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Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East
First of its kind publication promotes a spiritual dialogue between Christian and Muslims.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 2002
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166 people want to read
About the author
James S. Cutsinger
23Ìýbooks10ÌýfollowersJames S. Cutsinger (Ph.D., Harvard) is Professor of Theology and Religious Thought at the University of South Carolina.
The recipient of a number of teaching awards, including most recently USC’s Michael J. Mungo Distinguished Professor of the Year for 2011, Professor Cutsinger offers courses in Religious Studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and directs a series of great books seminars in the University’s prestigious Honors College.
He is a widely recognized writer on the sophia perennis and the traditionalist or perennialist school of comparative religious thought. An authority on the theology and spirituality of the Christian East, he is best known for his work on the Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon.
The recipient of a number of teaching awards, including most recently USC’s Michael J. Mungo Distinguished Professor of the Year for 2011, Professor Cutsinger offers courses in Religious Studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and directs a series of great books seminars in the University’s prestigious Honors College.
He is a widely recognized writer on the sophia perennis and the traditionalist or perennialist school of comparative religious thought. An authority on the theology and spirituality of the Christian East, he is best known for his work on the Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon.
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May 10, 2024
Wonder,
A garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka’ba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of Torah,
The scrolls of the Quran.
My creed is love;
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief,
My faith.
- Ibn Arabi, quoted in Mystical Languages of Unsaying by Michael Sells
This book is composed of a series of lectures, ending with a short panel discussion, from an international conference of Christian and Muslim scholars which took place at the University of South Carolina on October 18-20, 2001. Speakers included Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Kallistos Ware, John Chryssavgis, Reza Shah-Kazemi, Huston Smith, and James Cutsinger, who is also the editor of this volume. With the recent terrorist attacks of September 11th looming in the background, the speakers explored the interior pathways of transformation embodied in both Islamic and Eastern Christian tradition—with a special emphasis on Sufism and Hesychasm, respectively—uncovering the substantial convergence between them at the “esoteric� level. While some speakers resisted the possibility or desirability of a complete “esoteric ecumenism� between the traditions, maintaining an appreciation for the real differences between them at the “exoteric� level—which is, after all, the plane of observance, creed, and community in which each is visibly lived—the overall tenor of the conference tended toward the perennialist school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, both of whom were true believers in the secret interior unity of religions. One’s opinion of this brand of traditionalist perennialism will largely determine one’s opinion of the book.
For my part, I find it undeniable that as one goes “higher up and further in� within a given religious tradition, one finds a number of core elements which it shares with others, albeit under different configurations. But there is also a danger that in trying to articulate convergences, one may inadvertently impose an artificial uniformity, doing violence to the fullness of each tradition, which rightfully tries to hold the esoteric and the exoteric, the internal and the external, together as coessential aspects of the spiritual life. Creating a strict hierarchy between the “higher� interior truths and the “lower� external practices of a tradition is ultimately corrosive to the very existence of the latter; if True Religion is purely a matter of the heart, after all, then does one really need churches, mosques, gurudwaras, and the like? Such a mentality turns traditional perennialists into curious accomplices of the very secular liberalism they vehemently oppose.
If the heart—understood in both the Islamic and Christian worldviews as the integrative center of the human microcosm, the seat of the intellect (understood as intuitive awareness or contemplation, the Greek nous or the Sanskrit buddhi, rather than merely as discursive reason) as well as the emotions, the core of the person’s psychophysical being as the “imaging� or “viceregency� of God within creation, the portal within the individual to “supra-individual realms of being� (Nasr), the point of contact between the divine and the mundane, and thus the very Throne of God within creation—is the abode of a unity of spiritual experience which transcends the diversity of external forms, one must nonetheless caution against tearing the heart out of the body like an Aztec priest.
As an example and a modest critique, the Quran is unique among religious texts for the prominence of its “perennialist� outlook, promising salvation for all who believe in God and the Last Day and who do good works, whether Muslim, Christian, Jew, or Sabean—Zoroastrians later appear to make the list as well—and accepting the legitimacy of the previous dispensations of Torah and Gospel; yet one finds that as it tries to accommodate its predecessors, it tends to pare them down into precursors of its own message. Thus Moses and Jesus become prophets of Islam, but those aspects of the Tanakh and the New Testament that manifestly disagree with Islamic theology are dismissed as “corruptions� of the “original� message. Jesus could never have referred to God as His (and our) Father, for instance, because speaking of God as a Father is typically considered verboten in Muslim thought; even though the ascription of Fatherhood to God is the single most prominent characteristic of Jesus’s preaching as it appears in every extant Gospel, both canonical and apocryphal. There is much to be said for the syncretic approach advocated by David Bentley Hart, which appreciates and is open to adapting the genuine insights of other faiths and philosophies, but which doesn’t elide their differences or devalue the uniqueness of each.
