Loneliness.
Just as class and gender determine the way in which one lives in the world and is related to the world, so too may religion. Even for those not brought up in any religion, Western culture is still one in which religion is significant. Philosophical anthropology must thus take the phenomenon of religious experience seriously, in a way that empiricist anthropology does not. But its starting point is with the constitution of a religious consciousness, and with the conditions of the possibility of the forms of religion encountered; it does not start with theology. There is room once again for dispute over the possibility of any kind of transcendence. The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard thought that man's existence has meaning only in the experience of grace, which inexplicably raises man up from his worthlessness. The anguish and loneliness of mortal existence, the "wretchedness of man without God," is only overcome by a form of experience that confers faith in the existence of God and hence the ultimate possibility of human transcendence. Philosophical anthropology in its narrowest (third) sense is founded on an insistence that the only knowledge available to man is knowledge from his human perspective, conditioned, as he himself is, by his situation in the world. God cannot be invoked as a source of absolute standards of truth or of absolute values nor to give content to the supposition that there are any. If God exists, then the thought that there are such standards and values, even if we cannot know of them, remains possible. This possibility was denied with Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God; the attempt to come to terms with this view defines the scope of most philosophical anthropology. The view of religion that reflects the inversion which takes place was expressed by Ludwig Feuerbach in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity), when he declared that "man is not a shadow of God; it is God who is the shadow of man, an illusory phantasm that man nourishes out of his own substance.
For the first three centuries of the Christian Era, the different mystery religions existed side-by-side in the Roman Empire. They had all developed out of local and national cults and later became cosmopolitan and international. The mystery religions would never have developed and expanded as they did, however, without the new social conditions brought about by the unification of the Mediterranean world by the Romans. In the large cities and seaports, men from the remotest parts of the empire flocked together. Many people were removed from their accustomed surroundings and suffered from loneliness. They longed for new acquaintances and for assimilation, and they needed the assurance that only the knowledge of belonging to a community can give. Economic and political conditions in the Roman Empire also accelerated the growth of the mysteries. Members of a mystery society helped one another. For a lawyer, a craftsman, or a contractor, membership in a club could be the road to success. Furthermore, there is less opportunity for private initiative in a society ruled by a monarch than in a democratic society. The individual who felt that his initiative was frustrated by the preponderance of the imperial structure might well turn to a community that offered him the hope of a better future. The mystery societies, thus, commonly satisfied both a taste for individualism and a longing for brotherhood. At least in principle, the members of the communities were considered equal: one man was the other man's brother, irrespective of his origin, social rank, or nationality. Because membership in each of the mystery communities was a matter of personal choice, propaganda and missionary work were inevitable. In the religions of Isis and Mithra, missionary zeal was particularly obvious. The followers of Isis and Mithra considered Rome to be the centre of their worship, and the city was called sacrosancta civitas ("sacred city") in an Isis romance written in the 2nd century AD by the Latin author Apuleius.
A great deal of behaviour in social animals, such as humans, involves social interaction. Although the whole brain contributes to social activities, certain parts of the cerebral hemispheres are particularly concerned. The operation of leucotomy, cutting through the white matter that connects parts of the frontal lobes with the thalamus, upsets this aspect of behaviour. This operation used to be performed for severe depression or obsession neuroses. After the operation, patients lacked the usual inhibitions that were socially demanded, appearing to obey the first impulse that occurred to them. They told people what they thought of them without regard for the necessary conventions of civilization. Which parts of the cerebral hemispheres produce emotion has been learned from patients with epilepsy and from operations under local anesthesia in which the electrical stimulation of the brain is carried out. The limbic lobe, including the hippocampus, is particularly important. Stimulating certain regions of the temporal lobes produces an intense feeling of fear or dread; stimulating nearby regions produces a feeling of isolation and loneliness, other regions a feeling of disgust, and yet others
intense sorrow, depression, anxiety, and, occasionally, guilt. An ecstatic feeling can also occur in which it appears to patients that all problems have been or are just about to be solved. In addition to these regions of the cerebral cortex and the hypothalamus, regions of the thalamus also contribute to the genesis of emotion. The hypothalamus itself does not initiate behaviour; that is done by the cerebral hemispheres--insofar as one may abstract any single part from the whole.
