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Love and Beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from one another. — Jami
The human experience of beauty and the sublime has always been a predominant theme in Sufism. The spiritual traveler experiences beauty and the sublime through the encounter with worldly events or objects. Our experience of beauty and the sublime in the world is a gateway to our experience of the divine, which in turn gives rise to our love for God.
Though they are often spoken of together, beauty and the sublime can produce different effects in the human heart and mind. The Persian Sufi poet, Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi (d. 1213), defines the experience of divine beauty (jamal or hosn) as “the divine disclosure of perfected qualities to us that results from our striving and quest for the divine.” The perfected qualities he refers to are attributes such as goodness, compassion, mercy, purity of thought and action, truthfulness, forgiveness, and acts of kindness. The experience of beauty is then the witnessing of such qualities in the world. When we experience God through the manifestations of His beauty in the world, we come to love God. The more we strive to purify ourselves and to rid ourselves of base qualities, or as ‘Iraqi puts it, the greater our “striving and quest for the divine,” the more God reveals His beauty and the more we fall in love.
The relationship between love and beauty in Sufism is well illustrated by the following story about the great Persian Sufi Ruzbehan Baqli (d. 1209). During a sermon he was invited to give in Shiraz, Ruzbehan told of an encounter he had just before he entered the mosque. He had overheard a mother telling her daughter to cover her beautiful face so that no one would fall into temptation on account of her radiant beauty. But Ruzbehan stopped and said to the mother, “Your daughter will not listen to you. She is beautiful and beauty will not rest until it is united with love.”
The experience of the sublime (jalal), on the other hand, is God’s disclosure of His majestic qualities such as power, transcendence, ineffability and disruptiveness. According to ‘Iraqi, by disclosing these aspects God wants to show us that He is not in need of our worship and love and that He transcends our thoughts and images of Him. The Sufi is the one who is as much in love with the sublime aspect of God as he or she is in love with divine beauty. Experiencing qualities of the sublime such as power and disruptiveness can, in a way, lead us to the experience of unconditional love. Anyone can love God when the events in the world turn out to be in accord with their wishes; the real test of our love comes when we face hardship and misfortune in our lives. As Shakespeare puts it: “The course of true love never did run smooth.”
In the experience of divine beauty we are mostly the main agent of our transformation. The divine is simply reacting to our striving for purification inspired by the feeling of love for Him. The more we purify ourselves, the more God reveals His beauty and the more we fall in love. However, in our experience of the sublime, the divine takes a more proactive role in our transformation: by exposing us to His sublime qualities, it is as though God wants to test our love. When we are faced with destructive forces in our lives, or with what we perceive to be acts of evil in the world, we feel powerless and are shaken by such experiences. It is as though God were telling us, “I am far beyond your comprehension and I am not in need of your love or understanding. Do you still love Me?” For the Sufis, beauty and the sublime are two aspects of the same Reality. Loving God means loving both aspects of this Reality.
Throughout history, philosophers have pondered the nature of beauty and the sublime, offering ways of interpreting these concepts. Two eighteenth-century Western philosophers focused on the experience of beauty and the sublime in its own right without invoking God or love in their analysis of such experiences. Edmund Burke (d. 1797) and Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) spoke of the experience of beauty as distinct from the experience of the sublime. For both of them the experience of the sublime, in contrast with the experience of beauty, is overwhelming, disruptive and formless. Looking down at a vast desert or looking up at a towering mountain or being caught in a violent storm may give rise to such an experience. Moreover, immensity, greatness and vastness in our experience of the sublime may create in us a sense of fear, insignificance and the feeling of the unknown. The experience of beauty is, on the other hand, comforting and pleasurable. However, for Kant the experience of beauty is far more than our experience of the pleasant. Pleasurable experiences, unlike aesthetic experiences, are personal and are bound up with interest and desire. Eating food may be a pleasurable experience in that we gratify our hunger, but it is not a beautiful experience. But when we experience beauty by, for example, listening to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, our judgment is not tainted with self-interest or selfish desires.
For Burke, the experience of the sublime may create a sense of insignificance and ultimately humility in us which can perhaps make us more tolerant and cooperative in our interaction with others. Kant, on the other hand, thought that such experiences can reveal something to us about the limitations of our sensory perceptions and mental faculties. For Kant the subjective experience of the sublime shows us the limit of our knowledge. Anyone who looks at the clear sky at night and witnesses the vastness of the universe may experience such a boundlessness that the concepts of totality and infinity come to mind. We encounter something that is formless and boundless and we are unable to form an image of it. The sublime, for Kant, presents itself by revealing the limitation of our senses.
The Kantian or Burkean approaches to the human experience of beauty and the sublime are purely rational and the goal of such an exercise is to understand with the mind the nature and the meaning of such experiences. The Sufis’ aim, on the other hand, is not so much to understand the experience of beauty and the sublime intellectually, but to see it as a stepping stone and be guided by such an experience towards purification of the self and, ultimately, unconditional love of God.
The question now arises as to which approach we should adopt in life in dealing with our experience of beauty and the sublime. Should we live by the Kantian approach of analyzing and understanding our experience without ascribing any spiritual or divine significance to it? Or should we refrain from any analysis of our experience and, like the Sufis, let the experience take us wherever it will with the least of intervention and questioning from us?
I believe we need a combination of both approaches in our lives. We need a critical approach to our experience to make sense of it and avoid any pitfalls set by our own emotions and self-interest. A blind acceptance of our experience and its spiritual significance could push us towards fanaticism. In some spiritual schools, including Sufism, it is the community and ultimately the guide or the teacher who can provide the correct insight to unravel such experiences and ultimately help people to make a positive change in their lives. The validity of such experiences rests in how they can help us through the process of purification of the self and spiritual advancement.
There are, however, many so-called religious schools or spiritual disciplines that enforce a radical interpretation of one’s spiritual experience. For some, the experience of beauty and the sublime may mean the coming of the Messiah and the end of the world. Moreover, religious experience throughout human history has been used to justify violence against others. It is here that a Kantian approach of analyzing the experience may help to dismantle the elements of self-delusion. A Kantian approach starts by asking whether such experiences are common to humanity or whether they are the result of the individual’s idiosyncratic way of life and primarily caused by the individual’s self-interest and wishful thinking. If the latter, it is the individual who has to change by adopting a different way of life. Such experiences do not reveal anything about the nature of human beings and therefore have no validity.
Though intellectual analysis of our experience may help us avoid blind acceptance or fanaticism, it cannot be the only lens that we look through if we are to become a better person. Ignoring our experiences of beauty and the sublime as a doorway towards the spiritual realm is to reject the path of transcending our everyday mundane existence. A purely intellectual approach to our experience of beauty and the sublime does not help us to grow emotionally and spiritually. By emotional growth I mean fostering our sense of awareness of other people—or even animals and the natural world—and their needs, and subsequently developing a feeling of empathy for all of the creatures around us. By spiritual growth I mean striving to cultivate in ourselves an unwavering love and compassion for everything. This can happen only when we see the beauty in others, and following the example of the Sufis, we let the experience of beauty take us to the state of perpetual and unconditional love.