Some religious and moral teachings of Al-Ghazzali : $b Being brief extracts from his Ihya-u-Ulum-id-dinGhazzali
Islamic
Some religious and moral teachings of Al-Ghazzali : $b Being brief extracts from his Ihya-u-Ulum-id-din
Ghazzali
Islamic ethics -- Early works to 1800
These four causes when properly understood, demonstrate that the true
object of our love is God and therefore it has been enjoined: “Thou shalt
love the lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with
all thy mind”.[67]
Man’s highest happiness
The constitution of man possesses a number of powers and propensities,
each of which has its own distinctive kind of enjoyment suited to it
by nature. The appetite of hunger seeks food which preserves our body
and the attainment of which is the delight of it, and so with every
passion and propensity when their particular objects are attained.
Similarly the moral faculty—call it inward sight, light of faith or
reason—any name will do provided the object signified by it is rightly
understood—delights in the attainment of its desideratum. I shall call it
here the faculty of reason (not that wrangling reason of the Scholastics
and the dialecticians)—that distinctive quality which makes him lord
of creation. This faculty delights in the possession of all possible
knowledge. Even an expert in chess boastfully delights in the knowledge
of the game however insignificant it may be. And the higher the subject
matter of our knowledge the greater our delight in it. For instance
we would take more pleasure in knowing the secrets of a king than the
secrets of a vizier. Now delights are either (a) external, derived from
the five senses, or (b) internal, such as love of superiority and power,
love of the knowledge, etc. enjoyed by the mind. And the more the mind is
noble the more there will be a desire for the second kind of delights.
The simple will delight in dainty dishes, but a great mind leaving them
aside will endanger his life and his honour and reputation from the
jaws of death. Even sensuous delights present an amusing example of
preference. An expert in chess while absorbed in playing will not come to
his meals though hungry and repeatedly summoned, because the pleasure
of check-mating his adversary is greater to him than the object of his
appetite. Thus we see that inward delights and they are chiefly love of
knowledge and superiority are preferred by noble minds. If then a man
believes in a perfect being, will not the pleasure of His contemplation
be preferred by him and will it not absorb his whole self? Surely the
delights of the righteous are indescribable, for they are even in this
life, in a paradise which no eye has seen and no ear has heard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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