Hujjat al-Islam Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazali Tusi: On Knowing Yourself and God. Muhammad Nur Abdus Salam translation. Great Books of the Islamic World, 2010 [2002].

 

Born in Tus, Persia around 1056, al-Ghazali saw several regimes and nations, living in Baghdad in the 1080s, then Damascus beyond the turn of the century, before returning to his native town of Tus in 1106, five years before his death. Some accounts claim he also visited Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina. Sufi Islam often finds itself classified as a form of mysticism, but al-Ghazali—frequently cited as a major contributor to the development of that sect—uses no such term. Why is Sufism nonetheless so classified, and is the classification correct? How does Sufism differ from other forms of Islam, according to a leading Sufi or proto-Sufi?

Given his travels, al-Ghazzali had firsthand knowledge of the ways of life followed by several of those forms. He had the foundation for being what we would call a ‘comparativist,’ no hidebound dweller within one religio-political regime.

A Sunni not a Shi’ite (as most contemporary Iranians are) Al-Ghazali is also associated with the Asharite school of Islam, which points to the authority of clerical interpretation of the Qu’ran, as distinguished from the Mu’tazillite school, with its emphasis on logical analysis of that scripture. To what extent does al-Ghazali reject ratiocination, thus further contributing to the reputation of Sufism as a form of mysticism?

This book contains two of al-Ghazali’s writings, one on human nature (The Alchemy of Happiness), one on God (On Knowing God). Al-Ghazali emphasizes the exoteric character of these works, identifying places at which he deliberately fails to elaborate or deepen his argument. His orientation thus shares at least one quality commonly associated with mysticism, namely, the protection of a secret teaching. In explicitly pointing to the existence of such a teaching, he evidently intends to whet the appetite of at least some readers to undertake the effort of discovering them.

Al-Ghazali divides The Alchemy of Happiness into eighteen sections. He begins by indicating that this work is a prolegomena to On Knowing God. “The key to the knowledge of God” is self-knowledge because it is the key to all knowledge: “There is nothing closer to you than you. If you do not know yourself, how can you know anything else?” In this Socratic task seven questions arise:

1. “What sort of thing are you?” What is your nature insofar as you can be ‘classified’ within the natural order?
2. “Where did you come from?” What is your origin or genetic cause?
3. “Where are you going?” Where will your current path, your current way of life, take you?
4. “Why have you come to this stopping place?” What is the reason you have now paused to reflect on yourself, and more broadly to seek knowledge?
5. “For what purpose were you created?” What is your natural telos? This will provide a standard by which you can judge your way of life.
6. “What is your happiness and in what does it lie?”
7. “What is your misery and in what does that lie?”

The fourth, central question forms a sort of hinge in the overall structure of the list, which moves from the ‘given’ to incentives for action, change. The question asking you to classify yourself requires self-examination. Self-examination will show you that four “attributes” exist “inside you”: those of beasts of burden; those of predatory animals; those of demons; those of angels. Beasts of burden find their “nourishment and happiness” in “eating, sleeping, and copulating.” Predators find their “nourishment and happiness” in “giving free rein to tearing apart, killing, and rage.” Demons by nature encourage “evil, treachery, and deceit.” Angels “find their nourishment and their happiness in the contemplation of the Divine Presence.”

Given the decidedly mixed nature my self-examination reveals, what then? Al-Ghazali distinguishes the “external form” of a human being, its body, from the “internal spirit,” “vital principle” (jan), soul (nafs), or heart (dil). Among these terms, he chooses “heart,” which is very often the term seen in the Old Testament. The heart is “not the lump of flesh which is found in the left side of the chest,” which is visible and can be seen in many beasts, as well as the dead. With Augustinian language, he maintains that “the true nature of the heart is not of this world”; “it has come into this world as a stranger and a wayfarer.” It nonetheless rules the body as its rightful monarch, as it alone among the human attributes can know God and witness “the beauty of His Presence.” It is the attribute that distinguishes human beings from beasts.

How to cultivate this distinctively human trait? “If a person closes his eyes and forgets about his body and forgets the heavens and the earth and all else that the external eye can see, he will come to know his own existence out of necessity and become aware of himself, even though he is unaware of his form and the earth and the sky and all that is in them.” In performing what we today might call a thought-experiment, he will “perceive that his physical shape will be taken away from him, yet he will remain in place and not be annihilated.” There is something about ‘me’ that can be so-to-speak abstracted from my body and all bodily surroundings. That something is the core of my nature.

