Part 4

His “eschatology,” like that of the Soofis generally, is vague and shadowy. He may lean towards the doctrine of Marc Aurelius, “The unripe grape, the ripe and the dried: all things are changes not into nothing, but into that which is not at present.” This is one of the _monstruosa opinionum portenta_ mentioned by the XIXth General Council, alias the First Council of the Vatican. But he only accepts it with a limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not to the intellectual, worship of “Nature,” which moderns define to be an “unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of observed phenomena.” Consequently he holds to the “dark and degrading doctrines of the Materialist,” the “Hylotheist”; in opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, dry line between Spirit and Matter: Asia does not.

Among us the Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation of physical action and molecular motion into consciousness; and _vice versâ_, that they cannot say what matter is; and, lastly, that Berkeley and his school have proved the existence of spirit while denying that of matter.

The Materialists reply that the want of agreement shows only a study insufficiently advanced; that man cannot describe an atom, because he is still an infant in science, yet there is no reason why his mature manhood should not pass through error and incapacity to truth and knowledge; that consciousness becomes a property of matter when certain conditions are present; that Hyle ({Greek: hylae}) or Matter may be provisionally defined as “phenomena with a substructure of their own, transcendental and eternal, subject to the action, direct or indirect, of the five senses, whilst its properties present themselves in three states, the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous.” To casuistical Berkeley they prefer the common sense of mankind. They ask the idealist and the spiritualist why they cannot find names for themselves without borrowing from a “dark and degraded” school; why the former must call himself after his eye (_idein_); the latter after his breath (_spiritus_)? Thus the Hâjî twits them with affixing their own limitations to their own Almighty Power, and, as Socrates said, with bringing down Heaven to the market-place.

Modern thought tends more and more to reject crude idealism and to support the monistic theory, the double aspect, the transfigured realism. It discusses the Nature of Things in Themselves. To the question, is there anything outside of us which corresponds with our sensations? that is to say, is the whole world simply “I,” they reply that obviously there is a something else; and that this something else produces the brain-disturbance which is called sensation. Instinct orders us to do something; Reason (the balance of faculties) directs; and the strongest motive controls. Modern Science, by the discovery of Radiant Matter, a fourth condition, seems to conciliate the two schools. “La découverte d’un quatrième état de la matière,” says a Reviewer, “c’est la porte ouverte à l’infini de ses transformations; c’est l’homme invisible et impalpable de même possible sans cesser d’être substantiel; c’est le monde des esprits entrant sans absurdité dans la domaine des hypothèses scientifiques; c’est la possibilité pour le matérialiste de croire à la vie d’outre tombe, sans renoncer au substratum matériel qu’il croit nécessaire au maintien de l’individualité.”

With Hâjî Abdû the soul is not material, for that would be a contradiction of terms. He regards it, with many moderns, as a state of things, not a thing; a convenient word denoting the sense of personality, of individual identity. In its ghostly signification he discovers an artificial dogma which could hardly belong to the brutal savages of the Stone Age. He finds it in the funereal books of ancient Egypt, whence probably it passed to the Zendavesta and the Vedas. In the Hebrew Pentateuch, of which part is still attributed to Moses, it is unknown, or, rather, it is deliberately ignored by the author or authors. The early Christians could not agree upon the subject; Origen advocated the pre-existence of men’s souls, supposing them to have been all created at one time and successively embodied. Others make Spirit born with the hour of birth: and so forth.

But the brain-action or, if you so phrase it, the mind, is not confined to the reasoning faculties; nor can we afford to ignore the sentiments, the affections which are, perhaps, the most potent realities of life. Their loud affirmative voice contrasts strongly with the titubant accents of the intellect. They seem to demand a future life, even, a state of rewards and punishments from the Maker of the world, the _Ortolano Eterno_,[1] the Potter of the East, the Watchmaker of the West. They protest against the idea of annihilation. They revolt at the notion of eternal parting from parents, kinsmen and friends. Yet the dogma of a future life is by no means catholic and universal. The Anglo-European race apparently cannot exist without it, and we have lately heard of the “Aryan Soul-land.” On the other hand many of the Buddhist and even the Brahman Schools preach Nirwâna (comparative non-existence) and Parinirwâna (absolute nothingness). Moreover, the great Turanian family, actually occupying all Eastern Asia, has ever ignored it; and the 200,000,000 of Chinese Confucians, the mass of the nation, protest emphatically against the mainstay of the western creeds, because it “unfits men for the business and duty of life by fixing their speculations on an unknown world.” And even its votaries, in all ages, races and faiths, cannot deny that the next world is a copy, more or less idealized, of the present; and that it lacks a single particular savouring of originality. It is in fact a mere continuation; and the continuation is “not proven.”

