Sufi Poets

"There are two moments in life which are everything, and these are the present moment, when we are free to choose what we wish to be, and the moment of death, when we no longer have any choice and the decision belongs to God. Now if the present moment is good, death shall be good; if we are with God now − in this present which is ceaselessly being renewed but which always remains this one and only moment of actuality − God shall be with us at the moment of our death. The remembrance of God is a death in life; it shall be a life in death."

"We must distinguish between natural life, which is centrifugal, and supernatural life, which is centripetal; the first pulls the soul away from God and drives it into the world, whereas the second draws the soul away from the world and leads it back to God. Natural or centrifugal life comprises one effect which is dispersion and another which is compression: the profane or worldly man loses himself in the multitude of things, on the one hand, and becomes hardened in his passional attachments, on the other hand. The supernatural life, on the contrary, comprises one effect which is dilation and another which is concentration: the spiritual man is dilated towards the Interior, on the one hand, and is united to the Unique on the other hand, the one being the function of the other."

"We are surrounded by a world of tumult and incertitude; and there are sudden encounters with things that are surprising, incomprehensible, absurd or disappointing. But these things have no right to be problems for us, if only because every phenomenon has its causes, whether we know them or not. Whatever may be the phenomena and whatever their causes, there is always That Which Is; and That Which Is, lies beyond the world of tumult, contradictions, and disappointments. That Which Is can be troubled and diminished by nothing; It is Truth, Peace, and Beauty. Nothing can tarnish It, and no one can take It from us."

"Truth is the raison d’être for man’s existence; it constitutes our grandeur and reveals to us our smallness."

"Truth and Holiness: all values are in these two terms; all that we must love and all that we must be."

"What the virtues are to existential perfection, truths are to intellectual perfection; virtue is essentially simplicity, inward beauty, generosity, whereas truth, for its part, lies entirely in the discernment between the Real and the illusory or between the Absolute and the contingent."

"The first of the virtues is veracity, for without truth we can do nothing. The second virtue is sincerity, which consists in drawing the consequences of what we know to be true, and which implies all the other virtues; for it is not enough to acknowledge the truth objectively, in thought, it must also be assumed subjectively, in acts, whether outward or inward. Truth excludes heedlessness and hypocrisy as much as error and lying."

"One cannot state too clearly that a doctrinal formulation is perfect, not because it exhausts the infinite Truth on the plane of logic, which is impossible, but because it realizes a mental form capable of communicating, to whoever is intellectually apt to receive it, a ray of that Truth, and thereby a virtuality of the total Truth. This explains why the traditional doctrines are always apparently naive, at least from the point of view of philosophers − that is to say, of men who do not understand that the goal and sufficient reason of wisdom do not lie on the plane of its formal affirmation; and that, by definition, there is no common measure and no continuity between thought, whose operations have no more than a symbolic value, and pure Truth, which is identical with That which "is" and thereby includes him who thinks."

"Faith is to say "yes" to God. When man says "yes" to God, God says "yes" to man."

"If faith is a mystery, it is because its nature is inexpressible in the measure that it is profound, for it is not possible to convey fully by words this vision which is still blind, and this blindness which already sees."

"It could be said that faith is that something which makes intellectual certitude become holiness; or which is the realizatory power of certitude."

"The fact that spiritual realism, or faith, pertains to the intelligence of the heart and not to that of the mind, enables one to understand that in spirituality, the moral qualification takes precedence over the intellectual qualification, and by far."

"Humanly, no one escapes the obligation to "believe in order to be able to understand" (credo ut intelligam)."

"In the elementary sense of the word, faith is our assent to a truth that transcends us; but spiritually speaking, it is our assent, not to transcendent concepts, but to immanent realities, or to Reality as such; now this Reality is our very substance."

"A man may have metaphysical certainty without having "faith", that is, without this certainty residing in his soul as a continuously active presence. But if metaphysical certainty suffices on doctrinal grounds, it is far from being sufficient on the spiritual plane, where it must be completed and brought to life by faith. Faith is nothing other than the adherence of our whole being to Truth, whether we have a direct intuition of this Truth or an indirect notion."

"Faith is peace of heart arising from an almost boundless certainty, thus by its very nature falling outside the jurisdiction of doubt; human intelligence is made for transcendence, for otherwise it would be nothing more than an increase in animal intelligence. Apart from the content that completes it, faith is our disposition to know before knowing; indeed this disposition is already knowledge in that it is derived from innate wisdom, which it is precisely the function of the revealed content of faith to revive."

"The sacred is an apparition of the Center, it immobilizes the soul and turns it towards the Inward."

"Love of the sacred implies love of God, and inversely, the sacred is the perfume of Heaven."

"The sense of the sacred is the capacity to perceive, or feel, the presence of the Celestial in earthly symbols, whether sacramental or natural; and this implies the sense of dignity as well as of devotion."

