The name of Kahlil Gibran is acquitted with that of a poet, philosopher and artist. He is considered as one of the genius of his age, not only in the Near East, but certainly beyond. In this essay I want to convey some ideas that Gibran held on Jesus. Before doing so, I will discuss some introductory points to help us understand who Gibran was and his cultural milieu.

Gibran was born on January 6, 1883 in the small village of Bsherri, in the Northern part of Lebanon. He died on April 10, 1931 at the age of forty-eight, in New York. Certainly three important factors are worth mentioning in the life of Gibran: 1. The female influence that Gibran hadHis mother was had a prominent role in his intellectual maturation. Also five other women influenced Gibran�s life, concept of love and thought: Miss Hala Daher whom he immortalized in his novel The Broken Wings under the name of Selma. He wished to marry her but was refused because she issued from a wealthy family, and was promised already as a child by her parents to the hands of someone else; Miss Mary Haskell, with who he had an everlasting tie of friendship, apart from being a benefactress to Gibran; Emile Michel, a young, beautiful and self-confident French woman who taught French. Gibran never met personally, the female writer May Ziadeh, except through correspondence, however Gibran dreamt a lot of her and wished very much to end his moments of life close to her. Miss Barbara Young, who was Gibran�s biographer and friend. 2. His traveling helped him widen his experiences. He studied in America, Lebanon, France, and visited Greece, Italy and Spain. Apart from his Arabic influence, the Bible, F. Nietzsche, Buddhism, and W. Blake were the foreign in his works. 3. The spiritual and religious influence of Gibran. Gibran belonged to the Maronite Catholic Church. His mother was the daughter a Maronite priest. But after the episode with Miss Hala Daher, Gibran contested greatly the aristocratic Lebanese family and with it the Church. Writing the Spiritus Rebellious, his famous criticism of Lebanese high official society, religious ministers, and corrupted marriage love. As a result, Gibran was excommunicated from the Maronite Church and exiled by the Lebanon�s Turkish Government; also both of them burned his works in the market place. In 1908 his exile was revoked.

What is Religion for Man? For Gibran: Homo est naturaliter animal religiosum. Religion is a metaphysical dimension of human reality, and consequently there is a primordial manner of worshipping, natural to the soul. Therefore religion is eternally inscribed in the very core of human existence and is not the privilege of some institution. Religion for Gibran is theocentric. But for Gibran it is easier for the human mind to talk to God but not about God. Therefore this implies the importance of faith, which is different from knowledge. Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking (sand and Foam., p. 71). For Gibran the individual must search God in his unique way, for the interior presence of the Supreme Being appears differently to different persons. Man expresses his faith in God by loving, respecting and caring for others. For Gibran God is everywhere present and the whole creation attests to the living presence of God the Creator (creation must not be just understood as ex nihilo). Man through his actions must try to bring the world to a greater and purer perfection, that is man as a co-worker with the Divine. According to Gibran, man is need of God, and God is also in search of man. When the soul reaches God it will be conscious that it is in God, and that it is seeking more of itself in being in God, and that God too is growing and seeking crystallizing (Beloved Prophet., p. 267). A concluding point on God as proposed by Gibran is that he always portrayed God with the features and personality of a sensitive woman. The female sex is more perfect than the male sex, and the qualities of compassion, providence and love suit better the female than the masculine gender.

In this section of the ideas proposed by Gibran on God, my main source is the book: Ghougassian, J., Kahlil Gibran: Wings of Thought, Philosophical Library, New York, 1973.

Gibran was deeply touched by the person of Jesus. He was a great reader of the Bible, from which he extrapolated his image of the person of Christ. Gibran, perfected his concept of Jesus in the evening of November 12., 1926, when, following a moving mystical vision, wrote down the very first words of what later had to become his monumental book Jesus, The Son of Man.

Jesus the Madman: From several of the writings of Gibran one can easily conclude the Jesus was for Gibran a Madman. However attention must be paid to what definition he is to give to the meaning of madman. For Gibran the madman is the one who is able to liberate himself from the masks that hinder man from being himself: You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen - the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives - I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting: "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves." Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me. And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my our naked face and my soul was inflamed with love from the sun, and wanted my masks no more. And as if in trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks." Thus I became a madman. Jesus is the man who is able to raise his head and look above the others. He is able to come to terms with himself with whatever he is doing. The most important of all is that the madman, who symbolizes to a certain extent Jesus, is able to crucify himself for Man. And when I was hanged between earth and heaven they lifted their heads to see me. And they were exalted, for their heads had never before been lifted. But as they stood looking up at me one called out, "For what art thou seeking to atome?" And another cried, "In what cause dost thou sacrifice thyself?" And a third said, "thinkest thou with this price to buy world glory?" Then said a fourth, "Behold, how he smiles! Can such pain be forgiven?" And I answered them all, and said: " Remember only that I smiled. I do not atone - nor sacrifice - nor wish for glory; and I have nothing to forgive. I thirsted - and I besought you to give me my blood to drink. For what is there can quench a madman�s thirst but his own blood? I was dumb - and I asked wounds of you for months. I was imprisoned in your days and nights - and I sought a door into larger and nights.

