The Dragon on the Path and the Emerald of Love: A Nietzschean reading of Rūmī’s concept of love

1 Introduction

In the final ghazal, “Go lay your head on your pillow, let me be alone,”^[2] which he sings on his deathbed to console the grieving relatives and friends, Rūmī outlines the main principles of his thought regarding the relationship between man and God, as well as how to confront death and destruction. However, to fully comprehend these ideas one needs to examine both the framework of his thought as an Ashʿarite religious thinker^[3] and his unique and distinguished conception of love. Rūmī’s God is pictured in the ghazal as a tyrant or ruthless murderer who has a heart of granite, slaying His servants and no one can seek recompense. When confronted with such a dragon-like God, the only cure is to appeal to the emerald of love, the mystery of which resides in the act of dying. Rūmī’s concept of love and God’s self-love, according to this article, can be best understood within the metaphysical framework of the aesthetic perspective that the early Nietzsche^[4] tries to open for us in contrast to the dominant moral perspective. To confirm and explain his position, Nietzsche resorts to the Dionysiac tragedy and pre-Platonic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus.

Studies comparing Nietzsche and Rūmī are not uncommon, particularly in Persian,^[5] and it is fairly typical for Iranian scholars interested in both thinkers to try to connect them by giving Nietzsche a mystical reading and characterization, as if he were somehow familiar with Rūmī’s mystical thought and he essentially expressed the same thing that Rūmī had expressed before him, and of course better than him. Such a mystic understanding paved the ground for the development of a localized interpretation of Nietzsche, or what I call “local Nietzsche.” Iqbal Lahori is the first thinker who made this interpretation of Nietzsche widely known, particularly in his Persian poetry. Iqbal makes the following observation, which is typical of both him and many proponents of “local Nietzsche,” and is therefore worth quoting in full:

His [namely, Nietzsche’s] mental history is not without a parallel in the history of Eastern Sufism. That a really ‘imperative’ vision of the Divine in man did come to him cannot be denied. I call his vision ‘imperative’ because it appears to have given him a kind of prophetic mentality which, by some kind of technique, aims at turning its visions into permanent life-forces. Yet Nietzsche was a failure; and his failure was mainly due to his intellectual progenitors such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Lange whose influence completely blinded him to the real significance of his vision. Instead of looking for a spiritual rule which would develop the Divine even in a plebeian and thus open up before him an infinite future, Nietzsche was driven to seek the realization of his vision in such schemes as aristocratic radicalism. As I have said of him elsewhere…. Thus failed a genius whose vision was solely determined by his internal forces, and remained unproductive for want of expert external guidance in his spiritual life.^[6]

These types of comparisons are made possible by the common and well-established traditional interpretation of Rūmī, as a predominantly Islamic mystic and Sufi, which was provided by internationally renowned Rūmī commentators like Forouzanfar and A. Zarrinkoub as well as orientalists such as E. G. Browne, R. A. Nicholson, A. Schimmel, and W. Chittick. Most of these scholars, as Vaziri correctly points out, “have assumed that he was a purely scholastic Sufi bound by the dogma of religion and that he elaborated on ‘divine love’ through an exclusively Islamic lens,”^[7] and their accounts of Rūmī’s thought “include a predictable style of interpreting his poetry from the viewpoint of Sufism, with ‘standard’ presentations of the meanings of the sentimental or divine love themes, and of the categories and other symbolism inherent in Rumi’s writings.”^[8] However, in my opinion, Vaziri’s own aspiration “to create a fresher narrative of Rumi with a new historiographical and philosophical,”^[9] as well as “a secular and humanist”^[10] “approach” doesn’t veer too far from the classic interpretation in so far as the theme of love is concerned. According to Vaziri, while “[t]he God of Islam is the powerful Creator and final decision-maker about all manner of reward and punishment, determining who is good and who is a sinner,” the Rūmī’s new deity of Love is “the primordial and immortal force of life,” a God “who would not discriminate or promise reward and punishment between the faithful and the pagan, between a Muslim and a Christian, or even between a good person and a bad person.” In this not-particularly-distinctive image of the deity of Love as “a non-punishing and non-judging phenomenon,”^[11] as something “absolute,” in that it “is not in a state of flux, … it is analogous to the ocean, not the river; it is the sun, not the cloudy sky,”^[12] there is no disturbing and terrible aspect to elicit awe or dread.

