5 - Excursus: Embodying the Vision of God in Theology and Sufism

Summary

Introduction

While this study is intended to be on Sufi eschatology in a broader sense, the first two case studies have shown that focusing on one dominant aspect of the Sufi eschatological imagination – the vision of God – is almost unavoidable. Although this theme is not equally dominant in all of the works under discussion – al-Qushayrī in particular seems not to have been interested in it – it does stand out as the most significant theme among the majority of authors. It is certainly the most relevant for the theme of boundary crossing. This raises a theoretical challenge to our proposed contextualist approach: it was precisely this theme of vision that was much favoured by those scholars who wished to decontextualise and ‘perennialise’ mysticism. According to their approach, the theme of vision is paradigmatic for the ‘experiential’ and private experience that, similar to the theme of ‘mystical union’, transcends the particularities of religious traditions and is deemed universal.

In the context of the issue of the vision of God, the scholar of Jewish mysticism Elliot R. Wolfson has theoretically elaborated on this contextualist/perennialist debate. One may say that his study is the most prominent study available on seeing God in (Jewish) mysticism to date. He is, therefore, also worth mentioning in the context of our study. Although being in favour of a contextualist and constructivist approach, he shuns the ‘hard constructivist’ end of the perennialist–constructivist continuum and proposes a softer contextualist approach. On the one hand, he confirms that the mystic's understanding of his or her vision of God, and the way that he or she works towards this vision, is determined by the mystic's own religious tradition and context, and ‘pre-experiential beliefs’. On the other hand, borrowing elements from Eliade's theory of mysticism, he leaves some space for the idea that there may be a shared phenomenal structure among those religious traditions, and that a comparison between different religious traditions is possible along these structural lines despite the differences in context. He believes that the category of ‘vision’ may well be such a common structure that it enables comparison between different religious and mystical traditions. Given the fact that the faculty of vision is a common human characteristic, it is not surprising that ‘vision’ is also a universally recognised common structure of mystical experiences.