On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Certainty

Certainty Opposed to impurity, corruption, suffering, and death are Purity, Sanctity , Happiness, and Immortality. That separation from the world that has been deprived of its ‘‘true reality’’ becomes a foretaste of death. Since ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘death’’ are the only certainties in human existence, withdrawal from everything that is between them for the sake of connection with them means the victory of life over dying. That is concentration on the Moment, Peace, and fear. Two other certainties correspond to ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘death’’—God and the Day of Reckoning. Thus, these four names, in which lies certainty, proclaim oneness in existence, and hence one and the same certainty is revealed in different ways. God is now, so deliverance from the fragmentation of human existence is possible only through the harmonization of the will with the Will. Death is the loss of everything that is received and reduction to a right toward the world, which springs from complete powerlessness. It is also a debt to God. Thus, death is a meeting with the Death-giver Who is alive and outside every death. Unity with Him is salvation. Given that He is fullness, and as such Living, there can be no complete death. It is possible to say the same for each one of His attributes , such as Mercy, Purity, and so on. But, since the world is what is not God, nothing in it is fullness although nothing in it is without it. And that is the sense of the pronouncement : there is no god other than God; there is no fullness other 46 / On Love than Fullness; there is no reality other than Reality; there is no knowledge other than Knowledge; there is no sanctity other than Sanctity; there is no mercy other than Mercy; there is no beauty other than Beauty; there is no love other than Love, and so on. But the world—the totality of the material and the spiritual, the earthly, and the heavenly—offers divergence within the signs about the Self. Each sign has two sides, one toward the Self as secret and the other toward the world in which that secret is revealed. This division of every sign into its two sides is not sharp. Between them is a transition in which there are both light and dark, knowledge and ignorance , Reality and non-Reality. That is why it is possible to say of every illumination that it is dark in relation to the higher level of existence , of all knowledge that it is ignorance in relation to the higher proximity of fullness, of every Reality that it is unreal in relation to the higher proximity of Complete Reality. The reverse is also possible, depending on the adoption of the downward direction from the first intelligence toward man. The contingency of everything in existence raises the question of conviction, lack of doubt, and certainty in knowledge. Knowledge that has any level of certainty may be acquired only through the observation of the mutuality between fullness and phenomena. Those mutualities are determined by the wide range of qualities that are encompassed by God’s names and attributes. Those names and attributes give mankind the potential for conditionally complete orientation toward the realization of the true nature of phenomena. The divergence indicated by the duality of the heavens and the earth, the invisible and the visible, the spirit and matter, as also the multitude of people, has its root in original oneness—‘‘the heavens and the earth were but one solid mass’’11 and ‘‘It was He who created you from a single being.’’12 Thus, the totality of existence corresponds to God’s creative injunction willingly, since the beginning of everything lies in the proximity and clarity of His nature.13 It is the same with man. He at first responds to God’s question ‘‘Am I not your Lord?’’with the affirmation ‘‘We bear witness that You are!’’14 These responses, which Will / 47 are both voluntary and from the center of the Creator’s commandment, remain a source of certainty to which a man turns out of the total duality of existence. The original closeness is guarded by divergence and distance. They strive toward it as toward their deepest nature. Oneness directs the mass regardless of its divergence and dispersal. To say ‘‘Creator’’ means to assume createdness. But, since the Creator is always what He is, the question arises whether creation after...