Imitatio Christi

Intensive mysticism means a return to a pre-intellectual spiritual life. All intellectualism is lost in it, is overcome and rendered superfluous. But if, all this notwithstanding, mysticism has borne rich fruit for culture, this is the result of the fact that mysticism always proceeds through preparatory stages and only gradually discards the forms of custom and culture. Its fruits for civilization are born in its first stages below the upper limit of vegetation. This is where the orchard of ethical perfection blossoms as the required preparation for anyone who wishes to achieve the vision: peace and gentility of mind, the suppression of desire, the virtues of simplicity, moderation, industriousness, seriousness, and fervor. This was the case in India and the same thing is true here: the initial impact of mysticism is moral and practical, consisting above all in the practice of practical charity. All the great mystics have lavishly praised practicality...

In the Netherlands began that movement in which these concomitant elements of mysticism--moralism, pietism, charity, industriousness--became the main focus. This meant that from the intense mysticism of the remote moments of a few flow the extensive mysticism of the everyday life of the many, the ongoing communal fervor of modern devotees, in place of lonely and rare ecstasy. The sober mysticism, one is tempted to say...

In the Fraterhouses and the monasteries of the Windesheim Congregation, we find, constantly poured over quiet daily work, the radiance of religious fervor that was constantly present in the mind of the congregation. The flexible lyrical and the unrestrained striving elements have both been abandoned and, together with them, has evaporated the danger of faith gone wrong. The brothers and sisters are perfectly orthodox and conservative. It was mysticism en detail: one had not been struck by lightening, one had only received a little spark, and experienced in the small, quiet, unassuming circle the transport of ecstasy in the form of intimate spiritual communion, the exchange of letters and self-contemplation. Emotional and spiritual life was cultivated like a greenhouse plant; there was much narrow puritanism, much moral exercise, a stifling of laughter and of basic human drives, and much pietist simplemindedness...

But the most powerful and beautiful work of that period, the Imitatio Christi, arose in those circles. Here we meet the man, no theologian, no humanist, no philosopher, no poet, and actually also no mystic, who wrote the book destined to become for centuries a source of solace. Thomas a Kempis, quiet, introverted, full of tenderness for the miracle of the mass and with a most narrow perception of divine guidance, knew nothing about the outrage over church administration or secular life, such as inspired the preachers, or of the multifaceted ambitions of a Gerson, Denis, or Nicholas of Cusa, or of the wild fantasies of a John Brugman or of the colorful symbolism of an Alain de la Roche. He looked only for the element of quietude in all things and found it "in angello cum libello": "O quam salubre iucundum et suave est sedere in solitudine et tacere ei loqui cum Deo!" ("O how wholesome, how pleasant and sweet it is to sit in solitude and to be silent and speak with God!"). And his book, of simple wisdom for living and dying, addressed to resigned minds, became a book for all the ages. In his book all neo-Platonic mysticism has been abandoned...

There is something miraculous about the effect of the Imitatio. The thinker does not captivate us with his power or elan, as for example, Augustine, or by flowering prose, as St. Bernard, nor with the depth or fullness of his thought. Everything is even and melancholy, everything is kept in a minor key. There is only peace, calm, a quiet, resigned expectation, and solace...And yet, the words of this man, removed from the world, are able to strengthen us for life in this world as are those of no other. There is something this book for the tired of all ages shares with the expressions of intense mysticism: here too, the power of images is overcome as far as possible and the colorful garb of glittering symbols is discarded. For this very reason, the Imitatio is not limited to one cultural epoch; like ecstatic contemplations of the All-One, it departs from all culture and belongs to no culture in particular.

--Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, tr. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, University of Chicago Press (1996), 264-267.

Like a Latter-Day Sufi Poet...

جلال‌الدین محمد بلخى‎

The Reader

It waited for him in the dusty treatises
On his father's bookshelf, in the back stacks
Of the local library, in the rare book room
And the manuscript collection on the fifth floor,
In the basement where they kept the well-thumbed
Periodicals and crumbling theology texts.
Unshelved and displaced, uncatalogued, overdue,
It waited in the background while he scanned
The entries and noted the citations, memorizing
The names of authors, writing down titles.
It shuddered when he read about the infinite
Starry spaces and the fast-moving river
Into which he would never step twice,
And it paused in the margins of the ancients,
In archaic Greek rituals and thunderous voices
Rising out of the whirlwind. He could not
Hear it breathing between the pages, belabored
In German, trilling in Spanish, stammering
Backward in Hebrew. He did not listen
To it crying out softly in the trees
Like a prophecy, though it waited for him
Nonetheless, a patient and faithful oblivion,
An emptiness, which he would not call God.

--Edward Hirsch, 1994.

The truth is, we have stepped into this river, this very selfsame river many,
many times; but it doesn't matter.

We will step into this river again and yet again
because it is what we do: we are the ones who wade in.

We wade in most often wordlessly but, on occasion, remarking what we do:
out loud or to ourselves.

And the "infinite starry spaces" pay us no mind,
for that is what they do.

Or don't do. Either way, it looks and feels the same to us
(or to "him," whoever he might be).

