“I have time,” he said one day to a disciple. “Let us see, therefore, what ought to be drawn from the conversion of syllogisms. When all is going well, sailors have the right to light the fire, sing and dance.”
I wonder whether it is not better, truly, to sing and dance with the sailors than to occupy oneself with syllogisms. But that great philosopher employed his leisure in “drawing himself from their conversion.” How much more admiration I would have felt for Epictetus if he had wept, on observing the theft of his bronze lamp, because he was attached to that object! Nothing is more alive and personal than a lamp productive of light, and I see in Epictetus’ indifference in replacing the companion of his evenings with a clay lamp a dryness of heart that diminishes him—all the more so as he gave that petty event as an example frequently enough for it have flown through the ages in histories of philosophy.
Did Epictetus gaze at the sea with emotion from his doorless threshold? No text indicates that. I am afraid that he might have judged that contemplation unworthy of a true sage. When nothing distracted him from his thought, instead of occupying himself with “the negative syllogism,” as he assuredly did, how much better he would have done to go and pick up sea-shells on the beaches of the Gulf of Ambracia! The slightest indication of playing with children or familiar pleasantries would have rendered him more admirable in my eyes. Even a glass of wine, drunk with a disciple at sunset, would brighten his face with a warm and benevolent color. No drop of wine trickled into his beard, which must have been strangely stiff.
Many centuries after his death, in the environs if Nicopolis, pious Christians opened a tomb, the tomb of “a pagan of old.” All the bones of that pagan had been reduced to a handful of dust. All that subsisted intact was a beard. I am sure that it was the beard of Epictetus.
THE MISSION OF MOHAMMED
Mohammed was anointed with perfumes from head to toe and had an extreme liking for women. As soon as it was well-established that he was the prophet of God, he assembled a harem. The people of Medina thought, in any case, that a prophet of God ought to have more wives than other men. They were passionate to know which one was the favorite and it required special legal dispositions to limit the actions of the curious who came by night to discover the spouse with which Mohammed was sharing his bed.
Murder was not at all repugnant to Mohammed, although he did not commit it himself. There was a Jewish poetess in Medina named Asma, who wrote ironic poems against him. Humor was foreign to the prophet. He instructed one of Asma’s relatives to kill her. He did the same for one of the leaders of the Jewish aristocracy named Kaab, whose only crime was not to believe in him
An ancient law of Arabia obliged respect for caravans during one month, the sacred months of Ridchal, in order to permit them to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Security was then assured to them, even by the worst brigands of the desert. Mohammed did not hesitate to violate that ancient law and he ordered the pillage of caravans, under the pretext that the merchants were unbelievers, but in reality with the aim of possession of the stolen booty.
Reentering Mecca victorious, he forgave many of his old enemies, but he had a woman put to death who had written poems wounding his vanity. That was a crime he could not forgive.
It was at the moment of that reentry to Mecca that he destroyed, in order to proclaim the unity of God, the three hundred idols that populated the Kaaba. A significant fact is that he insisted on ripping out and destroying personally a wooden dove sculpted with great artistry. The dove has always been a symbol of the pure spirit.
Whence came the extraordinary prestige that the man in question had, and what was the secret cause of the immense role he played?
That former conductor of caravans, having become the husband of a rich widow, led in Mecca until his fortieth year the life of a wealthy merchant, with his wife and children. Then he acquired a taste for meditation. He neglected his business and frequently withdrew to certain caves of Mount Hira. There, what are nowadays called phenomena occurred. He heard inexplicable noises, confused voices. He had the sentiment that a supernatural power was seeking to make him comprehend in order to confide a mission to him. His wife Khadidja came to the cave and took account of the phenomena.
Finally, one night when Mohammed, increasingly versed in the science of meditation, was approaching ecstasy, he perceived a light so dazzling that he lost the sentiment of it. When he came to, he saw beside him a being that he subsequently identified as the angel Gabriel and who, by virtue of the bizarrerie and the indirect methods that one always remarks in the manifestations of the beyond, commenced by crying out to him: “Announce!”
“What shall I announce?” he replied, as anyone would have done.
Then the form, instead of speaking, deployed a silken cloth on which were written the words that figure at the head of the Koran, and in which it was said that he had to announce that the Lord was the author of all grace. Then the vision disappeared.
It was renewed some time afterwards, to speak words of great beauty to him—a beauty all the more striking because other words said to him subsequently in the same manner were sometimes mediocre and incoherent.
For twenty-three years Mohammed received advice, moral laws of great elevation and orders of extreme cruelty, emanating from a supraterrestrial world. That force was sometimes personified, and he continued to consider it as the angel Gabriel.
One cannot accuse Mohammed of having believed himself, by virtue of an unreasonable pride, to be the successor of Moses, Jesus and other great prophets. His faith in his mission only came after his visions and because of them. He was chosen.
Was there not in Arabia a more spiritually elevated man who could have fulfilled the mission of proclaiming the unity of God while giving a personal example of greater detachment from the passions and less fury with regard to his enemies? A prophet who would not have counseled believers to exterminate pitilessly those who did not think like them would have been more useful to humanity. At least, we suppose so, in the present state of our conceptions of good and evil.
