Is Atheism Possible? Understanding God as Beauty or Beauty as a Proof of God
Sacred as such? No. No sane and intelligent man has ever been one. An atheist denies God as the Ground of Being or Power to be, as Creativity and as Beauty. Let us try to understand one of the aspects of the Sacred as Beauty that no atheist can afford to deny. There are degrees of tawhid and the atheist may well be in a lower rung but a degree he does possess. This is what easily follows from comprehending the traditional metaphysical doctrine of God as Reality. Ibn Arabi argued for it. Let us explore less abstruse ways of appreciating impossibility of being an atheist in the sense of denial of Sacred embodied in the Mystery, Wonder and Beauty and especially focus on the last mentioned.
Mircea Eliade, one of the most distinguished scholars of religion, has explained how man is a worshipping animal or Homo sapiens is Homo religiosus:
…“sacred” is an element of the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness. On the most archaic levels of culture, living, considered as being human, is in itself a religious act, for food-getting, sexual life, and work have a sacramental value. In other words, to be – or rather to become – a man signifies being “religious.”
It implies, willy nilly, all men are summoned to take note of the Sacred or, in more popular theological language, worship God. All men worship God, argued Ibn Arabi, though all don’t know it consciously. Muslim sages including Ibn Arabi have shown how in denying God one nevertheless affirms Him. One can only succeed in illusorily fleeing from God and this illusion has to end at the pain of hell. Hell is nothing but the veil of self-love or failure to unconditionally love and be open to the Other which is the Sacred. Hell is a veil one has imagined between oneself and the Real and this has to be torn asunder by the burning of self will – “nothing burns in hell except self-will”/pride. This explains why pride alone is said to be unpardonable sin in a prophetic tradition (kufr is the sin of ingratitude/covering truth out of arrogance). In fact, for the Quran, hell is “only for the arrogant/haughty” who don’t recognize the truth that they are nothing/poor in relation to God.
One can’t escape from God the All Pervading Environment (al-Muheet). This may be easily comprehended by noting how God is Beauty/the Beautiful and, as Plato observed, He uses the net of beauty to attract souls to Himself. Religions across the world have made it a point to cultivate beauty in every sphere and Islam has made it the part of its own aspiration or fulfillment in ihsan which is from the root word hsn and calls for doing everything with an eye on beauty/perfection.
Despite methodological or official disavowal, the Sacred has been making a claim in the world of science in a way. Acknowledgment of significance and tributes paid to our experience of the mysterious and wonder by Einstein, to beauty in mathematical world by Dirac and Russell, to intelligence marking its presence everywhere by Hawking and to what Dawkins simply called sacred are a few illustrations. To quote Dawkins: “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.” Although modern scientific sensibility has quite an impoverished sense of the Sacred or what is called Mystery, it is worth noting that God the Compeller, the Irresistible (al-Jabbar, al-Qahar) can’t fail to penetrate even the most irreligious person.
For the poet Josh Malehabadi one needs no miracles to prove God as the sun rise is enough. Santyana, in a more secular idiom, expressed similar insight. For Schuon the sage a flower suffices to be a proof of God. For sages all experiences may convey the taste of the Beyond. Artistic perception involves effacing the ego resulting in transcendence which is joy. So the mystic’s argument against disbelievers is simply an invitation to cleanse the doors of perception and encountering things aesthetically which is what seeing things in God is like. Artist’s vocation as described by Underhill in Practical Mysticism recalls a similar trajectory.
Religions have made God all the more palpable or a Presence by virtue of alliance with beauty. Religious architecture, sacred art, use of harmonious sound in scripture and liturgy/prayer, decorum of traditional dress and ritual all embody beauty. Zen religion is akin to art; Sufi poetry sessions are mass mantra/wazeefa and God is Beauty; beauty of the face of Buddha is an upaya of salvation; the world of a saint is not the other world that Nietzsche or Camus would reject but this world seen subspecies aeternatatis – Heideggerian argument for poets showing the path of fugitive gods and Nietzschean-Foucaultian emphasis on making life a work of art becomes better understandable.
Beauty pursued on its own terms, not as an object to be possessed, is its own unceasing reward and an image of Heaven. One’s baptism in it leads to worship it till one climbs up to the fount of all beauty, God as Plato noted. As C. S. Lewis noted in The Weight of Glory:
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves–that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty grace, and power of which Nature is the image.
The God of certain theology may be dead but of the artist who has transcended his narrow cage of personality and a mystic or an ordinary believer who has not lost the attitude of thanks giving, of seeing life as sacrament, of wondering about the moral law within or the reign of the Good and discerning meaning of traditional symbols, can’t die. They glorify him for all the “dappled things.” Father Zossima’s conviction (in The Brothers Karamazarov) that paradise is here with us, all around us if we only knew (a similar idea is present in Nagarjuna’s statement that samsara is nirvana, a Rumi, Hafiz, Bedil, great Romantics and in fact in all great poets who believe with Blake in the power of Imagination – C. M. Bowra notes that, for Blake, ‘imagination is nothing less than God as He operates in the human soul. It follows that any act of creation performed by the imagination is divine and that in the imagination man’s spiritual nature is fully and finally realized’ – and through it our access to something of Heaven here and now) is laughed away by modern bats who fail to come out of the cave/dark night of the soul with the counterclaim regarding omnipresence of darkness of hell from which there is no exit.
Given the Sacred/God for the sages is accessible in unveilings of Being and an artist can’t be an atheist understood as one who wallows in ugliness and denies the Sacred manifested in beauty and there is no human who lives by bread alone or there is none who is not attracted by beauty which is “the attractive power of the Good” and “the splendor of Truth” as Plato noted, we can conclude that all men are more or less open to and moved by the Sacred present everywhere, in every event, in every experience. It is more a question of looking at the world more poetically or without ego, doing everything as a sacrament, loving life with a sense of gratitude for the gift of being and not hesitating to live innocently, with no sense of personal gain or loss, in tune with cosmic rhythms that in turn yields joy in just being and doing things detachedly. As long as we don’t consent to be consumed by beauty or open eyes to beauty or appreciate how all things are beautiful as beings (though may turn ugly for some when beings become qualified by certain attributes/relationships) we remain atheists to a degree and every day we need to cultivate more and more beauty at intellectual, spiritual, moral and physical planes to bear witness to the Sacred/Go the Beautiful (al-Jameel).
Believers are those who aspire to be Muhsins – those who cultivate beauty and a disbeliever/atheist would be one who fails in appreciating/cultivating/honouring beauty as a signature of the Divine in every form. The time spent in battling atheism may be better spent in deepening our own appreciation for beauty and battling the atheist in us who fails to see underlying being and judges/despises beauty. This would explain the statement that a fly or scorpion is as honourable as an angel as being (given God is Being and all things are beautiful in divinis) and Ibn Arabi’s reply to the query asking how come he says God alone is everywhere as there is shit also, that he never saw shit and Abu Yazid that he never saw anything without first seeing God. Who can claim to have perfected the art of witnessing beauty? Who can deny the ugliness within and without he/she fails to remove and as such atheist in him/her? Let us unite in celebrating beauty by letting life and the wonder and delight of being bloom and that constitutes the deeper meaning of durood on the Prophet, the Principle/Pole of Manifestation as pointed out by Frithjof Schuon.
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