ultimate beauty: god and his attributes

8:43:10

2019-02-12

1229

The Ultimate Being or Reality is God. God, as described by the Qur'an for the understanding of man, is the sole self‑subsisting, all‑pervading, eternal, and Absolute Reality. He is the first and the last, the seen and the unseen. He is transcendent in the sense that He in His full glory cannot be known or experienced by us finite beings‑beings that can know only what can be experienced through the senses or otherwise and what is inherent in the nature of thought or is implied by it. No vision can grasp Him. He is above all comprehension.

He is transcendent also because He is beyond the limitations of time, space, and sense‑content. He was before time, space, and the world of sense came into existence. He is also immanent both in the souls (anfus) and the spatio‑temporal order (afaq). Of the exact nature of God we can know nothing. But, in order that we may apprehend what we cannot comprehend, He uses similitudes from our experience.

He “is the light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His light is as if there were a niche and within it a lamp, the lamp enclosed in glass; the glass as if it were a brilliant star lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well‑nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: light upon light !”.

Likewise for our understanding, He describes through revelation His attributes by similitude from what is loftiest in the heavens and the earth and in our own experience (our highest ideals).

This He does in a language and an idiom which the people addressed to may easily understand. These attributes are many and are connoted by His names, but they can all be summarized under a few essential heads: Life, Eternity, Unity, Power, Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love, and Goodness.

As compared to the essence of God, these attributes are only finite approaches, symbols or pointers to Reality and serve as the ultimate human ideals, but though signs and symbols, they are not arbitrary symbols. God has Himself implanted them in our being. For that reason they must, in some sense, be faithful representations of the divine essence. They must at least be in tune with it, so that in pursuing them we human beings are truly in pursuit of what is at least in harmony with the essence of God, for they are grounded in that essence.

God is, thus; a living, self‑subsisting, eternal, and absolutely free creative reality which is one, all‑powerful, a11‑knowing, all‑beauty, most just, most loving, and all good.

As a living reality God desires intercourse with His creatures and makes it possible for them to enter into fellowship with Him through prayer, contemplation, and mystic gnosis, and lights with His light the houses of those who do not divert from His remembrance, nor from prayer nor from the practice of regular charity.

His life expresses itself also through His eternal activity and creativeness. God is one and there is no god but He. He is the only one and there is none like Him. He is too high to have any partners. If there were other gods besides Him, some of them would have lorded over others.

By: al-islam.org