The Poetics of Religious Experience

Peace, one and all…

‘The language of faith enunciates the bond between man and what he perceives or experiences as sacred.  The sacred cannot be captured in propositions of fact.  There is something about it which makes symbolic expression especially suited to it.  Several points need to be noted in this connection.  Firstly, the sacred is always perceived in the context of a relationship. It is never grasped as an object in itself.  While God is depicted in the Quran, for instance, as the Absolute, having attributes radically free of the limitations of creatureliness, significantly the revelation of God occurs there primarily in a dialogical context.  God speaks, and this speech is the most consequential act as far as human affairs are concerned.  For the divine is not contemplated as if by a spectator.  Hence the limitations of theology, which is an intellectual contemplation of God.  The divine is primordially revealed in a dialogical act.  In the Quran, humanity is addressed either directly or indirectly through the figure of a messenger or prophet.  Reciprocally, the prophet, or the humanity which he represents, enters into a verbal exchange (through prayer, etc) with the divine.

The second principle follows from the first.  The importance of the relational aspect means that the sacred becomes known to man in forms which reflect human psychology and culture.  In one form or another, the human relation with the divine involves internediation … Thirdly, the relationship of man to his own being, and to the being of all things, is by its very nature manifold rather than singular.  This implies, as the logical corollary, the legitimacy of spiritual pluralism.  Lastly, the indeterminacy of language about the sacred, which was noted above as a characteristic of symbolic language, argues not only against literalism, but in favour of a continuing rather than completed symbolism’

(A Esmail, The Poetics of Religious Experience: the Islamic Context)