With still greater emphasis than Chrysostom, who asserted that “the true Shekinah is man,” Carlyle says: “the essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself ‘I,’ is a breath of heaven; the highest Being reveals Himself in man.” An idea such as this would never have occurred to Mohammed. The fatherhood of God in its accepted human sense was repugnant to him. The mere thought was sacrilege!
His conception of God was much too exalted, much too divine for this. God and humanity could have no possible connexion. God was the Creator—the Potter, who out of the clay or matter in chaos had made the world and all therein. Humanity was but a small part only of His creation. Men were but as clay in His hands—mere creatures of His. Beyond this hard and fast line there could be no relationship between God and man. Association was as impossible as comparison was objectionable. God, as supreme Creator and Director of the universe, was a Being altogether distinct and apart from His own creation. Yet as such He was the soul or spirit of it, the breath of life to all that lived, and of death to all that died. Man was as evil, as puny, and as weak as God was great and good and strong. God was too exalted and glorious for words. Incomprehensible and inscrutable, He was beyond the power of language, outside the narrow limitations of thought to imagine. Just as the heavens were divided from the earth by boundless space, so far apart was God from man. The endless immensity of everything was insufficient to express His omnipotence—fell far short of the unthinkable reality. Even the heavens and earth as His handiwork did not convey as completely as it might appear to do the capacity of the power that belonged to Him. To Mohammed, in every vibrating star an all-seeing eye and glory of the great Creator, God, was visible; in every tiny blade of grass, in every spring of water, He was manifest and tangible. So some eleven centuries after Mohammed was laid to rest, a poor, struggling, but undaunted artist-poet, looking from his mean London garret with the eyes of a dreamer-mystic into the great invisible above and beyond him (just as Amin the faithful one had done), yearned:
“To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold Infinity in the palm of “his” hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
And in the middle of the late departed century—which rushed across the great void of Time like a hissing meteor—thus Tennyson:
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.”
While to Wordsworth, with a faith in Nature and Nature’s God as deep as Mohammed, the meanest flower that blows, gave thoughts that often lay too deep for words.
Society is only too apt to judge or condemn facts and men; also to ridicule the age and its spirit. This drastic method saves the trouble of comprehending them. The society of keen Arab traders and wily Bedouins which environed Mohammed did not comprehend him. To them he was not so much like a fish out of water, as a land quadruped at sea, altogether out of his element as well as out of his depth—a flotsam struggling to get to dry land as a jetsam.
Immeasurably above and beyond his social contemporaries either morally or spiritually, to them Mohammed was an enigma and a mystery. “Scenting a mystery is like the first bite at a piece of scandal, and holy souls do not detest it. In the secret compartments of bigotry there is some curiosity for scandal.” But among Mohammed’s opponents—the Koreish more particularly—it was not merely scandal that moved them: it was jealousy, envy, malice, and in the end sheer diabolical hatred. In describing the state of a mind that is advancing, we must remember that all progress is not made in one march or even series of marches. Mohammed’s march was entirely uphill, dead against the collar, the whole way and all the time, except, perhaps, just towards the end. Yet each day’s march brought him nearer to the goal of his desires. Slowly but surely he made progress, and with it reputation. The slowness of his movement, his advance, made progress and reputation all the more not a dead, but a living certainty. But there is always anarchy in reputation. It was this reputation—this individuality that dared to insolently assert itself in the overthrow of their ancestral gods—which explained Koreish hostility.
Mohammed was a calm, yet by no means an unprogressive agent of Providence. Brains that are absorbed either in mania or wisdom, or, as often happens, in both at once, are permeated very very slowly by the things of this world. But even admitting that there was melancholia, there was no mania about Mohammed. If ever a man was sane and healthy, he was. “You grant a devout man, you grant a wise man: no man has a seeing eye without first having had a seeing heart.” This fits his case to a nicety. A more devout man than Mohammed never lived. He was as pre-eminently wise as he was devout. He utilized his wisdom to the fullest extent of his capacity, and he proved his devoutness by putting his beliefs to the infallible test of stern and rigid practice. A trader to his finger tips, a clear-sighted man of business, and a statesman with prophetic instincts, who profited by the past, utilized the present, and prepared for the future, in this sense he was a contradiction. The being absorbed in wisdom did not prevent him from carrying on his worldly duties in the most conscientious and thorough manner. Per contra, his worldly duties did not prevent him from philosophical absorption. The one was his duty, the other the breath of life to him. His veneration of God gradually crystallized the religion in him into a creed. This is generally the result of concentration. His absorption of God ended in God’s absorption of him. It was a long and gradual process which occupied twenty years. During this period of embryonic development he withdrew, as it were, into himself. Then when the crisis arrived, it came out of him, as a river flows out of a spring, and was called Islam. “Our chimeras,” says Victor Hugo, “are the things which most resemble ourselves, and each man dreams of the unknown, and the impossible according to his nature.” Mohammed’s chimera, as we know, was God and Arabian unity. But there was nothing chimerical about the former, and with this invincible lever, the latter too was a distinct probability. For although he was doubtless superstitious—that is natural—and wrestled with shadows and visions, Mohammed dealt in realities. To him God was the most real thing, the sternest reality of all in the universe. God, in fact, was the Universe. These, which to another would have been the unknown and the impossible, were to him the possible and the inevitable. The nature that was in him was the nature of God and the universe. There is a point where profundity is oblivion, when light becomes extinguished. Though from a literary aspect Mohammed was not profound, in a religious sense his profundity, centring as it did in God, burst forth into the Cimmerian darkness which enveloped his country with the brilliancy of a meteor that illumines the blackest night.
