Pain Sung In Quiet

Peter Abelard, from his Planctus David super Saul et Jonathan* (trans. found in: Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927), 196-7): 

              Low in thy grave with thee
                    Happy to lie,
        Since there’s no greater thing left Love to do,
              And to live after thee
                    Is but to die,
        For with but half a soul what can Life do?

              So share thy victory
                    Or else thy grave,
        Either to rescue thee, or with thee lie;
              Ending that life for thee,
                    That thou didst save,
        So Death, that sundereth, might bring more nigh.

        Peace, O my stricken Lute!
            Thy strings are sleeping.
        Would that my heart could still
            Its bitter weeping!

*This is part of one hymn out of six that Abelard composed, about which we read the following in Adalbert Podlech’s Abælard und Heloisa; oder, Die Theologie der Liebe (Munich: Piper, 1990), 231ff: (trans. mine):

These Songs/Laments of Distress (Lieder der Not), already mentioned above as his first attempt to break the bars of the spiritual cage into which he had locked his soul, to tear down the walls within which he had immured Heloïsa in his soul—these Songs of Distress place him among the great figures of literary and musical history. . . .

The verses of the Latin hymn measure only long and short syllables; in translations, according to the sensibility of our own language, these are replaced by stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet already in the Carolingian period a new linguistic sensibility began to assert itself: it broke through the metrical rigidity of the ancient measure and created a new form in the sequence [Lat. sequentia]. Whereas the classical hymn was composed as verse and then set to music, the sequence is governed by the melody, which accounts for its name: versus sequens neumata—verses that follow the notes. . . .

No longer is there any adherence to a fixed metre; it is the stress of the syllables, rather than their length, that determines the verse. “The principle of measuring syllables is replaced by one that emphasises meaning, that weighs the syllables” (Th. Spoerri). This makes possible an intimate fusion of word, meaning, and melody. This union appears for the first time in Abælard’s Planctus. In literary history, they represent the breakthrough to the later sequence, “which, drawing on the verses of the hymns, above all on the component phrases of the trochaic fifteen-syllable line, continually invents new strophic variations, and thus becomes the true germ cell of modern poetry. With the Stabat Mater and Dies Iræ in the middle of the thirteenth century, the later sequence made its entry into world literature” (Th. Spoerri). . . .

Between the older and the later sequence stand Abælard’s Planctus: thematically poetic, they are hopeless situations taken from the Old Testament; poetically, songs in a continual alternation of lengths and rhythms; musically, the most intimate union of word and melody that the Middle Ages had achieved up to that time. . . .

One must read these Lamentations (Klagelieder), and then hear them, and imagine how they were sung by Heloïsa’s nuns at the Paraclete, accompanied by instruments: how the staccato rhythm drives verse and melody onward as death approaches, and how the pain is sung in quiet, almost motionless tones—a pain that refuses to end, frozen in place. We do not know whether the laments were composed and set to music for Heloïsa, or whether Abælard was, in them, breaking open the cage within himself, as it were, without any outward purpose, effecting a liberation from within. After he had given Heloïsa the Paraclete, he sent these songs to her and to her nuns, and they must have been performed there.

A Nature Delicately Wrought

Ṭāhir al-Tanāḥī, On the Deathbed [ʿAlā Fārash al-Mawt] (Egypt: Dār al-Hilāl, 1939), 110 (al-Tanāḥī is describing the poet Ismāʿīl Ṣabrī Pasha; personal trans.):

Ṣabrī had grown weary of life and had come to hold its pleasures in quite light an esteem, though he had not yet passed beyond the season of youth. He was wont, therefore, to speak often in disparagement of the world, and to lament the folly of placing one’s peace of mind in it, or rejoicing in the serenity of its days. Yet it was not because some cherished end had eluded him, nor because failure had overtaken him, that he found the world burdensome; he had rather tasted of its distinctions enough to whet the appetite of the most covetous; he had attained to offices such as might well have been the envy of others; and in the abundance of fortune, the ease of living, and the honours of renown, he had received a portion exceeding that which had fallen to the lot of many who came after him.

But his was a nature delicately wrought, and his sensibility exceedingly fine: the sudden flash of lightning, if it appeared out of season, was enough to pain him; the lightest breath of the breeze, if it passed where it ought not, could wound him. Thus it was that he wearied of the world, because he wearied of those who dwelt in it; he grew impatient with life, because he could not abide the frailty of the living; and he rose in revolt against society, because he was himself in revolt against its morals.

                The waters of shame have ebbed from every face,
                And left the world, grim-cheeked, a barren waste.
                Virtue’s neglect has spread among mankind,
                Till scarce to return a greeting counts as kind. [From a somewhat long poem by the Pasha]

A portrait of Ismāʿīl Ṣabrī Pasha

Divine Souls

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Al-Maṭālib al-ʿĀliya min al-ʿIlm al-Ilāhī, ed. Aḥmad Ḥijāzī al-Saqqā, vol. 1 (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1987), 55–57 (personal trans.):

It has already been established, in our view, that human rational souls differ from one another in quiddity (māhiyyah) and substance (jawhar). Some are noble, divine, and celestial; others are dark, turbid, and profane. . . . Once this has been established, we say: among souls there are those whose very substance and essence are, from the outset, divine souls—disposed toward the Presence of Holiness [or the Holy], endowed with an abundant love for It, and deeply immersed in the degrees of its knowledge. Others possess something of these qualities, yet only in a weak measure. Still others are murky and darkened souls, devoid of these divine attractions and spiritual inclinations, submerged in the sea of passing passion and in the darkness of the world of the senses and fancy. 

