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.