Virtues of Greatness in The Arabic Tradition Sophia Vasalou All Chapter

Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic
Tradition Sophia Vasalou

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Virtues of Greatness
in the Arabic Tradition
Virtues of Greatness
in the Arabic Tradition
SOPHIA VASALOU
1
3
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. Greatness of Soul: The Reception of an Ancient Virtue 13
Ancient Approaches: One Virtue, Many Configurations 13
Arabic Approaches: Defining a Virtue 18
The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Miskawayh 27
The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Al-Ghazālī 30
An Ethical Conflict and its Eclipse 47
Concluding Remarks 62
2. Greatness of Spirit: The Transfiguration of Heroic Virtue 65
Philosophical Handbooks: Aspiring to the Greatest Things 65
Mirrors for Princes: A Virtue Fit for the Great 84
The Genealogy of a Virtue Between Greek and Persian Ethics 97
Pre-Islamic Arab Culture and the Virtues of Heroes 108
Broader Perspectives 118
Postlude: A Living Virtue? 131
Situating Greatness of Spirit: A Second-Order Virtue? 134
Emulation, Aspiration, Self-Reference 139
Schematizing a Defence 147
Bibliography 157
Index 167
Acknowledgements
This book began life in late 2015, a few months before I joined the University
of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow in philosophical theology. From the
start, it was connected to a broader collaborative project exploring the
history of philosophical and theological approaches to the virtue of magna-
nimity. The fruits of this project will appear with Oxford University Press in
the coming year as an edited volume under the title The Measure of
Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity. I am grateful to a number of
organizations whose financial support made it possible to organize a con-
ference on that topic, which provided part of the context in which my
thinking in this book developed. They include the British Academy, the
Mind Association, and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.
I benefited greatly from the questions and comments of participants in that
conference, especially John Marenbon’s, and also from the feedback
I received from audiences in a number of other talks I gave on the topic
over the last couple of years, including at the conference of the British
Association for Islamic Studies at the University of Chester, the annual
conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in Oxford, the
Munich School of Ancient Philosophy, the School of Oriental and African
Studies in London, and New York University Abu Dhabi. Finally, I owe
special thanks to the two readers for the Press for their careful reading of the
manuscript.
Part 1 of the book includes material previously published in the Journal of
Religious Ethics (Volume 45, Issue 4) under the title ‘An Ancient Virtue and
Its Heirs: The Reception of Greatness of Soul in the Arabic Tradition’,
pp. 688–731, Copyright © 2017 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc., doi:
0.1111/jore.12197. The Postlude includes material previously published in
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review (Volume 56, Issue 2) under the
title ‘Greatness of Spirit: A New Virtue for Our Taxonomies?’, pp. 291–316,
Copyright © 2017 Canadian Philosophical Association, published by Cam-
bridge University Press, doi: 10.1017/S0012217317000324. I am grateful to
the publishers of both journals for allowing the material to be reproduced
here in revised form.
Introduction
When we survey the rich terrain of ancient ethics and the different visions of
the best human character that flourished within it, there is one element—
one virtue within these visions—that stands out as particularly distinctive.
This is a virtue usually translated as ‘magnanimity’ or ‘greatness of soul’. For
philosophical readers, its most familiar expression is the one it received at the
hands of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. In an evocative portrait, Aristotle
had enshrined the great-souled person or megalopsychos as an image of the
highest ethical accomplishment. One might call it an image of greatness, as its
very name suggests. Greatness of soul was the virtue of a person who possessed
all the virtues to a great degree, and whose self-knowledge was reflected in an
awareness of the ‘great things’ he was worthy of, above all honour. Looking
back, one can already see this virtue occupying an important place among
earlier writers, including Plato, who identified it as the philosophical virtue par
excellence in the Republic. Under shifting names, under different configur-
ations, the virtue would also feature prominently in the ethical outlooks of a
number of other ancient thinkers and schools, notably the Stoics. In later times,
it would continue life under a variety of guises among philosophical and
theological thinkers, from Aquinas to Descartes, and from Hume to Emerson.
