The Visionary Eye

The fourth dimension of Mazeppist paideia is designed to train the visionary eye. There are those to whom this faculty comes unbidden: spontaneously, as a gift of grace. For others, the ordinary ecstasies of the everyday become available after many years of cultivating the "inner eye." In tasawwuf, one must first arrive at the state of fana' (loss of self) before one can continue forward in a state of baqa' (as a transfigured self, capable of retrieving in consciousness the effects of fana' and, therefore, equipped with the visionary eye). Whether by dint of disciplined effort or spontaneous gift (or some combination of the two), a process of sublimation occurs. James Joyce declared that "it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments" (Joyce, Stephen Hero). It is not for the Mazeppist to gainsay the conclusions of the visionary Mr. Joyce.

"This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."

--James Joyce, Stephen Hero.

A (now classic) example:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

--William Blake, Songs of Experience.

Mazeppist Paideia

Bosnian gentleman reading the Qur'an at the graveside of a loved one.

Like that of John Keats before him, one may regard as truncated Richard Rorty's schema of "Soul-making." Rorty's tripartite schema (contingency, irony, and solidarity) can be expanded to include a fourth (Thoreauvian) dimension: ecstasy.

Through a "proper" education, i.e., one that disabuses the student of foundationalism and other forms of naive realism, the contingent nature of the human condition is acknowledged. Note that "acknowledgement" is the goal of this paideia: knowledge that is self-reflective. The journey to such acknowledgement is typically a long one. When it is reached, the student has come to terms with human being-in-the-world.

The tarbiyya (character building) involved in "coming to terms" with the human condition is not only lengthy, but also painful. Here Keats is indispensable: for he recognized the critical role of suffering in the vale of Soul-making.

Coming to terms with the process of suffering by which an individual "soul" is differentiated from a common pool of intelligence amounts to one act of reconciliation; a second act of reconciliation occurs in the aftermath of the first: for how does one go forward in light of the past? Rorty prescribed irony. The Mazeppist would agree with Rorty, but stipulate to a particular species of irony: the Jobean (Ayoubian) variety. "Though He/It slay me, yet will I trust Him/It" (Job 13:15). One moves forward not at all blind to the hazards of the road ahead but with lucid comprehension: this is the hand we are dealt; let us play it with as much wit and class as we can muster and, in so doing, demonstrate ourselves to be better than our fate.

When the ironic comportment is achieved, it is added to the acknowledgement of the first dimension. Now the student has entered her "sophomore year" as it were. She has acquired a degree of worldly wisdom, but the paideia continues; for now (if she has not done so already) she must look about her--look beyond herself--to discover the suffering of others. The fully ironized consciousness will recognize itself adrift on a ship of fools and will make a choice: for compassion over contempt, for affirmation of the human condition over self-pity and despair. And she will apply herself, to whatever degree she is capable, to alleviate the suffering of others and to enter the historic struggle against man's cruelty to man. This is Rorty's third dimension: solidarity in suffering.

At this point, Rorty's pragmatism finds its hands full. He can go no further; his spade is turned. Frankly, for many people, to reach this level of the paideia is quite an accomplishment. Indeed, if every man and woman on the face of this earth dedicated him or herself to reaching Rorty's third dimension and lived out their days actively fulfilling its requirements, we would find ourselves inhabiting a veritable Golden Age. The Mazeppist would have no objection to living in this Rortian Utopia. But there is a further possible dimension--a "fourth" dimension--available to those who can achieve it: and Mazeppist paideia would offer nothing beyond Rortian Romantic Humanism if it did not venture further.

The "fourth" dimension is the dimension of raqiya or "transcendentalism." It is the dimension of Thoreauvian ecstatic witness.

And so the fourfold paideia of the Mazeppist is as follows: contingency, irony, solidarity, and ecstasy. But what constitutes the fourth dimension (the dimension of "spiritual seniority" or shaykh-hood)? Well, courage for one thing: the courage to confront the worm that Jean-Paul Sartre asserted lies coiled in the heart of being, i.e., nothingness. Such a confrontation is a supreme exercise of freedom in the face of one's own mortal fate; and every exercise of freedom in this way requires of one the supreme sacrifice of emptying oneself of one's self. In other words, the confrontation with the emptiness that lies coiled in the heart of being requires one to identify with that emptiness and to become empty.

The fourth dimension requires yet another form of acknowledgment: for to come to terms with it, one must likewise come to terms with the fact that one has been empty all along. Being is shot through with non-being just as life and death are caught in mutual embrace.

