THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE WRITER
ONE WAY of understanding an author consists in deciphering his thoughts through his works. After all a book is a perfect self-projection of the personality, desires, ambitions and frustrations of the writer. In good philosophical language we say that there is a relation of proportionality if not identity between the “cause,” the producer, and “effect,” the product. Now, it is true that Gibran would sometimes refuse to be confused with his heroes, as he said, for instance, in a letter to Miss May Ziadeh concerning the personage The Madman.1 Still, I hold the theory that the motives behind a work have to be fetched “in” the individual contributor, in that la raison d’être of the product portrays the personality of the producer.
In this chapter, which I might have entitled “An Introduction to Gibran,” I will depict the essential themes of Gibran’s philosophy through his printed literature, in as much that I will attempt to outline the influences he bore, and the impact he left on his readers.
1. The Meaning of Gibran’s Publications
Gibran has conveyed his thoughts through many literary forms of expression. He wrote many books ranging from poems, aphorisms, short plays, parables, to essays, and novels.
The very first appearance of Gibran as a writer is that of rebellious youth disenchanted with anything called “organization.” Spirits Rebellious was composed in Arabic while studying in Paris in 1903. The book argues that the institutionalized laws of the church, as well as man-made social laws are decayed, for none of them enaid the individual to develop a self-identity. Rather, like Kierkegaard would say, they are “universal,” and therefore, they appeal to the common mass, and mold patterned or stereotyped personalities. The book especially denounces the Maronite clergy’s conduct toward the poor peasants as “simoniac,” and declares human laws as unethical oppressions exercised in the name of moral justice. This work is meaningful in many respects. (1) It reveals the political and religious situations of Lebanon at the time of its publication, in that it clearly underlines that the spirit of feudalism under the Turks was detrimental to the poor for it introduced the class struggle. (2) It represents Gibran’s moral philosophy.2 Though the tone of it sounds a bit rebellious, Gibran’s ethic, however, should not be identified with nowadays revolutionary radicals who abhore unconditionally whatever is called “establishment,” meaning a complete rejection of rules and order in society. On the contrary, like Rousseau, Gibran is a “reformer” of the social woes caused by injustice, ineffective traditions, and the unnatural laws that hurt the innate laws of human nature. His reform asks that kindness, forgiveness and love be the guidelines of social intercourse between citizen and government. (3) Finally, the novel anticipates Gibran’s later writings. In the theory-building of many philosophers, historians detect an evolution of ideas that involve contradictions and ambiguities, but, Gibran really never relinquished his very first ideas and never raised paradoxes in his system.
Soon after its publication, Spirits Rebellious was burned in the mid of Beirut. For punishment Gibran was excommunicated from the Catholic Maronite Church and was exiled by the Turkish officials from Lebanon. In a letter he wrote to his first cousin, Nakhli Gibran, he expressed his melancholy for what his countrymen did to him.
… I am not sure whether the Arabic-speaking world would remain as friendly to me as it has been in the past three years. I say this because the apparition of enmity has already appeared. The people in Syria are calling me heretic, and the intelligentsia in Egypt vilifies me, saying, “He is the enemy of just laws, of family ties, and of old traditions.” Those writers are telling the truth, because I do not love man-made laws and I abhor the traditions that our ancestors left us. This hatred is the fruit of my love for the sacred and spiritual kindness which should be the source of every law upon the earth, for kindness is the shadow of God in man … Will my teaching ever be received by the Arab world, or will it die away and disappear like a shadow?3
However, when in 1908, the Young Turks, headed by Niyazi, overthrew the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, the new government pardoned all the exiles including Gibran who was then in Paris studying painting with Auguste Rodin.4
His next novel is The Broken Wings (1912). Personally he writes: “This book is the best one I have ever written.”5 Best, indeed it is, yet with some reservations for The Prophet was not yet. In my opinion, the philosophy outlined in this book is in continuation with the philosophy of marriage stressed in Spirits Rebellious. Nonetheless, Gibran seems less preoccupied with polemic than trying to describe to us the human predicament of love, which constitutes the central topic of the whole novel. His definition of love hither is neither Platonic nor Freudian, but between romantic and spiritual.6 Furthermore, he insists, after the manner of Blaise Pascal, that love is not the work of reason but of the heart; not the carnal or bodily sensation heart, but of a heart that still has a logic. La logique du coeur is the correct expression. What the emotions know logically, the logic of abstract reason cannot reason about unless it falls prey to one of Freud’s defense mechanisms: rationalization.
The story that Gibran narrates is autobiographical7; it is about his first romance with Miss Hala Daher, whom he met while studying in Lebanon. By the way, his matrimony to Miss Daher was impeded not by the girl’s father, but rather by the town bishop who had imposed against the wills of the girl and her father, the decision of a marriage with his nephew. The nephew was an irresponsible man and the uncle bishop was most avid to inherit the wealth of the Dahers. By the way, a movie has been made about The Broken Wings.
