a world jammed on fast forward."

"... they destroyed themselves with the guillotine of reason."

"There is a mode of vital experience", begins Marshall Berman's magnificent study on modernity, "— experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils— that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience 'modernity.' To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world— and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. ... modernity can be said to to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish."

Berman begins his treatment of modernity with Goethe's Faust, the tale of the scientist-scholar who sells his soul to the devil, which he calls "the first, and still the best, tragedy of development." Generations have been spellbound by Goethe's treatment of this medieval story. What is the secret of Faust?

The secret is that Faust is the archetypal culture hero of modernity. The two volumes— which took Goethe a lifetime to complete— span the entire cultural history of the West, from the cloistered society of the Middle Ages to the great technological projects of the 19th century and even of our day. Goethe's Faust stands apart from its predecessors in that it emphasizes development, and in Goethe's view the development of the individual and of society must go hand in hand. Goethe is the man of the unitary vision: the self's development and economic development must complement one another. This is the true meaning of modernity.

We might well ask, then, how successful we have been in this project. We have indeed transformed the world. But have we also been able to reconstruct our selves, to become better human beings? To the extent that the answer is "No," the other half of modernity awaits us for its completion. As we shall see, however, this half has mostly been abandoned. As for the Sufic concept of self-transformation and the evolution of the self through seven stages of selfhood, these have, for the most part, not even been heard of.

Berman considers three stages in Faust's evolution: the dreamer, the lover, and the developer. At the beginning of the story, Faust is already an accomplished man. He has conquered realms of the mind. He is a respected scientist, philosopher, doctor, professor, lawyer, theologian. Yet these achievements give him no peace. Two souls live within his breast. He wants to complement his triumphs of inwardness. He longs for adventure, for change, for action, for social achievement. His intellectual progress has culminated in a dynamism that contradicts the stagnant society he lives in. It is at this point that Mephistopheles approaches him, and offers his services. In Faust's person, it is Western society that will be making a pact with the devil.

Note that Faust's situation is very similar to the predicament of Job. The devil is there to tempt him. Restless spirit that he is, Faust accepts the pact, under one condition: if ever he says to a moment: "stay, thou art so sweet," the devil will have triumphed. Yet at the very end of Faust II, when Faust dies, he has still not uttered these words. This is why the devil is finally foiled, and Faust is borne away by angels in the afterlife. All Mephisto's efforts have been in vain, and he is, in Goethe's words, "part of the power that would / Do nothing but evil, yet creates the good."

Note that this picture of the devil is quite different from that of earlier Christianity, where Satan was a figure of immense power, able to kill "God's Son" and comprising not only himself, but also the angel Azrael; he commanded the powers of evil and death combined. Meph is a tamer fellow altogether, much closer to the Islamic view of the devil, who is distinct from the angel of death and able to succeed only by deceitful suggestion ("whisperings").

Faust experiences a love affair with Gretchen, yet his love results in her destruction. Gretchen is the most delicate flower of the cloistered society, and as that society destroys her, it destroys its own highest values: generosity, devotion, humility. But it is Faust, the thinker of the deep, who first destroys her virginity, naiveté, and innocence. Faust's involvement with Gretchen— and by implication with other people— for the sake of his self-development is egotistic. He must either take responsibility for the development of people he comes in contact with, or be responsible for their doom.

This also draws attention to how most self-development and "care of the self" projects of our day are steeped in narcissism. Unless there is a moral and ethical law which mediates rules of conduct between self and others, schemes for self-transformation will become ever more selfish and never get off the ground. Self-realization cannot be considered apart from salutary moral conduct. Otherwise, it can easily and imperceptibly degenerate into egotism, narcissism, and anthropocentrism, as instanced in the expression "the Me Decade".

Faustian Man

Berman's treatment of the second part of Faust skips over themes— such as alchemy— that have little to do with modernity, but which occupy a significant place in Western cultural history. After many an escapade, Faust finally harnesses his restless drive toward self-expansion to the financial, social and technological forces that power the world. The romantic quest for self-development becomes a struggle for economic development. As Berman points out, Goethe himself was excited by the great tasks of engineering that marked his age, such as the prospect of building the Panama Canal. Faust now becomes the master builder, the developer of megaprojects, the captain of industry, the great capitalist mogul. He revels over his new power over people, over labor. When his development project is thwarted by an elderly, virtuous couple, Faust callously sends in Meph and his "liquidation squad" to get rid of them. As Berman notes, this is Faust's first self-consciously evil act, and he pays for it with his eyesight; he becomes blind, but then he has been blind all along, as the remover of his sight tells him. He has been conquered by the narcissistic will to power. No wonder we first hear of Nietzsche's Superman (übermensch) early in Faust, Part I (published in 1808), which is how the Earth Spirit addresses Faust.

Later on, Berman gives an example of the archetypal Faustian man in the person of Robert Moses, whose public works dislocated great masses of people and kneaded the face of New York, that unrecognized world capital, for more than half a century (1910s-1960s). Two things emerge from Faust's end: one, he fears the past, which is why he wants the elderly couple out of his way; he fears it so badly that he wants to abolish even its name. But two, once he has destroyed the past, there is nothing more left for him to do. He too becomes the past, and must perish.

So who is Faustian Man? He is the restless soul who incessantly wants to change the world, but fails to change himself. He destroys in order to create, but does not always succeed in improving things. In building the outer world he devastates his inner world, although he had hoped to manage both together. He loves the public but hates the people, is fond of an abstract concept of humanity but detests human beings in person, not so much because he has anything against them as because they get in the way of his projects. He is driven by boundless, frenzied ambition and a megalomaniac will to power. He is the midwife of modernity. Such are the contradictions, and the tragedy, of Faust. The lesson that Goethe cast his character in an alliance with the devil should not be lost on us.

The Cataclysm of Modernity

One characteristic of modernity that has often been noted is its massive dynamism, its sheer pace of change. We constantly find modernity described in terms of great natural disasters: upheaval, hurtling, uprooting, cataclysmic, drastic, vast, explosive, shattering, whirlwind, volcanic eruptions, turbulence, perpetual clash, apalling, devastation, abyss, earthquakes... are some of the epithets used to describe it. Baudelaire, the first poet of modernity, called progress a perpetual form of suicide. In the words of Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz, modernity is "cut off from the past and continually hurtling toward the future at such a dizzy pace that it cannot take root, that it merely survives from one day to the next: it is unable to return to its beginnings and thus recover its powers of renewal." A second relevant point is the universal nature of modernity: its scope of change is global.

From all this, we understand that modernity is experienced as an upheaval, a hurricane. Unless one is anchored to a solid spot in stormy seas, one is bound to get tossed by the waves and drown in the end.

That solid spot is God. God is the "eye of the hurricane," "the still point of the turning world" which one can resort to for solitude, strength and reassurance in times of rapid change. The fact that about ninety percent of the citizens of the United States, the most modernized country in the world, and about forty percent of its scientists, believe in God and religion at any given time, demonstrates that modernity and the sacred do not in fact negate but rather, complement each other. The example of the USA also makes nonsense of the idea of evolutionism, namely, that countries are arranged along an axis that moves from tradition and religion to modernity and irreligion. America is the best example of the fact that modernity does not mean atheism. According to Alain Touraine: "A society which completely abolishes both past and belief cannot be described as modern. A modern society is a society which transforms the old into the new without destroying it", in line with the concept of "change through continuity" which anthropologists such as Margaret Mead have always been careful to emphasize. "Both Western Europe and the United States provide convincing examples of how change can be associated with continuity..." As a result, the coexistence of modern and antimodern is the surest sign of modernity. Berman makes the same point when he observes that "for the sake of the modern we must preserve the old and resist the new." And in fact, only by a deep faith in God can an ultramodern society survive the cataclysm of modernity, or any society survive for a protracted period of time.

A Brief History of Modernity

In order to understand exactly what we are talking about when we mention modernity, we need to look at its history, at how it all came about. In the following summary, I shall rely upon the work of a French social scientist, on Alain Touraine's Critique of Modernity. Needless to say, such a vast subject cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs, and I shall confine myself to what is essential for our present purposes.

