Quick Sketches

RABI’A AL-ADAWIYYA
(d. 801)

Rabi’a was fated from conception for a life of holiness and selfless devotion to God. As later collectors of the lives of the ‘Friends of God’ (awliya’ Allahi) presented her, she was of humble lineage, she was endowed with exceptional beauty but her only lover was her Beloved One, and she endured much suffering and sacrifice of even modest worldly delights in witness of her love. During her real and to her dutiful journey to Mecca she was kidnapped, abused and managed to gain her escape from her captors, after which she resumed the life of a poor itinerant pilgrim on the earth (faqir). As a ‘Friend of God’ she vowed to forego even the rewards of Heaven and accept the pains of Hell should she ever weaken in her love of God.
What did such an unlearned person know of God? her detractors argued. His laws are hard to bear and most demanding of His would-be lovers. Her response was to retain nothing of herself except her sense of His presence. Her way was spare but without sorrow or fear. In her heart and mind there was only room for Him from whom she received the inspiration to love.
‘By doubting what you see of God’s mercy and plenitude of love, you despair in His power of Justice; if you dwell only on what you have failed to do, you show you are not truly a lover except of yourself. I am poor, I have been exhausted and broken in body, but my yearning (shawq) for You has only increased by what You have given me of Yourself.

HASAN OF BASRA
(d. 728)

Hasan of Basra, whose name is known by every Muslim ascetic (zahid) and mystic (‘arif), never claimed to have had any unusual spiritual experiences. Raised a Muslim by his father, who as a Persian had converted from Zoroastrianism to Islam, he took very seriously, as his father had, the belief in the Community of ‘Allah’ and its inclusion of all believers regardless of their ethnic or prior religious affiliations. The Muslim Community was to be one as God is One, was the gist of his belief and expectation from his membership in it. He also believed in the Qur’an as the word of God; and though a Pahlavi speaker, he had mastered Arabic to a degree unreached by many of his Arab associates. This achievement was the result of his own effort and, if you will, his idealism. As he matured and worked in both military (jaysh) and treasury (diwan) institutions of the nascent Islamic government (khilaftatu’l-umayya) as it expanded its Arabicization of Persian lands, he detected the alarming phenomenon of sectarianism among Arabs and discrimination between Arab and non-Arab peoples. It was a threat to his fundamental belief in the Unity of God and inclusiveness of God’s Community.
Unable to solve the outer crisis he felt increasing around him, he examined the crisis of belief and unbelief rising within himself. He was saddened and despondent. He began to believe in sorrow (huzn) and fear (khawf) as states of spiritual being appropriate for facing the crisis, and he withdrew profoundly into both, after taking a few epistolary shots at leaders of the Community whose behavior and polity contributed in his mind to disunity.
He adopted sorrow for any possible role he may have played in contributing to human conflict and fear for any failure of his own to trust in God’s compassion (rahma). Repentance (tawba) was the ground on which his spirituality was based, and he never swerved from his attachment to it.

They were neighbors in southern Brittany near Quimperle. She and her husband lived in her family mansion called Berluhec that had been seized by the Nazi during the Occupation. They had lost a son and she in particular had been overcome by the war years and by grief. Her husband was imprisoned. Two other children were young teenagers living with their mother in what were formally the servants quarters. After the war her husband returned to his family to find his wife paralyzed with grief, seeking the counsel of priests, succumbing to long periods of weeping. At one very daring moment he Charles gathered up their deceased son’s clothes and memorabilia of any kind collected by or about him, carried it out to a large trash barrel, and burned it all over her desperate screams. She hit him furiously with her fists and finally collapsed. She had never written anything more than a grocery list or a letter. On the advice of a priest she began to write an account of the burning. The work entitled La Brulure, was published, and received a national prize for the best “novel” of 1957.She met Louis Massignon through Catholic literary connections and joined him in several public demonstrations for peace during the Algerian War period. Her husband, as a military officer, was a friend and admirer of their fellow Breton General Beladier, who was the military commander in the French period of the War in Vietnam. It was he who suffered the defeat at Dien Bien Fu, declaring that the war was the inevitable conclusion to French colonialism and could not be won. He was decorated for bringing the war to an end with honor. In many rightest minds he was a traitor to France. He could not understand why the Americans had assumed responsibility for a war that could not be won and then expanded its carnage and unconscionable human suffering throughout Southeast Asia.Yvonne and he became staunch opponents to the development of Nuclear weapons in France and to their proliferation in the world. He was a young highly decorated general with a deep religious devotion to Christ and to compassion for the victims of violence, torture and war. Charles was a skeptic and ironic tease at times,but was tolerant of his wife’s intense religiosity and to the moral integrity and determination of their distinguished neighbor.HWM