Refracted in the virtue—its content shifting with them—were larger concep-
tions of the good life and the nature of human greatness.
Some of the stages of this long history are more familiar to us than others.
The sharpest spotlight has often fallen on Aristotle’s account, which has
fascinated readers almost as much as it has divided them, and still attracts
fresh readings and renegotiations. In recent times, there has been increasing
attention to other episodes of its development, both within the ancient world
and in later periods, enriching our perspective on the identity of the virtue
and furnishing us with new material for chronicling the life it led over the
course of intellectual history.¹ Yet to someone considering this broader
¹ See especially the forthcoming collection of essays, The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers
on Magnanimity, ed. S. Vasalou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
2 
scene, what will be striking is that most of what we know about the virtue
tends to be focused on the European context. Among the many lives this
virtue has led in philosophical and theological history, one in particular
remains conspicuously unwritten. This is the life it led in the Islamic world
and the Arabic tradition.
This may not be entirely surprising, given how many swathes of the
vibrant intellectual history of the Islamic world still remain plunged in
darkness. Yet there is much to suggest that such an investigation would be
worthwhile. This was a world, as we know, that opened its doors wide to the
ancient philosophical legacy early in its history, through a large-scale trans-
lation movement that saw an extraordinary array of Greek philosophical
and scientific texts translated into Arabic between the eighth and tenth
centuries. The response this legacy provoked among Muslim intellectuals
was composite. Often amicable and appreciative—as Ibn Qutayba (d.889),
one of the founders of Arabic letters, put it, ‘knowledge is the object of the
believer, and it profits him whatever the source from which it may be
drawn’—their engagement with this legacy was also marked by moments
of tension and high conflict.² It is the conflict that has frequently shaped
prevailing views of the place of philosophy in the Islamic world. In the past,
such views have rallied around the spectacular career of the eleventh-century
theologian Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (d.1111), and the truculent campaign he
_
appears to have waged against the philosophers, notably in his celebrated
work The Precipitance of the Philosophers.³ This picture has begun to loosen
its scholarly grip, and a changing view of al-Ghazālī’s own relationship to
philosophy has been among the many tributaries to its reversal. In recent
times, several readers have redirected attention to al-Ghazālī’s indebtedness
to and continued appreciation of the philosophical tradition.⁴
² See Ibn Qutayba, Springs of Information/ʿUyūn al-akhbār (Cairo: Matbaʿat Dār al-Kutub
_
al-Misriyya, 1996), introduction, p. sīn. Ibn Qutayba himself had an ambivalent relationship to
_
the philosophical tradition and its rationalistic methods.
³ Or Incoherence of the Philosophers, as it is often known. See Alexander Treiger, Inspired
Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennian
Foundation (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), for a defence of this alternative trans-
lation (App. B) and also, more broadly, for an account that contributes to the rereading of
al-Ghazālī’s relationship to philosophy.
⁴ A key stimulus for such rereadings was Richard Frank’s seminal account of al-Ghazālī’s
cosmology in Creation and the Cosmic System: al-Ghazâlî and Avicenna (Heidelberg: Carl
Winter, 1992), but since that time they have gathered apace. For useful pointers to this
scholarship, see Kenneth Garden, The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī and His
Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, _2014), 5–7.
 3
Many of the writings and rewritings of the status of philosophy in the

Islamic world have focused, unsurprisingly, on issues of metaphysics. These
were the issues that apparently channelled al-Ghazālī’s own discomfort in
The Precipitance. What about ethics? If we were interested in building a
more inclusive picture about the status of philosophy and calibrating more
finely the balance of amity and conflict that characterized Muslim thinkers’
transactions with it, it is clear that this could not be achieved without taking
into account these thinkers’ engagement with the ethical elements of the
ancient tradition. Ethics has sometimes seemed an unpromising subject to
commentators addressing the history of philosophy in the Islamic world.