The significance of a predominantly terrible and despotic conception of God in al-Ghazālī’s and Rūmī’s theology seems to have only been highlighted by prominent Rūmī commentator Abdolkarim Soroush who asserts that this concept of deity prompted Rūmī to incorporate the apparatus of love and beauty into his mysticism in order to soften that terrible conception and make it, as a result, desirable to live with. Considering the revelation experience of the prophets as basically the same as the experiences of poets and mystics, Soroush argues that Rūmī added love to the prophetic experience and revelation and thereby expanded and broadened them. Soroush is on the right track in his genealogical investigation of the concept of love in Rūmī, but he does not provide a satisfactory explanation of its nature and how it works.^[13] And in my opinion, he falls short of doing so due to his neglect of the very significant function that love, especially “God’s self-love,”^[14] plays in Rūmī’s creation theory and theodicy as well as his lack of any relevant philosophical framework of interpretation. By focusing on a specific interpretation of the development of the idea of God’s self-love and its significance in Rūmī’s theodicy based on an aesthetic metaphysics offered by Nietzsche’s construal of Heraclitus’s philosophy, I aim to address these shortcomings in this article.

In Section 2, I illustrate how two opposing viewpoints on the relationship between morality and God in Islamic tradition, known as the issue of rational or religious goodness and badness,^[15] resulted in two fundamentally different conceptions of God: the morally just God of the Muʿtazilites and the sovereignly unaccountable God of the Ashʿarites. The latter paved the way for the emergence of a terrifying image of God, the ruthless and dragon-like murderer, who has no qualms about inflicting pain and bringing countless ills and death on humans. The Muʿtazilite conception is more or less consistent with the common Christian conception of God,^[16] but the Ashʿarite conception,^[17] particularly in the extreme form offered by, for example, al-Ghazālī and Rūmī, is similar to Schopenhauer’s conception of the primordial source of all existence,^[18] the Will. In Section 3, I show how, while accepting such an image of the primordial origin of the world, Nietzsche attempts to abandon Schopenhauer’s moral view and replace it with an aesthetic–artistic perspective in which suffering and death are no longer evil and can be justified – the only satisfactory theodicy, or rather cosmodicy.^[19] Nietzsche regards Schopenhauer’s description as accurate insofar as it does not take the Will for what it is not, namely, the Christian God. However, by recognizing the Will as evil, it still falls within the moral framework of good and evil. There is still potential of viewing this Will from a different perspective known as the amoral/extra-moral aesthetic viewpoint. Some of Rūmī’s expressions evoke an image of God similar to Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s descriptions of the primordial unity behind appearances in respect of its being over and above any universal moral order, as explained in the section on the Ashʿarite God. In Section 4, it is argued that moving from the asceticism of fear and terror to the mysticism of love is Rūmī’s solution for facing such an image of God, which has much in common with Nietzsche’s emphasis on abandoning the moral position in favour of achieving an aesthetic standpoint. Some aspects of Nietzsche’s aesthetic and artistic approach to the primordial unity can aid in a more thorough and deeper interpretation of Rūmī’s concept of love, which is also his solution to the problem of death and annihilation of the individual in the world.

2 Two images of God in Islamic tradition

The Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite, two major theological schools of the tenth century, developed their respective conceptions of God as the primary source of creation in fundamentally opposed ways, and these conceptions have entirely different implications for man’s encounter and relationship with Him. First, I’ll go over certain principal attributes of the benevolent and moral Muʿtazilite God, as well as the kind of feelings, actions, and behaviours that one may have in the face of such a morally just God. Then I move on to the second image of God, which is primarily defended by Ashʿarite theologians, a God who is not subject to the constraints of wisdom, purpose, justice, or morality as they are widely understood by humans, nor is obligated to care for their well-being. Both of these images have their roots in the Qur’ānic text, and their emergence signifies the inevitable polarity in understandings of sacred text. However, this is not the place to delve into the debate over which image is more in line with Islamic tradition and text.

3 Nietzsche and the aesthetic justification of the existence

1. Nietzsche writes in a note from 1887:

I realized that I was instinctively opposed to what Schopenhauer was doing; I was seeking a justification of life (auf eine Rechtfertigung des Lebens), even in its most terrible, most ambiguous and most mendacious aspects…. Against the idea that the ‘intrinsic nature of things’ (in itself) is necessarily good, blessed, true and unitary (one), Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the thing-in-itself as ‘will’ was a step in the right direction; but he did not know how to deify this will: he still clung to the moral-Christian ideal. Schopenhauer was still so much under the sway of Christian values that, once he could no longer regard the thing-in-itself as ‘God’, it had to be bad, stupid, utterly reprehensible. He did not realize that there can be countlessly many ways of being different, even countlessly many ways of being God. A curse on that narrow-minded dichotomy, good versus evil.^[38]

This comment underlines what Schopenhauer was right about and what he misunderstood. The first was his emphasis on the impossibility of Christian theodicy, which holds that the existence of a benevolent God provides a convincing justification for the existence of suffering and evil in the world. According to Schopenhauer, if we actually look closely at the whole universe and nature with honest eyes, without the theological presupposition that it is the creation of an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God, we would be more inclined to consider the inner nature of the universe to be evil, morally repugnant, and something that ought not to exist, let alone divine and good in the traditional sense of the word. The nature of the universe is not divine, but demon-like, as Schopenhauer borrows from Aristotle.^[39] It is not pantheistic, but rather pandaemonic, to use Milton’s term.^[40] The primordial source of the world, or the thing-in-itself, is a blind, endless, irrational, and striving drive and force. It has no significant end or aim in sight. It is timeless, lawless and chaotic, absolutely free, almighty, and completely self-determining. If we look at the world from an anthropomorphic perspective, it is not but an eternal frustration and dissatisfaction as it aspires to nothing in particular and ends up nowhere. This one single drive perpetually discharges and multiplies itself in our world, the world in which we apparently live, the world of the principium individuationis. Since this is a world of terror and suffering, our birth and life are a curse rather than a blessing; something that would have been much better if it had not happened.^[41]