Existentialism is a mysticism that proposes an ironic "solution" to the human condition: life lived to the full is an empty life. And so it is traditionally said that the "true Sufi" is the one who is not.

The final irony belongs to Thoreau: for the one who has stepped outside of the illusions of being this or that and comes bearing "ecstatic witness" has achieved itlaq or liberation. She is now free to redeem whatever time is allotted her brief spark of individuated life in a manner that incorporates, yes, but also goes beyond Rortian solidarity. For now she sees through the veils of being (maya). And every moment is pregnant with the new possibilities that this kind of visionary way of being-in-the-world presents to her.

She has died before her death. She is an abdal (a transcendental changeling): no matter where she goes, no matter what she does, she is free.

Mazeppa, Falsafa and Tarjima

The task of the translator (mutarjim) and that of the faylasuf are intertwined. In fact, historically speaking, the 'Abbasid translation project of the 9th-10th centuries C.E. provided the impetus for falsafa. This fact should never be forgotten.

Mazeppism is falsafa for Mazeppa was translated (literally, "carried across") from one way of being-in-the-world to another and, in the event, had to find his footing while balancing himself between two disparate realities.

Mazeppist, faylasuf, and mutarjim are all synonyms: they each point to cognate truths.

John Keats's Gnostic Theodicy or Moral Ontology: the Vale of Soul-Making

"The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary imposition of God and taken to Heaven--What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion! Call the world if you Please 'The Vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world...Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence--There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls...till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. I[n]telligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God--how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain [sic] religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These three Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity...I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School--and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a Wold of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!...As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity..."

The foregoing lines are found in a famous letter that John Keats wrote to his brother (George) and sister-in-law in the Spring of 1819. In that letter, Keats outlined what I would term his "gnostic theodicy" or "moral ontology," but which he called "a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity." The degree to which this "faint sketch" resembles various Muslim accounts of the worldly career of the human being is quite uncanny; it is especially comparable to Baba Afzal's hikmah.

Of course, many Muslim pietists might argue that Keats only gets it half-right: the creation (or moral definition) of individual character (khulq) should produce within the transfigured spark that Keats names a "soul" a longing to be reunited with the divine source of that original intelligence or spark. According to this view, the sculpting of the perfected self over the course of a lifetime is actually preparation for the final leg of the journey--which is accomplished by means of ecstasy-inducing exercises and which, in turn, prepare the practitioner for death.

For Keats, Soul-making is an end in itself; for the vast majority of Muslims who are not pietists, on the other hand, Soul-making--though essential to salvation--is not an end in itself but, rather, a preparation for Judgment Day.

For most Muslims, ecstatic "tastes" of future bliss are not deemed necessary milestones on the road to eternity: that sort of experience is reserved to the "spiritual athletes," the adepts. Even so, there is an ordinary ecstasy of the everyday available to any who would "taste" it--and without which one's rice bowl is regrettably empty. Let those who hunger taste and see.

Recent Ruminations on Keats

The Vale of Soul-Making

The Keatsian Turn

"Like Keats, the more [Wordsworth] feels his mortality, the more vital and fresh and precious the things of this world seem. 'How astonishingly,' says Keats a year before his death, 'does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us. Like poor Falstaff, though I do not babble, I think of green fields. I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy...I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our sp[r]ing are what I want to see again' (Letters, 2:260). Those simple flowers may resemble Wordsworth's 'meanest flower that blows' ["Immortality" ode, line 204] but there is this important difference: for Keats it is the flowers in and of themselves that matter, rather than their participation in the grand union of mind and nature. The actual flowers are beautiful. That is enough."

--Ronald A. Sharp, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty, Athens: University of Georgia Press (1979), 58.

Crazy Jane on God

That lover of a night
Came when he would,
Went in the dawning light
Whether I would or no;
Men come, men go;
All things remain in God.

Banners choke the sky;
Men-at-arms tread;
Armoured horses neigh
In the narrow pass:
All things remain in God.



Before their eyes a house
That from childhood stood
Uninhabited, ruinous,
Suddenly lit up
From door to top:
All things remain in God.

I had wild Jack for a lover;
Though like a road
That men pass over
My body makes no moan
But sings on:
All things remain in God.

--William Butler Yeats

Mazeppism's High Argument

Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and
Hope,
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in wildest commonalty spread;
Of the individual Mind that keeps her own
Inviolate retirement, subject there
To Conscience only, and the law supreme
Of that Intelligence which governs all--
I sing: --"fit audience let me find though
few!"
So prayed, more gaining than he asked,
the Bard--
In holiest mood...

