Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/233

 of ecstasy whereby one becomes a knower ( ' arif), and receives assurance and enlightenment by direct communication from God. The soul of man differs from all other created things; it is essentially spiritual, and so outside the categories which are applicable only to material things. The soul has been breathed into man by God (Qur. 15, 29; 38, 72), and this is comparable to the way in which the sun sends out its rays and gives warmth to those things on which its rays rest. The soul, which has no dimension, shape, or locus, rules the body in the same way as God rules the world, so that the body is a microcosm reproducing the conditions of the world. The essential element of this soul is not the intelligence which is concerned with the bodily frame, but the will: just as God is primarily known not as thought or intelligence, but as the volition which is the cause of creation. Thus God cannot be considered as the spirit animating the world, which is the pantheistic position, but as volition outside the world which has willed it to be.

The aim of scholastic theology is to preserve the purity of orthodox belief from heretical innovation: "God raised up a school of theologians and inspired them with the desire to defend orthodoxy by means of a system of proofs adapted to unveil the devices of the heretics and to foil the attacks which they made on the doctrines established by tradition" (Al-Ghazali: Confessions). Aristotle himself was an unbeliever using arguments he should not, but, in