Exeter Book is the largest collection of Old English poetry. Copied c. 975, the manuscript was given to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric (died 1072). It begins with some long religious poems: the Christ, in three parts; two poems on St. Guthlac; the fragmentary "Azarius"; and the allegorical Phoenix. Following these are a number of shorter religious verses intermingled with poems of types that have survived only in this codex. All the extant Anglo-Saxon lyrics, or elegies, as they are usually called--"The Wanderer," "The Seafarer," "The Wife's Lament," "The Husband's Message," and "The Ruin"--are found here. These are secular poems evoking a poignant sense of desolation and loneliness in their descriptions of the separation of lovers, the sorrows of exile, or the terrors and attractions of the sea, although some of them--e.g., "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer"--also carry the weight of religious allegory. In addition, the Exeter Book preserves 95 riddles, a genre that would otherwise have been represented by a solitary example.
The remaining part of the Exeter Book includes "The Rhyming Poem," which is the only example of its kind; the gnomic verses; "Widsith," the heroic narrative of a fictitious bard; and the two refrain poems, "Deor" and "Wulf and Eadwacer." The arrangement of the poems appears to be haphazard, and the book is believed to be copied from an earlier collection.
In 1513 political events--the temporary ouster of the French from Milan--caused the now 60-year-old Leonardo to move again. At the end of the year he went to Rome, accompanied by his pupils Melzi and Salai as well as by two studio assistants, hoping to find employment there through his patron, Giuliano de' Medici, brother of the new pope Leo X. Giuliano gave him a suite of rooms in his residence, the Belvedere, in the Vatican. He also gave him a considerable monthly stipend, but no large commissions came to him. For three years Leonardo remained in the Eternal City, off to one side, while Donato Bramante was building St. Peter's, Raphael was painting the last rooms of the Pope's new apartments, Michelangelo was struggling to complete the tomb of Pope Julius, and many younger artists such as Peruzzi, Timoteo Viti, and Sodoma were active there. Drafts of embittered letters betray the disappointment of the aging master who worked in his studio on mathematical studies and technical experiments or, strolling through the city, surveyed ancient monuments. A magnificently executed map of the Pontine Marshes (Royal Library, Windsor Castle; 12684) suggests that Leonardo was at least a consultant for a reclamation project that Giuliano de' Medici ordered in 1514. On the other hand, there were sketches for a spacious residence for the Medici in Florence, who had returned to power there in 1512. But this did not go beyond the stage of preliminary sketches and never came to pass. Leonardo seems to have resumed his friendship with Bramante, but the latter died in 1514. And there is no record of Leonardo's relations with any other artists in Rome.
In a life of such loneliness, it is easy to understand why Leonardo, despite his 65 years, decided to accept the invitation of the young king Francis I to enter his service in France. At the end of 1516 he left Italy forever, together with his most devoted pupil, Francesco Melzi. Leonardo spent the last three years of his life in the small residence of Cloux (later called Clos-Lucé), near the King's summer palace at Amboise on the Loire. Premier peintre, architecte et méchanicien du Roi ("first painter, architect, and mechanic of the King") was the proud title he bore; yet the admiring King left him complete freedom of action. He did no more painting or at most completed the painting of the enigmatic, mystical "St. John the Baptist," which the Cardinal of Aragon, when he visited Amboise, saw in Leonardo's studio along with the "Mona Lisa" and the "Virgin and Child with St. Anne."For the King he drew up plans for the palace and garden of Romorantin, destined to be the widow's residence of the Queen Mother. But the carefully worked-out project, combining the best features of Italian-French traditions in palace and landscape architecture, had to be halted because the region was threatened with malaria.
Leonardo still made sketches for court festivals, but the King treated him in every respect as an honoured guest. Decades later, Francis I talked with the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini about Leonardo in terms of the utmost admiration and esteem. Leonardo spent most of his time arranging and editing his scientific studies. The final drafts for his treatise on painting and a few pages of the anatomy appeared. Consummate drawings such as the "Floating Figure" (Royal Library, Windsor Castle; 12581) are the final testimonials to his undiminished genius. In the so-called "Visions of the End of the World," or "Deluge" (Royal Library, Windsor Castle), he depicts with overpowering pictorial imagination the primal forces that rule nature.