All the revealed religions entail a subjectivation of the divine. Judaism started this, and it continued with Christianity. Jesus came to reaffirm the subject, the inner life of man, and the primacy of the person. His was an emphasis of man's spiritual aspect, and did not extend to politics. ("Give unto Caesar...") St. Augustine, in Book X (the most important part) of his Confessions, distinguished between the body of man and his soul, the more important and inner part. This became the basis for Christian dualism, where it was recognized that man inhabited both worlds. Christianity was also heir to the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, from whom it inherited the idea of a rationally ordered cosmos. God was rational, and man, created in His image, was also rational. Thomas Aquinas represented the culmination of the scholastics.

Nevertheless, by the Middle Ages, two other trends had also asserted themselves. The medieval Christian lived in what sociologists call a magical world, an enchanted world of sacraments. God was "a supreme being ... who could be influenced by magic." Further, although St. Paul had revoked Jewish law, the medieval Church had become the prime arbiter of social and political order. It could empower or excommunicate even kings. An elaborate divine law had been developed that was, in some respects, more stifling than Jewish law. The result was a cloistered and static society.

It was the perpetuation of its inherent injustices that finally led people to confront the traditional order. The Renaissance, with its humanism and its return to Greek civilization, introduced a worldly whiff of fresh air into this seclusion. The Renaissance was like the awakening from a long dream, and Western man, now refreshed, took in the physical world with receptive eyes. Attention began to be focussed on man, and the age saw the birth of humanism.

It was the Reformation which marked the true onset of modernity, although in those days nobody would have thought of it in such terms. Luther defied authority, and this is the deed for which he is best known; but he also did two other things that were to have far-reaching consequences. He abolished the sacraments (though not entirely), and so put an end to the magical, enchanted world of the Christians. Yet he also introduced the concept of the arbitrary will of God. While this viewpoint had the advantage of freeing God from accountability and justifying inscrutable events ("The ways of the Lord are mysterious"), it also severed the connection which might have been preserved between the rational cosmic order of earlier Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism. For example, a man with faith and good works could earlier have been assured of good recompense in proportion to his deeds. Luther removed that support. One's lifelong efforts could go up in smoke. Faith alone could save, and even that was not guaranteed. Thus Luther, in disposing of the rational cosmic order of earlier Christianity, threw away the baby with the bathwater. That rational order had earlier conflicted with the magical world. Now, both were gone.

Luther's case is interesting because he represented the starting point of two conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, he was brave enough to oppose authority and clever enough to survive. Yet it was also Luther, and not the Enlightenment, that initiated the split between faith and reason.

It is also interesting to speculate what might have happened if Erasmus, Luther's contemporary, had won the day with his Christian-based humanism. Erasmus and his followers stressed piety, argued for a minimal theology, and upheld both reason and faith. But their influence was marginal in this battle of the titans.

The Reformation brought on the backlash of the Counter-Reformation and many years of religious wars. Amidst the turmoil, a group of intellectuals and humanists struggled to rescue reason and faith. Among them were Pascal and Descartes.

Descartes is known as the father of rationalism, but he was actually the heir of Christian dualism. In his Discourse on Method (1637), Part IV, Descartes states on two consecutive pages his argument for the existence of an immortal rational soul, the phenomenal world, and God. His approach was the opposite of idealism. Descartes did not say cogitatio sum ("It thinks within me"), he said cogito ("I think"). This set him apart from those who thought that God was within man, and it also set him apart from those who subscribed to Mind or Being. For the first time, Cartesian dualism replaced the divine subject with the human subject; both are true without involving idealism, but this was not recognized at the time. The subject was defined by reason. Man was midway between God and nature, but distinct from both. It is surprising to discover that Descartes, often invoked in the battle against unreason, had a more balanced grasp on things. "For both Pascal and Descartes, thought and personal experience are unitary and not contradictory, and together they are a source of religious inspiration. We therefore have to question the identification of rationalism with an antireligious mode of thought which all too easily moves from being a social critique of the Church and religious practices to being a materialism".

Shortly after Descartes, we encounter John Locke. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke is concerned to formulate a naturalist view of man, and to reject the central role that Cartesianism gives to God. At that time, nature was understood in a wider sense than physical things alone; it also included the intellectual order and the moral order, and Locke is attempting to maintain the unity of man and universe.

Locke states that the identity felt by man shows the unity of body and soul. (This is an attempt to escape dualism, but note how the soul is subtly being assimilated into the body. When the definition of nature is reduced to the material world, the soul will evaporate.) Human understanding is a passive reflection based on the sensations. In the social field, Locke inaugurates the age of individualism, private property, natural human rights, and labor as the property of the worker. Although he does not defend rebellion, he justifies rebellion against oppression. (Grotius had earlier introduced the concept of natural law.)

The Enlightenment

We are now moving into the thick of modernity. The Enlightenment is its turning point, and the French Revolution which followed is the trigger that explodes the forces of modernity, scattering them everywhere.

In evaluating the events of this age, we have to bear in mind that this was war to the death. The Enlightenment was not so much a philosophy (although, of course, it was that too) as it was a modernist political ideology. Its primary aim was the destruction of the absolute monarchy, and reason was used as a weapon in this struggle. For the Counter-Reformation brought on its own reaction. The divine right of kings was based on the alliance of throne and altar, and that in turn was based on the authority of the Church. The Counter-Reformation had strengthened absolutism, and the alliance between throne and altar had subordinated civil society.

The lines of battle were drawn. In order to reach the fruit, the Enlightenment struck at the roots. It attacked not merely the Church, but the very faith that the Church rested on. This is the point of no return, after which reason and faith, body and soul, can no longer be reconciled. The struggle against religion led to the rejection of transcendence. "Enlightenment rationalism ... reduced modernity to rationalization and secularization."

Because it was born (or triggered) in revolution, modernity itself was experienced as a revolution. In its efforts to abolish the social order, the modernist ideology indulged with glee in the destruction of the sacred; it hacked and bit and tore until there was no longer any social order left, but neither was any meaningful concept of the sacred. Earlier, in the person of Luther, faith had turned its back on reason; now reason turned its back on faith. The divorce between the two was complete.

Yet even as they attacked religion, many Enlightenment thinkers were careful to exclude God Himself from this attack. Philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire were Deists or Theists. Only a very few accepted atheism. In most cases it was not God, but the religion they knew, that they were opposed to.

Down through the centuries (starting with the 16th), the humanists struggled to bring about a reconciliation between faith and reason, but in vain. The positivists in the 19th century attempted the same thing, but all they could accomplish was a secularized "religion of humanity" which never really caught on. In their full acceptance of secularism, today's humanists demonstrate that they have lost hope in the realization of this project.

For the notion of original sin, the thought of the Enlightenment substituted the notion of man's natural goodness; in place of guilt, modern consciousness substituted hope. This optimism was justified, but it was also naive in that it turned a blind eye on horrors worthy of the Marquis de Sade.

But if God was not to define morality and order, what was? In the minds of the Enlightenment philosophers, the answer was embodied in a single word: society. Society replaced God as the definitive principle behind moral activity. What was good and what, evil was to be defined in terms of social utility: we had to be good workers, good citizens, good mothers, good sons.

In this society, science replaced religion as the source of inspiration. "The idea of modernity makes science, rather than God, central to society and at best relegates religious beliefs to the inner realm of private life... In all cases, rationalization was seen as the sole principle behind the organization of personal and collective life, and it was associated with the theme of secularization". Modernization "is the achievement of reason itself, and it is therefore primarily the achievement of science, technology and education. ... Reason takes nothing for granted; it sweeps away social and political beliefs and forms of organization which are not based upon scientific proofs."

Its intention to extend the life lived according to reason to all men was the distinguishing characteristic of the Enlightenment. "The only thing that matters is that the political order can be founded without recourse to religious principles." The purpose is to create a new society and a new man. "The philosophy of the Enlightenment eradicated Christian dualism and the world of the soul in the name of rationalization and secularization."

