—a couplet which [FitzGerald] moulded into the magnificent stanza:
“Heav’n but the Vision of fulfilled Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.”
Jalāluddīn, therefore, does in a sense make God the author of evil, but at the same time he makes evil intrinsically good in relation to God—for it is the reflexion of certain divine attributes which in themselves are absolutely good. So far as evil is really evil, it springs from not-being. The poet assigns a different value to this term in its relation to God and in its relation to man. In respect of God not-being is nothing, for God is real Being, but in man it is the principle of evil which constitutes half of human nature. In the one case it is a pure negation, in the other it is positively and actively pernicious. We need not quarrel with the poet for coming to grief in his logic. There are some occasions when intense moral feeling is worth any amount of accurate thinking.
It is evident that the doctrine of divine unity implies predestination. Where God is and naught beside Him, there can be no other agent than He, no act but His. “Thou didst not throw, when thou threwest, but God threw” (Kor. 8. 17). Compulsion is felt only by those who do not love. To know God is to love Him; and the gnostic may answer, like the dervish who was asked how he fared:
“I fare as one by whose majestic will
The world revolves, floods rise and rivers flow,
Stars in their courses move; yea, death and life