‘Falsafa’, as Peter Adamson matter-of-factly notes in a conspectus of the
Arabic tradition, ‘is not particularly known for its contributions to ethics.’⁵
The intellectual giants of Arabic philosophy, such as Avicenna (d.1037) and
Averroes (d.1198), devoted their immense energies to other areas of philo-
sophical inquiry and mostly turned a cold shoulder to ethical topics. Those
works of philosophical ethics that were written sometimes seem to lack the
intellectual élan that gives sparkle to works in other areas. Even among
writers with overt religious commitments, conflict does not seem to be in the
air to make it crackle. In his famous autobiography where he discusses his
relationship to philosophy, notably, al-Ghazālī treats ethics with compara-
tively velvet gloves. Yet is it possible that by looking closer—and by posing
more specific kinds of questions—we might get a different view?
These larger perspectives and questions about the place of ancient phil-
osophy in the Islamic world lie in the backdrop of the present book, which
began life as an attempt to answer a simple question. Among the many
ethical ideas that thinkers in the Islamic world confronted in the Greek texts
that reached them in translation, how did they respond to this one—to the
virtue of magnanimity or greatness of soul? This is a virtue that occupied a
special place in the ancient tradition, embodying a conception not only of
goodness, but indeed greatness. No less important, this was a conception
that has often been viewed as unusually expressive of the distinctive socio-
cultural milieu in which it was articulated. How did Muslim thinkers make
sense of this distinctive virtue? What story could one tell about the reception
of this part of the ancient ethical tradition in the Islamic world?
To the extent that the backdrop sketched out above—regarding the place
of philosophy in the Islamic world—was shaped by questions about conflict,
⁵ Peter Adamson, ‘The Arabic tradition’, The Routledge Companion to Ethics, ed. John
Skorupski (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 63.
4 
such a story would seem calculated to engage it especially strongly. For

conflict has in fact been a salient theme in the trajectory this virtue has
traced across philosophical and theological history. This conflict has been
palpable among recent philosophers, even among votaries of Aristotle’s
ethics, who have taken turns decrying his depiction of greatness of soul for
a litany of moral evils. The focus of such criticisms has often been the flawed
mode of self-evaluation and deficient humility exhibited by Aristotle’s
exemplar. Yet this conflict has also been palpable in the reactions of earlier
eras, not least within theological circles, as suggested by the history of the
Christian engagement with the ancient tradition. The tension between
greatness of soul or magnanimity and humility, as Jennifer Herdt remarks,
‘is often seen as capturing the basic tension between pagan and Christian
conceptions of virtue’.⁶ This history of strained responses presents itself as
an important foil for considering the Arabic reception.
Yet if the present book began as an attempt to answer this simple
question, its plot—and the questions that oriented it—was gradually forced
to widen during its progress. On the one hand, it was soon clear that the
story about the reception of this ancient virtue in the Islamic world was not
quite what one would expect coming from the contexts just outlined. This,
in fact, turned out to be a story in which the theme of conflict had a more
complex place. It was a story that was as much about acts as it was about
omissions, and as much about what was said as about what wasn’t (and why).
Yet even more importantly for the overall plot, this was a story in which the
identity of the subject, as in many good stories, underwent transformation
in the telling. Because one of its surprises was that there are no less than
two distinct Arabic concepts that can be identified as counterparts or
interlocutors—to put it as broadly as possible—of the ancient virtue of
greatness that was megalopsychia. These were concepts whose genealogies
and trajectories converged but also diverged in crucial respects, and whose
content involved an equally delicate pattern of convergences and divergences
that marked them off as separate yet consanguineous.