Yet precisely because the modernist ideology was a weapon for militant revolutionaries, it was strong on criticism but weak on positive construction. And the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant, its highest representatives, were attempts to define a secular order that again aimed at the unity of man and universe in the light of universal reason. After them, this vision of unity would be irrevocably shattered. Reason would come to signify, not the quest for understanding, but the power to transform and control— just what the capitalism and technology of the 19th century needed. The first modernist critique of modernity was also provided by Rousseau, who thus fathered the Romantic movement.

One significant effect of the Enlightenment was the deification of rationality in the minds of many, i.e., the elevation of reason to the status of an absolute. (During the French Revolution, some people even enthroned "the Goddess Reason" in the Notre Dame.) This, of course, created the problem that, while reason and doubt were to be taken as arbiters in the acceptance of everything else, they themselves had to be held exempt from the same treatment, which means that reason became dogma. For what grounds do we have for accepting reason as ultimate arbiter, if not blind faith in reason itself? Make the system self-referential, i.e. apply the method of doubt to reason itself, and the whole edifice collapses. As Anthony Giddens observes, "Modernity is not only unsettling because of the circularity of reason, but because the nature of that circularity is ultimately puzzling. How can we justify a commitment to reason in the name of reason?" This shows that we have to take at least one thing as an unquestioned assumption, a metaphysical presupposition, a fundamental foundation; and if this is not God, then it will have to be reason, chance, progress, positivism, Marxism, or some other substitute. As Einstein put it:

Modernity and Post-Modernity

The 19th century saw the triumph of capitalism, industrialism, and technology, but in this very triumph were to be found the seeds of its own dissolution. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud provided the strongest critiques of modernity, and in this sense they were the fathers of post-modernism. They were both modern in their rationalism, and antimodern in their respective criticisms. Together they destroyed the concept of modernity. Freud, in particular, was responsible for the most systematic attack ever to be launched on the ideology of modernity. He made short shrift of the concept of a rational Ego, and showed that it floated like an island on a sea of irrationality. Contrary to the rationalist hopes of the Enlightenment, consciousness and rationality were mere components of the human psyche, and beyond technology and the economy, few human activities truly rested on rational decision.

Where capitalism and democracy were not available for modernization, the State stepped in to realize it by authoritarian or totalitarian means. In freeing society from religious power, political philosophies of modernity legitimized absolute power. Just as the ecological crisis led to a loss of faith in progress and in the idea that science and technology were unmixed blessings, totalitarianism pointed to a dark side of modernity and showed that something essential— including concern for human life and well-being— was lacking, or had irretrievably been lost. Totalitarianism was itself a by-product of modernity. Without efficient technologies of surveillance, control, and extermination, despotism, violent though it was, could not have been transformed into totalitarianism.

The 20th century saw the crisis of modernity. This crisis was due to a transition from one society to another, from limited modernity to full modernity. Industrial society was marked by production and rational activity; today's society is characterized by markets and marketing. Modernity no longer means the reign of reason, but the gratification of needs and the satiation of desires. The society we live in is called by many names: modern, late modern, high modern, post-modern, hypermodern, hyper-industrialized, post-industrial, programmed, the information society, the knowledge society, etc. This consumer society is primarily sensate and hedonistic. It no longer consumes industrial goods, but cultural goods. Ours is an age of cultural pluralism, but, for that reason, also of moral relativism.

So what is the identifying characteristic of this culture? It rejects symbols, because these refer to a supra-human world. It rejects depth, or the distance between signs and meaning. Signs have no significance beyond themselves; that is, they are not signs at all. "The world seems to have become as flat as a stage set or a page of writing." For the pre-moderns, the world was a divine text to be read hermeneutically; post-modernism spells the end of hermeneutics.

No matter by what name we call it, then, it is clear that the essence of modernity has not changed today. Even where it finds a subject, our society substitutes an object for it. It desires to "eliminate all reference to the subject, which is regarded as a disguised form of the divine substance. Modernity is, it would seem, by definition materialist." Nor is this anything new, since modernity has been materialist from the 16th century onwards. Quite contrary to the intentions of the initiators of modernity, however, we live in a broken and fragmented world, which is undergoing an increasingly complete decomposition of social life. The subject is first amputated, and we then try to discover an illusory unity in what is left behind— the objective world— whereas only the complementarity of object and subject, of yin and yang, would have made sense in terms of unity. A maimed person, too, constitutes a unity of sorts, but this does not obscure the fact that some essential organ is missing.

What are the consequences of this? The first result is the loss of meaning. 20th century intellectuals have been haunted by the feeling that everything is meaningless. Modernity "is caught up in an increasingly complete eradication of meaning", and when modernity, too, loses its meaning, it abolishes itself— there is no sense in modernity, or anything else. This, as Nietzsche was quick to realize, is nihilism. And for this reason, the intellectuals of the modern age "have constantly sought to replace religion with another version of the absolute: beauty, reason, history, the Id, or energy." Or even art: art in its modern form was born in 18th-century Germany as a substitute for the sacred, and such people as Nietzsche, Adorno and Roland Barthes have tried to discover an absolute without transcendence in art. And this, of course, explains why such quests are invariably doomed to failure: we cannot discover the absolute in a world of finitude, within a world of relativity and transience, such as the material world is. We are looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

The final consequence of a modernity that takes shape in the way described above is antihumanism. "Modernism is an antihumanism, because ... the idea of man is bound up with the idea of the soul, which necessarily implies the idea of God." Even Descartes, the father of rationalism, did not discard the concept of God when he defined the human subject, the "I". And this is why even the human subject has to be rejected by those who wish to keep God— or rather themselves— confined to outer darkness. In sociology but also elsewhere, the Self is defined as a set of roles we play in the social system— as boring (if true) a conception of the Self as can be found.

But if the material world is half of existence, and if we can access the other half without falling into contradiction with the material half, there is no reason why we should suffer any of the worst consequences of modernity.

The Subject

According to Touraine's analysis, our conception of modernity has hitherto left out something vitally important. This he calls "the Subject," which he defines as "both body and soul." "Our modernity's tragedy is that it developed in the course of a struggle against half of modernity itself. The subject had to be driven out in the name of science. The entire heritage of Christianity, which lived on in Descartes and through him into the following century, had to be rejected. ... What we go on calling modernity therefore meant the destruction of an essential part of modernity. Although modernity can only exist because of the growing interaction between subject and reason, between consciousness and science, we became convinced that we had to abandon the idea of a subject in order to permit the triumph of reason, that we had to stifle our feelings and imagination in order to se[t] reason free..."

Although most people would associate modernity with rationality and secularization, with technology and industrialization, with commodification, etc., these are all partial aspects. According to Touraine, "The best definition of modernity is ... the demand for freedom and the defence of freedom against everything that transforms individuals into instruments, objects or absolute strangers." This is one reason why he introduces the concepts of subject and subjectivation. In his view, modernity can only be understood as a combination of rationalization and subjectivation. "The idea of a subject is a dissident idea which has always upheld the right to rebel against an unjust power. ... The modern spirit was defined by its struggle against religion. ... modernity's subject is none other than the secularized descendant of religious expression of the subject."

Touraine's discussion of subjectivation is important, and in support of it I would like to call in two witnesses. The first is Thomas Carlyle. "Protestantism," says Carlyle, "is the grand root from which our whole subsequent European History branches out." Luther is the father of many things: capitalism (which, as Weber pointed out, marked a transition from otherworldly asceticism to worldly asceticism), nationalism, individualism... But his most significant achievement was in the defiance of arbitrary authority. Here is Carlyle's testimony:

The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise. ... His speech, of two hours, distinguished itself by its respectful, wise, and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not submissive to anything more than that. ... "Confute me," he concluded, "by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain just arguments: I cannot recant otherwise. For it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I; I can do no other: God assist me!"—It is, as we say, the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men. English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, and vast work these two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present: the germ of it all lay there: had Luther in that moment done other, it had all been otherwise!

