Steve Watson

Ethical Consequences of the Gnostic Union

There’s always the assumption that mystical gnosis will result in an elevated ethical state on the part of the gnostic. Given that there’s plenty of controversy over the ethical stance of someone who is concerned above all with their own salvation, I find this lazy acceptance a little puzzling. It’s easy enough, in fact, to see just how the unitive life can run the risk of moral detachment from humankind. Since at the moment I’m reading R. A. Nicholson 1914/1963) The Mystics of Islam, we can extract a few typical statements of the Sufi and see what they add up to.

First, here’s a passage from p. 109 recounting a story from the life of Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad

One day he had in his lap a child four years old, and chanced to give it a kiss, as is the way of fathers. The child said, ‘Father, do you love me?’ ‘Yes,’ said Fudayl. ‘Do you love God?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How many hearts have you?’ ‘One.’ ‘Then,’ asked the child, ‘how can you love two with one heart?’ Fudayl perceived that the child’s words were a divine admonition. In his zeal for God he began to beat his head and repented of his love for the child, and gave his heart wholly to God.

This is introduced by the remark that “It would be touching if it were not so edifying.” I find it neither, but rather chilling. We then learn, amongst many claims that we should approach all in the spirit of ‘love’ and ‘charity,’ this corroborating quote from Jami:

Even from earthly love thy face avert not,
Since to the Real it may serve to raise thee.
Ere A, B, C are rightly apprehended,
How canst thou con the pages of thy Koran?
A sage (so heard I), unto whom a student
Came craving counsel on the course before him,
Said, ‘If thy steps be strangers to love’s pathways,
Depart, learn love, and then return before me!
For, shouldst thou fear to drink wine from Form’s flagon,
Thou canst not drain the draught of the Ideal.
But yet beware! Be not by Form belated:
Strive rather with all speed the bridge to traverse.
If to the bourne thou fain wouldst bear thy baggage,
Upon the bridge let not thy footsteps linger.’

But the only interpretation of this can be that love is to be valued not as respecting the worth of the thing being loved, but only as a path to the only real object of the Sufi’s esteem, which is God. This makes it a consequentialist approach only – but one which requires that you pretend to be unaware of the consequentialist justification for the love that you are determined to feel.

Nicholson then remarks, with words that must be true for anyone committed to the extreme unity thesis that the Sufis defended (or, rather, that they mouthed adherence to,) that

Inevitably such a man will love his fellow-men. Whatever cruelty they inflict upon him, he will perceive only the chastening hand of God, “whose bitters are very sweets to the soul.”

And the consequence of this would have to be that any evils that the Sufi does to another ought equally to be seen by that other as “the chastening hand of God,” and this will be especially the case when the Sufi presumes to have achieved the sought-after Union with God, and to be able to declare with al-Hallaj that “I am the Truth.” The man who takes these moral consequences seriously would be a monster of egotism, not a saint.