CHAPTER II.
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde.[[189]]
Goethe.
‘Let us proceed, then,’ resumed Atherton, smoothing his manuscript, ‘on our Persian expedition. Dr. Tholuck, with his German translation, shall act as interpreter, and we may pause now and then on our way to listen to the deliverances of the two men of vision who accompany us from Breslau and from Boston.’
The first century of the Hegira has scarcely expired when a mysticism, strikingly similar to that of Madame Guyon, is seen to arise spontaneously in the devout ardours of a female saint named Rabia.[[190]] There is the same straining after indifference and self-abnegation—after a love absolutely disinterested—after a devotion beyond language and above means.
By the sick-bed of Rabia stood two holy men. One of them said, ‘The prayers of that man are not sincere who refuses to bear the chastening strokes of the Lord.’ The other went beyond him, saying, ‘He is not sincere who does not rejoice in them.’ Rabia, detecting something of self in that very joy, surpassed them both as she added, ‘He is not sincere who does not, beholding his Lord, become totally unconscious of them.’ The Mohammedan Lives of the Saints records that, on another occasion, when questioned concerning the cause of a severe illness, she replied, ‘I suffered myself to think on the delights of Paradise, and therefore my Lord hath punished me.’ She was heard to exclaim, ‘What is the Kaaba to me? I need God only.’ She declared herself the spouse of Heaven,—described her will and personality as lost in God. When asked how she had reached this state, she made the very answer we have heard a German mystic render, ‘I attained it when everything which I had found I lost again in God.’ When questioned as to the mode, she replied, ‘Thou, Hassan, hast found Him by reason and through means; I immediately, without mode or means.’
The seeds of Sufism are here. This mystical element was fostered to a rapid growth through succeeding centuries, in the East as in the West, by the natural reaction of religious fervour against Mohammedan polemics and Mohammedan scholasticism.
In the ninth century of our era, Sufism appears divided between two distinguished leaders, Bustami and Juneid. The former was notorious chiefly for the extravagance of his mystical insanity. The men of genius who afterwards made the name of Sufism honourable, and the language of its aspiration classical, shrank from such coarse excess. It was not enough for Bustami to declare that the recognition of our personal existence was an idolatry, the worst of crimes. It was not enough for him to maintain that when man adores God, God adores himself. He claimed such an absorption in his pantheistic deity as identified him with all the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of the universe. He would say, ‘I am a sea without bottom, without beginning, without end. I am the throne of God, the word of God. I am Gabriel, Michael, Israfil; I am Abraham, Moses, Jesus.’
If Epiphanius is to be believed, the Messalians were a sect chargeable with the very same folly. If asked, he says, concerning a patriarch, a prophet, an angel, or Christ, they would reply, ‘I am that patriarch, that prophet, that angel; I am Christ.’
A reference to Emerson’s Essay on History renders such professions perfectly credible. Bustami and the Messalians could not have made them in the literal, but (by anticipation) in the Emersonian sense. They believed, with him, that ‘there is one mind common to all individual men.’ They find in him their interpreter, when he says, ‘Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only sovereign agent.’ Emerson couches their creed in modern rhymes, as he sings exultant,—
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.
In the spirit of the same philosophy, Angelus Silesius hints at the possibility of such an empire. He reminds his readers that there is no greatness which makes the glory of the past that may not be realized by themselves in the present. Thus he asks—
Dost prize alone King Solomon as wisest of the wise?
Thou also canst be Solomon, and all his wisdom thine.[[191]]
But what is only potential with him is claimed as actual by mystical brethren bolder yet than he.
The first endeavour of the Sufi (as of so many Christian mystics) is to achieve that simplifying, purifying process which shall remove from the mind everything earthly and human—all its creaturely accidents, and reduce it to that abstract essence which mirrors Deity, and is itself ultimately divine. An apologue in the Mesnevi of Jelaleddin Rumi (a Sufi poet who wrote in the first half of our thirteenth century) teaches this doctrine quite in the oriental manner.
The Greeks and the Chinese dispute before a certain sultan as to which of the two nations is the more skilful in the art of decoration. The sultan assigns to the rival painters two structures, facing each other, on which they shall exercise their best ability, and determine the question of precedence by the issue:—
The Chinese ask him for a thousand colours,
All that they ask he gives right royally;
And every morning from his treasure-house
A hundred sorts are largely dealt them out.
The Greeks despise all colour as a stain—
Effacing every hue with nicest care.