Leonardo died at Cloux. He was laid to rest in the palace church of Saint-Florentin.
But the church was devastated during the French Revolution and completely torn down at the beginning of the 19th century. Hence, his grave can no longer be located. Francesco Melzi fell heir to his artistic and scientific estate.
Van Gogh worked hard and methodically but soon perceived the difficulty of self-training and sought the guidance of more experienced artists. Late in 1881 he settled at The Hague to work with a Dutch landscape painter, Anton Mauve. He visited museums and met with other painters. Van Gogh thus extended his technical knowledge and experimented in the summer of 1882 with oil paint. In 1883 the urge to be "alone with nature" and the peasants took him to Drenthe, a desolate part of northern Netherlands frequented by Mauve and other Dutch artists, where he spent three months before returning home, which was now at Nuenen, another village in the Brabant. He remained at Nuenen during most of 1884 and 1885, and during these years his art grew bolder and more assured. He painted three types of subjects--still life, landscape, and figure--all interrelated by their reference to the peasants' daily life, to the hardships they endured, and to the countryside they cultivated. Émile Zola's Germinal (1885), a novel about the coal-mining region of France, greatly impressed van Gogh, and sociological criticism is implicit in many of his pictures--e.g., "Weavers" and "The Potato Eaters." Eventually he felt too isolated in Nuenen. His understanding of the possibilities of painting was evolving rapidly; from studying Hals he saw that academic finish destroys the freshness of a visual impression, while the works of Paolo Veronese and Eugène Delacroix taught him that colour expresses something by itself. This led to enthusiasm for Peter Paul Rubens and a sudden departure for Antwerp, where the greatest number of Rubens' works could be seen. The revelation of Rubens' simple means, of his direct notation, and of his ability to express a mood by a combination of colours proved decisive. Simultaneously, van Gogh discovered Japanese prints and Impressionist painting. His refusal to follow academic principles led to disputes at the Antwerp academy, where he was enrolled, and after three months he left precipitately in 1886 to join his brother Theo in Paris. There, still concerned with improving his drawing, van Gogh met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and others who were to play historic roles in modern art. They opened his eyes to the latest developments in French painting. At the same time, Theo introduced him to Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, and other artists of the group.
By this time van Gogh was ready for such revelations, and the changes that his painting underwent in Paris between the spring of 1886 and February 1888 led to the creation of his personal idiom and style of brushwork. His palette at last became colourful, his vision less traditional, and his tonalities lighter, as may be seen in his first paintings of Montmartre. By the summer of 1887 he was painting in pure colours and using a broken brushwork that is at times pointillistic. Finally, van Gogh's Postimpressionist style crystallized by the beginning of 1888 in masterpieces such as "Portrait of Père Tanguy" and "Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel," as well as in some landscapes of the Parisian suburbs.
After two years van Gogh was tired of city life, physically exhausted, and longing "to look at nature under a brighter sky." His passion was now for "a full effect of colour." He left Paris in February 1888 for Arles, in the southeast of France.
In his pictures of the following 12 months--his first great period--he strove to respect the external, visual aspect of a figure or landscape but found himself unable to suppress his own feelings about the subject. These found expression in emphatic contours and heightened effects of colour. Van Gogh's pictorial style was not calculated, however, but spontaneous and instinctive, for he worked with great speed and intensity, determined to capture an effect or a mood while it possessed him. His Arles subjects include blossoming fruit trees, views of the town and surroundings, self-portraits, portraits of Roulin the postman and other friends, interiors and exteriors of the house, a series of sunflowers, and a "starry night." Van Gogh knew that his approach to painting was individualistic, but he also knew that some tasks are beyond the power of isolated individuals to accomplish. In Paris he had hoped to form a separate Impressionist group with Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others whom he supposed to have similar aims. He rented and decorated a house in Arles with the intention of persuading them to join him and found a working community of "Impressionists of the South." Gauguin arrived in October 1888, and for two months they worked together; but, while each influenced the other to some extent, their relations rapidly deteriorated because they had opposing ideas and were temperamentally incompatible.
