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,