That being said, the search for convergence at the level of the heart is a necessary corrective to the hard-heartedness and superficiality of the fundamentalisms—religious, political, and ideological—that plague the modern world, reducing the depth and richness of tradition—often shared across confessional boundaries—to the division and petty narcissism of tribe. Rumi is therefore not entirely amiss when he says in the Masnavi, “The creed of love is separated from all religions; the creed and the religion of the lovers of God is God himself.�
The conception of the heart as the center of the human being and the seat of all his faculties, including intellection, is remarkable in its consistency across cultures. The Bible and the Quran understand the heart in this way, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Chinese term xin, so central to the conceptual grammar of Confucianism and Taoism, refers both to the physical heart and to the faculties, both cognitive and affective, of the person; thus the term is often rendered in English as “heart-mind.� In his opening essay, Kallistos Ware quotes a passage from C.G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in which the psychologist recounts a conversation with a Native American named Ochwiay Biano, who declared that the whites were mad.
I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.
“They say that they think with their heads,� he replied.
“Why, of course. What do you think with?�, I asked him in surprise.
“We think here,� he said, indicating his heart.
Jesus sides with the Native Americans over the whites; for Him the heart is the source of our words, deeds, and thoughts, the wellspring of our personal energies, whether their fruits are good or ill: “The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks� (Luke 6:45).
As the microcosm of the human being, who in turn is the microcosm of the cosmos in both Christian and Islamic thought, the heart is the organ of spiritual perception, uniquely able to encompass creation and reflect, as in a mirror, the Qualities of God, from Whom it derives its supreme and irreducible being as a cosmic center. “Neither My Heavens nor My Earth contain Me, but the heart of My believing servant contains Meâ€� (Hadith Qudsi, Al-Ihya of Imam al-Ghazali). If one accepts Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s definition of a prophet as one who can hold God and humanity in a single gaze, one must identify this gaze with the spiritual vision of the heart when it is purified of the passions: those dispersive, subconscious, and insubstantial forces, like the ±¹Äå²õ²¹²ÔÄå²õ of Indian thought, which make us passive objects and occlude the true nature of the heart as the locus of irreducible self-consciousness, akin to that of God Himself: “I AM that I AMâ€� (Exodus 3:14).
The heart is a mirror, taking on the image of that towards which it is oriented: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also� (Matthew 6:21). It is furthermore, as already alluded, a kind of eye: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God� (Matthew 5:8). This is the Eye of the Heart attested in the Quran and the Hadith traditions, as well as the Sacred Heart of Roman Catholic devotion. It is the oculus cordis of Augustine: “Our whole business then, Brethren, in this life is to heal this eye of the heart whereby God may be seen� (Sermon 38.5 on the New Testament). It is the “third eye� of Hinduism and Buddhism; the “eye of the soul� described in Plato’s Republic. For Meister Eckhart (as for Rumi, al-Hallaj, et al.), it is the Eye that unites divine and human perception: “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love� (Sermon 57).
The heart is the Paradise from which we are estranged, and into which it is our life’s journey as rational natures to seek reentry. It is the Holy of Holies and the Kaaba. In its occluded aspect, it is the Tomb; the microcosmic gape of Hades into which Christ the True Light descends, setting it ablaze with the fire of love for God and all creation. For Sufis and Hesychasts, this return to the heart is the remembrance of our true life in God (Col. 3:3). As the Sufi remembers God through the invocation (dhikr) of His Names and Qualities, each of which is embodied to some degree by a particular non-human creature, but all of which are uniquely embedded (whether “remembered� or not) within the human being—akin to the Logos/logoi theology developed most comprehensively by Maximus the Confessor—so the Hesychast invokes the all-encompassing Name of Christ in the Jesus Prayer—first outwardly and then ever-inwardly, until it becomes a self-praying prayer, the very presence of Christ within—to draw the nous into the heart, achieving the inner tranquility (hesychia) in which the graces of divine-human vision (theoria) and divine-human communion (theosis) are made manifest.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr concludes his essay with an enchanting makarismos of pan-confessional relevance:
Happy is the man who can open the eyes of his heart with the aid of Heaven before his earthly eyes become shut at the moment of death, and who is able to see the countenance of the Beloved while still possessing the precious gift of human life.
February 28, 2019
A collection of articles from traditional authors. my favorite has to be Chittick. Always enjoy anything written by him.