"To have a sense of the sacred is to be aware that all qualities or values not only proceed from the Infinite but also attract towards It."

"The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity."

"The sense of the sacred, or the love of sacred things − whether of symbols or modes of Divine Presence − is a conditio sine qua non of Knowledge, which engages not only our intelligence, but all the powers of our soul; for the Divine All demands the human all. The sense of the sacred, which is none other than the quasi-natural predisposition to the love of God and the sensitivity to theophanic manifestations or to celestial perfumes − this sense of the sacred essentially implies both the sense of beauty and the tendency toward virtue; beauty being as it were outward virtue, and virtue, inward beauty. It also implies the sense of the metaphysical transparency of phenomena, that is, the capacity of grasping the principial within the manifested, the uncreated within the created."

"The "pneumatic" is the man in whom the sense of the sacred takes precedence over other tendencies, whereas in the case of the "psychic" it is the attraction of the world and the accentuation of the ego that take priority, without mentioning the "hylic" or "somatic", who sees in sensory pleasure an end in itself. It is not a particularly high degree of intelligence that constitutes initiatic qualification; it is a sense of the sacred − or the degree of this sense − with all the moral and intellectual consequences it implies. The sense of the sacred draws one away from the world and at the same time transfigures it."

"Every injustice that we suffer at the hands of men is at the same time a trial that comes to us from God."

"Man has the right not to accept an injustice − major or minor − from men, but he does not have the right not to accept it as a trial coming from God. He has the right − for it is human − to suffer from an injustice insofar as he cannot rise above it, but he must make an effort to do so; in no case has he the right to plunge himself into a pit of bitterness, for such an attitude leads to hell. Man has no interest, primarily, in overcoming an injustice; he has an interest primarily in saving his soul and in winning Heaven. Thus it would be a bad bargain to obtain justice at the price of our ultimate interests, to win on the side of the temporal and to lose on the side of the eternal, which is what man seriously risks when concern for his rights deteriorates his character or reinforces its faults."

"To accept a trial is to thank God for it, with the understanding that it permits us a victory, a detachment with regard to the world and with regard to the ego."

"Man has the duty to resign himself to the will of God, but by the same token he has the right to transcend spiritually the suffering of the soul to the extent that this is possible for him; and this, precisely, is not possible without a prior attitude of acceptance and resignation, which alone brings out fully the serenity of the intelligence and which alone opens the soul to help from Heaven."

"First of all one has to answer the question of why the painful experiences that man must undergo are called "trials". We would reply that these experiences are trials in relation to our faith, which indicates that with regard to troubling or painful experiences we have duties resulting from our human vocation; in other words, we must prove our faith in relation to God and in relation to ourselves. In relation to God, by our intelligence, our sense of the absolute, and thus our sense of relativities and proportions; and in relation to ourselves, by our character, our resignation to destiny, our gratitude. There are in fact two ways to overcome the traces that evil, or more precisely suffering, leaves in the soul: these are, firstly, our awareness of the Sovereign Good, which coincides with our hope to the extent that this awareness penetrates us; and secondly, our acceptance of what, in religious language, is called the "will of God"; and assuredly it is a great victory over oneself to accept a destiny because it is God's will and for no other reason."

"In order to be happy, man must have a center; now this center is above all the certitude of the One. The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery. To be man is to be at the center; it is to be center."

"The stability of happiness depends − quite apart from any question of destiny − not only on the beauty and wisdom of our attitude but also, and above all, on an opening towards Heaven which confers upon the experience of happiness a life continually renewed. One must realize in earthly mode that which will be realized in heavenly mode; this is the very definition of nobility of character."

"Beauty, and the love of beauty, give to the soul the happiness to which it aspires by its very nature. If the soul wishes to be happy in an unconditional and permanent fashion, it must bear the beautiful within itself; now the soul can only do this through realizing virtue, which we could also term goodness or piety."

"Happiness is religion and character; faith and virtue. It is a fact that man cannot find happiness within his own limits; his very nature condemns him to surpass himself, and in surpassing himself, to free himself."

"One of the first conditions of happiness is the renunciation of the superficial and habitual need to feel happy. But this renunciation cannot spring from the void; it must have a meaning, and this meaning cannot but come from above, from what constitutes our raison d'être. In fact, for too many men, the criterion of the value of life is a passive feeling of happiness which is determined a priori by the outer world; when this feeling does not occur or when it fades − which may have subjective as well as objective causes − they become alarmed, and are as if possessed by the question: "Why am I not happy as I was before?" and by the awaiting of something that could restore their feeling of being happy. All this, it is unnecessary to stress, is a perfectly worldly attitude, hence incompatible with the least of spiritual perspectives. To become enclosed in an earthly happiness is to create a barrier between man and Heaven."

"Sacred art helps man find his own center, that kernel whose nature is to love God."

