Before man was able to read or write he pondered the meaning of his existence on earth. He came from where? He was going where? And why?
And as man learned to write, though in a simple and crude manner, he left for us his conception of life and death. Modern writers called this writing philosophy.
However, in these few pages, we cannot explore at length this great and vast subject, examples of which fill the shelves of libraries throughout the world. We will attempt to determine only the belief and reflections in the heart and soul of Gibran. Much of his writing reveals that he asked himself the same perplexing questions as ancient man. He did accept the premise that there is a God, but was criticized for his definition of God.
Gibran’s ancestors in Lebanon and the Middle East described God as a merciful Father and hewed His image from rock in the likeness of an old man with a long beard. This conception was expressed in the three great religions of the West: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Some philosophers, particularly the Arabic ones, searched for a more comprehensive definition of God.
Averröes (1126-1198), a great Arabic philosopher, wrote that a simple-minded believer would say, “God is in heaven.” However, he said, “A man of trained mind, knowing that God must not be represented as a physical entity in space, would say, ‘God is everywhere, and not merely in Heaven.’
“But if the omnipresence of God be taken only in a physical and special sense, that formula, too, is likely in error.”
“Accordingly, the philosopher more adequately expresses the purely spiritual nature of God when he asserts that God is nowhere but in Himself; in fact, rather than say that God is in space he might more justly say that space and matter are in God.”
Gibran, educated in Lebanon, must have accepted the explanation of Averröes. In his Garden of the Prophet, he has one in a group of men ask, “Master, we hear much talk of God hereabout. What say you of God, and Who is He in very truth?” Gibran answered saying: “Think now, My Beloved, of a heart that contains all your hearts, a love that ecompasses all your loves, a spirit that encompasses all your spirits, a voice enfolding all your voices, and a silence deeper than all your silences, and timeless.
“Seek now to perceive in your self-fullness a beauty more enchanting than all things beautiful, a song more vast than the songs of the seas and the forest, a majesty.…”
“It were wiser to speak less of God, Whom we cannot understand, and more of each other, whom we may understand. Yet I would have you know that we are the breath and the fragrance of God. We are God, in leaf, in flower, and oftentimes in fruit.”
When it came to questions about the soul the biographers and critics of Gibran were at a loss. Some biographers said that Gibran believed in the transmigration of the soul, which is better known as the doctrine of Nirvana. Others, because Gibran assailed the activities of some religious men, accused him of being a heretic.
Therefore, to understand the philosophy of Gibran, we must discard part of what his biographers have written and consider objectively what Gibran himself wrote. He wrote many articles in Arabic about the great philosophers, among them Avicenna, Al Farid and Al Ghazali. Gibran regarded the belief of Avicenna nearest to his own. The following are Gibran’s words translated from the Arabic:
“A Compendium on the Soul” by Avicenna
by Gibran
There is no poem written by the ancient poets nearer my own beliefs and my spiritual inclination than that poem of Avicenna, “A Compendium on the Soul.”
In this sublime poem, the old sage embodies the greatest hopes engendered by man’s aspiration and knowledge, the deepest well of imagination created by man’s thinking; and he raises those questions which are the first in man’s quest and those theories which result from great thought and long meditation.
It is not strange for such a poem to come from the awareness of Avicenna, the genius of his age; but it is paradoxical for it to be the manifestation of the man who spent his life probing into the secrets of the body, into the peculiarities of physical matter. I believe he reached the mystery of the soul by studying physical matter, thus comprehending the unknown through the known. His poem, therefore, provides clear proof that knowledge is the life of the mind, and that practical experiments lead to intellectual conclusions, to spiritual feelings and to God.
The reader is bound to find, among the great writers of the West, passages which remind him of this sublime poem. For example, there are lines in Shakespeare’s immortal plays similar to this one of Avicenna:
“I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.”
There is a resemblance to the writing of Shelley in the following:
“I dozed, and in a revelation, I saw what it is not possible to see with open eyes.”
There is in the writing of Browning this parallel thought: “It shone like lightning, but it vanished as if it had never shone.”
Nonetheless, the sage preceded all these English writers by centuries, yet he embodied in a single poem ideas which have appeared in a variety of writers of many ages. This is what confirms Avicenna as the genius not only of his century but of the centuries following and makes his poem “A Compendium on the Soul” the most sublime poem ever composed upon this most glorious subject.1
Al Farid
Al Farid was a devout poet. His unquenchable soul drank the divine wine of the spirit, wandering intoxicated through the exotic world where dwell the dreams of poets, lovers and mystics. Then, sobered, his soul returned to this earth to register what it saw and heard in words of beauty.
If we examine the merit of Farid’s work, we find him a holy man in the temple of free thought, a prince in the great kingdom of the imagination and a general in the mighty army of mysticism. That mighty army inches steadily, nevertheless, toward the kingdom of God, conquering on its way the petty and mean things in life, ever seeking the magnificent and the majestic.
Al Farid lived in an era (1119-1220) void of creativity and original thinking. He lived among a people who parroted tradition, energetically commenting upon and explaining the great heritage of Islamic learning and philosophy.