Let us now review the witness of Lancelot Law Whyte:

The social principle which made possible the unique achievement of Europe was this: in the European tradition the individual is conceived to be in direct relation to the universals in terms of which individual and social life are organized; every man stands in direct relation to God, to the world of ideas, and to the law and justice of the community. In the centralized ancient societies the formative tendencies of the individual were stifled under the rigid system which dominated him; the new communities which laid the foundations of Europe threw aside that tyrannical bondage. ... the European... is free to think, to pray, to interpret justice, for himself. Europe is the name of this priceless inheritance.

The European tradition is unique in ... the assumption that all men are potentially equal, each and all having direct access to God, being endowed with the faculty of thought, and entitled to the appropriate forms of justice. ... The most important consequence of this element ... was ... in its effect on the subjective confidence of the individual in his own abilities... the individual dared more than he ever could before.

... The individual sometimes dared to stand alone against tradition and tyranny because of this sense of power withim him. This is the permanent gift of Europe to mankind, which no other civilization or continent has equaled.

We are now in a better position to appreciate Touraine's identification of the Subject with dissidence, with social movements, and with rebellion. When we go down to the bottom of things, we find resistance to unjust authority at their root. Modernity owes its very existence to the human subject who had the courage to speak out against tradition; yet it has ended up denying precisely the thing that brought it about. This is what Marshall Berman calls "modernization's betrayal of its own human promise", which is that "modern men and women must become the subjects as well as the objects of modernization".

But hold on. Religious institutions are not—or need not be—identical with religion. If we can find a guiltless, churchless, rational religion that does not oppose faith to knowledge, there is no reason why we should not re-establish connection with the Transcendent. Our opposition to those who claimed to speak in the name of God need not result in turning our backs on God Himself— unless, of course, we have passed the point of no return in deconstructing the concept of God. The trouble is, certain institutions have become so identified with divinity in our minds that we cannot break the conceived link between them. If we ponder it carefully, Whyte's statement: "every man stands in direct relation to God" is already enough to do away with any and all mediating institutions. But we have yet to realize this completely and to act upon it. Even Luther, who felt the oppression of the mediating structure so deeply, ended up by founding a substitute, leaving his main project incomplete. It was left for the Enlightenment to complete this task, but it, in turn, fell overboard on the other side by rejecting, in toto, God and the inner world of man.

Secularization has resulted in the dissolution of institutionally organized personal connections. Assuming that we moderns do not want to return to a church-based social order, and perhaps also cannot, we must look forward to a religion that renounces clerical institutions right from the start. In contrast to Christianity and Buddhism, which are "church religions," Hinduism and Islam are "organic religious sytems" (to use Donald E. Smith's terminology), and only one of the latter fulfills the condition of monotheism.

There are many overlaps, but also many differences, between the religion of Islam and our Western religions. The differences are most confusing in concepts which have the same name, and therefore ought to mean the same thing, at least theoretically. Yet such is not the case. Some of us believe God is Triune, Islam holds that God is—and can only be—One. Some of us believe that The Word of God is a man, Islam—while not denying that man, nor even that title—claims that the Word of God is more properly a book (the Koran). To us, God is love; in Islam, God created the universe through love, and the universe—not God—is therefore love, or the fruit of thereof. We believe "God said: 'Let there be light,' and there was light"; according to the Koran, "God is the light of the heavens and the earth; light upon light." It is not that we have got things wrong; it is rather that various factors are emphasized or weighted differently, enabling a stable equilibrium to be achieved.

The Solution

Modernity, we have said, is totally materialistic and has banished meaning. Why is this so? Because modern science, on which it is based, is also materialistic. And why should science concern itself only with the physical world? Because that is all it ever set out to study to begin with. Listen to Richard Lewontin:

Early on, those engaged in the pursuit of science decided that they would restrict their investigations to the inert and tangible world of matter. Although the scope of science has subsequently expanded to include animate and intangible things as well, the tendency has been to restrict attention to the animate or intangible aspects of the material world; or, in cases where this is not possible, to reduce phenomena to their physical manifestations, and to study these projections or "shadows."

Now, let us by no means forsake such investigations. Let us by all means study the physical world to its very limits. And, by the use of technology, let us make the fullest use of the physical resources of the cosmos, and avail ourselves to the utmost of its amenities. Let us enjoy those pleasures of secular existence to which we have a right.

But let us not delude ourselves about two things. First, let us not expect to discover meaning within the world of matter. And second, let us not believe that we will be able to explain everything in the physical world solely by reference to that world.

In order to clarify what I mean, consider a jigsaw puzzle. When the puzzle is complete, you usually have some sort of sensible depiction, such as a landscape or Mona Lisa. We now scramble the puzzle, take a handful from among the mass of scrambled pieces, define this as the total set of our new puzzle, and proceed to solve it.

What chances do we have of success? Even if, by some legerdemain, we were able to place all the pieces in their correct places, immense gaps would remain in our picture. At this point we would have two options. We could either realize that the puzzle as it is was incomplete, go back to the pile of pieces we left behind, and solve for the entire set.

Or else we could insist that our handful of pieces is, after all, the total set. In this case, since there are gaps between the pieces when they are in their correct positions, and since gaps ordinarily oughtn't to occur in a jigsaw puzzle, we would try to rearrange them. After that, we would never get it right. Of course, we might be able to piece together apparently meaningful subpatterns, which, however, were as a matter of fact not intended in the original puzzle.

Now this is almost exactly where we find ourselves today. There are gaps in our knowledge because the universe unfolds through a series of levels of existence, as defined by Sufism. The observable universe, the physical world, is only the final outcome— the crystallization or "congealment"— of these levels, which are ontologically prior to it. It is true that the universe is so vast and wonderful that we can discern tantalizing patterns just by remaining within the world of matter and referring it to itself. But as long as our view of matter remains self-referential (i.e., "everything in the world of matter is ultimately explicable in terms of matter,") we shall get nowhere.

Think of these other levels of existence as filters. We start with a meaningful whole. Every level filters out certain things, until we are left, in the material world, with an apparently random ensemble. This is why we can never find meaning solely within the material world.

These other levels are ontologically prephysical. Yet they are all potentially accessible to human consciousness, just as the material world is. The difference is that their finer "substances" have been "filtered out" by the time we reach the coarsest level, the material world, and hence cannot be apprehended by our five physical senses working within the physical realm. Yet the human entity includes correlates of the physical senses that can render these other levels perceptible, provided we never forget that these other levels are nonphysical.

Totality (the "real universe" or "omniverse") is comprised of these levels plus the physical level, which complete and complement each other. Traditionally, they have been lumped together under the— by now fuzzy— name of "spiritual world." But another word for "spirit" in Arabic is "meaning" (ma'na). And the word for "spiritual" is "meaningful." In Islamic and Sufic thought, the world of meaning completes the world of matter, precisely because it supplies the meaning that is missing from the material world. When we think about it, it becomes clear that "spirit" has this sense even in our Western languages, as in the word l'esprit in French.

At the zenith of all these levels is God. God is the ultimate meaning of the universe. Because He is the ultimate meaning, God is the First Fact about the universe. He is the first Being we need to consider in our dealings with the universe; but because He is beyond all levels, He is also the subtlest, the farthest removed from our faculties of perception (whether physical, spiritual, or mental). This is why His existence must be taken on faith.

If we want to reach meaning, we must climb higher and higher through the levels. Only by getting closer to God can we achieve higher levels of meaning— which implies, as a by-product, a heightened level of perception and an enhanced intelligence. (The gray matter in our brains is capable of perceiving more than just clay.) For this there are certain psychospiritual exercises or psychophysical practices, but the foundation of them all is a moral law, without which spiritual elevation is impossible. The moral law is the mediator between the physical and the spiritual world, as well as the collective world of society and the psychological world of the individual, for human beings. In this conception, religion need not impose any social order or institutions other than the freely chosen moral conduct of human beings. Emancipated humanity does not need a nanny or a chaperon.