"Apart from its purely didactic role, the essential function of sacred art is to bring Substance − at once single and inexhaustible − into the world of accident and to bring accidental consciousness back to Substance. We could also say that sacred art brings Being into the world of existence, action, or becoming, or that in a certain fashion it brings the Infinite into the finite world, or Essence into the world of forms; thus it suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a path starting from appearance or accident and issuing into Substance or its celestial reverberations."

"No art in itself is a human creation; however, what distinguishes sacred art is that its essential content is a revelation, that it manifests a properly sacramental form of heavenly reality, such as the icon of the Virgin and Child, painted by an angel, or by St Luke inspired by an angel, and the icon of the Holy Face, which dates back to the Holy Shroud and St Veronica; or such as the statue of Shiva dancing, or the painted or carved images of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Taras."

"[In sacred art], true genius can develop without making innovations: it attains perfection, depth and power of expression almost imperceptibly by means of the imponderables of truth and beauty ripened in that humility without which there can be no true greatness."

"In fact, what separates man from divine Reality is but a thin partition: God is infinitely close to man, but man is infinitely far from God. This partition, for man, is a mountain; man stands before a mountain which he must remove with his own hands. He digs away the earth, but in vain, the mountain remains; man however goes on digging, in the name of God. And the mountain vanishes. It was never there."

"The intelligence may well affirm metaphysical and eschatological truths; the imagination − or the subconscious − continues to believe firmly in the world, neither in God nor in the hereafter; every man is a priori hypocritical. The path is precisely the passage from natural hypocrisy to spiritual sincerity."

"To transcend oneself: this is the great imperative of the human condition; and there is another that anticipates it and at the same time prolongs it: to dominate oneself. The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. Nobility and holiness are the imperatives of the human state."

"In fact, if metaphysical knowledge remains purely mental, it is worth practically nothing; knowledge is of value only on condition that it be prolonged in both love and will. Consequently, the goal of the way is first of all to mend this hereditary break, and then − on that foundation − to bring about an ascension towards the Sovereign Good, which, in virtue of the mystery of immanence, is our own true Being."

"The essential function of human intelligence is discernment between the Real and the illusory or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality; carried to their highest level or reduced to their purest substance, they constitute the underlying universality in every great spiritual patrimony of humanity, or what may be called the religio perennis; this is the religion to which the sages adhere, one which is always and necessarily founded upon formal elements of divine institution."

"Among the qualities indispensable for spirituality in general, we shall first mention a mental attitude that for want of a better term could be designated by the word "objectivity": this is a perfectly disinterested attitude of the intelligence, hence one that is free from ambition and bias and thereby accompanied by serenity. Secondly, we would mention a quality concerning the psychic life of the individual: this is nobility, or the capacity of the soul to rise above all things that are petty and mean; basically this is a discernment, in psychic mode, between the essential and the accidental, or between the real and the unreal. Finally, there is the virtue of simplicity: man is freed from all unconscious tenseness stemming from self‑love; towards creatures and things he has a perfectly original and spontaneous attitude, in other words, he is without artifice; he is free from all pretension, ostentation, or dissimulation; in a word, he is without pride. Every spiritual method demands above all an attitude of poverty, humility, and simplicity or effacement, an attitude that is like an anticipation of Extinction in God."

"Esoterism as such is metaphysics, to which is necessarily joined an appropriate method of realization. But the esoterism of a particular religion − of a particular exoterism precisely − tends to adapt itself to this religion and thereby enter into theological, psychological and legalistic meanders foreign to its nature, while preserving in its secret center its authentic and plenary nature, but for which it would not be what it is."

"Esoteric truth is a two-edged sword: there are men who lose God because they are ignorant of this truth, which alone would save them, and there are others who think they understand it and forge for themselves an illusory and arrogant faith, which they put practically in place of God."

"Knowledge of the various traditional worlds, thus of the relativity of doctrinal formulations and formal perspectives, reinforces the need for essentiality on the one hand and universality on the other; and the essential and the universal are all the more imperative because we live in a world of philosophical supersaturation and spiritual disintegration."

"Esoterism comprises four principal dimensions: an intellectual dimension, represented by doctrine; a volitive or technical dimension, which encompasses the direct and indirect means of the way; a moral dimension, which concerns the intrinsic and extrinsic virtues; and an aesthetic dimension, to which pertain symbolism and art from both the subjective and objective point of view."

"There is no theophany that is not prefigured in the very constitution of the human being, made as it is "in the image of God"; and esoterism aims at actualizing what is divine in this mirror of God that is man."

"The spiritual anthropology of authentic esoterism starts from the idea that man is defined by a total and "deiform" intelligence, whereas the common religion readily defines man as "sinner," "slave," even "nothing"; hence in accordance with the "fall" or with creaturely limitation alone, rather than with his inalienable substance or, consequently, with the "divine content"."