The First Beloved

<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png" width="1280" height="720" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!wwRW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d68128-feaf-4895-a0f2-4d00b967cb04_1280x720.png"></a></figure></div><p>Sometime in tenth-century Basra, an anonymous brotherhood set down fifty-two epistles and hid their names inside them. The thirty-seventh treats love. They filed it under the sciences of the soul, between an epistle on the cycles of the heavens and one on resurrection. It opens with the sleepless lover, wasting and hollow-eyed, and it closes with the turning of the spheres. What follows is that epistle, carried over rather than explained. The Brethren speak for themselves.</p><div><hr></div><h2>What the sages have said about love</h2><p>They begin by gathering the verdicts of those who came before them, and they refuse none of them outright.</p><blockquote><p>Know that the sages have said much in the sciences and the ways of knowledge and the wonders of wisdom, in mathematics and natural philosophy and metaphysics and the divine sciences, and some of that knowledge is finer than the rest. We wish to set down in this epistle something of what the sages and philosophers have said concerning the nature of love: its kinds, how it arises and from where, the causes that bring it into being, the occasions that call it forth, and its furthest purpose; since it is a thing present in the world, rooted in the nature of souls always, never absent so long as creation endures.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><p>The catalogue that follows sets blame beside praise and leaves both standing.</p><blockquote><p>Some of the sages have named love and blamed it, and recounted the faults of its people and the ugliness of its causes, and claimed it a vice. Some said love is a virtue of the soul, and praised it, and recounted the merits of its people. Some did not stand upon its secrets and causes, and claimed it a sickness of the soul. Some said it is a divine madness. Some claimed it the idle passion of an empty soul. Some claimed it the work of the idle and unoccupied, who have nothing to do.</p><p>By my life, love does leave the soul empty of every care except the care of the beloved, and the long remembrance of him, and the thought of his affair, and the surging of the heart, and the bewilderment in him. But that is not the work of the idle and the empty, as one claims who has no experience of hidden things and fine secrets, and knows of affairs only what shows itself to the senses.</p></blockquote><p>They explain, with a physician’s eye, why some called it illness and others called it possession.</p><blockquote><p>Those who claimed that love is a sickness of the soul said so only because they saw what befalls lovers: the wakefulness of the night, the wasting of the body, the sinking of the eyes, the racing of the pulse, and the drawn sighing, as befalls the sick. And those who claimed it a divine madness said so only because they found for it no medicine to treat the lovers with, and no draught to give them, that they might recover from the trial they are in, except prayer to God, and almsgiving, and offerings in the temples, and the incantations of the priests.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><div><hr></div><h2></h2><div><div><div><p>Spiritualrelief's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div><h2>Longing toward union</h2><p>Among the definitions, the Brethren single one out as the soundest, and they take care to say what it rules out.</p><blockquote><p>Some of the sages claimed that love is excess of affection and intensity of inclination toward one kind of being rather than the rest, and toward one person rather than the rest. If love is this, then no one is free of it; for none is found who does not love and incline toward some thing more than is needful.</p><p>Some said love is the intensity of longing for union. This is the soundest of what has been said, and the finest of what has been pointed to. For union belongs to spiritual things and the states of the soul. Bodily things admit no union, but only nearness, mingling, and contact. Union is in the things of the soul.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><p>A verse carries the longing further than the prose will:</p><blockquote><p>I embrace her, and my soul still longs toward her; is there any nearness beyond the embrace? I kiss her mouth to quiet my passion, and what I suffer of longing only grows. As if my heart will not be healed of its thirst save that it see the two spirits mingle.</p></blockquote><div><hr></div><h2>The seed and the glance</h2><p>Love, for the Brethren, is a slow growth traced from a first look.</p><blockquote><p>The beginning of love, and its first, is a glance or a turning toward some person; and the likeness of it is like a seed sown, or a branch planted, or a drop fallen into a human womb. The glances and looks that follow are like matter pouring into that place, and it grows and increases with the passing of days, until it becomes a tree, or an embryo. For the aim of the lover and his wish is nearness to that person; and when that is granted and made easy, he wishes for seclusion and company; and when that is made easy, he wishes for the embrace and the kiss; and when that is made easy, he wishes to enter under a single garment and to hold close with every limb as much as he can. And with all of this the longing remains as it was, lessening in nothing, but increasing and growing.