Our Limits Make Us Who We Are
The intellect is a limited faculty. Most modern people have no idea what the intellect does. That's in part because we use ‘intellect’ as a catch-all word to include everything that has to do with thinking, analyzing, interpreting, reasoning, judging, and intuiting. Not so for the ancient Greeks, Romans, and ancient Arabs.
Philosophers took great pains to distinguish ways of perceiving and knowing. Intellect, for instance, means to read (legere) between (inte-) something. Likely where we get the phrase Read between the lines. This word has to do with the power to interpret information.
Ancient cultures often identified knowing as a ‘spiritual’ activity, as in having to do with the spirit. This is perhaps why many viewed intellectual gifts as gifts, bestowals from On High. To be ‘inspired’ means to be breathed into (in is in + spirare means to breathe.) Breathed into from whom? From a Higher Power. Socrates spoke of a spirit that aided him, the Greeks had their goddess of wisdom, the ancient Arabs thought that behind every great poet was a jinn.
Inherent in all of these cultural artifacts is the idea that the human ‘mind’ is aided by the spirit, particularly when it does its best work. That means that without spirit, the mind lacks a certain oomph. Even that phrasing falls short because knowing is an inherently spirit-filled activity. To that point, knowledge and gnosis (esoteric knowledge of spiritual truth) come from the same word.
The Qur’an uses more than one word to communicate the idea of thinking, contemplating, and perceiving and its location in the human being. In the Qur’an, the heart functions similarly to the mind. The heart doesn’t just feel, it also reasons and understands (ya’qilun).
Have people not traveled through the land with hearts that understand and ears that hear? It is not people’s eyes that are blind, but their hearts within their chests. {22:46}
Our limitations make us who we are. Limitations are all we know, and we can only know through our limitations. But a limit is just a tool. Everything that we use for our benefit is limited. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to use it. Every hammer has to fit within our grasp for it to be useful. We use limited tools to help us grasp things that would otherwise evade us. Limits make us human. They are the intentional design of God that enables us to experience existence how He desires us to. Yet, our ability to connect to the spirit, that breath of inspiration that comes from a rarified realm, can transform our limits into the finest tools of perception and knowing.
Best,
Faatimah
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