2. In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche contrasts the ecstatic state of Dionysiac reunion and loss of personal individuation with the Apolline state of limitation and individuation. The everyday world we experience and live in, according to his Kantian-Schopenhauerian worldview,^[42] is the phenomenal world of plurality and individuation which appears in the forms of space and time, as well as the category of causality. Hence, it is a world governed by the principium individuationis. For Nietzsche, this world is symbolized in the Greek boundary-drawing God, Apollo, and the Apolline state of dream-like imagery, culture, organized civilization, and image-making art forms. Apollo is thus the deity associated with the sober, moderate, calm, and sound individual human being who has an artistic drive towards form, delineation, clarity, and vivid representational art forms such as epic poetry and sculpture.

However, behind this world of appearance and underlying it, there is the “thing-in-itself” or “the real per se,” which is beyond space, time, and causality, and thus beyond any distinct individuation and plurality. It is chaos. It is the one, the unity or, as Nietzsche calls it, “das Ur-Eine,”^[43] the primordial oneness or unity of all individual beings. The phenomenal world of everyday objects and experiences is illusory and dream-like, with “the veil of māyā”^[44] interposed between us and the ultimate unified reality, according to Schopenhauer’s adaptation of Indian thought. Given the human subjectivity and the spatiotemporal quality of his cognition, he will never be able to approach and reach this ultimate reality through his understanding. Nietzsche introduces Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and intoxicated ecstasy, to symbolize this underlying level of existence. Dionysus is associated with formless flux, mystical and orgiastic excess, and the obliteration of all forms and limits of individuation, causing the separate individual identities to dissolve in the whole and find themselves reconciled with the primordial energies of existence. In art, it also represents the formless and non-representational art forms, particularly music and dance.^[45]

In the Apolline state of everyday life and existence, the individual human being sits calmly “in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery…, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis” just as a boatman sits and rests in his small boat, “trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves.”^[46] That is not the whole story, though. With the smallest crash in the boat of individuation and spatiotemporal cognition, the scene changes and an entirely new and strange experience enters his consciousness:

If we add to this horror the blissful ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself, whenever this breakdown of the principium individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy of intoxication. These Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow in intensity, cause subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-forgetting, awaken either under the influence of narcotic drink, of which all human beings and peoples who are close to the origin of things speak in their hymns, or at the approach of spring when the whole of nature is pervaded by lust for life.^[47]

In such experiences, whether they occur in the medieval dances and singing of St John and St Vitus or the wild and orgiastic festivities of song and dance and sexual excess in various religious rituals, the individuality and subjectivity of the human person collapse, and he feels that “all the rigid, hostile barriers… break asunder. Now, hearing this gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be not simply united… with his neighbor, but quite literally one with him, as if the veil of māyā had been torn apart, so that mere shreds of it flutter before the mysterious primordial unity.”^[48] He thus expresses his sense of belonging and return to the whole universe while intoxicated through singing and dancing. All of his personal and self-related cares, hopes, fears, joys, and pains seem suddenly unimportant, superficial, and local and then disappear under the powerful spell of the formless energy of the whole. This way,

He has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the brink of flying and dancing, up and away into the air above … . [H]e feels himself to be a god, he himself now moves in such ecstasy and sublimity as once he saw the gods move in his dreams. Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: all nature’s artistic power reveals itself here, amidst shivers of intoxication, to the highest, most blissful satisfaction of the primordial unity.^[49]

3. As emphasized in the note from 1887, Nietzsche accepts the fact that the very Dionysiac foundation of existence is “fearsome, wicked, mysterious, annihilating and fateful,”^[50] and that “the total character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, … wisdom.”^[51] However, he differs from Schopenhauer in that he does not conclude that this Dionysiac source should be regarded as evil or morally repugnant. Schopenhauer’s mistake was to remain inside the religious framework of moral interpretation and significance of existence which Christianity presupposed in order to necessitate the existence of a benevolent God. If the source of existence is not the wholly good God of Christianity, it does not follow that it is Schopenhauer’s wholly evil God. Rather, this source might be thought of as

an utterly unscrupulous and amoral artist-god who frees himself from the dire pressure of fullness and over-fullness, from suffering the oppositions packed within him, and who wishes to become conscious of his autarchic power and constant delight and desire, whether he is building or destroying, whether acting benignly or malevolently.^[52]

