A Treatise on Reason and Love

You who walk the road to God, king of the realm of words, from your speech the whole world is filled with priceless pearls. You are a star of good fortune; the world is bright with your radiance. You laid down reason itself, and the world is barren of your equal. Beside your verses, what standing has the poetry of others? Magic looks worthless before the miracle of Moses. This servant has a question for you to explain and answer, for the pure of heart seek only from the generous. Does reason or love show a man the road to God? Open this closed door, for it is a mighty gateway. Though these two rarely settle in one person, they both live at ease in your wakeful mind and heart. If reason can be called higher than love, then say so, since both are your companions and friends day and night. Show, in your kindness, the rank and station of each, so that my ailing soul may be revived by your sweet words. May you be at peace, free of the world's good and evil, your mind mirror clear like the breath of a sage. The Answer The Messenger of God, peace be upon him, said: The first thing God created was the intellect. He told it, 'Come forward,' and it came forward. Then He said, 'Turn back,' and it turned back. He said, 'By My glory and majesty, I have created nothing dearer to Me than you. Through you I take, through you I give, through you I reward, and through you I punish.' So the judgment of my master Sa'd al-Din is entirely correct: he placed reason first and knew it as a means of nearness to God. Yet the road should be asked of those who have arrived. God's generosity cannot be counted, for 'if you tried to number God's blessings you could never reckon them.' It comes to mind that reason, with all its nobility, is not the road itself but the lamp of the road; and the beginning of the road is the discipline of the path. The virtue of a lamp is that by its light one distinguishes the road from the pit, good from bad, enemy from friend. Once a person knows these things, he must set out: for though he has a lamp, until he walks he will not reach the goal. Travelers reach a station where knowledge itself becomes a veil, for knowledge is a tool for attaining the goal, not the whole goal. So whoever stops at knowledge alone is like one stranded in the desert, cut off from the Kaaba. The aim of outer knowledge is noble character and inner purity. When the dawn of purity breaks, the scent of the rose of gnosis breathes from the gardens of holiness, until the breezes of divine grace intoxicate the seeker and take the reins of choice from his grasp. The beginning of this intoxication is the sweetness of remembrance, its middle is rapture, and its endless end is love. The reality of love is the scent of familiarity and the hope of union, and this veils the seeker from perfect gnosis. The road of gnosis is not closed; rather the army of love's fancy blocks the way. The talisman of love's affliction guards the treasure, and it strikes down whoever comes upon it. No one finds the way to Korah's treasure; and if he does, he finds no way back out again. Do you know the meaning of 'I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known'? A treasure is an image for an immeasurable hidden bounty, and no one reaches it except the king and a few of his chosen ones. The king sheds with a merciless sword the blood of those who know its secret, so it stays hidden. Likewise the King of eternity keeps the reality of the hidden treasure of His essence known to none, save a few of His chosen, the poor and the abdal, who sit with no one and appear before no one, of whom it is said, 'Many a dust covered one who, if he swore an oath upon God, God would fulfill it.' As soon as they gain awareness of some secret of the Unconditioned, He sheds their blood with the sword of reason, so the tale of the treasure does not fall onto every tongue. At this banquet, the cup is given only to the one who has first been given the drug of oblivion. So the hidden secret of the reality of the Unconditioned Essence stays concealed. If someone asks me to describe Him, what can a lost heart say of the traceless One? Lovers are the slain of the Beloved; no sound rises from the slain. A dervish's foot may descend into a treasure, and it may be that his head is lost within it. I ask you: what is the instrument of gnosis? You answer: reason, analogy, capacity, and the senses. But what use are they when, at the very first stage, the scent of spring and rapture carries the seeker off, and reason, perception, analogy, and the senses are left bewildered? I told your face, 'Let me say a few words,' but you unveiled your face and locked my speech shut. Bewilderment arose from this: that unveiling does not happen without rapture, and rapture takes one away from perception. This is why the ripe have confessed to rawness, those who arrived have admitted their incompleteness, and even the angels of the highest assembly have owned their helplessness, saying, 'We have not known You as You deserve to be known.' At every step the traveler is handed a cup, and, too fragile to bear it, he is drunk and senseless from a single cup at the very first step. They cannot endure the pure wine of divine love; through rapture they become absent from presence, they remain in the wilderness of bewilderment, and they never bring the desert to an end. In this whirlpool a thousand ships have sunk, and not a single plank has surfaced on the shore. Abu Bakr the Truthful put it well: 'O You whose knowing eludes all knowing, the perfect knowledge of the truthful is to know that they cannot know.' So the utmost gnosis of anyone is the station where his ascent is cut off by rapture. O bird of dawn, learn love from the moth: that burned one gave up its life and made no sound. These pretenders are ignorant in their search for Him, for whoever gained knowledge of Him sent back no report. Why ask about the sign of the sea of fire, when men burn upon its very shore? Why ask about the wilderness of this abyss, when no created being has ever grasped this meaning? At this banquet, the cup is given only to the one who has first been given the drug of oblivion. * This road is not made for any beggar's feet; in my hand and on my tongue there is only praise. Who am I, and what is this praise? 'I cannot number Your praises,' spoken by the prophets, is enough. * You who are beyond imagination, reasoning, guess, and fancy, beyond all we have said, heard, and read. The gathering has ended and our life has run out, and still we are stuck at the first word of Your description. * That is no face whose beauty I could describe; ask this of someone else, for I am bewildered.