To make these meanings more vividly clear, let me offer the following analogy. The mountains and hills of the world are of two kinds: in some there occurs mineral deposits, while in others there are not. Induction shows that mountains devoid of minerals are far more numerous than those in which minerals are formed. Furthermore, among the mountains that do produce minerals, some yield only inferiour, base substances, such as petroleum, sulfur, lime, and salt; while others produce precious, noble minerals, such as gold, silver, ruby, spinel, and the like. Again, induction shows that the mountains containing these precious and noble minerals are vastly fewer than those producing only the inferiour kinds. We may further observe that, among those mountains which contain these precious and noble minerals—the seven principal metallic bodies—the baser the metal, the more abundant its deposits; whereas the nobler the metal, the scarcer its occurrence.

Let human souls be understood by analogy with mountains and hills, and let the lights of the knowledge and love of God correspond to pure, refined gold. Just as most of the mountains and hills of this world contain no mineral deposits at all, so too the souls of most human beings are devoid of any inclination toward the world of spiritual realities. Moreover, even if souls of this kind were to devote themselves to the most rigourous bodily disciplines, they would derive but little benefit from them, just as a mountain lacking any mineral vein yields nothing at all, no matter how much effort one expends in excavating it.

And just as the mountains that do contain minerals differ from one another in degrees of richness and abundance beyond all possibility of precise measurement, so too the ranks of souls differ in strength and weakness, in greater and lesser capacity, by differences that admit of no exhaustive determination. And just as it is not impossible that, on rare occasions, there should exist a mountain containing a cavern filled with gold, so likewise it is not impossible that, in widely separated æons, there should arise a human being whose inward cavern of spirit is filled with the lights of the Divine Majesty.

Once you have grasped this analogy, you will understand that not everyone who undertakes spiritual discipline—even in its most arduous forms—is thereby destined to attain anything. Nor does everyone who attains something thereby reach the final end. Indeed, the ultimate end in this path admits of no limit. For just as there is no end to the Majesty of God or to the sublimity of His Greatness, so there is likewise no end to the degrees of beatitude attainable upon this path.

Therefore, keep this analogy constantly before your eyes and firmly fixed in your imagination, lest you be deceived into thinking that everyone who travels the path arrives, or that everyone who seeks necessarily finds. We do not deny that these spiritual disciplines have certain effects in some respects, for perseverance in practice does indeed produce effects of a certain kind. Yet it is evident that merely applying kohl to the eyes is not the same as possessing dark, thick eyelids.1

How excellent are the words of the Sage of Poets [= al-Mutanabbī]:

The heart is urged to forget you,

Yet innate nature refuses to be transformed.

Aristotle likewise said: ‘‘Whoever wishes to embark upon the pursuit of these divine sciences must acquire for himself another nature’’ What he means is that one must exert oneself to strip the intellect of its attachments to sense, to mere assumptions (wahm), and to fancy.

1 This line is from a line of verse by the poet al-Mutanabbī, which reads more beautifully in Arabic: وليس التكحُّل في العينين كالكَحَل.

Retrieving The Divine

Friedrich Hebbel, Diari (Tagebücher), edt. Lorenza Rega, 2009, Diario 1, 23 March, 1835, p. 39 (personal translation from the Italian): 

This notebook must record all the notes of my heart and preserve them faithfully, for my future edification. Man is not an instrument in which all the notes come back in an eternal cycle, even if in the most distinct and singular combinations; the sentiment that is extinguished in his chest vanishes away evermore; the self-same ray of sunshine never yields the same flowers in physical or psychic life. Each hour becomes a closed world that has a large or small beginning, a tedious intermediate part, and a dreaded or longed-for end. And who can help indifferently witnessing the spectacle of thousands of worlds sinking into him, without wanting to at least retrieve the divine, whether it was a joy or a pain, that ran through them? This is my justification for dedicating a few minutes to this journal every day.

Death and Civilisation

Hubert Lauvergne, De l'Agonie et de la Mort dans toutes les Classes de la Société sous le Rapport humanitaire, physiologique et religieux (Paris: 1842, Librairie de J.-B. Baillièrech), tome i., ch. ii., pp. 131-2:

As we move away from the great centres of civilisation, as we approach the plains and the mountains, the character of death takes on more and more the calm aspect of the sky on a beautiful evening twilight. The Arab who dies in his tent asks to see the East once more, and this wish, which is an extraordinary thing, is very often the last which great and pure intelligences make when they feel seized by the hand of time. How different is such an end from that suffered by a citizen of Rome or Paris, in the midst of symbolic ceremonies which make him miss life longingly and the thousand joys with which it adorns itself in the eyes of a powerful and rich human! In general, death is brought about in a manner that is all simpler and more natural the freer one is from the innumerable ties of civilisation.

À mesure qu'on s'éloigne des grands foyers de civilisation, qu'on se rap proche des plaines et des montagnes, le caractère de la mort prend de plus en plus l'aspect calme du ciel par un beau crépuscule du soir. En général la mort s'accomplit d'une maière d'autant plus simple et naturelle qu'on est plus libre des innombrables liens de la civilisation. L'Arabe qui meurt sous sa tente demande à voir encore une fois l'orient, et ce vœu, chose extraordinaire, est bien souvent le dernier que font les grandes et pures intelligences quand elles se sentent saisies par la main du temps. Quelle différence d'une telle fin à celle que subit un citoyen de Rome ou de Paris, au milieu des cérémonies symboliques qui lui font regretter la vie et les mille joies dont elle se pare aux yeux de l'homme puissant et riche! En général, la mort s'accomplit d'une manière d'autant plus simple et naturelle qu'on est plus libre des innombrables liens de la civilisation.