It is most hard to be a man;

and the Pilgrim’s sole consolation is in self-cultivation, and in the pleasures of the affections. This sympathy may be an indirect self-love, a reflection of the light of egotism: still it is so transferred as to imply a different system of convictions. It requires a different name: to call benevolence “self-love” is to make the fruit or flower not only depend upon a root for development (which is true), but the very root itself (which is false). And, finally, his ideal is of the highest: his praise is reserved for:

—Lives Lived in obedience to the inner law Which cannot alter.

[1] The Eternal Gardener: so the old inscription saying:—

locatus est in Homo damnatus est in horto humatus est in renatus est in

NOTE II

A few words concerning the Kasîdah itself. Our Hâjî begins with a _mise-en-scène_; and takes leave of the Caravan setting out for Mecca. He sees the “Wolf’s tail” (_Dum-i-gurg_), the {Greek: lykaugés}, or wolf-gleam, the Diluculum, the Zodiacal dawn-light, the first faint brushes of white radiating from below the Eastern horizon. It is accompanied by the morning-breath (_Dam-i-Subh_), the current of air, almost imperceptible except by the increase of cold, which Moslem physiologists suppose to be the early prayer offered by Nature to the First Cause. The Ghoul-i-Biyâbân (Desert-Demon) is evidently the personification of man’s fears and of the dangers that surround travelling in the wilds. The “wold-where-none-save-He (Allah)-can-dwell” is a great and terrible wilderness (_Dasht-i-lâ-siwâ Hu_); and Allah’s Holy Hill is Arafât, near Mecca, which the Caravan reaches after passing through Medina. The first section ends with a sore lament that the “meetings of this world take place upon the highway of Separation”; and the original also has:—

The chill of sorrow numbs my thought: methinks I hear the passing knell; As dies across yon thin blue line the tinkling of the Camel-bell.

The next section quotes the various aspects under which Life appeared to the wise and foolish teachers of humanity. First comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines are quoted beginning with Shab-i-târîk o bîm-i-mauj, etc. Hûr is the plural of Ahwar, in full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly “Houries.” Follows Umar-i-Khayyâm, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or Sooffeism, even as the Soofis (Gnostics) spiritualized Moslem Puritanism. The verses alluded to are:—

You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a second marriage in my house, Divorced old barren Reason from my bed And took the Daughter of the Vine to spouse. (St. 60, Mr. Fitzgerald’s translation.)

Here “Wine” is used in its mystic sense of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation has been trained into a likeness of the “Hymn of Life,” despite the commonplace and the _navrante vulgarité_ which characterize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American School. The same has been done to the words of Isâ (Jesus); for the author, who is well-read in the Ingîl (Evangel), evidently intended the allusion. Mansur el-Hallâj (the Cotton-Cleaner) was stoned for crudely uttering the Pantheistic dogma _Ana ’l Hakk_ (I am the Truth, _i.e._, God), _wa laysa fi-jubbatî il’ Allah_ (and within my coat is nought but God). His blood traced on the ground the first-quoted sentence. Lastly, there is a quotation from “Sardanapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes,” etc.: here {Greek: paîze} may mean sport; but the context determines the kind of sport intended. The Zâhid is the literal believer in the letter of the Law, opposed to the Soofi, who believes in its spirit: hence the former is called a Zâhiri (outsider), and the latter a Bâtini, an insider. Moses is quoted because he ignored future rewards and punishments. As regards the “two Eternities,” Persian and Arab metaphysicians split Eternity, _i.e._, the negation of Time, into two halves, _Azal_ (beginninglessness) and _Abad_ (endlessness); both being mere words, gatherings of letters with a subjective significance. In English we use “Eternal” (_Æviternus_, age-long, life-long) as loosely, by applying it to three distinct ideas; (1) the habitual, in popular parlance; (2) the exempt from duration; and (3) the everlasting, which embraces all duration. “Omniscience-Maker” is the old Roman sceptic’s _Homo fecit Deos_.

