Similar views are expressed by Al-Ghazzali, who regards the mystics not only as the ultimate source of our knowledge of the soul and its capacities and defects, but as the salt which preserves human societies from decay. “In the time of the philosophers,” he writes, “as at every other period, there existed some of these fervent mystics. God does not deprive this world of them, for they are its sustainers.” It is they who, dying to themselves, become capable of perpetual inspiration and so are made the instruments through which divine grace is mediated to those whose unregenerate nature is
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