Avicenna On Divine Love & Beauty

God is Absolute-Beauty and Absolute-Perfection together with being Omniscient or All-Knowing, such that He perceives all, and nothing escapes His Knowledge and perception; now where there is beauty, love follows, and the greater the beauty of the beloved and the more intense the faculty of perception of the lover and consequently the greater the perception by the lover of the beloved’s beauty, the more intense and fervent the fire of love; therefore God who is absolute-beauty and the All-Perceiving Being, is Himself the lover, Of His Essence, and the beloved, by His Essence; meaning that He perceives and knows Himself, with a knowing and perception that is perfect and most intense, as the most beautiful and perfect reality, and knowing His Essence as He Knows His Essence, He Loves it. God does not love or desire anything external to and other than His Essence because desire is induced by a lack of some good or perfection, but how can there be any desire in that which lacks nothing and lacking nothing, desires nothing; love, desire or an inclination towards another is indicative of the existence of some imperfection or the privation of some good in the essence of the lover, the removal of which requires the lover to seek his beloved, but it is impossible for there to be any privation or imperfection in an Essence which is Absolute-Beauty and Absolute-Perfection, and consequently such a being cannot be inclined towards or desire something else, and therefore only loves His own Essence to the exclusion of all things, because whatever is beautiful or perfect besides God, has been granted that beauty and perfection by God and hence God’s love for that contingent is nothing but His love for Himself, because contingent beings are nothing but mirrors reflecting divine beauty.

However God’s love for His Essence is not some psychic state that arises in the lover’s essence as a consequence of the perception of the beloved’s beauty, and is therefore existentially distinct and separate from that perception because, if God's love for His Essence is a consequence of His perception of His Essence so asserting this renders God's Love existentially distinct and separate from his perception, and God's attributes are identical to His Essence, meaning that His perception is identical to His Essence,and His Love is also identical to His Essence, but if His Love is his Essence and His Perception is also His Essence, and Love is distinct from Perception then this would mean that His Essence is distinct and separate from His Essence, meaning that His Essence is other than itself, and this is a contradiction. Therefore God's love cannot be something distinct and separate from His perception of His Essence. Moreover if His Love for His own Essence is a consequence of his perception of divine beauty and is therefore distinct from that perception, so this would render God a composite and every composite is dependent upon its parts and hence rendered necessary through another, and that which is necessary through another cannot simultaneously be necessary in itself.

Love or attraction in the case of God is simply perception of divine beauty and the ontological perfections of its Essence, for after all love is a necessary consequence of the perception of beauty, in other words perception is a preliminary cause of love without which there can be no love because love occurs due to the lovers perception of the beloved's beauty; Love in the lover cannot subsist without this perception of the beloved's beauty regardless of whether this perception is sensible, imaginal or intelligible. On the other hand hate or repulsion is the necessary consequence of the perception of ugliness therefore perception is also the preliminary cause of hate as without the perception of ugliness or evil there can be no hate or repulsion, but since there is no evil or ugliness in the divine therefore the term "Love" when used in relation to God, denotes only the perception of beauty and goodness in the divine essence by itself, in other words it implies the complete absence of evil and ugliness in that exalted being. Therefore when it is said that God love's himself, and we know that love is the lover's perception of the beloved's beauty and hate the perception of evil or ugliness therefore God's love for His Own Essence denotes the presence of All-Beauty to the exclusion of All-Ugliness. Had we not used the word "love" in relation to His Own essence but would have only relied on the use of the term "perception", so that could have been misconstrued to imply the possibility of the existence of evil or ugliness in the Divine Essence, because perception is common to both good and evil, beauty and ugliness, but by using the word "Love" it becomes evident that this perception is solely His cognizance of His Beauty, to the exclusion of All-Evil and ugliness from His Essence.

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