...the Mind of Man--
My haunt, and the main region of my song
--Beauty--a living Presence of the earth,
Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms
Which craft of delicate Spirits hath com-
posed
From earth's materials--waits upon my
steps;
Pitches her tents before me as I move,
An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of
old
Sought in the Atlantic Main--why should
they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
--I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal
verse
Of this great consummation:--and, by
words
Which speak of nothing more than what we
are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too--
Theme this but little heard of among men--
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended
might
Accomplish:--this is our high argument.

--William Wordsworth, The Recluse, 769-825.

Blind Genius

Beginning with Being and Time, Martin Heidegger built his philosophical reputation on an extended argument about the state of philosophy in our Evening Lands. He complained that it had lost its way, that philosophers had stopped asking the vital questions--had stopped interrogating "Being" and become obsessed, instead, with "beings." He admitted that this shift had produced one happy accident (the rise and development of the natural sciences) but, in his view, that too had become deeply problematic. Since the philosophers had abandoned their leading role in the development of Eveninglander intellectual life and become subservient to scientists, science itself had lost its way and devolved into "scientism." With philosophers out of the "wisdom business," scientists turned towards the production of technology. As a direct consequence, the Evening Lands lost their soul to capitalism and technicalism. Heidegger spent his intellectual energies trying to "retrace" philosophy's steps, to divert the Evening Lands from an historical trajectory that would be their ruin. In this respect, he was an heir to Thoreau and Tolstoy.

Like most Eveninglanders before and since, the German thinker was unaware that falsafa (also known traditionally as hikmah or wisdom) had not lost its way: that it had continued to develop a cosmological vision that was essentially ethical and aesthetic and (perhaps Quixotically) devoted to interrogating the Gordian knot that is the problem of the One and the Many--a knot that most Evening Land intellectuals, with characteristically Alexandrine impatience, had peremptorily severed.

How can they possibly be so blind? Ironically, Eveninglanders are largely incapable of considering Islamicate culture or civilization as a possible repository of wisdom because of its apparent social and technological "backwardness." So even an astute critic like Martin Heidegger would not imagine that falsafa had anything to offer him. After all, history had clearly favored the Evening Lands; the only conceivable future for them lay somewhere in the mists of their distant past. Of course, the irony here lies in the fact that it is Evening Land technicalism (the very thing Heidegger criticized) that creates this impression.

We often forget that even genius can be tragic; even genius can be blind.

Two Dimensional Dasein

"The whole philosophical enterprise [among Muslims] depends upon discerning the difference between high and low, heaven and earth, spirit and body...Body and spirit (or soul) are differentiated in terms of their attributes. One must avoid the common mistake of thinking of the two as discrete and distinct 'things.' In modern times, people tend to think of the body as something material, concrete, and real, and the soul as another discrete 'thing,' which is, however, impalpable, intangible, and unreal or illusory. This way of thinking is totally alien to the Islamic philosophical tradition...Readers of the philosophical texts should always keep in mind that body and soul are correlative terms, because they are understood and conceptualized in relation to each other. The body is a reality that is known only in terms of its qualities, and the spirit is a reality that knows itself precisely because its qualities can be differentiated from those of the body."

--William Chittick, The Heart of Islamic Philosophy, 80.

The Anthropocosmic Vision and the Fourfold

In pursuing the anthropocosmic vision, Muslim intellectuals had, by the 13th century, articulated their sense of what Martin Heidegger would later call "the fourfold" dwelling of human being: a dwelling composed of earth, sky, divinities, and their own mortal bodies.

They accomplished this feat by weaving, almost seamlessly, Qur'an and ahadith into a rich tapestry of Hellenistic cosmology, Persianate theosophy, and ethical reflection that drew from all of the above plus Biblical and pre-Islamic Arab sources.

The goal was to construct a "Theory of Everything" that could be both guide to life and an explanation of why the world is as it is. Synthesis mattered more than analysis and mythic comprehension more than scientific precision.

In the seminaries of Iran, today, the work continues unabated. Eveninglanders scoff at this project for a variety of reasons: it cannot be completed, one cannot corner the market on it, it defies proof, it produces nothing more than a discursive tradition. What good is it?

There are many responses to that question, but one will have to suffice: it keeps alive the epic quest of individual perfectibility. Not through market forces or technological ingenuity, not through the StairMaster or surgery, not through the vicarious suffering and death of a dying and rising god (salvation deus ex machina), but through daily attention to the details of one's thoughts, feelings, words, and deeds, and the exertion of effort to correct one's comportment in light of the "theory"--less tendentiously known as a "wisdom tradition."