The next section is one long wail over the contradictions, the mysteries, the dark end, the infinite sorrowfulness of all existence, and the arcanum of grief which, Luther said, underlies all life. As with Euripides “to live is to die, to die is to live.” Hâjî Abdû borrows the Hindu idea of the human body. “It is a mansion,” says Menu, “with bones for its beams and rafters; with nerves and tendons for cords; with muscles and blood for cement; with skin for its outer covering; filled with no sweet perfume, but loaded with impurities; a mansion infested by age and sorrow; the seat of malady; harassed with pains; haunted with the quality of darkness (Tama-guna), and incapable of standing.” The Pot and Potter began with the ancient Egyptians. “Sitting as a potter at the wheel, Cneph (at Philæ) moulds clay, and gives the spirit of life to the nostrils of Osiris.” Hence the Genesitic “breath.” Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being “by whom the fictile vase is formed; the clay out of which it is fabricated.” We find him next in Jeremiah’s “Arise and go down unto the Potter’s house,” etc. (xviii. 2), and lastly in Romans (ix. 20), “Hath not the potter power over the clay?” No wonder that the first Hand who moulded the man-mud is a _lieu commun_ in Eastern thought. The “waste of agony” is Buddhism, or Schopenhauerism pure and simple, I have moulded “Earth on Earth” upon “Seint Ysidre”’s well-known rhymes (A.D. 1440):—

Erthe out of Erthe is wondirli wrouzt, Erthe out of Erthe hath gete a dignity of nouzt, Erthe upon Erthe hath sett all his thouzt How that Erthe upon Erthe may be his brouzt, etc.

The “Camel-rider,” suggests Ossian, “yet a few years and the blast of the desert comes.” The dromedary was chosen as Death’s vehicle by the Arabs, probably because it bears the Bedouin’s corpse to the distant burial-ground, where he will lie among his kith and kin. The end of this section reminds us of:—

How poor, how rich; how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is Man!

The Hâjî now passes to the results of his long and anxious thoughts: I have purposely twisted his exordium into an echo of Milton:—

Till old experience doth attain To something of prophetic strain.

He boldly declares that there is no God as man has created his Creator. Here he is at one with modern thought:—“En général les croyants font le Dieu comme ils sont eux-mêmes,” (says J. J. Rousseau, “Confessions,” I. 6): “les bons le font bon: les méchants le font méchant: les dévots haineux et bilieux, ne voient que l’enfer, parce qu’ils voudraient damner tout le monde; les âmes aimantes et douces n’y croient guère; et l’un des étonnements dont je ne reviens pas est de voir le bon Fénélon en parler dans son Télémaque comme s’il y croyoit tout de bon: mais j’espère qu’il mentoit alors; car enfin quelque véridique qu’on soit, il faut bien mentir quelquefois quand on est évêque.” “Man depicts himself in his gods,” says Schiller. Hence the _Naturgott_, the deity of all ancient peoples, and with which every system began, allowed and approved of actions distinctly immoral, often diabolical. Belief became moralized only when the conscience of the community, and with it of the individual items, began aspiring to its golden age,—Perfection. “Dieu est le superlatif, dont le positif est l’homme,” says Carl Vogt; meaning, that the popular idea of a _numen_ is that of a magnified and non-natural man.

He then quotes his authorities. Buddha, whom the Catholic Church converted to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize Ishwara (the deity), on account of the mystery of the “cruelty of things.” Schopenhauer, Miss Cobbe’s model pessimist, who at the humblest distance represents Buddha in the world of Western thought, found the vision of man’s unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, so overpowering that he concluded the Supreme Will to be malevolent, “heartless, cowardly, and arrogant.” Confucius, the “Throneless king, more powerful than all kings,” denied a personal deity. The Epicurean idea rules the China of the present day. “God is great, but he lives too far off,” say the Turanian Santâls in Aryan India; and this is the general language of man in the Turanian East.