A Tear and a Smile (1914), argues through poems and prose poems that human existence oscillates between two metaphysical predicaments, viz., joy and suffering. These are metaphysical, because they express human dimensions, and impregnate the core of the being of man. Somehow, the philosophy that he expounds in this book is neither Schopenhauerism nor Leibnizian. The former thought that everything is evil and that our world is the worst one that God could have ever created. To the other extreme, Leibniz taught an exaggerated optimism, saying that if opportunity was presented, God could not create a better world than this one. Gibran is mid-way. Life is both a “tear” and a “smile.” The tear has an intrinsic or extrinsic motive; the extrinsic is, however, the motive of the former. This amounts to saying, evil that surrounds us out-there in society, in politics, or in my other fellowman, is what tortures and hampers my existence, thus, affecting me from within. This being the case, we understand why Gibran has included in the book some short essays that portray the cupidities of society. Yet, Gibran does not stop at the iniquities of life, he also acknowledges the reality of happiness, joy and love. To put it bluntly, he approves of the philosophy of stoicism. The stoics bear courageously their cross; a lamentation which is not followed immediately by a pursuit of an intellectual meditation, abases man’s intellectual capacities whose teleologic is to overcome meaningfully the pain. However, this should not make us think that Gibran’s philosophy is an escape from life’s frustrations through a calculative thinking process. Maybe, existentialism is the closest philosophy with which his system finds affinities. Indeed, like the existentialists, he assumes that pain and joy are complementary and interrelated. For instance, love is not without some sacrifices; there are no roses without thorns; there can be no appreciation of happiness unless the soul has first drunk of the cup of bitterness. Somehow, the book surmises that it is Utopia to want a world exempted from psychological stress, in as much that it is untrue that human life knows nothing of joy, friendshipness, happiness. Finally, it is my personal conviction that A Tear and a Smile is not of a “Nietzschean inspiration,” as said Andrew Dib Sherfan.8 The overtone is similar to the British poet William Blake, whom Gibran imitated a great deal. For example, the so many articles about the function of the poet in society reflect a resemblance with Blake’s conception of the authentic poet: a messenger sent from Heaven to lead people on the right path of God’s love.
In 1918, at the age of thirty five, Gibran summed up his meditations in The Procession. The work was first written in Arabic verses. It communicates a dialogue between a youth full of vigor, an optimist, a believer in the native goodness of man, and worshipper of nature where he dwells—and an aged sage embittered by the inhabitants of the metropolis, where the rhythm of life is so mechanized and standardized that beauty, love, religion, justice, knowledge, happiness, gentleness, are veiled by false pretences. In the last page, the sage avows that if youth was granted to him, he would choose to run wild and free in nature. The poem reminds us of J. J. Rousseau’s contrasts between the native goodness of human nature and the rotten constructed nature that civilization imparts upon us through its bad stimuli. Our author had a high esteem of Rousseau. On many occasions he spoke of the latter as a liberator of mankind from tyranny and “Bastille.”9
Gibran’s first publication in English is a collection of poems and parables with the title The Madman (1918). Here we see Nietzsche’s influence on Gibran’s style. Like Nietzsche, Gibran expresses himself through parables. But also, his Madman following the trend of Zarathustra, introduces himself to others with a “shout.” The cry of Zarathustra was the declaration of God’s death; Gibran’s Madman, however, does not proclaim the deity’s death but asserts a relation of cooperation between man and God concerning Creation. As we turn the pages, we are struck by the attitude of irony and sarcasm that slowly builts up till it reaches its zenith with the last parable “The Perfect World.” This essay, once more, denounces the hypocritic behaviors performed in the name of a “God of lost souls.”10 The Madman is not literally mentally unbalanced; on the contrary, he is, in the language of psychosomatic medicine, perfectly healthy. His madness is only in the eyes of others, from whom he deviates in his right and just and logical doings. Gibran here agrees with the opinion held by the humanistic psychologists, namely, we tend to be what society expects from us, although these expectations could be detrimental for the development of our self-identity. Whence often times we veil our true self with masks, out of fear of being ridiculed by others. The ethics of Gibran’s hero is quite simple: better be labelled madman by others, than hide my inner self with filthy social masks. The parables “The Wise King” and “The Blessed City” are significant in that they imbed at the manner of Aesop and La Fontaine, a moral lesson from which our contemporary world could learn something about sincerity.
With The Forerunner (1920) Gibran becomes more mysterious and more of a mature philosopher. The title he selected is quite appropriate for the type of philosophic thoughts he conveys through the parables. In his preface he defines man as a “forerunner” meaning that we foreran what we “are” today. His logic here is not much different from the historical dialectic of Marx or Sartre. Basically, he asserts that “man invents man” (Marx); we are our own product; “I am what I am because I have made of myself what I am” (Sartre). Nobody is to be blamed for our “being” and “having,” but ourselves. Psychologically speaking, this is called self-actualization. Yet, this process is Herachtian, i.e. it never ends for the tomorrow is always stretched out-there, untouched. In other words, Gibran makes clear that we are our own destiny, and not the toy of a blind fate. Moreover, the essay makes ample reference to intersubjectivity. A man’s existence does not run parallel to another’s. Existence is a coexistence. For better or for worse, man is not an island; he is a social animal.