The focus of one of these concepts—kibar al-nafs, or ‘greatness of soul’—
was on the right attitude to the self and its merits, and bore a strong affinity
to Aristotle’s configuration of the virtue. The focus of the second—ʿizam
_
⁶ Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), 40. For an exemplary expression of this view, see Bertrand Russell, History
of Western Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 170. Yet even within Christian
theological history, the expression of this conflict has not always been straightforward. See my
brief comments in chapter 1 below, and also my introduction to The Measure of Greatness.
 5
al-himma, which I translate as ‘greatness of spirit’—was on right desire or

aspiration. Unlike the first concept, which ultimately appears to have failed
to strike deep roots in Arabic-Islamic ethical culture, the second spread like
wildfire through a number of genres of ethical writing and formed an import-
ant element of the visions of character excellence articulated in different kinds
of ethical works. Recounting the fuller story about both concepts meant
moving away from a simple account of the reception of Greek thought, and
toward a more complex narrative about a broader family of moral concepts
and larger region of moral thought. One might call this family ‘virtues of
greatness’.⁷ While the biography of this family provides new insight into the
Arabic reception of ancient ethics, it also has much to tell us about the sources
and pattern of Islamic ethical thought more globally.
The complexity of this biographical account is reflected in the structure of
the present book, which unfolds in two parts. Let me briefly sketch them out.
Part 1 focuses on the first virtue of greatness, which is also the virtue that can
be most straightforwardly identified as the ‘heir’ of the ancient one. Survey-
ing the ethical works of some of the most prominent Muslim thinkers
influenced by ancient thought, notably al-Fārābī (d.950/1), Miskawayh
(d.1030), and al-Ghazālī, we find that greatness of soul indeed makes an
appearance in these works. It does so under the Arabic term kibar al-nafs, a
calque of the Greek megalopsychia. In Miskawayh’s and al-Ghazālī’s classi-
fications of the virtues and vices, this virtue is predominantly defined in
terms that approximate to Aristotle’s account. The overall treatment the
virtue receives among these writers appears all too cursory. This may seem
surprising in view of its relative significance within the ancient tradition. It
may also seem surprising in view of what we know about the chequered
career of the virtue in other philosophical and theological (Christian) circles,
particularly in its Aristotelian version, whose conflict with an ideal of
humility has often come up for remark. Did thinkers in the Arabic tradition
take a different view of this ideal—a different view of the ‘ethics of self-
esteem’ and the right attitude to the self and its merits?
I investigate this question by offering a substantive reading of Miska-
wayh’s, and, rather more concertedly, al-Ghazālī’s account of the ethics of
esteem (honour) and self-esteem, drawing on a more extensive range of
⁷ This term has also been used recently by Daniel C. Russell, but in a rather different
connection, referring to Aristotle’s virtues of magnificence and magnanimity: ‘Aristotle’s virtues
of greatness’, in Virtue and Happiness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas, ed. Rachana Kamtekar
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
6 
works. There are delicate interpretive issues to be navigated in piecing

together a confident account of al-Ghazālī’s ethical commitments in this
context. Yet my conclusion is that, just like philosophical and theological
critics of Aristotelian magnanimity, al-Ghazālī privileges the virtue of
humility and denigrates the status of honour as a good. The virtue of
magnanimity that al-Ghazālī incorporates in his tables of the virtues thus
appears to be in profound conflict with his considered ethical viewpoint—
indeed, with what has a serious claim to being viewed as an ideal central to
Islamic religious morality. Why, then, does al-Ghazālī (like Miskawayh) pass
this conflict over in silence, leaving it to his readers to read between its lines?
I end with some suggestions about where the answer to this puzzle might lie,
and what it may have to tell us about these thinkers’ engagement with
ancient philosophy more broadly.