An Old School approach, to be sure; but an approach that has existed among human beings in one form or another since Zarathustra left the Vedic priesthood to preach a new message to his neighbors some 3,000 years ago.

The Anthropocosmic Vision

The Islamic philosophical tradition can only understand human beings in terms of the unity of the human world and the natural world. There is no place in this tradition to drive a wedge between humans and the cosmos. In the final analysis the natural world is the externalization of the human substance, and the human soul is the internalization of the realm of nature. Human beings and the whole universe are intimately intertwined, facing each other like two mirrors. The quest for wisdom can only succeed if the natural world is recognized as equivalent to one's own self, just as one must see the whole human race as the external manifestation of the potencies and possibilities of the human soul.


William Chittick, The Heart of Islamic Philosophy, 66.

Afzal the Obscure

In an article published in Sacred Web 5 (Summer 2000), William Chittick offered readers a foretaste of his soon-to-be-published book-length study of the works of Baba Afzal Kashani (The Heart of Islamic Philosophy). Of all of Chittick's contributions to Islamic Studies (and there have been many), his recovery of Baba Afzal may be the most significant. For in this 13th century faylasuf, we do indeed encounter Islamic philosophy's "heart"--the vital center--as it found expression in the life and work of a single (and singular) individual.

Chittick's article ("The Goal of Islamic Philosophy") is worth reading in its entirety--before one moves on to The Heart of Islamic Philosophy (published in 2001 by OUP). It is available in pdf here.

I wish to cite to one passage in particular:

'For Baba Afzal...the basic philosophical question is "Who am I?" Or, in other terms, "What does it mean to be human?" His answer is that the true substance of a human self, or a human soul, is intelligence, and that the proper object of intelligence's scrutiny is itself. Intelligence is fully achieved only when the knower, the known object, and the act of knowing have come to be one. This, for Baba Afzal, is tawhid--the first principle of Islamic faith--a word that is normally understood to mean "asserting the unity of God." In Baba Afzal's view, no one can grasp the unity of God who has not himself achieved the unity of soul. When it is reached, the intellect that knows is identical with the object known. Baba Afzal calls this self-knowing intellect the "radiance" (furugh) of the Divine Essence, and he tells us that this radiance can never cease to shine.' [Chittick, "Goal," 24].

The background of Hellenistic philosophy is quite substantial here: with the necessity for the human microcosm to mirror the extra-human macrocosm if (1) a harmony between the two and (2) the personal integration of the human subject itself are ever to be achieved.

But there is also an anticipation of the Romantic quest for what American philosopher Russell Goodman calls "the marriage of self and world." For Baba Afzal--as for the Romantic thinkers to follow him six centuries later--"intelligence" worthy of the name is not achieved by means of a process of distanciation but through acts of what we might call "communion" or "consummation." Human intelligence involves the whole human being: the brain is part of the nervous system. Thoughts are intimately bound up with feelings. To know oneself is to be in touch with what one feels. And self-knowledge ("Know Thyself") is the goal of falsafa. The faylasuf spends a lifetime exploring the question "Who am I?" with a methodology that comes of age in Europe and North America as Romantic Humanism ("Mazeppism").

Baba Afdal

Afdal al-Din Kashani (d. 1213/4 CE), known to his students affectionately as "Baba" (or "Papa") Afdal, "was one of the few Islamic philosophers to write almost entirely in [his native] Persian." This was a departure from the standard practice of his day which employed Arabic as the language of scholarship and technical philosophy. Baba Afdal's contribution to the Islamic intellectual tradition consists in making his "synthesis of Neoplatonic-Aristotelian and Sufi ideas intelligible to a wider audience, many of whom would have found the uncompromising and sometimes unwieldy technical precision of Arabic philosophical texts forbidding."

The "overriding concern" of Baba Afdal's body of work was "how to achieve salvific knowledge of the self (dhat, huwiyya) by means of rational inquiry and ethical cultivation. When one realizes one's own everlasting self as intellect (khirad, 'aql)--according to Baba...a kind of radiance from God--one perfects or actualizes one's own nature."