This leads me to the discovery of two “worlds.” The “world of creation” is subject to “linear measurement, amount, and quantity.” “The root meaning of ‘creation’ is ‘calculation, estimation.'” But the “world of command,” the human spirit, “has no amount or quantity, and for this reason cannot be divided.” It is creative, partaking of the world of creation by commanding it. It is “the essence of a person, and all form is subject to it.” “Its true nature is very difficult to comprehend,” and “it is not permissible to expand upon this.” Here the esoteric teaching would begin, but esoteric teachings by definition do not get committed to writing in any explicit way. Al-Ghazali will give some hints, however, later on.

What can be elaborated upon is the heart/spirit’s status as “the monarch of the body.” The heart’s “work is the seeking of happiness; and its happiness is in the gnosis (marifat) of God Most High.” “It acquires this knowledge of God Most High through the knowledge of His handiwork, and this is the totality of the universe.” The human senses are the initial means of such knowledge. “Knowledge is [the heart’s] prey; the senses are its net.” That is why human beings need their bodies, as the senses are bodily. Once the net captures the elements of nature, the internal powers of perception go to work on them. Just as there are five senses, so there are five such internal or heart-powers: imagination, thought, memory, recall, and conjecture. Taken together, these are the ten “armies” at the command of the heart.

Al-Ghazali elaborates on the metaphor of human nature as a regime, to be classified as a kingdom. The body is the “nation”; lust is the “tax collector”; anger is the “policeman”; reason is the king’s “chief minister”; the heart is the “king.” Al-Ghazali doesn’t like tax collectors any more than you do: bodily appetite or lust “is a liar, a babbler, and a confuser,” “always desir[ing] to confiscate whatever wealth there is in the kingdom under the pretext of taxation.” He doesn’t like cops, either. Anger, “the policeman of the state,” is “wicked and very hot-tempered”; “it always loves killing, breaking, and overthrowing.” The only defense against these malefactors is the king, who must “always… consult the minister of reason,” ignoring the corrupt blandishments of the tax collector and “tightly” controlling the policeman. If the king governs with reason, “the kingdom will be well-ordered.”

If the “kingdom” that is the individual human being is well-ordered, the passions of lust and anger serve the body by nourishing and defending it; the body exists to “bear the senses,” to be their servant; the senses serve “for the intelligence-gathering of reason,” “spies” for the king’s minister; reason then advises the king, which is the spirit of command or, as we ‘moderns’ would say, the will, which issues commands. “Reason has been created for the heart, to be its candle and lamp. By its light, the heart may see the Divine Presence which is its Paradise.” In so seeing, the heart “becomes the slave and servant of the Divine Presence.” Al-Ghazali quotes God as reported by the Quran: “I created the jinn [angels] and mankind only that they might worship Me.” That is, the human will, the ‘king’ of the human person, serves as the commanding executive of God’s commands.

How do the other internal powers of perception fit in? Imagination serves as a postmaster, collecting the ‘mail’ or impressions the senses bring in. Memory is the “mailbag and repository” for these impressions. “At the appropriate time, the information will be presented to Minister Reason,” who “will arrange [the kingdom’s] affairs and the journeys of the king,” “tak[ing] the necessary steps if he finds that one of the armies, such as lust or anger… is in rebellion against the king, and has acted in disobedience, intending to kill him” and to usurp the rule of the human being’s rightful monarch, itself the rightful slave of the King of kings.

In dealing with such rebellions, “the minister does not seek to kill the rebel.” The kingdom cannot be ruled without tax collectors and policemen. “Instead, he arranges to bring the rebel back within the boundaries of obedience,” to tame him, make him a friend; thus the former rebel “will receive a robe of honor in due time.” On the Day of Resurrection, all the qualities of each individual human being “will be revealed, and their forms will correspond to their natures.” Souls ruled by bodily desires will be revealed as pigs, as “impure” men; predators as wolves, “tyrannical” men. “Form follows nature, so that every one is seen in the same form that is inside him.” Shifting his metaphor, al-Ghazali compares the heart to a mirror, whereon “repugnant traits are like smoke and darkness,” preventing any reflection of the Divine presence.” If kept clean, however, the heart is “a shining mirror the displays the whole universe,” from whose order one intuits the presence of God.

