~Frithjof Schuon
Love seems to be the only element capable of uniting the soul to God,
for it alone is desire of possession or union—a desire whose sublimation
can engender the greatest sacrifices—whereas knowledge, as seen
from this point of view, appears on the contrary as a static element
having no operative or unitive virtue.
To adopt this standpoint is
either a question of terminology—and then “knowledge” is taken to
mean only theory while “love” is held to exclude no mode of spiritual
union—or it shows a misconception of metaphysical “consciousness”,
which is an eminently concrete participation in transcendent realities:
far from denying love or the fear that is its complement, this consciousness
embraces them in surpassing them, and because it surpasses
them.
Before being able to “love” it is necessary to “be conscious”; the
sun pours out light before heat, as is proven by the visibility of immeasurably
distant stars; and to be conscious in the sense that interests us
here is to fix the heart in the Real, in permanent “remembering” of the
Divine. Fear distances from the world, and love brings near to God;
but consciousness “is” already something of its content or aim; it is
true that this observation is valid for other spiritual modes as well, but
in a less direct way since intellective consciousness alone transcends
human subjectivity by definition. In a certain sense love saves because
it includes the whole subject, whereas consciousness delivers because
it excludes it.
Within the framework of gnosis, love has something impersonal
about it because the love of man for God joins in a sense with that
of God for man. The divine quality of “love” is everywhere, being in
the very substance of the Universe, “created by love”; it belongs to no
single person and embraces all; it is derived in short from the supreme
Beatitude, which is at the same time divine Contemplation and creative
Will.
All men have the need in some degree or another to understand
and to love; but there are men who understand only love and act
through it alone, just as there are others who are stirred only by sapiential
consciousness; the element “truth” then takes precedence over
the element “life”, if one may so express it. The fundamental contemplation
of these souls—and not the sharpness of their intelligence on
lower planes—is equivalent to a need for total truth and cannot be
stopped by formal screens, any more than light can come to rest in
space; for these screens, being symbols, are transparent, only the blind
believing them to be opaque.
Contemplativity implies furthermore a
certain natural distance with regard to the world, not only because
things appear in their metaphysical “translucence”—outward alternatives
then lose much of their importance—but also because the
human world is shown up in all its absurdity, so that the simple fact of
enduring it is already a form of asceticism.
From: Gnosis: Divine Wisdom