On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Trust

Trust A person appears to himself by means of what his will offers him. And it can turn him both toward the body and toward the spirit, toward the earth and toward heaven. But this illusion of the sufficiency of his will, as separate from the Will in which lies all potential, distances him from the trust that his madness reveals as love, and his calculation as madness. We offered Our trust to the heavens, to the earth, and to the mountains, but they refused the burden and were afraid to receive it. Man undertook to bear it, but he has proved a sinner and a fool.1 Refusal of the offered trust is the only reasonable response of the created to the Creator, if it is based on calculation. That means accepting being only the recipient of the Almighty, being only His slave. But, such a response denies the love whose reasons lie in neither weakness nor power. Neither weakness nor threat can be an obstacle to love. Both the endurance of violence and enterprise, despite their evident madness, remain unknown and despised in relation to the beauty of the Face in which the lover sees himself. No arguments of the reason can participate in that surpassing of duality through the testimony that there is no face other than the Face nor beauty other than Beauty. 34 / On Love And not only that. Trust is the relation of the faithful, or those who have faith. And faith is love that wishes to know the beloved. It is also knowledge that wishes to love the known. The fact that God says, ‘‘We have offered,’’ or, ‘‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness : and let them have dominion,’’2 confirms that the hidden is the oneness or completeness of the Self. But this oneness is revealed and confirmed by countless multiplicity, in which every sign discloses oneness. Thus, the Self discloses Itself through this multiplicity, but without losing anything of its oneness. For Him/Her it is the same to say ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘We,’’ for He/She is made manifest in the totality of creation. Trust between the supreme I and every other I means that the love of the first is revealed in the second and that knowledge of the second is reshaped into love for the first. Only man unites the totality of knowledge about the Creator. With that knowledge, his love overcomes every individual phenomenon, recognizing in it the mark of the Creator. Faith is, therefore, love of knowledge and knowledge of the loved. The will is always revealed in denial or action. It means restraining oneself and saying ‘‘no’’ to evil and what is unclear, or doing what is good. In that way a person directs himself toward goodness as the essential character of his self. This direction presupposes a divergence in the self. For, if there were no such divergence, direction would not be possible either. What is divergent, therefore, consists of what is higher and lower, or closer to the origin and more distant from it. This establishes a debate in the self. Its higher character reproaches what is lower. And as long as there is ‘‘breath in the body’’ there is no end to that reproach. It is reflected in the irreconcilability of reason: the nonabatement of the inner debate corresponds to the immeasurability of relations between phenomena in the outside world. Both are reflected in the will, which is in a state of ceaseless reorientation. Its ‘‘teaching’’ presupposes consciousness of its aim. It follows the inexhaustible possibility of comparison within which reason functions Will / 35 along with all the reflections of that insoluble war between the higher and the lower in the self. The task of every spiritual act is to confirm that the divergence of the self into its lower and higher horizon bears witness to the axis of existence between the truth and nothingness. Orientation toward the truth is the essence of every action, although truth surpasses it. The role of such an act is to instruct and accustom the will in its orientation toward the truth, in its restraint from everything apart from it and in its giving of everything a person has. For, nothing other than the truth is sufficient, and nothing that a man has received is his. Although truth is in everything and with...