Brighter and brighter shines their polished front,
More dazzling, soon, than gleams the floor of heaven.
This hueless sheen is worth a thousand dyes,—
This is the moon—they but her cloudy veil;
All that the cloud is bright or golden with
Is but the lending of the moon or sun.
And now, at length, are China’s artists ready.
The cymbals clang—the sultan hastens thither,
And sees enrapt the glorious gorgeousness—
Smit nigh to swooning by those beamy splendours.—
Then, to the Grecian palace opposite.
Just as the Greeks have put their curtain back,
Down glides a sunbeam through the rifted clouds,
And, lo, the colours of that rainbow house
Shine, all reflected on those glassy walls
That face them, rivalling: the sun hath painted
With lovelier blending, on that stony mirror
The colours spread by man so artfully.
Know then, O friend! such Greeks the Sufis are,
Owning nor book nor master; and on earth
Having one sole and simple task,—to make
Their hearts a stainless mirror for their God.
Is thy heart clear and argent as the moon?
Then imaged there may rest, innumerous,
The forms and hues of heaven.[[192]]
So, too, says Angelus Silesius,—
Away with accidents and false appearance,
Thou must be essence all, and colourless.
And again,—
Man! wouldst thou look on God, in heaven or while yet here,
Thy heart must first of all become a mirror clear.[[193]]
Jelaleddin Rumi describes the emancipation of the soul from intellectual distinctions—the laws of finite thought, the fluctuations of hope and fear, the consciousness of personality,—under the image of night. This has been the favourite and appropriate symbol of all the family of mystics, from Dionysius, with his ‘Divine Darkness,’ to John of the Cross, in his De Nocte Obscurâ, and on to Novalis, in his Hymnen an die Nacht. In the following vigorous passage, Night is equivalent to the state of self-abandonment and self-transcendence:—
Every night God frees the host of spirits—
Makes them clear as tablets smooth and spotless—
Frees them every night from fleshy prison.
Then the soul is neither slave nor master,
Nothing knows the bondman of his bondage,
Nothing knows the lord of all his lordship,
Gone from such a night is eating sorrow,
Gone the thoughts that question good and evil.
Then, without distraction or division,
In the One the spirit sinks and slumbers.
Silesius has the same thought, cold and dry, after the poetic Persian, yet in words that would furnish no inapt motto to express in a sentence this species of mysticism:—
Ne’er sees man in this life, the Light above all light,
As when he yields him up to darkness and to night.[[194]]
The ascetic Sufi bids the mystical aspirant close the senses against every external impression—for the worlds of sense and of contemplation reciprocally exclude each other. We have seen how the Hindoos and the Hesychasts endeavoured literally to obey this counsel, reiterated so often by so many mystagogues:—
Put wool within the ear of flesh, for that
Makes deaf the inner hearing, as with wool;
If that can hear, the spirit’s ear is deaf.
Let sense make blind no more the spirit’s eye.
Be without ear, without a sense or thought,
Hark only to the voice, ‘Home, wanderer, home!’
It is quite in accordance with such precepts that the judging faculty should be abandoned by the Sufi for the intuitive, and the understanding sacrificed to the feeling. According to the Koran, Mohammed once soared heavenwards, to such a height that Gabriel could not overtake him, and far off below, appeared to the Prophet no larger than a sparrow. Jelaleddin compares the heart, the divine principle in man (the spirit, in his psychology), to Mohammed, and the understanding to Gabriel. Names and words, he says, are but ‘nets and shackles.’ With justice, in one sense, he bids men pass from the sign to the thing signified, and asks,—
Didst ever pluck a rose from R and O and S?
Names thou mayst know: go, seek the truth they name;
Search not the brook, but heaven, to find the moon.
The senses and the lower powers, nourished by forms, belong to earth, and constitute the mere foster-mother of our nature. The intuitive faculty is a ray of Deity, and beholds Essence. The soul which follows its divine parent is therefore a wonder, and often a scandal to that which recognises only the earthly. Jelaleddin compares the rapturous plunge of the soul into its divine and native element to the hastening of the ducklings into the water, to the terror of the hen that hatched them.[[195]]
While exulting in a devotion above all means and modes, we find the Sufi (in nearly every stage of his ascension save the last) yielding implicit obedience to some human guide of his own choice. The Persian Pir was to him what the Director was to the Quietist or semi-Quietist of France; what the experienced Friend of God was to the mystic of Cologne or Strasburg; what Nicholas of Basle was so long to Tauler. That a voluntary submission to such authority was yielded is certain. Yet we find scarcely an allusion to these spiritual guides among the chief bards of Sufism. Each singer claims or seeks a knowledge of God which is immediate, and beyond the need of at least the orthodox and customary aids and methods. Thus Rumi says—
He needs a guide no longer who hath found
The way already leading to the Friend.
