Traditional Quotes and Symbols
The remembrance of God is not only an inwardness free from images and flavours, but also a perception of the Divine in the symbols of the world.
All 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.
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 Quran more than once, and the virtues are called 'beautiful things'. '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 but also from that of analogy; 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 remembrance 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 concomitance of the love which God shows towards us, or a message of hope from the 'Kingdom of Heaven which is within you.'
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Frithjof Schuon
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Quoted in: The Essential Frithjof Schuon (edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr)
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Image: Kano Eitoku - Cypress Trees
The remembrance of God is not only an inwardness free from images and flavours, but also a perception of the Divine in the symbols of the world.
All 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.
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 Quran more than once, and the virtues are called 'beautiful things'. '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 but also from that of analogy; 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 remembrance 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 concomitance of the love which God shows towards us, or a message of hope from the 'Kingdom of Heaven which is within you.'
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Frithjof Schuon
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Quoted in: The Essential Frithjof Schuon (edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr)
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Image: Kano Eitoku - Cypress Trees