In all of this, it is easy to see why many Muslims view the Sufi with suspicion. It isn’t that Sufis are mystics in the sense of being hazy-minded navel-gazers, hippies avant la lettre. It is that they resemble Platonic philosophers, albeit in Quranic apparel. Perhaps to forestall such accusations, al-Ghazali adopts a more emphatically ‘religious’ tone in his central and subsequent chapters.

He begins by addressing his question respecting the origin of the human being. After all, “How do we know that [man] has been created for angelicness and the moral nature [of the angels], so that he may acquire that, and not for the other [non-angelic] traits?” “Some”—the Hugh Hefners among us—”suppose that man has been created for eating, sleeping, copulating and taking pleasure.” Others, “like the Arabs, the Kurds, and the Turks”—here the Persian al-Ghazali’s ‘comparativist’ knowledge acquired in his travels comes in—”suppose that man was created for dominion, violence, and conquest.” “Both groups are in error” because carnal appetites are not distinctively human, and indeed man isn’t as good at satisfying them as some animals: “A camel can eat more than a man, and the copulation of sparrows is more frequent than that of mankind. So, how are humans superior to them” in that respect. And many animal species are more voracious and efficient predators than we humans are. Notice that al-Ghazali appeals not only to the philosophic mind, which intends to classify the elements of nature so as better to understand it. He also appeals to the political mind, interested in rule, in justifying a claim to rule founded upon some natural superiority. Sufism isn’t necessarily any more apolitical than it is mystical.

“The true nature of a human being is that his perfection and his nobility lie within him.” This sounds like Plato or Aristotle. But al-Ghazali adds a religious promise: “When he dies, neither anger nor lust remains. Either a bright, gleaming essence, adorned with the spiritual knowledge or gnosis of God Most High in the form of an angel” will be his now-revealed nature, or he will be “dark, gloomy with head bowed in shame,” gloomy because tarnished by sin and ashamed because he hasn’t lived up to what he could have been. The shameful soul “will be with Satan in Sijjin,” Hell.

Further tying his doctrine to a form of religiosity, al-Ghazali asserts that the “nobility” of the heart has two “degrees”: knowledge and power. Knowledge is also divided into two degrees: what the mass of mankind can know and what can be known only by the few. What can be known by the few has two degrees: dreaming and the inner voice of inspiration—both non-sensual. Non-sensual dreams are similar to the thoughts derived from the meditative practices al-Ghazali mentioned earlier, abstracting the heart from all bodily and worldly forms. He now adds another element to those meditative practices. More than only closing your eyes and “suspending the work of sensory organs,” the Sufi will call out to God (“Allah! Allah!”) “with the heart and not the tongue until one is unaware of one’s self and has no report of the entire world or of anything save God Most high; if it is thus, then the window of the heart will open even though one be awake and one will see while awake what others see in sleep,” namely, “the kingdoms of the earth and the heavens,” as revealed by “the prophets.” “Do not concern yourself with the arrangements of this world, for He will manage your affairs Himself,” acting as your “Protector.” “The way,” the regime, “of the saints is this, and it is the way of prophethood.” The scholar’s way of acquiring knowledge by learning is also “great,” but “it is trivial in comparison with the knowledge of the prophets and saints which came to their hearts from the Divine Presence without an intermediary or the instruction of human beings.” The prophet also differs from the saint. Both achieve gnosis of God, but the prophet is a messenger, one who takes God’s Word to others, whereas the saint does not, either because “when the Religious Law is new there is no need for another kind of invitation, or because public propagation of the faith needs certain qualities that the saint may not possess.”

But what about the “creative” dimension of the heart? Al-Ghazali explains that knowledge of God endows the prophet with “the power to subject some of the physical bodies of the world to itself”—to effect what are called “miracles,” contraventions of ordinary natural laws. “Some spirits—nobler and stronger, nearer to and more resembling the angelic essence—[are] obeyed by other bodies external to it so that should his awe affect a lion, it will become abject and obey him.” On the other side, “what is called ‘the evil eye’ and that which is called ‘sorcery’ are of this kind and are the effects of a person’s spirit on the bodies of others.” Persons with such powers have connected their hearts with the demonic powers. Weaker versions of such extraordinary powers for good or evil may be seen in everyday life, in what we now call ‘psychosomatic’ effects, as “when a sick person acquires hope [and improves],” or “when a sound person becomes anxious, [and] falls ill.”