We conclude that although modernity may be incomplete, it can be complemented— and its deficiencies completed— by the services of a rational religion. This is how we can find inner happiness and fulfilment.

The Subject and Self-Realization

We have already seen that modern and antimodern can coexist within modernity. The point is to find a combination that does not interfere destructively. Pre-modern does not necessarily mean antimodern. There are many elements of pre-modern thought that can easily be accommodated within modernity, not least because much of modernity is rooted therein. (The philosophers and mathematicians of Antiquity were all pre-moderns.)

For one thing, we can restore the human subject to its former dignity. The idea of the human soul has traditionally been referenced to the divine that is within it. We can accept both the divine subject and the human subject without opposing one against the other. In other words, the traditional view and the modern view need not contradict one another. Further, we have yet to come to terms with Goethe's telling insight that the self-development of the individual and the socioeconomic development of society must complement each other: "these two modes of development must come together, must fuse into one, before either of these archetypally modern promises can be fulfilled." We have accomplished the second but neglected the first, and that task still lies ahead of us.

Another thing we can do is to return to hermeneutics. The meaninglessness of the world is a result of our own projection upon it. This does not mean that there is nothing behind the surface, but simply that we have persuaded ourselves that this is so. The Koran and Sufism, on the contrary, explain that everything is a sign from God, if only we can begin to divine its significance. A cloud, a star, a tree will all divulge their secrets if studied carefully, which is how science came about in the first place. A spiritual/hermeneutical reading of the universe, then, need not contradict physical science but can actually complement it; it is an extension of science to deeper levels of meaning.

There is a further twist to this. If the world is meaningless, then so is the subject. If the world has no depth, neither does the soul of man. If this is true, then what is self-realization all about? In a world of Hollywood props, the human self, too, would have nothing behind it and nowhere to go. Cosmic meaninglessness is supplemented by personal meaninglessness. The fact, however, that I have a visual impairment and cannot see a table does not mean that it does not exist. There are other faculties besides sight that our vision-centered civilization has overlooked. Since God is the essence and meaning of the universe, if you evict Him, all you will be left with is an empty shell— which is none other than nihilism, as Nietzsche clearly understood.

The moment you accept that the world can be read hermeneutically, you allow the self, the subject, to be read in the same way. It, too, is full of depth and meaning. This, as a matter of fact, is not a projection, but a recognition of what is already there.

What happens if we don't allow this? "Personal meaninglessness— the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer— becomes a fundamental psychic problem in circumstances of late modernity. ... The self in modern society is frail, brittle, fractured, fragmented... for authors writing in the poststructuralist [ antihermeneutic] vein, the self effectively ceases to exist: the only subject is a decentred subject, which finds its identity in the fragments of language or discourse." Under these circumstances, the promise of self-actualization withers away into a farce: to enlarge one's self becomes mere ego-inflation, and the quest for new tastes and sensations degenerates into hedonism.

Reopening the pathways that lead the human subject to God also heralds the prospect of ending the troubles of Faustian Man, the possibility of soothing and beautifying his soul. The fact that we have not yet discovered the correct algorithm for approaching God simply means that we have not encountered it yet. In his Life Against Death (1959), Norman O. Brown remarked: "The Faustian restlessness of man in history shows that men are not satisfied by the satisfaction of their conscious desires." His hope was that the right form of psychoanalytic thought would "offer a way out of the nightmare of endless 'progress' and endless Faustian discontent, a way out of the human neurosis..."

But since the essence of man and the essence of the universe are ultimately One, we need to plumb depths that were never dreamt of in the philosophy of psychoanalysis, which stopped at a shallow point in the ocean of consciousness. Only the divine can fill the infinite vacuum that its absence leaves in the human heart and bestow contentment on the latter. Then, we won't need to sell our souls or make pacts with shady characters, either.

Finally, the phenomenon of radical doubt— which, as an integral part of modernity, has come to plague modern humans and which fills them with existential angst (anxiety)— can be removed only by an act of faith: not blind faith or superstition, which I have never intended nor shall ever intend, but an enlightened faith, a rational faith (like that of Descartes) which recognizes what is invariant among a wide variety of human transformations, and anchors itself therein. For we must not only recognize the revolt of reason against faith. We must also take account, in Yeats's words, of the "revolt of the soul against the intellect," which, if not allowed rational, legitimate expression, will surely erupt through irrational, destructive outlets.

Cyberculture and the Future of Modernity

And what of the future? Where, if present trends continue, are we headed? Indications are that post-postmodernism may be a post-humanism, which is an anti-humanism and, in the final analysis, a subhumanism. A cultural critic who also happened to be a student of Sufism might make the following observations:

Granting the validity of many other interpretations, it remains a fact that man, with his intelligence and labor, his discoveries and inventions, is the motive force behind technology. If man does not believe in God, and does not abide by the rules outlined by God for the benefit of man, he will be ensnared and enslaved by his Base Self. The Base Self then becomes the engine driving technology, the motor behind civilisation. And to the extent that this bestial self is at the helm, whatever good that results will be, not due to it, but in opposition to its innate disposition.

Intelligence is of little use here. In fact, the greater the intelligence, the more the Base Self is enabled to do harm. For, supposing a genius to be involved, the Base Self is able to avail itself— somewhat like a computer virus— of all the brain circuits, all the firepower, of that genius. Its capacity to wreak havoc, its ability to cause harm, is correspondingly amplified and enhanced.

At the beginning of the scientific revolution, "Francis Bacon and René Descartes set forth a philosophy of power that founded the modern world view. Guided by the love of mankind, by 'charity' and 'generosity,' they undertook to transform the world into a garden through the conquest of nature, with the aim of eventual planetary mastery by man..." The Base Self relishes power, but since they were in that age imbued with the high morals of Christianity, both men at least tried to harness that power to good ends.

In the sixth and final part of the Discourse on Method, Descartes debates with himself whether or not to publicize his discoveries, and is persuaded to do so by the fact that they will be useful to humanity. "In his effort to do great things for others, Descartes gives mankind a method that will lead [ in his own words] 'to the invention of an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it'..." This is, above all, a Christian sentiment, one of altruism and concern for one's fellow man.

Today, however, this inspiration of the Founding Fathers has been lost, along with faith in God, and the Base Self has been released from all its inhibitions. Only to the extent that it survives as an atavism, therefore, will the humanly beneficial use of technology bother hardened hearts and callous consciences. In what Mark Dery calls "Ballard's Rule," sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard identified "the most terrifying casualty" of the twentieth century as the "demise of feeling and emotion." Idolaters are cursed by progressively becoming like their idols— they turn into what they adore— and mechanolaters or cyberlaters have similarly been doomed to become increasingly unfeeling and insensitive. Everyone else, watch out! All those evil cyborgs and killer robots you see in movies are images of the Base Self— in a technological setting— bubbling up from the psyche.

Technology is about control, and one of the greatest kicks of the Base Self is to bend others to its desires, to subjugate them to its will. A whole gamut of dangers lies here, from the remote control of electrode-implanted human beings to cybertorture and sadism (obtaining pleasure by inflicting pain), to cybertotalitarianism where a whole populace is reduced to unthinking obedience by chip implants in the brain. Only the fear of God can prevent people from engaging in such affairs without compunction, for the only effective restraint is self-restraint.

The Future is Now

Looking at the cyberculture scene, certain trends are already evident that provide a foretaste of the future. Earlier this century, Teilhard de Chardin tried to reconcile Darwinian evolution with the God concept. Evolution culminated with man, but man, in turn, would be superseded by the emergence of the "noosphere"— the sphere of pure intelligence— at the Omega Point. Already, there are those who think of individual human beings as neurons and the Internet as a "world brain." Meanwhile, the computer screen and its wraparound extension, Virtual Reality, provide an escapism from mundane reality, its troubles and its cares, in a more potent way than television did in the past.