Both aspects are parts of a complete scene of the same world, the world as the release and redemption of God, “achieved at each and every moment, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the most suffering being of all, the being most full of oppositions and contradictions,” able to redeem and release itself only in the beautiful Apolline semblances.^[53]

Morality, concepts of good and evil, and all our apparatus of axiological anthropomorphisms should be situated within the phenomenal world of the Apolline, just like all the other objectifications and manifestations of that single God. According to Nietzsche, in addition to the possibility of seeing God or the source of the world as the benevolent being of the Christians and the Muʿtazilites, or as the evil being in Schopenhauer’s moral worldview, and to some extent, al-Ghazālī’s and Rūmī’s, there is a third possibility of viewing this primordial creating force from an aesthetic rather than a moral perspective, and thereby thinking of Him as an artist at the moment of creating His work of art, instead of an architect and engineer during the construction of a magnificent edifice.

In a metaphor adopted from Heraclitus, Nietzsche writes that the Ur-Eine, or the primordial united force, is like the playful child-god Aeon,^[54] who wantonly and haphazardly “sets down stones here, there, and the next place, and who builds up piles of sand only to knock them down again,” taking equal pleasure in both parts of this creative and destructive process.^[55] As Nietzsche further explains in his notes on Heraclitus, from God’s “con-tuitive” perspective there is no “guilt, injustice, contradiction and suffering” in this world, which appears in this manner just for “the limited human mind which sees things apart but not connected.” Before Heraclitian God’s fire-gaze,

not a drop of injustice remain[s] in the world… In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as children and artists play, so plays the ever-living fire. It constructs and destroys, all in innocence. Such is the game that the Aeon plays with itself. Transforming itself into water and earth, it builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. An instant of satiety-and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by his need to create. Not hybris but the ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being. The child throws its toys away from time to time and starts again, in innocent caprice. But when it does build, it combines and joins and forms its structures regularly, conforming to inner laws.^[56]

The most similar image that can be painted of this God or “cosmic child (Weltkind)” is not of a human being acting on the basis of any moralistic tendencies or teleological purposes but of a child who builds and destroys sandcastles simply out of his inner unconscious and innocent drives and impulses. This image resembles a creative artist who, stimulated by his contradictory inner drives and his “struggle of the many,” while standing “contemplatively above and at the same time actively within his work” and paring “necessity and random” and “oppositional tension and harmony,” attempts to create a work of art and then, by breaking the form of the same work of art, goes a step further and creates another new work of art.^[57] The whole process is a game, a cosmic game of creating, becoming, and dissolving that should not be viewed morally. As Nietzsche puts it, “It is a game. Don’t take it so pathetically and – above all – don’t make morality of it!”^[58]

According to Nietzsche, the entire universe, including ourselves, is nothing more than a momentary configuration of shapes in the sand created by the primordial source of the universe without any anthropomorphic ends. This everlasting flow and becoming, as the child’s play, does not in any meaningful way adhere to rational norms and serves no end other than itself. It is an amoral, “innocent” process in which “everything that exists has been deified, regardless of whether it is good or evil.”^[59] The existence of the world is accordingly justified for the wanton Heraclitian child as a pleasing aesthetic spectacle, whose “at one and the same time subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator” He is.^[60]

Based on such an aesthetic view of the process of creation, the problem of theodicy, as the philosophical attempt to reconcile the manifest evil in the universe with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent God who has created it, no longer arises.^[61] There is no God who created a separate and isolated universe. His numerous objectifications and manifestations are all that exist. The entire process of creation is not but a “whole comedy of art” created by its true creator, the Ur-Eine, out of his over-fullness in an attempt to “release and redeem” himself “in beautiful semblances.” We exist as “images and artistic projections” for this true creator of art, and our true significance and dignity lie in our being His works of art.

The Ur-Eine is both “the creator and spectator of that comedy of art” and we are released and consoled insofar as we merge or feel identified with the Ur-Eine and the whole process of his artistic creation.^[62] All we can do to justify our individual existence with its fears and terrors is to go beyond it, recognizing that behind the constant change and destruction of the phenomenal world of the Apolline, which is necessary and inevitable, there is the eternal Ur-Eine with “its unbounded greed and lust for being.” Feeling this “exuberant fertility of the world-Will [the Ur-Eine]” which makes “an uncountable excess of forms of existence thrust and push themselves into life,” all “the struggle, the agony, the destruction of appearances… seems to us to be necessary.” Now, we, not as individuals living amid the apparent world, but as untied or feeling united with the Ur-Eine, “as the one living being,” with whose “procreative lust” and its “immeasurable, primordial delight in existence we have become one,” find a way to reconcile and become at peace with what lies behind the appearances. Therefore, the world and life may come to seem “justified” for us and the metaphysical solace of the eternal lust and delight of existence may tear us momentarily out of the turmoil of changing figures to the extent that we, through various ecstatic or aesthetic experiences, can come close to identifying ourselves as the primordial child and seeing the beauty of the play by looking at it through an aesthetic lens.^[63]