There is too a way of encountering error by going all the way to meet the truth, also by a sort of violent good faith which accepts everything unconditionally. There was nothing violent (certainly not for a long period), but there was everything that stands for goodness and stability in Mohammed’s faith. It was thus—in the spirit of a hero and the valour of a Paladin—he encountered the error and opposition of his enemies by first of all going out of his way to meet the truth; then, in spite of themselves and their hostility, by enforcing it upon those who would not be persuaded. According to Fontenelle, “there is only truth that persuades, and even without requiring to appear with all its proofs. It makes its way so naturally into the mind, that when it is heard for the first time, it seems as if one were only remembering.” This was very much the case with Mohammed. This was why he tried at first to lead and not to drive his countrymen to the truth. To him who saw the truth of God’s existence, His mercy written as plainly in the falling raindrop as His power of retribution is in the lightning that flashes across the sky as if it would rend it, their stubbornness in rejecting God was utterly incomprehensible. His mind had two attitudes. The one was turned to God, the other to man. In contemplating God, he but studied man’s interests and his own. But contemplation with Mohammed did not end by becoming a form of indolence. Imaginative—visionary, in fact—as he was, he did not allow his imagination to play tricks with him. He did not fancy that he wanted for nothing. Even when married to Khadija, and in tolerable affluence, there was obviously a great void in his life. This want of course was spiritual. Exact and punctilious as he was in his temporal duties, his whole bent and inclination was towards the former. As a younger and poorer man, he had looked so much at the humanity around him that he saw right down into its very soul. With the same fervent intensity he had looked into nature until he saw or rather felt the creator and controller thereof. “There are times when the unknown reveals itself in a mysterious way to the spirit of man. A sudden rent in the veil of darkness will make manifest things hitherto unseen, and then close again upon the mysteries within. Such visions have occasionally the power to effect a transfiguration in those whom they visit. They convert a poor camel-driver into a Mahomet; a peasant girl tending her goats into a Joan of Arc.” A conscientious and faithful worker, Mohammed was at the same time a dreamer. But his dreams were but the reflex of his work and of his ideas. These came to him like mountainous waves, or the swell of an angry surf as it thunders on the beach with a threatening roar, a mass of water that would submerge the very earth. His ideas did not, however, submerge him. Nor did they destroy or bury him. Out of their unknown and bosky depths Mohammed invariably rose to the surface with the buoyancy of a life-belt, calm and unmoved, for his spiritual centre of gravity always held him up. He dreamt of man, but chiefly of God—of God’s goodness and greatness, of man’s impotence and frailty. He looked at the solid earth on which he stood, with its stones and its sand, its wheat and its tares, its joys and sorrows, but particularly its suffering children and helpless women. Then he looked at the vast void above, with its star-spangled sky, its sun and moon, and the God that made all and was in all. This led him to think of the void that was in himself, and to compare the one with the other. Then he pondered and compared. The greatness of it all passed into him and he dreamt again. There was no void above, for God filled it. So too his own emptiness gave place to the Supreme. All at once a great feeling of tenderness was aroused within him. From the egotism of the genus vir, he passed to the contemplation of the genus homo, the man who contemplates and feels. God had touched his heart. In forgetfulness of self was born a great compassion for all. For years and years Mohammed lived with his neck in a noose of obstacles composed of human thorns and millstones. He was, so to speak, an outcast, thrown on the dung heap, and into the brambles; at times even in the mud. Yet no mud clung to him, not even to his feet. His head at all events was always in the light, his hand always resting on the omnipotence of the Almighty. Invariably gentle, attentive, serious, benevolent, easily satisfied, he remained serene and peaceful. It was only in the last extremity, when all his persuasive earnestness failed him, that his enemies stirred him to wrath. But it was a just and dispassionate wrath; it was the wrath of God. For whether they liked or no, Mohammed in his dual capacity as God’s agent and Arabian patriot had made up his mind that they should have God. On this point he was inexorable. Feeling that there is an eternity in justice, he felt that in justice to God, and to themselves, and in spite of themselves, it was his duty to proclaim the truth. Many a less tenaciously sincere man, many a real hero, would have shrunk from and have succumbed before an ordeal so terrific, a contest so supremely Titanic. But Mohammed was made of sterner stuff, of the spirit that gods are made of. Failure was a word that he did not recognize. With God at his back, success was an absolute certainty—a foregone conclusion.