One might reply that only an individual of that nature, deeply steeped in violence, could direct the violent. But when Mohammed violated the truce of the sacred month, for an unjust pillage, he scandalized all the honest and moderate men of Medina. He went further than his fellow citizens’ capacity for evil.
If Mohammed was chosen, by whom was he chosen? By a general consciousness of the Arabs, materializing in light, form and voice, to strike the missionary spirit? By his own superior soul, wanting to enlighten the inferior soul of the merchant? By the powerful directors of human races who labor with persistence and impotence for the perfection of humanity—if they exist?
That choice would then be proportional to the mediocre knowledge that they must have of humans, in view of their solitude, their more elevated preoccupations and the sadness of their failures.
THE SONGS OF NANAK
Nanak was one of the greatest humans of the human race, but the Occident does not even know his name, although his influence is exercised over millions of people. He lived at the beginning of the sixteenth century and he was the prophet of a large part of northern India.25
Like many prophets, who did not know at the beginning of their lives the extent of their destiny and the necessity of chastity to bring their mission to a successful conclusion, he committed the error of marrying. Confucius and Ramakrishna fell into the same trap. Nanak even had two children.
He is the most seductive of all the great religious prophets because he was a poet, and he never separated poetry and the lyrical impulse from the research of the divine.
He was the son of the steward of a rich Rajput in the environs of Lahore. In his youth he showed himself incapable of devoting himself to any work. Having obtained the position of director of a warehouse from his brother-in-law, he linked himself with a bohemian musician named Mardana. He spent all his time with him, playing the rebec and searching for the most appropriate music to accompany re
ligious hymns.
He had the custom of going to take a bath in the river at sunrise. One morning, emerging from the river, as he went into a nearby forest, he had a vision of God. He saw a supernatural light and heard a voice that said to him: “I am Brahma and you are the divine Guru.”
An analogous vision accompanied by a voice is generally the prelude to the career of great missionaries: the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, Swedenborg in a London inn. Jacob Boehme knew his mission by virtue of a ray of sunlight with a particular brightness, falling on a pewter tray one day while he was mediating in Goerlitz, and Van Helmont by virtue of a gleam in a crack in a wall.
Nanak knew that his mission was to show Hindus and Muslims that it was the same God that they worshiped under different names, and that he had to preach that unity in the world. As Hindus and Muslims wore different costumes, he adopted a bizarre and slightly ridiculous costume participating in both religions, with the headdress of Muslims and the sign of his Hindu caste on the forehead.
On the point of quitting his family definitively, with his companion Mardana, when his wife begged him to stay he dared not tell her the irrevocable character of his departure; he replied vaguely: “Your sovereignty in my heart will last forever... Perhaps you will come to join me...” And later, when his mother threw herself at his knees in order to make him return to the familial hearth, he seized his kithara and intoned a mystical song by way of his sole response.
Whatever prestige of the truth might have, even in a messenger of God, how reduced one is by that human weakness on the part of someone who, by a rigorous sincerity, ought to have closed the door to all hope!
He did not recognize the authority either of the Vedas or the Koran. He was the enemy of all prejudices, all rites and all habits that petrified the soul, and he attempted to liberate humans from them.
His life reproduced the principal features of the existence of great masters, temptation by the demon or the expulsion of merchants from the temple. However, the gods granted him one favor that very few received, and which became very useful to a saint traveling on foot in hot countries. When he went to sleep under a tree, the shadow of that tree stopped rotating in accordance with the movement of the sun and only recovered its normal place in celestial geometry when he awoke.
He lived to be very old. Sensing death coming, he gathered his relatives and friends and went to lie down under an acacia. He composed a poem, read it aloud and asked the audience to sing it in the tone that he had indicated. While it was being sung, he extended a sheet of cloth gently over his face. When the song ended, he was dead.
THE DANCES OF CAITANYA
Almost at the same time as Nanak sang, Caitanya danced. Caitanya was another great missionary of northern India who possessed an ecstatic love of God. That ecstatic love, as well as his teaching and his admirable wisdom, he manifested by dancing.26
Dancing has lost its religious character for us, but in India it has remained a sacred manifestation of divine love. Shiva, the third person of the Hindu trinity, is represented as the great cosmic dancer who leads the eternal round of planets and creatures.
Caitanya had the privilege of being born to pious parents during an eclipse of the moon, which is a sign of the favor of destiny. He was married at sixteen and one cannot know the measure in which the kiss of the beautiful Laksmi counterbalanced in his soul the taste for study and religious controversy. A woman’s kiss must have had a certain attraction for him, because, when Laksmi died of a snake-bite, he married the beautiful Visnupriya.
He was twenty-three when he had the revelation of the invisible world and the love of Krishna gripped him so imperiously that his relatives thought him mad and summoned the most reputed physicians in order to treat his loss of reason. The sudden advent of veritable reason is almost always confounded with madness in that fashion.
