Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran (80 page)

Those who follow the doctrine of Nirvana believe that after death the soul enters the bodies of lower animals or the bodies of other human beings; and that it passes from one body to another until it is purified. It then returns to the dwelling place of its god.

Gibran did not accept the purification process. He believed that the soul comes back to finish what the man abandoned when he left the earth.

In an article about reincarnation and Nirvana, “The poet from Baalbek,” written in Arabic, Gibran stated that the soul returns to an equal status. He wrote: “And the prince inquired, saying, ‘Tell us, O sage, will the gods ever restore me to this world as a prince and bring back the deceased poet to life? Will my soul become incarnated in a body of a great king's son and the soul of the poet in the body of a great poet? Will the sacred laws permit him to face eternity composing poetry about life? Will I be able to shower him with gifts?' And the sage answered the prince saying: ‘Whatever the soul longs for it will attain. The sacred laws which restore the spring after the passing of the winter will reinstate you a prince and will reinstate the poet as a poet.'”

Gibran wrote in
The Prophet:

Fare you well, people of Orphalese

This day has ended.

Forget not that I shall come back to you.

A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body.

A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.

Gibran wrote in the last page of
The Garden of the Prophet:

O, Mist, my sister, my sister, Mist,

I am one with you now.

No longer am I a self.

The walls have fallen,

And the chains have broken;

I rise to you, a mist,

And together we shall float upon the sea until life's second day,

When dawn shall lay you, dewdrops in a garden,

And me a babe upon the breast of a woman.

In the late eighteenth century, materialism gained wide hold in Europe. The economic life of society became more important than religious ethics. The theory of natural selection was held to justify might against right, whether between individuals or nations.

Nietzsche and many other writers made the “self” the center of something approaching worship. Nietzsche even proclaimed that God was dead.

John A. T. Robinson maintained that Nietzsche was not an atheist, that he was trying to free man from the God who is a tyrant, who impoverishes, enslaves and annihilates man. He was trying to get rid of the kindly old man who could be pushed into one corner while men “got on with business.”

One of Gibran's biographers has claimed that Gibran became acquainted with the work of Nietzsche and was even influence by it.

Gibran demanded that his people in the Middle East should revolt against Turkish rule. But at no time did he ever deny the existence of God.

We know that Gibran believed in God and in the immortality of the soul. But did he believe that man and his soul required guidance and, if so, what kind of guidance?

It is essential that we know the traditions and auspices of Gibran's background to answer the questions raised by his works. Gibran was born to the daughter of a Maronite priest, was baptized by his grandfather in rites employing Syriac, or Aramaic, the language Christ spoke. The Maronite Church is typical of Lebanon's tradition of being not only physically but philosophically and intellectually at the crossroads of the world. The Maronite rite came to Lebanon directly from the Church of Antioch, but it is Roman Catholic, preserving its ancient language and rituals through the Patriarch of Antioch and the Middle East, but preserving also its allegiance to Rome. Maronite priests are often married, for a married man may become a priest. A man may not, however, marry after he takes the Maronite vows of the priesthood.

At the age of five, Gibran was sent to a village school under the auspices of the Maronite Church. When he was eleven, he had memorized all the Psalms. At thirteen, he entered Al Hikmat, a church college, where he remained for five years. At Al Hikmat, he studied with Father Joseph Haddad, whom Gibran described as “the only man who ever taught me anything.”

In his maturity, after he had written
The Prophet,
Gibran wrote
Jesus, the Son of Man,
a book which reflects Gibran's deep knowledge of the Bible and of both Western and Eastern thought; for Gibran wrote not only of Arab philosophers but also of such men as St. Augustine, whom the West considers the Father of Latin theology. Augustine, nevertheless, was of Lebanese origin (Punic or Phoenician); he had been educated in the Phoenician schools of Carthage and was 33 before he accepted Christianity. Augustine accepted St. Paul's belief in man's original sin, but defined evil as that evil that man does voluntarily; St. Augustine wrote that only with help and through grace could man attain salvation, a premise which is now an orthodox doctrine of the Church.

Also, even a cursory review of Gibran's works reveals that he had familiarized himself with the works of the ancient Lebanese, the high priests of Eshtar, Baal and Tamuz; he knew, too, Moses, the Prophets, the Beatitudes, and had read deeply of both Christian and Islamic theology. Gibran's thirst had taken him to the fountains of Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Voltaire, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Jefferson, Emerson and even to Lincoln. Gibran recognized that our religions advocate discipline and guidance, first through ceremonial practices, and secondly through prescribed ethical conduct.

Although religious rites vary greatly, Western ethics today are still those codified by Gibran's ancestors along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, rules which advocate prudence, temperance, courage, justice, love, mercy and self-sacrifice.

Gibran was a rebel, but only against ceremonial practice, not against the ethos of his ancestors. Barbara Young, Gibran's secretary in the latter years of his life, has written, “Organized religion had no attraction for this man.” But careful reading proves that Gibran was not agnostic; his anger was against religion as it was practiced, not against the religious man.

When Gibran was growing to manhood, the Turks ruled Lebanon, and the Maronite church accepted a feudal role in order to survive within an Islamic society. Buttressing the feudal position of the church, the Christian Lebanese, the Maronites, zealously donated more lands to the church than it could cultivate; therefore, as the church turned more and more to the practice of sharecropping, it became increasingly a feudal master and employer of its own members. As the Church's secular power grew, some of its hierarchy, its bishops and priests, used their position and the Church's power to advance and enrich friends and relatives.

Gibran grew up too near the Church not to recognize its worldliness. He lost his first love to the nephew of a rapacious bishop. Then, leaving his own land, he saw the contrast provided by liberty, tolerance and freedom in America. His rebellion against the religious, then, was not only personal, but grew from the very ethos he had first learned from the religious.