4. In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche attempts to provide an aesthetic justification of existence, referring to it as “the true metaphysical activity/task of this life.”^[64] This, in turn, is rooted in his Schopenhauerian conception of man’s metaphysical nature and need. According to Schopenhauer, the human being is an animal metaphysicum, an exceptional one who, via his reason, begins to marvel and wonder first at its own works and acts, and asks himself what they themselves are. “And its wonder is the more serious, as here for the first time it stands consciously face to face with death, and besides the finiteness of all existence, the vanity and fruitlessness of all effort force themselves on it more or less.” Indeed, it is the human’s knowledge of “the terrifying certainty of death,” as well as the suffering and miseries of life, that makes the world in need of a metaphysical, or for that reason, religious, explanation. A life without pain and end would not require us to ask why the world exists, or why it is the way it is.^[65]

But, just as there is a remedy and a treatment for every ill and sorrow in nature, the same reason that allows the knowledge of death to enter human consciousness also helps us acquire a metaphysical perspective: “All religions and philosophical systems are directed principally to this end, and are thus primarily the antidote to the certainty of death which reflecting reason produces from its own resources.”^[66] In the first place, and more generally, this “consolation”^[67] or treatment was offered by religion. The ubiquitous presence of religion suggests that religion, with its “allegorical”^[68] and metaphorical language, as “popular metaphysics,”^[69] and especially with its promise of life after death, fulfills this metaphysical need for the vast majority of human beings. However, according to Schopenhauer, the best philosophical consolation is offered by Buddhism and Brahmanism, in which man is not originally born and does not die. Rather they “teach man to regard Brahman, as the original being himself, to whom all arising and passing away are essentially foreign.” Such a person not only dismisses the fear of death as meaningless, but he despises it with confidence.^[70]

In the wake of Schopenhauer’s notion of human metaphysical need, Nietzsche’s task of aesthetically justifying life and bringing “the art of metaphysical solace,”^[71] i.e. Dionysiac tragedy, to the stage is an attempt to confront the certainty of our death and fragility. We take pleasure in watching tragedy and the annihilation of its hero, Oedipus or Hamlet, since through watching their artistic and symbolic self-destruction we penetrate the essence of our individuality and phenomenality, experiencing their fate as the human inevitable fate. The tragic hero welcomes his fate of death and annihilation since he sees that “in the ground of things, and despite all changing appearances, life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable.”^[72] As previously indicated, the key to this embracing attitude is his ecstatic vision of unity with the Ur-Eine. By adopting this viewpoint, the tragic hero no longer fears the annihilation of his individuality and identity. Rather, he derives the greatest pleasure, calm, and consolation from this devastating experience, which stems from the metaphysical insight that by surrendering our phenomenal and individual existence, we are returning to our primordial state. And this state, from a metaphysical standpoint, is where we always really reside. Our individual and separate identity is thus nothing more than an illusion that exists solely at the level of individual consciousness. The liberation of our consciousness from the burden of this illusion, and the feeling of its return to that primordial state is the source of profound and genuine pleasure and solace. We get joy and pleasure from the experience of watching tragedy and its hero’s downfall because we recognize his destruction as an illustration of our own experience of destruction and return to the primordial source of all existence. We feel joy and receive pleasure because we see his destruction as an example of our own genuine destruction, death, and return to the original state. Similarly, the delight we experience from intoxication and ecstatic orgies is rooted in the same sense of loss of individuality and oneness with the origin.^[73]

4 Rūmī and the emerald of love

1. The images of the lion and the dragon in al-Ghazālī’s and Rūmī’s works indicate that the source and origin of the universe, or God, is beyond the moral constraints of human intellect or any governing universal moral order. A deity like this is not the benevolent Muʿtazilite or Christian God who brings peace to those who seek refuge in his grace. The lion or the dragon is more akin to Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s immoral and completely free primordial source which acts solely out of its rich and contradictory nature without any moral or humane purpose. In the presence of lions and dragons, a human being first and foremost trembles with fear and terror, knowing that their behaviours are unpredictable and they have no regard for other creatures. Fear is a “natural reaction to the possibility of future suffering and harm inflicted on a person, which threatens to destroy his individual existence.”^[74] In fact, fear is the state and reaction of an individual who, in the midst of the world of individuality, is content with his individual existence, fears its destruction, and wishes to survive. However, fear does not go anywhere and the lions or the dragons will finally destroy the individual existence whenever they want, which is why Rūmī frequently states that “in the end, this house will fall of itself into ruin.”^[75]