Dino was Italian by heritage and birth. For reasons of war, incarceration, breakdown of health, expatriation to study at the Academie de Beaux Arts in Paris, and marriage to a French woman, he spent most of his life living with her and their son in the capital and in Burgundy. He was an artist, a sculptor early, but due to health issues he turned exclusively to painting and eventually adding to the illustration of books. Existence he knew both through crisis and happiness. He painted essences by observing and imagining attributes. An old woman with a bent back, her shoulders covered by a blue shawl, her long arms pushing a cart of produce, lived on his canvas without existing being a question. His art was drawn from nature both observed and imagined without question or distinction. Art was what he did, saw and was.It was an action other than science, philosophy or religion, fusing each through color and format enhanced by family hospitality to guests, by food, and by the harmony of each with cheese and wine. He was Catholic by cultural heritage, libertarian by political skepticism , undogmatic by religious egalitarianism . He painted meditating Buddhas, whirling Sufi dervishes, martyred Christs, guiding Moseses, sacrificing Abrahams, and journeying Gilgameshes, all in miniature narrative studies. Religion was for him a narrative of many episodes and colors, of essences and by art of forms. HWM

Phil, as his four brothers and only sister called him. He was the eldest of his father’s children. His mother died in childbirth. His father married his wife’s sister, by whom the other children were born. Phil was thus a half brother, so to say. He was an exemplary student, more ambitious intellectually than his siblings. He was destined to be a scholar. After completing his undergraduate and graduate studies in Literature and Philosophy at Harvard, his father sent him abroad to England, France and finally Germany to further his studies in Philosophy.In the Preface to his one published book THE X OF PSYCHOLOGY (Harvard UP, 1940) he paid homage to those teachers, ancient and modern, who formed his outlook on Philosophy and Psychology. He lists first Plato, Descartes and Kant as major influences upon him, to a lesser degree Aristotle, Leibniz and Hume. In Marburg he studied with Cohen and Natorp, the two major disciples of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. (He married Natorp’s daughter Gertrud, 18 years his younger. He returned with her to a seemingly well conceived life in Boston.Once there he would father four children, the last dying a crib death. This information is of another order than Philosophy and outside the purview of this brief sketch.) He studied in Paris with Henri Bergson, who is often cited by modern Existentialists as influencing them back via Aristotle, to Aquinas, and away from Hume, Kant and Hegel toward either fellow Vitalist Nietzsche or as in the case of Maritain and Marcel to Catholicism. Obviously Phil was not inclined toward the religious pathology of a forerunner of Existentialism such as Kierkegaard. Louis Massignon, in a 1923 letter to his friend and philosopher Gabriel Marcel, referred to the world view of Kant as “kantocentrism” with Descartes thrown in as a self “aesthetically myopic”. Phil remained steadfastly with his choices who were hesitant to wander far into metaphysics beyond the Platonist theory of Ideas including of The Good. He noted the company of his Harvard professors in the early 1900s: Santayana, James, Royce, Munsterberg, among a host of other academic philosophers in America and abroad. He left out mention of three major loves of his life in literature far from academic philosophy, but not unphilosophical: the Indian Upanishads, the poetry of Rabinandrath Tagore, and Goethe’s Faust. From these above all , especially in the years after he lost his sight, he spoke to his students at Bowdoin College from a flawless memory as being transmitters of Light.HWM

