Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral Beauty

Sophia Vasalou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000472967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Al-Ghaz?l? and the Idea of Moral Beauty rethinks the relationship between the good and the beautiful by considering the work of eleventh-century Muslim theologian Ab? ??mid al-Ghaz?l? (d. 1111).

A giant of Islamic intellectual history, al-Ghaz?l? is celebrated for his achievements in a wide range of disciplines. One of his greatest intellectual contributions lies in the sphere of ethics, where he presided over an ambitious attempt to integrate philosophical and scriptural ideas into a seamless ethical vision. The connection between ethics and aesthetics turns out to be a signature feature of this account. Virtue is one of the forms of beauty, and human beings are naturally disposed to respond to it with love. The universal human response to beauty in turn provides the central paradigm for thinking about the love commanded by God. While al-Ghaz?l?'s account of divine love has received ample attention, his special way of drawing the good into relation with the beautiful has oddly escaped remark. In this book Sophia Vasalou addresses this gap by offering a philosophical and contextual study of this aspect of al-Ghaz?l?'s ethics and of the conception of moral beauty that emerges from it.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students in Islamic ethics, Islamic intellectual history, and the history of ethics.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-1

… would Eros be anything except love of beauty?

Plato, Symposium

At a celebrated juncture of the Symposium, Plato describes the ascending course an individual must trace through the different objects of love. From love of beautiful bodies, the lover will progress to love of beautiful souls, to love of beautiful laws, practices, and sciences, and finally to love of the transcendent form of Beauty itself, on which all mundane beauty depends (210a–212a).¹ Holding this piece of philosophical idealisation together are a number of important assumptions. The idea that souls can be beautiful or ugly is one. The idea that the beautiful and the good are inseparably connected is another; what makes a soul beautiful, to take a key example, is its virtues. Finally, there is the idea that the truest beauty is transcendent, and all particular beauty points to and depends on it. Some of these ideas pick out features that were central to the physiognomy of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy in particular. Yet some of them enjoy broader reach, representing features frequently taken to be integral to ancient philosophical and indeed non-philosophical thinking more generally. The connection between the beautiful and the good, most notably, is embedded in the basic facts of linguistic usage. “[I]n Hellenic culture,” as one scholar has crystallised an oft-made observation, “the beautiful and the good are brought together in a single notion.” That notion is the Greek term to kalon, which can refer equally to the kinds of things we would naturally call “beautiful” (such as human faces or bodies) and to the kinds of things we would naturally call “good” (such as human actions and traits).²

To contemporary philosophical sensibility, many of the features just listed have come to seem eccentric. The idea, in particular, that ethical considerations could intersect or even—in some manner still to be defined—coincide with aesthetic ones is liable to appear intellectually indefensible if not morally pernicious. Despite certain structural similarities, such as the ostensible independence of both moral and aesthetic value from antecedent personal interests or purposes, these kinds of value would seem to be separated by a gulf. Aryeh Kosman articulates part of the ground of this concern when he remarks that

we would find it decadent or something like belleletristic to be directed to keep a promise because it would be lovely or in good taste to do so, or enjoined not to commit mass murder because doing so would be tacky. For us, “she acted beautifully” and “she acted rightly” do not mean the same thing.

Put differently, moral reasons carry a type of normative demand that aesthetic considerations do not.³

Yet more recently, there has been a surge of philosophical efforts to bridge this perceived gulf. Taking their focus from the virtues and the vices, the most significant of these projects have set out to restore credibility to talk of beauty with reference to human character or the human soul. “Moral beauty,” in the view of Panos Paris, is neither loose talk nor a category error, but perfectly in order when applied to the excellence of a person's character traits taken as complex forms that promote a particular end (the human good). Defending this view involves expanding the cramped conception of aesthetic objects that has come to dominate philosophical aesthetics, with art and nature, and by extension sensory objects, monopolising the discussion.⁴

Many of these philosophical projects are framed as attempts to honour our ordinary ways of thinking and talking about ethics, and about human character in particular. “We may call someone who exhibits many moral virtues a beautiful person,” Berys Gaut points out, just as “we may say of a kind and generous action that it was a beautiful action.” Colin McGinn lists a number of terms of approval and disapproval that he suggests have substantial aesthetic connotations, including “sweet” and “pure,” “foul,” “disgusting,” “or “grotesque.”⁵ We can see these linguistic intuitions at work in prominent literary texts, as in Jane Eyre's admiring ascription of a “beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance” to one of the characters of the eponymous novel.⁶ These intuitions unite us to the proximate past, as this literary example attests. The same applies to Gaut's expression, which echoes nothing more than Hume's remark, in the Treatise, that “[t]here is no spectacle so fair and beautiful as a noble and generous action.”⁷ The latter remark reflects a broader willingness among Hume and his contemporaries to reach for aesthetic language in speaking about qualities of character. Recent projects have thus also taken their bearings from philosophical history, both proximate (as represented by Hume and his peers) and remote (as represented by their ancient precursors), viewing their project as in part one of restoration.