Having gazed with keen eyes into the depth of the fearful, destructive, and dragon-like nature of God, man’s fear of the destruction of his personal existence and getting caught in all kinds of calamities and suffering is not unreasonable. However, because the human being has acquired knowledge that neither fear nor action can change the dragon-like nature of the primary source of existence, he may find action repulsive and resort to the pessimistic passivity and inaction of Buddha or Hamlet.^[76]

In light of the concept of love, Rūmī contends, a third possible reaction and attitude, aside from fear or inaction, arises. Knowing the fact of his eventual fragility, the human being tries to come to terms with the lion or the dragon and embraces their lawless foundation. Unlike the men of knowledge and reason who “are abased before Him from necessity,” the lovers “are abased with hundredfold free will.”^[77] Such men of love first of all move beyond fear and hope. According to al-Ghazālī, the one whom God took control of his heart and became acquainted with Him “does not basically look to the future so that fear, as fear of the occurrence of some unpleasant things in the future, and hope, as hope for the occurrence of some desirable and pleasant things in the future, do not appear in his heart.”^[78] Achieving such a state, which corresponds to Nietzsche’s aesthetic attitude towards the Ur-Eine, is desirable for Rūmī. Therefore, Rūmī, for example, wants the cup-bearer to give him as much as the wine of love and ecstasy which takes him beyond fear and hope and beheads the thought of good and bad, as well as gain and loss.^[79] As long as man thinks of his own existence and is not drowned and annihilated in the sea of nothingness, he fears death and destruction and will always remain upon the planks of fear and hope, but “once planks and mariner have passed away, nothing remains but drowning.”^[80] As he puts in one of his most renowned ghazals, “the fearful people have no place in the path of our beloved [since] everyone there is himself a king and not a slave and thrall.”^[81]

2. To properly grasp this third reaction one can apply the Nietzschean metaphysical framework to Rūmī’s claims and make sense of some of his baffling ones. In Rūmī’s metaphysics, as in Nietzsche’s, the primordial source of all existence, “the one,”^[82] is described in nearly the same terms as the Ur-Eine. It is beyond space and time, called spaceless/placeless, the realm with no locality and no past, future, and present.^[83] It is a “direction with no direction and place.”^[84] It, like “meaning,” is formless, allowing it to objectify itself in a variety of ways.^[85] The “form-giver of the world” is itself “simple and without form,”^[86] a “form-ripper.”^[87] The Ur-Eine, which is itself without the head, hand, and foot, is the origin of head and hand and foot, namely, all the qualities and determinations needed for individuation to be realized.^[88] All of these forms “came forth from the Formlessness,”^[89] or “form is brought into existence by the Formless, just as smoke is produced by a fire.”^[90] The Ur-Eine is like fire in that it has no distinct and individual shape but it emits smoke that has different distinct shapes. The “formless form-maker”^[91] is without any address or trace, place, and form.^[92] Given the fact, best articulated in Kant’s philosophy, that in our everyday perceptions, we are just able to perceive whatever has form, that is, whatever is in space and time, the Formless is not perceivable through our ordinary perceptual apparatus. Therefore, Rūmī defines it as “ghaīb,” that is, what is absent from our perception, the unseen, “the formless, infinite form of the unseen,”^[93] which is pregnant with numerous forms.^[94]

In a renowned ghazal, ghaīb is described as “a non-existent coloured existence, from whence every existence springs forth.”^[95] Similar paradoxical expressions are introduced in Mathnawī, such as “the non-existent world appearing as existent” and “the existent world appearing as non-existent.”^[96] This really existent Ur-Eine is also like a concealed ocean with the really non-existent “foams,” that is, the plurality of the individuals which are the visible semblances of that “ocean of placelessness.”^[97] The Ur-Eine is, then, the absolute existence and the only real realm of existence, and, owing to its lack of space and time, any limit, boundary, form, and individual objectifications, it cannot be perceived by our perceptual apparatus. This description also justifies another term Rūmī uses to characterize this realm: “̔adam,” signifying nothingness and non-existence (nīstī in Persian). Nevertheless, for Rūmī ̔adam is the realm of “openness,” “release,” and “expanse of opening” in which he can “fly” or “dance,” and the realm of “one colour and one essence,” contrasting to the narrow realm of existence which is immersed in “bonds,” “knots,” and boundaries.^[98] In the sphere of ̔adam, there is no “sorrow and sadness.” Instead, it is all “real life,” and even all existence is beholden to it.^[99] Due to these characteristics, Rūmī sees himself as “intoxicated and drunken” by ̔adam,^[100] fleeting from his existence and dwelling in non-being.^[101]

