EXPERIENCING RUMI AND PICO:
CONVERGING THOUGHTS, DIVERGING KNOWLEDGE
A Thesis submitted to the faculty of AS 36 San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
• SU the Degree
Master of Arts In Humanities
by
Parisa Soultani
Sausalito, California
December 2017 Copyright by
Parisa Soultani
2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Experiencing Rumi and Pico: Converging Thoughts, Diverging Knowledge by Parisa Soultani, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Humanities at San Francisco State University.
Carel Bertram Ph.D. Professor of Humanities
CONVERGING THOUGHTS, DIVERGING KNOWLEDGE Parisa Soultani Sausalito, California 2017 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207- 1273) came to similar conclusions while looking for answers to deep questions about the place of human in nature and her relationship to God. Both Rumi and Pico sought to approach this quest with an open mind that uses reason and experience rather than relying solely on traditional knowledge and religious doctrines, and they came to similar conclusions that put human concerns first in divine creation. While Pico remains reliant on reason and speaks in terms of philosophy, Rumi sees and speaks from another dimension: the path of direct experience expressed through poetry and allegory. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Chair, Thesis Committee Date TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION...... 1 2. THE HUMANISM OF PICO AND RUMI...... 7 3. THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DIVINE...... 16 4. THE KNOWLEDGE OF EXPERIENCE VERSUS THE PHILOSOPHY OF REASON...... 21 5. LANGUAGE AND EXPERIENCE OF THE MYSTICAL VISION...... 27 6. CONCLUSION...... 37 7. WORKS CITED...... 40 t v 1 Introduction Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity o f Man has long been recognized as a central document in the foundation of humanism in the European Renaissance. Pico (1463-1494) was working in a deeply Christian setting, but his Oration departs from the medieval Christian tradition by citing arguments and ideas from many non-Christian sources of knowledge, including ancient pagan Mediterranean, Arab, Persian, and Jewish learning, sources that Pico uses to display his intellectual virtuosity and to demonstrate the validity of his ideas about humanity and God. But there is another thread that appears time and again in Pico’s work but remains unattributed: traces of Sufi thought. Several central concepts and language in Pico’s Oration echo Sufi ideas, especially from the work of the noted theologian, jurist, and poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273). Both came to similar conclusions while looking for answers to deep questions about the place of humans in nature and humanity’s relationship to God. These commonalities raise important questions about the Muslim sources for Renaissance humanism in Italy particularly in terms of the means through which questions about the nature of God lead back to the self. They show the possibility that Pico had either direct knowledge of Rumi or indirectly shared common sources of influence (such as Al-Ghazali). On the other hand, the difference between Pico and 2 Rumi in this search can show us how the nature of humanistic thought, when framed against the background of two cultural traditions, can be influenced by individual experience. This thesis will explore those similarities and differences and argue that while we see a convergence of humanistic thought between the two scholars, their knowledge diverges due to the role of direct experience. One personal encounter, Rumi had and as far as we know, Pico did not. Rumi’s meeting of Shams of Tabriz, turned the Muslim scholar and jurist into a poet who gained what he considered true knowledge of God through the experience of love. Pico, who seems to have had no analogous experience, remained committed to reason and scholarship as the means for knowing God and the self. These similarities and differences in experience can be seen in the way they used language, with Pico retaining a scholarly tone while Rumi’s writing pass through an intense internal experience that ends up in unique synthesis of scholar and poet. Pico would seem to have little in common with his long-dead predecessor, Rumi. As a nobleman, a young count of a small territory of Mirandola near Modena, Pico was renown as a prodigy who met, studied with, and impressed leading scholars, churchmen, and politicians of his day. He studied philosophy from an early age with the most notable scholars of the time, travelled in Northern Italy and France, befriended Lorenzo de Medici, and ran into trouble from the church on several occasions. His confidence in his own abilities to understand and communicate the truth about humanity’s place in the universe, desire to demonstrate his intellectual 3 prowess before others, notorious chutzpah and knack for self-promotion, and early death at age thirty-one recalled the life of a kind of a Renaissance intellectual rock star. He talked a lot but wrote little, including the Oration and a short philosophic work On Being and Unity, intent upon proving truth to an elite audience using methods of philosophy. For centuries, scholars and fans of the Renaissance have viewed him as a key thinker of modem humanism, a person who, in many tellings, singlehandedly removed humanity from its dependence on a fixed place in God’s creation and gave us the ability to shape our own lives for our own benefit. (Kibre) Rumi, formally known as Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, has the reputation in the modem West as an esoteric mystical poet of love. Bom 250 years before Pico, Rumi came from a family long known for producing experts in theology and law, in a region, Persian Khorasan, today’s Afghanistan, known for philosophers and Sufis (Arberry 1). The family fled during the invasion of the Mongols around 1220 and settled in Anatolia under the protection of Seljuk Turks (hence the moniker “Rumi” from that region). There, Rumi taught for decades on a wide variety of topics. His students and followers wrote down great amounts of their master’s lectures in the massive volume of poetic Mesnevi (Masnavi) and the Discourses. After his encounter with Shams al-Din of Tabriz, Rumi became known also for ecstatic poetry and dance, from which emerged the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes. One of the central figures in Persian and Islamic literature, law, and philosophy, the works of Rumi entered Western consciousness in the early nineteenth-century 4 Romantic period, which cast him as a poet of love, and his mysticism and love poetry found a mass audience in the West beginning in the 1960s. What many people do not realize, however, is that Rumi was more than an ecstatic mystic. His teachings were firmly grounded in real concerns and challenges of human life in the world, and his thinking touches a wide variety of topics about proper living and believing in time of instability following the Mongol invasion of the Middle East. One cannot help but speculate about the sources of the similarities in the thought of these two men. Perhaps it has something to do with the basic personality of each, the sense in each that truth must be found in a broad consideration rather than a narrow tradition. It is unlikely that Pico had read or even heard of Rumi; his contact with Islamic thought came mostly through Latin translations of Arabic philosophy and science and the works of various Iberian Jewish thinkers (Wirszubski). It is possible, however, that Pico did have some access to Sufi thought through his Jewish contacts or readings of Arab philosophers. Pico’s library, for example, has been catalogued, but there are still many texts that are obscure or unidentified of over 1100 books. His collection on the Jewish Cabala was one of the most extensive in Europe. But he only had about eight in Arabic and apparently none in Persian (Kibre 39). The list of books in his library does not contain any references to Persian or Arabic works that might be considered Sufi, let alone about Rumi. He had a Koran, but most of his knowledge of Arabic works came through Latin translations (Kibre 48). Those include Alfarabi, Averroes, Alkindi, and Avicebron. 