How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume II we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the middle ages through the early renaissance. Today’s session is on Deliverance from Error by Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali.

One power to fill the vacuum left by Roman collapse was Islam, which created a new civilization in the West. Deliverance from Error is the spiritual autobiography of al-Ghazali (1058-1111), the most influential thinker of medieval Islam and still considered by Muslims as one of their greatest religious thinkers. He was learned in philosophy, but deeply suspicious of philosophy’s effect on religious belief — comparison with Saints Augustine and Bonaventure would not be out of order. Born in Persia (now Iran), al-Ghazali became a superstar academic at Nizamiyya Academy in Baghdad. But a few years later, an intellectual crisis of doubt overtook him, and he gave it all up, becoming a wandering ascetic. He made the Hajj, lived in Damascus, and visited Jerusalem, finally receiving Sufi mystical illumination. In this work, al-Ghazali argues for the superiority of the way of life he’s found: mysticism — as opposed to a somewhat philosophical theology (kalām), exclusivist-insider religious instruction, and philosophy.