On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Divergence

Divergence The will is expressed as endeavor and action in the opposite direction from the one in which the self is drawn and confined by the lower levels of the soul. Such a will is good. Its orientation toward good confirms evil as opposition. It is not possible to understand that good will without its opposite. The freedom of the will includes also the possibility of its agreeing to the opposite of such orientation. Since the human self is divided between fullness and nothingness, its realization involves turning to and enduring on the Righteous path. Contrasted to that is the opposite action. The extreme of the first is wrath, and of the second Peace. If human perfection is considered in its earthly manifestation, then it is the balancing of those opposites in connection with heavenly glory: ‘‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!’’ say the heavenly prophets, announcing the birth of the Anointed One.1 The appearance of the embodied Word in that pronouncement is connected with objective reality, with the world in the heights that makes manifest God’s glory; opposite those heights, at the other end of the perpendicular, on the surface of the earth, is man in relation to other people, where that mutuality may be direct, without the heights that are proclaimed in every sign or through it. Out of mutuality with the heights springs the recognition of signs in the horizons as the discourse of truth. And these are the presence 60 / On Love and discovery of beauty in phenomena. The Face of God is proclaimed in that of man. That is why the heavenly is recognized in the earthly, and the Divine in the human. The human core is the apex of both the heavenly and the earthly, the passing through and surpassing of phenomena and openness to the One. The objective world becomes an inscription that is transformed in the reality of the Self. The love of Being Known is revelation. Here good will is seeing oneself through another. Orientation toward the perfection of the Anointed One has three stages—the heights and the vertical, which are proclaimed by the heavens; lowness and the horizontal, represented by the earth; and centeredness and inclusion, gathered together through good will toward men. In this divergence the heights correspond to the Spirit. Directedness toward them is striving for Peace as the primary reality of the self. It is only in that striving that divergence may be resolved as the realization of the self. When it is resolved, there is no duality of the spirit and soul. But the self in the world means also the presence of that divergence. Good will is opposed to the soul, which is inclined to evil and incites to it and does not permit it to become its mistress.2 The spirit attracts the soul, since at every lower level the soul feels a stranger and finds in a return to its source movement toward the home of fullness. Thus it marries itself to the higher, which takes it and accepts as a condition of its fulfillment. The strength of the will, through denial and separation, opposes the attraction of the world. And when the will expresses an affirmative attitude to the testimony that there is no god other than God and that the Praiser is God’s Emissary through prayer, giving to others, restraining from taking or fasting , and undertaking the sacred journey toward the given aim, then too the will’s submission to commands, which has the form of acceptance , indicates refusal of that toward which it is drawn by its corporeal nature and the undirectedness of reason.3 The greater the power of that denial of gods—whether they are passions, accustomed closeness , blind habits, or confinement in systems of thought—the more Love / 61 evident it becomes that the will itself, or the submission that it stimulates and maintains, is not sufficient to enable the territory in the soul in which it reproaches itself to be crossed, and for it to give itself up to the attractive power of Peace. And Peace is the highest potential of the self. It cannot be satisfied by anything else. And God is perfect Peace,4 and He too has satisfaction in showing the freedom of the self in the actualized truth that there is...