5 There were, however, two works in Hebrew translation of the Persian Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the eleventh-century theologian and mystic, as well as the famous refutation of Al-Ghazali by Averroes, the noted Iberian Muslim Aristotelian philosopher (Kibre 81). Al-Ghazali was one of the great intellectuals of Islam, a noted Sufi and anti-philosopher, and very well known to Rumi. It seems likely, based on his similarities with Rumi, that Pico, either directly through these texts or in conversation with Jewish or Hebrew scholars, had an acquaintance with Sufi thought that led him to similar conclusions about humanity’s place in the world. What these men share is a common desire to know the nature of humanity and our place in the universe. They start with a distrust of authorities passed down by tradition. Can one know humanity through one institution or one tradition? Parents, church, reason, faith, school, the community, a book, a prince, these can all be fallible, contradictory, or irrelevant when taken alone. This approach means that knowledge of the self takes on special importance. As Rumi said, the inner existence is needed to know the outer world: “the light of the heart (nur-i-dil), which is reason, illumines the light of the eye, i.e. the sense of sight, and thereby enables it to discern the real quality of the objects which it perceives” (Iqbal 77). As Pico wrote: “Philosophy has taught me to rely on my own convictions rather than on the judgments of others and to concern myself less with whether I am well thought of than whether what I do or say is evil” (Pico, Oration 36). Perhaps this is a consequence of their lives in uncertain times, perhaps because of their reading of 6 common sources in philosophy and theology, or perhaps merely a coincidence of personality and common experience. The human experience in knowing God for oneself is essential, but for both, this axiom did not mean knowing god for oneself alone. Even as they sought truth for themselves, they can discover universalities. Love, friendship, and the other were all necessary to help the self understand its place in the universe. In their writings, Pico and Rumi show themselves to be open to a universalist view, a broad and inclusive attitude that allows them to transgress the boundaries of their respective times and religious traditions. All worldviews, philosophies, religions, and stories are worthy of exploration because there is always something that can be learned in every tradition. Pico was not the non-Christian humanist that he long had a reputation as being, nor was Rumi the supposedly other-worldly mystic. In Pico’s case, an ambition to uncover the true nature of Christianity in everything led him to consider many ideas, some of which brought him into conflict with Church doctrine and officials. Rumi was deeply embedded in an Islamic framework, and yet he was highly critical of many Muslims and their technical religiosity. He compares the “men of religion,” for example, to “dry grass ... mean and dry—they became drunk and joyous with the lust of your lips (love)” (Divan-e Shams 2242). Both Rumi and Pico sought to understand humanity’s place in the universe with an open mind, and they came to similar conclusions that put human concerns first in divine creation. 7 The Humanism of Pico and Rumi “Humanism,” as many currently understand the term, is the product of nineteenth-century Romanticism. However, one can trace the origins of humanistic thought to the beginning of the philosophic/metaphysical assumptions, with the Greeks, that reality, including the reality of human nature, presumes a dualism between man and God and also between man’s material and divine dimensions. So, the idea of becoming one with God is grounded in this dualism, and different cultures, traditions, and religious communities have produced different ways of striving to overcome this assumed dualism to attain oneness with God, through what’s commonly referred to as mysticism. In early modem Italy, the umanisti were merely “language teachers, rhetoricians, translators, and the tools they forged for their trade were the lexicon and the glossary” (Davies 4). The term was revived by nineteenth- century German philosophers and scholars who promoted a new educational curriculum based on Greco-Roman or Renaissance letters. Their goal was to produce a human-centered civilization that could counteract the negative effects of the abstract economic and political forces that seemed, to many, to be sweeping away the individual in modem times. In this sense, nineteenth-century humanism could be deeply conservative, a characteristic that led it to become controversial. As Tony Davies points out, “On one side, humanism is saluted as the philosophical champion of human freedom and dignity, standing alone and often outnumbered against the 8 battalions of ignorance, tyranny and superstition.... On the other, it has been denounced as an ideological smokescreen for the oppressive mystifications of modem society and culture,... for the nightmare of fascism and the atrocity of total war” (5). Neither Rumi nor Pico were humanists in the sense that particularly valued Western antiquity. While rooted in platonic dualism, Pico and Rumi’s humanism was of a different nature: its aim was to put the human individual at the center of the quest for truth and meaning. In the broadest sense, these thinkers help us see that a humanist is someone who studies the human experience, that is, what it is like to be human, rather than what constitutes the divine or the natural world outside of humanity. Rumi and Pico were humanists in that they both put human concerns first, yet in the midst of divine creation. Human beings can reach the divine, and indeed alone of all creatures have been given the tools by God to become one with the divine; yet it is only through our human existence that we can fulfill or attain this status, not through the work or actions of others. But it may be more likely that both Pico and Rumi were dealing with a similar religious problem and came to similar conclusions that allow them to show that each human being had agency in the world to uncover the truth about God for themselves. Many of Pico’s ideas mentioned in the Oration reveal a philosophical outlook that many have interpreted as revolutionary (Kibre). For Pico, humans, no longer seen as fixed in a natural hierarchy and condemned by original sin to the profane world, can, 9 through philosophy and God’s gift of a creation, which can be revealed, move closer to God and even attain unity with Him. Moreover, Pico was arguing for a way to know God for oneself through personal search and discovery, rather than through the authority of the Church and tradition. He