On Christmas Eve 1888, van Gogh broke under the strain and cut off part of his left ear. Gauguin left, and van Gogh was taken to a hospital. He returned to the "yellow house" a fortnight later and resumed painting, producing a mirror-image "Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear," several still lifes, and "La Berceuse." Several weeks later, he again showed symptoms of mental disturbance severe enough to cause him to be sent back to the hospital. At the end of April 1889, fearful of losing his renewed capacity for work, which he regarded as a guarantee of his sanity, he asked to be temporarily shut up in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in order to be under medical supervision.
Van Gogh stayed there for 12 months, haunted by recurrent attacks, alternating between moods of calm and despair, and working intermittently: "Garden of the Asylum," "Cypresses," "Olive Trees," "Les Alpilles," portraits of doctors, and interpretations of paintings by Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet all date from this period. The keynote of this phase (1889-90) is fear of losing touch with reality and a certain sadness. Confined for long periods to his cell or the asylum garden, having no choice of subjects, and realizing that his inspiration depended on direct observation, van Gogh fought against having to work from memory. At Saint-Rémy he muted the violent colours of the previous summer and tried to make his painting calmer. As he repressed his excitement, however, he involved himself more imaginatively in the drama of the elements, developing a style based on dynamic forms and a vigorous use of line (line often equated with colour). The best of his Saint-Rémy pictures are thus bolder and more visionary than those of Arles.Van Gogh himself brought this period to an end. Oppressed by homesickness--he painted souvenirs of Holland--and loneliness, he longed to see Theo and the north once more and arrived in Paris in May 1890. Four days later he went to stay with a homeopathic doctor-artist, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a friend of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, at Auvers-sur-Oise. Back in a village community such as he had not known since Nuenen, four years earlier, van Gogh worked at first enthusiastically; and his choice of subjects such as fields of corn, the river valley, peasants' cottages, the church, and the town hall reflects his spiritual relief. A modification of his style follows: the natural forms in his paintings are less contorted, and in the northern light he adopted pale, fresh tonalities. His brushwork is broader and more expressive and his vision of nature more lyrical. Everything in his pictures seems to be moving, living. This phase was short, however, and ended in quarrels with Gachet and feelings of guilt at his inescapable dependence on Theo (now married and with a son) and his inability to succeed. In despair of ever overcoming his loneliness or of being cured, he shot himself and died two days later. Coincidentally, Theo died six months later (Jan. 25, 1891) of chronic nephritis.
In the 1940s Robert Redfield, strongly influenced by Louis Wirth and other members of the Chicago school of urban ecology, conceived of the urban as invariably impersonal, heterogeneous, secular, and disorganizing. In the folk-urban model, as set forth in his article "The Folk Society," Redfield contrasted this image of city life with an image of the folk community, which he characterized as small, sacred, highly personalistic, and homogeneous. He presumed that as individuals moved from folk community to city or as an entire society moved toward a more urbanized culture, there would be a breakdown in cultural traditions. Urbanizing individuals and societies would suffer from cultural disorganization and would have higher incidences of social pathologies like divorce, alcoholism, crime, and loneliness. Redfield's conception of the city depended on the urban research carried on by sociologists in American industrial cities, predominantly Chicago. He ethnocentrically assumed that their findings could be generalized to all urban cultures. Subsequent research indicated that this conception was in many respects wrong even for American industrial cities. In spite of being generally ethnocentric and specifically inadequate for American cities, this conception still holds sway over much popular thinking, which conceives of cities, in all cultures and all times, as centres of bohemianism, social experimentation, dissent, anomie, crime, and similar conditions--whether for good or bad--created by social breakdown. Gideon Sjoberg (The Preindustrial City, Past and Present, 1960), in the next step toward a cross-culturally valid understanding of cities, challenged this conception of urban culture as ethnocentric and historically narrow. He divided the world's urban centres into two types, the preindustrial city and the industrial city, which he distinguished on the basis of differences in the society's technological level. Preindustrial cities, according to Sjoberg, are to be found in societies without sophisticated machine technology, where human and animal labour form the basis for economic production. Industrial cities predominate in the modernized nations of western Europe and America where energy sources from fossil fuels and atomic power phenomenally expand economic productivity. For Sjoberg, preindustrial urban culture differed markedly from its industrial counterpart: the preindustrial city's neighbourhoods were strongly integrated by personal ties of ethnicity and sectarian allegiance; it maintained strong family connections, and social disorganization was little in evidence; churches or other sacred institutions dominated the skyline as well as the cultural beliefs of the urban place; and the major urban function was imperial administration rather than industrial production. Although Sjoberg's conception of a preindustrial urban type was a major improvement over previous urban definitions, it too suffered from overgeneralization. Sjoberg collapsed urban cultures of strikingly different sorts into a single undifferentiated preindustrial city type--for example, the cities of ancient empires were conflated with present-day urban places in the Third World.
