and we will prove ourselves.”The curtain was lifted. Then one saw their side
shining and full of the same colors as that of the Romans, because in its purity and
clarity, it functioned as a mirror. The side of the Chinese excelled through more
clarity; on it appeared what the Romans had also tried.
So it is with the soul in relation to the record of divine knowledge. You have two
possibilities to create these impressions: thefirst is the appropriation of drawing
itself (that is called art), as with the Romans. The second is the readiness to
apprehend the drawings from outside.‘Outside,’here refers to the preserved tablet
(al-lauh al-mahfuz) and the spirits of the angels. On them is the truthful knowledge
actually always painted, exactly as in your head the entire Quran is recorded, when
you have thoroughly learned it, as with all your knowledge. But this is not a sensory
perception or a visible drawing, but one of the spirit, the existence of which is
denied by one whose perception is limited to and does not rise above the sensible
things.^4
Al-Ghazali recognizes truth in reflection rather than representation. Yet far
from undermining the image, the reflection requires the image in order to
supersede it.
Referring to the Orphic myth in which the Titans distract the infant
Dionysus with toys including a mirror before plotting to dismember him,
Plotinus describes the mirror as a distraction, yet also as a space of return
enabling the apprehension of the Real:
The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have
entered into that realm in a leap downward from the Supreme: yet even they are
not cut offfrom their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come
bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have
descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.^5
Physical reality is through-the-looking-glass. Like the mirror, art is also a
toy:“Art...is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies–toys, things
of no great worth–and it is dependent upon all sorts of mechanisms by
which alone its images can be produced.”^6 By analogy, art, like the mirror,
which is like the world itself, functions as a distraction and yet also a space
of return toward the Real.
Plotinus’discussions reflect Socrates’use of painting as a trope in Plato’s
Republic.^7 Socratesfirst uses painting as a metaphor for creating an ideal
city–just as a painter selects perfect parts from several bodies to depict one
ideal, the dialogue aims to assemble perfect paradigms of governance in
imagining an ideal state. Soon after, the painter again serves as an
(^4) al-Ghazali, 2006 : 114–115. (^5) Plotinus, 1991 : 265 (4.3). (^6) Plotinus, 1991 : 263 (4.3).
(^7) Halliwell, 2002 : 58.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali between Plotinus and the Buddha 133