A prophet, then, has three qualities: the knowledge others achieve in a dream state, when their bodies and bodily passions are passive, the prophet attains while awake; the prophet’s heart affects the bodies of others; he knows in his heart what others know by learning. It is in this that al-Ghazali’s Sufism invites the term ‘mysticism.’ Although rational, its rationality seems to be a matter of pure noesis. There is no suggestion that the prophet or the saint arrives at this noesis by the way of logical argument, of thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Indeed, “no truth has been disclosed to a person who learns the way of disputation in defense of belief.” A philosopher would concur in this judgment, if by disputation al-Ghazali means the sort of argumentation often heard in law courts or in political disputes—rhetoric in the pejorative sense of the work, polemic. A philosopher would balk if al-Ghazali means by disputation any argumentation at all.

That he cannot simply reject any rational argumentation at all may be seen in his more-or-less Aristotelian account of human happiness: “The pleasure of everything lies in that it is required by one’s nature.” As a Muslim, he of course goes beyond Aristotle by asserting, “no spectacle can be more pleasurable than the spectacle of the Divine Presence, and that is according to the demand of the spirit’s nature.” That is, he goes beyond Aristotle insofar as he understands the Divine Presence to be the Allah invoked in the Qu’ran rather than the Good posited by Aristotle. Al-Ghazali also upholds the doctrine of the immortality of the spirit of the individual human being more insistently than Aristotle does.

Al-Ghazali concludes with an argument anticipating that of Thomas Aquinas, finding in the design of the human being a sort of proof of God’s existence. (In this, it should be noted, he plays the scholar, not the prophet or the saint.) First, from “a droplet of fluid,” semen, a person develops. “There is no work in the world more wonderful than this”; resurrection after death “will be [much] easier!” Second, what being other than an all-knowing one could do such a thing? Finally, we learn from this act of creation that God’s “Grace, Mercy, and Care for His servants is limitless,” as body has exactly the parts it needs to live and function and more, “that which was not needed or necessary, but would improve [man’s] appearance,” “such as the blackness of the hair, the redness of the lips, the arch of the eyebrows, a straight posture.” And all of these physical attributes “are trivial in comparison with the knowledge of the heart.” If man “throws the alchemy of happiness upon the essence of the heart, he will travel from the degree of the beasts to the degree of the angels.”

In On Knowing God” al-Ghazali again indicates the esoteric character of his teaching on the heart. “It has two aspects”: one “more obscure,” which “cannot be explained to ordinary folks, or is telling it [to them] proper”; the other understandable “by everyone.” “A person knows from his own essence the existence of the essence of God, may He be praised and glorified!” He knows this because man couldn’t create one hair on his head, and this points to the existence of an intelligent creator. What Thomas calls the argument from design is an exoteric argument. God is the perfect version of our lesser, imperfect natures, which parallel but in no way approach His nature. And just as a person may come to know God by knowing himself (as argued in The Alchemy of Happiness) so he can know himself, his own “ineffability and inscrutability,” from “the ineffability and inscrutability of God.”

This leads to another instance of al-Ghazali’s much-favored arguments from analogy. Just as your heart rules your body and its passions through the “tenuous substance [that] physicians call ‘spirit,’ [which] carries the powers of perception and motion,” so God’s Will rules the universe. The natural scientist and the astrologer understand the universe through physical observations and measurements; this gives them correct but incomplete knowledge of Being. This may be why al-Ghazali distrusts disputation, whereby each participant “may have spoken the truth from one aspect of the truth, but they see some part and suppose that they have seen all.” Only “the ocean of knowledge of prophethood… encompasses all sides of the kingdom and all the agents, captains, and servants of the Lord.”

Those who appreciate the comprehensiveness of God’s wisdom, if only through trust in the prophets and arguments via analogy to human experience of the human soul, will readily glorify God. Al-Ghazali discusses four statements whereby a Muslim will glorify Him. These statements are not expressions of mere sentiment but, taken together, convey “knowledge of the Divine.”

The first is “Glory be to God.” It signifies the “absolute incomparability” of God contrasted with the partial “incomparability” of man. God, man, angels (and presumably fallen angels, demons) have heart, spirit, unlike all other beings. Human incomparability is only partial because human beings also have a physical nature, shared with animals.

