Songs of Kabir | Page 5

he escapes the excessive emotionalism, the tendency to an
exclusively anthropomorphic devotion, which results from an
unrestricted cult of Divine Personality, especially under an
incarnational form; seen in India in the exaggerations of Krishna
worship, in Europe in the sentimental extravagances of certain
Christian saints.
Next, he is protected from the soul-destroying conclusions of pure
monism, inevitable if its logical implications are pressed home: that is,
the identity of substance between God and the soul, with its corollary
of the total absorption of that soul in the Being of God as the goal of
the spiritual life. For the thorough-going monist the soul, in so far as it

is real, is substantially identical with God; and the true object of
existence is the making patent of this latent identity, the realization
which finds expression in the Vedântist formula "That art thou." But
Kabîr says that Brahma and the creature are "ever distinct, yet ever
united"; that the wise man knows the spiritual as well as the material
world to "be no more than His footstool." [Footnote: Nos. VII and IX.]
The soul's union with Him is a love union, a mutual inhabitation; that
essentially dualistic relation which all mystical religion expresses, not a
self-mergence which leaves no place for personality. This eternal
distinction, the mysterious union-in-separateness of God and the soul,
is a necessary doctrine of all sane mysticism; for no scheme which fails
to find a place for it can represent more than a fragment of that soul's
intercourse with the spiritual world. Its affirmation was one of the
distinguishing features of the Vaishnavite reformation preached by
Râmânuja; the principle of which had descended through Râmânanda
to Kabîr.
Last, the warmly human and direct apprehension of God as the supreme
Object of love, the soul's comrade, teacher, and bridegroom, which is
so passionately and frequently expressed in Kabîr's poems, balances
and controls those abstract tendencies which are inherent in the
metaphysical side of his vision of Reality: and prevents it from
degenerating into that sterile worship of intellectual formulæ which
became the curse of the Vedântist school. For the mere intellectualist,
as for the mere pietist, he has little approbation. [Footnote: Cf.
especially Nos. LIX, LXVII, LXXV, XC, XCI.] Love is throughout his
"absolute sole Lord": the unique source of the more abundant life
which he enjoys, and the common factor which unites the finite and
infinite worlds. All is soaked in love: that love which he described in
almost Johannine language as the "Form of God." The whole of
creation is the Play of the Eternal Lover; the living, changing, growing
expression of Brahma's love and joy. As these twin passions preside
over the generation of human life, so "beyond the mists of pleasure and
pain" Kabîr finds them governing the creative acts of God. His
manifestation is love; His activity is joy. Creation springs from one
glad act of affirmation: the Everlasting Yea, perpetually uttered within
the depths of the Divine Nature. [Footnote: Nos. XVII, XXVI, LXXVI,
LXXXII.] In accordance with this concept of the universe as a

Love-Game which eternally goes forward, a progressive manifestation
of Brahma--one of the many notions which he adopted from the
common stock of Hindu religious ideas, and illuminated by his poetic
genius--movement, rhythm, perpetual change, forms an integral part of
Kabîr's vision of Reality. Though the Eternal and Absolute is ever
present to his consciousness, yet his concept of the Divine Nature is
essentially dynamic. It is by the symbols of motion that he most often
tries to convey it to us: as in his constant reference to dancing, or the
strangely modern picture of that Eternal Swing of the Universe which
is "held by the cords of love." [Footnote: No. XVI.]
It is a marked characteristic of mystical literature that the great
contemplatives, in their effort to convey to us the nature of their
communion with the supersensuous, are inevitably driven to employ
some form of sensuous imagery: coarse and inaccurate as they know
such imagery to be, even at the best. Our normal human consciousness
is so completely committed to dependence on the senses, that the fruits
of intuition itself are instinctively referred to them. In that intuition it
seems to the mystics that all the dim cravings and partial apprehensions
of sense find perfect fulfilment. Hence their constant declaration that
they see the uncreated light, they hear the celestial
melody, they taste the sweetness of the Lord, they know an
ineffable fragrance, they feel the very contact of love. "Him verily
seeing and fully feeling, Him spiritually hearing and Him delectably
smelling and sweetly swallowing," as Julian of Norwich has it. In those
amongst them who develop psycho-sensorial automatisms, these
parallels between sense and spirit may present themselves to
consciousness in the form of hallucinations: as the light seen