created Adam in His own form (sura)." Al-Ghazzali takes that to mean that
there is a likeness between the spirit of man and God in essence, quality, and actions.
Further, the spirit of man rules the body as God rules the world. Man's body is a
microcosm beside the macrocosm of this world, and they correspond, part by part. Is, then,
God simply the anima mundi? No, because He is the creator of all by His will, the
sustainer and destroyer by His will. Al-Ghazzali comes to this by a study of himself. His
primary conception is, volo ergo sum. It is not thought which impresses him, but
volition. From thought he can develop nothing; from will can come the whole round
universe. But if God, the Creator, is a Willer, so, too, is the soul of man. They are kin,
and, therefore, man can know and recognize God. "He who knows his own soul, knows his
Lord," said another tradition.
This view of the nature of the soul is essential to the Sufi position and is probably
borrowed from it. But there are in it two possibilities of heresy, if the view be pushed
any further. It tends (1) to destroy the important Muslim dogma of God's Difference (mukhalafa)
from all created things, and (2) to maintain that the souls of men are partakers of the
divine nature and will return to it at death. Al-Ghazzali labored to safeguard both
dangers, but they were there and showed themselves in time. Just as the Aristotelian +
neo-Platonic philosophers reached the position that the universe with all its spheres was
God, so, later, Sufis came to the other pantheistic position that God was the world.
Before the atomic
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