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>Three souls, three loves</h2><p>The Brethren divide the soul in three, and give each its proper object. This division carries the whole epistle.</p><blockquote><p>Know, my brother, that since the embodied souls are three kinds, as the sages and philosophers have said, their beloveds too are three kinds. There is the vegetal, appetitive soul, and its love is toward foods and drinks and couplings. There is the irascible, animal soul, and its love is toward domination and victory and the love of rule. And there is the rational soul, and its love is toward knowledge and the gaining of virtues.</p><p>No one of mankind is free of one of these three kinds, or is found taking a share of each, little or much.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>The single bond</h2><p>Beneath every particular love the Brethren set one design: a yearning built into the structure of things, downward as mercy and upward as desire.</p><blockquote><p>Know that the divine wisdom and the lordly providence have bound the ends of all beings to one another in a single bond, and ordered them in a single order. For since some beings are causes and some are effects, some first and some second, there was set in the make of the effects a yearning toward their causes and a longing for them, and there was set likewise in the make of the causes a tenderness and a mercy and a compassion toward their effects; as is found in fathers and mothers toward their children, and in the great toward the small, and in the strong toward the weak, for the great need the small have of the help of the strong.</p></blockquote><p>And the proof of it comes as a remembered saying, asked of a chief by a king.</p><blockquote><p>So answered the chief of Quraysh and its sage, when Khusraw asked him: which of your children is dearest to you? He said: the youngest of them until he grows, and the sick of them until he is healed, and the absent of them until he returns.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>The ladder of the beloved</h2><p>Before the ascent, the Brethren lay out the whole field of love at once, from mating to charity to knowledge passed down the centuries.</p><blockquote><p>Among the kinds of beloved is the love of animals for coupling and mating, for what is in it of the survival of offspring; and the love of mothers and fathers for children, their tenderness toward the small and their rearing of them and their care over them; and the love of the masters of rule for rule, and their eagerness in seeking it, and their guarding of those under them; and the love of craftsmen for showing their crafts and their eagerness to perfect them; and the love of merchants for their trades, and the love of those who desire the world for the gathering and storing of it; and the love of the learned and the wise for drawing out the sciences and describing the disciplines and teaching them and searching out hidden things and recording them in books, nation after nation and age after age, for what is in it of the quickening of souls and the mending of character and the welfare of religion and the world together; and the love of charity and kindness; and the love of one’s own kind, which is called passionate love.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><p>Then the epistle turns the catalogue into an ascent. The same faculty that loves a toy will, when trained, love what the toy was standing in for.</p><blockquote><p>Know that the beloveds of souls are of many kinds, and they are according to the rank of the souls in knowledge and their degree in understanding. The appetitive soul is not fitted for the love of rule and domination; nor is the animal soul fitted for the love of knowledge and the gaining of virtues; nor is the angelic soul fitted for the love of bodies and being with the fleshly, bloody frames. What befits it is the love of parting from bodies, and the ascent to the kingdom of heaven, and the ranging in the wide expanse of the spheres.</p><p>The example of this is the souls of children and of the deficient among people: they do not love or desire anything but play, and the painted, adorned images that suit the rank of their souls. When they come to reason and learn and are trained, their aspirations rise, and their souls are occupied with what is more real than that, which is the form and beauty and adornment found in the shapes and fleshly bodies of animals and people. And when their souls are trained in the divine sciences and the lordly knowledge, their souls rise also above these forms and painted images set in flesh and blood, to what is nobler and finer; which is the form belonging to the souls of beauty and splendor and perfection, that the rational, delivered souls behold in the world of spirits.