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180

THEOLOGY

"Shall I let my camel run free and trust in God?" Replied the Prophet, or someone for him with a good imitation of his humorous common-sense, "Tie up your camel and trust in God." The other head was the use of remedies in sickness. The whole controversy parallels strikingly the "mental science" and "Christian science" of the present day. Medicine, it was held, destroyed tawakkul. In the fourth century in Persia this insanity ran high and many books were written for it and against it. The author of one on the first side was consulted in an obstinate case of headache. "Put my book under your pillow," he said, "and trust in God." On both these points the usage of the Prophet and the Companions was in the teeth of the Sufi position. They had notoriously earned their living, honestly or dishonestly, and had possessed all the credulity of semi-civilization toward the most barbaric and multifarious remedies. So the agreement of Islam eventually righted itself, though the question in its intricacies and subtilties remained for centuries a thing of delight for theologians. In the end only the wildest fanatics held by absolute tawakkul.

But all this time the second form of Sufiism had been slowly forcing its way. It was essentially speculative and theological rather than ascetic and devotional. When it gained the upper hand, zahid (ascetic) was no longer a convertible term with Sufi. We pass over the boundary between Thomas à Kempis and St. Francis to Eckhart and Suso. The roots of this movement cannot be hard to find in the light of what has preceded. They lie partly in the neo-Platonism

SPECULATIVE SUFIISM

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which is the foundation of the philosophy of Islam. Probably it did not come to the Sufis along the same channels by which it reached al-Farabi. It was rather through the Christian mystics and, perhaps, especially through the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and his asserted teacher, Stephen bar Sudaili with his Syriac "Book of Hierotheos." We need not here consider whether the Monophysite heresy is to be reckoned in as one of the results of the dying neo-Platonism. It is true that outlying forms of it meant the frank deifying of a man and thus raised the possibility of the equal deifying of any other man and of all men. But there is no certainty that these views had an influence in Islam. It is enough that from A.D. 533 we find the Pseudo-Dionysius quoted and his influence strong with the ultra Monophysites, and still more, thereafter, with the whole mystical movement in Christendom. According to it, all is akin in nature to the Absolute, and all this life below is only a reflection of the glories of the upper sphere, where God is. Through the sacraments and a hierarchy of angels man is led back toward Him. Only in ecstasy can man come to a knowledge of Him. The Trinity, sin and the atonement fade out of view. The incarnation is but an example of how the divine and the human can join. All is an emanation or an emission of grace from God; and the yearnings of man are back to his source. The revolving spheres, the groaning and travailing nature are striving to return to their origin. When this conception had seized the Oriental Church, when it had passed into Islam and dominated its

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