Experiencing Rumi and Pico

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 <x_ Sandra Luft Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy EXPERIENCING RUMI AND PICO: 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,

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