At this week’s World Religions Café, Axel Takács, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the study of religion, presented on a topic related to his dissertation, which is an exercise in Christian comparative theology with the Islamic religious tradition, and tentatively entitled “Cultivation of Desire.” For his presentation, Axel examined a Persian love lyric (ghazal) by the well-known 14th-century poet of Shīrāz, Ḥāfiẓ. He situated his interpretation of this love lyric within two traditions contemporaneous to Ḥāfiẓ. The first is the Akbarian mystical tradition, which is the textual tradition inaugurated by Muḥyiddīn ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), and the second is the so-called madhhab-i ʿishq (“school/way of love”) tradition. In addition to considering various well-known authors in both these traditions in order to proffer one possible interpretation for the Shīrāzī poet’s œuvre, he turns to an early 17th-century commentary on the love lyrics by Abū al-Ḥasan Khatamī Lāḥūrī, who insightfully and explicitly brings together these traditions.
Axel, both in his Café and in his dissertation, also engages the interpretation theory and hermeneutical strategies of Paul Ricœur. In brief, Ricœur’s theory offers a method for seeking the perduring meaning of a text rather than the fleeting historical, social, and personal circumstances that produced the text, even though the latter is never abandoned for the former, and vice versa. Axel argues that reading certain ghazals through the Akarbian and madhhab-i ʿishq traditions is certainly productive and constructive for understanding meaning (which perdures), even though this is separate from explaining the event of the discourse (which is fleeting). To this end, he employs Ricœur’s method ultimately to seek not what is behind the text (history), but rather what is in front of the text, which is a world projected from the text in the act of interpretation. He thus contends that interpreting certain love lyrics effects a cultivation of desire that is intended to transform the interpreter’s way of being-in-the world. This existential transformation in the act of interpretation is thus (trans)formative, effective, and performative rather than merely informative, descriptive, and constative. Furthermore, the transformative effect of cultivating one’s desire is entirely in line with the cosmological vision of these contemporaneous traditions, which is the very being-in-the-world that the reader appropriates, to use Ricœur’s theory, in the act of engaging the world unfolded in front of the text.
Ultimately, if the love that is the subject of the ghazals transcends both the secular and the mystical, as some have pointed out, it is because that self-same love is identical with the very existence of God, and thus pervades the cosmos via divine self-disclosures (tajalliyāt) in a complex, multilayered cosmology intended to draw God's servants to Himself. God is both the ground of being and beyond being, or both the ground of passionate love and beyond desire’s grasp, simultaneously drawing us to Herself through love and remaining ever out of reach.
Just as he plans to take a constructive turn in his dissertation, he also briefly alluded to one at his Café presentation. The act of interpreting Ḥāfiẓ’s love lyrics is itself constitutive of “mystical experience.” However, “experience” here is not some anomalous event that takes the interpreter “outside herself” and outside mundane experience; rather, it takes her both “into herself” and also into a richer experience of all relationships, secular, divine, and everything in between. The experience is part of a perpetual process of interpreting the text and then the world. In cultivating desire, one’s perception is transformed such that passionate love become the lens through which all relationships are viewed. All relationships then become means to augment our desire. Explaining history thus becomes only half of the dialectic of interpretation; should we stop there, we would treat the love lyric as dead. Instead, I argue that the love lyrics are not descriptive and constative, but they are prescriptive and performative. Just as God created the world (form) to draw us toward herself, likewise the poet versifies in order to draw others into the snare of love. The interpreter is thus to appropriate the desire or passionate love projected from the text, transforming her very being-in-the-world. The event of meaning perdures as the text draws us into desire so that we enter deeper into the here and now, into the quotidian events of one’s phenomenal existence, so that for others we may become the passionate love that courses through reality from God, so that we perceive others through this very same passionate love.
The love lyric Axel interpreted as a case study is found below.
Whenever I follow his path, he provokes enticing discord.
But when I break from seeking [him], he rises up with a vengeance.
When, because of [my] desire, for a moment on the path
like dust I fall to her feet, like the wind she flees.
When I seek out half a kiss, a hundred no-no’s
from the jewel-box of his mouth, like sugar, spill down.
The trickery that I see in your narcissus-like eyes
has sullied many a righteous with the dust of the path.
The ups and downs of the desert of passionate love is the snare of affliction.
Where is the lionhearted one who will not avoid affliction?
You, demand life and patience, for the wheel [of fate], with its sleight-of-hand,
will again stir up a thousand tricks more marvelous than this.
Upon the threshold of submission lay your head, Ḥāfiẓ,
for if you argue, time will argue back!
In his dissertation, Axel performs a close reading of the 9th-century Christian theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena before turning to the love lyrics of Ḥāfiẓ. He then plans to bring his comparative project into conversation with the famous 20th-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1988) in order to construct a theological ethics of engagement with alterity that takes seriously the ultimate mystery of God and other—understood as infinitely knowable rather than absolutely unknowable.