The first part of the book may seem to lead to a disappointing denoue-
ment. That larger-than-life virtue which had formed one of the brightest
jewels in the crown for Aristotle and other ancient thinkers enters the
Islamic world only to fade away; the foreign graft never takes. Yet this, as
Part 2 of the book aims to show, is not the end of the story of the ‘virtues of
greatness’ in the Arabic tradition. There was another concept belonging
to the same region of moral thought that led a more flourishing and
full-blooded life within this tradition, namely greatness of spirit (ʿizam
_
al-himma). Crucially, this virtue appears not only in philosophical treatises,
but also in a number of other genres of ethical writing, including mirrors for
princes and works of etiquette or literature (adab). Unlike the first concept,
which thematized the right attitude to the self and its merits, this second
concept thematizes right desire or aspiration, and some of its chief architects
parse it more specifically as a foundational virtue of aspiration to moral
virtue, or indeed moral greatness.
I begin by documenting its development in works of a philosophical
character, focusing on the works of the tenth-century Christian philosopher
and theologian Yahyā ibn ʿAdī (d.974) and the eleventh-century religious
_
and literary scholar al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī. I then turn to plot its development
_
in mirrors for princes, drawing on a number of prominent representatives of
this genre. There are important continuities between the ways the virtue is
articulated across these genres, though also some noteworthy discontinuities.
There are likewise suggestive comparisons to be drawn with approaches to
the virtue of greatness of soul familiar to us from broader philosophical
history. Taken together, these observations invite a question about the
intellectual origins of the virtue. This genealogical story turns out to be a
 7
marvellously complex one. While the influence of the Greek tradition cannot
be wholly excluded, a stronger argument can be made for the influence of the
Persian cultural tradition and, more intriguingly and more convincingly,
the influence of pre-Islamic Arab culture. ‘Greatness of spirit’ was in fact one
of the epithets applied to the Arab hero of pre-Islamic times. This heroic ideal
is reconfigured in telling ways after it is transplanted into the soil of the Islamic
faith and exposed to the effects of other intellectual traditions. Against this
landscape, one can place on new footing the question about the relationship of
the virtues of greatness to Islamic religious morality.
Questions about how the approaches taken in the Arabic tradition relate
to developments in broader philosophical history form a running theme in
Parts 1 and 2 of the book. In the book’s concluding Postlude, this philosoph-
ical concern takes a different, and less historical, form. The virtue of greatness
I identified as a more prominent and distinctive element of the ideals of
character articulated in the Arabic tradition, greatness of spirit, may have
much to tell us about the content of these ideals, and about the intellectual
processes that shaped them. Yet does this historical lesson exhaust the interest
that contemporary readers might take in this particular ideal? Is there any-
thing in this ideal to engage the attention of contemporary philosophers of
the virtues? In seeking to answer these questions, I consider two different ways
of construing the identity of this virtue: one as a meta-virtue, another as a
substantive virtue that has an affinity with the virtue of ‘emulousness’ as
theorized in recent philosophical work on the virtues. It is the latter construal
that enables us to pick out the distinctive commitments that constitute the
virtue, above all its emphasis on open-ended moral aspiration. Many philo-
sophers of the virtues will find these commitments contentious. I outline a
number of ways in which this virtue can be defended. Yet the greatest value of
engaging with this ideal of character may lie in the very space for debate it
opens and in persuading us that this debate is worthwhile.
In framing the project of this book, I have spoken of a ‘family’ of
concepts, and of different virtues that can be viewed as ‘counterparts’ or
‘interlocutors’ of the ancient virtue of greatness of soul. The question may
be raised: how exactly is such talk to be understood, and how much weight
is it intended to carry? Put differently: what kind of claim of kinship is
being made here, and is it sufficiently robust to ensure that this is a book
with a coherent subject—a book about a single subject? Unless the two
‘separate yet consanguineous’ virtues that form the focus of this book can
be seen to be united by a robust relation, what sense does it make to treat
them as part of a single story?
