Stranded, or rather exposed on an Island by his mother, a Princess—who is not reminded of the same motive in a biblical story?—nursed by a Roe—another favourite motive of semi-mythical periods.
Later on, wholly left to his own resources, yet nothing daunted, by sheer pluck and energy he builds himself up a material existence, then by the sharpness of his wit, the originality and penetration of his thought, the incisiveness of his intuition, he rapidly builds up a spiritual structure of Nature, Heaven, and its Mover and Ruler, God, until, at the age of fifty, he has attained to that highest stage of Sufic evolution, the Ecstasy, the complete immersion in, and absorption by, the One Essence, the True One, that Eternal Being: Ecstasy, the same state which is so beautifully described by that famous Arabian philosopher, Avicenna, when he says:—“Then when a man’s desires are raised to a high pitch, and he is sufficiently well exercised in that way, there will appear to him some small glimmerings of the Truth, as it were flashes of lightning, very delightful, which just shine upon him and then go out. Then the more he exercises himself, the more often he’ll perceive them . . . till through frequent exercise he at last attains to a perfect tranquillity: and that which used to appear to him only by fits and starts, becomes habitual; and that which was only a glimmering before, a constant light.”
To detach and deliver the soul—if only for a few hours—from the withering despotism of everyday life and strife, grey and monotonous with its eternal round of toil, worry, and trouble; to bathe the soul in the full sunshine of sublime wisdom, depicted and represented in this simple romance, with its exquisite charm and captivating grace, clear as crystal yet pregnant with ideas that have moved the world—this was the idea which guided me in embarking upon this work.
If I have succeeded in this task, even only in a small degree, by resuscitating this gem of Arabian philosophical literature—then I consider myself richly repaid for the labour I have bestowed on this little book, which has, indeed, been a labour of love.
Paul Brönnle.
25th April 1904.
- This book, by the way, was the first book in Arabic type which issued from the Oxford University Press, just as his “Porta Mosis,” containing the six Prefatory Discourses of Maimonides on the Mishna, was the first Hebrew text (in fact Arabic with Hebrew characters) printed at Oxford.
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- The value of the book was quickly recognised. In a comparatively short time it quite caught the fancy of the public—in fact it took the world by storm, and for a long time it remained greatly in vogue.
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THE AWAKENING OF THE SOUL
A PHILOSOPHICAL ROMANCE.