Vasspaan

Corbin invokes Dante
and the group of poets known in Italian as the Fedeli d'Amore time and again throughout his work. The
primary source is Volume 3 of En Islam
Iranien, Book 3, Les Fideles d'Amour. For the English speaking
reader the best place to begin is his profound and beautiful book on the
great Islamic mystic Ibn ‘Arabi, Creative
Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi (now published as Alone with the Alone). Here he
recounts an incident from the Master’s life that illuminates the
question at the heart of the soul’s journey. In Mecca in the year 1201
(A.H. 598) the mystic and poet was a guest in the home of an Iranian
family originally from Isfahan. The daughter of the house was a figure
of surpassing intelligence, beauty and spiritual discernment. Her name
was Nizam, ‘ayn al-Shams wa’l-Baha’,
which is Harmonia, Eye of the Sun and of Beauty. As Beatrice did for
Dante, so she revealed the human face of the eternal Sophia for Ibn
‘Arabi. Of his discussion of this incident, and of much else besides,
Corbin writes,

"There is [one] term which perhaps calls for
special justification: Fedeli d'amore.
We have already had occasion to speak of the Fedeli d'amore, Dante's companions, and we shall speak
of them again, for the the theophanism
of Ibn 'Arabi has a good deal in common with the ideas of the symbolist
interpreters of Dante (Luigi Valli) , though it is secure against such
criticism as that of the literalist philologists, who were alarmed to
see the person of Beatrice fade into pale allegory… In any case the
young girl who was for Ibn ‘Arabi in Mecca what Beatrice was for Dante ,
was a real young girl, though at the same time she was “in person” a
theophanic figure, the figure of the Sophia
aeterna (whom certain of Dante’s companions invoked as the Madonna Intelligenza)…

It has
not been our intention to re-open the great debate inaugurated by Asin
Palacios, concerning the actual historical relations between those to
whom we can give the name of the Fedeli
d’amore in the East and West. It has seemed more important to
indicate the undeniable typological affinities between them. We shall
observe that this term Fedeli d’amore…
does not apply indiscriminately to the entire community of Sufis; it
does not, for example, apply to the pious ascetics of Mesopotamia who in
the first centuries of Islam took the name of Sufi. In making this
distinction we only conform to the indications provided by the great
Iranian mystic Ruzbehan Baqli of Shiraz (d. 1209) in his beautiful
Persian book entitled the Jasmine of
the Fedeli d’amore. Ruzbehan distinguishes between the pious
ascetics or Sufis, who never encountered the experience of human love,
and the Fedeli d’amore for whom
the experience of a cult of love dedicated to a beautiful being is the
necessary initiation to divine love, from which it is inseparable. Such
an initiation does not indeed signify anything in the nature of a
monastic conversion to divine love; it is a unique initiation, which
transfigures eros as such, that
is, human love for a human creature. Ruzbehan’s doctrine falls in with
Ibn ‘Arabi’s dialectic of love. It … makes Ruzbehan the precursor of
that other famous man of Shiraz, the great poet Hafiz, whose Diwan is still observed today by the
Sufis of Iran as a bible of the religion of love, whereas in the West
it has been solemnly debated whether or not this Diwan has a mystic meaning. This
religion of love was and remained the religion of all the minstrels of
Iran and inspired them with the magnificent ta’wil [spiritual hermeneutic] which supplies a link
between the spiritual Iran of the Sufis and Zoroastrian Iran, for
according to this ta’wil the
Prophet of Islam in person proclaims Zarathustra to be the prophet of the
Lord of love; the altar of Fire becomes the symbol of the Living Flame
in the temple of the heart." (Alone
with the Alone, 100-101)

A few pages further on Corbin
writes that those among the Sufis whom “we group as the Fedeli d’amore… [are] dominated by
two great figures: Ibn ‘Arabi, the incomparable master of mystic
theosophy, and Jalaluddin Rumi, the Iranian troubadour of that religion
of love whose flame feeds on the theophanic feeling for sensuous beauty.
Fedeli d’amore struck us as
the best means of translating into a Western language the names by which
our mystics called themselves in Arabic or Persian (‘ashiqun, muhibbun, arbab al-hawa,
etc.) Since it is the name by which Dante and his companions called
themselves, it has the power of suggesting the traits which were common
to both groups and have been analyzed in memorable works. " (Alone with the Alone, 110)

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