Man has always fashioned his idols with his own hands, and then worshiped them. Where a satisfactory faith in God is absent, the adulation of the machine and the deification of technology, a Sufi student would say, is the natural outcome of an unrestrained Base Self and an unguided— or rather, misguided— spirit. Technology confers on man both power and a sense of power, and power (plus sex) is what the Base Self is mainly interested in. Knowledge is power, and as Lord Acton observed, absolute power corrupts absolutely— it seduces the Base Self beyond its wildest dreams, which in turn gives thanks to the machines that have placed so much in its hands by worshiping them as superior to man.

If man is imperfect and machines superior, the more closely man ought to approach perfection the more mechanized he gets. The notion of a cybernetic organism, or "cyborg," has been in the air for a long time. Ultimately, one's mental patterns would be tranferred to a machine, getting rid of the human body altogether. This prospect, however; is viewed with euphoria by some and with anxiety by others, for the perfection of the man-machine symbiosis also spells the demolition of man.

This is a mere continuation, when viewed in perspective, of the Christian loathing of the flesh and the fear of death. Since we now believe that we do not possess immortal souls, but rather are supposed to be composed of bioelectronic currents in the brain, immortality is to be attained by "downloading" those currents into a suitable machine. This is supposed to be an improvement over the human condition, based on a body which is full of fluids, messy, and prone to sickness, pain, old age and death. The idea has been around for a long time in science fiction, and as usual, Arthur C. Clarke was there before many of them. Long before Hans Moravec argued that we would be able to transfer the "patterns of information" that are "ourselves" into robot bodies, for example, Clarke described the extraterrestrials of 2001:

... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic. ... They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.

[ Later on,] they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.

Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves... Now they were lords of the Galaxy, beyond the reach of time.

This is all very well, and very inspiring. The student of Sufism, however, would maintain that what these aliens evolved to in thousands or millions of years, every human being now possesses as a natural birthright by virtue of one's immortal soul, and that we have not yet fathomed the perfection of a fully awakened body harnessed to a fully enlightened spirit, infinitely beyond the possibilities of any machine, however wondrous.

The entrenched habits of a culture die hard. Even Clarke, who stands quite remote from Christianity, cannot resist viewing the body as inferior to machines, which, still being material, are in turn inferior to light/energy (which the spirit already consists of, though not the physical sort). If matter is something to be disposed of, however, why the fear of death, wherein we shed our material shells anyway? Furthermore, why did God create man with both a body and a soul if the soul is more perfect? The answer is that certain options, such as self-improvement, are open to us only during our sojourn on earth, when we are incarnate.

There is, therefore, another possibility beyond what is offered us by our present civilization, that paradoxically unites both alternatives viewed as mutually exclusive or contradictory in that civilization: the harmonious togetherness and development of the body and the soul. We can either remain within the confines of such contradictions, or move on to an exhilerating synthesis— that provided by the Sufi vision of things.

The radiant future, the immense potential promised us by the cyberprophets, we possess already. All we need to do is become aware of it, open up to it here and now, using the techniques of Sufism. Machines and computers are all right in themselves; it is only when they are made into a be-all and end-all that the healthy balance is lost. Man impoverishes himself by expecting too much from machines and too little from himself. But man is always superior, since the computer emerged from man and not the other way around. In producing Artificial Intelligence, what man has effectively done is to take his own intelligence and place it in the machine. The machine did not create its own intelligence of itself, independently of man. If we can keep matters in proper perspective, machines can continue their role of helping man and not harming him. Otherwise, man will be enslaved by his own slaves.

It is a fact, as interesting as it is unexpected, that the concepts of Sufism can help us to understand the human condition at the turn of the second millenium. It comes as a surprise that the intellectual tools of a mystical teaching, which one would not expect to be of any practical use to the man in the street, can offer insights leading to a better appreciation of our contemporary predicament. But it becomes intelligible when we consider that Sufism is the highest expression of the perennial philosophy, and represents man's loftiest aspirations and potentialities. We shall deal with one such example below.

Similarity and Incomparability

Let us see where an analysis in terms of the two Sufic conceptions, tashbih and tanzih, will lead us. First, of course, we need the definitions of these technical terms. Tashbih is the "similarity" of certain attributes of God to those of created things; one makes use of analogy. Tanzih is the "incomparability" of certain other attributes of God with creaturely attributes; here, one dissociates God from creation.

To make things clearer, incomparability makes use of the so-called "negative attributes." That is, God is immortal, infinite, unlimited, invisible, and so on. Similarity, on the other hand, makes use of positive attributes, only to a superlative degree. So God is the All-Knowing, the Everlasting, the Ultimately Real, the All-Seeing, the Omnipotent, etc. There is a close correspondence here, though perhaps not identity, with Transcendence and Immanence. In one case, we affirm that God is beyond all things; in the other, we claim that when God created the universe, He did this as His self-expression, so that everything contains— itself constitutes— a "sign" or signature of God, however minute and remote, and God is "inner than the innermost." Talking about God is a difficult matter, because He is singular, and unlike anything we know. Hence, we must resort to the dual use of the tools of similarity (immanence) and incomparability (transcendence).

Now one of the cardinal principles of Islam is that these two tools must be used together, and in a balanced fashion. Ibn Arabi's selection from the Koran is an oft-quoted example: "Nothing is like Him; He is All-Hearing, All-Seeing" (42:11). The former part of this sacred verse displays incomparability, the latter part similarity. This combination of transcendence and immanence is unique to Islam. By this means, it avoids the pitfalls encountered when either approach is taken alone, exclusive of the other.

The Case of Transcendence

The investigation of these pitfalls proves both enlightening and revealing. Take, first, the case of transcendentalism (associated with tanzih). The consequences of this stance is well illustrated by the following Sufi teaching-story: A scholar was addressing an audience, among whom happened to be a sage. The scholar was outlining the incomparability characteristics of God: "God cannot be seen, He cannot be heard, He cannot be known..." After a while, the sage interrupted the scholar, and remarked: "You're trying to say God doesn't exist, but you can't quite bring yourself to say it."

The negative characteristics of God, then, if overemphasized, can lead to a total rejection of His existence. God is effectively placed beyond the observable universe—He becomes a remote god. The Latin term for the inactive god, deus otiosus, quite clearly indicates his nature: idle, sterile, useless. The implication is that after he created the universe, such a god either lost interest in his creation, or became so exhausted that he left creation to take care of itself. This is the fallacy of the "Divine Watchmaker" analogy, in which God, after designing and building a clockwork universe, leaves it alone to tick on unattended till the end of time.

Human beings have little use for a remote god indifferent to the affairs of men; as Mircea Eliade has shown, the tendency in many cultures is to conceive of a substitute, a demiurge or son who carries on the affairs of this world and to whom recourse may be had. The remote god is still there, perhaps, but he is appealed to only as a last resort, when all other supplications to other eminences have failed.

Once man has banished God from the universe in this manner, two consequences follow. One is that human beings become more this-worldly and materialistic. Since God does not interest Himself in human affairs, men are left to shift for themselves, and to pay inordinate attention to the physical world. The second result is that they become more rationalistic, because reason is a very good tool for dealing with the affairs of this world. The Jews are a significant—though not the only—example of this situation. Although God, in their view, is omnipotent, His transcendent characteristic leads, in time, to a this-worldly attitude (especially after the Age of the Prophets and God's direct involvement in the history of Judaism), while rationalism is built into the structure of Jewish casuistry.

Things may not end there, however. As soon as God is pushed out of the universe, He becomes "supernatural," in contrast to physical nature which is accessible to the senses and lends itself to scientific investigation. Once God is relocated utterly beyond the universe, it is only one step to dispensing with Him entirely. Under these conditions, the absolute transcendence of God may lead to atheism or a position perilously close to it.

Once the point of atheism is reached, it is dangerously easy for a human being to fall victim to egotistic drives, the core of which has been described in Sufism as "the Base Self." The Base Self is always intent on extending its sphere of influence, and its inmost desire is to usurp God's place—in effect, to become God, even if it never can. One then becomes subject to self-adulation and self-approval, narcissism and pride, with megalomanic tendencies. In the political sphere, totalitarianism is the tendency of the unchecked Base Self, and it is no coincidence that the rationalistic and materialistic utopias of our time have ended in dictatorships.