himself finds knowledge wherever it is: “I have so trained myself that, committed to the teachings of no one man, I have ranged through all the masters of philosophy, examined all their works, become acquainted with all schools” (Pico, Oration 43). For Rumi, as for all Sufis, there are many roads to be followed, both to God and through life. As he says in one instance, “Do you not see that there are many roads to the Kaaba? For some the road is from Rum [i.e., Anatolia], for some from Syria, for some from Persia, for some from China, for some by sea from India and Yemen. So if you consider the roads, the variety is great and the divergence infinite; but when you consider the goal, they are all of one accord and one” (Arberry 109). Humans appear as generalists in creation with no specific characteristics, or, more accurately, capable of all characteristics, in Pico’s view. We are not purely rational but capable of reason, which we can use or not use. Pico explains how we are beings of potentiality, unlike other beings, whose nature is fixed, be they angels or animals. “God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities,” he writes, “the germs of every form of life” (Pico, Oration 8). The animals, or “brutes,” are brought into this world possessed only with their nature and can never change, while the angels, “the highest spiritual beings,” although beings of pure intellect, are likewise “fixed in their mode 10 of being.” Humans, however, can be different things: “If sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.” (Pico, Oration 8-9). Humans thus “have been bom into this condition of being w hat... [they] choose to be” (Pico, Oration 11-12). They can use their intellect to appreciate God’s creation or ignore it and become like beasts. For Pico there is a hierarchy in nature. Intelligence is linked to the divine and unreflective emotion linked to the animals while humans are capable of going in either direction. Humanity’s special place in the universe has more to do with the human ability to love the divine creation than in any special human nature for intelligence or divine favor. As Pico states at the beginning of the Oration, he is “not fully persuaded” that the most important aspect of human nature lies in any characteristics of intelligence, reason, or intermediary location between heaven and earth, between God and animals (3). Instead, he suggests that humanity’s uniqueness lies in the fact that God created humans to have someone to behold creation. The condition of man, he writes in the Oration, comes from the “longing” of God “for some creature” to be “moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur” (5). Humans are thus the “creature destined to praise the divine generosity” (6). In On Being and the One, Pico argues that it is our obligation to investigate the divine in our own fashion, using our own high faculties. “Lest we dispute for others rather than for ourselves,” he writes, “we must be careful that while we are 11 investigating the highest things we do not live in a low condition, that is, unworthy of those whom heaven has enabled to explore the reasons even of heavenly things” (Pico, On Being 61-62). The human soul is divine, and we have the choice to follow its searching to reach that which is holy. “We must constantly remember that this our mind, to which even divine things are accessible, cannot be of mortal race, and will be happy only by the possession of divine things” (62). No other can make this journey; we make the choice to use the tools we have or not: “Mind wanders here as a stranger, and approaches happiness insofar as it raises itself more and bums for divine things, having put aside concern with earthly things. The present disputation seems above all to warn us that if we wish to be blessed we must imitate the most blessed of all things, God, possessing in ourselves unity, truth, and goodness” (62). Similar to Pico, Rumi places man capable of reaching above the level of angels or falling below the level of animals. He speaks at length of three kinds of beings. The first are the angels, who are by nature “pure intelligence” and know no “carnal desire.” They cannot be given credit by God for obeying (Arberry 89). The second are the “beasts, who are pure lust” with no intelligence, who “are under no burden of obligation (Arberry 89). Finally, there is “poor man,” [humans] one “half angel, half animal,” a combination of desire and intelligence, who must forever struggle with opposing forces within him (Arberry 90). And yet humans are able to become one with God, through Love, a faculty beyond intuition and reason. 12 In Rumi’s view, again similar to Pico, we can choose between our intuition, inner knowing, and our reason, which do not always work together as exemplified in the story of Majnun and the camel. Majnun, the famous Persian folk hero, representing the human intellect, rides a camel to get to his beloved Laila. Laila represents the Beloved as the Divine, and thus the story is about the divine quest. However, the camel represents worldly desires because she wants to go back to her foal in a different direction. When Majnun is awake, he sets the camel straight on the path, but as soon as his mind wanders, the camel diverges and walks for miles in the wrong direction. After months of going in circles, Majnun jumps off the back of the camel, breaks a bone in doing so, and proceeds alone on the journey, exclaiming “This camel is the ruin of me!” (Arberry 29). In this story, Rumi explains that humans too are pulled between our intellectual capability and animal instincts and are constantly in a struggle with ourselves to find and stay on the path to unity with the Beloved, and there’s always a price to pay to be on this journey. Pico is also concerned with nature of humanity; he elaborates upon this in his Heptaplus, an exposition on the Christian truths embedded in the prophecies of Moses. Here he, like Rumi, indicates humanity’s intermediary nature between this world and the divine. The great division between the earth and heaven, “such different natures,” can be connected, by “a delicate and airy body which physicians and philosophers called the spirit and which Aristotle says is of diviner nature than the elements and corresponds by analogy to heaven” (Pico, Heptaplus 119) Light is 13 the mediator that allows the human and the divine spirit to make contact: “It may be added that just as every virtue of the heavens (as Avicenna writes) is conveyed to earth by the vehicle of light, so every virtue of the soul, which we have called heaven, every power -life, motion, and sense-joins and is transferred into this earthly body, which we have called earth, through the medium of the luminous spirit” (119). In similar fashion, Rumi sees the special relationship between humans and God as one in which we exist to observe and contemplate creation. For this, he uses the metaphor of the astrolabe, the ancient device raised to heaven to allow people to judge their position on earth. “Man is the astrolabe of God,” he explains, using a metaphor that suggests God uses humans a tool to reflect on the divine: “When God causes a man to have knowledge of Him and know Him and be familiar with Him, through the astrolabe of his own being he beholds moment by moment and flash by flash the manifestation of God and His infinite beauty, and that beauty is never absent from the mirror” (Arberry 22). The human capability to appreciate divine creation betrays itself in a similar language of