[If the mystic’s inward voice bids him turn to anything except God, it deceives him.]
“And He said to me, ‘If thou perishest for the sake of other than Me, thou wilt belong to that for which thou hast perished.’
“And He said to me, ‘This world belongs to him whom I have turned away from it and from whom I have turned it away; and the next world [belongs to him towards whom I have brought it] and whom I have brought towards Myself.’”
[He means to say that everlasting joy is the portion of those whose hearts are turned away from this world and who have no worldly possessions. They really enjoy this world, because it cannot separate them from God. Similarly, the true owners of the next world are those who do not seek it, inasmuch as it is not the real object of their desire, but contemplate God alone.]
The gnostic descries the element of reality in positive religion, but his gnosis is not derived from religion or from any sort of human knowledge: it is properly concerned with the divine attributes, and God Himself reveals the knowledge of these to His saints who contemplate Him. Dhu ’l-Nūn of Egypt, whose mystical speculations mark him out as the father of Moslem theosophy, said that gnostics are not themselves, and do not subsist through themselves, but so far as they subsist, they subsist through God.
“They move as God causes them to move, and their words are the words of God which roll upon their tongues, and their sight is the sight of God which has entered their eyes.”
The gnostic contemplates the attributes of God, not His essence, for even in gnosis a small trace of duality remains: this disappears only in fanā al-fanā, the total passing-away in the undifferentiated Godhead. The cardinal attribute of God is unity, and the divine unity is the first and last principle of gnosis.[9]
[9] According to some mystics, the gnosis of unity constitutes a higher stage which is called ‘the Truth’ (haqīqat). See above, [p. 29].
Both Moslem and Sūfī declare that God is One, but the statement bears a different meaning in each instance. The Moslem means that God is unique in His essence, qualities, and acts; that He is absolutely unlike all other beings. The Sūfī means that God is the One Real Being which underlies all phenomena. This principle is carried to its extreme consequences, as we shall see. If nothing except God exists, then the whole universe, including man, is essentially one with God, whether it is regarded as an emanation which proceeds from Him, without impairing His unity, like sunbeams from the sun, or whether it is conceived as a mirror in which the divine attributes are reflected. But surely a God who is all in all can have no reason for thus revealing Himself: why should the One pass over into the Many? The Sūfīs answer—a philosopher would say that they evade the difficulty—by quoting the famous Tradition: “I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known; therefore I created the creation in order that I might be known.” In other words, God is the eternal Beauty, and it lies in the nature of beauty to desire love. The mystic poets have described the self-manifestation of the One with a profusion of splendid imagery. Jāmī says, for example:
“From all eternity the Beloved unveiled His beauty in the solitude of the unseen;