Past urban cultures that did not readily fit the Sjoberg conception, such as the autocephalous (self-governing) cities of early modern Europe, were disposed of as temporary and unusual variants of his preindustrial type rather than important varieties of urban culture.
In "The Cultural Role of Cities," Robert Redfield and Milton Singer tried to improve on all previous conceptions of the city, including the one Redfield had himself used in his folk-urban model, by emphasizing the variable cultural roles played by cities in societies. Redfield and Singer delineated two cultural roles for cities that all urban places perform, although with varying degrees of intensity and elaboration. Cities whose predominant cultural role is the construction and codification of the society's traditions perform "orthogenetic" functions. In such urban cultures, cadres of literati rationalize a "Great Tradition" of culture for the society at large. The cultural message emanating from Delhi, Paris, Washington, D.C., and other capitals of classic empires or modern nation-states functions to elaborate and safeguard cultural tradition. By contrast, cities whose primary cultural role is "heterogenetic," as Redfield and Singer defined it, are centres of technical and economic change, and they function to create and introduce new ideas, cosmologies, and social practices into the society.
In cities like London, Marseille, or New York, the intelligentsia challenge old methods, question established traditions, and help make such cities innovative cultural centres. Continuing Redfield and Singer's concern for the cultural role of cities within their societies, Paul Wheatley in The Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971) has taken the earliest form of urban culture to be a ceremonial or cult centre that organized and dominated a surrounding rural region through its sacred practices and authority. According to Wheatley, only later did economic prominence and political power get added to this original urban cultural role. Wheatley, following Redfield and Singer, established that any conception of an urban culture had to be grounded in the cultural role of cities in their societies; research must specifically address how the urban cultural role organizes beliefs and practices in the wider culture beyond the urban precincts, and, consequently, how this urban cultural role necessitates certain life-ways and social groupings (cultural forms) in the city. Beginning in the 1970s, David Harvey (Social Justice and the City, 1973), Manuel Castells (The Urban Question, 1977), and other scholars influenced by Marxism caused a major shift in the conception of urban cultural roles. Although they mainly worked on cities in advanced capitalist cultures, their approach had wide relevance. Rather than looking outward from the city to the urban culture as a whole, the new scholarship conceived the city as a terminus for cultural roles emanating from the wider culture or even the world system. Harvey, for example, linked major changes in American urban life-ways to the urban culture of advanced capitalism: for him, the growth of suburbia developed out of capitalism's promotion of new patterns of consumption in the interests of profit. Castells saw the city as an arena for social conflicts ultimately emanating from the class divisions within capitalist society.
This Marxist scholarship did not contradict the earlier emphasis on the city as the source of cultural roles so much as complement it. Studying the cultural roles of cities must include not only the cultural beliefs and practices that emanate from cities but also the cultural forms that develop within the city as a result of the impact of the urban culture on it. In this way scholarship can bring forward a cross-culturally and historically valid conception of cities, their cultural forms, and the urban cultures in which they are set.
While there was generally no explicit dualism in ancient Egyptian religion, there was an implicit dualism in the contrast between the god Seth and the god Osiris. Seth, a violent, aggressive, "foreign," sterile god, connected with disorder, the desert, and loneliness, was opposed to Osiris, the god of fertility and life, active in the waters of the Nile. Seth also possessed some typically dualistic marks of a mythological character; his action, as well as his personality itself, was ambivalent; and, as a typical trickster, he was also capable, at times, of constructive action in the cosmos. The myths of Osiris and Seth may be compared in various ways with those recently discovered among the Dogon people of the western Sudan, which contrast Nommo, a fertile and happily mated primordial being pictured in fish form, with Yurugu ("Pale Fox"), an unhappy, sterile character who lives in the wilderness without a mate. Yurugu is considered to be the element that makes the universe complete (the same role assigned to Seth in the Egyptian myth).
Dualism, broadly speaking, was also present in ancient Mesopotamian religion.