viewing, seeing, or observing. Both Pico and Rumi see the special human ability to look at the world around us. Pico, for example, describes God’s motives for placing humans in Eden as one based on having a good place to observe the world: “I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains” (Pico, Oration 7). Rumi says that all worldly things first are seen in the imagination, and 14 God intends it this way. “When God most High wished to produce in this world all manner of rare and wonderful things, orchards, gardens, meadows, sciences, compositions of various kinds, He first implants the desire and demand for them in the inward hearts, so that thence they may become visible,” he says (Arberry 149). We exist to see, as God has provided: “Similarly every thing which you see in this world, be sure that it exists in that world.” So it is also with “this creation of heaven and earth... God implanted the demand for that... and so of course the world became visible accordingly.” The implication for both Pico and Rumi is that human beings can become one with God. For Pico, philosophy and reason can allow humans to reach godhead, an idea that denies the fundamental Christian tenet of original sin, which sees all humanity as corrupt to the core and dependent upon God for divine grace. There is a notion of a dual nature, one to pull downwards toward disharmony, upwards toward harmony. Pico refers to a lower self that keeps pulling us down while the higher self keeps pulling us up, and humanity’s ongoing challenge is to move upward despite the tension between these two forces. For Rumi, the struggle between the “beastly” and the “saintly” exists not in the external world as a struggle between Satan and God but inside ourselves (Arberry 90). This struggle was created by God so that both sides “might be manifest;” humans have this capability because it is the only way they can know God, for “it is impossible to make anything known without its opposite” (Arberry 92). Rumi 15 explains, in another passage, that to say “I am God” is not a “great pretension” but a statement of humility, for a man who says that he is a “servant of God” claims to exist a separate existence, whereas the one who says “I am God” has negated himself and asserted that there is only God: “I am not, He is all, nothing has existence but God” (Arberry 56). Humans therefore are singular in creation in their ability to perceive their position in the universe and in relationship to God. Both Rumi and Pico put the onus on the individual to know the self and the self s larger relation to the whole. They are not “humanists” as we currently understand the term, that is, someone who cultivates the individual spirit through the independent study of ancient texts and knowledge. They are humanists, however, in that they believe that humans can know the divine directly and that the individual can only know the divine through the study of the spirit and its relationship to the divine. Their sensibility is of a religious humanism that does not rely on outside religious institutions or authorities but the individual’s own explorations to reach knowledge of God. 16 The Relationship with the Divine Relationships are therefore central to both thinkers’ understanding about how humans can find the divine, and love is crucial, because it is the inner yearning that supports this relationship. For Rumi, a concrete relationship with his friend Shams allowed him literally to discover God, for both became one: “I declare these words openly, my Shams and my God. I have reached truth because of you, O my soul of truth” (Arasteh 64). Pico too spoke of love and friendship as the way to forge a strong bond to God. Each believed that a sincere love from inside the self was the only way to reach the truth, to connect the individual soul to the divine and experience a fully human life. One did not have to wait until death to meet God but could cultivate a relationship between the human and God based on love, friendship, and peace. In the Oration, Pico discusses at length how the goal of God is peace, a peace that is attained for humans using philosophy and theology to “indivisible union” and “seamless friendship” (22). In this way, humans can become as God: “This is the peace that God established in the high places of heaven and which the angels ... announced to men of good will, so that men ... might become angels.” Humans, he explains, can create an abode for God and the soul, outfitted with philosophy and theology, becomes the “spouse of God” (23). 17 Rumi also equates unity with God as peace, for on earth we experience a constant “itch,” an “agony,” a “yearning,” to act in the world, but the human heart only finds peace with God: “Men call the Beloved ‘heart’s ease’ because the heart finds ease in the Beloved. How then should it find ease and rest in any other?” (Arberry 75). In another poem, Rumi speaks of the path of love towards oneness with the Beloved. The sign of being on this path is a peace, harmony, and happiness that is self-evident, just like the smell of wine on the breath of the intoxicated, a state of Being that he calls eternal living. To live a good life, he asks everyone to die first: “Die, die, die in this love, once you have died to yourself, you will attain eternal life, cut yourself free from your Nafs (ego), because you are its prisoner... Take a pick, and start to get out of this prison now” (Divan-e Shams 636). For Rumi, a death needs to happen before our physical death. That death is the death of our ego, necessary to reach God. The imagery of the lover and the Beloved is central to the Sufi outlook. Rumi’s words, of course, reflect this on a fundamental level in many places throughout his poetry and in the discourses. For example, Majnun is in love with Laila as with wine, for him it is the wine that he loves, not the form of the cup: “If I had a golden beaker studded with precious stones, and in the beaker there were vinegar or something other than wine, of what use would that be to me? An old broken gourd in which there is wine is better in my eyes than such a goblet and a hundred like it” (Arberry 83). Rumi then transfers this reality of earthly love to love for God. He urges that we “acquire appetite and yearning, so that you may not be merely a viewer of form, but in all 18 being a space you may see the Beloved... Everyone has his face turned to somebody, and the ultimate object of all is God” (Arberry 84). Rather surprisingly, Pico, in a short section of the Oration, also takes an imagery of love and intoxication. Philosophy, he asserts, is no dry or emotionless practice, but one that, following Bacchus, “will make us drunk with the richness of the house of God.” Theology too will “supervene to inspire us with redoubled ecstasy” after “grasping the primordial beauty of things” we shall become “the winged lovers of theology” (27). Pico’s use of such direct emotions is striking here, after long discussions and arguments in the Oration. It means, of course, that one must devote oneself to philosophy and theology, and thus to truth, with heart as well as mind. As a metaphor, the reference to Bacchus makes sense. But the ecstatic imagery is so intense and strong that one wonders if there is another source. In On Being and the One, Pico also develops the idea that the direct experience of love for God is much more direct as a result of our inner yearning: “But see, my Angelo, what madness seizes us. While we are in the body we can love God more than we can speak of him