In line with much Hellenistic philosophy, Baba Afdal regarded "the human being as a microcosm of the universe" which, he held, "contains within itself all the lower levels of existence, i.e., all the actualized potentialities presupposed by its own living soul. The actualization of human existence (wujud) in particular--which Baba Afdal characterizes as 'finding' (yaftan) rather than just 'being' (budan)--consists in the full self-awareness of the intellect. It is through this perfection of self-knowledge that the soul awakens from its forgetfulness and separates itself from the body in preparation for death. But on a macrocosmic level, it is through the flowering of the human being (as a microcosm) that the potentialities of the universe as a whole can ultimately be actualized and the return or ascent of creation to God can be effected."

Baba's "epistemology of the self" appears to anticipate the key insight of Existentialism (existence precedes essence) and democratizes the Sufic (and Rabbinic) notion of the abdal or "hidden saint" for whose sake the universe continues to exist--though, in the case of Baba's ontology, the progress of the individual on the path to perfection is part and parcel of the perfection of the cosmos itself.

"What makes Baba Afdal's thought particularly interesting and compelling is its eminently practical conception of philosophy [falsafa] as a way of life, aimed at salvific self-realization and the perfection of our nature, and the stylistic verve and clarity with which he presents this project. Apart from Baba Afdal's many philosophical works, he is highly regarded for his poetry, also in Persian."

Quoted material from the entry on Afdal al-Din Kashani in Peter S. Groff, Islamic Philosophy A-Z (Edinburgh, 2007).

Enigmata

When we draw the card of the wandering eremite, we are obliged to ask ourselves if we have found a way out; if the answer is negative, the eremite urges us to look within...

There is value to studying enigmata: as Rimbaud advised George Izambard, one arrives at the unknown "through the disordering of all the senses" (Letter of May 13, 1871). Close the door to the city, as Suhrawardi would say, and open the door to the wilderness. The Suhrawardian wilderness welcomes us with its weird intensity, and we hesitate. Why? Because he was a Muslim who lived in Iran in the 12th century and we have been culturally conditioned (not to say indoctrinated) to think that nothing good could possibly come from (1) a Muslim, (2) an Iranian, and (3) the 12th century.

And yet we read Blake with only occasional flinching, or Thoreau's passing strange interjection in Walden, apropos of nothing obvious, that "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail," and do not close the book then and there and flee the premises.

Enigmata challenge us to expand our otherwise narrow conceptions of what the world contains and of what may possibly contain the world. They are resources for living a life as Thoreau and Blake and Rimbaud and, yes, Suhrawardi lived: of "ecstatic witness" (see Alan Hodder's book of that name).

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

--Arthur Rimbaud, "Phrases," Illuminations, tr. Louise Varese.

The Great Escape

When Thoreau built his little cabin by the lake and Camus's Rieux and Tarrou took their dip in the sea to escape the daily grind of fighting back the plague, they were re-enacting the mystical escape from material bondage into the purity of the wild.

In the 12th century, Shihabuddin Suhrawardi (Maqtul) composed a series of treatises in which he detailed the journey of "the aspirant out of material bondage into the realm of the soul." As summarized by W. M. Thackston, to follow this itinerary is to "close the door to the city" and "open the door to the wilderness." Suhrawardi employed a variety of images in order to convey this message but there were certain consistencies throughout his writings (which also echoed in the Persian ghazal): the city is "the realm of rationality" while the wilderness is "the abode of the 'mad.'" Thackston explains that the journey is one of "transcending" ratiocination in order to enter into the realm of "transrationalism, or intuitive knowledge, knowledge 'through the heart' rather than through the intellect." [Thackston, The Treatises of Suhrawardi, xxviii-xxix].

The key difference between the "nature mysticism" of Thoreau and Camus and the gnosis of Suhrawardi lies in the role that nature plays in the imaginaries of the modern and the pre-modern aspirant. For the modern aspirant, wild nature is, in fact, the Real to which one escapes whereas for the pre-modern aspirant the Real to which one escapes cannot be identified with wild nature, only analogized to it. Put another way, Plato was the patron saint of pre-modernity, Aristotle the patron saint of the modern.

Both Thoreau and Camus were sympathetic to the pre-modern ontology: Thoreau was steeped in the classics of East and West, Camus wrote his M.A. thesis on Neo-Platonism. But both thinkers were as inescapably modern as Suhrawardi was inescapably pre-modern.

Despite this difference, one finds in Suhrawardi in particular and Sufic thought in general a firm conviction that "the pilgrimage of the individual soul must inevitably end thus: although the soul may attain its goal of finding the [divine] 'king,' it must return whence it came and conquer the materiality that has ensnared it from the beginning." [Thackston, xxi].

The "great escape," then, is not so great; it is perhaps better described as a kind of khalwa or strategic retreat.