But Jesus for Gibran was not made of different stuff than other man, except that he had successfully developed to its peak the divine potentialities of love and compassion that God the Creator encompasses within our nature. For Gibran the supernatural is implanted within each man and it comes to each individual to realize the divinity of his nature. The soul is a link in the divine chain. For Gibran in our pursuit of being worthy of God, he recommends to follow the path of Jesus. So for Gibran, Jesus is viewed as the great human exemplar who best fulfilled the metamorphoses of transmutation from human nature into Godlike. Gibran was certainly at this point influenced by William. Blake, who believed that in this world we can perceive the direct manifestation of the Divine presence if we take away the scales of our eyes. The Divine is incarnated in everything and the material world of our sense perception corresponds to the spiritual world. Therefore, both for Gibran and Blake, Jesus is a lived example who realized the Christian enlightenment, by perfecting through self-discipline and inner struggle his human and divine nature. What Jesus wanted for himself he also wanted for his disciples: My face and your face shall not be masked; our hands shall hold neither sword nor scepter, and our subjects shall love us in peace and shall not be in fear of us.

But does this mean that for Gibran Jesus is not divine? A very difficult question to answer, and I may be very arrogant to discuss such question. Certainly the Church in which Gibran was a member emphasized greatly Christ�s Divinity, to the detriment of lessening Christ humanity. But one cannot say that Gibran does not give a divine aspect to Jesus. According to Gibran there is something strange about this Jesus. And when the Persians beheld Mary and her babe, they took gold and silver from their bags, and myrrh and frankincense, and laid them all at the feet of the child. Then they fell down and prayed in a strange tongue which we did not understand. And when I (Anna, mother of Mary) led them to the bedchamber prepared for them they walked as if they were in awe at what they had seen. Also this Jesus is a true lover of man. He is able to love Man in himself: You have many lovers, and yet I alone love you. Other men love themselves in your nearness. I love you in your self. Other men see a beauty in you that shall fade away sooner than their own years. But I see in you a beauty that shall not fade away, and in the autumn of your days that beauty shall not be afraid to gaze at itself in the mirror, and it shall not be offended. I alone love the unseen in you. For Gibran Jesus can enter the temple of the soul in man, which is his own body. Jesus healed many also physically. But certainly for Gibran Jesus is the Man who is accessible to the humans. Gibran had no attachment for organized religion. This is why he never meant to speak of Jesus of the Christians, but of Jesus of Nazareth, the man who had a mother and father, that is, the Son of Man. Jesus that Gibran described is not the Jesus of theology and dogmas. He rather depicts to us a Jesus made of flesh, tormented by human passion, but who, however, has transcended the evil limitations of lust, injustice and insensitiveness. Gibran gives several titles to Jesus: Son of my daughter, master physician of His people, never married. For Gibran Jesus was a human being. From the writings of Gibran one can feel that he had a personal human encounter with Jesus. Jesus was a human being: able to laugh, cry, be happy, was part of his people, close to the earth, never judged others and accepted all sinners, and above all gave great importance to the heart, to the inward search for the essential things life. Therefore according to Gibran writings, the people were attracted to Jesus. Jesus� personality and words distinguished him from the others, although he was a father, a brother and a son for all.

According to Gibran, Jesus was never a hypocrite. The mission of Jesus never consisted in establishing an organized institution with rules, codes, sanctions and a hierarchy of minds. Jesus never meant to erect a specific geographical location where God his Father would and should be physically present. Jesus is depicted by Gibran as accusing the scribes and pharisees of setting snares and digging pitfalls (erecting the kingdom of this world) in the path of those who long after the Kingdom, and He denounced them. It is interesting to note that Gibran doesn�t give a pleasant picture of St. Paul, for he translated the experience of Christ into theology and dogma. For Gibran Jesus is against the stable religion and state. It may also be that Gibran saw himself and his own experience in the person of Jesus. Gibran named a story he wrote depicting this struggle between Jesus and His message against the organized church and state: Khalil the Heretic. One must know that the original name of Gibran was Khalil, and it was during his first stay in US that influenced by his teachers and friends changed it to Kahlil. Could it be that this story is a parable of his own life?

Is the idea of Jesus according to Gibran valid for a Roman Christian? Some aspects in Gibran�s thoughts that are essential to Christ are lacking. But I am struck by some points that Gibran had of Jesus especially the importance given to the personhood of Jesus. Also one can be an expert in theology, but have no experience of Christ in his life. It is very easy to render theology just to a science, I think that it something more. There are essential things created in us and restored through Grace which are worth searching.

One can find may works of Gibran as well as some good commentaries on the author at the University Library of Malta, and the Pope John XXIII, as well at the Seminarian Library. I personally urge for the reading of some of his own works, especially the famous: The Prophet and Jesus, The Son of Man. Let yourself be carried in mind and heart to were ever Gibran has to lead you