He was a genius; a genius is a miracle. Al Farid deserted his times and shunned his milieu, seeking seclusion to write and to unite in his universal poetry the unknown with the known in life.
Al Farid did not choose his theme from daily events as Al Mutanabbi2 had done. He did not busy himself with the enigma of life as Maary2 had done. Rather, he shut his eyes against the world in order to see beyond it, and he closed his ears against the tumult of the earth so that he could hear the eternal songs.
This, then, was Al Farid, a soul pure as the rays of the sun, a heart aflame, a mind as serene as a mountain lake, his poetry reaching beyond the dreams of those who came before and after him.
Al Ghazali
There exists between Al Ghazali and St. Augustine a spiritual unity. They represent two eras, but one idea despite the difference in the time, the religion and the society of their days. That idea is that there is a desire deep within the soul which drives man from the seen to the unseen, to philosophy and to the divine.
Al Ghazali gave up a life of ease and a high position to follow a life of asceticism and mysticism.3 He searched for those thin lines which join the end of science to the beginning of religion. He searched for that hidden chalice in which the intelligence and experience of man is blended with his aspirations and his dreams.
St. Augustine had searched for the same chalice more than five centuries earlier. Whoever reads The Confessions of St. Augustine finds that he used the world and its fruit as a ladder to climb to consciousness of eternal truth.
However, I have found Al Ghazali nearer the secret and the heart of the matter than St. Augustine. This could be attributed to the difference in their eras; also, to Al Ghazali’s inheritance of the teaching and philosophies of the Arabs and Greeks who preceded him, as well as St. Augustine’s bequest. By this I mean the matters t
hat one mind hands down to another just as customs and dress represent certain eras.
I found in Ghazali a golden chain linking those mystics of India who preceded him with the deists who followed him. There is something of Al Ghazali in Buddhism and there is some of Ghazali’s thinking in Spinoza and Blake.
Al Ghazali is highly respected among learned Orientalists of the West. The religious among them consider his the greatest and noblest concepts born of Islam. Strange as it seems, I saw on the wall of the fifteenth-century church in Venice a mural including Al Ghazali among the philosophers, saints and theologians whom, in the Middle Ages, the Church considered the cornerstones and pillars of its spiritual temple.
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Gibran, in his articles about Avicenna, Al Farid and Al Ghazali, left no doubt about his admiration for these great Arabic philosophers and made clear his belief in the philosophy of Avicenna: “There is no poem … nearer my own beliefs and my spiritual inclination than that poem of Avicenna.”
Gibran followed the definition of Averröes: “Space and matter are in God.” Gibran said: “We are the breath and the fragrance of God.” Gibran believed in the existence of God, in the existence of the soul and its rebirth, but not according to the doctrine of Nirvana.
Those who follow the doctrine of Nirvana believe that after death the soul enters the bodies of lower animals or the bodies of other human beings; and that it passes from one body to another until it is purified. It then returns to the dwelling place of its god.
Gibran did not accept the purification process. He believed that the soul comes back to finish what the man abandoned when he left the earth.
In an article about reincarnation and Nirvana, “The poet from Baalbek,” written in Arabic, Gibran stated that the soul returns to an equal status. He wrote: “And the prince inquired, saying, ‘Tell us, O sage, will the gods ever restore me to this world as a prince and bring back the deceased poet to life? Will my soul become incarnated in a body of a great king’s son and the soul of the poet in the body of a great poet? Will the sacred laws permit him to face eternity composing poetry about life? Will I be able to shower him with gifts?’ And the sage answered the prince saying: ‘Whatever the soul longs for it will attain. The sacred laws which restore the Spring after the passing of the winter will reinstate you a prince and will reinstate the poet as a poet.’”
Gibran wrote in The Prophet:
Fare you well, people of Orphalese
This day has ended.
Forget not that I shall come back to you.
A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body.
A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.
Gibran wrote in the last page of The Garden of the Prophet:
O, Mist, my sister, my sister, Mist,
I am one with you now.
No longer am I a self.
The walls have fallen,
And the chains have broken;
I rise to you, a mist,
And together we shall float upon the sea until life’s second day,
When dawn shall lay you, dewdrops in a garden,
And me a babe upon the breast of a woman.
In the late eighteenth-century materialism gained wide hold in Europe. The economic life of society became more important than religious ethics. The theory of natural selection was held to justify might against right, whether between individuals or nations.
Nietzsche and many other writers made the “self” the center of something approaching worship. Nietzsche even proclaimed that God was dead.
John A. T. Robinson maintained that Nietzsche was not an atheist, that he was trying to free man from the God who is a tyrant, who impoverishes, enslaves and annihilates man. He was trying to get rid of the kindly old man who could be pushed into one corner while men “got on with business.”
One of Gibran’s biographers has claimed that Gibran became acquainted with the work of Nietzsche and was even influenced by it.
Gibran demanded that his people in the Middle East should revolt against Turkish rule. But at no time did he ever deny the existence of God.
We know that Gibran believed in God and in the immortality of the soul. But did he believe that man and his soul required guidance and, if so, what kind of guidance?
