Rumi's Masnavi, part 5: On love

For Rumi, love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries and the animating force of creation

A man in love, no matter what he says
The smell of love wafts love-ward from his mouth
He speaks of jurisprudence, what emerges?
From mystic poverty a sweet effulgence
He blasphemes, the scent of faith arises
He offers doubts, no doubt we grow more sure
Masnavi 1: 2880-82

Rumi urges us to choose voluntary poverty as a way of being in the world, as we saw earlier; we might perhaps think of this chosen poverty (faqr) in modern terms as the simple life of moderation. As we have also seen, Rumi calls us to a natural theology of sorts, encouraging us to learn to read the mystical signs inscribed upon the human breast by the fingers of God. This is the language of love, an orientation and an attitude which, for Rumi, defines the very essence of righteousness and true religion. It does not matter if the seeker of truth approaches truth through law, through skepticism or even blasphemy, so long as that seeker turns to face the truth of the sun, and is attuned to the meaning of love.

The Sufis early on co-opted the language of earthly love poetry as a metaphor for the divine beloved, just as they adapted the language of wine poetry and terrestrial inebriation as symbolic of the transcendental mystic experience, in which the worshipper loses control of his rational faculties, and becomes a God-intoxicated lover of the divine beauty. Rumi's theology draws upon love as both eros ('ishq) and agape (mahabbat):

Agape then describes what's real, Eros, too.
Masnavi 5: 2186

The force of love, even if initially a this-wordly desire, in the end can lead us toward the transcendent beloved (Masnavi 1:111). Love transcends questions of faith and infidelity – love is the kernel contained within the shell of the dichotomy of blasphemy and religion (2 :1529-31, 2, 3322). Love grows in the garden of human perfection (5: 2742-44), and exalts the earthly body above the seven heavens (1: 25). In the realm of free will and pre-destination, divine wisdom made human beings lovers of one another (3: 4400-4403), although everything is the beloved, while the lover is just a foil (1: 30), an illusionary separation of subject and object. Love is the physician that cures all our symptoms – it is our Plato and our Galen (1: 22-24).

The partial intellect may reject love (Masnavi 1: 1982), caught up as it is in rationality. Worship through ascetic self-denial, motivated by fear of sin or awe of the mysterium tremendum, while it can help us gain control of the baser self, ultimately produces a flat-footed and desiccated spirituality, insofar as it is not impelled by love.

The fearful ascete treks his faith on foot
The lovers flash ahead like lightning, wind
Masnavi 5: 2192

Fear is a human trait, not a divine attribute, whereas "Love describes the Lord" (Masnavi 5: 2184-5). The godhead requites our love, since the love of God establishes a mutuality between creator and creatures. As stated in the Qur'an (5: 54), God loves a people and they love him. Rumi in fact alludes to a famous tradition – "I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known, so I created the creation to be known" – explaining love as the underlying motivation for God's creation:

Were it not for the ocean of pure love
What reason would I have to forge the heavens?
Masnavi 5: 2739

Rumi even seems to posit love as the primal element of creation, a vital force that stirs the universe and creates the noosphere (to borrow a term from Teilhard de Chardin):

It's waves of love that make the heavens turn
Without that love the universe would freeze:
No mineral absorbed by vegetable
No growing thing consumed by animal
No sacrifice of anima for Him
Who inspired Mary with His pregnant breath
Like ice, all of them unmoved, frozen stiff
No vibrant molecules in swarms of motion
Lovers of perfection, every atom
Turns sapling-like to face the sun and grow
Their haste to shed their fleshly form for soul
Sings out an orison of praise to God
Masnavi 5: 3854-9

Love is thus a mystic force for Rumi – it is the "Astrolabe of the divine mysteries" (Masnavi 1: 110). Whatever one says in explication of the theology of love is embarrassingly incomplete, because love speaks without words, and reason gets stuck in the mud trying to describe it (Masnavi 1: 112-115).

Love's detailed explanation's still untold
though Judgment Days – hundreds – may come and go
For the length of the Judgment Day is fixed,
but how curtail description of the Lord?
Masnavi 5: 2189-90

Love cannot be carried or contained in words
Love's an ocean of unfathomed depth:
Infinite, the ocean's drops of water
Yet the Seven Seas, tiny, next to love
Masnavi 5: 2731-2