62 AN INTRODUCTION TO SUFI DOCTRINE

light. The whiteness of the light is moreover really
an absence of colour, and this is analogous to the fact
that the Essence, which synthetises all the Qualities
(Siaft), cannot be known on the same plane as the
Qualities.

For the mind the perfect Qualities are abstract
ideas; for intuition, which “tastes” the essence of
things, they are more real than are things themselves.
All that Sufis teach about the Divine Qualities the con-
templatives of the Christian Orthodox Church say of
the Divine ““ Energies’ which they equally consider as
uncreated but immanent in the world : the “ Energies ™
cannot be detached from the Essence (Greek: Ousia)
which they manifest and yet are distinct from It. This
is something which, as St. Gregory Palamas puts it, can
only be conceived through an intuition which ““distingui-
shes the Divine Nature by uniting it and unites it by
distinguishing it.”” This same truth is expressed in the
Sufi formula which defines the relation of the Qualities
to God: “neither He nor other than He* (/G huwa wa la
ghayruhu). The Essence, says St. Gregory Palamas, is
“incommunicable, indivisible and ineffable and is be-
yond every name and all understanding ™ ; It is never
manifested ‘““outside Its own ipseity,” but Its very
Nature implies “‘a supra-temporal act” of revelation
by virtue of which It becomes in a certain manner
accessible to creatures in the sense that ¢ the creature
is united with the Divinity in Its Energies.”” !

1. See ““ The ascetic and theological Doctrine of St. Gregory Palamas >’

by the monk Wassily Krivochene of the monastery of St. Pantaleimon on
Mount Athos, translated intc German by Fr. H, Landvogt, Wurzburg, 1939,