The Prophet (1923) is his masterpiece; this book has become a second Bible for the readers. Priests don’t mind to consult it during mass. James Kavanaugh for instance, when he was still part of the Catholic Clergy, cited during a matrimonial ceremony the lines of The Prophet on marriage instead of reciting the prayers of the St. Office.11
Now, it should be understood that Gibran had long meditated on The Prophet and rewrote it three times. He was just fifteen years old when he composed its first version. At the age of twenty, he revised The Prophet in Arabic. Then took it to his mother who was seriously ill,
and he read to her what he had written of the young Almustafa. [The hero of the play]. The mother, wise in her son’s youth as she had been in his childhood, said “It is good work, Gibran. But the time is not yet. Put it away.” He obeyed her to the letter. “She knew,” he said, “far better than I, in my green youth.”12
Then between 1917-1922, he rewrote the book for a third time; finally in 1923 he released it to the press.
Most particularly The Prophet is a direct copy of the style of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Yet, Almustafa does not share at all the philosophy of Zarathustra who is grim and pessimistic about the abilities of man. Here, like elsewhere, Gibran is simply fascinated by the style of Nietzsche; as to the content of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Gibran is not the least under his spell. In my opinion the real straight forward influence on Gibran’s thoughts of The Prophet is rather the Bible. Actually, Nietzsche himself was inspired by the figure of Jesus Christ, his speeches and style of expression, the parables. That is why we find many “numerical numbers” in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that were borrowed from the Holy Scriptures. For instance, Christ and Zarathustra both began their prophetic mission at the age of thirty.13
Fundamentally, all the sermons of the Prophet revolve around one dimension of human reality: the authentic social relations. Thus, Almustafa revokes all the intersubjective situations—marriage, law, children, friendship, giving, etc.—where people come in contact with each other. But also, the book teaches how these existential relations should genuinely be experienced. I know that I would not be exaggerating if for sake of comparison, I recalled to the attention of the reader that M. Heidegger, the leader of existentialism, has a somehow similar definition of the human predicament. Heidegger, following his teacher E. Husserl, characterizes man as a Mitdasein. That is metaphysically, man is a being-with-others, and in no instance could human nature be exempted from such a facticity; as for the case of solitude, isolation once more proves rather than disproves the “fact” of “togetherness.” One may retract in his ivory tower either because he wants to reevaluate the meaning of his relations with his fellowmen, or because he has been hurt by others. But in all events we realize that the metaphysical predicament of being-with-others permeates man socially and psychologically, and not the other way around.
“Intersubjectivity” is not, however, the only kind of relation Gibran sought to express. Actually, The Prophet and two others, The Garden of the Prophet (1933) and The Earth Gods (1931) form a trilogy intended to outline the three-fold relational dimensions of the existential man. The corresponding technical philosophic expressions are Mitwelt (relation with other minds; synonymous, Mitdasein), Umwelt (relation with the world), and Gotteswelt (relation with God).
The Garden of the Prophet studies man’s relation to nature (Umwelt). The emphasis is that of “ecology” and “environmentalism,” not with a scientific outlook but poetic. Gibran was a worshipper of nature and wild life. Had he lived long enough to witness to what degree our scientific inventors have intoxicated the air and polluted the rivers, there is no doubt that he would have sharply deplored our tyrannical attitude toward helpless nature. It is said that our primitive ancestors fought physically and intellectually to preserve themselves from cosmic calamities; well, today the role of master-servant relation is reversed; it is man now who presents a threat to nature. At any rate, the cosmology that Gibran propounds in the book is very much anthropomorphic. He describes human emotions with concepts borrowed from nature.
As for The Earth Gods, it explicates God’s relation to man (Gotteswelt). Man has the desire to be close to the Divine. In Gibran’s philosophy man ascends to God “in,” “through” and “with” love only. The essay is a dialogue between three gods, two of whom consider that “man is food for the gods.”14 That is, man is meat for the glory and plans of the gods, and a toy that satisfies their whims. The third god, however, is all compassion; his speech is an attempt to change the despotic attitude of the two others; he reminds them that love is the virtue of the gods; finally, to win them on his side, in favor of the human, he reminds them that man is capable of practicing the very virtue of the gods: he gives them the case of the love of man for woman.
