What is the essential mystical experience? Many would say that it lies in the believer's sobering realization of the inadequacy of reason in comprehending God and his design. The mystic receives God as a subjective experience, beyond the bounds of dogma. Love and devotion—at times, rapturous ecstasy—helps bridge the manifestly large gulf between him and God. In the face of existential angst, he seeks refuge in the inner recesses of the soul; happiness is to be found via surrendering of self to the benevolent divine, detachment from worldly pleasures, and suppressing the ego. Clearly, a mystical worldview does not engender ideas like competition, personal ambition, or democracy. Instead, it furthers tolerance and pacifism. Many scholars have noted that such a spiritual notion of faith flowered in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Eastern Christianity, but barely so in Western Christianity.

A key difference between the Greeks and the monotheists is that the latter blended the moral and the political with revelation, the political more so in Islam than in Christianity. A universal, durable code of behavior and personal conduct is an understandable human craving. And so much more comforting when God Himself shows up and lays it out in one's own language! Soon, and inevitably, it pervaded most aspects of life—personal-moral and social-political—for the divine will is hard to compartmentalize by negotiation. The decadence of the later Roman empire contributed to the rise of Christianity. The human agency of the Greco-Romans got circumscribed, if not crushed, by its totalitarian claims. In came a documented moral framework, an imaginative cosmology for the common mind, and a recipe for living a good life. The conversion of Constantine indeed helped but the fact that a Roman emperor could embrace Christianity and expect his subjects to adopt it only proves that it had acquired critical mass in the preceding three centuries. It was already popular among his soldiers whose profession made the idea of a world beyond appealing.

Centuries later, it is hardly unfair to say that the 'revealed' moral codes of all monotheisms have not only exposed their rational deficit but have frequently incited men to hatred, division, and wars. Sufi mysticism, while no champion of external human agency or reason, at least had the virtue of being a private, pacifist, and tolerant belief system. Humankind's perennial craving for God is evident enough, but the greater scourge perhaps lies with His self-professed intermediaries and their exclusivist rule books. Can we escape this conclusion: While they continue to serve the need to believe—and often without harm—there ain't no worthy metaphysics in our monotheisms?

The Greeks were no mystics—their Homeric paganism had no other-worldly spirituality. Classical Greek values were built upon the public space; they were creatures of the polis; morality derived from the logic and culture of the demos. In fifth century BCE, Pericles declared, 'unlike any other nation, we regard him who takes no part in public duties not as unambitious but as useless.'♣ This represents a worldview that is antithetical not only to the spiritual-mystical one but also to all dogmatic monotheisms: elevation of self is opposed to its annihilation; participation and ambition go farthest with individual reward; competitive self-interest thrives better alongside egalitarian politics and civic justice. Indeed, the adoption of the classical Greek worldview is at the expense of others almost by definition. 

The high watermark of Greek thought lies in the Hellenistic age, in the philosophy of the Stoics and the Epicureans. They went farther with reason, as did some Hindus and the Buddhists before them.♣ The Stoics favored a lesser role for the ego, while retaining their engagement with society and politics. They downgraded the pursuit of selfish gain; in addition, all partaking of the pleasures of life need always be accompanied by the stoic virtues of good sense, justice, courage and temperance. Tranquility, or ataraxia ('untroubledness'), was deemed a cherished state and they cautioned against 'the passions by which the mind is disturbed—desire and delight, fear and grief'.

Ataraxia, however, was not to be achieved by shunning the world. Stoic philosophy, in the words of Professor Jonathan Barnes, 'became the Art of Living ... a philosopher's task was to discover the best life, to teach it, and to live by it. Ethics, or practical philosophy, emerged as the regent part of the subject ... The Stoics valued social life, and they urged an involvement in politics.'  The good life was a sequence of successes, of appropriate acts virtuously performed, of acts in conformity to nature, performed in full knowledge of their conformity. In addition, 'The Stoics taught that women, slaves, and barbarians were all part of the human community, each of comparable moral worth ... They coined the label cosmopolitics for their political philosophy.' ♣ Marcus Aurelius, the celebrated second century CE Stoic and Roman emperor, greatly influenced in his youth by Epictetus who was born a slave, recorded this in his Meditations, 

Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things.

The Stoic notion of a universal moral law in accord with nature and binding on all men, and their priority to morality over politics, found an expression in Roman law and in the eloquence of Cicero.♣ It is alive today in the notion of 'universal human rights' as distinct from the intractable customs of nations.

