Ghazali often quoted this Persian proverb:
"Eat the vegetable wherever it comes from, and do not ask where the garden is."
He quoted this, for example, when counseling people how to fight demons (The Marvels of the Heart). Why get caught up in origins, ontology, and metaphysics, asking what world demons come from, what level of being they occupy? The main thing is to conquer their temptations in your heart, with your heart so you can walk uprightly in this world, with love, justice, and humility.
But this proverb also expresses Ghazali's view of truth. He pulled his writings and teachings (which influenced many Jewish and Christian theologians) from many different sources, the Qur'an, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, colloquial sayings, Greek philosophy, and much more.
This practice and understanding of wisdom is a welcome one in our current situation, in which fundamentalists (among all religions) and militant secularists (from among all religions) have crowded the stage, pushing all people of faith seeking understanding off the stage, calling us "rebels" or "infidels" for holding a view of God with which they do not agree, or "idiots" for trusting in God at all. Both these dogmas, as different as they seem to be, share a belief: that the origin of an idea contaminates or purifies it. For religious fundamentalists, any idea or image of God that does not come from the one true source that their group identifies (the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian scriptures, the Qur'an, or others), as interpreted by them is not only suspect but false. For the materialist or secular fundamentalists, those who reject any possibility of the reality of God, any idea or image of God, especially if it comes from an organized religion, is false because it is nonsense, meaningless. For them, any statement that is not objectively verifiable, that does not originate in scientific thinking, must be false.
For both these varieties of fundamentalism, faith and reason are mutually exclusive. For the religious dogmatists, whatever does not come from (their) faith comes from human reason and is therefore deception (because human reason is clouded by sin and it is only pure revelation that can be trusted). For the secular dogmatists, whatever does not come from (their notion of modern scientific) reason comes from faith and is therefore self-deception (because human beings are weak and childish and want an illusion of something greater than they are to depend on).
I am reminded here of the logical fallacy called "poisoning the wells." One identifies the one pure source of truth as the well one drinks from, and claims that all other wells, and everything springing forth from them, every word, thought, idea, practice, is, by necessity, contaminated. Thus, they drink only from their wells. They eat vegetables only from their gardens.
Ghazali's proverb can show us another way. "Eat the vegetable wherever it comes from, and do not ask where the garden is."
Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. Throughout history, in all religious traditions, western and eastern, there have been thinkers and communities who have not been afraid to recognize truth no matter what its source. Not just mystics and radicals, but people at the heart of religious traditions have recognized and absorbed truths that came to them from outside their tradition or culture. Philo, Jews returning from captivity in Babylonia, Augustine, Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Maimonides, John Calvin--the list could go on and on. It was the medieval Christian theologian Anselm who gave us the common motto for this approach, faith seeking understanding. But the approach knows no historical, cultural, or religious bounds. Trusting in the Oneness and infinite wisdom of God, they strove to recognize truth whenever and wherever it appeared, even if that truth came from Greek philosophy, Persian religion, or the best science of the day. For them, to reject a truth simply because one is unfamiliar with its source is to be ungrateful to the One; it is to reject the Oneness, infinite wisdom, and overflowing abundance of the One and the gifts that flow from God. When one recognizes a truth, one sees that its ultimate origin is in God, not another person or community. That is why one accepts it if one does.
So let's be discriminating, yes. Don't eat cardboard or rancid meat. Know what you're eating. Seek out nourishing vegetables. And when you find them, don't subject them, or their growers or deliverers, to a long inquisition about the garden they came from, the mineral content of the soil, the rain levels, the integrity of the gardeners, and so forth. Did this truth grow in the garden of faith? No matter. No reason to condemn it. Did it grow in the garden of reason? No matter. No reason to reject it out of hand. Let's move beyond the false dichotomy of faith or reason and start talking about what truths nourish us and that we share with others.
We could die of spiritual starvation in this desert of fundamentalism before all the garden questions are raised and answered. The practice is simple and profound: Eat your vegetables; and leave the garden, Pardes, paradise, which is more glorious and abundant and various than we could ever imagine, to The True.
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