Who stands already on heaven’s topmost dome
Needs not to search for ladders. He that lies,
Folded in favour on the sultan’s breast,
Needs not the letter or the messenger.
So Emerson,—
‘The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.... Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour.’[[196]]
Hence, in both cases, the indifference before noticed to all the various forms of positive religion. The Persian describes all religions as the same liquor in different glasses—all are poured by God into one mighty beaker.
The self-abandonment and self-annihilation of the Sufis rest on the basis of their pantheism. Personal existence is with them the great illusion of this world of appearance—to cling to it is to be blind and guilty. Mahmud (a Sufi of the fourteenth century) says, in the Gulschen Ras,—
All sects but multiply the I and Thou;
This I and Thou belong to partial being;
When I and Thou and several being vanish,
Then Mosque and Church shall bind thee never more.
Our individual life is but a phantom:
Make clear thine eye, and see Reality!
Again, (though here the sense may be moral rather than philosophic, and selfishness, not personality, abjured)—
Go, soul! with Moses to the wilderness,
And hear with him that grand ‘I am the Lord!’
While, like a mountain that shuts out the sun,
Thine I lifts up its head, thou shalt not see Me.
The lightning strikes the mountain into ruins,
And o’er the levelled dust the glory leaps!
Jelaleddin says of the Sufi in his self-abnegation,—
His love of God doth, like a flame of hell,
Even in a moment swallow love of self.
Mahmud, to express the same thought, employs the image used by Thomas à Kempis:—
The path from Me to God is truly found,
When pure that Me from Self as clearest flame from smoke.
Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any existence separate from the Divine Substance—the Absolute:—
While aught thou art or know’st or lov’st or hast,
Not yet, believe me, is thy burden gone.
Who is as though he were not—ne’er had been—
That man, oh joy! is made God absolute.
Self is surpassed by self-annihilation;
The nearer nothing, so much more divine.[[197]]
Thus individuality must be ignored to the utmost; by mystical death we begin to live; and in this perverted sense he that loseth his life shall find it. Hence, by a natural consequence, the straining after a sublime apathy almost as senseless as the last abstraction of the Buddhist. The absolutely disinterested love, to which the Sufi aspires, assumes, however, an aspect of grandeur as opposed to the sensuous hopes and fears of Mohammed’s heaven and hell. Rumi thus describes the blessedness of those whose will is lost in the will of God:—
They deem it crime to flee from Destiny,
For Destiny to them brings only sweetness.
Welcome is all that ever can befal them,
For were it fire it turns to living waters.
The poison melts to sugar on their lip;
The mire they tread is lustrous diamond,
And weal and woe alike, whatever comes.
They and their kingdom lie in God’s divineness.
To pray, ‘O Lord, turn back this trouble from me,’
They count an insult to the hand that sent it.
Faithful they are, but not for Paradise;
God’s will the only crowning of their faith:
And not for seething hell, flee they from sin,
But that their will must serve the Will Divine.
It is not struggle, ’tis not discipline,
Wins them a will so restful and so blest;—
It is that God from his heart-fountain ever
Fills up their jubilant souls.
So, again, Angelus Silesius, sometimes pushing his negation to unconscious caricature:—
True hero he that would as readily
Be left without God as enjoy him near.
Self-loss finds God—to let God also go,
That is the real, most rare abandonment.
Man! whilst thou thankest God for this or that,
Yet art thou slave to finite feebleness.
Not fully God’s is he who cannot live,
Even in hell, and find in hell no hell.
Nought so divine as to let nothing move thee,
Here or hereafter (could’st thou only reach it).
Who loves without emotion, and without knowledge knows,
Of him full fitly say we—he is more God than man.
Compare Emerson, discoursing of Intuition and the height to which it raises men:—
‘Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The soul is raised over passion,’ &c. So, again: ‘Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.’[[198]]
This elevation above petition and above desire, towards which many a Sufi toiled, watching, fasting, solitary, through the ‘seven valleys’ of mystic discipline, is cheaply accomplished now-a-days by mere nonchalance, and is hit off by a flourish of the pen. It is the easy boast of any one who finds prayer distasteful and scoffs at psalm singing—who chooses to dub his money-getting with the title of worship, and fancies that to follow instinct is to follow God. The most painful self-negation and the most facile self-indulgence meet at the same point and claim the same pre-eminence.