3. Thus, the source of all existence is the formless and simple form-giver who creates the individual and determinate forms of creatures in place and time in a continuous flow. It is like “a jug which is filled to the brim with wisdom and beauty,” or “a hidden treasure which, from the excess of fullness and abundance” of the contradictory forms with which it is pregnant, “burst forth,” and “surged up,” making all these forms appear in a shiningly beautiful manner.^[102] The term “treasure” refers to the well-known hadīth that “I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known, so I created creation that I might be known.”^[103] According to Rūmī’s interpretation, the entire world and everything in it was created for the sake of manifestation, so that the treasure of Divine beauty and wisdom would not remain hidden.^[104] Or according to another passage, “God says, ‘I was a hidden treasure, and I wanted to be known’_ that is, I created the whole world and the end of it all was our manifestation, sometimes through kindness/mercy and sometimes through wrath.”^[105] In his interpretation, Rūmī follows the views of many Sufis who believe that the innermost motive or cause for the creation of the whole world is the love of God for himself and his own beauty.^[106] The Divine Essence, which is full of contradictory forms, is love, the lover, and the beloved. He wanted, willed, and loved to be self-disclosed and to behold his own beauty reflected in the mirror of creatures. Therefore, He created this world. “God’s love and the mystery of His dallying with His favourite were the origin of all His veil-making (creation of phenomena).”^[107] In other words, “He, who loves himself eternally,” and “plays love with himself,” makes this world a mirror of water and clay to reflect the Divine beauty.^[108]

In this way, God resembles a painter who brings out various forms and pictures as a painter and an incomparable master-artist in order to display his art to Himself. These forms and pictures are smooth, refined, and humane at times, ugly, impure, and devilish at others. Rather than establishing the existence of good and evil in the world, or, in Schopenhauer’s words, revealing the ugliness of the painter or calligrapher,^[109] they both represent the existence of an artist who paints various forms in the most elaborate way possible. “Both kinds of pictures [i.e. those which seem ugly or beautiful to us] are (evidence of) His mastery: those (ugly ones) are not (evidence of) his ugliness; they are (evidence of) his knowledge and mastery.” God “makes the ugly of extreme ugliness” not because He is ugly or for any moral calculation, but “in order that the perfection of His skill may be displayed, (and that) the denier of His mastery may be put to shame.” Therefore, since “the ugliness of the script is not the ugliness of the artist; nay, ’tis an exhibition of the ugly by Him,” Rūmī concludes that He is the most powerful and skillful artist who paints and creates ugly pictures and beautiful forms in the most masterful manner.^[110]

Thus, the process of creating individual and multiple forms serves no moral purpose. These forms only appear as good and evil or beautiful and ugly in our eyes, and there is no good and evil, nor beauty and ugliness from another perspective, that of God’s love for His beauty, or, to use Nietzsche's expression, from the aesthetic perspective. There is only one artist-painter God who does his job with the utmost skill and mastery, whether he paints the beautiful or the ugly. Yet, in another analogy, the eternal painter resembles a rammāl, a geomancer, who draws right and wrong patterns on the sand.^[111] Rūmī’s painter, or rammāl, is indeed the same as Heraclitus’s child-god who, like “a child at the seashore,” makes the love-play to himself.^[112] This child-God has his own intelligence, intelligibles, and inner laws according to which he acts and manages the whole world of creation. These intelligibles and laws belong to the realm of love and are totally different from those found in our everyday earthly life.^[113]

In the whole aesthetic play of love and beauty, He is, indeed, “both the water and the giver of drink and the drunken.”^[114] Before the painter and the brush, we human beings are not but “helpless and bound pictures like a child in the womb,” and we should not strive with the painter since we just “tear out [our] own mustaches and beard” by struggling hand to hand with the painter.^[115] The eternal painter who creates such drawings is not afraid to ruin them, and if a prophet like Moses inquires about the mystery of such a thing, the answer he receives is one from the painter’s own point of view which transcends human intellect and knowledge.^[116] In fact, this destruction and reconstruction should be considered as part of the world’s overall process of constant flux and change, which shapes the foundation for the continuous emergences and manifestations of beauty in the world. Every moment, the world is renewed, God makes a new form, and a new beauty appears “so that from seeing the new (visions) ennui dies away.”^[117]

Rūmī, like Heraclitus, views the world as a constantly flowing river, “a stream ever arriving anew,” in which old forms always disappear and new forms take their place.^[118] In other words, the world is an ever-expanding flow, the basis of which is the transformation between opposites and contradictories. The two most important opposites are existence or construction and non-existence or ruin. The beauty of this world stems from the duality of existence and non-existence, as well as newness and oldness, which equates to constant births and renewals as well as continuous destructions and obsolescences. Every entity and existence contains non-existence in its being, and every non-existence contains existence in its nothingness. In Rūmī’s words, existence is “contained in non-existence” as “one opposite is concealed in another opposite,”^[119] which causes the edifice of creation to be built on a constant war between contraries, so that “the world is all at strife, mote with mote.”^[120]

