Page:One Hundred Poems Kabir (1915).djvu/23

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INTRODUCTION
xxiii

grasp this, we shall not go far in our understanding of his poems.

Kabīr belongs to that small group of supreme mystics--amongst whom St. Augustine, Ruysbroeck, and the Sūfī poet Jalālu’ddīn Rūmī are perhaps the chief--who have achieved that which we might call the synthetic vision of God. These have resolved the perpetual opposition between the personal and impersonal, the transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic aspects of the Divine Nature; between the Absolute of philosophy and the “sure true Friend” of devotional religion. They have done this, not by taking these apparently incompatible concepts one after the other; but by ascending to a height of spiritual intuition at which they are, as Ruysbroeck said, “ melted and merged in the Unity,” and perceived as the completing opposites of a