The Test of the Veil

5

by Tom Cheetham

Are You Alive?

In his profound and beautiful book on the great Islamic mystic Ibn‘Arabi, Henry Corbin recounts an incident from the Master’s life thatilluminates the question at the heart of the soul’s journey. It lingers inmy mind as one of the most powerful passages in all of Corbin’s great

opus

. In Mecca in the year 1201 (A.H. 598) the mystic and poet wasa guest in the home of an Iranian family originally from Isfahan. The

daughter of the house was a gure of surpassing intelligence, beauty

and spiritual discernment. Her name was Nizam, ‘ayn al-Shams wa’l-Baha’, which is Harmonia, Eye of the Sun and of Beauty. As Beatricedid for Dante, so she revealed the human face of the eternal Sophiafor Ibn ‘Arabi. One day in contemplation while performing the ritualcircumambulation of the Ka’aba, the poet recited these desolate linesto himself:Ah! to know if

they

know what heart

they

have possessed!How my heart would like to know what mountain paths theyhave taken!Ought you to suppose them safe and sound, or to suppose that

they

have perished?The

fedeli d’amore

remain perplexed in love, exposed to every peril.

1

We know from Ibn ‘Arabi’s own commentary that

they

are the Indi-viduations of Eternal Wisdom, the personal theophanies of the divinelove that binds together the mystic and his Lord. The words expressthe anguish of the lover whose beloved has withdrawn, of the mystic

who has lost contact with the gure of the Lord, and of all who have

come to doubt the existence of the divine Beloved. The

fedeli d’amore

,the Faithful in Love, the Italian phrase for Dante’s companions, is the

1

Henry Corbin,

Creative Imagination in the Sufsm

of Ibn ‘Arabi

. Translated byRalph Manheim, Princeton/ Bollingen Series XCI, 1969. (Re-issued as

Alone withthe Alone

. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 140.

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translation Corbin favors for a group of words in Persian and Arabicthat his mystical lovers of God use to designate themselves.

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While lost in his melancholy, Ibn ‘Arabi was startled by the touchof Nizam emerging from the crowd, who had overheard his cry of distress. Astounded by his question, she reprimanded him at length,concluding with these heart-stopping words:And what did you ask…: Ought you to suppose them safeand sound, or to suppose that they have perished?—As for them, they are safe and sound. But one cannot help wonder-ing about you: Are you safe and sound, or have you perished,O my Lord?The gentle tone of her chastisement underlines the profundity of her question. For the crisis of doubt opens the way to despair. It initiatesa re-orientation of cosmic proportions. At times it happens that in lessthan a heartbeat the center of Creation shifts from God to the humansoul. The limitless plenitude of a sacred world collapses to the con-

nes of a nite and darkened mind. But the contraction is unstable,

and the void is soon compensated by a mad expansion of the humanwill. The abandoned soul becomes the measure of all things. Whilethe world had been a mysterious and luminous window, it becomes a

reection of the human soul and its isolated imaginings. The order of

things is inverted, turned inside-out. Nizam’s ironic question,

Have you perished My Lord?

is a call to turn back, to re-turn, and signals arevolution of the heart that can heal both disorientation and despair.

They

are safe. There is no need to wonder about them. It is we whohave perished. The doubt arises in

us.

It does not affect God or theAngels. But for us it is fatal.The soul does, somehow, contain all things, as Aristotle said. TheKingdom of God

is

within us. But our inner depths become opaqueand we are barred from the Kingdom when we lose our connection toour Angel. We become, in a word, unconscious. But this unconscious-ness is a blindness to the

supraconscious

, for it means being cut off from the Celestial Pole. Unconsciousness of our source and origin isa fall into darkness from which we may escape only with great travail.It is a measure of the power of our desire to return Home that thedarkened and disoriented human soul can so expand in hubris and in power as to eclipse God and threaten all Creation. Without a Guide,

2

See ibid., 110.

Tom Cheetham

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the anguish of abandonment that begins as an intimate and personaldespair expands to become public and dogmatic a-gnosticism thatdescends naturally into nihilism.To be unconscious in this way is to be unbalanced in the absence

of the gure of the Heavenly Twin, the Angel Holy Spirit who is the

Orient of the soul and the foundation of all community. Bereft of

any consciousness of this gure I am abandoned. My anguish and

despair are mine, and I am alone. But because I am plunged intounconsciousness there appears no boundary to my soul and my pas-

sions seem to ll all the cosmos. If I let them consume me, my private

terrors become absolute, and I am undone. Then I cannot sense the bounds of the doubts and fears that belong to me as a limited, fallibleand ignorant creature, and boundless, they eclipse the Angels andeven God, and so I perish in confusion and misery. Released fromthe bonds of communion, my solitary despair knows no limits and I plunge into the abyss.

This extraordinary ination, the tormented arrogance with which

the human soul becomes the measure of all things, is a form of

philautia,

self-love. The love which is properly turned towards theAngel and to others through whom the Angel’s beauty shines is turnedentirely inward. The energies of the soul are blocked from naturalexpression and release. The result is a chaos of emotion. MaximusConfessor, the great 7

th

century mystic and martyr, says “Whoever has

philautia

has all the passions.”

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Passion, as the term is used bythe ascetics of the early Christian church, covers all the forms of compulsion to which we are prey, and corresponds very closely towhat C.G. Jung called a complex. Maximus tells us that

philautia

isa form of idolatry, that we are idolators of ourselves, and that this isthe root of all the passions.And so it seems we cannot turn away from the Angel, for to do

so invites only inevitable madness and death. But here we nd a great

paradox. We cannot turn away, and yet we must. For to come into being at all as creatures distinct from the Creator, we must exist atsome remove from the source of our being. Otherwise we would haveno independent being whatever, and there would be no creatures, noCreation. Our eternal individualities would be impossible. For us to

be

at all there must be an original separation, a fall or a rupture giving

3

Olivier Clément,

The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts From the Patristic Era with Commentary

(London: New City Press, 1993), 134.

The Test of the Veil