The second statement is “Praise be to God.” It signifies that “your sovereignty is a particle of His sovereignty, that all causes and means are in its service as in a pen in the hands of a scribe.” Hence all praise and gratitude are rightly directed toward God, “as there is no benefactor other than He.”

Third, “There is no god but God.” It signifies that “there is no one other than He to command His own secret.” No form of polytheism is acceptable, and of course Muslims reject the Christian Trinity, the teaching that God has three ‘Persons,’ all of Whom partake in His knowledge and power. “No one knows God perfectly and truly save Himself.”

Finally, “God is greater.” This doesn’t mean that there is some scale of measurement by which God’s superiority can be weighed. “There is nothing with Him for Him to be greater than. All existing things exist through the light of His existence.” “He is greater than anything by which man can know Him by logical analogy.” This means that al-Ghazali’s can intend his arguments-by-analogy only as “illustrations,” not as real arguments. “All of these are illustrations so that a person, in accordance with human weakness, might in fact comprehend something of the beauty of the Divine Presence.” And even this level of comprehension can only be hinted at, here. “An explanation of the knowledge of God Most High is lengthy and cannot be put in a book like this as it would not be satisfying.” It must be experienced directly; “a person’s [spiritual] happiness is in gnosis and in the service to and worship of Him.”

To achieve this gnosis, which will impel the individual to such service and worship, there are two possible ways of proceeding. One is “through his own reasoning, desire, and independent judgment.” It is “impossible” to know God that way “because his desire will master him and always conceal the way to God from him. Whatever he desires will appear in the image of correctness.” The other way is “through another.” That s the right way. “But just anyone is not fit for this,” only “the wisest of people,” namely, the prophets. The Religious Law or Sharia enunciated by the prophets shows how right service and worship are to be undertaken. All else is transgression. As the Quran teaches, “He who transgresses God’s limit, verily he wrongs his soul.”

Al-Ghazali calls the transgressors “libertines.” Their ignorance takes seven forms. Some believe in no God at all. Seeking God “in the treasury of imagination and whim,” they fail to find Him, consequently looking to “the stars and physical nature” for guidance, in the manner of astrologers and some philosophers. Some believe in no afterlife, supposing that death is the end of human life, as it is for plants and animals. Others believe in God and the afterlife, but weakly. They are ignorant of Religious Law. Such ignorance weakens their souls because their failure to achieve the “gnosis and abstention from sin” that lead to “a sound heart,” one strong enough to deserve salvation.

Some know the Religious Law but doubt its effectiveness, claiming that it does not cleanse the heart of sin. These might be some Christians, who deprecate the Law in a misguided attempt to exalt spirituality. But the Religious Law “was enjoined [upon us] to control anger and lust or carnal passion, and to hold them in check so that they do not overcome the Law and reason.” We will likely still commit “minor sins,” which God can forgive, but obedience to the Law will guide us away from the major sins. Human beings are not free of lust and anger; they control their lust, and forgive those with whom they are angered.

Some do not know God’s attributes. They suppose that because God is merciful He will not punish libertines harshly. Eventually, they will learn otherwise. Some are ignorant “of their own pride.” They believe that they have overcome their sins. But only God is perfect. Indeed, He has no sins to overcome. Finally, there are those who know God and His Law but remain self-righteous, denying that their immoral behavior is immoral. “Dealing with such people is done better by the sword than by the argument of reason,” as they have already, as we now say, ‘rationalized’ their own conduct and passions.

In both of these works, al-Ghazali effectively identifies reason with revelation, not with thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction—or at least not primarily so. He centers his readers’ attention on noesis, not so much reasoning itself. Reasoning unassisted by Quranic study will fail to achieve noetic apprehension of God. His figure of the will, not reason, as the sovereign, and of the will as minister or adviser to the will, could easily lead to the assumption that he is a proto-Nietzschean of sorts, that even God is primarily the supreme Will and not the supreme Logos. This remains ambiguous, however, because the Will of God does, and the will of man should, listen to reason and be guided by it. The will is sovereign in the sense that it makes the decision, but it evidently can choose whether it follows reason, thumos, or appetite. For human beings, ‘reason’ means preeminently gnosis of God and His Law. What does Reason mean for God? Does God’s Reason submit itself to God’s Will, to some kind of creative Will to Power? But why would an omnipotent Being aim at more power? How could He, given His omnipotence? Or are God’s Reason and Will one? And His Law the expression of that perfect combination of His Will and His Reason? As al-Ghazali might say, these are questions beyond the scope of this book.

