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Updated: May 20, 2025
Man is usually governed by his own passions, his own circumstances, or his own reason, not by any verbal propositions. And when an apt and timely adage seems to determine him, it is, for the most part, because it acts upon responsive feelings preëxistent in him and already struggling to express themselves.
This is why He says: “I am the bread which descended from heaven; whosoever shall eat of this bread will not die” —that is to say, that whosoever shall partake of this divine food will attain unto eternal life: that is, every one who partakes of this bounty and receives these perfections will find eternal life, will obtain preexistent favors, will be freed from the darkness of error, and will be illuminated by the light of His guidance.
It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all respects.
In other words: it was probable that there should exist geological evidences of suffering and death: that the gigantic ichthyosaurus should be found fixed in rock with his cruel jaws closed upon his prey: that the fearful iguanodon should leave the tracks of having desolated a whole region of its reptile tribes: that volcanoes should have ravaged fair continents prolific of animal and vegetable life: that, in fine, though man's death came by man's sin, yet that death and sin were none of man's creating: he was only to draw down upon his head a prëexistent wo, an ante-toppling rock.
Augustine and his followers, rejecting such a view, and relying on the literal sense of the words of revelation, advanced the hypothesis that infants sinned, not in a preëxistent state, but in Adam; for which they are justly exposed to pain and death.
In Paul and John and the Epistle to the Hebrews, there is incarnate in Jesus a preexistent heavenly Being the Man from heaven, the Word who was from the beginning with God, the Son through whom He made the worlds. They present us with a Divine Being made a man. This last conception is not combined by any New Testament writer with a virgin-birth.
The spirit is independent of the body, and in relation to it the spirit is an essential preexistence. Though the rays are always inseparable from the sun, nevertheless, the sun is preexistent and the rays are phenomenal, for the existence of the rays depends upon that of the sun. But the existence of the sun does not depend upon that of the rays, for the sun is the giver and the rays are the gift.
It enters directly into the activities of the expert and the educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner. Failure to bear in mind the difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of teacher and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge.
To recapitulate: the Súfís admit God and the creature, and say that God resolves Himself into the infinite forms of the creatures, and manifests like the sea, which appears in the infinite forms of the waves. These phenomenal and imperfect waves are the same thing as the Preexistent Sea, which is the sum of all the divine perfections.
Therefore, the realities of beings, which are the things known of God the Most High, have the existence which knowledge has, since they have the form of the Divine Knowledge, and they are preexistent, as the Divine Knowledge is preexistent.
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