8 
These are interesting questions, and they point on to larger questions

about what it means to say that one concept is ‘like’ another, or an ‘instance’
of another, or of a larger ‘family’ or ‘kind’. What is particularly worth
bearing in mind is that notions like ‘being the same concept’ or ‘being the
same kind of concept’ are not fenced off by crystal-clear boundaries which
would lend themselves to crystal-clear replies to such questions. Yet as in the
literal foundation of the metaphor of ‘families’ and ‘family relations’, this
does not prevent us from being able to intuitively recognize resemblances
and pick out patterns when faced with actual cases.
Thinking about many of the standard virtues, we naturally assume that
we have a sufficient grasp of their conceptual contours that there would be
no insuperable difficulty in recognizing them even in new contexts—at the
limit, in other cultures whose moral language is unfamiliar to us and whose
fabric of ethical thought we are newly confronted with. To be sure, this kind
of cross-cultural identification is not entirely unproblematic, even when we
think of standard virtues such as courage or compassion. ‘It is a difficult
question,’ as Daniel Russell points out, whether ‘the courage of a Quaker is
the same as the courage of a Samurai’.⁸ Yet from a methodological view-
point, the confidence that such cross-cultural identification of the virtues is
possible would seem to be underpinned by a universalism that has been
tightly bound up with an ethics of character, and that in turn is wedded to
the naturalistic terms in which this ethics has been commonly developed.
This kind of universalism, as Martha Nussbaum suggested in an influential
essay, shapes Aristotle’s approach to the virtues. Taken most simply, the
virtues and vices represent better and worse ways of handling universal
spheres of experience which all human beings share and which necessarily
confront them with the choice of acting in one way or another.⁹
Yet this point would now appear to add fresh impetus to the question
raised above about ‘families’ and ‘kinds’. Because the virtue of magnanimity
or greatness of soul has often been felt to constitute a very special case set
against the other virtues that feature in Aristotle’s work and that of his
philosophical successors—virtues like courage, temperance, generosity, or
justice. It has frequently been described, and decried, as a virtue steeped in
the specificities of its time, encoding (in one phrasing) ‘an attitude to one’s
⁸ Daniel Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 173.
⁹ See Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Non-relative virtues: an Aristotelian approach’, Midwest Studies
in Philosophy 13 (1988), 32–53.
 9
own worth that is more Greek than universal’.¹⁰ It is the flagrant exception
to the apparent universalism of Aristotle’s ethics—the Trojan Horse, for
some, that betrays its contingent cultural roots, serving up the image of the
Athenian gentleman in one view (Alasdair MacIntyre) and the repugnant
relics of the Homeric hero in another.¹¹ Faced with a virtue of such thick
cultural identity, what chance does the notion of a broader ‘kind’ or ‘family’—
a family of which this virtue would be only one member among others, and
to which virtues articulated in other ethical cultures might be discovered to
belong—have of getting off the ground?
From this perspective, it would seem that one could only intelligibly speak
of this virtue as it lived and breathed in this particular cultural and textual
tradition. This would have crucial implications for the way we understand
our ability to identify the concept, yielding an emphasis on genetic descent
in which the metaphor of ‘family relations’ would come to its narrowest
fruition. Our ability to recognize that a given concept found among particu-
lar thinkers represents the same concept as the one at work in the ancient
tradition would depend on our ability to recognize these thinkers as heirs
and participants of this tradition. Isn’t this genetic continuity, it might be
said, foundational to our ability to identify Aquinas’ notion of magnanimi-
tas, Descartes’s générosité, or Hume’s ‘greatness of mind’ as instances of the
very same concept? On these terms, a story about the life that the virtue of
greatness of soul led in the Islamic world could only make sense as a story
about the reception of the Greek textual tradition.
