How to Become a Worm, a Faqr, Not Yourself, Nothing

It’s a popular sport, it seems, to make fun of the Calvinist view of the human being as a worm.  How absurd, we think.  Didn’t the Renaissance, which preceded Calvin, turn all this religious drivel on its head and praise the glory of man.  Think Pico della Mirandola’s oration “On the Dignity of Man.”  Think Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.  Calvin and his ilk were nothing but religious reactionaries.   

So the popular interpretation goes.  Whether we blame Calvin or other religious leaders, we often assume that to be modern, to be progressive, to be scientific we need to move beyond God and glorify, or at least focus on,  humankind.

But let’s dig a little deeper.  It’s not just Calvin.  It’s not just dead theologians from another age than our enlightened one.  And it’s not just religious reactionaries who speak of God and of the smallness of humankind in relation to God.  To cultivate proper humility  among human beings is not to muzzle intellect, art, and science.  It is to place humankind in perspective.

Just as the Renaissance was necessary to highlight  humankind and the temporal world, now, in our post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment world, it is necessary to be reminded that humankind and the material world are not all that there is.  We need to de-center humankind for many reasons.  One, anthropocentrism and human pride have contributed to the damage of our environment.  Two, our concern for our selves interferes with our ability to relate to others and is the cause of much suffering.

Maybe it’s time to take another look at what Calvin and other mystics and ordinary people were trying to remind us of.

Yes, John Calvin spoke of human beings as worms before the majesty of God. He also was a Renaissance man and praised the glories of human reason and humankind’s creative accomplishment in the political and artistic realms.  What he wanted to remind people of is the danger of making humankind ALL. 

The Qu’ran, too, speaks of this when it says, “O, humankind! You are the poor!  Allah is plenitude.” (35:15)  It is partly for this reason that Sufis became faqrs and faqirahs, ones who are poor, indigent and needy.  Their torn and patched cloaks were a reminder of their poverty of self in relation to God.  “The work you do,” Jalal al-Din Rumi writes, “yourself not in the midst, that is work done by God—know this for sure.” (Mystical Poems of Rumi, tr. A.J. Arberry, 2:32)

This teaching is not for mystics, but for everyone.  It is not for one tradition, but for all.  

Jews bow and cover their heads, Christians bow and kneel, Muslims prostrate themselves, and Buddhists bow—these are not the acts of submissive persons; they are reminders of who we are in relation to that which surpasses all our thought and feeling, the circumference we can never reach—small, fragile, ephemeral creatures not fit to be the center or scope of the universe. Pascal saw this while looking at the night sky filled with stars and recorded it in his Pensees, not to demean the human creature, but to place it in the proper perspective. . These gestures are a call to awake from the illusion of our great selfhood and find ourselves in a genuine humility that liberates us to find our true place in the world of nature, humans, and other animals..