The eastern mystic ignores humanity to attain divinity. The ascent and the descent are proportionate, and the privileges of nothingness are infinite. We must accompany the Sufi to his highest point of deification, and in that transcendental region leave him. His escape from the finite limitations of time and space is thus described,—
On earth thou seest his outward, but his spirit
Makes heaven its tent and all infinity.
Space and Duration boundless do him service,
As Eden’s rivers dwell and serve in Eden.
Again, Said, the servant, thus recounts one morning to Mohammed the ecstasy he has enjoyed:—
My tongue clave fever-dry, my blood ran fire,
My nights were sleepless with consuming love,
Till night and day sped past—as flies a lance
Grazing a buckler’s rim; a hundred faiths
Seemed then as one; a hundred thousand years
No longer than a moment. In that hour
All past eternity and all to come
Was gathered up in one stupendous Now,—
Let understanding marvel as it may.
Where men see clouds, on the ninth heaven I gaze,
And see the throne of God. All heaven and hell
Are bare to me and all men’s destinies,
The heavens and earth, they vanish at my glance:
The dead rise at my look. I tear the veil
From all the worlds, and in the hall of heaven
I set me central, radiant as the sun.
Then spake the Prophet:—‘Friend, thy steed is warm;
Spur him no more. The mirror in thy breast
Did slip its fleshly case, now put it up—
Hide it once more, or thou wilt come to harm.’
This magniloquence of Said’s is but the vehement poetic expression for the ‘absolute intuition’ of modern Germany—that identity of subject and object in which all limitations and distinctions vanish, and are absorbed in an indescribable transcendental intoxication. If the principle be true at all, its most lofty and unqualified utterance must be the best, and what seems to common-sense the thorough-going madness of the fiery Persian is preferable to the colder and less consistent language of the modern Teutonic mysticism. Quite in the spirit of the foregoing extracts, Emerson laments that we do not oftener realize this identity, and transcend time and space as we ought.—
‘We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related,—the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.’ And again:—‘Time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit sports with time—
‘Can crowd eternity into an hour
Or stretch an hour to eternity.’
So Angelus Silesius:—
Rise above Space and Time, and thou canst be
At any moment in Eternity.[[199]]
The following passage from Jelaleddin exhibits the kind of identity with God claimed by the more extravagant devotees of Sufism:—
Are we fools, we’re God’s captivity;
Are we wise, we are his promenade;
Are we sleeping, we are drunk with God;
Are we waking, then we are his heralds;
Are we weeping, then his clouds of wrath;
Are we laughing, flashes of his love.
Some among them carried their presumption to a practical extreme which did away with all distinction between good and evil. They declared the sins of the Sufi dearer to God than the obedience of other men, and his impiety more acceptable than their faith.[[200]]
Two extracts more will suffice to show the mode in which this pantheistic mysticism confounds, at its acme, the finite and the infinite. They are from Feridoddin Attar, who died in the second or third decade of the fourteenth century.—
Man, what thou art is hidden from thyself.
Know’st not that morning, mid-day, and the eve,
All are within thee? The ninth heaven art thou;
And from the spheres into this roar of time
Didst fall erewhile. Thou art the brush that painted
The hues of all this world—the light of life,
That rayed its glory on the nothingness.
Joy! joy! I triumph! Now no more I know
Myself as simply me, I burn with love
Unto myself, and bury me in love.
The Centre is within me, and its wonder
Lies as a circle everywhere about me.
Joy! joy! no mortal thought can fathom me.
I am the merchant and the pearl at once.
Lo, time and space lie crouching at my feet.
Joy! joy! when I would revel in a rapture,
I plunge into myself and all things know.
The poet then introduces Allah, as saying that he had cast Attar into a trance, and withdrawn him into his own essence, so that the words he uttered were the words of God.[[201]]
Both with Emerson and Angelus, he who truly apprehends God becomes a part of the divine nature,—is a son, a god in God, according to the latter; and according to the former, grows into an organ of the Universal Soul. This notion of identity Emerson seems to arrive at from the human, Angelus from the divine side. The salvation of man is reduced with the German, very much to a process of divine development. With the American, every elevated thought merges man for a time in the Oversoul. The idealism of Emerson is more subjective, his pantheism more complete and consequent. Angelus is bold on the strength of a theory of redemption which makes man necessary to God. Emerson is bolder yet, on his own account, for he makes his own God. This he does when he adores his own ideal, and, expanding Self to Universality, falls down and worships.
