On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Extremes

Extremes A person is situated between these extremes, given that he is in relation with fullness on the basis of faith, which is not possible without free will. And free will opens up for him the space between nothingness and fullness. The fact that he is within those borders, but that he can cross them and surpass them, does not mean anything other than that his heart is elementarily adaptable to every change in existence, and that as such it can rise above them through its connection with fullness, which is beyond every limitation and all change. But the changeableness of the heart is resistance to the changeableness of the world. And that is revealed as the inevitability of suffering as the accompaniment of love, and pain as the companion to friendship . The stronger the will for attainment of the Highest, so the opposition of the lover to everything that lies between him and the beloved is the more cruel and merciless. In that thought systems disperse, since the opposition mentioned above includes the whole of the being. It reveals that wholeness cannot be reduced to any one of its contents. In this it is possible to know the reason the face and the heart are the two key phenomena in speaking about love. The face is what is seen, that in which the inner being is disclosed. It is both divergence and unitedness. There is nothing that so clearly bears witness to duality and its surpassing. Duality united in the face, in which the looker sees himself, shines with beauty. And that relaxes 28 / On Love the looker, directing him from thinking, which is dispersal and tension , toward the center in which totality is united. The face ‘‘descends ’’ into the heart of the observer. In it thinking is surpassed. That is the connection of totality with its revelation in beauty. It does not remain in confrontation with the face. Relaxation and embracing what is revealed as beauty suppress thought. But they are transformed into attraction, which is directed by the will rooted in the heart as the center of the entire being. Rational explanations and their coldness are in conflict with that will and are most frequently powerless before it. The difference between love and knowledge becomes clearer: knowledge is the relationship of the one who realizes and the one who is realized, during which they may be distant and without mutual attraction ; as soon as the object of knowledge is revealed as a face, that is as beauty, the connection descends from reason toward the totality of the being and love floods knowledge. That path from knowledge to love is not a necessity. Another direction is also possible: beauty is directly knowable and it is as such loved and attractive, and it spurs and demands knowledge in which the separation of the knower and the known could be removed through unity. In both cases love is revealed as inseparable from beauty as the proclamation of the Essence and surpassing of separation. Beauty, closeness, and similarity stand in contrast to greatness, distance , and difference. Thus, it is possible to say that the entirety of existence diverges between the extremes of greatness and beauty. That duality is in complete harmony and confirms oneness. It is conceivable as the divergence of the whole of existence between the two hands of the Creator. Its sheer dividedness reflects the intensity of the opposition between distance and incomparability on the one hand, and tenderness, closeness, and similarity on the other. Greatness, distance, and incomparability give rise to fear, while tenderness, closeness, and similarity give rise to and maintain joy. The self is afraid of His anger and hopes for His satisfaction. The extremes of this duality, greatness and love, are revealed in the self, which encompasses also the proclamation that God created Adam with His own two hands.15 The Impossibility of Definition / 29 This duality may also be expressed through the Secret, the Hidden, and the Invisible, which are the equivalent of the Essence and the Visible , which are the equivalent of the world. The Visible confirms the Invisible, just as duality confirms oneness. Such divergence shows that greatness and beauty are in God’s names. But this divergence is expressible both as God and as everything other than God. And only on the basis of that divergence is it possible to discuss the two...