“God is Beautiful and Loves Beauty” (Part I)

An Excerpt from the Unpublished Manuscript, A Poisoned Cup

"The mystic Ahmad Ghazali, talking to a disciple", Persian miniature from the manuscript "Majalis al-Ushshaq" ("Meetings of the lovers"), 1552..jpgn...

There is a mystery that surrounds beauty in Sufism: it is a paradox suggested in the tradition which tells us, “God is beautiful and loves beauty.” But what is that “beauty” which God loves, this God who is also called “beautiful”? Is this not, the Sufis ask, like the eye of the narcissus lost in its own gaze, God’s own eye occupied with the divine beauty witnessed in all of creation? In other words, is there a beauty anywhere for God to love which is not ultimately God’s own?

This is the question of the Sufi masters of the mazhab-i ‘eshq, the ‘school of love.’ For when God is identified with beauty and said to love it, is there any way to avoid the conclusion that the subject of God’s own contemplation is the beauty of the divine self clothed and masked in creation? And if God is beautiful, and the source of all beauty, is there any beautiful thing that we may contemplate, which will not, in time, lead us back to its divine source? Indeed, is there any beauty in the world which is not itself the very face of God for us?