§

What explains the fate of al-Farabi's tradition? The Islamic renaissance of the Abbasid period was in its death throes by the time he returned to Aleppo. The famous encounter of al-Arabi and Averroës became the symbolic end of Islamic rationalism. The early spirit of scientific inquiry, which explains their advances in navigation, astronomy, and mathematics, did not persist, nor extend to the sociopolitical realm. This was because conditions for the rise of individualism did not exist in the lands conquered by the Arabs; an al-Farabi or an Averroës mattered little. Instead, mysticism became the dominant face of Islam until the nineteenth century. To the long tradition of asceticism and the inner life in the Islamic heartland, that was the natural extension, not Greek culture. The other prominent current, represented by the theologians, obviously had little affinity to intellectual inquiry. We can say in summary that early Islam merely had a fling with the Greek spirit— it could not gather critical mass. The dice was loaded from the start against Avicenna. 

In the West, however, due to the lack of a spiritual-mystical dimension in the faith of the masses, the temporal, and its characteristic external engagement, gained emphasis. There was barely a tradition of seeking refuge in a subjective/personal divine. The weakening of their dogma-centric metaphysics was therefore accompanied by the rise of attitudes and values similar to those of Classical Greece, which too had no spirituality—hardly surprising, given a waning orthodoxy and the absence of a non-denominational faith that seeks worldly detachment. Notably, this took root in regions with relatively recent 'barbarian' pasts and poorer records of spiritual life—northwestern Europe. Western Christianity's centralized power and its looser link with the temporal (compared to Islam) certainly helped, but were likely not decisive. These factors also applied to Eastern Christianity, which had a very different history due to the significant spiritual-mystical disposition of its masses.

Beyond a certain point, literal interpretations of scripture buckle under the challenge of science.♣ Inquiry gathers momentum and leads to new knowledge in navigation, astronomy and gunpowder (all of which had illustrious histories elsewhere, particularly in China). The hostile Ottomans catalyze the search for a sea route to the East; it leads to the chance discovery of the New World—Columbus, even after three trips, dies believing it to be Asia. Spain and Portugal soon carve it out between themselves. The guilt at the purging and looting of natives remains muted for a long time, what with the Christians' divinely ordained moral superiority over pagans. Colonies begin supplying the raw materials to fuel nascent but growing economies at home; the needs of sugar and cotton plantations give rise to international slave trade; for centuries, demographics would get shuffled around for the sake of profit. 

With the Counter Reformation, the Roman Church bounces back by the close of the 16th century. The Popes regard themselves as equal to emperors and flaunt their power, prestige and divine mandate by commissioning great monuments. Monarchs vie to do the same. The Baroque becomes an expression of their desire to impress and dazzle. Art becomes fantastic, replete with drama and play of color and shadows. This is the age of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens and Bernini. Ideas of liberty, equality and democracy emerge alongside a wider race to acquire colonies abroad for a plethora of illiberal ends. This is the birth of the Modern, the French Enlightenment, and the rise of the modern scholar. This is the age of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, David, Delacroix and Goya.

With new sources of raw material and overseas markets, the Industrial Revolution takes off in western Europe. Unregulated capitalism contributes to the rise of crowded slums and Dickensian hard times. The spread of mass culture, entertainment, music, and myriad arts fuels new attitudes and movements that engage an ever larger population. They are accompanied by nationalism, urbanization, and mechanization; profit driven creativity and productivity become the need of the hour. Science, technology and material wealth lessen the reliance on God and nature, particularly for the Protestants of northwestern Europe; finally, Darwin deals a mortal blow to Christian dogma—from a step below the angels, man is relegated to a step above the apes. Change fuels more dramatic change. Collective faith now begins to alight upon an entirely secular objective: linear progress, or the Hegelian dialectic. The path soon leads to a God-shaped hole in the human consciousness.♣

As Ivan Karamazov said, if there is no God, everything is permitted.♣ Whatever seeks to fill that hole too has produced mixed results at best. The two popular expressions of Eastern and Greek thought—mysticism and individualism—are above all frameworks for everyday life. The credulous mystics of Islam and Hinduism, in this sense, are similar to the contending urban masses of the modern West: the former subordinate reason to an unknown God, the latter to the social logic of competitive self-advancement. Both deflect the mind away from all that for which there are no answers. Which of them leads to greater happiness, perhaps the most cherished of human aspirations down the ages? Al-Farabi might have argued that happiness is a personal triumph, not quite a property of the 'system' (provided the 'system' does not actively hamper its achievement).

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