The Study of the Classics

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written, and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well--that is, to read true books in a true spirit--is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory--a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that: if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.

Walden
Henry David Thoreau
American Dervish

Helen's Exile

The Mediterranean has a solar tragedy that has nothing to do with mists. There are evenings, at the foot of mountains by the sea, when night falls on the perfect curve of a little bay and an anguished fullness rises from the silent waters. Such moments make one realize that if the Greeks knew despair, they experienced it always through beauty and its oppressive quality. In this golden sadness, tragedy reaches its highest point. But the despair of our world--quite the opposite--has fed on ugliness and upheavals. That is why Europe would be ignoble if suffering ever could be.

We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took arms for it. A basic difference--but one that goes far back. Greek thought was always based on the idea of limits. Nothing was carried to extremes, neither religion nor reason, because Greek thought denied nothing, neither reason nor religion. It gave everything its share, balancing light with shade. But the Europe we know, eager for the conquest of totality, is the daughter of excess. We deny beauty, as we deny everything that we do not extol. And, even though we do it in diverse ways, we extol one thing and one alone: a future world in which reason will reign supreme. In our madness, we push back the eternal limits, and at once dark Furies swoop down upon us to destroy. Nemesis, goddess of moderation, not of vengeance, is watching. She chastises, ruthlessly, all those who go beyond the limit.

Albert Camus
French-Algerian Faylasuf
Mediterranean murid

The Gospel According to this Moment

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,--the gospel according to this moment.

"Walking."
Henry David Thoreau
American Dervish

Now and Here

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

Walden
Henry David Thoreau
American Dervish

Redeeming the Time

Pre-modern thought was burdened by a category mistake that was initiated by Plato but carried forward by his various successors in one form or another: rhetorical constructions were mistaken routinely for ontological (underlying) realities. This error obscured the fact that the beautiful vision of Plotinus is not a given, it is a way of being-in-the-world to be achieved. As in Berger and Luckmann's classic The Social Construction of Reality, the "reality" we experience everyday is something collectively interpreted and individually internalized. If we know this, however, we can become--at least to a limited extent--active participants in this process. We can put our hands to the wheel and build Golgonooza. So let's get to work...

It is only by arousing the passional self and directing its energies into angelic channels that we have any hope of redeeming the time.

The Community of "Arcane Discipline"

"As he struggled with the shape that faith assumes in the world of the Nazis, the discipline of the secret was Bonhoeffer's partial answer about how the type of faith to live in the 'world come of age' might secure its boundaries within the world. While immersed within the world in the most profound way, the community of 'arcane discipline' would not drown in the waters of modernity. These boundaries were not to be protected because of a desire for personal piety, or the religious path of withdrawal from the world, rather the mysteries of the church were to be guarded and protected lest they become reduced to something that does not bear the power of God in the world."

The thoroughly modern dervish finds much of value in the prison writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the paragraph above (from Jeffrey Pugh's 2008 study of Bonhoeffer entitled Religionless Christianity, p. 146), the dervish would substitute for "the mysteries of the church" something on the order of "the beautiful vision." That vision arises from the contemplation of nature...

and meditation upon the so-called 99 most beautiful names of God...

both of which are stimulated by the hanific desire for an ever elusive, unmediated relation to "the Real."

The key word here is desire: for it is the passional self that requires an "arcane discipline" to inculcate the habits through which the beautiful vision is made manifest in the daily activities of an ordinary life.

Such is the manhaj or methodology of disillusioned "sainthood."

The Decent Orientalist

William Montgomery Watt's body of work continues to educate and inspire. A Scottish clergyman, Watt was, nonetheless, a sincere student of Islamic history and traditions. It was Watt's translation of Ghazali's "spiritual autobiography" (the Munqidh min al-Dallal or That Which Delivers From Error) that I read in Paris in 1995 and, through reading it, came to recognize al-Ghazali's religious genius.

Watt's mastery of the Arabic language and his deep appreciation of the Qur'anic kerygma make his scholarship invaluable; the latter facet no doubt emerged from his critical embrace of Christianity: having understood the gospel message, he could see how Muhammad's preaching was both a continuation of New Testament trends and re-directions of them.

The volume which contained Watt's translation of the Munqidh also contained his translation of another work by Ghazali: Bidayah al-Hidayah (The Beginning of Guidance). When I finished reading the Munqidh, I moved on, with great anticipation, to read Bidayah--only to be quite perplexed. The Bidayah is a manual for daily living that is so detailed (not to mention medieval in its assumptions about the actual activities of daily living) that one cannot help but wonder of what practical use it could possibly be.

