Majesty & Beauty

Sunrise, Dec 8, 2018

The Mercy and Generosity of God offer access into the Unknowable—limited access but as much as humans can contain—offered through complementary opposites. In this season, the pairing of Majesty&Beauty especially stands out. As we’re experiencing the edge of winter, with the loss of fruit, flowers, even leaves, finding beauty seems harder than it was in the lovely spring, in the abundant summer, and in autumnal color. My camera has to search into a different dimension of majesty, into the power that moves through loss. 

I’m learning to play with special effects. They force the questions around truth and reality. How might creativity and imagination lead into in-sight and under-standing of the Eternal Essence of Life. Perhaps the Severe guides toward a sense that more can be known than is reflected in the “realistic” image. Perhaps imaginative play with special effects can still ask for truth but for Truth that passes understanding and that still guards the heart-mind (cf. Phil. 4:7). 

Certain readings are providing strong guidance. Many of the passages that discuss this Beauty/Majesty dynamic contain “unsayings,” a concept developed very helpfully by Michael Sells in Mystical Languages of Unsaying. So we can expect to feel, even to be reassured by the presence of paradox. It’s like the hunter in Iron John who recognizes the track by the mark of trouble in the deep forest: the dogs have gone in and have not returned.

In Chapter 2, “Divine Duality,” Sachiko Murata includes a section on Majesty and Beauty (pp. 69-74, The Tao of Islam). In it, she cites, quotes, and elaborates several classic texts on the Majesty-Beauty dynamic. For background, she references Annemarie Schimmel and Rumi. Schimmel situates the pair in a special kind of spiritual knowing: 

“Rumi’s favourite idea is that things can be known only through their opposites—if a bird has tasted sweet water he will understand the brackish taste of the water in his native brooklet.God’s twofold aspects are revealed in everything on earth: He is the Merciful and the Wrathful; His is jamal, Beauty beyond all beauties, and jalal, Majesty transcending all majesties (twentieth century Western history of religion invented the juxtaposition of the mysterium tremendum and the mysterium fascinans to come closer to God’s attributes).” From pp. 230-1, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi. Schimmel also footnotes Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy “which couches in scientific terms—tremendum and fascinans—the two aspects of the Experience of the Holy, as they had been known to the Sufis for centuries” (p. 448).

In addition to Rumi (d. 1273), Murata cites Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209) in order to show the nature of vision felt in the Majesty-Beauty dynamic: 

“The unveiling of beauty is the place where spirits are plundered through passionate affection, yearning, and love. Through it the gnostic is given the ability to travel through the attributes and to remain constant in the vision of eternity and subsistence. The gnostic says, ‘The station of the witnessing of beauty demands intoxication, ecstasy, and turmoil.’ 

The vision of majesty is the station in which the elect are overcome by fear, dread, veneration, and reverence. The gnostic says, ‘The vision of majesty distracts the spirits and upsets the bodies.’” (quoted on p. 73, Tao of Islam)

As hinted at the beginning with the focus on finding beauty in winter, our vision may need further development if we are to progress on the path of beauty, of love, of God. This development moves into the remaking of meaning that surrenders attachment to pleasure, to indifference, to self. To elaborate this, Murata references Chittick’s Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi where Chittick translates a passage from the Mathnawi:

“Pain is an alchemy that renovates—where is indifference when pain intervenes? 

Beware, do not sigh coldly in your indifference! Seek pain! Seek pain, pain, pain!”   (lines 4304-4, Book VI, quoted on p. 72 in Tao of Islam and p. 208 in Sufi Path of Love)

Chittick quotes these lines in a section, “Love and Beauty: True and Derivative” which is in Part 3, Attainment to God. He also explicates the lines:

“In the present context Rumi explains the nature of beauty clearly and succinctly: It is a drop of spray from the infinite Ocean, or a ray of light shining upon a wall. All beauty derives from the other world, so here it is borrowed and ephemeral. True Beauty pertains only to God” (p. 201).

Chittick again cites the line and elaborates in a later section on Separation and Union: 

“Rumi considers this awareness of pain (dard) as the doorway to the path of Love, and he advises us, ‘Seek pain! Seek pain! pain, pain!’ Man cannot truly understand the meaning of pain and ‘suffering’ (rani) until he becomes aware of his state of separation” (p. 237)

As noted, Rumi’s “seek-pain” line comes from the sixth and concluding book of the Mathnawi. Nicholson’s translation has the lines this way:

“Passion is the elixir that makes (things) new: how (can there be) weariness where passion has arisen?Oh, do not sigh heavily from weariness: seek passion, seek passion, passion, passion!

The passage comes all mixed-up, Rumi-style (Alan Williams describes seven interwoven types of discourse in the Mathnawi's narratives), in a story beginning a hundred lines earlier about a man of Baghdad who has squandered his rich inheritance and who then dreams that his hopes of opulence could be fulfilled in Cairo. After traveling there, he’s reduced to begging for food and is assaulted as a robber by the night patrol. As he tells his story from the heart, the patrolman is touched and assists the treasure-seeker toward the revelation that the great treasure, the Water of Life, can only be found back in his own home. The unveiling of the treasure, the Beauty, the Beloved, apparently cannot be gained without Majesty. Through the hard journey comes the revelation. It seems that the growth of eyes-to-see depends on passion and is often experienced as severity and suffering.

A compelling theme for civilization, wisdom literature, and spirituality teaches the Hidden Treasure, the archetypal pearl of great price. In summarizing her chapter on Divine Duality, Murata says:

God created the cosmos to make the Hidden Treasure manifest. Only after that can He be known by the creatures, who themselves are part of the Hidden Treasure. . . Once God creates the cosmos out of love and mercy, He is concerned to nurture knowledge of Himself in the others, since all reality and bliss lie in the Real, the Blissful. (p. 77)