Much of the reasoning al-Ghazali does undertake is fairly loose, consisting mostly in analogies based on introspection. His emphasis on introspection is likely what has gained Sufism the reputation as a form of mysticism—this, along with his emphasis on meditation, staying still—its downplaying of action. This is a matter of degree, however. He ends with an adjuration to take forceful action (to the point of death) against some libertines. As for the principle of non-contradiction, it too has its place in al-Ghazali’s thought, as seen in his overall critique of the libertines, which depends upon seeing the contradiction between their beliefs and conduct and the beliefs and conduct of those who follow the Religious Law.

Abraham Lincoln found in the natural-right principles of the Declaration of Independence the moral foundation of the American Union, worth of defending. Any regime needs some purpose to hold it together, else why found a regime at all?

What, then, is the foundation of God’s regime, according to Christianity? Obviously, God is, understood Christianly as the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But how does God want his consenting subjects to understand their union under Him, with one another, in their ‘called out’ assembly, their church? The Apostle Paul addresses this question in his Epistle to the Colossians, chapter 3, verses 1-17.

Paul begins by lifting the Colossians’ sights to “those things that are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.” The Ruler of the Christian regime lives above not only human regimes, but above any intermediary beings such as angels, of which the Colossians reportedly were making much. “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” This is the command Machiavelli and his followers have persistently attempted to reverse, charging Christians with dangerous neglect of their own lives here, of politics on earth. But Christians, Paul insists, should be ‘dead’ to the earth; “your life is hid with Christ in God.” When Christ returns to earth, He will return as its ruler, and “then shall you also appear with him in glory.”

Being ‘dead’ on earth has a rational dimension, then, in the sense that Paul tells Christians to shift their attention to the true Ruler and the true ruling structure of ‘Being.’ But life-in-death also has a moral-psychological dimension. “Mortify”—literally “deaden”—”your members, which are upon the earth; fornication [the root word is the same as that for prostitution], uncleanness, inordinate affection [emotion or pathos], evil concupiscence [desire], and covetousness [“wanting more’], which is idolatry.” These are the elements of the soul Plato’s Socrates classifies generally under bodily desires, powerful but low. Reason or logos rightly rules them, and in Christianity Jesus himself is the Logos. Indeed, the reason to deaden the body’s “members” is to avoid the indignation of God, which “comes upon the children of stubbornness—literally “unpersuadableness.” To be unpersuadable is to refuse to listen to reason, to authoritative, contradiction-free logos, which is both a natural characteristic of human beings but, in its perfect, ‘clean’ form, embodied in the Logos, or Christ, ruling at God the Father’s “right hand.” Unchecked, the bodily desires render the soul stubborn, turn reasoning into rationalization.

You have “walked some time” with these desires, “liv[ing] in them.” “But now you also put off all these”—the image is taking off a garment—namely, indignation, fury [thumon, derived from thumos or spiritedness], malice, calumny, and obscenity.” To leave the walk-way or regime of the desires means more than to get rid of the desires themselves; it also means to abandon rule of the desires when they are fortified by another element of the soul, as Socrates describes it: spiritedness. In order really to rule, the desires must enter an alliance with the stronger passions, the passions that generate self-assertion, the desire for dominance. Souls gripped by the alliance of desires with spiritedness will generate logoi or words, speech, consisting of calumny and obscenity—calumny, because they desire to dominate others by defaming them; obscenity, because they express the low or bodily desires in the most spirited, angry way.

Such souls will also seek to deceive others in order to satisfy their desires. “Lie not one to another, seeing that you have put off the old man”—the thumoerotic soul, the soul of the postlapserian Adam—”with his deeds”—typically violent, domineering, acts that would override reasoning souls. Rather, “put on” (again, as one would a garment) the “new man,” who is “renewed in knowledge”—more literally, “re-cognized”—”after the image of him that created him.” Since God created man in his “image,” in reorienting himself to his Creator man is turning away from his corrupted nature, back to his reasoning, logical, logos-nature, made by God in imitation of himself, the Logos. 