To revert back to The Prophet, Gibran has attained his zenith among the international scholars with “the little black book”15, as he liked to refer to it because of its black cover. The thoughts contained in the work are so powerful and attractive that it has become one of the rare manuscripts ever to be translated in more than twenty languages. Every reader sees a bit of himself in the philosophic discourses of Almustafa. To many this “strange little book,”16 still serves as a guide for their examination of conscience. The following stories are true happening; Miss Young relates:
There was a young Russian girl named Marya, who had been climbing in the Rockies with a group of friends, other young people. She had gone aside from them and sat down on a rock to rest, and beside her she saw a black book. It was The Prophet, which meant nothing to her. Idley she turned the pages, then she began to read a little, then a little more. “Then,” said Marya, telling us the story, “I rushed to my friend and shouted, ‘Come and see—what I have all my life been waiting for—I have found it—Truth!”
There was another man, a lawyer who sat through an hour of reading aloud from the same book in another bookshop in Philadelphia. He was a man full of years, with a benign countenance, and he listened with a quality of attention that could not fail to attract the reader’s notice. When the evening was over this lawyer came to speak to me as others were doing, and he said, “I am a criminal lawyer. If I had read that chapter on Crime and Punishment twenty years ago I would have been a better and a happier man, and an infinitely better counsel for the defense.”
I know a gentleman in New York City, the manager of a well-known real estate firm. He told me this: “My wife has three copies of The Prophet in our house. When we meet a new acquaintance who promises to be congenial, she lends him, or her, one of the copies. According to the person’s reaction to the book we form our opinion of his worth-whileness.”… You cannot read a page without being moved in the depths of your consciousness, if you are one of those “ at all ready for the truth.”17
Sand and Foam (1926) is a compilation of maxims and aphorisms similar to those of La Rochefaucault, William Blake, and F. Nietzsche. Each of these sayings could be used for intellectual meditation. But to consider them as good thoughts that could be wrapped in Chinese fortune cookies, I deem the project of bad taste.
Another major important work is Jesus The Son of Man (1928). Gibran has always been attracted by the majesty of Jesus’ teachings and by the mystery of his life. He viewed Jesus as the great human exemplar who best fulfilled the metamorphosis of transmutation from human nature into Godlike. As the title already implies, the Jesus that Gibran describes is not the Jesus of theology or dogmas of whom Revelation attests as the Son and Equal of God and the Holy Spirit in the Mystery of Trinity. Rather, he depicts to us a Jesus made of flesh, tormented by human passions, but who, however, has transcended the evil limitations of lust, injustice, and insensitiveness. At this point I remind the reader that Gibran had no attachment for organized religion. That is why he never meant to speak of the Jesus of the Christian, but of the Jesus of Nazareth, the man who had a mother and a father. His real concern is to make the image of Jesus accessible to the human. We know that the so-called intimidated mortals consider the life and deeds of Jesus unimitable because a priori they judge him not as a human but their God. Consequently, these souls remain unaffected by the exhortations of Jesus. Well, Gibran’s new narration of the life of Jesus purposes to change our attitude toward this “extraordinary man, Jesus,” who after all was not made of a different stuff than us, except that he had successfully developed to its peak the divine potentialities of love and compassion that God the Creator encompasses within our nature. Gibran recounts the life of Jesus through the testimony of seventy seven persons who knew him. The last personage is “A Man From Lebanon,” most probably Gibran himself. I find it difficult to conclude that our author committed the heresy of the Jacobite Monophysites, or even of the Nestorians. The point he meant to get across to us is that the supernatural is implanted within each man, and it comes to each individual to realize the divinity of his nature. “The soul is a link in the divine chain.”18 For guidance in our pursuit of being worthy of God, he recommended to follow the path of Jesus.
Finally, the remaining of the works reiterate his thoughts already elaborated in his previous books. The Wanderer (1932) is a posthumous collection of fifty stories; Secrets of the Heart (1947) is an amalgamation of short stories, among which “The Tempest” sarcastically portrays at the manner of Nietzsche the lack of spirituality in modern society; The Nymphs of the Valley (1948) repeats once more his polemics against the social and ecclesiastical woes; The Voice of the Master (1959) speaks of the death of the prophet Almuhtada and gives an account of the teachings of the Master; A Self-Portrait (1959) contains some of his correspondences with his closest friends; Thoughts and Meditations (1961); Spiritual Sayings (1962); and, Beloved Prophet (1972) is a collection of Gibran’s letters to Haskell; also this book contains Miss Haskell’s private journal about Gibran’s life and personality.
In conclusion allow me to express my discontent with some of Gibran’s publishers. This man from Lebanon is widely read by the scholars and the laymen, and yet I personally feel that he is little understood by either of these readers. I have spoken to many of his admirers, to my surprise I discovered that they have a vague and confusing comprehension of what he meant to convey to mankind. After much thoughts I believe that the cause of the symptoms of ignorance among his readers are threefold. (1) Many get acquainted with just one or a few of his works, leaving their mind blank as to what he elaborates in his other books. And yet, no scholar can be enough appreciated intellectually unless a great number of his publications are absorbed. (2) A good part of the blame for people’s ignorance has to be attributed most particularly to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who for monetary profit has made available The Prophet in three different kinds of lithography: purse feasable, medium, and gift wrap format. This “little black book” has become commercial. Friends will buy it as a Christmas or anniversary gift for other companions; and if it is the big edition they are offered, the wide white cover and precious sheets, the receivers will display it along with the painting books of Da Vinci on the table in their living room, where visitors will glance at it. Still, the latest and worst subjugation of Gibran to “intellectual prostitution,” is Knopf’s insignificant calendar-book Kahlil Gibran’s Diary (1971, 1972) of which I am sure our author never dreamed of. (3) The last possible explanation for the reader’s insufficient knowledge about Gibran’s message, stems from the too poetical and musical phraseology employed by Gibran. Many enjoy reading Gibran because the lecture carries them to sleep in a beautiful concert of self-complacency; thereby they cease meditating upon the deep philosophical meaning hidden beneath the sound verses.
