INTRODUCTION
This willing acceptance of the here-and-now as a means of representing supernal realities is a trait common to the greatest mystics. For them, when they have achieved at last the true theopathetic state, all aspects of the universe possess equal authority as sacramental declarations of the Presence of God; and their fearless employment of homely and physical symbols - often startling and even revolting to the unaccustomed taste - is in direct proportion to the exaltation of their spiritual life. The works of the great Sufis, and amongst the Christians of Jacopone da Todl, Ruysbroeck, Boehme, abound in illustrations of this law. Therefore we must not be surprised to find in Kabir's songs - his desperate attempts to communicate his ecstasy and persuade other men to share it - a constant juxtaposition of concrete and metaphysical language; swift alternations between the most intensely anthropomorphic, the most subtly philosophical, ways of apprehending man's communion with the Divine. The need for this alternation, and its entire naturalness for the mind which employs it, is rooted in his concept, or vision, of the Nature of God and unless we make some attempt to grasp this, we shall not go far in our understanding of his poems.
Kabir belongs to that small group of supreme mystics - amongst whom St. Augustine, Ruysbroeck, and the Sufi poet Jalalu'ddln Rumi 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 per feet Whole. This proceeding entails for them - and both Kabir and Ruysbroeck expressly acknowledge it - a universe of three orders: Becoming, Being, and that which is "More than Being," i.e. God.[1] God is here felt to be not the final abstraction, but the one actuality. He inspires, supports, indeed inhabits, both the durational, conditioned, finite world of Becoming and the unconditioned, non-successional, infinite world of Being; yet utterly transcends them both. He is the omnipresent Reality, the "All-pervading" within Whom "the worlds are being told like beads." In His personal aspect He is the "beloved Fakir" teaching and companioning each soul. Considered as Immanent Spirit, He is "the Mind within the mind." But all these are at best partial aspects of His nature, mutually corrective: as the Persons in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity - to which this theological diagram bears a striking resemblance - represent different and compensating experiences of the Divine Unity within which they are resumed. As Ruysbroeck discerned a plane of reality upon which "we can speak no
- ↑ Nos. VII and XLIX.
