Logos to Bios: Evolutionary Theory in Light of Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism by Wynand De Beer (review)

Abstract

15. For some excellent treatments, see Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. N. Pearson (New York: Omega, 1994), 73–76, 103–104; Michael Gilsenan, Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 156–187; Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 2:210–214; Valerie J. Hoffman, Sufism, Mystics and Saints in Modern Egypt (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 163–188; Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 167–178. 16. Among less focused treatments, mention should be made of S. Nasr’s brief comparative analysis of modes of interior prayer in Eastern Orthodox and Islamic spirituality (“The Prayer of the Heart in Hesychism and Sufism,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 31 [1986]: 195–203); and S. Sviri’s lengthy piece, not on dhikr per se, but the mystical “power of words” in early/ proto-Sufism (“Words of Power and the Power of Words: Mystical Linguistics in the Works of al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam [2002]: 204–244). 17. The Japanese scholar’s translation grew out of his 1970 doctoral dissertation at Harvard on prayer in Ghazālī. See also his “A Structural Analysis of Dhikr and Nembutsu,” Orient 7 (1971): 75–98. 18. I have relied on the 2001 Maktaba Madbūlī Cairo edition, one of the two versions utilized by Williams, for my own comparison. 19. The theological problem, common to the monotheistic traditions, essentially rests on the exact ontological status of the “link” ( = Logos, Word, Kalima, Kalām, Revelation, Incarnation, Inlibration) that joins God with the world. Is it created or uncreated, divine or not-divine?