It was then that, having entered a school of Vishnonites, he commenced to dance in a circle every evening in the house of another devotee, chanting poems to Krishna to the sound of cymbals and drums.27 Then he departed to proclaim in the world that there is no greater truth than love. The exaltation of that love impelled him to frenetic dances in which he found a foretaste of union.
One day when he was walking with his disciples he saw a shepherd playing the flute. That sight caused him to evoke Krishna and threw him into such emotion that he fell to the ground, prey to delirium. A group of Pathan horsemen arrived. Their leader suspected Caitanya’s disciples of having made him absorb a drug in order to rob him. A violent argument ensued. In the meantime, Caitanya recovered his senses, but instead of immediately giving a clear explanation of what had happened to him he began a mystical dance around the disciples and the Pathan horsemen. By the effect of the dance and the speech that followed, the Pathans were converted to his doctrine and became his disciples.
Once, traversing the Jumna on a raft, he found the blue of the waters so moving that he dived into them in order to embrace the suavity of the color. It was necessary to watch over him; another time he threw himself in the sea because of its beauty. He died of a wound in the foot that he had caused by striking the ground with excessive rhythm in the intoxication of a dance.
But in a sage as filled with perfect amour, who thinks of nothing but rejoining the divine essence by means of ecstasy, how can his excess of rigor be explained?
He considered chastity to be essential and had made a vow not to look at any woman, including his wife. He demanded a similar austerity of his disciples. When he learned that young Haridas had asked a woman for alms, and, in consequence, must have looked at her, he expelled that scandalous disciple and rejected his presence with such rigor that Haridas, crushed by the weight of his crime and his master’s wrath, committed suicide.
It is impossible to know anything about Haridas’ past. He must have been a charming young man and I think, like him, that it is always necessary to look women in the face, especially if one is asking them for alms. But a little is known about his future. There was no chastisement for him in the afterlife, where moral men affirm that suicides are severely punished. I even think that the glance that earned him the malediction of his master followed him like a lamp and illuminated his path.
THE VIOLENCE OF LUTHER
The reformer Luther is the only one among inspired men who, instead of a divine archangel, saw the Spirit of Evil in person in the course of his solitary meditations.
He was in the castle of Wartburg, where he had taken refuge, and where he spent nine months. It was there, he recounted, that he had a conversation with the king of Christian demons, who had become visible to his eyes. He identified the Spirit of Evil with human reason, which he found “more abominable than any fornication.” He argued bitterly with his vision and doubtless did not have the upper hand in the debate; he threw his inkwell at the figure. The inkwell must have traversed the transparent matter of the vision, for it broke against the wall. The trace was shown off at the castle of Wartburg for a long time with the veneration that the testimony of the anger of such a great man merits.
Luther was sensitive to the fornications that he qualified as abominable. One of the first points of his reform, perhaps the most important in his eyes, was to authorize priests to marry. He took advantage of that permission himself, and married Catherine de Bore, an emancipated nun, and she bore him six children with an extreme rapidity. He said that nature does not permit a man to do without women, any more than nourishment. Once, in the pulpit, he advised the husbands present that, if their wives refused to do their conjugal duty for any reason, they should call upon their maidservant to replace her.
He was unusually violent, and the vulgarity of his language, which attained an extreme never surpassed, provoked the joy and admiration of the vulgar men of his time. His hatred of his enemies was so powerful that he considered it as a real entity susceptible of being bequeathed by testament. “I hate Erasmus,” he said to his disciples. “I instruct you in my last will and testament to hate that vipe
r Erasmus.”
He had an enormous appetite for eating and drinking. Some time before his death he formulated his essential desire in a conversation on the subject of his illness. “I ask nothing of physicians except to use the gifts of God, to eat and drink what I please.”
And in the same conversation he, who had succeeded in everything, said: “Men are nothing but devils. The best one can hope for is a brief moment of happiness and then to disappear.”
One can compare that remark with that of the great optimist that Goethe was: “I can truly say that in the entre course of my seventy years I have not had four weeks of true happiness.”
THE SOLITUDE OF SPINOZA
One evening as Spinoza was returning to the furnished hotel in which he lived modestly, a madman who was lying in wait for him threw himself upon him and tried to stab him with a knife. It transpired subsequently that the madman had no valid reason for striking the philosopher. The only one was that Spinoza was in contradiction with the ideas of the rabbis of the synagogue of Amsterdam.
In the same way, the insane often hurl themselves upon philosophers, as if they were obeying a secret law. Just as there is a variety of humans who assassinate tyrants, there is one of those who aspire to strike thinkers. How can the motive of such creatures be explained? It seems that they would have difficulty replying to that question. The hatred of thought is in certain individuals profound and primordial. There are beings who, from form to form since the beginning, perhaps without knowing it, have been on a path to which thought is contrary, and represents a loathsome element.
Spinoza changed residence after the attack by the enemy of thought and realized a miracle of solitary life. He loved poverty sincerely, refusing offers of a pension several times. Doubtless he was one of the rare men who knew that one goes further in the research of the infinite if one is detached from material goods, the minimum of which is represented by a few items of furniture and a family carpet.
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