Document Type : Original Article
Abstract
The basis of ethical life, for Mulla Sadra, is love, and real love is love of God – which is a manifestation of the divine love for human beings. If someone truly loves God, s/he ascends to the level that all human beings – which are the various manifestations of God – will become his/her beloved. Such a person regards himself (as well as others) as the 'beloved' in personal ethics, economics, and social life. By making a distinction between passionate love and divine love, Mulla Sadra states that either kind is a sort of servantship. A sensual love for something – whether it is a wooden or stone idol, properties and children or mundane stations – cannot be anything other than polytheism; because this is a devotion and servantship to things other than God. But the divine love – which can also be termed as the Love of knowledge and wisdom – is antipathetic to the passions of the soul and on the face of its mundane objects, since true believers see all things as the divine manifestations. Knowledge of God's perfection and His beauty is what causes man to love by heart, as we read this Prophet's Tradition that 'God is beautiful and loves Beauty.' This is to say that God is beautiful and because the world a reflection of Him, it cannot be but beautiful. By speculating on the world and meditating about it, human being's love for God increases, because Beauty characteristically creates a joyfulness that is only achieved by one who has purified his heart from all stains; one who has attained to the 'station of love'. Achieving this position is, among all creatures, characteristic to human beings, because they are of the properties that cannot be found in other beings.
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