Put away the tale of love that travellers tell;
Do thou serve God with all thy might.
JALÁLU'D-DÍN RÚMÍ.
Súfíism, then, is the religion of Love. Lafcadio Hearn tells us, in his
inimitable way, that earthly love is brought about by the memories of
innumerable loves in the past, a host of the phantoms of you seeking
in your momentary ego the joy of Love over again. Schopenhauer, with
much pride, quotes Rochefoucauld as having said that "love may be
compared to a ghost since it is something we talk about but have
never seen." Precisely; but this is no antagonistic statement, as
Schopenhauer supposed. Rather than belittling the beauty of Love,
it is an unconscious defence of a very great truth. Love can only
be compared with Love. There is nothing else to compare it with. No
one has seen Love, because no one has seen God. A little child plays
at funerals and tenderly buries a dead butterfly, not because it
understands the mystery of Death, but because Love prompted the action.
And so we love without knowing the why and the wherefore. Scientists
have already proved that first love is not controlled by either of
the individuals loving; that it is but the expression of thousands
of tendencies in past lives. That Love can be ever personal, ever
limited to the individual, is unthinkable. We must recognise some day
that those countless tendencies, those strivings after men and women
seeming to hold our souls' affinities, were but the momentary finding
of God in His creatures. We do not love a woman merely because she is
pretty, possesses a pleasing mannerism. We love her because, in an
indescribable way, she sings a song we alone can fully understand,
a voice that lifts up our soul and makes it strong. We follow that
Invisible Figure from land to land, from heart to heart, from Death
into Life, on and on. When Love loves Love for its own sake, when the
self is dead, we shall meet Him. We shall find the Beloved to be the
Perfection, the realisation of that strong desire that made us lose
ourselves in others. The more we lose ourselves in God the more we
find Him. Men and women love and die. But Love is a Divine Essence
working through and through innumerable lives for its own eternal
glory. Personality is limited only to the finite world--perhaps a
phase or two beyond the grave. Even that is the sum-total of countless
so-called personalities in the past. We love instinctively. If it
was wholly physical then it dies with the death of the object. If
it was infinitely more than that, if it was the love of Goodness
and Purity and the Beautiful it lives on for ever. But these things
live not eternally in humanity. They are parts of that all-pervading
Essence--the Love Divine. Love God's light in men and women, and not
the lanterns through which It shines, for human bodies must turn to
dust; human memories, human desires, fade away. But the love of the
All-Good, All-Beautiful remains, and when such is found in earthly love
it is God finding Himself in you, and you in Him. That is the supreme
teaching of Súfíism, the religion of Love.
[Footnote 1: _A Literary History of Persia_, vol. i.]
[Footnote 2: "Among the Adepts and Mystics of Hindostam." _The Occult
Review_, December, 1905.]
[Footnote 3: For further extracts from Súfí writers see _A Historical
Enquiry concerning the Origin and Development of Súfíism_, By R. A.
Nicholson. _The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, March, 1906.]
[Footnote 4: See _History of Ottoman Poetry_, by E. G. W. Gibb, vol. i.]
[Footnote 5: Translation by Professor E. G. Browne.]
[Footnote 6: Compare the Alexandrian doctrine of Emanations. Also
Jámí's _Lawā'ih_. Translated by E. H. Whinfield and Mūrzā Muhammad
Kazvīnī.]
[Footnote 7: _Life of Sir Richard Burton_. 2 vols. By Thomas Wright.]