or know him. In loving we profit more, we labor less, we obey him more. Yet we prefer to be always seeking him through knowledge and never finding what we seek, rather than to possess by loving that which would be found in vain without loving” (52). We cannot create, as we might say, a model of God constructed by human perceptions because God is more than human. God, Pico writes, “is not only above such perfections, but above every name that can be formed, 19 above every notion that can be conceived by us. Then for the first time we know him in some way when we are altogether ignorant of him. It can be concluded from this that God is not only that than which no greater can be conceived, as Anselm said, but he is that which is infinitely greater than every thing that can be thought” (53). This insight opens Pico to the value of the mystic vision. He advocates that one study the contributions of the ancient mystics, a study that “opens a great window of legitimate understanding upon the books of Dionysius entitled On Mystical Theology and On the Divine Names. In these books we must be careful not to underestimate what he wrote, since it is sublime” (Pico, On Being 53). In this way, Pico again shows his belief that there are multiple paths, and that the intuitive one should not be excluded. In his work on Moses, he speaks of his individual path as a scholar that lead him on his own individual path, leaving other authorities behind: “going beyond all these, we shall suggest seven other interpretations of our own discovery and development, in which we should take pains first of all to overcome, if we can, three difficulties with which all have undertaken to expand this book seem to have had a great and difficult struggle” (73). Pico sounds in the Oration like Rumi when he points out that humans can be as the Seraphim, a “lover,” who is “in God and God is in him; even, it may be said, God and he are one.” This state is the highest, of loving God (14). In the end “we shall be, no longer ourselves, but the very One who made us” (27). He speaks in a voice of mysticism that the human “should recollect himself 20 in the center of his own unity, he will there, become one spirit with God ... himself transcend all creatures” (9). The Muslim Sufi and Italian Renaissance scholar thus show significant similarities in their views on the nature of humanity’s place in the universe, relationship towards God, and the need for intuition and inner yearning in knowing the divine. At times, they speak in terms that seem so similar it is difficult to believe that Pico had no contact with Rumi’s ideas or his work. But the potential mysticism of Pico was firmly bounded in the rules and institutions of Western Christendom that privileged reasons and thus diverged significantly from Rumi, whose life experience allowed him to transcend the notion that reason as the highest arbiter of truth. An experiential relationship to God was much less well developed in Pico due to this emphasis on reason, logic, and philosophical proof. 21 The Knowledge of Experience versus the Philosophy of Reason Rumi seeks to show that humans cannot know God through philosophy and reason alone, whereas Pico maintains that argumentation, logic, and proofs demonstrate essential truths and can lead one to oneness with God. Each thinker’s language betrays the different emphasis. Rumi makes real the notion of knowledge through experience, while Pico relies on scholarly discourse. There are conscious strategies that show two different understandings of knowledge. Pico lived in a world where philosophy and philosophical theology was the highest path to truth, and his thinking reflects the intellectual tradition and expectations of Western Christendom in the late medieval and early Renaissance period. His patrons expected intellectual virtuosity that would demonstrate their taste and their success, and he himself wanted to display the depth and breadth of his personal knowledge. Indeed, Pico’s intent was not to learn non-Christian traditions for their own sakes but to demonstrate the correctness of the Christian tradition as the most fundamental human knowledge. In this sense, he expanded the field of evidence but did not change the object of proof: to show the rightness of Christian understandings of the divine. Pico’s form of argumentation based on reason and use of evidence show that his Christian humanism could not go the ultimate step that Rumi two hundred years earlier had already transcended: to move from needing 22 rational proof for the possibility of oneness with God to knowing God and reaching oneness (Tawhid). Pico’s emphasis on intuition or emotion was always put in the context of supplementing and fulfilling humanity’s fundamental ability to know through reason. As he wrote, “man was so constituted by nature that his reason might dominate his senses and that by its law all the madness and craving of anger and lust might be curbed” (Pico, Heptaplus 125). In “practical life” the emotional bond between the human and the divine must be supported by law and reason, explained by Pico as the rational way of the Cherubim, as opposed to the emotional way of the Seraphim (Pico, Oration 15). Greek philosophy cautions us to live as high moral beings in moderation, for only through reason can we cast aside distractions to perfect our soul: We, therefore, imitating the life of the Cherubim here on earth, by refraining the impulse of our passions through moral science, by dissipating the darkness of reason by dialectic - thus washing away, so to speak, the filth of ignorance and vice - may likewise purify our souls, so that the passions may never run rampant, nor reason, lacking restraint, range beyond its natural limits. Then may we suffuse our purified souls with the light of natural philosophy, bringing to final perfection by the knowledge of divine things (Pico, Oration 16). For him, emotion bounded by reason allowed the human being to avoid errors that came from succumbing to the dominance of the senses: “we are not one if we could 23 not bind, the union of virtue, sense bent downward with reason which looks at heavenly things” (Pico, On Being 61). The divided nature of humanity that existed in Christianity between good and evil, reason and emotion, were constantly in struggle with each other. He explained this using the analogy of changes in political policies: If there are two princes in us, reigning in turns, as it were, we for a time follow god with the law of mind, for the time follow Baal with the law of the flesh, and our kingdom divided against itself is utterly desolated. If we are one in such a way that reason is enslaved by sense, and only the law of the members commands, this would be a false unity, since we would not be true. We would be called and appear to be men, that is, animals living by reason, and yet we would be brutes, for whom sensual desire is law (Pico, On Being 61-62). Pico’s goal, after all, was to prove the essential truth of Christianity by pointing out the underlying truths in all religious and philosophical traditions. As he once wrote, “Philosophy seeks the truth, theology finds it, and religion possesses it” (Sudduth 61). Sudduth argues that Pico does not break with the medieval Christian tradition but extends and develops it (62). Philosophy, for Pico, was not something to be practiced for its own sake but to explore religious belief. His Oration is not a celebration of the dignity of man but a praise of philosophy (Sudduth 63). Pico sees philosophy