I hope that this present manuscript will conteract successfully the epidemic of ignorance blurring the intellectual vision of the reader. This is the very reason I am endeavoring here to explicate the most basic concepts that Gibran expounded, although he presented them in a scattering way.
2. Gibran’s Innovation in Modern Arabic Literature
In the contention of the Russian Orientalist, Ignace Kratchovski, the Arab immigrants in America played an important felicitous role in the modernization of Arabic Literature.19
Till the turn of the nineteenth century, Arabic belles-lettres followed faithfully the conventional literary style laid down by the Koran and the Traditions of the Middle Ages. Thus, “in poetry—notes Professor Cachia—by far the commonest form was the panegyric.… In all the sentiment expressed was conventional.… Poetic compositions were overlaid by far-fetched similes, metaphors, and allusions, with elaborate paronomasias and ambilogies.…[On the other hand in] fine prose … the narrative element became no more than a framework on which to hang verbal tours de force.”20 All this amounts to saying with Sir Hamilton Gibb, that “conservatism was too deeply bound up with the entire heritage of Arabic literature to allow any kind of simplification,”21 novelty, and originality in stylistic expressions and content.
However, when Napoleon came to Egypt in 1798, and translations of eminent European thinkers were made available to Middle-East intellectuals, a sort of rejuvenation and improvement was born in Arabic literature. Yet. to a large extent, the immigrants (Mahjar) also concurred in emancipating modern literature from the sterile and decadent literary style of scholasticism. Most particularly. Gibran’s new writing’s form and content inspired his fellow country authors to adopt the “free verse” as their new stanza.
Already as early as 1913, Gibran along with other immigrant writers, Amin Rihani and Nasseeb Arida, began to publish in the New York monthly newspaper al-Funnon, essays, articles, poems that were drastically different from the classical metric schemes (Sadj). The literary style that they employed was Prose Poem (Shir manthur).
Also, on April 20, 1920, the immigrant Arab writers, headed by Gibran as their president, formed a literary circle called “Arrabitah” (Pen-Bond), whose purpose was to update Arabic Literature “from the state of sterility and imitation to the state of beautiful originality in both meaning and style.”22 Soon “Arrabitah” impressed the Arab world. In the words of Muhammad Najm, this new school “characterized by power, modernity and revolt against all that is traditional and rotten, is the strongest school that modern Arabic literature has known until the present day.”23
And precisely, through the society of “Arrabitah” and the literary form of “Prose Poem,” Gibran contributed to the innovation of Modern Arabic literature. During his time he set the example as to how to combine prose with poetry and vice-versa. In depth his writings are poetical, though the verses are proses. The strophes have rhythm and rhyme.
Of course, it is Friedrich Nietzsche, the Psalms, and the Bible filled with parables, that gave a definite literary direction to Gibran’s style of expression. From Nietzsche not only he borrowed Zarathustra’s form of expression which is quite similar to the Christian Gospel, but he also acquired from Nietzsche the flair for mingling emotions and thoughts, sorrow and happiness. As from the Bible he learned the old Semitic literary figure of parables, metaphors, anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism.
In summary, Gibran is hailed today by all the commentators of Modern Arabic belles-lettres as an innovator in Middle Eastern literature; and in my opinion, his writings can teach something to Western authors. To the Arabs he showed them how to break away from classical rhymed poetry (Sadj) and to feel free with the rhythm (prose-poem). To the Westerners, he is a lived example, as to how to make of philosophy a pleasant literature, and not a boring, eyes-tiring lecture of an incomprehensible language.
No thinker can totally sever himself from the past and present ideologies. Not even the French philosopher, René Descartes, who planned in breaking the ties with traditional philosophy, did succeed in keeping his system virgin from foreign influences. Well, Gibran too bore some influences in his art work, poetry and philosophy. It is not possible for us to estimate accurately all the influences that shaped his art and thoughts. Nor is it possible for us to draw chronologically the evolution of influences on Gibran. Nevertheless, we do in fact detect a few major currents that attracted him as an artist and a writer.
