Woman Woman and lnteriorization *

'WOMEN, PERFUMES AND PRAYER' these three things, according to a famous hadith 'were made worthy of love' to the Prophet; and this symbolism provides us with a concise doctrine of the outward reverberations of the love of the Inward. Woman, synthesizing in her substance virgin nature, the sanctuary and spiritual company, is for man what is most lovable; in her highest aspect, she is the formal projection of merciful and infinite Inwardness in the outward; and in this regard she assumes a quasi-sacramental and liberating function. As for 'perfumes,' they represent qualities or beauties that are formless, exactly in the same way as music; that is to say that side by side with the formal projection of Inwardness, there exists also a complementary formless projection, symbolized, not by visual or tangible qualities, but by auditory and olfactory ones; perfumes are silent music. As for 'prayer; the third element mentioned in the hadith, its function is precisely to lead from outward to Inward, and it both consecrates and transmutes the qualitative elements of the outward realm; from this it may be seef! that the ternary comprised in the saying of Muhammad, far from being of an astonishing arbitrariness and a shocking worldliness- as is believed by those who have no idea either of Oriental symbolism in general or of the Islamic perspective in particular- provides on the contrary a doctrine which is entirely homogeneous, and which is founded, not on the moral or ascetical alternative1 - that goes without saying- but on the metaphysical transparency of things. The nature of the three elements of the ternary can be further delineated with the help of the notions -enumerated in the corresponding order-of 'beauty; 'love' and 'sanctity': it is beauty and love that reflect the Inward in the outward world, and it is sanctity, or the sacred, which establishes the bridgein both directions -between the outward and inward planes. ~11 that is beautiful comes from the Beauty of God; says a hadith. Moslems readily affirm the link between beauty and love and show little inclination to dissociate these two elements which for them are but the two faces of one and the same reality; whoever says beauty, says love, and conversely, whereas for Christians mystical love is almost exclusively associated with sacrifice, except in chivalric esoterism and its prolongations. 2 The hadith just quoted really contains the whole doctrine of the earthly concomitances of the love of God, in conjunction with the following hadith: 'God is beautiful, and He loves beauty'; this is the doctrine of the metaphysical transparency

of phenomena. This notion of beauty or harmony, with all the subtle rhythms and symmetries which it implies, has in Islam the widest possible significance: 'to God belong the most beautiful Names; says the Qoran more than once, and the virtues are called 'beautiful things' (husna). 'Women and perfumes': spiritually speaking these are forms and qualities, that is to say, they are truths that are both dilating and fruitful, and they are also the virtues which these truths exhale and which correspond to them within us. 'Everything on earth is accursed except the remembrance of God; said the Prophet, a saying which must be interpreted not only from the standpoint of abstraction (tanzzh) but also from that of analogy (tashbzh); that is to say, the remembrance of God is not only an inwardness free from images and flavours, but also a perception of the Divine in the symbols (ayat) of the world. To put it another way: things are accursed- or perishable- in so far as they are purely outward and externalizing, but not in so far as they actualize the ~emembrance of God and manifest the archetypes contained in the Inward and Divine Reality. And everything in the world that surrounds us which gives rise to a concomitance of our love of God or of our choice of the 'inward dimension; is at the same time a con comitance of the love which God shows towards us, or a message of hope from the 'Kingdom of Heaven which is within you.' These considerations- or even simply the notion of the 'love of God~ lead us to a related question, that of the Divine Person in relation to our capacity for love: what, it may be asked, is the meaning of the masculine character attributed to God by the Scriptures, and how can man- the male- accord all his love, naturally centered on woman, on a Divine Person who seems to exclude femininity? The answer to this is that the masculine character of God in Semitic monotheism signifies, not that the Divine Perfection could possibly exclude the feminine perfections (which is unthinkable), but simply that God is totality and not part, and this totality has its image, precisely, in the human male, whence his priority with regard to woman- a priority which in other respects is either relative or nonexistent; it is indeed important to understand that the male is not totality in the same way that God is, and likewise that woman is not 'part' in an absolute manner, for each sex, being equally human, shares in the nature of the other. If each of the sexes constituted a pole, God could neither be masculine nor feminine, for it would be an error of language to reduce God to one of two reciprocally complementary poles; but if, on the contrary, each sex represents a perfection, God cannot but possess the characteristics of both- active perfection, however, always having priority over passive perfection. Whether one likes it or not, in Christianity the Blessed Virgin assumes the function of the feminine aspect of the Divinity, at least in practice, and in spite of every theological

precaution; however, this observation, far from being a cause of reproach in the eyes of the writer, has on the co~trary for him the most positive meanings. In Islam it is sometimes said that man has a feminine character in relation to God; but from another point of view, the doctrine of the Divine Names implies that the Divinity possesses all conceivable qualities, and if we see in the perfect woman certain qualities which are proper to her, she cannot have them except in so far as they are a reverberation of the corresponding Divine Qualities ... NOTES Woman and Interiorization 1. Prmciple: to realize God one must reject the world, since the latter moves us away from God in a variety of ways. This perspective is incarnated by Buddha and Christ. 2 Some may think that the relationship 'beauty-love' is purely 'natural' and therefore foreign to spirituality; this is to overlook that a positive natural relationship is rooted in the supernatural and comprises the virtues of the latter in function of the spiritual value and ritual attitude of man. At the exoteric level, this is the fruitless dialogue between two different orders of truth, one ascetical and one alchemical; this is stressed once again because, at least on the moral plane, it is the main stumbling block between West and East. In this connection it may be added that all exoterism- be it de facto or de;ure- tends to put humility in the place of intelligence, and merit in the place of beauty, as if these were unavoidable alternatives.