Maybe someday someone somewhere will once more attend to the soft
crying in the branches and find it joyfully (or fearfully) articulate.

And he or she will interpret for the rest us what was heard, or thought heard; and maybe, just maybe,
we will return then to gather "on this beach of the tumid river"

to sing or to recite,
to laugh or to weep,
to admonish or to forgive,

once more, before sleep.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), Unacknowledged Sufi Poet

All in a simple innocence I strove
To give myself away to any power,
Wasting on women's bodies wealth of love,
Worshipping every sunrise mountain tower;
Some failure mocked me still denying perfection,
Parts of me might be spended not the whole,
I sought of wine surrender and self-correction,
I failed, I could not give away my soul.
Again seeking to give myself I sought
Outward in vain through all things, out through God,
And tried all heights, all gulfs, all dreams, all thought.
I found this wisdom on the wonderful road,
The essential Me cannot be given away,
The single Eye, God cased in blood-shot clay.

Section X of the poem, "The Truce and the Peace" (November 1918).

The Passing of Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

A retrospective.

On tasawwuf.

Ibn 'Arabi's Implied Aesthetic

Slow down.

Pay attention.

Keep it simple.

wabi sabi.

Less is more.

"That which is [al-haqq] discloses itself only to [through?] one who achieves diaphanousness."

The Method of my Madness

As a college freshman (1978-1979), I recorded a statement that Martin Luther made (in Table Talk 352) on a 3 x 5 index card and taped it to the wall beside my dorm-room bed. Here is what Luther said: "A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating."

At 18, I was in earnest.

Luther's remark struck a chord with me insofar as I was tempted to pursue a seminary education or divinity degree after obtaining my baccalaureate; indeed, it helped me to resist that temptation. I knew then--or was beginning to recognize--that thinking, reading, and speculation were three things I had an aptitude for; consequently, I was not on the road to being "born" a theologian. I understood, as well, that, at 18, I had had very little experience of living, even less of dying and, of being damned, none at all (or none that I was aware of). I also appreciated the deep irony that Luther's dictum held for what is familiarly termed "theological education" in the United States and Europe: a curriculum of "thinking, reading, and speculating." In other words, an education that promised only to abort the birth of a would-be theologian. Martin Luther's table talk showed me the fork in the road.

After a few years of post-baccalaureate wandering in the wilderness of Wondering What Comes Next, I managed to avoid seminary by entering law school (albeit a school run by the Holy Ghost fathers of the Roman Catholic church). It was there that I began to acquire the requisite experience of living, dying, and being damned, an experience that would only intensify during the decade of legal practice to follow.

In 1995, enjoying some of the fruits of my professional labors, I found myself in Paris with a copy of Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali's Munqidh min al-Dallal (translated by W. M. Watt as The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali). To my astonishment, I discovered in the autobiography of that late 11th/early 12th century Muslim theologian a life trajectory that anticipated Luther's later insight. Half a millennium before the German reformer, Ghazali had pursued a life of thinking, reading, and speculating in the mistaken belief that such a path would make him an "authentic" theologian--only to discover, to his sorrow, that "authentic" theology is not the product of thinking, reading, and speculating but, as Luther put it, of living, nay dying and being damned.

Now I found myself standing, once again, at a very familiar fork in the road. After several more years in the law, I returned to school: not for a theological education (I was acquiring that by more honest means), but to become an historian of religions. Such was the method of my madness.

In Praise of Folly

Fool

Lear's Fool

God's Fool (Russian)

God's Fool (Hallaj)

Day of Ashura (10th Muharram)

On the Eve of the Anniversary of the Tragedy at Karbala (680 CE)

We remember the family of the Prophet Muhammad.

Niffari

In everything is a trace of me
If you speak of it, you change it.

Tr. Michael Sells, from Kitab al-Mawaqif.

Ethics and Aesthetics are One

Santiago Zabala

Only art can save us now - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

So immerse yourself in it.

The Abdal

The renunciate zealously abandons his life in this world, and the one who trusts in God passionately entrusts his affairs to his Master; and the aspirant is taken up with audition and ecstatic states, and the worshipper fervently renders worship and strives in devotion; and the person of wisdom and gnosis is enamoured of his spiritual wisdom and resolve. Yet those who possess true knowledge and spiritual governance are concealed in the World of the Unseen (ghayb), so that they are unknown to the gnostic, aspirant or worshipper, and they are invisible to the one who trusts in God and the one who renounces the world. For the renunciate abandons [the world] for the purpose of being recompensed; the entruster fides [in God] to attain the object of his desire; the aspirant seeks ecstasy to relieve distress; the worshipper strives hard in his longing for closeness; and the wise gnostic through his spiritual will aims at union. However, the Real God (haqq) only reveals Himself to one who can no longer be described or named at all.

Ibn 'Arabi, The Four Pillars of Spiritual Transformation, tr. Stephen Hirtenstein, 30.

Doing More With Less

Carved dervish begging bowl


Not just a slogan: a way of being-in-the-world.

Et in Arcadia ego.

For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God? If then I was a nightingale, I would do the part of a nightingale: if I were a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God: this is my work; I do it, nor will I desert this post, so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song.

--Epictetus, Discourses, ch. xvi.