as a “necessary but insufficient element in the evolutionary human journey back to God” to be completed by theology (Sudduth 64). Logic and reason was his main tools, even when used to explore the manifestations of the divine in the 24 world through magic or the hidden messages of the Kabbalah. Humans were rational because God was rational, and the truth of the universe could be revealed through reason (Sudduth 74). For Pico, reason, expressed in philosophy and theology, is the means to know truth. Rumi, on the other hand, always pointed to the limits of logic, reason, and philosophy. He does not believe in universal reason, for everything is constantly changing, and thus there is no “truth” that can be grasped by a fixed universal reason. In many poems and stories, Rumi points out the foolishness, futility, and falseness of those who rely solely on reason. One of Rumi’s stories is about a fly in a puddle of donkey’s urine, who boasts to his boat of straw and his ocean of urine, which he has “conquered” using his “recently discovered superb rational method,” which demonstrates how Rumi thought of those who gave reason and its rational methods too much validity. Rumi argues that an overreliance on reason can lead the believer down the wrong path and warns against those who would rely exclusively on argument and informed opinions to demonstration the truth of religious experience. As Afzal Iqbal puts it “The apparent belittling of the intellect is only a protest against the gross exaggeration of its role in life” (264) The example he uses come from the story of Amir Mu’aviyah from volume II of the Masnavi. In this story, Amir Mu’aviyah is a man of religion who engages in a conversation with Satan. In this conversation, it becomes apparent that Satan is a man of tremendous intellect who can easily out 25 argue the man of technical religiosity. Rumi argues that Muhammad can beat the devil because he had direct experience of God through love of the divine. As Rumi says: Knowledge has two wings, Opinion one wing ... The one-winged bird soon falls headlong ... The bird, Opinion, falling and rising, goes on with one wing in home of (reaching the nest). (But) when he has been delivered from Opinion, Knowledge shows its face to him: that one winged bird becomes two-winged and spreads his wings. After that, he walks erect and straight, not falling flat on his face or ailing (cited in Iqbal 263). Intuition and inner longing for experience are thus just as important as reason for the religious person. In another story Rumi tells, a father sends his son to the academia to enhance his good sense through scientific knowledge. Upon the son’s return, the father decides to test his son. He holds a gold ring in his fist and asks the son to guess what it is. The son says that it is an object; round, yellow, and hollow in the middle. The father, impressed by the acuteness of the son’s observation, asks him to name the object that he described so well. The son responds, “it’s a sifter (gharbit).” Shocked at this outrageously stupid answer, the father exclaims: “You described the shape, color, and other physical characteristics of the object so well. With all the education you have received, how can you think that a(n object as large as a) sifter would fit in my fist?” 26 (Fihi Ma fih III). With this story, Rumi shows how scientists and theologians know minutiae and abstract theories about so many things but have very little direct or practical experience of those things. Yet reason is a part of humanity that we cannot do without, even if it cannot tell us the complete truth. He compares human reason to a moth while God is a candle: the moth “by nature” cannot do without the “light” of the candle no matter what hurt or agony its attraction causes (Arberry 48-49). Rumi’s distrust in pure reason, however, does not mean one should abandon good sense. Rumi tells a story in which Jacob hypothetically, is called to look down the well, because “Joseph is down there!” Rumi says, if Jacob were a fool, he would bend down and be pushed down that well. Jacob was sensible enough to know Joseph was not in that well. Rumi then goes on saying that don’t believe the fool who is pranked and ends up falling in the well when he proclaims that he’s an innocent victim, for the fool’s sin is foolishness. If a person loses their way, they can use their good sense to find their way back home. But one who has lost good sense can never find the way home (Divan-e Shams 1264). 27 Language and Experience of the Mystical Vision The divergent approaches of Rumi and Pico are reflected in their use of language. Rumi demonstrates through allegory and example to communicate an experience, while Pico convinces through exposition and logic to prove an idea. Pico’s language is grounded on a virtuoso’s knowledge of scholarship and philosophy to persuade educated patrons; his writings are thus full of proofs, arguments, authorities, and the ego of the author. Rumi, ironically, was also a scholar and jurist well-versed in philosophical method and legal argumentation, yet he chose a different path. His innovation came from an actual experience, his encounter with Shams of Tabriz, the moment when he realized the limitations of his previous knowledge. His emphasis on the importance of lived experience over abstract reason led him to significant deviations from contemporaneous Islamic practices. It also explains why he relied on poetry rather than scholarly exposition to communicate his beliefs. Shams of Tabriz was the sun, the fire, the fountainhead of real experience for Rumi. Other than multiple narratives about that meeting, some more likely to be true than others, we know nothing of the nature of their meeting and what these two men experienced through that encounter. All we can know would be from what Rumi expressed in words. Their meeting was more like the merging of two oceans, because they were already highly achieved vast human beings, both in outer knowledge and inner contemplation and self-discovery. Neither would be the same after this meeting. 28 Rumi calls this new period of this life his rebirth. After all this transformation he admits that “My first birth is over now, I’m bom this moment from Love. I am so much more than myself now, because I was bom twice!” (Divan-e Shams 1409). As he recounted: “I was a pious man, you’ve turned me into a poet, singer, leader of the drunken party gang. I was a respected scholar, you’ve turned me into a subject of laughter to the kids on the street” (Divan-e Shams 1890). And somewhere else he asks for the bartender to keep filling his cup with wine, may it put out the fire in his heart ignited by the love of Shams. He recalls the days where his “hand would be holding books, and his lips would be touching worry beads, but now his hands hold the wine cup and his lips are constantly kissing poetry and songs” (Divan-e Shams 2351). Who was this Shams who turned Rumi from a respected philosopher, religious scholar, lecturer, and jurist into a singing, dancing, ecstatic poet, who denounces everything he has ever known but his love for Shams? We know very little about Shams. He showed up on 26th of Jumada Al-Thani (the sixth month in the Islamic calendar) 642 (1244 CE) in Konya. It is widely accepted that Shams was from Tabriz, Iran, where he had a teacher named AbuBakr Sallebaf, AbuBakr the Basket Weaver. Shams was aware of his own intensity and polarizing effect, and most of Rumi’s followers could not stand him. Their hostile attitude finally drove