KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE 3]

It is true that fear stands, as it were, only at the thresh-
hold of contemplation, but, when it is spiritualised, it
can none the less bring man out of the collective dream
which the ¢ world ” is and bring him face to face with
Eternal Reality. Love is higher than fear even as
knowledge is higher than love, but this is true only of
direct, immediate knowledge which outstrips reason (or
discursive thought), for spiritual love embraces every
individual faculty and imprints each of them with the
seal of Unity.!

In his Mahasin al-Majalis Ahmed ibn al-‘Arif says
that love (al-mahabbah) is “the beginning of the valleys
of extinction (fana) and the hill from which there is
a descent towards the stages of self-naughting (al-mahu);
it is the last of the stages where the advance guard of
the mass of believers meets the rear guard of the elect.”
Muhyi-d-Din ibn ‘Arabi on the other hand considers
love to be the highest station of the soul and subordinates
to it every possible human perfection. This may seem
strange, coming as it does from one of the most eminent
of the representatives of the way of knowledge. The
explanation is that, for Ibn Arabi, knowledge is not a
station of the soul. In the perfection of knowledge
nothing specifically human remains since such know-
ledge is identified with its object, the Divine Reality. In
its immediate actuality knowledge can thus no longer be
attributed to man or to the soul but only to God, since
it no longer has any psychic outline. - At the same time

1. On the question of knowledge and love and the distinction between

the ways corresponding to these see Frithjof Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and
Human Facts, (Faber and Faber, London, 1954).