The Prophet was there…
Protected by the shadow of the God of Friendship, withdrawn, with a welcoming face and reassuring look, he is one whose eyes reveal all the profundity of the cosmos. There is intelligence there and an expression of grandeur appears in each detail.
In him there is the serenity of a Moses before his Creator, or of Isaiah or of Plato. There he meditates.
His thoughts are of God and of that existence where this wonderful human adventure began, from the creation of the world to its culminating point – the appearance of Christ on this earth, with Golgotha and the Resurrection, and so down to our own day. He sees the procession of the titans, those whom he finds worthy of note, Socrates and Plato, Euclid and Thales, Pythagoras and St. Paul, Michelangelo and Raphael, Dante, Beethoven and Mozart, Shakespeare and Delacroix and Pasteur and Einstein … and not of course forgetting himself.
Few are they, those outstanding men of the human race, monuments of the intellect, of science, of art and of history.
He is himself a luminary shining among the great lights, with spiritual outreach rising to the highest spheres.
A creator in dialogue with his Creator, he is of this world, yes, but I see him as superhuman. He is there, already enthroned in eternity, radiating glory.
Tribune, theologian, poet, historian, an artist pure, free and bold, he knows well how to handle the epithets, to embrace them or reject them, when he comes to his Holy of Holies, Lebanon, sacred soil sanctified by Christ and by Holy Writ.
A master, he teaches greatness and love of Lebanon, justice, truth and brotherhood.
He is one of the stars of this great Phoenician-European civilization and enterprise of the human spirit, where the shining figure of the Virgin of Illige stands out, offering us her Holy Child.
He is there, firmly seated in the Lebanon of six thousand years of antiquity, unfolding its civilizations, its arts, its heroes, its saints and its makers of human existence.
Magician of words, researching in the laboratories of thought, theologian never dividing Christ God from the Virgin Mary…
Son of the Cedars of Lebanon, son of Sannine and of Hermon, Saïd Akl, a giant of poetic fire and polychrome perfumes; with sounds enchanting, rhythms harmonious, his poems are prayers with all the force of his soul, of his visions born of religion and of righteousness unswerving! A great Lebanese, full worthy of his great name, a spirit open and warm, seeking always to know, to learn, to serve, and to love.
Born of the Sun and of El…
With outreaching hand he gathers the stars and all heavenly bodies as an innocent child from a fruit tree gathers multi-colored stars of gold.
Through the humdrum visible, he explores the image of the divine Invisible.
A simple man, but demanding, for where love of country is concerned his stance is firm
He has never known compromise, and where religion is concerned, for him God has made himself known. Two thousand years ago he lived among us. Christ is the God of love…Ecce Homo just as Ecce Libanus.
For nearly fifty years I have known Saïd Akl, half a century of glory, of greatness and of cultural ascension.
When making reform of this means of communication that is this language, he knew that he was reforming thought, this other essence almost virginal and intact in our Middle Eastern world.
A humanist, a great heart, a monk adoring in the cloister of thought, he preaches high on the dignity of access to the freedoms, the freedoms outside of us and the freedoms inside, the latter to be attained only when the former are assured.
Every form of expression, artistic, political, cultural and religious is bound up with freedom within. This it is that has made Europe a great home of civilizations, of free nations sheltering free people.
Liberty, a common possession, like patriotism in all its forms, liberty individual and collective at the same time, freedom to reach the highest summits of science, of holiness and of art.
In the school where the wind of liberty blows, Saï Akl has boldly chosen the great beacons of civilization, Athens, Rome, Florence and Paris, all daughters of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Ugarit.
His spirit has taken in all of them to make a synthesis at once spiritual, cultural and patriotic, inspired by El, Christ, Plato and Saint Paul.
Of Saïd Akl the boundless, whom I try out of love to enfold, I would like by these few words to give an idea, with the high worth and merited renown that all affirm.
Joseph Matar
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Translated from French: K.J.Mortimer
