Read Ebook: Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion by Vaughan Robert Alfred

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The first endeavour of the Sufi 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 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.

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.

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.

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 , 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.

While exulting in a devotion above all means and modes, we find the Sufi 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.'

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.

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, --

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 ? Kempis:--

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.

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 .

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.'

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:--

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.

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.

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