It is essential that we know the traditions and auspices of Gibran’s background to answer the questions raised by his works. Gibran was born to the daughter of a Maronite priest, was baptized by his grandfather in rites employing Syriac, or Aramaic, the language Christ spoke. The Maronite Church is typical of Lebanon’s tradition of being not only physically but philosophically and intellectually at the crossroads of the world. The Maronite rite came to Lebanon directly from the Church of Antioch, but it is Roman Catholic, preserving its ancient language and rituals through the Patriarch of Antioch and the Middle East, but preserving also its allegiance to Rome. Maronite priests are often married, for a married man may become a priest. A man may not, however, marry after he takes the Maronite vows of the priesthood.
At the age of five, Gibran was sent to a village school under the auspices of the Maronite Church. When he was eleven, he had memorized all the Psalms. At thirteen, he entered Al Hikmat, a church college, where he remained for five years. At Al Hikmat, he studied with Father Joseph Haddad, whom Gibran described as “the only man who ever taught me anything.”
In his maturity, after he had written The Prophet, Gibran wrote Jesus, the Son of Man, a book which reflects Gibran’s deep knowledge of the Bible and of both Western and Eastern thought; for Gibran wrote not only of Arab philosophers but also of such men as St. Augustine, whom the West considers the Father of Latin theology. Augustine, nevertheless, was of Lebanese origin (Punic or Phoenician); he had been educated in the Phoenician schools of Carthage and was 33 before he accepted Christianity. Augustine accepted St. Paul’s belief in man’s original sin, but defined evil as that evil that man does voluntarily; St. Augustine wrote that only with help and through grace could man attain salvation, a premise which is now an orthodox doctrine of the Church.
Also, even a cursory review of Gibran’s works reveals that he had familiarized himself with the works of the ancient Lebanese, the high priests of Eshtar, Baal and Tamuz; he knew, too, Moses, the Prophets, the Beatitudes, and had read deeply of both Christian and Islamic theology. Gibran’s thirst had taken him to the fountains of Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Voltaire, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Jefferson, Emerson and even to Lincoln. Gibran recognized that our religions advocate discipline and guidance, first through ceremonial practices, and secondly through prescribed ethical conduct.
Although religious rites vary greatly, Western ethics today are still those codified by Gibran’s ancestors along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, rules which advocate prudence, temperance, courage, justice, love, mercy and self-sacrifice.
Gibran was a rebel, but only against ceremonial practice, not against the ethos of his ancestors. Barbara Young, Gibran’s secretary in the latter years of his life, has written, “Organized religion had no attraction for this man.” But careful reading proves that Gibran was not agnostic; his anger was against religion as it was practiced, not against the religious man.
When Gibran was growing to manhood, the Turks ruled Lebanon, and the Maronite Church accepted a feudal role in order to survive within an Islamic society. Buttressing the feudal position of the church, the Christian Lebanese, the Maronites, zealously donated more lands to the church than it could cultivate; therefore, as the church turned more and more to the practice of sharecropping, it became increasingly a feudal master and employer of its own members. As the Church’s secular power grew, some of its hierarchy, its bishops and priests, used their position and the Church’s power to advance and enrich friends and relatives.
Gibran grew up too near the Church not to recognize its worldliness. He lost his first love to the nephew of a rapacious bishop. Then, leaving his own land, he saw the
contrast provided by liberty, tolerance and freedom in America. His rebellion against the religious, then, was not only personal, but grew from the very ethos he had first learned from the religious.
Gibran later wrote a story in Arabic called “Kahlil the Heretic,” in which a novice tries to convince the monks to distribute all their possessions and to go preach among the poor. “Let us restore to the needy the vast lands of the convent and let us give back the riches we have taken from them. Let us disperse and teach the people to smile because of the bounty of heaven and to rejoice in the glories of life and of freedom.
“The hardships we shall encounter among the people shall be more sanctifying and more exalting than the ease and serenity we accept in this place. The sympathy that touches a neighbor’s heart is greater than virtue practiced unseen in this convent. A word of compassion for the weak, the criminal and the sinner is more magnificent than long, empty prayers droned in the temple.”
The monks, of course, unable to make Kahlil obey their rules, throw him out of the monastery.
“The feudal lord proclaims from his castle that the Sultan has appointed him as overlord to the people and the priest proclaims from his altar that God has appointed him as guardian of their souls.”
“The feudal lord binds the poor ‘fellah’s’ arms while the priest filches from his pockets. Between the lord representing the law and the priest representing God, the bodies and the souls of the people of Lebanon wither and die.”
In another story, also written in Arabic, “John the Madman,” Gibran tells of John’s reading the New Testament, which ordinary men were forbidden to read.
One day, reading and meditating, John neglected his herd, the heifers slowly wandering into the monastery’s pasture. The monks kept the heifers and demanded payment for damages. Unable to pay, John’s mother ransomed the herd by giving the monks her heirloom necklace in payment. Thus John became a crusader against the church, a preacher in the public square:
“Come again, O Jesus, to drive the vendors of thy faith from thy sacred temple.… They fill the skies with smoke from their candles and incense but leave the faithful hungry.”
Mirrors of the Soul Page 4