This means re-entering God’s regime, because God did not make Adam a Greek, a Jew, a barbarian, a Scythian, a slave or a citizen. God’s regime, seen in His assembly, ‘called out’ from the regimes of this world, “neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” Christ is all, in the sense that He is the supreme object of the attention of renewed minds, by virtue of now being in all of those minds. Holy—separated, cleansed, transcendent—spirituality replaces spiritedness because God as Creator is separate from his creations. To renew our relationship with God is to partake, in some limited way, in that separation from the regimes of the world and our corrupted flesh with its thumoerotic passions, and then to unite with one another under His rule in His regime. “Put on, therefore, as the elect [the chosen] of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humility of mind, meekness, patience.” “Love” here means agapic love, the will to the good of the other person, from which those virtues flow. The old man is vengeful, not merciful, cruel, prideful of mind in rejecting logos and the Logos, self-assertive, and resentful. Christians forbear one another, forgive one another precisely because agapic love wants not to exact revenge but to help the other person achieve the good. Concretely, “If any man have a quarrel with against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do you.” Had Christ not forgiven you, you could not re-cognize Him, and therefore could not fulfill your God-given capacity to fulfill your nature as a rational person. Re-establishing the bond with Christ enables you to re-unite with others because you, like Him, are reanimated (literally re-souled) with the agapic love with which you were created and forgiven, the love that makes re-union as human, not as Greek, Jew, barbarian, Scythian, slave, citizen, both real and lasting.

“And above all these things put on”—again, the garment-image—”agape, which is the bond of perfectness.” The word translated as perfectness derives from telos, meaning the end of purpose of a thing. Human beings are ‘perfected,’ they achieve the purpose of the nature God intended them to have, in loving ‘agapically.’ This doesn’t mean they no longer experience thumoerotic desire or sin, but that through accepting the rule of Christ within their souls they become more nearly free from that desire, more fit to unify within their assembly, called out by the logoi, the words, of the Logos. That this is and must be a regime becomes clear in the following sentence: “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also you are called in one body; and be you thankful.” Agapic love ends or at least mitigates strife when it rules and forms the foundation of the unified ‘polis’ or assembly of subjects grateful to God for their liberation from the bondage and strife animating souls once ruled by thumoerotic desire.

Paul then returns to the mind, a mind now aligned with God, having re-cognized Him. “And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” Although Jesus commends wisdom in its practical form, phronēsis, to His disciples, here Paul commends wisdom in its higher form, sophia. A philosopher by definition loves sophia, but a Christian has found it in the logos of the Logos. This is why Paul elsewhere derides philosophers as seeking wisdom but never finding it. Without the agapic love of God, a Person, the love of wisdom understood impersonally as ‘theory’ or comprehension of nature will never find the source of nature, its Creator. And without the agapic love of God for his human creations, that ‘way,’ that path to wisdom would be blocked. Why songs instead of dialectical conversations? Probably because songs are right for assemblies of men; dialogues are for pairs, or small groups. Homer’s songs united Greeks; David’s songs united Israelites; Christian songs unite Christians. Among His disciples, Jesus dialogued and more often ‘monologued,’ but never sang. The words of Christian songs present the doctrines of Christianity to the minds of Christians assembled, in their ‘political’ condition. They open each mind to the meaning of God’s word, although some may advance farther into the meaning of those words than others, and so make better teachers—like Paul.

“And whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father through Him.” Gratitude to the Creator-God is owed to Him by those He created, inasmuch as he fashioned their original parents after His image. His Son, who ‘died for our sins,’ is now the indispensable mediator between Creator and created because that obedient “mortification” or “deadening” of God’s Son in atonement for the human refusal of God’s regime shows the path back to the path, way, regime of God, a way followed in words and acts alike. Hence “through Him.”

Augustine understands creation as bringing something out of nothing, something entirely separate from its Creator. God did not extrude the world from Himself. He was not and is not ‘immanent’ in His creation. What is more, He did not need to create the world; he did it by choice or ‘free will.’

Providence or ‘predestination’ means that God continues to perfect His creation by adjusting it according to changing circumstances. By creating man in His image God endowed a part of creation with free will, along with reason and speech or ‘logos.’ Providence refers to the bringing-into-being aspect of creation; free will belongs to its ‘separation’ side because God freely adjusts His creation in response to man’s freely willed thoughts, speeches, and actions.

