CHAPTER IV DIVINE LOVE
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Nicholson, Reynold Alleyne
“O God! whatever share of this world Thou hast allotted to me, bestow it on Thine enemies; and whatever share of the next world Thou hast allotted to me, bestow it on Thy friends. Thou art enough for me.” (Rābiʿa.)
“O God! if I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting beauty!” (Rābiʿa.)
“Notwithstanding that the lovers of God are separated from Him by their love, they have the essential thing, for whether they sleep or wake, they seek and are sought, and are not occupied with their own seeking and loving, but are enraptured in contemplation of the Beloved. It is a crime in the lover to regard his love, and an outrage in love to look at one’s own seeking while one is face to face with the Sought.” (Bāyazīd.)
“His love entered and removed all besides Him and left no trace of anything else, so that it remained single even as He is single.” (Bāyazīd.)
“To feel at one with God for a moment is better than all men’s acts of worship from the beginning to the end of the world.” (Shiblī.)
“Fear of the Fire, in comparison with fear of being parted from the Beloved, is like a drop of water cast into the mightiest ocean.” (Dhu ’l-Nūn.)
“Unless I have the face of my heart towards Thee,
I deem prayer unworthy to be reckoned as prayer.
If I turn my face to the Kaʿba, ’tis for love of Thine;
Otherwise I am quit both of prayer and Kaʿba.”
(Jalāluddīn Rūmī.)
Love, again, is the divine instinct of the soul impelling it to realise its nature and destiny. The soul is the first-born of God: before the creation of the universe it lived and moved and had its being in Him, and during its earthly manifestation it is a stranger in exile, ever pining to return to its home.
“This is Love: to fly heavenward,
To rend, every instant, a hundred veils;
The first moment, to renounce life;
The last step, to fare without feet;
To regard this world as invisible,
Not to see what appears to one’s self.”
All the love-romances and allegories of Sūfī poetry—the tales of Laylā and Majnūn, Yūsuf (Joseph) and Zulaykhā, Salāmān and Absāl, the Moth and the Candle, the Nightingale and the Rose—are shadow-pictures of the soul’s passionate longing to be reunited with God. It is impossible, in the brief space at my command, to give the reader more than a passing glimpse of the treasures which the exuberant fancy of the East has heaped together in every room of this enchanted palace. The soul is likened to a moaning dove that has lost her mate; to a reed torn from its bed and made into a flute whose plaintive music fills the eye with tears; to a falcon summoned by the fowler’s whistle to perch again upon his wrist; to snow melting in the sun and mounting as vapour to the sky; to a frenzied camel swiftly plunging through the desert by night; to a caged parrot, a fish on dry land, a pawn that seeks to become a king.
These figures imply that God is conceived as transcendent, and that the soul cannot reach Him without taking what Plotinus in a splendid phrase calls “the flight of the Alone to the Alone.” Jalāluddīn says:
“The motion of every atom is towards its origin;
A man comes to be the thing on which he is bent.
By the attraction of fondness and yearning, the soul and the heart
Assume the qualities of the Beloved, who is the Soul of souls.”
‘A man comes to be the thing on which he is bent’: what, then, does the Sūfī become? Eckhart in one of his sermons quotes the saying of St. Augustine that Man is what he loves, and adds this comment:
“If he loves a stone, he is a stone; if he loves a man, he is a man; if he loves God—I dare not say more, for if I said that he would then be God, ye might stone me.”
The Moslem mystics enjoyed greater freedom of speech than their Christian brethren who owed allegiance to the medieval Catholic Church, and if they went too far the plea of ecstasy was generally accepted as a sufficient excuse. Whether they emphasise the outward or the inward aspect of unification, the transcendence or the immanence of God, their expressions are bold and uncompromising. Thus Abū Saʿīd:
“In my heart Thou dwellest—else with blood I’ll drench it;
In mine eye Thou glowest—else with tears I’ll quench it.
Only to be one with Thee my soul desireth—
Else from out my body, by hook or crook, I’ll wrench it!”
Jalāluddīn Rūmī proclaims that the soul’s love of God is God’s love of the soul, and that in loving the soul God loves Himself, for He draws home to Himself that which in its essence is divine.
“Our copper,” says the poet, “has been transmuted by this rare alchemy,” meaning that the base alloy of self has been purified and spiritualised. In another ode he says:
“O my soul, I searched from end to end: I saw in thee naught save the Beloved;
Call me not infidel, O my soul, if I say that thou thyself art He.”
And yet more plainly:
“Ye who in search of God, of God, pursue,
Ye need not search for God is you, is you!
Why seek ye something that was missing ne’er?
Save you none is, but you are—where, oh, where?”