On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

Uprightness

Uprightness Truth for a person means his existence through what he is. The human self is thus identified with its essence. But, thought is incapable of surpassing ontological objectification and fundamental duality. This is because thought is divergent in its essence. In relation to Reality, it is like the color white: it is not visible without light and cannot itself illuminate anything. In it one may clearly distinguish the divergence of existence into being and knowing. If this duality is to be overcome, being must become knowing, but knowing must also become being. If existence itself is observed in its dual divergence, then it is necessary to be rather than to think, because thought indicates a direction but does not reach an aim. It does not encompass the whole human being, so its encompassing of Reality is even more limited. This duality may be resolved in the following demand: to know only what is—God; to be only what is known—the Self. The attainment of that aim is deliverance or liberation from duality. And that includes the testimony that there is no identity other than the Self. Salvation is, therefore, in the self and attainable in its acknowledgment that there is nothing apart from the Self. Thus, the self is directed from itself to itself. It finds itself divided. In a man there are, therefore, two identities present. They are not reducible to a common measure. Toward one another they are either nothing or infinity. Their aspirations are quite contradictory. But, 12 / On Love there exists a ‘‘contact’’ or ‘‘connection’’ between them. On one side is the self of existence or the anima. It is woven of external and internal chance factors, among which memories and desires predominate. On the other side is the spiritus, or pure Intellect, whose identity is rooted in fullness. That Self or that pure Intellect sees the first self as a shell or something external and alien to the Self, which is the One and Only. And that Self is both transcendent and immanent. Those two sides of the human identity, or those two identities in the human being, are indisputable. Of the first it is possible to say that it strives toward happiness and survival in happiness. And the visibility and justification of such an aim cannot be denied. But neither can it be denied that pure Intellect, which is one of the two sides of the human self, strives toward its source. The riddle about mankind is nothing other than the question of resolving this duality, which is outlined in the Exordium by the demand that the Self makes of the self: Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom You have favoured, not of those who have incurred Your wrath, nor of those who have gone astray.2 This utterance contains the beginning of all human potential— orientation toward the Almighty, which is rooted in eternity and infinity , orientation contrary to what is facing nothingness; but also orientation that rejects existence without connection to the perpendicular line up-down. If all the height and extent of the heavens, and all the depth and extent of the oceans, are looked upon, their meaning is nothing other than a sign placed before a person about that line. With it every phenomenon is forever before the Lord’s Face. The division of the self into anima and spiritus enables it to let its belonging to the world of phenomena be seen from above, by the superindividual self, and the human self to maintain tension and change in which the last word is that of the spiritus, derived from the Spiritus Sanctus. The Impossibility of Definition / 13 The human being is thus positioned on three levels—body, soul, and spirit. The soul is witness to the body, and the spirit to the soul. The human self cannot be identified with the body given that in its inner being the soul opens up as a world of feeling and imagining. The Center of this is the Intellect, through which the transcendence and immanence of the One and Only Self are revealed in a person. ‘‘The soul,’’ says Frithjof Schuon, ‘‘is the inner witness of the body, as the spirit is the inner witness of the soul.’’3 A person, therefore, has two directions—one toward the outer world, which he or she touches and...