A cogent interpretation of Augustine on this point was written by John Cassian, who lived between (it is estimated) 360 and 435. In his book the Conferences, Cassian remarks that Augustine defends Christianity form the Pelagian heresy by upholding the human need for God’s grace, which animates His providence. Cassian suggests that Augustine exaggerated the role of grace, somewhat at the expense of free will, because he recognized the (as it were) logographic necessity or rhetorical importance of doing so. Augustine began his intellectual life as a student of rhetoric, and so his approach should come as no surprise, and no disappointment.

Cassian sees that in his letter to Abbot Valentinus of Hadrametum Augustine does argue that to deny free will altogether would be to make God’s judgment of human sins unjust. Further, in his commentary on Psalm 102, Augustine writes: In treating the spiritual illness of sinful man, God “heals whoever is infirm, but not him who refuses healing.” His freely offered grace may be freely accepted or freely refused. Hence the idea of ‘prevenient’ or cooperative grace, a spiritual synergism between God and man that the Bible itself portrays again and again, and which the Bible’s reader re-enacts.

Augustinian predestination is not Calvinist predestination, at least as Calvin is usually understood. Augustine teaches that God wills the damnation of those who freely choose evil by choosing to reject His grace, but that is not to say that He wills them to choose evil. Doctrines of ‘strong’ predestination misconstrue Augustine’s argument. This notwithstanding, at the Council of Orange in 529 the Catholic Church itself eventually condemned Cassian’s reading as the “Semi-Pelagian Heresy,” a doctrine contradicting what the bishops took to be Augustine’s understanding of predestination, and of the understanding of grace propounded by the Apostle Paul. Post-lapsarian human nature being entirely depraved, no human being ever genuinely opens his soul to God. As an example, God’s Holy Spirit convinced Paul forcefully, by knocking him off his horse, duly impressing him with the limitations of the human will respecting salvation. But could Paul have refused even this divine command? Paul would say no, because by then the Holy Spirit had entered his soul and ‘turned’ it decisively to Himself.

Wherever the truth may lie in this controversy, it is undeniable that in Augustine we see the confrontation of Biblical religion and Platonic philosophy. It is the personal and creative character of the Biblical God that leads to such questions as free will and predestination, although the same problem can be seen to some extent in the tension between choice and ‘Fate,’ so prominent among the ancient Greek playwrights and philosophers alike. Philosophers look at nature, especially its forms and its purposes (‘the good’)—at one may be apprehended by ‘unassisted’ reason, which culminates in noesis. (‘Unassisted’ reason means reason unassisted by divine revelation, not unassisted tout court. That would be impossible.) Saints look toward God, the personal Creator of nature. Such a God can be known, but only as one knows a person and not as one knows an idea, or as one knows a physical object. A person can be known, intimately, but not fully in the way an idea, or a fact, can be known. God speaks to man from behind a cloud, or through His prophets, including His only begotten ‘Son.’

The personal, Creator-God encompasses a trinity: the Father (who is); the Son (who knows); the Holy Spirit (who wills). But this trinity is also a unity, because the Father’s being is coterminous with His knowledge and His willing. God is the Being who is knowing and willing; He is wisdom’s self, three ‘persons’ in one.

For Augustine, to philosophize or ‘love wisdom’ is to love God. As a person, not an idea or form, therefore not transparent and fixed, God rightly says “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” To love God properly is to love Him the way He loves you: with agapic love, not erotic or even ‘philiac’ love. Erotic love desires, seeks to acquire the beloved for the lover. Philos does not expect fully to acquire the object of its attraction, which is wisdom in the sense of theoretical knowledge, knowledge of the ideas, but neither does it suppose that the beginning of wisdom is fear. For the ‘philiac’ lover the beginning of wisdom is wonder. Agapic love wants the good for its beloved; it does not at all suppose that the beloved can be acquired. In this way it is ‘selfless.’ The marriage animated by erotic love alone won’t endure; the marriage animated by agapic love, by the mature and reciprocated fondness of husband and wife, can endure.

The Book of Genesis describes Abraham as the greatest man of his generation but also the most anav, the most humble. The humility of him animated by philosophic love, love of wisdom, consists in his acknowledgment that he will never fully possess the object of his love. The modesty of agapic love of Wisdom is that you do possess the object of your love—you do know God—but in a limited, if intense, way: the way in which one knows the best person you have ever loved. This is why Augustine prays before he philosophizes. He exercises his reason, while knowing that his reason will go only so far as “God grants us to see the light,” as a Bible-reading statesman once said.