4. This war among ever-quarreling forces makes suffering an essential and ineluctable element of human existence so that “every existence that emerged from non-existence is poison to one and sugar to another.”^[121] We can put a muzzle on all theodicy-related doubts and temptations only by viewing this constant struggle as a game of love and beauty that God plays with Himself.^[122] Knowing that all pictures are painted by one and the same painter,^[123] the lover “is at peace with this Father”^[124] and “befriends Him,” and this world of war and struggle “seems like Paradise” to him. Instead of suffering, the lover “may eat sugar even from a jar of poison” and behold “a new form and a new beauty” at every moment, which can make his ennui die away.^[125] Mercy and Wrath, or good and evil, are two seemingly opposing manifestations of God, who is beyond Mercy and Wrath, or good and evil, or any other contradictory attributes. Thus, God is coincidentia oppositorum,^[126] in whom all things enfold and contradictories coincide. He makes use of all of these polar opposites to disclose his beauty. It may even be argued that one of the most beautiful and skillful arts of this formless and modeless creator is precisely making an opposite appear out of its very opposite. In other words, God creates what is the best thing in our eyes precisely out of what seems to us to be the worst one.^[127]

Thus, according to Rūmī, loving requires that the lovers achieve a level of awareness comparable to that which “painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas.”^[128] From the depths of their being, the lovers comprehend that they are nothing but aesthetic pictures painted by the primordial painter. The separated individual existence is full of fear, and no one is consoled and happy unless he shares the same aesthetic position as the eternal painter through the awareness in which the lovers come out of their individual existence, stop looking for how and why, go beyond good and evil, or sugar and poison dualities, immerse themselves in the sea of non-existence and unity, pitch their tents in nothingness, and achieve a holistic standpoint.^[129]

For Rūmī, the lover acquires the awareness through love that the whole game of becoming, opposites forces, and this “I” and this “we” have originated from the primordial Lover’s eternal self-love and are contrived to keep the cosmic aesthetic play moving forth and back. If the lover can progress through the stages of selflessness and ecstasy and feel united with that true eternal love and lover, he may reach a level of existential expansion in which he will find the whole game of existence playing and unfolding inside him, transforming him into a fiery whale that swallows everything from good to evil in its digestive tract. He becomes the whole, the lover of the whole, who is nothing but Himself and His self-love, and the stage on which the entire play is performed:^[130]

I am truly enamored of His Wrath and His Mercy: ’tis marvelous (that) I (am) in love with both these contraries.

By God, if (I escape) from this thorn (of Wrath) and enter the garden (of Mercy), because of this I shall begin to moan like the nightingale.

This is a wondrous nightingale that opens his mouth to eat thorns and roses together.

What nightingale is this? (Nay), ’tis a fiery whale: because of love all unpleasant things are pleasant to him

He is a lover of the whole, and he himself is the whole: he is in love with himself and seeking his own love.^[131]

The true lover, then, is the whole himself, and, as Schopenhauer correctly points out, while theism “places the primary source of existence outside us, as an object[,] all mysticism, and so Sufism also, … draw this source gradually back into ourselves as the subject, and the adept at last recognizes with wonder and delight that he himself is it.”^[132]

5 Conclusion

Both Rūmī’s love and Nietzsche’s Dionysiac tragedy give us some means of gaining access to an aesthetic perspective that transcends any moral-teleological framework of good and evil and rejects conventional theories of theodicy in that they unsatisfactorily attempt to reconcile the reality of suffering and death with the existence of a just and merciful God. For both thinkers, this attempt amounts to degrading the primordial force to the level of the phenomenal world and its anthropomorphic notions and then seeking justification at that level. According to Rūmī and Nietzsche, the individual existence of the appearance is doomed to, and must be prepared for, painful annihilation. As a result, it is fraught with all kinds of fears and anxieties. To address this, both Rūmī and Nietzsche want to convince us to go beyond and behind the changing individual appearances where the eternal lust and delight of existence free from any moral calculation reside. We are armoured in the face of suffering and death as long as we are united with this all-encompassing whole, whether it is for brief moments of aesthetic and ecstatic experience of watching tragedies or orgiastic dancers, as in Nietzsche, or for the lifelong experience of the Rūmī’s exemplar lover who aspires to reach the state of ‘adam.

There are, I acknowledge, plenty of Rūmī’s poems and ideas that can largely be understood through traditional interpretations and as a continuation of Islamic Sufism. Moreover, unlike Vaziri, I do not believe that the authentic Rūmī should primarily be found outside of those narratives.^[133] However, I argue that Rūmī’s works contain certain themes and streaks, including those highlighted in this article, that when taken together provide a different perspective on him. This alternative understanding demonstrates that, even at the deepest levels of religiosity, there were always spaces for other perceptions that occasionally manifested. A separate investigation is required to ascertain whether it is possible to reconcile these two seemingly incompatible aspects – between Rūmī as a mystic Sufi and as an independent philosopher. But it seems that part of this contradictory appearance is due to Rūmī’s dual inner nature, as when he returns to tradition, he perceives everything as being clear, defined, and determined, whereas when he is by himself and observes real life itself, a nearly different world unfolds. And this unfolding serves as the foundation for a philosophical outlook that is much more expansive, robust, and challenging.