Hâjî Abdû evidently holds that idolatry begins with a personal deity. And let us note that the latter is deliberately denied by the “Thirty-nine Articles.” With them God is “a Being without Parts (personality) or Passions.” He professes a vague Agnosticism, and attributes popular faith to the fact that Timor fecit Deos; “every religion being, without exception, the child of fear and ignorance” (Carl Vogt). He now speaks as the “Drawer of the Wine,” the “Ancient Taverner,” the “Old Magus,” the “Patron of the Mughân or Magians”; all titles applied to the Soofi as opposed to the Zâhid. His “idols” are the eidola (illusions) of Bacon, “having their foundations in the very constitution of man,” and therefore appropriately called _fabulæ_. That “Nature’s Common Course” is subject to various interpretation, may be easily proved. Aristotle was as great a subverter as Alexander; but the quasi-prophetical Stagyrite of the Dark Ages, who ruled the world till the end of the thirteenth century, became the “twice execrable” of Martin Luther; and was finally abolished by Galileo and Newton. Here I have excised two stanzas. The first is:—

Theories for truths, fable for fact; system for science vex the thought Life’s one great lesson you despise— to know that all we know is nought.

This is in fact:—

Well didst thou say, Athena’s noblest son, The most we know is nothing can be known.

The next is:—

Essence and substance, sequence, cause, beginning, ending, space and time, These be the toys of manhood’s mind, at once ridiculous and sublime.

He is not the only one who so regards “bothering Time and Space.” A late definition of the “infinitely great,” viz., that the idea arises from denying form to any figure; of the “infinitely small,” from refusing magnitude to any figure, is a fair specimen of the “dismal science”—metaphysics.

Another omitted stanza reads:—

How canst thou, Phenomen! pretend the Noumenon to mete and span? Say which were easier probed and proved, Absolute Being or mortal man?

One would think that he had read Kant on the “Knowable and the Unknowable,” or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could “differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite.” It is a common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena, the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the “residuum of a bad metaphysic,” which deforms the system of Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are, or can be conceived, things in themselves (_i.e._, unrelated to thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that we cannot know what they are. But who dares say “cannot”? Who can measure man’s work when he shall be as superior to our present selves as we are to the Cave-man of past time?

The “Chain of Universe” alludes to the Jain idea that the whole, consisting of intellectual as well as of natural principles, existed from all eternity; and that it has been subject to endless revolutions, whose causes are the inherent powers of nature, intellectual as well as physical, without the intervention of a deity. But the Poet ridicules the “non-human,” _i.e._, the not-ourselves, the negation of ourselves and consequently a non-existence. Most Easterns confuse the contradictories, in which one term stands for something, and the other for nothing (_e.g._, ourselves and not-ourselves), with the contraries (_e.g._, rich and not-rich = poor), in which both terms express a something. So the positive-negative “infinite” is not the complement of “finite,” but its negation. The Western man derides the process by making “not-horse” the complementary entity of “horse.” The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi tenet that the five (six?) senses are the doors of all human knowledge, and that no form of man, incarnation of the deity, prophet, apostle or sage, has ever produced an idea not conceived within his brain by the sole operation of these vulgar material agents. Evidently he is neither spiritualist nor idealist.

