Like other preachers of righteousness, Ghazzali strove to rouse men out of lethargy by laying stress on the terrors of the world to come and the Judgment Day. He was not one of those who think fear too base a motive to appeal to; he strikes the note of warning again and again. Towards the close of his life he composed a short work on eschatology "Al Durra al Fakhirah" ("The precious pearl") of a sufficiently lurid character. In it he says: "When you watch a dead man and see that the saliva has run from his mouth, that his lips are contracted, his face black, the whites of his eyes showing, know that he is damned, and that the fact of his damnation in the other world has just been revealed to him. But if you see the dead with a smile on his lips, a serene countenance, his eyes half-closed, know that he has just received the good news of the happiness which awaits him in the other life.
"On the Day of Judgment, when all men are gathered before the throne of God, their accounts are all cast up, and their good and evil deeds weighed. During all this time each man believes he is the only one with whom God is dealing. Though peradventure at the same moment God is taking account of countless multitudes whose number is known to Him only. Men do not see each other, nor hear each other speak."
Regarding faith, Ghazzali says in the Ihya-ul-ulum:
"Faith consists of two elements, patience and gratitude. Both are graces bestowed by God, and there is no way to God except faith. The Koran expounds the excellence of patience in more than seventy passages. The Caliph Ali said, 'Patience bears the same relation to faith as the head does to the body. He who has no head, has no body, and he who has no patience has no faith.'"
Ghazzali's philosophy is the re-action of his intensely religious personality against the naturalistic tendencies of men like Avicenna and Averroes. They believed in the eternity of matter, and reduced God to a bare First Cause. He also, though sympathising with the Sufis, especially on the side of their asceticism, was opposed to Sufistic Pantheism. He conceived God chiefly as an active Will, and not merely as the Self existent.
While his contemporaries were busying themselves with metaphysical theories concerning matter and creation, Ghazzali laid stress on self-observation and self-knowledge ("He who knows himself, knows God"). As St. Augustine found deliverance from doubt and error in his inward experience of God, and Descartes in self-consciousness, so Ghazzali, unsatisfied with speculation and troubled by scepticism, surrenders himself to the will of God. Leaving others to demonstrate the existence of God from the external world, he finds God revealed in the depths of his own consciousness and the mystery of his own free will.
He fared as innovators in religion and philosophy always do, and was looked upon during his lifetime as a heretic. He admits himself that his "Destruction of the philosophers" was written to expose their mutual contradictions. But he has no mere Mephistophelic pleasure in destruction; he pulls down in order to erect. He is not a mere sceptic on the one hand, nor a bigoted theologian on the other, and his verdict on the Mutazilite heretics of his day is especially mild. Acute thinker though he was, in him will and feeling predominated over thought. He rejected the dogmatic and philosophic systems of his contemporaries as mere jejune skeletons of reality, and devoted the close of his life to study of the traditions and the Koran.
Like Augustine, he finds in God-derived self-consciousness the starting-point for the thought, and like him emphasizes the fundamental significance of the will. He sees everywhere the Divine Will at work in what philosophers call natural causes. He seeks the truth, but seeks it with a certain consciousness of possessing it already within himself.
He is a unique and lonely figure in Islam, and has to this day been only partially understood. In the Middle Ages his fame was eclipsed by that of Averroes, whose commentary on Aristotle is alluded to by Dante, and was studied by Thomas Aquinas and the school-*men. Averroes' system was rounded and complete, but Ghazzali was one of those "whose reach exceeds their grasp"; he was always striking after something he had not attained, and stands in many respects nearer to the modern mind than Averroes. Renan, though far from sympathising with his religious earnestness, calls him "the most original mind among Arabian philosophers," and De Boer says, "Men like Ghazzali have for philosophy this significance that they are a problem alike for themselves and for philosophy, because they are a fragment of spiritual reality that requires explanation. By the force of their personality they remove what hinders them in the construction of their systems without troubling about correctness. Later thinkers make it their business to explain the impulses that guide such men both in their work of destruction and of restoration. Original minds like his supply food for reflection to future generations."
[44] Imam, i.e. leader.