The love of the wholly Other
Contents
In a thousand forms, we are engaged in an intense search for something indestructible, something profound that escapes every contingency, every limitation, and that expresses, in boundless plenitude, a freedom, a meaning we all feel and towards which our soul aspires, sometimes with a kind of painful intensity. One expression of that aspiration is love, the mystery of love. For if the spiritual quest is a mystery, love is a mystery within the mystery. What is this love? Why is it so important, and why do we feel it as such?
Among the different forms of love, I would like to speak to you today of the love of the wholly Other: the love of that essence I spoke of at the outset, the thrust towards that inaccessible star which lies in each of us, at the heart of each of us, and towards which, consciously or unconsciously, our whole being aspires. I stress the inaccessibility, the distance, the wholly Other, because in that relationship true unity can only be realised in the awareness of a transcendence. Something must draw us ceaselessly beyond ourselves, and it is only in that place where there is no longer any awareness of you and me, where nothing remains but unity, that true union is achieved. Let us listen, for example, to Rumi, the saint of Konya and founder of the whirling dervishes, speaking of this passage from duality to unity. Love truly expresses itself when the Lover, the Beloved and Love itself are no longer anything but one: ‘When man and woman become one, you are that one. When the unities are erased, you are that unity. You fashioned this “I” and this “we” so that you might play the game of adoration with yourself, so that every “I” and every “you” might become a single soul and, in the end, be submerged in the Beloved.’
Such love is unreason, such love is madness; it runs against all the usual criteria by which our individual being rebuilds a universe around itself, an environment. It stands in opposition, or in counterpoint, or against the current of what is usually called love, which is in fact only one of the many ways of loving oneself. We love those we love because, on the whole, they send us back an image of our own love for ourselves. It is the love for one’s near ones, for the children who perpetuate us, for everything that refers back to that universe we have woven and that makes us exist. That is a reasonable love. The love of unreason, by contrast, is a love for something that no longer refers back to ourselves but reveals to us, in the mirror of the other, the mirror of otherness, a presence, a spiritual essence.
Let us listen to this other poem of Rumi’s: ‘If I seek my heart, I find it in your quarter. If I seek my soul, I find it in your hair. When, thirsty, I drink water, in the water I see the image of your face.’
For the love of the other to yield no longer the reflection of our own image but the image of his or her spiritual essence, there must be this distance, this inaccessibility. There must be this thirst, this longing. There must be this sickness of love, this pain of love, this intense desire that becomes the food we live on. There must be what in all the love poetry of the world is called the sorrow of love, a sorrow from which no lover would wish, for all the gold in the world, to be delivered. In the Song of Songs I noted these few verses: ‘I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, what will you tell him? That I am sick with love.’
That sacred flame must be lit in our hearts. We must catch fire, as Rumi himself says of his own journey, of his whole life. He sums it up in three things: ‘I was green, then I was cooked, and now I am consumed.’
That sacred fire must be recovered, because it is the weight of our being and because love, through all these tales, all these poems, all these examples of lovers, of loving men and women, tells us the secret of life. It tells us what we cannot manage to say in words, for as soon as we try to explain that secret in words, we fall into confusion. Love has its own language, its own mystery, its own truth; love is that secret language between lover and beloved, between ourselves and that ultimate point of our being where our complete freedom lies. A point at once inaccessible and closer to us than we are to ourselves. No thought, no conception, no expression can account for this mystery. It is enslavement to this love, enslavement to this mystery, that found expression in countless poems on that bondage, on those sorrows of love. A Sufi poet says: ‘If unhappiness must be the price of my love, I am ready to accept it. Try me, try me in every way, that you may know I love you in every way.’
Love as a remedy for the ego
Because in the end, and this is why this love is a remedy, love delivers us from the deepest ill of all: that ill which is always on hand to divert things, their purpose, their reality; the ill of our self, of our ego. True love, absolute love, deep love delivers us from that ego; it alone can do so, and it alone can bring us into that inaccessible beyond-ourselves.