In this work, my aim is to broaden the philosophical record to include an important episode that has not yet received adequate consideration. This is the episode contributed by the prominent eleventh-century Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). Many of the ideas picked out on the previous page as central tropes of ancient philosophical thinking—particularly in the Platonic and Neoplatonic schools—turn out to have significant counterparts within the Islamic world. Partly, this is the result of intellectual influence, as ancient texts that formed key vectors of these ideas were translated into Arabic and found their way into the hands of Arabic-speaking intellectuals. That material process, it must be said, was not the most straightforward, and in certain regards, the textual links appear surprisingly thin. Plato's Symposium, for example, seems never to have been translated into Arabic, though some of its ideas made it into Arabic-Islamic culture through indirect routes, reflecting a generally patchy record of transmission for Plato's corpus as a whole. Plotinus’ Enneads, in which these kinds of ideas achieved a critical articulation, was only available in part and in paraphrase under the title The Theology of Aristotle.⁸ Yet a reasonable leaven of these philosophical ideas made it into the mix of intellectual elements at work in the Islamic world, and it entered into a variety of intellectual schemes that elaborated the relations between ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. This includes, above all, Sufism, where the idea of God's transcendent beauty—which worldly entities either naturally manifest or normatively seek to emulate—formed a cynosure of spiritual preoccupation.⁹

A thinker of boundless ambition, breadth, and curiosity, al-Ghazālī drew equally from the granary of philosophical and Sufi ideas in crafting his own intellectual vision. Both influences can be seen at work in his late-life multi-volume masterpiece, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, where this vision receives its most powerful and influential expression. Al-Ghazālī's purpose in this book is to guide the reader through the process of ethical and spiritual formation required to reach ultimate happiness, this being happiness in God. It is in this context that al-Ghazālī makes an approach to a theme that has formed the defining focus of Sufi spirituality, the love of God. This approach turns out to be an account of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics rolled into one. Love of God is love of beauty; and virtue is one of the forms of beauty.

Although al-Ghazālī's account of divine love in the Revival has justly received considerable attention, its special way of drawing the good into relation with the beautiful has oddly escaped remark.¹⁰ One reason for wishing to focus attention on it, as already suggested, is to enrich the historical record we survey and seek to mine as we attempt to rethink the relationship between the good and the beautiful, ethics and aesthetics. If we believe this effort is worthwhile, a broadened sense of intellectual community will seem worth cultivating. But a closer meditation on this aspect of al-Ghazālī's thinking is also important if we are interested in gaining a clearer insight into al-Ghazālī's ethics on its own terms. Al-Ghazālī's ethics simply cannot be understood without taking into account the aesthetic framework in which he locates the ethical life, and more specifically the life of virtue. As I will show, the insight that results from this engagement is not entirely free from difficulty. Al-Ghazālī's account of the relation between the good and the beautiful turns out to problematise the unity of his thought, and to raise on fresh grounds an enigma familiar to his major interpreters concerning the consistency between the viewpoints of his different works. If we are to appreciate the complexity of al-Ghazālī's thought, and of Islamic ethical discourse more broadly, this is a challenge well worth confronting.

After a brief foray into al-Ghazālī's attitude to aesthetic enjoyment more generally (Section 2), I set out some of the linguistic, religious, and philosophical background that provides a context for al-Ghazālī's specific way of linking aesthetics with the domain of ethics (Section 3). I then begin to unpack the relation between the good and the beautiful as al-Ghazālī presents it in his key virtue-centred works, especially the Revival, focusing on the account of moral beauty he develops in the context of his discussion of the love of God (Section 4). Moral virtue is the prime exemplar of an intelligible type of beauty, and the disinterested love that human beings universally experience towards beauty provides the central paradigm for thinking about the love they may direct to God. Having explored this model philosophically, I then turn to consider the quandary it poses for our understanding of al-Ghazālī's oeuvre as a whole, given its apparent antagonism to the (anti-rationalist, anti-objectivist) view of ethical value expressed in his theological and legal works (Section 5). I try to meet this challenge by outlining a number of approaches that would allow us to remove the apparent contradiction, including appeals to chronology, levels of discourse, and “supercharged” hermeneutics (Section 6). A concluding comment (Section 7) tries to broaden the vista against which we engage with this particular episode and place the historical record in the service of the beautiful and the good.

2 The place of aesthetic experience in al-Ghazālī's ethics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196556-2

A good way to get into our topic is through a broader question about the place of aesthetic experience in al-Ghazālī's thought. “Aesthetics”—from the Greek aisthesis, “sense” or “sense-perception”—is itself a modern concept with no exact counterpart in the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition. Aesthetics was not conceived of and pursued as a separate subject of inquiry. Yet beauty (jamāl or ḥusn) was a theme that preoccupied Muslim intelligentsia across numerous vehicles of cultural expression, including literature (adab), philosophy, and Sufism. In philosophy, beauty surfaced as a theme within discussions organised under rather different headings, such as metaphysical explorations of the nature of God or explorations of literary art inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics.¹ When we seek to study questions of “aesthetics” in a particular work or thinker, we will thus often need to track our subject through a variety of environments and to identify it using one or both of the following means: the use of core aesthetic vocabulary (such as jamāl and ḥusn) and the reference to experiences that we are happy to recognise as instances of the aesthetic in light of both their objects and their described phenomenology.²

Approaching al-Ghazālī in this manner, one of the first references to aesthetic experience we find in the Revival of the Religious Sciences will evoke an immediate sense of scepticism about the status of such experiences within his concerns. “Anyone who takes delight in the present world,” he writes in the book On the Condemnation of the Mundane World, “be it by hearing some birdsong, by gazing upon some verdure (khuḍra), or by taking a drink of cool water, will have his reward in the hereafter diminished several times in proportion.”³ Both the objects and the broad phenomenology of these experiences allow us to confidently recognise them (at least the first two) as instances of aesthetic experience on our terms.⁴ And al-Ghazālī's attitude to such experience seems unmistakably clear: it is one of thoroughgoing condemnation. This ties...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The place of aesthetic experience in al-Ghazālī’s ethics
• 3 The good and/as the beautiful in context
• 4 Moral beauty and the paradigm of disinterested love
• 5 A conflict in al-Ghazālī’s ethics?
• 6 Resolving the conflict: An interpretive toolbox
• 7 Concluding comment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index