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Pages 59-75
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Prophet, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Prophets and Intelligibility
Fear and Social Conventions
Silence and Communication
Religion
Summary
Analysis
Next, a priestess asks about prayer. Almustafa says he wishes that the citizens would pray in times of joy and not just in distress. Prayer, he says, should be a visit to the “temple invisible” with the goal of “ecstasy and sweet communion” with everyone else praying at that moment. The prophet tells the crowd that he cannot teach them how to pray using words, for God puts little stock in words. He tells them rather to listen to the natural landscape, which will reveal the silent prayer to God that it puts forth.
Almustafa’s speech about prayer returns to the distrust of speech touched on earlier, as well as to the value of looking to nature and allowing oneself to become receptive to a message coming from somewhere deeper than oneself. His mention of the “temple invisible” frames worship as something that should be transcendent and spiritual in a metaphysical sense.
Themes
A hermit then asks about pleasure. Almustafa commends pleasure, in contrast to common denunciations of it; he calls it a “freedom song.” However, this is not the same as freedom, and Almustafa acknowledges pleasure’s value while recognizing its limitations. He does not rebuke youths for seeking pleasure, and he wishes that elders would remember former pleasures fondly instead of regretting them, for “regret is the beclouding of the mind.” He finds some people’s flight from pleasure to be a source of pleasure for them in itself. He rejects the inclination to abstain from pleasures, suggesting the denied urges only accumulate. He then tells the citizens to be in pleasure like the flowers and the bees, who mutually take pleasure in giving and receiving from one another.
Almustafa’s teaching on pleasure calls to mind his doctrine on reason and passion: as with passion, he proves that puritanical attempts to banish pleasure are misguided by pointing to its evident occurrence in nature. As with reason and passion, he urges a balance regarding pleasure: it is nothing to be ashamed of, and yet it is not all that there is to life. With the image of bees and flowers, he ties pleasure to his economic doctrine of mutual respect and universal satisfaction.
Themes
At this point, a poet asks about beauty. Almustafa gives several examples of people defining beauty as reflections of their own personalities and whatever they happen to want or lack at the moment. Yet, the prophet says, “beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.” It is an ineradicable image and song, an encounter with life in its unveiled holiness, which is really identical with the individual’s encounter with themself.
A priest now asks about religion. Almustafa replies that everything he has been speaking of today falls under that category, as religion is inseparable from the daily actions of life—and any attempts to separate the two are futile. The prophet critiques the orthodox treatment of morality as simply a “garment,” denouncing a rigid set of rules in favor of a simpler, freer, and more intimate relationship with the divine. Daily life, he says, is one’s temple, and God need not be sought through solving “riddles” but can be plainly witnessed in natural phenomena and the laughter of children.
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Almitra now speaks again, asking finally about death. Almustafa responds that death can only be known if one opens oneself wholly to life, “[f]or life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” Fear of death is just nervousness before receiving a great honor. Physical death is merely returning to the elements and thereby having one’s life forces liberated.