Thus, Gibran’s paintings reflect the impact of the Paris schools, Academic Julien and Ecoles des Beaux Arts, and most especially, that of his teacher Auguste Rodin under whom he studied in 1908 in France. But also, as the critic of his Twenty Drawings, Miss Alice Raphael noted: “In painting he is a classicist and his work owes more to the findings of Da Vinci than it does to any modern insurgent.”24 Gibran’s interest in Da Vinci dates back when at six years old he was given by his mother a volume of Leonardo’s reproductions.
On the other hand, in his literature, Gibran was impressed by the early-Islamic poet Mutanabbi,25 and the notorious Persian Ibn al-Muqaffa, who is best known for his translations of Pahlavi works into Arabic. Ibn al-Muqaffa employed a lavish rhetorical style for recounting fables which encompassed a moral lesson.26 Gibran in his turn, used the style of fables in order to communicate to his reader a moral teaching. Also, Amin Rihani, Mikhail Naimy, Nasseeb Arida, the Egyptian woman author May Ziadeh, and many other Arab literati left deep imprints on Gibran’s expressionistic literature.
Yet, it seems that his exposure to European culture refined by far his prose-poetry and provided him with philosophic ideas. Lest I repeat the names of those who influenced him in both his literary form and philosophical content, let’s outline in brief the main Eastern and Western ideological movements that gave a special orientation to his philosophy and style of expression.
This German philosopher (1844-1900) has probably next to the Bible the most influenced Gibran’s thoughts and style of expression. Miss Haskell reports that Gibran had read Nietzsche since “he was twelve or thirteen.”27 Gibran had a high respect for Nietzsche. He would call him: “the loneliest man of the nineteenth century and surely the greatest.”28 At other occasions Gibran depicted him as “a sober Dionysus—a superman who lives in forests and fields—a mighty being who loves music and dancing and all joy.”29
Essentially, Nietzsche’s philosophy denounces society for the despiritualization and demoralization in the world. He blames Christianity and the social institutions for the dehumanization of the individual, and the occurrence of “slave morality.”
Of all the works of Nietzsche, Gibran liked most Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His books, The Madman, The Forerunner, The Prophet and The Tempest were written with a Nietzschean inspiration. From Nietzsche Gibran learned how to convey his ideas in a messianic overtone, while at the same time using a flammatory style for criticizing the organized religion and the social establishment.
Now, to be precise, I call your attention to the fact that although Gibran was attracted by Nietzsche, he was not, however, in complete agreement with his teacher’s philosophy. For one, Nietzsche was a pessimist and an atheist. His Zarathustra declared the death of God, and denied the immortality of man.30 But Gibran’s Almustafa is theocentric and believes that Good will prevail over Evil. Of his own, Gibran confesses: “His [Nietzsche’s] form [style] always was soothing to me. But I thought his philosophy was terrible and all wrong. I was a worshipper of beauty—and beauty was to me the loveliness of things.”31 In the text, I will, when needed, further elaborate on the similarities and dissimilarities between the two.
When I visited the private library of Gibran located in the Museum in Bsherri, I noticed many editions of the Bible and in different languages, among his few other readings. This indicates, in contrast to Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, that Gibran is a firm believer in the teachings of the Gospel. And indeed, his philosophy of love recapitulates in its fullest details Christ’s sermons on “Agape.” Actually, it is my understanding that Gibran’s hermeneutics of life is his personal paraphrasing in a simple and highly emotional language, of the Holy Book. Besides the parabolical figure of speech that he borrows from Jesus and the anthropomorphism of the Gospel’s metaphors, I find it interesting that he makes ample use of the biblical numbers 3, 7, 12 and 30, whenever he wants to convey a messianic or prophetic numerology of events. About these numbers, he once attempted to explain them in the following way: “7 is probably from the five planets the ancients knew, and the sun and the moon. And 12 was sacred too, from the months of the year, and 4 from the four seasons and the four points of compass. And 3 we can never get away from.”32
In The Poet From Baalbek, The Nymphs of the Valley, and “The Farewell” of The Prophet, in as much as in many other passages, Gibran speaks of the reincarnation of the soul and Nirvana. Undoubtedly, through reading his predecessors the Middle-Age philosophers Avicenna, Al Farid and Al Ghazali on whom he wrote articles33, he got acquainted with the doctrine of transmigration.
A brief expose of reincarnation as propounded by Buddhism will help us to understand the spirit of Gibran.
The term used in Buddhism for transmigration or rebirth is samsara, that is, moving about continuously or coming again and again to rebirth. The term refers to the notion of going through one life after another. The endlessness and inevitability of samsara are described in Samyutta - Nikaya, II. (A portion of the Buddhist scriptures.)
The idea of rebirth in Buddhism receives its most essential meaning from the Buddhist truth of the dukkha or suffering entailed in all existence. To understand suffering, it is not enough to consider one single lifetime, wherein dukkha may or may not be immediately evident; one must have in view the whole unending chain of rebirth and the sum of misery entailed in this whole seemingly endless process.