</p></blockquote><p>The whole apparatus of love, then, is a single virtue placed in creation to draw the lower toward the higher.</p><blockquote><p>They said: were love not present in creation, all these virtues would lie hidden, and would not appear, nor would those vices be known. So it has become clear from what we have said that affection and love are a virtue that has appeared in creation, a lofty wisdom and a precious, wondrous trait; that is from the grace of God upon His creatures, and His care for their welfare, and a guide for them to Him, and an urging of them toward what He has commanded.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>Stronger in love</h2><p>Every love so far has had a parting in it. The Brethren now name the one love that does not.</p><blockquote><p>When the rational soul wakes from the sleep of heedlessness, and rouses from the slumber of ignorance, and the eye of insight opens for it, and it beholds its world and knows its origin and its return, it longs then for its Maker, and yearns and inclines toward Him as the lover inclines toward his beloved. To this He pointed in His saying: <em>and those who believe are stronger in love of God</em>; that is, than every beloved besides Him.</p><p>Every lover of a thing, longing for it and bewildered by it, when he reaches it and gains what he desires of it and attains his need of enjoyment in its nearness, must one day part from it, or weary of it, or change toward it, and that sweetness goes and fades, and the flame of that longing dies down; except those who love God among the believers, and those who long for Him among His righteous servants. For them, each day, there is from their beloved a nearness and an increase, forever and ever, without end and without limit.</p></blockquote><p>The seeing they are promised is unhooked from every image. The Brethren press the words until they will hold no shape.</p><blockquote><p>The sight of the friends of God is not like the sight of persons and figures and forms and kinds and bodies and accidents in places and positions, but of a kind nobler and higher, above every bodily description and every corporeal trait. It is a seeing of light by light, for light, in light, from light, as God said: <em>God is the light of the heavens and the earth</em>; that is, neither formal nor material.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><p>And the place where He is found is given as an old report, plainly.</p><blockquote><p>It is related of Moses that he called to his Lord and said: my Lord, where do I find You? And He said: with those whose hearts are broken for My sake. And he said: worship God as if you see Him; for if you do not see Him, He sees you.</p></blockquote><div><hr></div><h2>Why love was placed in the soul</h2><p>The Brethren now state the purpose of the whole machinery of attraction. The beauty of bodies is real, and it is a summons.</p><blockquote><p>The furthest purpose of love being present in the make of souls, and their love of bodies and their finding them fair, and their longing toward the various beloveds, all of this is only a waking of the soul from the sleep of heedlessness and the slumber of ignorance, and a training of it, and a lifting of it, and a raising from the sensible bodily things to the intelligible things of the soul, and from the corporeal rank to the spiritual beauties; and a guide to the knowledge of its own substance and the nobility of its origin and the beauty of its world and the welfare of its return.</p></blockquote><p>The fairness on the surface of bodies, they say, was set there as a lure, drawn by a higher hand.</p><blockquote><p>All the beauty and adornment and every desired thing seen on the surfaces of bodies are only pigments and inscriptions and traces that the Universal Soul has drawn in prime matter, and with which it has adorned the surfaces of bodies; so that when the partial souls look upon them they long toward them and yearn for them, and set out to seek them by looking and pondering and reflecting; all of this so that those inscriptions and beauties take form in the soul itself and are imprinted in its substance. Then, when those bodily persons are absent from the witnessing of the senses, those inscriptions and forms, beloved and desired, remain pictured within it, a pure spiritual form, abiding with it, its beloveds united to it, fearing neither their parting nor their loss, ever.</p></blockquote><p>The proof they give is the experience of any lover who has lost a face and kept it.</p><blockquote><p>The proof of what we have said is the knowledge of one who loved, some day of his life, a certain person, then was consoled of him, or lost him, or he changed; then found him afterward changed from the beauty he had known. When he turns and looks to those inscriptions and forms that remain in his soul from the old time, he finds them in their state, unchanged. He beholds then in himself the beauty and the forms he used to see before, and finds within his own substance what he had been seeking outside himself. Then it becomes clear to him that the truly beloved was those very inscriptions and forms he used to see on that person, which he now sees engraved in his soul, pictured in his essence, abiding, unchanged.