Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra has been much noted, and Gibran himself admitted his debt. Yet if Gibran’s mouthpiece is shrouded in symbol like Nietzsche’s, and his discourse on human existence takes the same shape (the presentation of the seer, the imminent departure, the sermons and the final farewell), there the resemblance ends. Almustafa’s passionate belief in the healing power of universal love and unity and the certainty of spiritual growth poses a transcendentalism which descends from both the Medieval Christian mystics and the Oriental Sufis, and is a far cry from the self-centered philosophy of independence advocated by Zarathustra. Zarathustra’s ideal differs radically from that of Gibran, who presents Almustafa as solitary but loving, insistent upon the bonds between all men, the links between all forms of life, and the absolute necessity of continuity.
Gibran has affinities with many Romantic poets and symbolist painters, but perhaps the greatest influence on both his painting and his writing was William Blake. To Gibran he was a hero:
Blake is the God-man. His drawings are so far the profoundest things done in English – and his vision, putting aside his drawings and his poems, is the most godly. [14]
Blake’s voice can be detected throughout The Prophet. Suheil Bushrui notes that Almustafa’s sermon on joy and sorrow conveys the same ideas as Blake’s poem The Mental Traveller, and shades of The Tyger are evident in his personification of nature and symbolic presentation of the forest as a refuge for the enlightened when he talks of clothes:
Some of you say, ‘It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.’
And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,
But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
When Almustafa says
oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store up the desire in the recesses of your being,
he is virtually quoting Blake’s celebrated aphorism,
He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence
from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. [15]
The principle of universal love pervades The Prophet. Love is the first facet of existence that Almustafa is asked to speak about, and referring to this part of the book, Mary Haskell said that there was ‘none more beautiful’. [16] Gibran’s preoccupation with sorrow and pain as inseparable from the joy of love is central to The Prophet. Almustafa tells the people:
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
The imagery here immediately recalls Christ, and the incantatory rhythm of his speech suggests the Psalms or the Song of Solomon. Repetition throughout the book of biblical forms such as the frequent opening of sentences with ‘And’, or the use of expressions such as ‘and verily’ or ‘I say unto you’ evoke the Gospels and Christian teaching. More overtones of the Psalms and a pantheism that smacks of Blake, the Romantics and Sufis resound in Almustafa’s affirmation of an all-abiding divine presence:
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
Though Almustafa is evidently a Christ-figure, his words also echo those of the prophet Mohammed, and his philosophy is truly eclectic. When he speaks of good and evil he seems to refute traditional notions of righteousness, suggesting that both are a part of all of us, and refusing to admit to absolute right or wrong.
What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Almustafa sees the guilty as members of the whole:
the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in the twilight between the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self.
He uses a lucid image to assure all men that spiritual advancement can be theirs:
You are good when you