One of the great affirmations of Buddhism is that human consciousness cannot be transformed in a single lifetime. The first conviction of Gautama was the conviction that became known as first of the Four Holy Truths, namely: “now this, monks, is the noble truth of pain; birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful, sorrow, lamentation, dejection, and despair are painful. Contact with unpleasant things is painful, not getting what one wishes is painful.” Suffering or dukkha means more than just physical pain; it is the pain of heart and mind. Conflict, alienation, estrangement is at the very root of man’s existence. It is claimed by Buddha that to appreciate properly the truth of dukkha entailed in all existence one must keep in mind this whole frightful chain of rebirth.
But samsara refers not only to round after round of rebirth in human forms. The whole range of sentient beings is included from the tiniest insect to the noblest man. This range forms an unbroken continuum.
The good news of Buddhism, however, is that the continuum can be broken and has been broken. At the stage of human existence samsara can be transcended, and released and Nirvana (or the Pali word, Nibbana) be attained. Nirvana was the final peace, the eternal state of being. But how to describe for his followers the state in which all identification with a man’s historical finite self is obliterated while experience itself remains and is magnified beyond all imagination did not occupy the mind of the Buddha. When he was asked by a wandering monk if it was possible to illustrate by a simile the place called Nirvana, the Buddha replied:
If a fire were blazing in front of you, would you know that it was?
Yes, good Gautama.
And would you know if it were to be put out?
Yes, good Gautama.
And on its being put out, would you know the direction the fire had gone out to from here—east, west, north, south?
This question does not apply, good Gautama.
The Buddha then closed the discussion by pointing out that the question the ascetic has asked about existence after death was not rightly put either. “Feelings, perceptions, those impulses, that consciousness” by which one defines a human being have passed away from him who has attained Nirvana. “He is deep, immeasurable, unfathomable, as is the great ocean.” (Samyutta-Nikaya).34
Later on, in Chapter Seven, I will come back to this issue.
Among the Anglo-Saxon authors, Blake (1757-1827) played a special role in Gibran’s life. Most particularly Gibran agreed with Blake’s apocalyptic vision of the world as the latter expressed it in his poetry and art. Also, Gibran followed the path of Blake in becoming a “poet of the Bible.” Blake who was deeply touched by the life and teachings of Jesus, believed that in this world we could perceive the direct manifestation of the Divine presence, if we took away the scale of our eyes. Accordingly, the Divine is incarnated in everything. And the material world of our sense perceptions corresponds to the spiritual world. This correspondence is not a Platonic copy of a shadow to its light, but real for Blake, as it became for Gibran. The reason we lack this vision or enlightenment for seeing the unity between the material and the spiritual, is because, concluded Blake, as would later say Gibran, the vision of modern civilization is encrusting; symbolically speaking, we are caught up in the old Jerusalem and fail to see the new Jerusalem.35 The man of the world creates polarities, social class differences, moral disparities, and speaks in a double language logic. Blake stresses this point in his two well-known metaphysical poems “The Little Black Boy,” and “The Tyger.”36 But to the man of vision the polarities come together in the unity of God, who indwells in the tiniest matter as in the superior intelligences. Jesus, for Blake and Gibran, is a lived exemplar who realized the Christian enlightenment, by perfecting through self-discipline and inner struggle his human and divine nature. But also, the poet—considered Blake and Gibran—is a man who has an apocalyptic vision of the world, seeks the correspondence between the transcendence and immanence of God, and who has a messianic mission in leading the people back to Truth.
No wonder that Gibran spoke favorably of Blake. “Blake is the God-man,” he wrote. “His drawings are so far the profoundest things done in English—and his vision, putting aside his drawings and poems, is the most godly.”37 On the other hand, I find it true what Miss Haskell wrote in January 25, 1918 to Gibran: “Blake is mighty. The voice of God and the finger of God are in what he does … He really feels closer to you, Kahlil, than all the rest.”38 This closeness in thinking and painting even Auguste Rodin noticed; that is why he called Gibran “The twentieth century Blake.”
Finally, let me add, that Nietzsche, the Bible, Buddhism, and Blake were not the only foreign influences on Gibran. I think that Rousseau, Hugo, Lamartine, Voltaire, Bergson, Freud and many others, have provided Gibran with some insights. Since the scope of my research is to bring to light both the meaning of Gibranism and its place in history, I will then, when needed, cross-examine our author’s idea with those who influenced his trend of thought. However, it is important to keep in mind, that an influence is always partial and temporary. Gibranism is a Weltanschauung of its own.
1 S.P., p. 34.
2 See “Chapter Five”.
3 S.P., p. 14.
4 Barbara Young, This Man From Lebanon, New York: A. Knopf, 1970, p. 186.
5 S.P., p. 20.
6 I am in complete disagreement with Andrew Dib Sherfan who considers that the kind of love Gibran displays in this narration is Freudian. (Kahlil Gibran: The Nature of Love, New York: Philosophical Library, 1971, p. 26). Freudian love is a far more intricate and unconscious type than the love Gibran describes in The Broken Wings. Sublimation, cathexis, and sex are the unconscious processes that underline Freudian love; a love which by the way substitutes the pleasure principle with the reality principle. Whatever were the carnal desires of Gibran in The Broken Wings—and they are not non-existent—express merely romanticism, youth and idealism, but hardly Freudism. In Chapter Six I will come back on this issue.