The Case of Immanence

Let us now consider what happens when one goes to the other extreme, that of similarity (tashbih). Three stages can be discerned here. The first step is that, due to analogies drawn between the Supreme Being and other beings, as well as the conception that God is "within" all things, Creation comes to be confused with the Creator. God is reduced to the observable universe, so that the result is pantheism.

As Murata and Chittick have also observed, however, the process does not stop at pantheism. Once the concept of God is absorbed into the universe, the human tendency to draw distinctions takes over. Theoretically, the universe should be "saturated" with God in a homogeneous manner, but in practice things work out differently. It is difficult to conceive of divinity as equally immanent in a piece of garbage and a valuable jewel, so the jewel has, as it were, a "higher coefficient of sacralization." The ground is thus laid for polytheism and idolatry.

Pantheism can also lead to atheism, since the existence of a God separate from the universe is denied. In fact, it appears to be a halfway house, or waystation, along the road from theism to atheism. Pantheists regard the universe and nature as divine. In their haste to distance themselves from the concept of a creator God, however, the pantheists of our day have drawn on the arguments of atheism to such an extent that they have undermined their own position and defeated their own purpose. However unintentionally on their part, these arguments do away with the concept of divinity so thoroughly that no basis is left for considering anything (including the universe) divine. Pantheism can thus slide into pan-atheism; "all is God" is a less defensible position than "all is not God." In misappropriating specific attributes of God— such as infinity and eternity— to the universe, pantheists are also making an unsubstantiated metaphysical claim from the scientific point of view, and a claim that is simply wrong from the mystical (empirical/experiential) viewpoint.

The ultimate outcome of similarity in an absence of the checks and balances of incomparability, however, is the deification of man. The reader will easily discern that this plays straight into the hands of the Base Self, which, as already noted, has a thirst for self-deification. In the second stage of our process, the tactic of the Base Self is to establish divinity closer to home. It does this, not by declaring itself God directly (which other human beings might dispute), but by declaring another human being divine. This is seen in such cases as the pharaohs of Egypt, the ancient god-kings of Persia, or Jesus in Christianity.

Because a human being is the most advanced creature in the universe, it is easier to confuse man with God in drawing analogies than anything else. For instance, the attributes of Sight and Hearing belong to the higher animal species, but the attribute of Knowledge—comprehensive knowledge—belongs to man alone. But it is the spirit of man, above all, that is compared to God in all traditional cultures. Once this point is reached, therefore, the spirit and the life of the spirit become all-important. If God is pure spirit and the transience of material life inessential, one is tempted to ignore the physical world as far as possible and to live the life of a hermit or monk. This overemphasis on the spiritual world to the virtual exclusion of the material world is what happened, for instance, in Christianity.

The hazard of immanence or analogy, then, is that it results in anthropotheism. But immanence should not be confused with identity. "God is in man"—any man at all—does not mean "God is man," any more than "God is within all things" means that God is identical with the universe.

The Base Self, on the other hand, would like to fancy otherwise. By equating a human being—any human being—with God, it is establishing for itself an outpost, a base, from which it becomes easier to declare its own divinity. For if a human being can be God, members of the same species—other human beings—are that much closer to being God themselves. If one can claim to be closer, in some sense, to the deified human than other people, one is already a demigod. This is what is known as "covert associationism" in Islam—i.e., the Base Self's pretence to be an associate with God, if indeed not God Himself, which may go consciously unnoticed. The third stage, therefore, is this self-deification of the Base Self—an abomination if ever there was one. Because of the totalitarian tendencies of the unleashed ego, this also results in rigid hierarchical structures and inquisitions.

If, on the other hand, it appears preposterous to one's reason that a human being can be God, one is likely to again land in atheism. For while human beings are endowed with very special characteristics in some respects, they are also ailing, failing creatures in other respects, such that picturing a human being, no matter how wonderful, as God may indeed overtax the imagination.

It follows, then, that the extremes of incomparability and similarity, of dissociation and analogy, of transcendence and immanence—when taken alone, all of them lead to trouble. The only firm ground is the middle ground, balancing the two sides. At either extreme, the Base Self wins. This does not imply that God loses, since God is beyond loss or gain. It means that we lose, that humanity suffers.

At first, it may appear paradoxical that extreme spiritualism and extreme materialism should lead to similar results. It may be normal for atheists to engage in totalitarianism. But how can ostensibly God-fearing people show the same predilection?

The secret lies in the Base Self. Since it has already deified itself, it appropriates the right to mete out "divine" punishment to those who oppose it. Furthermore, since the Base Self is cruel and unjust— it always commands, and compels to, evil— it will do this even to the innocent. Its alibi is that it is acting in the name of God, but its actions are diametrically opposite to God's desires. It is only when God is respected and loved— something a person in the grip of his Base Self is hardly capable of— that one is wary of encroaching on territory and authorization reserved for God alone. The totalitarian tendencies of the Base Self, then, will assert themselves regardless of whether the supremacy of the Base Self is approached from the spiritualistic or the materialistic extreme.

A Different Interpretation

Let us now chart—very briefly, for this could be a life's work if elaborated in detail—the course of our civilization in the light of transcendence and immanence. We begin with Judaism, a this-worldly and legalistic, rationalistic religion. Two thousand years ago, Christ appeared in order to redress the balance, to remind humankind of its spiritual roots. But his teaching was interpreted from an exclusively other-worldly viewpoint, until the Renaissance came along. The reaction to a spiritually-oriented existence culminated with Protestantism and the Enlightenment. As a protest against Catholicism, Protestantism was marked by a resurgence of worldly activity, placing it closer to the original Judaism with its emphasis on transcendence. As sociologist Max Weber pointed out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), latter-day capitalism had its roots in worldly asceticism rather than other-worldly asceticism.

We have, then, an oscillation from transcendence (Judaism) to immanence (Catholic Christianity) back to transcendence (Protestantism); from materialism to spiritualism back to materialism. It is this latter materialism (in science, in economics, etc.), coupled with rationalism, that has acted for nearly four hundred years as the driving force behind modernity, which subsequently shed all its ties with religion. In the Faustian restlessness of modern man, in the relentless striving to conquer and subdue nature, in the drive to overpower and master entire planets, in the worship of ceaseless change to such an extent that continuity and stability are thrown to the winds, there is much for the Base Self to feed on.

We now stand, if the cycle is to continue, at the threshold of another swing of the pendulum, a swing back to spiritualism. But the shortcomings of either extreme have long been apparent. Do we have any alternative?

Art and Self-Realization

Let us now consider the possible contribution of Sufic thought to modernity, with art as the special focus.

In a world in which— as Touraine points out— the distance between sign and meaning has collapsed, where Meaning has evaporated, where the human subject is repressed, what are the chances of self-actualization? Quite obviously, the self, too, becomes shorn of its higher potentials. Its further dimensions and possibilities are reduced to zero. The self is then placed in a rat maze; its freedom of movement is restricted to two dimensions and certain pathways, plus such goals as psychologists may be able to devise.

As Charles Taylor has pointed out, moral relativism in our age also leads to an emphasis on one's self-development and the exclusion of ethical considerations in relations with other human beings. The moral ideal behind self-realization is sincerity and authenticity, which means to be honest toward oneself. Anthony Giddens notes that authenticity has become the framework for self-actualization. When the moral dimension is lost, self-actualization can degenerate into narcissism and hedonism. Yet this should not blind us to the high ideals that the concept of self-realization embodies. It cannot be explained away simply as egoism, moral laxity or selfishness.

Everyone has the right to be, or to become, himself. Self-discovery and self-definition is closely linked with artistic creativity. Art as we understand it today came into existence in the 1800s, and since then there has been a tendency to view the artist as a culture hero, to respect him as the creator of cultural values.

