‘A man comes to be the thing on which he is bent’: what, then, does the Sūfī become? Eckhart in one of his sermons quotes the saying of St. Augustine that Man is what he loves, and adds this comment:
“If he loves a stone, he is a stone; if he loves a man, he is a man; if he loves God—I dare not say more, for if I said that he would then be God, ye might stone me.”
The Moslem mystics enjoyed greater freedom of speech than their Christian brethren who owed allegiance to the medieval Catholic Church, and if they went too far the plea of ecstasy was generally accepted as a sufficient excuse. Whether they emphasise the outward or the inward aspect of unification, the transcendence or the immanence of God, their expressions are bold and uncompromising. Thus Abū Saʿīd:
“In my heart Thou dwellest—else with blood I’ll drench it;
In mine eye Thou glowest—else with tears I’ll quench it.
Only to be one with Thee my soul desireth—
Else from out my body, by hook or crook, I’ll wrench it!”
Jalāluddīn Rūmī proclaims that the soul’s love of God is God’s love of the soul, and that in loving the soul God loves Himself, for He draws home to Himself that which in its essence is divine.
“Our copper,” says the poet, “has been transmuted by this rare alchemy,” meaning that the base alloy of self has been purified and spiritualised. In another ode he says:
“O my soul, I searched from end to end: I saw in thee naught save the Beloved;