On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Balance

Balance Creation as such is submissive to God. With man as God’s viceregent it is a whole. Without man the submission of the worlds is complete and without freedom. With him it also has freedom: man can maintain his most beautiful uprightness in complete submission and out of free will. Thus he becomes a bridge between the worlds and God, a viceregent in the totality of existence for the sake of Divine revelation. In Divine oneness all the names of phenomena exist as undivided potential. They are divided and scattered through the worlds. And here they are submissive to God: ‘‘Do you not see that those in the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the mountains and the trees, the beasts, and countless men—all do homage to God?’’39 The expression ‘‘countless men’’ emphasizes that only man can be an exception. In that way, he is a special factor in the totality of creation. Thus, only his relationship with God is free. And that is a condition of trust in which they—God and man—faithfully swear to one another , God as fullness or affluence and man as emptiness or poverty. What is scattered through the worlds is gathered together in man: he is the image of the Merciful. The scattered as a whole is the submissive or the serene (as Islam). Balance between everything is the way of existing in creation. Man accepts and adopts that way of his own free will. Thus he realizes the good in himself, his nature as the Divine image and createdness in the most beautiful uprightness. By 90 / On Love doing this out of his own free will, he is faithful with the Faithful, oneness in which distance and incomparability—none is equal to Him;40 nothing can be compared with Him41 —are revealed in closeness and similarity. God is closer to man than his jugular vein;42 He is with you wherever you are,43 and whichever way you turn there is the Face of God.44 Thus, a man who prostrates himself lives together with all the phenomena in the heavens and on the earth. And that is his path. Along it multiplicity is revealed in oneness and oneness in multiplicity. From the viewpoint of Divine incomparability and nonsimilarity, all the phenomena of creation—both individually and as a whole—are submissive to Him. From the viewpoint of His closeness, the qualities of creation and the Creator’s name are gathered together in man, and therefore only he can be His viceregent on the earth. Those two viewpoints gather together the two human natures—the slave and the viceregent , with one being the condition of the other. Viceregency is the male, or active, principle toward the worlds, which are the perfect female, or receptive, principle toward God. ‘‘A human being has two transcriptions: an outward transcription and an inward transcription. The outward transcription corresponds to the macrocosm in its totality, while the inward transcription corresponds to the God.’’45 That outward content of the human being corresponds to his enslavement, while the inward content proclaims lordship and viceregency. The outward side reflects distance from God and His incomparability . The inward side mirrors closeness and man’s nature in His image. The two of them reflect and bear witness to God’s hands, which have made the human being. The whole cosmos comes into existence through the marriage of the complementary divine names, the names of beauty and majesty. The first group of names is connected more closely to God’s similarity, while the second group is connected to His incomparability . God’s double relationship with created things results in the polar structure of humans: spiritual and corporeal, or formless and formal.46 Toward Peace / 91 Love is the impulse of oneness toward multiplicity, in order for it to be made manifest. But love is also the impulse of multiplicity, which is nothing other than duality, toward oneness. Here are both the cause and the aim of humanity: the satisfaction of the revelation of oneness has drawn this humanity, together with the world, into existence . The satisfaction of return will turn duality toward oneness. That return takes place by rising up by the levels of the human core. The first is in the breast, at the level of the soul, which ‘‘leads to evil,’’ where submission to the Higher...