Apophatikos I

God does not possess motivation, for the implication of motivation is the existence of bias and preference. It is ambition with a conclusion, a system of design rather than the sheer and perfect “will of God”. For God does not possess, in the conventional definition of the term, all is of He, rather than of His. The mystery of the Lord is understood in His encompassing reality and not as a being in possession of the fealty of another being. The entirety of His creation is enveloped in He, as He is reality. This is the practical and illuminating theology of negation, demonstrated in the kalima. Islam confronts not merely the existence of that which would equal God, but the concept of godhood itself. God gives Himself no name, but demonstrates His absoluteness/perfection in taking the very concept of divinity as it was conceived by the human being’s attempt to comprehend their connection to an immutable and undeniable presence of a seemingly conscious natural law, that when engaged with through contemplation and rites of restraint/sacrifice would “respond” through signs and revelation. In claiming the title of god, the reality that is the origin of time, phenomena, and material negates the very possibility of multiplicity in divinity. There is nothing but He.

Abraham contemplated his Lord through the movement of celestial bodies, and witnessed in them not the mechanisms of a pantheon of deities nor the supremacy of one deity over others, but the functioning of the subtle and constant order of reality that at its origin could only ever be absolute/perfect but without qualification. This reality cloaked Himself in the language of His creation, and crowned Himself with divinity, thus defining divinity indefinitely as being qualified by He who is without qualification. The language of submission innate to the human being as it is in all creation became His adornment, as did the language of magnanimity. God made Himself known not through incarnation but by an unveiling of Himself as the eternal presence as the sustainer of an existence that flowed out from His love, which like the knowledge of His “presence” is unqualified by the limitations of love as it is comprehended in the language of the human being.