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WorkAl-Ghazali

The Alchemy of Happiness

Al-Ghazālī's Persian book on turning the soul towards God, in an American missionary's 1873 abridgement from a Turkish version.

by Al-Ghazali133 passages held

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Original title
Kīmiyā-yi Saʿādat
Original language
Persian

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Overview

Towards the end of his life, around 1105, al-Ghazālī wrote the Kīmiyā-yi saʿādat in Persian, as a shorter counterpart to his forty-book Arabic Revival of the Religious Sciences; the full work runs to four parts of ten chapters each, on worship, dealings with other people, the vices and the virtues. The title carries the argument. As alchemy was thought to turn base metal into gold, the right knowledge turns a person away from the world and towards God, and that knowledge has four parts: of the self, of God, of this world as it really is, and of the next. Henry A. Homes spent fourteen years in Constantinople as an American missionary, served there as the United States chargé d'affaires, and later became librarian of the New York State Library in Albany. In 1873 he brought out at Albany an English version, translated from a Turkish edition printed at the imperial press in Constantinople in 1845. That Turkish edition, he noted, was only a portion of the original, and he left out further digressions, repetitions and some illustrations. He also argued that because the Ottoman censors had passed it, the book showed what was still held orthodox eight centuries after it was written. His text gives a chapter to each kind of knowledge, with self-knowledge first as the key to knowing God, and a fifth chapter to the love of God. Other English versions followed: Claud Field's abridgement of 1910, made partly from an Urdu translation, and Jay R. Crook's complete translation from the Persian in 2008.

Key concepts

Why is the book called an alchemy?

The alchemy of the title is the knowledge of God. Alchemists hoped to turn base metal into gold, and this knowledge turns a person from the world towards God, which is the only lasting happiness. It cannot be had cheaply: the book says it needs self-denial and effort. It also warns that the alchemy is rare, and that whoever scorns the solid gold of ordinary religious learning while hunting for it ends up with nothing.

What are the four kinds of knowledge the book is built on?

Four things must be known, and the book gives each a chapter: oneself, God, this world as it really is, and the world to come. They form a ladder. Knowing the self comes first because it is the key to knowing God. Knowing God shows what the world is for, and knowing the world and the next shows what to do with the years in between. The love of God, the last chapter, is where the ladder leads.

What does the book mean by the spirit?

The spirit is a person’s real self, and it is not the body. Its existence is beyond doubt, the book says, but it has no hand, foot, eye or ear of its own and occupies no place, while the body is its instrument and its mount. Senses and limbs serve it as servants serve a ruler. At death the body is set aside and the spirit continues, with whatever it has come to know and love.

What does the book mean by “the world”?

In this book the world is not the earth or other people but a state: the condition before death, named for its nearness to dying, set against the future state, named for its permanence. Its purpose is to let a person gather provisions for the next life: knowledge, love of God and good deeds. Anything in it becomes worldly in the bad sense only when it stops serving that purpose and is loved for itself.

What separates a prophet from a saint?

Both receive knowledge from God directly, without study. A prophet is someone so gifted who is also sent to call the nations to God and to bring a way of life, a law; what he does beyond the ordinary is called a miracle. A saint has the same kind of gift but follows the law of an earlier prophet and is not sent; what he does beyond the ordinary is called a wonder. The book asks readers to deny neither.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Small Copy of the Sovereign

Can looking inward teach anyone about God? The first two chapters argue that the self is the one model of divine rule a person can study from the inside.

The book opens on the saying that whoever knows himself knows his Lord, and treats it as a method. The spirit is not the body, yet it governs the body as a ruler governs a kingdom, unseen and in no one place. That arrangement is a brief copy given to each person, so that they can grasp a sovereign who rules the world without being located in it. Those who credit events to the stars or to heat and cold are like an ant that sees a pen moving and never thinks of the hand.

  • self-knowledge
  • knowledge of god
  • soul
  • body
  • body and soul
  • human nature
  • analogy
  • creation
  • divine providence

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A Market on the Road

How much of a life should go to the things this life needs? The answer turns on a single picture of the world as a stopping place, not a home.

