The Sweetness (of the Law)

The perennial spring of imperishable sweetness is within everyone' (Meher Baba). This essay attempts an intellectual attack upon everything in us that rises in revolt against this statement, against all that would dismiss out of hand the reality of its truth and confine its meaning to the realm of sentimental metaphysics. Likewise, it stands in defense of everything that already feels and knows this statement’s correctness, not as concept, but as immanent fact: the universal fact of essential sweetness. I pursue this two-fold aim by investigating the relation between sweetness and the law, because it is precisely via a stimulation and vexation of our sense of law that the statement of the universal fact of essential sweetness impresses us. The inversive and profoundly intimate link between these terms is found in the bitter waters of Marah (Exodus 15: 25), which I interpret in light of medieval mystical ideas about the immanence of paradise in order to argue for the universal ontological illegality of worry. At the still point or moment of identity that forms the crux of the law/sweetness relation, is found the highest anagogical sense of law, the impossible yet inevitable taste of eternal justice.