On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

The Intellect

The Intellect The nature of the Intellect is not to identify itself passively and blindly with the phenomena it recognizes. Its aim is the reduction of phenomena to their essence, ‘‘to know ultimately That which knows; by the same stroke, the sage—precisely because his subjectivity is determined by the Intellect—will tend ‘to be That which is’ and ‘to enjoy That which enjoys.’’’17 The trinity of existence, Consciousness, and Blessedness is revealed in divergence although it is just one Self. That Self speaks in the self: In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, The Compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgement! These words, which are a discourse between the Self and the self, include the resolution of the subject-object duality. The Self descends into the self, in order to make possible also the ascent by which the self rises to the Self. It is only in this way that the self recognizes in the worlds, as an elemental and clear object, just as in itself, the reason for the affirmation: ‘‘We are in thrall to Thee and we praise Thee.’’ Directing itself along that path toward the oneness of the subject and the object, the self submits voluntarily to one will. In that way, it comes before the Essence, which is veiled. But, disclosing it, the self Will / 53 discloses itself, in order to free itself from the semblance of duality: for, to know oneself is nothing other than the knowledge of the One. In that being before the Veiled, which becomes disclosure, the self travels along the road toward encounter and unity. That passage is ascent if the aim is shown as Beauty, which directs the will toward Beauty and impels the will to drive or draw the self despite its laziness and weight. ‘‘The most beautiful uprightness’’ is also primary perfection. Nonacceptance of the untouchability of the veil disturbed the balance of primary being at the apex of existence, so the self is exposed to the division of two opposing wills—one that draws it toward the plain of existence and another that reminds him of his primary state or the apex of existence: Have We not given him two eyes, a tongue, and two lips, and shown him the two paths? Yet he would not scale the Height. Would that you knew what the Height is. It is the freeing of a bondsman; the feeding, in the day of famine, of an orphaned relation or a needy man in distress; to have faith and to enjoin fortitude and mercy.18 Two eyes placed in a straight line and two lips, whose separation indicates verticality, bear witness to a language or discourse that reaches into the world of space and time out of the core or oneness. The two paths are upward and a return to the core, or downward and distance from primary perfection. The first is reflected in humility and generosity , and the second in arrogance and miserliness. The will, which is active on the first path, maintaining the domination of the higher over the lower, grants itself disappearance into the complete will, which is nothing other than belief—love and knowledge . But the will that is abandoned to descending the steep slope is revealed to itself as power and sufficiency. In the slope it seems that 54 / On Love the will has no power over man, nor that anyone ever sees it. The enslaved and hungry, orphans, and the suffering reveal nothing on that path about the self that is opposite them. They are not the state of self of the one who bears witness to them, but merely one of the phenomena of the outer world. The self in descending the steep slope becomes more and more confined in the sufficiency of its will. Neither patience nor Mercy has any essential meaning for it. In the ‘‘hidden treasure,’’ love of revelation is the potential of undivided phenomena to attain existence. Attaining existence means ‘‘clothing’’ or ‘‘enveloping’’ preexistentional archetypes in one of the multiplicity of phenomena of the world. Coming into being, creation or revelation is separation and being clothed in form. Each of the phenomena in the outside world, or ‘‘in the horizons,’’ is a sign of the oneness and indivisibility of the ‘‘hidden treasure.’’ Everything that is divided and revealed ‘‘in...