Gibran later wrote a story in Arabic called “Kahlil the Heretic,” in which a novice tries to convince the monks to distribute all their possessions and to go preach among the poor. “Let us restore to the needy the vast lands of the convent and let us give back the riches we have taken from them. Let us disperse and teach the people to smile because of the bounty of heaven and to rejoice in the glories of life and of freedom.

“The hardships we shall encounter among the people shall be more sanctifying and more exalting than the ease and serenity we accept in this place. The sympathy that touches a neighbor's heart is greater than virtue practiced unseen in this convent. A word of compassion for the weak, the criminal and the sinner is more magnificent than long, empty prayers droned in the temple.”

The monks, of course, unable to make Kahlil obey their rules, throw him out of the monastery.

“The feudal lord proclaims from his castle that the Sultan has appointed him as overlord to the people and the priest proclaims from his altar that God has appointed him as guardian of their souls.

“The feudal lord binds the poor ‘fellah's' arms while the priest filches from his pockets. Between the lord representing the law and the priest representing God, the bodies and the souls of the people of Lebanon wither and die.”

In another story, also written in Arabic, “John the Madman,” Gibran tells of John's reading the New Testament, which ordinary men were forbidden to read.

One day, reading and meditating, John neglected his herd, the heifers slowly wandering into the monastery's pasture. The monks kept the heifers and demanded payment for damages. Unable to pay, John's mother ransomed the herd by giving the monks her heirloom necklace in payment. Thus John became a crusader against the church, a preacher in the public square:

“Come again, O Jesus, to drive the vendors of thy faith from thy sacred temple…. They fill the skies with smoke from their candles and incense but leave the faithful hungry.”

The monks had John arrested and refused to free him until his father testified that he was insane. Therefore no one listened to John because the public was led to believe he was a madman.

Gibran, writing a friend about “John the Madman,” said, “I found that earlier writers, in attacking the tyranny of some of the clergy, attacked the practice of religion. They were wrong because religion is a belief natural to man. But using religion as an excuse for tyranny is wrong. That is why I made sure that John in my story was a powerful believer in Jesus, in his Gospel and in his teaching.”

The ethics of the West are, of course, the products of religion. It is true that much of the Western world has separated the state from religion;
⁴
but our laws recognize Mosaic law in the prohibition against murder, theft and adultery and in recognition of each individual's property rights. Gibran, recognizing the traditions and ethos of religion, also urged prudence, temperance, courage, justice, love, mercy and self-negation. Nowhere, however, does he answer the question, “Is it possible to believe in God, to practice the ethics of religion and to admit salvation without the rites of religion?” He does, however, recognize the question in his short poem in Arabic, “O Soul”:

O Soul

by Gibran

O Soul, if I did not covet immortality, I would never have learned the song which has been sung through all of time.

Rather, I would have been a suicide, nothing remaining of me except my ashes hidden within the tomb.

O soul! if I had not been baptized with tears and my eyes had not been mascaraed by ghosts of sickness, I would have seen life as through a veil, darkly.

O soul! life is a darkness which ends as in the sunburst of day.

The yearning of my heart tells me there is peace in the grave.

O soul! if some fool tell you the soul perishes like the body and that which dies never returns, tell him the flower perishes but the seed remains and lies before us as the secret of life everlasting.

1
. In the field of medicine, the books of Avicenna remained basic textbooks of the universities of Europe almost until the present day. About a hundred treatises are ascribed to him. He was great not only in his medical work, but in mathematics and astronomy, as well as philosophy. See
One White Race
by Joseph Sheban, page 241.

2
. Both Matanabbi and Maary are great Arab poets.

3
. Al Ghazali was a professor at the college in Bagdad. He gave up his chair suddenly, left his family and devoted himself to the ascetic life. He left 69 works, one of them in thirteen volumes. Al Ghazali wandered through Damascus, Jerusalem, Hebron, Mecca, Medina and Alexandria, but returned to Tas, Arabia, where he died.

4
. See
One White Race,
by Joseph Sheban.

“ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU”

T
HE FEUDAL
system disappeared in both the political and religious life of Lebanon. It is now an independent state with its president and parliament elected by the people. Some of the stories and articles written by Gibran fifty years ago are a matter of history, but others are as modern as today's political situation, remaining timeless.

On the walls of many American homes hangs a plaque commemorating the statement of the late President John F. Kennedy:

Ask not what your country can do for you,

but ask what you can do for your country.

This statement appeared in an article written by Gibran in Arabic, over fifty years ago. The heading of that article can be translated either “The New Deal” or “The New Frontier.”

The article was directed to Gibran's people in the Middle East, but its philosophy and its lesson will continue as long as man lives in a free society. Hence we offer the translation of the whole article:

“The New Frontier”

by Gibran

There are in the Middle East today
¹
two challenging ideas: old and new.

The old ideas will vanish because they are weak and exhausted.

There is in the Middle East an awakening that defies slumber. This awakening will conquer because the sun is its leader and the dawn is its army.

In the fields of the Middle East, which have been a large burial ground, stand the youth of Spring calling the occupants of the sepulchers to rise and march toward the new frontiers.

When the Spring sings its hymn the dead of the winter rise, shed their shrouds and march forward.

There is on the horizon of the Middle East a new awakening; it is growing and expanding; it is reaching and engulfing all sensitive, intelligent souls; it is penetrating and gaining the sympathy of noble hearts.

The Middle East, today, has two masters. One is deciding, ordering, being obeyed; but he is at the point of death.

But the other one is silent in his conformity to law and order, calmly awaiting justice; he is a powerful giant who knows his own strength, confident in his existence and a believer in his destiny.