In myths pertaining to the origin of the gods and of the cosmos, the opposition between the primordial deities (Apsu, the Abyss; and Tiamat, the Sea) and the new ones (particularly Marduk, the demiurge, or creator) displayed some dualistic aspects.
Though the earlier deities had established the basic reality of the universe--its ontological core--because of their chaotic and selfish nature they resisted their own offspring, who were later to create the now existing, definite order of the cosmos.
A dualism of the ontological--basic reality or being--versus the cosmological--the form or order of the material universe--is thus implicitly affirmed.
The art produced by peoples living in the peninsula of Korea has traditionally shared aesthetic concepts, motifs, techniques, and forms with the art of China and Japan.
Yet it has developed a distinctive style of its own. In general, Korean art has neither the grandeur and aloofness of Chinese art nor the decorative sophistication of Japanese art, and Korean artists were often not as technically perfect or precise as their Chinese and Japanese counterparts.
Instead, the beauty of Korean art and the strength of its artists lay in simplicity, spontaneity, and a feeling of harmony with nature. In mood, the art of Korea is often characterized by a sense of loneliness arising from the serenity of the image and reflecting the Korean philosophy of resignation.
The basic trend of Korean art has been naturalistic, a characteristic already evident as early as the Three Kingdoms period (c. 57 BC-AD 668) but fully established by the Unified, or Great, Silla (Korean: Shinla) period (668-935).
The traditional attitude of accepting nature as it is resulted in a highly developed appreciation for the simple and unadorned. Korean artists, for example, favour the unadorned beauty of raw materials, such as the natural patterns of wood grains. The Korean potter was characteristically unconcerned about mechanical perfection of his surfaces, curves, or shapes. His concern was to bring out the inherent or natural characteristics of his materials and the medium. Potters, therefore, were able to work unselfconsciously and naturally, producing wares of engaging simplicity and artistic distinctiveness.
Simplicity applied not only to economy of shape but also to the use of decorative motifs and devices. The intervention of the human hand is restricted to a minimum in Korean art. A single stem of a flower, for instance, may be drawn in a subtle shade of blue on the side of a white porcelain vase or bottle, but never merely from a desire to fill an empty space. The effect is rather to enlarge the white background.
The avoidance of extremes is another characteristic tradition in Korean art. Extreme straightness of line was disliked as much as extreme curvilinear. The straight bold contour of a Sung dynasty (960-1279) Chinese bowl becomes a graceful, modest curve in a Korean bowl of the Koryo period (918-1392). The sharply curving Chinese roof is modified into a gently sloping roof. Sharp angles, strong lines, steep planes, and garish colours are all avoided. The overall effect of a piece of Korean art is generally gentle and mellow. It is an art of fluent lines. What is most striking is not the rhythm so much as the quiet inner harmony.
Sufism, in its beginnings a practical method of spiritual education and self-realization, grew slowly into a theosophical system by adopting traditions of Neo-Platonism, the Hellenistic world, Gnosticism (an ancient esoteric religio-philosophical movement that viewed matter as evil and spirit as good), and spiritual currents from Iran and various countries in the ancient agricultural lands from the eastern Mediterranean to Iraq. One master who contributed to this development was the Persian St.-Suhrawardi, called al-Maqtul ("killed"), executed in 1191 in Aleppo. To him is attributed the philosophy of ishraq ("illumination"), and he claimed to unite the Persian (Zoroastrian) and Egyptian (Hermetic) traditions. His didactic and doctrinal works in Arabic among other things taught a complicated angelology (theory of angels); some of his smaller Persian treatises depict the journey of the soul across the cosmos; the "Orient" (East) is the world of pure lights and archangels, the "Occident" (West) that of darkness and matter; and man lives in the "Western exile."At the time of Suhrawardi's death the greatest representative of theosophic Sufism was in his 20s: Ibn al-'Arabi, born at Murcia, Spain, where speculative tendencies had been visible since Ibn Masarrah's philosophy (died 931). Ibn al-'Arabi was instructed in mysticism by two Spanish woman saints. Performing the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, he met there an accomplished young Persian lady who represented for him the divine wisdom. This experience resulted in the charming poems of the Tarjuman al-ashwaq ("Interpreter of Yearning"), which the author later explained mystically. Ibn al-'Arabi composed at least 150 volumes. His magnum opus is al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah ("The Meccan Revelations") in 560 chapters, in which he expounds his theory of unity of being.The substance of theosophic Sufism is as follows. According to the Hadith qudsi, or "holy tradition"--"I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known"--the absolute, or God, yearned in his loneliness for manifestation and created the world by effusing being upon the heavenly archetypes, a "theophany (a physical manifestation of deity) through God's imaginative power." The universe is annihilated and created every moment. Every divine name is reflected in a named one. The world and God are said to be like ice and water, or like two mirrors contemplating themselves in each other, joined by a sympathetic union. The Prophet Muhammad is the universal man, the perfect man, the total theophany of the divine names, the prototype of creation. Muhammad is the "word," each particular dimension of which is identified with a prophet, and he is also the model for the spiritual realization of the possibilities of man. The mystic has to pass the stages of the Qur'anic prophets as they are explained in the Fusus al-hikam ("Bezels of Wisdom") until he becomes united with the haqiqa Muhammadiya (the first individualization of the divine in the "Muhammadan Reality"). Man can have vision only of the form of the faith he professes, and Ibn al-'Arabi's oft-quoted verse, "I follow the religion of love wherever its camels turn," with its seeming religious tolerance means, as S.H. Nasr puts it: "the form of God is for him no longer the form of this or that faith exclusive of all others but his own eternal form which he encounters." The theories of the perfect man were elaborated by Jili (died c. 1424) in his compendium Al-insan al-kamil ("The Perfect Man") and became common throughout the Muslim world.Ibn al-'Arabi's theosophy has been attacked by orthodox Muslims and mystics of the "sober" school as incongruent with Islam because "a thoroughly monistic system cannot take seriously the objective validity of moral standards." Even the adversaries of the "greatest master" could not, however, help using part of his terminology. Innumerable mystics and poets propagated his ideas, though they only partly understood them, and this circumstance led also to a misinterpretation of the data of early Sufism in the light of existential monism. Later Persian poetry is permeated by the pantheistic feeling of hama ost ("everything is He").Ibn al-'Arabi's contemporary in Egypt, the poet Ibn al-Farid, is usually mentioned together with him; Ibn al-Farid, however, is not a systematic thinker but a full-fledged poet who used the imagery of classical Arabic poetry to describe the state of the lover in extremely artistic verses and has given, in his Ta'iyat al-kubra ("Poem of the Journey"), glimpses of the way of the mystic, using, as many poets before and after him did, for example, the image of the shadow play for the actions of the creatures who are dependent upon the divine play-master. His unifying experience is personal and is not the expression of a theosophical system.
A statistical service is essential in planning, administering, and evaluating health services. The interest of public authorities in medical-care schemes has increased the importance of statistics on the incidence of diseases and other problems, as well as the epidemiology necessary to combat them. Both are vital in the planning, organization, and evaluation of medical-care schemes. Traditionally, the epidemiological method was used for infectious diseases, but it is now being used increasingly for non-infectious diseases and the problems of medical care, changes resulting from an aging population. In more affluent nations, an increase in older age groups brings about the need for public health facilities to provide special services for them. Health care of the elderly includes measures to prevent premature aging and the chronic and degenerative diseases and to confront the psychological problems resulting from loneliness and inactivity. Geriatric clinics have been set up to meet these needs and to conduct research into the process of senescence.
(Portuguese: "yearning"), overtone of melancholy and brooding loneliness and an almost mystical reverence for nature that permeates Portuguese and Brazilian lyric poetry. Saudade was a characteristic of the earliest Portuguese folk poetry and has been cultivated by sophisticated writers of later generations. In the late 19th century António Nobre and Teixeira de Pascoais were the foremost of a growing cult of saudosismo. Especially in the poems collected in Só (1892), Nobre was intensely Portuguese in his themes, his mood (an all-pervading saudade), and his rhythms; whereas Teixeira de Pascoais typified the pantheist tendencies of Portuguese poetry. They inspired the movement known as the Renascença Portuguesa, centred on Porto about 1910. The Portuguese Renaissance's poets, particularly Mário Beirão, Augusto Casimiro, and João de Barros, adopted saudosismo as the key to the nation's greatness.