Art in its modern conception differs from sacred art and from art as mimesis, as a simulation of nature or a representation of reality. Modern art came into being as a reaction against these forms. What counts now, according to Taylor's analysis, is not the copying of something that already exists, but the creation of something entirely new. We think of the imagination as creative.

This means, says Taylor, that the artist is discovering himself through the thing he creates. He produces a new artistic language, and only by this means does he become what he was supposed to be. Self-discovery is an act of building, of construction. In creating his art, the artist creates himself. And only authenticity, being sincere to oneself, can infuse self-discovery with value.

According to Taylor, self-realization, if it is to be authentic, must— far from excluding ethical principles and moral values— make them mandatory. If the art of the artist is his self-discovery and this self-discovery is also his self-realization, applying Taylor's idea to art yields a situation where ethics and aesthetics, goodness and beauty, are fused.

Many artists have rejected this possibility as impeding or cramping their art. And their view is right if we accept moral relativism, where up and down or right and wrong are the same. But if there are universally valid moral principles for humanity, we have to face the fact that a work of art can positively aid or negatively impede not only an artist's self-discovery, but also the self-actualization of others. (Banning freedom of artistic expression is not a solution here. What is required is the self-control and self-restraint of the artist.)

The Art or the Artist?

Among the various fields of artistic endeavor, the figurative arts (by which I primarily mean painting and sculpture, but also such fields as photography and cinematography) have provided the most impressive range of masterpieces. These are part of the cultural heritage of mankind, and their importance cannot be gainsaid.

In the visual field, Islamic patterns of endlessly-repeated exquisite geometrical figures have the most direct quality of sacred art. It is not so much the precise mathematical forms that define them, as the spaces between the forms. It is this seeming emptiness, which is not a vacuum but actually a plenum, that congeals into these forms; it is as if the forms themselves, representing the intricate mathematical and scientific laws of our observable universe, are what remains after the other levels of reality (of which we have spoken above) have been filtered out. These levels, too, possess form and meaning, and it is only by perceiving these levels, which appear to the physical senses as empty space, that one can complete the jigsaw puzzle. Even when the physical universe appears random, it is not, for it meshes precisely with the other, filtered levels.

An additional problem in contemporary art is that many of its forms have become emptied of meaning. If we believe that the world is meaningless, there is no reason to assume that art forms have to—indeed, can—be meaningful. The widespread feeling of cosmic and personal meaninglessness are inevitably reflected, through the artist's consciousness, onto works of art.

Traditionally, idol-worship was the greatest danger behind the production of images and forms (remember the Golden Calf). That we are not entirely free of this possibility even in our age is proved by an anecdote related of Rodin, who, after finishing his statue of Moses, stood back and contemplated his creation in wonder. It was so lifelike that he felt compelled to address it: "Speak, O Moses!"

Another great danger is that, because the artist is engaged in the act of creation, he begins to mistake himself for the Creator. It has already been remarked that the Base Self is always bent on self-apotheosis. Of course, this can happen in any field of art, but the tendency is more pronounced in the figurative arts. For example, the sublimity of Beethoven's music led him to see himself as a demigod, an intermediary between God and man. The same thing happened to Tolstoy, who at times saw himself as "God's elder brother."

It is the field of the visual arts, however, that is especially precarious in this respect. Picasso, in his old age, fancied himself as an art-god, a magician transmuting the base materials of his trade into high art. Historian Paul Johnson, after giving these examples, relates the following which should rank among the classics:

Matisse was a similar case. Having completed the chapel he had designed and decorated in the South of France, he showed and explained his work to two nuns, a prioress and a simple sister whom he had known for many years. The prioress thanked him for devoting so much time and genius to the glory of God. Matisse replied: "But I did it all for myself." The sister, shocked, said: "But Maìtre, when you were still at work, you told me you were doing it for Almighty God." Matisse replied calmly: "I am God."

These are the dangers of the creative act if it serves to feed one's ego. But there is more, much more, to art than this. In order to appreciate what is involved, let us consider the following story, taken from Okakuro Kakuzo's The Book of Tea.

Peiwoh and the Reluctant Harp

In the forest beside the river Lungmen, there was a tree with roots extending to the depths of the earth and branches high enough to speak with the stars. One day, a powerful sorcerer turned this tree into a harp; a harp of such savage spirit, however, that only a master musician could tame it. The harp, from which no musician was able to extract a pleasing note, remained for a long time in the treasury of the Chinese Emperor. Despite all the efforts of the musicians, the harp only emitted nasty and discordant sounds.

One day, Peiwoh, the greatest harpist in the world, chanced to come by and asked to try his hand at the harp, whose fame had reached him. When the Emperor gave permission, Peiwoh took his place at the harp, began to stroke and caress it kindly as if soothing a wild stallion, and, gently touching its strings, began to sing the songs of the seasons, lofty mountains, and rivers. Suddenly, the harp remembered that it had once been a tree, and all its forest memories were recalled to it.

Now, sweet spring breezes were playing on its branches; little waterfalls were dancing on the brooks and smiling at flowers and blossoms. Next, the dreamy sounds of summer with its thousands of insects, the gentle patter of rain, the plaintive cry of a cuckoo bird was heard. A tiger roared from afar, the brooks answered. Then came autumn and next, winter. After this, Peiwoh changed tunes and sang love songs, and then songs of war. With Peiwoh's every song, a thousand memories of the forest came to life in the wood from which the harp had been made, floating through and engulfing the Emperor's palace.

Enraptured, the Emperor asked Peiwoh the secret of his success. "Your Majesty," replied Peiwoh, "those before me failed because they all sang their own songs. As for me, I left the tune to the harp. Did the harp then become Peiwoh, or did Peiwoh become the harp? Even I do not know."

Beauty, Love, and Sufism

I want to suggest that there is more than one thing of crucial importance to art in this story. First, it suggests that in order to produce truly great art, the artist must become united—or even one—with his instrument or medium. This is sympathy or empathy, which lies at the root of aesthetic perception.

Second, when such a unity is achieved, the artist is indeed creating or discovering himself through his art; the modern conception of art is vindicated. Baudelaire conceived of the sort of modern person who "made himself into a work of art" by changing his external appearance; the artist enjoying some mode of unity with his creation is not only the subject but also the object of the artistic process (through his art he shapes himself), while the Sufi fashions himself as a work of art by working on his self and modifying his internal states.

Third, such a degree of unity can only be obtained by love, and where love and unity are concerned, the Sufis have the last word: the artist's union with his medium and creation is a subset of the Sufi's love for God and the universe. And is not true love, indeed, the total concern for the other to the exclusion of one's own self-interest?—until one even ceases to have a separate existence (as in the Persian tale of Laila and Majnun, where Majnun finally says: "I am Laila"), and if the love is mutual, both cease to exist separately, and only God is left. True love is the rarest and most delicate thing in the world, not reducible to sex or to anything else; it is, in Dante's words, "the power that moves the sun and other stars," a manifestation of the sacred. Love is the answer to all things, love is the balm of sore hearts, love is what—if deep enough—will lead us straight to God.

Fourth, great art reaches out and involves its audience, too, in the unity and ecstasy of the process that created it—it pulls them into the vortex of the artistic process. The spectators become actors or active participators. This happens on the subtler levels of consciousness, so that we are aware, perhaps, only of a general, diffuse feeling of elation, of being in the presence of grandeur. But sympathy is involved not only in the creation, but also in the perception of such a work. And this kind of sympathy is a spiritual thing—it cannot be understood in terms of the motions of matter, of waves or particles or wavicles. If we want to understand this phenomenon, the proper conceptual tool to invoke is consciousness.

Fifth, the creation of the artist is particular—bounded by space and time, by culture and geography, by the personal touch of the artist; yet it strikes a universal chord: in that presence breathe we all. Through the particular, there shines the light of the universal—which, ultimately, is the light of the Divine.

Art itself, then, is a sign of God—as are, indeed, all things in the universe. But because it involves itself directly with beauty and with a sensibility that can only be understood in terms of spirit, art—especially great art—