He then proceeds to show that man depicts himself in his God, and that “God is the racial expression”; a pedagogue on the Nile, an abstraction in India, and an astrologer in Chaldæa; where Abraham, says Berosus (Josephus, Ant. I. 7, § 2, and II. 9, § 2) was “skilful in the celestial science.” He notices the Akârana-Zamân (endless Time) of the Guebres, and the working dual, Hormuzd and Ahriman. He brands the God of the Hebrews with pugnacity and cruelty. He has heard of the beautiful creations of Greek fancy which, not attributing a moral nature to the deity, included Theology in Physics; and which, like Professor Tyndall, seemed to consider all matter everywhere alive. We have adopted a very different Unitarianism; Theology, with its one Creator; Pantheism with its “one Spirit’s plastic stress”; and Science with its one Energy. He is hard upon Christianity and its “trinal God”: I have not softened his expression ({Arabic} = a riddle), although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other objections they can get over, not this. Nor is he any lover of Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and its Hellenic hedonism; with the world of thought moving between these two extremes. The former, defined as predominant or exclusive care for the practice of right, is represented by Semitic and Arab influence, Korânic and Hadîsic. The latter, the religion of humanity, a passion for life and light, for culture and intelligence; for art, poetry and science, is represented in Islamism by the fondly and impiously-cherished memory of the old Guebre kings and heroes, beauties, bards and sages. Hence the mention of Zâl and his son Rostam; of Cyrus and of the Jâm-i-Jamshîd, which may be translated either grail (cup) or mirror: it showed the whole world within its rim; and hence it was called Jâm-i-Jehân-numâ (universe-exposing). The contemptuous expressions about the diet of camel’s milk and the meat of the Susmâr, or green lizard, are evidently quoted from Firdausi’s famous lines beginning:—

Arab-râ be-jâî rasîd’est kâr.

The Hâjî is severe upon those who make of the Deity a Khwân-i-yaghmâ (or tray of plunder) as the Persians phrase it. He looks upon the shepherds as men,

—Who rob the sheep themselves to clothe.

So Schopenhauer (Leben, etc., by Wilhelm Gewinner) furiously shows how the “English nation ought to treat that set of hypocrites, imposters and money-graspers, the clergy, that annually devours £3,500,000.”

The Hâjî broadly asserts that there is no Good and no Evil in the absolute sense as man has made them. Here he is one with Pope:—

And spite of pride, in erring nature’s spite One truth is clear—whatever is, is right.

Unfortunately the converse is just as true:—whatever is, is wrong. Khizr is the Elijah who puzzled Milman. He represents the Soofi, the Bâtini, while Musâ (Moses) is the Zâhid, the Zâhiri; and the strange adventures of the twain, invented by the Jews, have been appropriated by the Moslems. He derides the Freewill of man; and, like Diderot, he detects “pantaloon in a prelate, a satyr in a president, a pig in a priest, an ostrich in a minister, and a goose in a chief clerk.” He holds to Fortune, the {Greek: Túxae} of Alcman, which is, {Greek: Eunomías te kaì Peithoûs adelphà kaì Promatheías thugátaer},—Chance, the sister of Order and Trust, and the daughter of Forethought. The Scandinavian Spinners of Fate were Urd (the Was, the Past), Verdandi (the Becoming, or Present), and Skuld (the To-be, or Future). He alludes to Plato, who made the Demiourgos create the worlds by the Logos (the Hebrew Dabar) or Creative Word, through the Æons. These {Greek: Aìwnes} of the Mystics were spiritual emanations from {Greek: Aìwn}, lit. a wave of influx, an age, period, or day; hence the Latin _ævum_, and the Welsh Awen, the stream of inspiration falling upon a bard. Basilides, the Egypto-Christian, made the Creator evolve seven Æons or Pteromata (fulnesses); from two of whom, Wisdom and Power, proceeded the 365 degrees of Angels. All were subject to a Prince of Heaven, called Abraxas, who was himself under guidance of the chief Æon, Wisdom. Others represent the first Cause to have produced an Æon or Pure Intelligence; the first a second, and so forth till the tenth. This was material enough to affect Hyle, which thereby assumed a spiritual form. Thus the two incompatibles combined in the Scheme of Creation.

He denies the three ages of the Buddhists: the wholly happy; the happy mixed with misery, and the miserable tinged with happiness,—the present. The Zoroastrians had four, each of 3,000 years. In the first, Hormuzd, the good-god, ruled alone; then Ahriman, the bad-god, began to rule subserviently: in the third both ruled equally; and in the last, now current, Ahriman has gained the day.

Against the popular idea that man has caused the misery of this world, he cites the ages, when the Old Red Sandstone bred gigantic cannibal fishes; when the Oolites produced the mighty reptile tyrants of air, earth, and sea; and when the monsters of the Eocene and Miocene periods shook the ground with their ponderous tread. And the world of waters is still a hideous scene of cruelty, carnage, and destruction.