SUFISM AND PANTHEISM 25

R vt o 4
W
. B V‘b

advaitics compare things to pots of differing form but
all made of clay, they are perfectly well aware of the
inadequacy of such a picture. Moreover this quite evi-
dent inadequacy excludes the danger of people reading
into it anything more than a symbolic allusion. As for
allusion itself, its whole justification is based on the in-
verse analogy which exists between the essential unity
of things—all of them “made of Knowledge”’—and their
“material” unity, which has nothing to do with any
theory of “‘causality’ in the cosmological sense of that
word.

Again, it must be added that the contemplative
never tends to enclose reality in any single one of its
modes—such as substantial continuity—or in any single
one of its levels—such as sensory existence of intel-
ligible existence—to the exclusion of others. On the
contrary, he recognises innumerable levels of reality,
the hierarchy of which is irreversible, so that one can
affirm of the relative that it is in essence one with its
principle,! or that it ““is’ its principle, although one can-
not say of the principle that it is included in its product.
Thus, all beings are God, if considered in their essential
reality, but God is not these beings and this, not in the
sense that His reality excludes them, but because in face
of His infinity their reality is nil.

The essential Unity (al-Ahadiyah), in which all
diversity is “drowned” or “extinguished”, is in no wise
contradicted by the metaphysical idea of the indefinite

1. By the word ‘principle’ is here to be understood the ontological
cause, independent of its effects,