Al-Ghazali

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Deliverer from Error, the Revival of the Religious Sciences and The Niche of Lights.

Certain knowledge

Al-Ghazali begins from a demand. Certain knowledge, he writes in The Deliverer from Error, is knowledge in which the thing known is laid bare so that no doubt remains with it and no possibility of error. He knows that ten is more than three in that way: if someone claimed the reverse and proved it by turning a stick into a snake before his eyes, he would wonder how the trick was done, but he would not doubt what he knows.

Measured against that demand, most of what he held failed. The senses deceive: the eye looks at a shadow and sees it standing still, though an hour later it has moved; it sees a star the size of a coin, though geometry shows it larger than the earth. Reason judges the senses, but what judges reason? In a dream a man believes what he sees and on waking knows it false; perhaps there is a state beyond waking that would show waking itself to be a dream, as the Sufis claim for their states, and as the saying goes that people are asleep and wake when they die. The doubt lasted nearly two months, he says, and no argument cured it. It was cured by a light that God cast into his breast, and that light, he holds, is the key to most knowledge.

Tasting

Then he weighed the seekers of his day. The theologians defend the faith, but argue from premises their opponents grant, and so cannot heal a doubter. The philosophers are sound in mathematics and logic, partly sound in the study of nature, and full of error in metaphysics. Those who wait on an infallible hidden teacher already have one in the Prophet. Only the Sufis offered what he sought, and their way could not be learned from books, because its heart is tasting, dhawq: a change of state, not a set of propositions.

His example is a famous one. There is a difference between knowing the definition of health and its causes and being healthy, and between knowing the definition of drunkenness and being drunk: the drunk man knows nothing of the definition and is drunk, and the sober man knows it and is not. What can be learned of the Sufi way by study he learned, he says; what remained could be reached only by walking it.

Beyond the intellect

He sets the human being on a ladder of perception. A child first has touch, then sight, hearing and taste; at about seven comes discernment; later the intellect, which grasps what the senses cannot. Beyond the intellect lies another stage, in which an eye opens to the hidden and to what is to come, and this is prophecy. A taste of it is given to everyone in true dreams, where the sleeper sees the unseen while the senses are stilled. One who denies this stage is like a man born blind who is told of colours and denies them because he has never seen one.

The self and its four natures

The Alchemy of Happiness opens on the saying that whoever knows himself knows his Lord, and sets the seeker four things to know: the self, God, this world and the next. To know the self is to know that the true human being is not the body but a subtle reality that the books call by four names, heart, spirit, self and intellect, each of which also has a bodily meaning. The heart is a king, the body its kingdom, the senses and limbs its soldiers, the intellect its vizier, and desire and anger its servants, who must serve and never rule.

He gives the same teaching as a picture. Inside a person's skin, he says, live a pig, a dog, a devil and a sage. The pig is appetite and the dog is anger; the devil stirs them up and lends them cunning; the sage is the intellect. Whoever obeys the pig and the dog has made them his masters, and the work of the path is to bring both under the sage, so that appetite and anger become the servants of what is good.

The mirror, the pool and the painters

The heart is a mirror in which the truth of things can appear, and the remembrance that polishes it is taught on The Sufis. Al-Ghazali adds why a heart shows nothing. A mirror fails for five reasons: it is unfinished, like iron not yet shaped, as a child's heart is; it is rusted, as a heart is by sins; it is turned away from what it should show, as a heart busy only with outward things is; a veil hangs before it, as a belief taken on trust in childhood hangs before the heart; or it does not face the place where the thing lies, as when a seeker does not know the way to what is sought.

Knowledge reaches the heart in two ways, as water reaches a pool. It can run in through streams from outside, which is learning by the senses and by study; or the pool can be dug until clear water rises from its own floor, which is the way of the Sufis. To show the difference he tells of a contest between the painters of Byzantium and of China. The Byzantines covered their wall with marvellous paintings, while the Chinese only polished the wall facing it; when the curtain between them was drawn back, every painting appeared on the polished wall, more beautiful still. The scholars paint the heart, and the Sufis polish it.

The cure of character

The Revival is built in four quarters of ten books each: acts of worship, the customs of daily life, the vices that destroy and the virtues that save. In its second half he works as a physician of the heart. Good character can be acquired, he holds, because a trait is formed by doing its acts until they come naturally. A miser who wants to be generous must give, even when giving hurts, until it becomes easy and then a joy; the proud must do the deeds of the humble; and each vice is treated by its opposite, as a physician treats heat with cold.

The guide treats each pupil by his own illness, as a physician does not give every patient the same medicine. One who is held by the love of wealth is set to giving it away, one held by the love of status is set to humble work, and each is watched until the trait has changed, so that the cure is never harsher or longer than the sickness needs.

Fire and cotton

In The Incoherence of the Philosophers he denies that what we call a cause makes its effect by necessity. When fire touches cotton the cotton burns, but we see only that the burning comes with the touching, never that it comes from it. Fire is lifeless and does nothing; the burning is created by God at the touching, as he creates all things, and he can withhold it, as he did when Abraham was cast into the fire. The order of nature is God's custom, steady because he keeps it, and a miracle breaks no law.

Of the twenty teachings he attacks, three he judges unbelief: that the world is eternal, that God does not know particular things, and that bodies do not rise again. The other seventeen he counts errors, not unbelief. And he warns the other way too: whoever defends the faith by denying what is proved, such as the cause of an eclipse, does the faith harm.

The Niche of Lights

In The Niche of Lights he reads the verse of the Qur'an that calls God the light of the heavens and the earth. Light is what is seen and makes other things seen, and in that sense God alone is light in truth; every other light is borrowed from him, as the moon's light is borrowed from the sun. The parts of the verse are the powers of the soul. The niche is the spirit of the senses; the glass is the imagination; the lamp is the intellect; the blessed tree is reflective thought, which branches; and the oil that would almost shine though no fire touched it is the holy spirit of prophecy.

On the saying of the seventy veils of light and darkness he ranks the seekers. Some are veiled by darkness alone, by the senses and the self; some by light mixed with darkness, worshipping what they picture; some by light alone, holding a true but still limited idea of God. Those who arrive pass beyond every veil and find, as the Qur'an says, that everything perishes except his face.