Watt's brief summary of the Bidayah (actually contained in his Islamic Surveys, vol. 1) puts Ghazali's little book into historical perspective:

"In the spiritual crisis of 1095 [Ghazali] turned again to sufism, but quickly realized that an intellectual understanding of it was not enough, and that he must begin to put it into practice in his life. It was with this thought in mind that he abandoned his post in Baghdad and divested himself of his wealth. Some idea of the outward manner of his life may be gained from a short work The Beginning of Guidance. It was really a kind of monastic rule, and the band of disciples he gathered round him at Tus had the makings of a monastic community" [p. 120].

The final sentence of that paragraph contains an insight that would be unavailable to most scholars who lack training in church history: for it calls to mind the small community of like-minded pietists that coalesced on the family estate (in Thagaste) of Augustine (later of Hippo). Augustine's own early experiments in monastic living inspired writings (of disputed provenance) that have collectively come down to us as his "monastic rules." Familiarity with those rules (and others from Christian monasticism and, one might venture, Buddhist) permit one to see how Ghazali's Bidayah might actually function as a manual of practice in early 12th century Iran.

Watt, the decent Orientalist who passed away in October 2006, will be sorely missed.

Ghazali's Hellenism

Despite his aversion to metaphysical speculation, one finds that al-Ghazali was quite conversant with the cosmology of Neo-Platonism. It is important to recall, however, that, by Ghazali's time (late 11th-early 12th centuries) medieval thought was as saturated with Neo-Platonic assumptions as 21st century thought is saturated with the assumptions of contemporary materialist science. The practical effect of this "saturation" is that the underlying (Neo-Platonic) metaphysics of everyday life was as self-evident to a 12th century intellectual in Baghdad or Cairo as the underlying (Newtonian? Einsteinian?) physics of everyday life is to a 21st century intellectual in Boston or Paris.

Al-Ghazali was as at liberty to shrug off Hellenism as a fish is at liberty to shrug off the deep blue sea.

The Grand Ghazalian Synthesis

"Even at the time [Ghazali] was born, more than four centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam itself was in many ways still in the process of being elaborated as a coherent religious system. Broadly speaking, five general trends had established themselves in this regard, and the proponents of each were competing vigorously for the allegiance of Muslim rulers and/or the Muslim masses. These five trends or tendencies may, for convenience, be labelled traditionist legalism, metaphysical philosophy, rational theology, esoteric (batini) Shi'ism, and Sufi mysticism."

--Elton L. Daniel, The Alchemy of Happiness, pp. xxi-xxii.

Al-Ghazali engaged all of the dominant trends of his milieu and chose, from among them, those aspects that he thought would serve the long term interests of his Sunni co-religionists. Judging by the subsequent 1,000 years of Muslim history, his choices were quite sound for, in Daniel's words, he managed to "sort out, prioritize, and synthesize the various religious tendencies of his time into a comprehensible religious system which has remained at the heart of mainstream Sunni Islam ever since" (ibid., xxxiv).

This is quite an achievement for a single intellectual whose only real authority during his lifetime and through the centuries succeeding it has been the force of his rhetoric: for Sunnism never developed a central authority (like the Vatican) capable of promulgating dogma and enforcing allegiance to it.

Orientalist anxieties in the face of such a commanding (and obviously superior) intellectual presence have resorted to blaming al-Ghazali for "destroying Islamic philosophy" and, thereby, depriving Muslims of a robust intellectual tradition. Bizarre as this claim may sound, one finds it stated and re-stated in a variety of ways throughout Western scholarship on Islam. What Ghazali accomplished in the early 12th century, however, was to deliver much of Sunni Muslim thought from the burden of metaphysical speculation--whether in philosophy or theology. Beginning in the early 20th century, intellectuals in the West (from Heidegger and the Existentialists to Wittgenstein, Rorty, and the American pragmatists) have struggled to unburden themselves, with mixed success, of the Plato to Kant metaphysical legacy. On the whole, however, that legacy appears to be one that Western philosophy seems incapable of escaping.

Far from "destroying" Islamic philosophy, Ghazali presided over its transformation into a mode of reflection that has survived the obsolescence of metaphysics and restored falsafa to its late Hellenistic emphasis on social criticism and character formation.

The Descent Into Primeval Chaos

As readers of this blog (and its sibloglings) will no doubt appreciate, there is no direct route to becoming an American faylasuf: all maps are useless, the GPS has gone dead. "When you are philosophizing," Wittgenstein remarked to himself in 1948, "you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there."