Hear him describe this transcendental devotion:—
‘The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.’ Again: ‘I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be but the fair accidents and effects which change and pass.’ So, speaking of the contemplation of Nature:—‘I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God,’ &c.
Angelus says, in virtue of his ideal sonship,—
I am as great as God, and he as small as I;
He cannot me surpass, or I beneath him lie.
God cannot, without me, endure a moment’s space,
Were I to be destroyed, he must give up the ghost.
Nought seemeth high to me, I am the highest thing;
Because e’en God himself is poor deprived of me.[[202]]
The central idea of the Persian mysticism is Emanation. The soul is to escape from the manifold to the One. Its tendency (in proportion as its votary believes that return accomplished) is to confound man with the Father. The leading principle in the mysticism of Eckart and Angelus Silesius is Incarnation. Angelus is never weary of reiterating the doctrine that God became man in order that man might become God. He does not labour, like the orientals, to attain deification by ascetic efforts of his own. He has a kind of Mediator. He seems to believe that through Christ, in some way, every man is a divine Son of God, if he will only think so. All he has to do is to realize this sonship; then he becomes, by Grace, all that the Son of God is by Nature. The obvious result of this mysticism is to identify man with the Son.
In that order of modern mysticism represented by Emerson, the central doctrine is Inspiration. In the creative efforts of the poet, in the generalizations of the philosopher, the man of genius speaks as he is moved by the Oversoul. An influx of the universal spirit floods his being and carries him beyond himself. In intuition the finite Ego is identified with the absolute Ego. Humanity is a divine evolution, and each true man (to use Emerson’s apt illustration)—a façade of Deity. Even Angelus would have acknowledged that it was in some sort through Christ that his boastful sonship became possible. But the believer in the Oversoul will admit no such medium, and owns a debt to Christ much as he owns a debt to Shakspeare. Mysticism of this order usurps the office of the Holy Ghost, and directly identifies the spirit of man with the Spirit of God.
Mysticism has always been accustomed to express the transports of its divine passion by metaphors borrowed from the amorous phraseology of earth. It has done this with every variety of taste, from the grossness of some of the most eminent Romanist saints, to the beautiful Platonism of Spenser’s Hymns of ‘Heavenly Love’ and ‘Heavenly Beautie.’ But nowhere has metaphor branched so luxuriantly into allegory as in the East, and nowhere in the East with such subtilty and such freedom as among the Persian mystics. The admiring countrymen of Hafiz, Saadi, and Jami, interpret mystically almost everything they wrote. They underlay these poems everywhere with a system of correspondence whose ingenuity would have done no discredit to Swedenborg himself. Sir William Jones furnishes some specimens of a sort of mystical glossary, by aid whereof their drinking songs may be read as psalms, and their amatory effusions transformed into hymns full of edification for the faithful.[[203]] Never, since the days of Plotinus, was a deity imagined more abstract than the Unity toward which the Sufi aspires. Yet never was religious language more florid and more sensuous. According to the system alluded to, wine is equivalent to devotion; the tavern is an oratory; kisses and embraces, the raptures of piety; while wantonness, drunkenness, and merriment, are religious ardour and abstraction from all terrestrial thoughts.
The following passage from Mahmud’s Gulschen Ras may suffice as a specimen of these devout Bacchanalia. It has the advantage of exhibiting the key in the lock:—
Know’st thou who the Host may be who pours the spirit’s wine
Know’st thou what his liquor is whose taste is so divine?
The Host is thy Beloved One—the wine annihilation,
And in the fiery draught thy soul drinks in illumination.
Up, soul! and drink with burning lip the wine of ecstasy,
The drop should haste to lose itself in His unbounded sea.
At such a draught mere intellect swims wildered and grows wild;
Love puts the slave-ring in his ear and makes the rebel mild.
Our Friend holds out the royal wine and bids us drink it up;
The whole world is a drinking-house and everything a cup.
Drunken even Wisdom lies—all in revel sunken;
Drunken are the earth and heaven; all the angels drunken.
Giddy is the very sky, round so often hasting,
Up and down it staggers wide, with but a single tasting.
Such the wine of might they drink in blest carouse above.
So the angels higher lift their flaming height of love.
Now and then the dregs they fling earthward in their quaffing,
And where’er a drop alights, lo, an Eden laughing![[204]]