seeing God Everywhere," Munjed Murad, a Th.D. student at the Harvard Divinity School and a resident and Junior Fellow of the Center for the Study of World Religions, explored the concept of theophany in the natural world as explained by the Islamic metaphysical traditions that he studies at Harvard. The following recounts the presentation.
Why would the topic of "Seeing God Everywhere" seem novel enough for a talk like this today? Why is it that factories on riverbeds, large-scale desertification, widespread extinctions of species, and all the phenomena of the environmental crisis occur in the modern context and not in any other within human history as we know it? One may suggest technological limits of pre-modern civilizations as an inhibiting factor, but there is significant pushback to this theory. The Chinese civilization for long had gunpowder and the Islamic civilization had no less the mathematical genius that is used for today's most intricate technological endeavors. However, the former did not produce the dynamites we use today for mountaintop removal and the latter, rather than developing intricate algorithms for the stock markets of consumerist cultures, created the geometric masterpieces of architectural landmarks such as the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal. There was something in the human view of nature and of greater things that kept humanity in those moments in history from causing the wanton destruction similar to today's. For an explanation, we resort to a previously established observation today on the roots of the environmental crisis, specifically that the particularity of the environmental crisis to the modern world is the modern mind's loss of a sense of the sacred that is both in and beyond nature.
Having addressed this, the presentation next turned to some paradoxes implicit to particular worldviews in order to better understand the relationship of God and nature. The first is a subtle paradox in the Creator-creation divide. An emphasis on the dividing boundary between Creator and creation also emphasizes the separation of creation from God as a distinct entity. Addressing creation as nature for the purposes of this presentation, it next noted the risk of the deification of nature for seeing God as a category and nature as another category. This, within the Islamic context, risks what the tradition considers the greatest sin, that of shirk–the ascription of partnership to God. Should our picture of reality involve two categories–one of God and the other of nature–we risk the deification of the other category as being one alongside God's.
A reconciliation, however, is attainable through reference to the parts of the Islamic tradition that have for long been conscious of this paradox. This reconciliation is both metaphysical and mystical. It posits that from one angle the Islamic image of reality indeed presents a solid bifurcation between Creator and creation; however, seen from another angle, the whole image of reality itself, so to speak, can be said to constitute God, encompassing all categories previously considered. In this way the Islamic tradition provides reconciliation between the existence of a Creator-creation divide and the necessary oneness of God as Reality.
This lecture next considered a paradox existent in modern religious thought that has proclaimed the glory of God as Transcendent and, simultaneously, denied the sacredness of the natural world. The premise to this belief is that God, Transcendent be He, is too above this world in order for there to be anything profound in the natural world within it. What this presentation considered problematic in this worldview was that the relegation of the presence of God to a place in or above the Heavens alone–as opposed to being both there above the Heavens and here in this world–also subtly proposed a delimitation of God. Should we only consider God to be present "there" and not "here," we would have set boundaries around God. We have thus compromised, to our minds, the divine glory, for, according to this perspective, God is limited by the boundaries that confine Him to "there" and away from "here." Thus, this worldview, according to its image of reality, paradoxically compromises the very glory of God that it at first sought out to proclaim.
A more comprehensive worldview seems to be the following. Precisely due to God's transcendence, God is beyond delimitation and thus both beyond this world and within it. In His infinitude and omnipresence, God is also present in the very world of nature that some have considered profane. This presence of God in nature then implies a sacredness to nature, for there is no presence of God without sacredness. Thus, the natural world necessarily constitutes a locus of divine presence and sacredness.
These two paradoxes allude to a necessary continuity of the sacred between God and nature. This continuity necessary complements the aforementioned worldviews, even if they at first appear to deny it. Without it, we risk either the deification of nature, as in the first paradox, or the delimitation of God, as in the second paradox. Both results are practical impossibilities to the traditional Islamic mind.
The impetus to this exercise was the need to fill a lacuna, specifically the lack of the sense of the sacred that is a necessary component to the concept of "seeing God everywhere." An important note to keep in mind before continuing, however, is that in "seeing God everywhere," the Islamic tradition has in mind the sight of something of God and not the totality of God in each natural phenomenon encountered. It is simply an exercise of traversing from manifestation to the source of manifestation.
Having shed light upon the necessary continuity of the sacred between God and nature, this lecture then sought to go through the different approaches to the theophanic aspect of nature in the Islamic tradition. The first was drawn from two treatises of Abū-Ḥāmid Al-Ghazzāli, the 12th century Islamic theologian and philosopher of Persian descent. For him, the religious person is always a servant standing before the King that is God. Natural phenomena are seen in the light of that relationship. The falling rain is a mercy of God to the servant and thirst is a sign of the servant's dependence upon the Lord. In this approach to theophany, as in all the others, everything speaks of the richness of God and the poverty of creation.
Our second example constitutes the meeting of religious phenomena and natural phenomena. More specifically, it sees a natural phenomenon as a referent to a religious one. The full moon in the Islamic context refers to the Prophet of Islam, as the sun in the Christian context refers to Christ, for example. In this way, many a traditional Muslim person makes a prayer for the Prophet of Islam at the sight of the full moon.
The third example is the consideration of each natural phenomenon as a gateway to either Heaven or Hell. In the writings of the 12th century Andalusian Islamic figure Ibn al-Barrajān, each natural phenomenon at once speaks of this life and the next life. The sight of the scorpion is the sight of something hellish, and the drinking of cool and refreshing water is a taste of Heaven. Each experience in this life is immediately an experience of the afterlife as well.
Perhaps it could be argued that the prior examples are not approaches to nature as immediate "sights" of something of God. They are nonetheless included here as approaches to the meeting between the supernatural and the natural, and so lead up to the following.
The final example explored in this lecture is the consideration of the qualities of God exhibited by each natural entity. This method was the one explored most extensively here. It involved an address of the "huwa lā huwa" concept of the 12th century Andalusian metaphysician Muḥyi al-Dīn ibn al-'Arabī, in which each being points towards its being God and not being God, which, put in this presentation's vocabulary, is each entity's being something of God and being nothing at all. The color and scent of a rose display the beauty of God. The withering away of the rose points towards the rose as being a finite and mortal phenomenon and that beauty is really only God's.
Such is nature's display of the testimony of faith that is central to the Islamic tradition, that there is no god but God–lā ilāha illā'Llāh. To "see God everywhere" is to see nature as the theater of the qualities of God displayed, each natural phenomenon asserting the richness or fullness of God and the poverty or nothingness of itself.
—By Munjed M. Murad