</p></blockquote><p>The one who reaches this is loosed from a sickness the Brethren describe without pity, in a borrowed verse.</p><blockquote><p>His soul rested then from its toil and its weariness and the hardship of keeping company with another, and was freed from the sickness that never ceases to befall the lovers of bodies and the desirers of frames, as they have described it in their verses and complained of in their states; as one of them said:</p><p>There is none on earth more wretched than a lover, though he find his passion sweet to the taste. You see him weeping at every hour, in fear of parting, or out of longing. He weeps in yearning when the beloved is far, and weeps in dread of parting when near; his eye runs hot at the separation, and runs hot again at the meeting.</p></blockquote><p>So the wise are marked off from the common by where the same sight carries them.</p><blockquote><p>The common among people are those who, when they see a fair-made thing or an adorned person, their souls long to look at it and draw near it. The elect are the sages, who, when they see a well-wrought craft, their souls long for its wise Maker, its knowing Originator, its merciful Fashioner, and cling to Him and find rest in Him, and strive to resemble Him in their crafts and to follow Him in their deeds, in word and act and knowledge and work.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>The First Beloved</h2><p>The ascent runs out past the souls of the wise into the cosmos itself. The Universal Soul loves the way a soul loves, and the heavens move on that love.</p><blockquote><p>The souls of the wise strive, in their deeds and knowledge and characters, to resemble the Universal, celestial Soul, and they wish to be joined to it. And the Universal Soul likewise resembles the Maker in its turning of the spheres and its moving of the stars and its bringing of beings into being, all of that in obedience to its Maker and worship of Him and longing toward Him. For this the sages said: God is the First Beloved, and the sphere turns only out of longing toward Him and love of permanence and long duration, upon the fullest of states and the most complete of ends.</p></blockquote><p>And then the image your eye first fell on. The good descends as light descends, order by order, each rank borrowing from the one above.</p><blockquote><p>All those beauties and virtues and goods are only from the overflow of God and the irradiation of His light upon the Universal Intellect, and from the Universal Intellect upon the Universal Soul, and from the Universal Soul upon prime matter; and they are the forms that the partial souls see, in the world of bodies, on the surfaces of persons and bodies, from the encompassing sphere to the center of the earth.</p><p>The likeness of the flowing of those lights and beauties, from their first to their last, is like the flowing of the light and the radiance on the night of the full moon, issuing from the body of the moon onto the air; and what is on the body of the moon is from the sun; and what is on the body of the sun and all the stars is from the irradiation of the Universal Soul; and what is on the Universal Soul is from the Universal Intellect; and what is on the Universal Intellect is from the overflow of the Maker and His irradiation, as God said: <em>God is the light of the heavens and the earth</em>.</p></blockquote><p>The conclusion is drawn in the open.</p><blockquote><p>So it has become clear from what we have said that God is the First Beloved, and that all beings long toward Him, and aim toward Him, and to Him the whole matter returns; for by Him is their existence, their subsistence, their permanence, their duration, and their perfection. For He is the pure Existent, and His is the everlasting permanence and duration, and the supported fullness and completeness.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><div><hr></div><h2>The light completed</h2><p>The epistle ends, as the Brethren end, by turning from the argument to the reader, and naming the company he might be brought into.</p><blockquote><p>May God bring you, my brother, to Him, and complete your light, as He promised His friends and His chosen among His servants; that is His saying: <em>the day you see the believing men and the believing women, their light running before them and on their right hands, saying: our Lord, complete for us our light, and forgive us; surely You are powerful over all things</em>.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, “On the Nature of Love”</em></p><p>From the hollow-eyed lover at the start to the light running before the believers at the close, the brotherhood has moved a single thread the whole way. The longing in the body and the turning of the outermost sphere are the same longing, read at two ends of one descent.</p><div><div><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/BAo3F4003ag?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" width="728" height="409"></iframe></div></div> <p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/the-first-beloved" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/gXwHmp1 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>