Ignorance
idea · 7 works · 10 mentions · 17 anchored passages
ignorance · الجهل · al-jahl · the ignorant man · acting in ignorance · acting through ignorance · al-jahālah · his ignorance · jahl · mufriṭ aw mufarriṭ
in the texts
Adab al-wazīr
Jahl, ignorance, named as the seat of the instincts from which lying arises.
And lying is among the instincts of ignorance;
The harm of ignorance is more pervasive than the harm of evil, because the rule (qānūn) of evil is known while the rule of ignorance is not known.
a good man who is ignorant, who keeps peace by his goodness and leads astray by his ignorance.
Stromata
The condition of ignorance, discussed both as a disputed premise in Gnostic myth and as the state remedied by first repentance.
For upon the first and only repentance of sins (this would be of the sins that pre-existed in the gentile and first life, the one in ignorance, I mean) there is set forth at once, to those called, the repentance that cleanses the place of the soul from offences, that faith may be founded.
Is the ignorance, then, of good things or of base?
Surely, then, if cowardice is constituted by ignorance of the things fearful and not fearful, the gnostic alone is confident, knowing the present goods and the goods to come, and knowing together with these, as I said, the things that are not truly fearful—since, knowing vice alone to be hostile and destructive of those who advance toward knowledge, fenced about with the weapons of the Lord, he wars it down.
Kitāb al-Safīnah al-Nūḥīyah fī al-sakīnah al-rūḥīyah
Jahl, ignorance, made one of the two roots of every ugly deed and divided into ignorance of present ugliness and ignorance of final consequence.
And when I reached the age of maturity in my years and came to hold the judgement over myself, I abandoned study root and branch, out of the extremity of my weariness, and I kept company in the market with folk and people over whom ignorance prevailed;
ignorance of what is in the present state, and ignorance of what is in the final outcome.
So out of his own ignorance he pronounces the masters of knowledge unbelievers, and disparages the station of him in whom excellence lies, and of its people.
Nicomachean Ethics
Not knowing the particular circumstances of one's act, which renders the act involuntary if regretted.
Acting through ignorance however seems to be different from acting in ignorance;
(b) An act done through ignorance is in every case not voluntary, but it is involuntary only when it causes the agent pain and regret:
for in this case the act is pitied and forgiven, because he who acts in ignorance of any of these circumstances is an involuntary agent.
Risālat al-Wāridāt
Jahl, ignorance: at once the polemical diagnosis of the imitators who condemn what they have never tasted, the darkness the reader is summoned out of, and — analysed as pure non-existence — the reason knowledge must be predicated of the wholly existent Real.
(And again) Since the Real is existence in every respect, and ignorance is pure non-existence, ignorance is impossible for Him and knowledge is necessary for Him;
and come out of the murk of the darknesses of your ignorance, for the cleft of dawn has breathed.
whoever is ignorant of a thing is hostile to it, and whoever sinks earthward away from the heights refuses it.
Ad Nationes
The willful not-knowing of the accusers, identified as the basis of their hatred of Christians.
that all who once shared your ignorance and your hatred, the moment it falls to them to know, cease to hate as soon as they cease to be ignorant;
Apologeticum
The condition of not knowing what Christians actually are, blamed for public hatred.
since, if no debt of hatred be found in it, surely the best course is to cease from hating unjustly;
The witness to their ignorance — an ignorance which, while it excuses the injustice, also condemns it — is this:
They praise what they know, they blame what they do not know, and what they know they spoil with what they do not — though it were juster to prejudge the hidden by the manifest than to condemn beforehand the manifest by the hidden.