Shams out of Konya. Rumi was so depressed that he shut down his lectures and retrieved into solitude. His son Sultan Valad found Shams in Damascus and finally convinced him 29 to return to Konya. Shortly thereafter, however, Shams again disappeared, this time forever. Some say Shams was murdered, others think he returned to Iran and died in Khoy, a town near Tabriz. All we can do is to imagine Shams through Rumi’s poetry and the effect he had on Rumi. During the three years that Shams and Rumi sat together and held lectures in Konya, Rumi’s students wrote down some of Shams’s teachings, which survive as the Maqalat (Discourses) of Shams. Rumi later suggests that he himself was merely a vessel of Shams: “Oh the pride of all Tabrizians, oh the Sun of Truth and Religion, keep talking. Everything that comes out of me is your voice!” (Divan-e Shams 2056). Shams’s discourses were not organized or coherent in any certain manner, much like his personality (Kadkani 17). Shams was a somewhat harsh, rude, and inconsiderate eccentric. He did not care about social norms and would put down the revered teachers or renowned politicians without hesitation or regard for what people might think. He would praise simple unknown people and find them more important and interesting than the so-called famous figures. According to Kadkani, Shams claimed he would prefer infidels if he liked them: “I like infidels much better, at least they don’t pretend to be my friends,” he once said, while on another occasion he claimed a unique ability to create atheists: “whoever hangs out with me will either become an absolute believer or an absolute atheist” (Kadkani 18). This experience with Shams led Rumi away from the scholarly towards the experiential. It changed his approach to knowledge and, importantly, his method for 30 communication. Rumi uses metaphor to describe the truth of direct experience. In many of his allegories, dry land symbolizes the material world and the ocean symbolizes the world of meaning or truth. The mind is a vessel which can travel only on land but will drown in the ocean. The way to communicate with the material world is through thought. But the only way to communicate with the divine is the lack of thought. The vessel which can travel in the ocean is silence. This silence is quieting the mind, emptying oneself of thought, and experiencing the Beloved within one’s own being (Mosaffa 86). For Rumi the fire which pushes a seeker all the way into the depths of that ocean is the sun of love, that which is free from all norms, turns everything upside down and inside out. After Shams left, Rumi was destroyed, and many verses describe the grief and pain of the separation he experienced. The humility of his innocence and the sincerity with which he begs his beloved Shams to return creates the image of a soul searching for love. “From the pain of your separation, in seeking you my heart has been everywhere.” This search carries Rumi upward: “In searching for your face beautiful like Venus, my heart is constantly looking upward. My heart kept climbing upward, moving upward, this beauty in searching for you.” As day ends and night comes, his heart “is still seeking the ecstasy of that love and that beauty.... Oh what a beautiful path there is from my heart to yours” (Divan-e Shams 2056). This moment in Rumi’s life, his encounter with Shams and their separation, was a turning point in his emphasis on the experiential in poetry and in life. The language of 31 Rumi is oral (and written down only by his students) and narrative; he uses stories and allegories about ordinary life to demonstrate directly the experiential way of knowledge. Rumi believes in the authenticity of direct experience, which allows him to go beyond reason and argumentation that Pico uses as tools for exploration and discovery. Rumi tells stories that use anecdote, allegory, and metaphor to transmit an experience to the reader. Even though Pico and Rumi have come to similar conclusions about the need for humans to love God in a direct relationship, Rumi has gone a further step to experience that relationship in reality and offer glimpses of that experience to others through poetry. Throughout this thesis, all of Rumi’s ideas have been delivered in this way, but one example is a verse in the Divart-e Shams (1855) that describes the impact of the separation from Shams. Rumi needs to know for himself a way to understand his feelings about what just happened to him. He was a serious scholar, theologian, jurist from the most respectable lineage of Khorasan, from a family of great reputation. Students came from across the Muslim and Greek worlds to learn from this prolific scholar. Yet he has no way to folly communicate the intensity of the experience with Shams. For him, he seems to have lost his reason and grip on reality with no way to understand it. His systems of knowledge and understanding have fallen apart. Unable to explain this experience with any legalist or philosophical argument, Rumi bursts into ecstatic dance, song, and poetry: 32 How could I know that this longing (literally “black love”) would drive me so crazy; That it would make my heart an inferno, and my eyes the Jeyhoun river? How would I know that flood would suddenly swallow me; And throw me like a ship into the middle of an ocean of blood? And then a wave would beat this ship and split it board by board; And every board itself would fall apart from every rotation? And then a whale would raise its head above the water and drink the ocean up; So that the endless ocean turns into a desert? And then the desert would split the ocean-devouring whale and kill the it with extreme wrath like Croesus? And then, when all these transformations came, the desert and the ocean did not remain; What do I know what happened next, because reason (choon) was drowned in the reason-less (bichoon)? There are many “I don’t knows,” however, I don’t know; For I must have swallowed a mouth full of opium in that ocean! This poem depicts the experience that Rumi had after his separation from Shams, from the man who had already pushed Rumi beyond his reason and scholarly understanding of his religion, his relationship with God, his reality, and right way of living into what I call “beyond the beyond.” This poem gives the reader an experience 33 of dwelling inside that beyond the beyond space. First, there is wonder at the inability to understand an experience ignited by this love. This post-separation dark side of love pushes him, the rational reasonable man, into madness, not knowing anything but only feeling the burning and the destruction. The land is the space where we understand through our rational mind, but the ocean is something beyond, where our rational mind will drown. He is washed away into the ocean but has found a vessel to carry him beyond reason, his love for Shams. But then, the vessel falls apart, Shams leaves, and more catastrophes await in that unpredictable place until full destruction, until the division between the known (the land) and the unknown (the water) disappear and become one. It is there where duality ends, and Lover and Beloved become one through Love. Experience is life changing, something that goes to the heart of the human. Rumi’s language is the language of the poet, that we know God through our human experience mediated by our individual selves. In Rumi, there is a path beyond reason that leads to oneness with or annihilation in the Beloved, but most people spend their life struggling with the seeming