Ibn Arabî concludes the scriptural argumentation of this introductory paragraph by mentioning a series of akhbâr, “traditions” attributed to the Prophet. I shall only reiterate one, due to the great significance it has within the Akbarian doctrine on love, “God is beautiful,” the Envoy of God declared, “and He loves beauty.” This hadîth is in fact ubiquitous in Ibn Arabî’s writings on love (including this chapter [178] of the Futûhât)- whether he refers to it explicitly, or discreetly alludes to it – so indissociable are these two notions of love and beauty for him. It is true that imâm Ghazâlî accords equally great importance to this subject in the long chapter of the Ihyâ’ ‘ulûm al-dîn entitled Kitâb al-mahabba. However, for him beauty is only one cause (sabab) of love among others; for Ibn Arabî it is the primary and inexhaustible source. Therefore, he replies without a hint of hesitation to Tirmidhî’s one hundred and eighteenth question: “Where does love come from? ” by saying, “From his epiphany in the Name al-Jamîl.”
Beauty, he maintains, is an efficient cause of love since it is loved per se (mahbûb li dhâtihi). It follows that God, who is beautiful, loves Himself. Now love is, essentially, a dynamic force: in fact it possesses the property of compelling the muhibb to move. It makes him strivetowards the object of desire which, under the effect of the magnetic attraction of love, is in return irresistibly drawn towards the one who desires it. The whole universe is literally moved in this way by love. “If it had not been for love,” Ibn Arabî declares, “nothing would have been desired and [consequently] nothing would exist: this is the secret contained in [His saying], ‘I loved to be known.’ ” Love is the generating force of existence because it simply has to fill an absence or, more exactly, it wants to make present the loved object which is necessarily absent (ghâ’ib) or missing (ma’dûm) since it is true that one only desires what one does not have. Hence one has recourse to khayâl, imagination, which allows the mahbûb to be re-presented and which the Prophet implicitly recommended in the spiritual life when he defined ihsân as “to adore God as if you saw Him.” However, for some people there is a risk that they will come to prefer the image which is imagined – and consequently necessarily limited – to the One of whom it is only an imperfect and limited representation.
Thus the universe, which is known by God from all eternity but which is unaware of itself, is torn from nothingness simply due to the love which God has for Himself; the movement which leads it towards existentiation is therefore, Ibn Arabî states categorically, a movement of love, “That is what the Prophet pointed out when he reported [from God] ‘I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known’; if it had not been for this love, the world would not have appeared in Him; its movement from nothingness to existence is a movement of love on the part of the One who gave it existence.” The Shaykh is so deeply convinced of this that he repeats it endlessly in all the passages where he mentions cosmogenesis, usually choosing to describe this Divine drama using the symbolism of the Divine Sigh: the movement that initiates the cosmogonic process is the vibration produced by the nafas rahmânî, the “Breath of the Merciful”. Breathing out due to the pressure of loving desire inspired by His own beauty, God releases the “Cloud” (al-‘amâ’), that is the materia prima which potentially contains the whole of Creation, “This Cloud is the substance of the cosmos and therefore receives all the forms, spirits and natural constitutions of the universe; it is an infinite receptacle.”
Consequently, the Shaykh al-Akbar maintains repeatedly, “God only created the world through love” > ; this love is firstly love for Himself, for His own beauty which He wishes to display then, consequently, for the creatures who reflect it, “God loves beauty,” he writes, “now, He is beautiful, so He loves Himself. Then He wanted to see Himself in something other than Himself, so He created the world in the image of His beauty. He looked at the world and loved it with the love of One whose look is binding.” Beauty therefore takes on a primordial role, together with love, in the cosmogonic process as conceived by the Shaykh al-Akbar, whose key idea is that of tajalliyât, “theophanies”. Captured by His beauty, God longs to manifest Himself in order to contemplate Himself. The theophanies are conceived in this desire: the universe is born from the urgent need to give them a receptacle, to provide places of manifestation for the Divine Names. “All creatures,” declares the author of the Futûhât, “are wedding beds where God manifests Himself.” Created in the image of God in order to be his majlâ, the epiphanic place where He displays the innumerable riches which the “hidden treasure” conceals, the world is therefore necessarily beautiful. “Nothing is more beautiful than the universe!” exclaims Ibn Arabî. The idea that the world is beautiful because the God who created it is Beautiful – an idea which does not exclude renouncement (zuhd) but forbids contemptus mundi – is in line with Ghazâlî’s famous thesis, according to which this world is the most perfect possible (laysa fî l-imkân abda’ min hâdhâ l-‘âlam). But Ibn Arabî does not stop there; he draws all the inferences, however serious, from this observation; “He created the world in the image of His beauty; He looked at the world and He loved it.”
God cannot help loving the world which returns the image of His beauty to Him and a fortiori, Man, who is his mazhar, his place of manifestation par excellence as that other hadîth which Ibn Arabî frequently quotes testifies, “My heaven and My Earth do not contain Me but the heart of My believing servant contains Me.’ By loving him, He only loves Himself. And since God knows Himself and loves Himself from all eternity, it follows that He has loved his creatures since eternity without beginning and will love them for eternity without end, “The love God has for His creatures is without beginning or end. [ ] He has never stopped loving His creatures just as He has never stopped knowing them [ ] His existence has no beginning, therefore His love has no beginning!” It is worth pointing out that about two centuries after Ibn Arabî, Julian of Norwich (d. 1416) wrote in her Revelations of Divine Love, “Before he made us he loved us [ ] and just as we shall be eternally, so we were treasured and hidden in God, known and loved since before time began.” It is from this strictly infinite love that the anchorite from Norwich draws her certainty of the apocatastasis, “All shall be well”, she assures us. Ibn Arabî is no less categorical, ” the entire universe is beautiful and ‘God loves beauty’; now, the one who loves beauty loves that which is beautiful. And the one who loves does not punish the loved one, unless it is in order to make him find ease or to educate him [ ], like a father with his child. Therefore, our final outcome (ma’âlunâ) will be – God willing – ease and well-being (al-râha wa l-na’îm), wherever we find ourselves!” A passage from our Chapter 178 clearly indicates that the Shaykh al-Akbar is alluding here to the after-death stations, paradise and hell, ” All that,” he says, “comes from His Mercy and His Love towards his creatures so that the final outcome will be happiness (al-sa’âda)”; he then explains this matter further by adding, ‘ there is another group of people who will suffer the punishment of the Next World in the fire in order to be purified. Then they will receive mercy in the fire since providence made love come first, even though they do not come out of the fire. For the love God has for His servants has no beginning and no end.”
The universal and, ultimately, unconditional love that God vows to humanity therefore guarantees that each person will know eternal happiness in fine, although it is understood that it will not be of the same kind for everyone and, furthermore, some will enjoy it immediately and others later. The fact remains that the sâlik must strive to win the love that He bestows on the believers in a special way but under certain conditions, his very embarking on the mystical Path testifying to his desire to obtain this privilege and he must pay the price. For the undertaking is hard: whoever wishes to be loved by God has a duty to be beautiful, with this unchanging beauty, because it belongs to the Divine Essence, which Man has been endowed with by virtue of his original theomorphism, although its brilliance has been tarnished by his sins. According to Ibn Arabî, the sulûk, the initiatic path, should lead to its shining again. When someone announced that he liked to appear beautiful (to men, that is), the Prophet replied by saying, “God deserves that more than you!” The author of the Futûhât takes this to mean, “You have said that you love beauty, and God loves beauty; therefore, if you beautify yourself for Him, He will love you; and you cannot beautify yourself in His eyes unless you follow me! (illâ bi-ittibâ’î).”