There is another form of creating one’s other self. South African diplomat Arnold Smit experienced it as conversion and realized it fully as commitment for life to another institution. He was stirred within to walk across Rue Kleber from his South African Embassy to St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church where he asked a priest if he could instruct him on membership in that church. He didn’t hear Jesus speak to him, but responded to an impulse to walk across the street: to in effect turn away from one institution to another. It was a stirring in his heart and mind simultaneously impelling him to act. He had previously been attracted to Romanesque churches and ancient monasteries aesthetically pleasing to him. He responded to invitations from historic beauty itself that he saw variously during his tenure in France. It was creating an impression of a story and a character in himself as another self than his own. He responded one day spontaneously, he later thought,not realizing its gradual and decisive creation of his other self. He took instruction, went on retreats, most crucially to the early Benedictine monastery of Bec Hellouin in Normandy. He discovered himself there as a monk in an old established community of brothers. He did not as yet think theologically or even expect the weighty importance of Catholic Christian theology as necessary for himself. He knew Afrikans, English, German, French, some Portuguese from his two years as undersecretary in Rio. He announced to his friends in Paris that he had CONVERTED. His full immersion in the institutional Roman Catholic Church was yet to come. He wrote to a few friends that he had entered another stage of his life; a dramatist might say, another staging and another role beyond the diplomatic one he had been playing. These letters had a tinge of pomposity to them, of a level of life unknown and superior to theirs. It was part of his creation of another self. Following his confirmation by the Papal Nuncio to Paris, he was invited to Rome. He began there his study of Latin and Catholic theology at the Beda College for older converts and following that at the Roman French College, from which he graduated and was returned to serve in parishes in Paris. He was Pere Smit and later Canon Smit, after which he retired to con-celebrating at masses in many churches with other priests. He wrote an autobiography in which he appears most interestingly as a musician, painter, host, and understates his other self as priest. In the latter stages of his life he is almost not there or at least discreetly understated and deferential to others. Conversion to another self meant only that he was known to others he served as Pere Smit. He returned in old age to his piano and his paint brushes and love of German and English novels, as if he were creating a third self, the one he had left behind which contained his family memories and friendships as well as his talent for composing and painting water color scenes of nature. He rediscovered Paris by walking about. Music and art were gifts and his unaltered passion. In his “case” what was Conversion?* *His autobiography Itineraires: Le Cap -Rio-Paris. Paris 2014. French edition translated by Alice Gillet-Robert, with Preface by HWM

The distinguished French Islamicist Louis Massignon, from his own crisis experience, his Catholic spiritual tradition, and the mystical love of the Muslim martyr al-Hallaj, created a sodality called the Badaliya with his Egyptian Coptic friend Mary Kahil. Badal in Arabic means “exchange” as an active verb ”he exchanged”, as a noun form: “substitution”. The Badaliya became known as the Substitutes through its actions on behalf of others. Al-Hallaj and a series of other mystics were considered the abdal, the substitutes for the human community giving through sacrifice of themselves salvation for others. The Dutch novelist JK Huysmans called such transference during his experience of suffering cancer of the throat “mystical substitution” ; that is,of one’s suffering relieved by another’s offering. To Massignon it is a kind of third self. One is given a self, one is driven to create a second self, and finally one is called to exchange oneself with another who is suffering physically, spiritually. For the third self one takes on the other’s suffering self. The first self is given by nature, the second by will and creativeness, the third by love. Many poets create a second self as a literary phenomenon. The Badaliya phenomenon, Massignon believed, isn’t literary. HWM