7 Accordingly, Gibran once confessed to Miss Haskell that the experiences and the personages reported in The Broken Wings were not his own. (B.P., pp. 50-51) Now, to us historians, Miss Haskell’s information sheds confusion on the biographical credibility of the novel. Whom should we believe? Miss Haskell who was told by Gibran? or the gossip folks of Bsherri who till today vaunt with pride that the great philosopher Gibran fell in love with one of their daughters, Miss Hala Daher whose family is still alive? As a biographer, this is my answer: there is plenty of doubt about Miss Haskell’s knowledge of Gibran’s early personal life; for one, whenever Gibran spoke to Haskell of his family, he overexaggerated with lies the story. For example, he did tell her the lie, that his father was wealthy and a tax collector in the Lebanese Government who unfortunately was trialed one day and found guilty of “embezzlement of taxes”, but was then granted pardon, exiled etc.…(B.P., pp. 20 - 21). Another reason why Haskell was misled about the real autobiographical value of The Broken Wings, has to do with the fact that Gibran never revealed to Haskell the names of his early love affairs, though he spoke freely about their adventures. (B.P., pp. 68-69). Most probably, I believe Gibran denied in front of Haskell the autobiography of the novel, in order that he makes the dedication of the book to Haskell more genuine. Yet, in conclusion, I do concur with the biographers J. Sheban, A. Dib Sherfan, A. Otto, the natives of Bsherri, etc., that The Broken Wings is an autobiography of Gibran’s first romance with the Lebanese girl, Hala Daher.
8 Andrew Dib Sherfan, Kahlil Gibran: The Nature of Love, New York: Philosophical Library, 1971, p. 26. Also, it should be noted that Gibran titled his book Tears and Laughter, but H. Nahmad when he translated it from Arabic he preferred for sake of phonetic the word “Smile” instead of “Laughter”. In A Self-Portrait Gibran referres to it twice. (S.P., p. 7 and p. 35).
9 S.P., p. 4.
10 MM. pp. 69-71.
11 The National Catholic Reporter, July 21, 1968
12 Barbara Young, This Man From Lebanon, New York: A. Knopf, 1970, p. 56.
13 Cf. The Portable Nietzsche, ed. by Walter Kaufman, (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), p. 121; and The Gospel of Luke, Ch. 3, verse 23. In The Voice of the Master the hero prophet is 30 years old. (V.M., p. 7).
14 E.G., p. 11. About the complete triology of the prophet the third book that Gibran planned to publish along the same lines of The Prophet and The Garden of the Prophet, was The Death of the Prophet—whose content was to be about man’s relation to God. Unfortunately, this book did not appear. (Cf. Barbara Young, op. cit., p. 119). Fortunately, however, Gibran did ponder occasionally on the theme of man’s relation to God. In the text I have taken the liberty of calling The Earth Gods a work that deals with man and God, with the exception that this time it is God’s relation to man which is under speculation.
15 Barbara Young, This Man From Lebanon, New York: A. Knopf, 1970, p. 13.
16 Mikhail Naimy, Kahlil Gibran, His Life and His Work, Beirut: Khayats, 1964, p. 194.
17 Barbara Young, This Man From Lebanon, New York: A. Knopf, 1970, p. 64; pp. 16-17; and p. 65.
18 N.V., p. 19.
19 Ignace Kratchovski, Monde Oriental, Tome XXI, Fasc. 1-3.
20 P.J.E. Cachia, “Modern Arabic Literature” in The Islamic Near East, ed. by D. Grant, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960, p. 284.
21 Sir Hamilton Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, Boston: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 261.
22 Quoted in Nadeem Naimy, Mikhail Naimy. An Introduction, Beirut: American University Press, 1970, p. 121.
23 ibidem, p. 123.
24 Gibran, Twenty Drawings, with an Introduction by Alice Raphael, New York: A. Knopf, 1970, p. 3.
25 R.A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 304-313.
26 A.J. Arberry, Aspects of Islamic Civilization, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1967, pp. 73-118.
27 B.P., p. 83.
28 ibidem, p. 93.
29 ibidem, p. 36.
30 “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. by W. Kaufman, (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), “Prologue”, pp. 121-137.
31 B.P., p. 83.
32 ibidem, p. 344.
33 MS., pp. 46-50.
34 The Wisdom of Buddhism, ed. by Christmas Humphreys, New York: Random House, 1961. See also, The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, ed. by E.A. Burett, New York: The New American Library, 1955.
35 Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. by Northrop Frye, New York: The Modern Library, 1953, pp. 264-316.
36 ibidem, p. 25, and p. 43.
37 B.P., p. 260.
38 ibidem, p. 296.