division between emotion and reason, rational and the translational. One’s focus should not be on the experience with any person, thing, or time but on experience itself. For Pico, however, reason has a much more central role in the search for truth. His language is the language of the scholar, that one can know the truths about God mediated by human argument, reason, scholarship, and 34 philosophy. Rumi speaks to all humanity, while Pico only talks to a narrow scholarly or elite audience. Pico relied on scholarly language, philosophical argument, and pure quantitative overload to explain and convince, from which we are supposed to acquire knowledge. The audience was not ordinary people but the educated elites and wealthy patrons who would understand his references and recognize his genius. The very beginning of the Oration, for example, addresses this elite audience, the “most esteemed Fathers,” and informs them that two ancient authorities, “Abdala the Saracen” and Hermes Trismegistus, both support the notion that “there was nothing to be seen more marvelous than man” (3). In the text he cites as authorities such diverse sources as Moses, David, the Persians, Timaeus, the Pythagoreans, the Hebrews, Empedocules, Mohammed, “Evantes the Persian,” “Asaph the Prophet,” the Apostle Paul, the book of Job, Homer, the Greeks, Plato, the Chaldeans, Cicero, and Aristotle, among many others. He listed at least twenty-two others on pages 45 and 46 alone. Pico was conscious that opponents would criticize his method as an overreliance on authorities but argued that his arguments became more convincing when backed by the largest number possible. As he suggested in the Oration, he was the responsible party, not them: “I m ust... answer those who are scandalized by the large number of propositions and the variety of topics I have proposed for disputation, as though the burden, however great it may be, rested on their shoulders and not, as it does, on mine” (41-42). To put a limit on the material used would, to Pico, ensure 35 merely an incomplete and less effective argument: “Surely it is unbecoming and captious to want to set limits to another’s efforts and, as Cicero says, to desire mediocrity in those things in which the rule should be: the more the better” (42). A full approach would lead to more knowledge: “I do not see how it would be more praiseworthy to succeed in defending ten theses than in defending nine hundred” (42). In another section, he claims that “I have adduced seventy-two theses in physic and metaphysics” and that will allow “anyone subscribing to these theses ... to resolve any question proposed to him in natural philosophy or theology” (50). Numbers were a core component in Pico’s method. He claimed to have developed “a new method of philosophizing on the basis of numbers” that stretched back to the ancient Greeks. As he explained, through numerology he believed (and promised) to “solve by means of this method of number seventy-four questions which are considered, by common consent, among the most important in physics and divinity” (52-53). Through numbers, Pico believed he could uncover the secrets of hidden knowledge, and he advocated the study of magic for the same reason (53). Rumi believed that knowledge is revealed only one has passed beyond intellect, beyond the ego. As he says in the Masnavi, “this consciousness (hoosh) is only available to people who can sense beyond reason (*bihoosh)” (volume 1,1). Pico, from the point of view of Rumi’s experientialism, remains stuck in the limited and unknowing intellectual world of scholars as well as his own massive ego when concludes the Oration: “I have wanted to make clear in this disputation, not only that 36 I know a great many things, but also that I know a great many things which others do not know” (69). To Rumi, there is a joy to humility, just like delicious wine “that flows downward. It is so in love with prostration, intoxicated with humility. Just know that arrogance is tasteless, and what punishment for the arrogant than his own tasteless” (.Divan-e Shams 408). 37 t Conclusion Rumi overcame the intense emotions that ruled his loss of Shams, but he emerged with a new synthesis of poetry and scholarship. That synthesis, as Iqbal says, “is at once a description, an explanation and a justification of his religious experience... combing and merging into a higher unity - Rumi’s symphony of Love” (Iqbal 265). In this way, Rumi discovered something deeper in his experience with Shams than Pico was able to achieve in his short life, for we have no knowledge of Pico’s own personal religious experiences hidden behind his philosophical expositions. The two thinkers, both advocates of the direct human experience with the divine, could not be more different in the way they know of and express that religious experience. After Rumi’s intoxicating meeting, merging, separating, and emerging from Shams, over many years Rumi produced the Masnavi, a fountain of wisdom, a product of a sobriety that came from his direct experience of oneness with the Bleoved. In it, he used analogy and poetry to describe the place of humans and how they must overcome separation from God. The entire Masnavi with over 30,000 verses is the story of the pain that humanity experiences when separated from the eternal source. The analogy he uses it that of the reed separated from its stalk: “Listen to the reed flute as it tells the story of its separation, that ever since they have cut me from the reed bed, in my pain men and women have wailed. I want a heart tom open 38 in longing to tell the story of this yearning ... listen to the reed flute as it reveals its secrets” (Masnavi II). For Rumi the source of any insight to God is human being. But he sets conditions on such human being. Just like the reed flute needs to be hollowed out, it needs to be first emptied of its “me-ness” or ego (nafs) to be played by the breath of God. As Rumi tells it, “my secret is no other than the sound that comes through me, but the physical eyes and ears don’t have the ability to hear that. Body and spirit and spirit and body are not separate from one another. But not everyone is given the privilege to recognize that truth. The sound of the reed flute is produced by fire, not air. Whoever doesn’t have this fire, doesn’t exist” (.Masnavi II). Humans need to let go of the ego and be in love with God to overcome the separation and reach God. Experience, and not just reason, is the true path. Both Pico della Mirandola and Rumi are responding to an inner yearning to know and become one with God. While Pico remains reliant on reason and speaks in terms of philosophy, Rumi, through his experience with Shams, sees another dimension: the path of direct experience expressed through poetry. As Dabashi says, “Rumi performs the divinity in the human language. The human become sublime, while earthly, in Rumi” (Dabashi 148). The Islamic humanism of Rumi thus does more than advocate for a human-centered universe, it literally puts the relationship between poet and humanity at the center. Rumi’s masterwork creates not just an Islamic humanism but a universal means for humanizing any religious culture separated from experience by 39 theology and religious authority. Perhaps if Pico had had a Shams, Pico and the European Renaissance would have added more emphasis on direct experience to its humanism. 40 Works Cited Arasteh, A. Reza. Rumi: The Persian, the Sufi. Tucson: Omen Press, 1972. 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