On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

‘‘The True Faith’’

‘‘The True Faith’’ It is possible to understand that injunction to stand firm in one’s devotion to ‘‘the true faith’’ also as directing man toward his deepest human nature: a person is nothing other than a debt to the Creator and complete, original purity. The debt is accepted in trust and its repayment is inevitable. A man’s good will affirms his original nature, which is debt and purity. Through instruction that will is directed toward the Face or Beauty and discloses its inner being as love. ‘‘Therefore religion is the same as love, and love is the same as religion ,’’ says Imam Bakir.9 In original purity faith is constant and complete. Given that faith is the same as love, the human core or the uncreated and uncreatable Divine breath in man is His love of beauty. Thus, concentration on that breath in man leads to surpassing and passing through the world for the sake of Divine love. ‘‘A believer can taste the sweetness of God’s love,’’ says Imam Sadiq, ‘‘if he abstains from the world. He will thus succeed. Then he will attain God’s love. He will be considered to be insane by those who love the world, but in fact the sweetness of God’s love has made him attend to nothing but God.’’10 Since Peace is the highest human potential, the desire of Peace for another is the same as loving him.11 Love is rooted in the will, but also free from it. The transformation of the will into love, as man’s striving for Peace, includes the recognition of the verticality that begins from each of his states and leads Love / 63 toward fullness. The possibility of such a recognition of man’s being in the center of the surface with a multitude of paths is transformed into intention: the self is revealed on the edge and is directed toward the center. Such an intention is submission. The perfect intention is perfect submission and harmony with God’s Will. The search for absolution and the turning away from the self to the Self is acceptance of the truth, and is achieved through its image, given that God made man in His image. Submission is, therefore, revelation of the source and confluence in the image, and so it is the essence of every act of directing the will toward harmonization with the Will. Intention and submission are inseparable from desire and will. ‘‘The Fall is equivalent to a turning away of the will from God,’’ writes Whitall N. Perry. ‘‘Man is redeemed when his will is again concentrated , definitively, upon God.’’12 But, being a man means to be separate. In the horizons or the totality of the outer world, one hears, sees, smells, and feels otherness. The human self is opposed to it. Beauty is revealed in the self as a subject and in the world as an object. It is in them, but also outside them. Man knows it directly as his deepest and highest nature, but not also as reducible to separateness. Although beauty is always revealed in phenomena and never in the same way, beauty is one and the same and inseparable from love. Where there is beauty, there is love, and the other way around. The attraction of beauty, which is nothing other than love, bears witness to man’s original purity, perfection as his core, and the endurance of his debt to beauty. ‘‘God is beautiful and loves Beauty!’’13 Since beauty is made manifest in the other, its attraction is nothing other than the action of original human nature or the revelation of the self itself. The mention of love usually directs one to the connection between male and female, the giving or taking of a wife, marriage—whose core is eros—conception, and birth. Marriage does not surpass separateness and human distance from the pure core and fullness as its aim, but without directedness toward oneness—and original perfection is that and nothing less—every attraction in the field of love is 64 / On Love suffering. Love is the aim that confirms sense and suffering, which it transforms into a way of bearing witness to its fullness in the world of phenomena. Love is in the depths of man even as water is in the depths of the earth, and man suffers from not being able to...