The Garden of Truth by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Author:Seyyed Hossein Nasr [SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061744389
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE VIRTUES

Sufi doctrine, like all truth, comes from God. What we bring to the path is our soul, which must become embellished with the virtues in order to be worthy of entering the Garden of Truth. But even the virtues belong ultimately to God, who has made them available to us through the Prophet. Also from the practical and operative point of view the duty of the faqīr is to remove the vices that prevent the virtues from manifesting themselves in the soul. In order to gain the virtue of humility we must overcome the vice of pride, and in order to be embellished with the virtue of truthfulness we must stop being hypocrites and remove from ourselves the vice of deceitfulness. For the vast majority of members of Sufi orders, the spiritual life consists of the battle to become virtuous. Only a few are able to devote themselves to Sufi metaphysics, but from a more profound point of view each virtue is an aspect of the truth as reflected in the soul. Virtue as understood in Sufism is not simply moral virtue but rather spiritual virtue with a noetic and existential dimension. For example, humility is not simply the sentimental attitude of humbling our egos before God and the neighbor. It is the metaphysical awareness that before the Absolute we are nothing and that the neighbor is not incomplete in the same way as we are and that even in his or her incompleteness possesses existence, which comes from God and before which we must have an attitude of humility.

Classical Sufi texts are replete with the description of the virtues. I shall mention later some of the early Sufis, who wrote on this subject and whose writings culminate in al-Ghazzālī’s Iyā’ ‘ulum al-dīn (Revivification of the Sciences of Religion), the most important work of spiritual ethics in the history of Islam. Since the steps to God or the stations can be enumerated in different ways and seen from different perspectives, the number of stations and their ordering is not the same everywhere. Some speak of three main stations, some of seven, some of forty, and some of even higher numbers. In what follows I shall mention some of the main stations, whose understanding opens the door for the comprehension of this subject in general.

The three cardinal virtues of the Universal Man, or for Muslims the Muammadan Reality, which encompass the others and which are found in one way or another in every integral and authentic spiritual tradition, are humility, charity and nobility, and sincerity and truthfulness. From the Sufi perspective, each of these virtues is illuminated by the light of the intellect and is not only sentimental. Many people put on an air of humility to hide the pride of the ego; this is not humility but hypocrisy. It is also against intelligence and knowledge of the truth not to admit one’s superiority in a particular matter pertaining to the truth while remaining humble. If a person knows that

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