June 4, 2022
“The heart is the center of the human microcosm, at once the center of the physical body, the vital energies, the emotions, and the soul, as well as the meeting place between the human and the celestial realms where the spirit resides. How remarkable is this reality of the heart, that mysterious center which from the point of view of our earthly existence seems so small, and yet as the Prophet has said it is the Throne (al-‘arsh) of God the All-Merciful (ar-Rahmân), the Throne that encompasses the whole universe. Or as he uttered in another saying, “My Heaven containeth Me not, nor My Earth, but the heart of My faithful servant doth contain Me.� It is the heart, the realm of interiority, to which Christ referred when he said, “The kingdom of God is within you� (Lk 17:21), and it is the heart which the founders of all religions and the sacred scriptures advise man to keep pure as a condition for his salvation and deliverance. We need only recall the words of the Gospel, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God� (Mt 5:8)
°Ú…]
In Christianity the Desert Fathers articulated the spiritual, mystical, and symbolic meanings of the reality of the heart, and these teachings led to a long tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church known as Hesychasm, culminating with St Gregory Palamas, which is focused on the “prayer of the heart� and which includes the exposition of the significance of the heart and the elaboration of the mysticism and theology of the heart. In Catholicism another development took place, in which the heart of the faithful became in a sense replaced by the heart of Christ, and a new spirituality developed on the basis of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Reference to His bleeding heart became common in the writings of such figures as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Catherine of Sienna. The Christian doctrines of the heart, based as they are on the Bible, present certain universal themes to be seen also in Judaism, the most important of which is the association of the heart with the inner soul of man and the center of the human state.
In Jewish mysticism the spirituality of the heart was further developed, and some Jewish mystics emphasized the idea of the “broken or contrite heart� (levnichbar) and wrote that to reach the Divine Majesty one had to “tear one’s heart� and that the “broken heart� mentioned in the Psalms sufficed. To make clear the universality of the spiritual significance of the heart across religious boundaries, while also emphasizing the development of the “theology of the heart� and methods of “prayer of the heart� particular to each tradition, one may recall that the name of Horus, the Egyptian god, meant the “heart of the world�. In Sanskrit the term for heart, hridaya, means also the center of the world, since, by virtue of the analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the center of man is also the center of the universe. Furthermore, in Sanskrit the term shraddha, meaning faith, also signifies knowledge of the heart, and the same is true in Arabic, where the word îmân means faith when used for man and knowledge when used for God, as in the Divine Name al-Mu’min. As for the Far Eastern tradition, in Chinese the term xin means both heart and mind or consciousness. � Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chapter 3: The Heart of the Faithful is the Throne of the All-Merciful)�
� Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East
Artwork: The falcon embodied the warrior and solar gods, among the most important of which was Horus. This magnificent breastplate, made using the cloisonné technique of inlaid glass, was found in the tomb of the teenage king Tutankhamun, who died around 1325 B.C. Egyptian Museum, Cairo
°Ú…]
In Christianity the Desert Fathers articulated the spiritual, mystical, and symbolic meanings of the reality of the heart, and these teachings led to a long tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church known as Hesychasm, culminating with St Gregory Palamas, which is focused on the “prayer of the heart� and which includes the exposition of the significance of the heart and the elaboration of the mysticism and theology of the heart. In Catholicism another development took place, in which the heart of the faithful became in a sense replaced by the heart of Christ, and a new spirituality developed on the basis of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Reference to His bleeding heart became common in the writings of such figures as St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Catherine of Sienna. The Christian doctrines of the heart, based as they are on the Bible, present certain universal themes to be seen also in Judaism, the most important of which is the association of the heart with the inner soul of man and the center of the human state.
In Jewish mysticism the spirituality of the heart was further developed, and some Jewish mystics emphasized the idea of the “broken or contrite heart� (levnichbar) and wrote that to reach the Divine Majesty one had to “tear one’s heart� and that the “broken heart� mentioned in the Psalms sufficed. To make clear the universality of the spiritual significance of the heart across religious boundaries, while also emphasizing the development of the “theology of the heart� and methods of “prayer of the heart� particular to each tradition, one may recall that the name of Horus, the Egyptian god, meant the “heart of the world�. In Sanskrit the term for heart, hridaya, means also the center of the world, since, by virtue of the analogy between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the center of man is also the center of the universe. Furthermore, in Sanskrit the term shraddha, meaning faith, also signifies knowledge of the heart, and the same is true in Arabic, where the word îmân means faith when used for man and knowledge when used for God, as in the Divine Name al-Mu’min. As for the Far Eastern tradition, in Chinese the term xin means both heart and mind or consciousness. � Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Chapter 3: The Heart of the Faithful is the Throne of the All-Merciful)�
� Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East
Artwork: The falcon embodied the warrior and solar gods, among the most important of which was Horus. This magnificent breastplate, made using the cloisonné technique of inlaid glass, was found in the tomb of the teenage king Tutankhamun, who died around 1325 B.C. Egyptian Museum, Cairo
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