The central gesture
Six years after The Seal of the Saints, Chodkiewicz published, in 1992, a shorter book — but one that carries a decisive thesis. Its title is an image: the work of Ibn ʿArabī is an ocean without shore — measureless, dizzying, in appearance without limits. But an ocean, however vast, has a source. And that source, Chodkiewicz demonstrates, is single: it is the Quran.
The book aims at a precise misunderstanding. Ibn ʿArabī has long been read as an overflowing mystic, a "genius" who supposedly improvised his own metaphysics, even a syncretist freed from the Muslim Law. Chodkiewicz establishes, text in hand, that this is false. Far from freeing himself from the Quran and the Law, Ibn ʿArabī does nothing else, page after page, than read them in depth. His boldness is not a rupture: it is a fidelity carried to the point of vertigo.
The key concepts (made plain)
- The inexhaustibility of the Quran — The title of the first chapter is a verse: "If all the trees of the earth were pens…" (Quran 31:27) — there would not be ink enough to write the words of God. For Ibn ʿArabī, the Quran does not have one meaning, but an infinity of meanings, which are discovered without end. To read the Book is never finished.
- All is in the Book — Second verse-title: "We have omitted nothing from the Book" (Quran 6:38). For Ibn ʿArabī this is taken literally: every truth, every science, every reality has its root in the Quran. His whole metaphysics is only an unfolding of what is contained there in seed.
- An infinite exegesis — Ibn ʿArabī does not "comment" on the Quran as a scholar: he receives it as an ever-actual unveiling. Each verse can, at each reading, open a new meaning — not through fancy, but because the divine Word is living and inexhaustible.
- The Book and the Law — The sharīʿa is not, for Ibn ʿArabī, a husk that the mystic would abandon. The Law is the very form that wisdom takes. The highest of the saints is also the most exact of practitioners: he fulfils the Law because he has grasped its meaning, not in spite of that meaning.
- The horizons and the souls — Fourth verse-title: "In the horizons and in their souls" (Quran 41:53). God shows Himself both in the world (the horizons) and in inwardness (the souls). The Quran is the key that allows one to read the two books: that of the cosmos and that of the heart.
- Perpetual prayer — The last chapter bears on "those who are perpetually at prayer" (Quran 70:23). The term of the Akbarian way is not a speculation: it is a state — that of the being who, having received everything from the Book, remains without interruption turned towards God.
The architecture of the work
Five chapters — and each has for its title a verse of the Quran. The form already states the thesis: one does not study Ibn ʿArabī starting from ideas, one studies him starting from the Book from which he proceeds.
- "If all the trees of the earth were pens…" (Quran 31:27) — the inexhaustibility of the Word
- "We have omitted nothing from the Book" (Quran 6:38) — all proceeds from the Quran
- "And unto Him you shall be brought back" (Quran 36:83) — the origin and the return
- "In the horizons and in their souls" (Quran 41:53) — the double book of the world and the heart
- "Those who are perpetually at prayer" (Quran 70:23) — the term of the way
A few voices
The conviction that carries the whole book Chodkiewicz states without evasion: there is, in Ibn ʿArabī, no thought "alongside" the Quran. The Shaykh al-Akbar adds nothing to the Book; he draws out of it what slept within it. To grasp this is to cease reading Ibn ʿArabī as a vague poet of Unity, and to begin reading him as what he is: an exegete of an unequalled boldness.
To read it
Shorter and more accessible than The Seal of the Saints, An Ocean Without Shore is probably the best doorway into Chodkiewicz's work — and one of the best ways to correct, in a few chapters, the received ideas about Ibn ʿArabī. To be read before venturing into the Futūḥāt.
Resonances
- The source doctrine — see Ibn ʿArabī
- Chodkiewicz's other great book: The Seal of the Saints
- The science of letters and of the Quran — the Roots module
- The site's Metaphysics