INTRODUCTION
more of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but only of One Being, the very substance of the Divine Persons"; so Kabir says that "beyond both the limited and the limitless is He, the Pure Being."[1]
Brahma, then, is the Ineffable Fact compared with which "the distinction of the Conditioned from the Unconditioned is but a word": at once the utterly transcendent One of Absolutist philosophy, and the personal Lover of the individual soul - "common to all and special to each," as one Christian mystic has it. The need felt by Kabir for both these ways of describing Reality is a proof of the richness and balance of his spiritual experience; which neither cosmic nor anthropomorphic symbols, taken alone, could express. More absolute than the Absolute, more personal than the human mind, Brahma therefore exceeds whilst He includes all the concepts of philosophy, all the passionate intuitions of the heart. He is the Great Affirmation, the fount of energy, the source of life and love, the unique satisfaction of desire. His creative word is the Om or "Everlasting Yea." The negative philosophy, which strips from the Divine Nature all Its attributes and - defining Him only by that which He is not - reduces Him to an "Emptiness," is abhorrent to this most vital of poets. Brahma, he says, “may never be found in abstractions." He is the One Love who pervades the world, discerned in His fullness only by the eyes of love; and those who know Him thus share, though they may never tell, the joyous and ineffable secret of the universe.[2]
Now Kabir, achieving this synthesis between the personal and cosmic aspects of the Divine Nature, eludes the three great dangers which threaten mystical religion.
First, he escapes the excessive emotionalism, the tendency to an exclusively anthropomorphic devotion, which results from an unrestricted cult of Divine Personality, especially under an incarnational form; seen in India in the exaggerations of Krishna worship, in Europe in the sentimental extravagances of certain Christian saints.
Next, he is protected from the soul destroying conclusions of pure monism, inevitable if its logical implications are pressed home: that is, the identity of substance between God and the soul, with its corollary of the total absorption of that soul in the Being of God as the goal of the spiritual life. For the thorough-going monist the soul, in so far as it is real, is substantially identical with God; and the true object of existence is the making patent of this latent identity, the realization which finds expression in the Vedantist formula "That art thou." But Kabir says that Brahma and the creature are "ever distinct, yet ever united"; that the wise man knows the spiritual as well as the material world to "be no more than His footstool."[3] The soul's union with Him is a love union, a mutual inhabitation; that essentially dualistic