The world, in the third chapter, is a market opened in the wilderness where travellers buy provisions for a longer journey. The body is the pilgrim's camel: it must be fed and watered, but a pilgrim who spends every hour on his camel loses the caravan and dies in the desert. Seen from outside, the world is an old woman dressed in silks and brocade, and the foolish fall in love with the costume. The religious law sets the measure, enough care for the body to keep travelling and no more.

  • worldliness
  • attachment
  • desire
  • religious law
  • obedience
  • spiritual discipline
  • virtue

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What Death Uncovers

If the next life punishes, where does the punishment come from? Al-Ghazālī locates it in the loves a person carries out of this world.

Death, the fourth chapter argues, does not destroy the spirit but separates it from the body, and the spirit keeps whatever it loved. Someone whose heart was bound to money, rank or pleasure is torn from all of it at once, and the scorpions and serpents of the grave are those same attachments turned to pain. The spiritual hell has three fires: separation from what one craved, shame when hidden faults become plain, and exclusion from God's beauty. None of them is added from outside, and each is built in this life.

  • afterlife
  • death
  • heart
  • moral psychology
  • reason
  • prophecy

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Loving What Is Beautiful

Can anyone be obliged to love? The book answers that love follows knowledge, so whoever sees what God is will love him without being told to.

The last chapter calls the love of God the goal of every other knowledge, and says love has two causes, beauty and beneficence. People love a fine piece of calligraphy and feel drawn to the hand that wrote it. Beauty of form, the book insists, belongs to the spirit and not to the body, and every beautiful thing has its beauty from God's light, so all real love is finally love of him. Since he is also the source of every kindness received, the one who knows God cannot help loving him.

  • divine love
  • love of god
  • happiness
  • mysticism
  • worship
  • knowledge
  • epistemology
  • cosmology

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Within this work

passages held
133
distinct concepts
216
by passages held, corpus-wide
#444

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “afterlife” and “knowledge of god”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
afterlifeknowledge of god7
afterlifeattachment6
afterlifesoul6
knowledge of godsoul6
afterlifedeath5
heartknowledge5
attachmentdeath4
deathsoul4
heartknowledge of god3
afterlifedivine love2
afterlifeheart2
deathdivine love2
deathknowledge of god2
heartsoul2
afterlifeknowledge1
attachmentknowledge of god1
attachmentsoul1
divine loveheart1
divine loveknowledge of god1
knowledgeknowledge of god1
knowledgesoul1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Deliverance from Error (المنقذ من الضلال)

    An intellectual autobiography, written at Nishapur after his return to teaching in 1106; Claud Field's Confessions of Al Ghazzali first brought it into English in 1909.

     EN
  2. The Alchemy of Happiness (Kīmiyā-yi Saʿādat) you are here EN
  3. The Incoherence of the Philosophers (تهافت الفلاسفة)

    The book by which he is known in philosophy, finished in Baghdad in January 1095, months before he gave up his chair there and left the city.

     AR
  4. The Just Balance (القسطاس المستقيم)

    One of several answers to the Ismāʿīlīs, this one cast as a dialogue on the road; his autobiography points readers to it instead of repeating its case.

     AR
  5. The Marvels of the Heart (كتاب شرح عجائب القلب)

    The twenty-first of the forty books of the Revival of the Religious Sciences, and the ground for the books on vices and virtues that follow it.

     AR
  6. The Niche of Lights (مشكاة الأنوار)

    Among his late works, and the one in which his thought comes closest to the mystics: three chapters on a single verse of the Qurʾān and a single saying of the Prophet.

     AR
  7. The Standard of Knowledge (معيار العلم في فن المنطق)

    Written after The Incoherence of the Philosophers to explain the philosophers' technical vocabulary to its readers, and to give jurists and theologians a test for their own arguments.

     AR
  8. مقاصد الفلاسفة

    A report before a refutation: Avicenna's system set out without a word of objection, then framed by a short preface and ending that point ahead to The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

     AR
  9. ميزان العمل

    The second half of a pair: having set a standard for knowing in The Standard of Knowledge, he set one here for acting, still in Baghdad, around 1095.

     AR
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