The Great Escape

When Thoreau built his little cabin by the lake and Camus's Rieux and Tarrou took their dip in the sea to escape the daily grind of fighting back the plague, they were re-enacting the mystical escape from material bondage into the purity of the wild.

In the 12th century, Shihabuddin Suhrawardi (Maqtul) composed a series of treatises in which he detailed the journey of "the aspirant out of material bondage into the realm of the soul." As summarized by W. M. Thackston, to follow this itinerary is to "close the door to the city" and "open the door to the wilderness." Suhrawardi employed a variety of images in order to convey this message but there were certain consistencies throughout his writings (which also echoed in the Persian ghazal): the city is "the realm of rationality" while the wilderness is "the abode of the 'mad.'" Thackston explains that the journey is one of "transcending" ratiocination in order to enter into the realm of "transrationalism, or intuitive knowledge, knowledge 'through the heart' rather than through the intellect." [Thackston, The Treatises of Suhrawardi, xxviii-xxix].

The key difference between the "nature mysticism" of Thoreau and Camus and the gnosis of Suhrawardi lies in the role that nature plays in the imaginaries of the modern and the pre-modern aspirant. For the modern aspirant, wild nature is, in fact, the Real to which one escapes whereas for the pre-modern aspirant the Real to which one escapes cannot be identified with wild nature, only analogized to it. Put another way, Plato was the patron saint of pre-modernity, Aristotle the patron saint of the modern.

Both Thoreau and Camus were sympathetic to the pre-modern ontology: Thoreau was steeped in the classics of East and West, Camus wrote his M.A. thesis on Neo-Platonism. But both thinkers were as inescapably modern as Suhrawardi was inescapably pre-modern.

Despite this difference, one finds in Suhrawardi in particular and Sufic thought in general a firm conviction that "the pilgrimage of the individual soul must inevitably end thus: although the soul may attain its goal of finding the [divine] 'king,' it must return whence it came and conquer the materiality that has ensnared it from the beginning." [Thackston, xxi].

The "great escape," then, is not so great; it is perhaps better described as a kind of khalwa or strategic retreat.