Al was a GI ground soldier in France during World War !!. He was wounded and hospitalized. During his convalescence he fell in love with Marianne his nurse; and at the War’s end, and with her parents permission, he married her. Instead of returning to the States, he found a job teaching History — his major at Yale had been American and European History — and the young couple settled into an apartment in Versailles, near the hospital where she worked and a short train commute to the American School in Auteuil. Six children were born of the marriage. The parents were devout Catholics, she French, he Irish American. They were regular communicants and the children were baptized and confirmed in the Church. Al was a conscientious teacher, a non ideological presenter of facts, comparative and recurrent historical themes, and relative cultural perspectives. He was an often generous grader and advocate of growth through encouragement and patience. He was sometimes taken advantage of by budding but mischievous teenagers who tested his transparent sincerity. He had a very joyous face more often smiling than frowning when having to caution or discipline unruly boys and girls.He was loved by them and by colleagues both French and American, few of either however being religious. He was looked upon as a saint, which was a term of respect rather than shared belief. He had known serious reality, so his sainthood was hard won and even harder at times to preserve. He was an active member of the Paris branch of the Legion of Mary, not a right wing political group, of which there were many in France; his witness was one of human and spiritual rescue of women from the depths of exploitation and degradation based inextricably in the business of prostitution. He was involved in visiting Pigalle and the more high end prostitution houses around La Madeleine. He and his co members carried donated funds to in effect bribe women to get free of their enslavement to pimps and the solicitation system. He was a gentle, patient and non judging persuader of girls and women who ranged in age from 14 to 50. He and his co members visited such places in pairs, he and another man or a woman. He sometimes would come to school Mondays after two discouraging days in Paris red light areas and seemed exhausted and sad to his students, who never knew what his other vocation was. They would lift his pedagogical spirit by asking him challenging questions about the importance of conflicting eye witness accounts with regard to the so called facts of History.HWM

Annemarie died in her eightieth year in her home town of Bonn, Germany. At age 17 she was considered a brilliant linguist and was sent by the Nazi government to Turkey, where she served as a decoder of enemy messages. She remained in Ankara after the war and married a Turk, from whom she was divorced after a brief marriage. She returned to Bonn, completed degrees in oriental languages (Arabic, Persian, Urdu) adding them to the European languages she knew (English, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French among others). Being a woman even with a doctoral degree she was excluded from tenured professorships in her own country. She was discovered by a wealthy Pakistani business man who established a one semester a year for life chair for her in the States at Harvard. She was a tall slender woman, very feminine, not an academic type or any type at all. She effortlessly attracted a circle of students to her Islamic mysticism or Sufism subjects, expecting them to acquire their accesses through their own fluencies to Arabic, Persian and Urdu traditions. She lectured and recited poetry in each language with her eyes closed, virtually unaware of her audiences whether large or small. She wrote her own poetry in German and experimented in English. She wrote numerous studies in German, English and Urdu and recited from memory poetry of seven languages. She was a living encyclopedia of poetry.She exposed her inmost self unconsciously and spontaneously at times like the whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order inspired by the Persian Rumi. She entered the ecstatic state of the one who read her heart as she read his. She wasn’t a computer. She emptied herself repeatedly of every line of verse she ever knew, which however always came back to her, refusing to forsake her even as she released them from herself to others. She was a mystic. She made no cures but words between hearts were enough…HWM

He was a bachelor, a very private man, a noted philosopher who held no academic position in France, but tutored university students voluntarily in his home. He lived through the Crisis of the German Occupation of his country. He was influenced by the modern philosophers who with background in Kant and Kierkegaard formed the direction and stimulus of Existentialism that took many forms. His was a very inward quietly spoken form, but involved communion with others, not with his own mind alone. He explained this approach many times in his apartment on Rue de Tournon with his large long haired cat in his lap. His bushy white mustache tickled his nose. It was he who went to Gallimard publishers in Paris and insisted they publish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Crisis had made him anything but introspective and hermetic despite his personal suffering and appearance of a solitary life. Crisis became transformed spontaneously into outward generosity, oppression into release from fear. His was called Social Existentialism by recent historians of philosophy. It might be called transformative existentialism transcending the paralyzing dialectic between Essence and Existence, the ontological issue that both Nietzsche and Bergson in their different ways had helped contemporary minds escape. Marcel and others of his persuasion found kinship in St. Thomas Aquinas. Others found no kinship philosophically in others or in God and made their own existence as their essence. Marcel’s view was of God’s Existence as the contingency of all existences and all life being the result of God’s infinite liberality.He once said that we fight for our liberty even when we have it as the expression of God’s and our own particular creativity.Communion of existences centered for him on Christ included intercessions, spiritual transferences, and divine foreshadowings. He wasn’t a preacher, claimed no ecstatic moment or power to perform miracles. He was a friend of many academic philosophers and specialists in various fields. He rented his apartment. His landlord was threatening to sell and thus to throw him out. A lady friend and admirer, Mme Abeille, was quietly soliciting donations to enable him to purchase his apartment. He knew nothing of this effort. Nor did his cheshire cat.HWM