There is one thing I also want to draw attention to: this flame of love, this enjoyment of love is so great that there is also a trap along this path. A trap that consists in loving not the beloved but love itself; in seeking not the beloved but the enjoyment of love for its own sake. I remember a verse that expresses perfectly this error of seeking love for love’s sake (however attractive it is, however much it is a trap we would gladly fall into): it is Alfred de Musset’s famous line, ‘Love is all that matters; what matters the mistress? What matters the flask, provided we have the drunkenness.’ That is one way of falling into a sort of recuperation of love itself, of no longer remaining in that tension towards the inaccessible, or remaining there only artificially, kept up for the enjoyment it affords.
Nizam, Beatrice and the inaccessible beloved
The question has often been asked, in spiritual love poetry and in Sufi poetry especially, whether the beloved is something real or unreal, because there is such ambiguity that we wonder whether we are dealing with a symbol or a reality. In the Song of Songs, for example, as in many traditions of that kind, I believe the ambiguity is intended, and cultivated. Intended because the beloved is at once real and unreal. We may also be quite astonished when we read the texts of the great Sufi mystic Ibn ’Arabi speaking of his love for a young woman he met in the city of Mecca, whose name is Nizam.
Here is a man at the height of his realisation, regarded in his lifetime as one of the greatest masters of Sufism, speaking of this woman in utterly extraordinary terms, burning with love. He even wrote a magnificent collection of poems about her, The Interpreter of Desires, in which he speaks of Nizam in terms that celebrate her beauty and her spirituality alike. Faced with the scandal these texts provoked, Ibn ’Arabi had to comment on his poems, which settled nothing, since the commentary carried the ambiguity to its ultimate expression.
The same remark can be made about Dante’s Beatrice. Here again we find that same search for the inaccessible through someone entirely concrete. This tension towards inaccessibility comes from something that calls us beyond our own frontiers, beyond ourselves. It has often been expressed in various aphorisms or sayings, among them a tradition said to be prophetic: ‘He who loves, remains chaste and dies without betraying his secret, dies a true witness.’
It has to be said, however, that inaccessibility in this case does not mean unreality. For what is at stake, what finds expression through this dimension of love, is that even when our relations are as close as can be, even in the case of direct proximity, there is in every being with whom we stand in that relation a dimension of mystery, a dimension of the divine inaccessible, which forms the secret binding us to that being. The greatest possible outward closeness must in no way exhaust that share of inaccessibility, that share of divine secret within the other. Hence the tradition that took shape as the love of the ‘lady of the tower’ in Western culture, and as all the forms of courtly spiritual poetry in Eastern culture. In that tradition, the lover is subjected to trials that clearly establish that what he loves in the other is not simply a reflection of himself but her spiritual essence, drawing him beyond himself.
True love leaves nothing
In Sufism, many things are expressed through stories, notably those of a certain eccentric and clownish character, Nasruddin.
It is said that Nasruddin was the judge of a village when a traveller, passing near the village, was robbed bare by Bedouins. The victim went to the village judge and said: ‘The thieves of your village have stripped me.’ ‘When you were stripped,’ Nasruddin asked him, ‘were you wearing this shirt you have on now?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the victim, ‘it is the only thing they left me.’ ‘Then they were not ours,’ Nasruddin concluded: ‘had they been ours, they would have left you nothing!’
In the same way, true love leaves nothing; it strips us of everything. No reflection of our self survives; all is consumed.
This love, which is not the reflection of oneself but the true love of the other in his otherness, in his spiritual essence, this love is true compassion. Those who receive this love, who receive this compassion, feel it for what it is, because compassion finds its full meaning only when it addresses itself in a specific and profound way to the one who receives it. And there can be no subterfuge there. Everything is known, everything is felt. What do outer acts matter? What matters is the inner acts and their meaning. And it is this meaning that guides, like a breath of sincerity, our thoughts, our feelings and our deeds.
Faouzi Skali