One lives the life that unfolds according to the hands that are dealt and, at some point, discovers that the game is just that, a game, but that the cards are fascinating objects in themselves. Then one looks up and, glancing around the table, takes mental notes on the relations between the players: their jokes and asides, their rapid calculations as each round plays itself out, their regard or disregard for their competitors--the scent of human sympathy or contempt--and concludes that, after all, it is this that really matters.

And then the old cliche about winning and losing being less important than one's conduct during the game returns to the mind as a kind of fierce and unforgiving wisdom.

At that moment the cards, the players, the green felt table-cloth, the beer bottles and ash-trays, the snide remarks, the entire scene is revealed to the last detail as one extended symphony of cliches. And you are playing your part, inescapably. And when the dealer shuffles and glances in your direction you say, automatically, "I'm in," because you know, whether or not you play this round, you are still "in" so long as you can take a breath.

You are "in the soup," as they say: the soup of death but also recrudescence. Both death and recrudescence stain your shirt as you rise from the table, and those stains announce to the world your complicity in all that has transpired through the long night of gaming.

When your head clears, you return to your books and writing desk to see what sense you can make of it all. That's really what differentiates you from the other players in the game: you happen to be in touch with the long history of human self-reflection. The community in which you live places a modest value upon that history and dedicates some of its surplus to supporting those of its members (like yourself) who are willing and able to make and preserve a record. Why the community does this is unclear, but perhaps it is because making a record is just another way of keeping score. In any case, this is your niche, which you will occupy until you are no longer able to hold on--at which point it will pass to another.

And so it goes. Falsafa is like running a tab. It is "keeping tabs" on oneself and the found world. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Augustinian Sincerity

While St. Augustine has been admired through the centuries for his commanding intellect and rhetorical skill, it is the sincerity of his piety, shining through the former attributes, that has always endeared him to me. Frankly, I find many of his arguments unconvincing on a wide variety of issues; but I am never in doubt as to his earnestness or his devotion to his god.

Augustinian Christianity, like Ghazalian Islam, is, without question, for those who wish to pray. But it is also (like Ghazalian Islam) for those who never cease to think and, above all, for those who are intent upon leading an exemplary life in the service of others. The abode of faith (dar ul-iman) in Augustine's piety--as in al-Ghazali's--is the heart. And where the heart is engaged, love will abide.

Without love, there is no justification for religion; no justification at all.

Petrarchan Humanism

Gur Zak's Petrarch's Humanism and the Care of the Self is a little gem. The summary on the back cover is helpful, as far as it goes:

Overcome by a strong sense of fragmentation, Petrarch turned to the ancient idea that philosophy can bring harmony and wholeness to the soul through the use of spiritual exercises in the form of writing. Examining his vernacular poetry and his Latin works from both literary and historical perspectives, Zak explores Petrarch's attempts to use writing as a spiritual exercise, how his spiritual techniques absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that arose from his efforts to care for the self through writing.

The "tensions" referenced arose from Petrarch's dependence upon three model writers as guides to writing one's way to a sense of personal integration: Seneca, Ovid, and Augustine.

Seneca claimed that writing, as a mode of reflection, was a pathway to virtue. Ovid, on the other hand, wrote in order to activate desire. Virtue and desire are not necessarily in conflict, but Seneca's eclectic Stoicism regarded desire as a potential snare to the attainment of virtue. St. Augustine, though schooled in the "pagan" classics, was deeply conflicted about their value as aids to virtue and so, from an Augustinian perspective, both Seneca and Ovid were to be held under a cloud of suspicion.

Zak argues that Petrarch spent much of his life struggling to find some sort of balance among these three competing modes until, late in life, he wrote a series of letters that "bring to the fore a sense of reconciliation, of compromise, of finding a middle ground between these different tendencies and practices" (Zak, 143).

He then takes the reader through selections of Petrarch's correspondence in order to demonstrate how the great man of letters achieved his goal. In the end, it appears that he settled upon a kind of cost-benefit analysis: "Despite their unavoidable limitations, Petrarch ultimately asserts...that the pursuit of virtue through writing and the reading of secular letters is the best means available in this life to care for both himself and the world around him, to bring it back to the virtue and glory of old" (ibid., 157).

In other words, Petrarch learned to say "no" to St. Augustine (and did so, in part, by weighing Augustine's own practice of reading "secular letters" against his saintly admonitions against them).

It takes a humanist, like Petrarch or Shakespeare, to recognize that there are customs "more honour'd in the breach than the observance" (Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.4.18).