Yet, on the one hand, it is important to observe that, even within that
philosophical tradition which is connected by a visible backbone of genetic
descent, this virtue had a far from unified identity. It was a virtue, for one,
whose conceptual traits changed over time. Aquinas’ magnanimity, to take
the most obvious example, is in some ways a dramatic revision of Aristotle’s,
making way, among other things, for the element of humility that the latter
has been accused of disregarding. Even within the ancient context, different
thinkers approached it in a variety of ways. If Aristotle, for example,
articulated it as a virtue of self-evaluation concerned with honour, promin-
ent Stoic thinkers articulated it as a virtue codifying the attitude of indiffer-
ence to external goods that epitomized their moral approach. We should not
¹⁰ Ibid., 38; cf. 34, referencing the remarks of Bernard Williams and Stuart Hampshire.
¹¹ For MacIntyre’s view, see After Virtue, 3rd edn (London: Duckworth, 2007), 182, and A
Short History of Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 75–7; for the second point,
which is in fact closely linked to MacIntyre’s, see Nancy Sherman, ‘Common sense and
uncommon virtue’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988), 102–3.
10 
thus overlook the plurality of ways in which this concept was articulated
in the ancient context, or indeed the plurality of terms through which it
was expressed (Plato’s megaloprepeia, Aristotle’s megalopsychia, Longinus’
megalophrosyne, Cicero’s magnitudo animi). If in fact we look far back
enough to take in the Homeric roots of the concept—as Aristotle himself
invites us to do in the Posterior Analytics—our sense of the conceptual and
linguistic boundaries of the concept will be loosened still further.¹²
This is not to deny that many of these articulations had important
conceptual ingredients in common. As Arthur Lovejoy noted in a different
context, intellectual innovation is often less a matter of the emergence of
entirely novel elements than of a new patterning or rearrangement of
existing ones.¹³ Many of the ancient configurations of greatness of soul
can be seen as different ways of patterning or balancing a limited number
of existing elements. These notably include an attitude to self-worth, and an
attitude to external goods, including honour. The way such elements were
patterned by particular philosophers—a high sense of self-worth as an
individual or a human being? attachment to honour or indifference?—
reflects larger variances in ethical outlook. Yet the differences are sufficiently
real to suggest that the notion of a ‘family’ of concepts—a family constituted
by an intersecting pattern of likenesses and unlikenesses exhibited over
time—may be required even in approaching an intellectual tradition
sharing the same broad pathway of genealogical descent.¹⁴ Once this is
granted, the possibility of opening up this family to virtues articulated
outside this cultural tradition begins to look less unimaginable.
For an example of what such cross-cultural identification might look like,
one might consider the case of the Icelandic sagas. In an essay written some
time ago, Kristján Kristjánsson proposed that it is possible to recognize
a substantial affinity between the concept of greatness of soul articulated
by Aristotle and a concept that is central to the moral code presented in the
sagas, the mikilmenni—variously translated as ‘great men’, the ‘great-hearted’,
or ‘great-minded’. Like Aristotle’s great-souled men, the mikilmenni combine
great virtue with a strong sense of self-esteem and awareness of their merits.
¹² In Homer, a common heroic epithet is megaletor. For Aristotle’s remarks, see Posterior
Analytics II.13.97b15–25.
¹³ Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1964), 3–4.
¹⁴ Christopher Gill’s suggestion that the Stoic conception of magnanimity may have devel-
oped independently from Aristotle’s adds an interesting twist to this point. See his ‘Stoic
magnanimity’, in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou.
 11
They are likewise flanked by two vicious extremes, the ‘small-minded’ and the
‘overly ambitious’. Given the heroic roots and overtones of the ancient virtue,
there are also suggestive comparisons to be made with saga morality, with its
heroic aspect.¹⁵
If this account is correct, here we have two virtue terms which are
connected by sufficient similarities in conceptual content for us to be able
to identify them as cross-cultural ‘counterparts’. This is one possible model
for how such identification could happen, though just how heavily we can
lean on this particular instance will ultimately depend on our approach to
complex questions about the relative importance of indigenous and foreign
elements (notably the influence of Latin literature) in the sagas.¹⁶ It is an
interesting question how much cultural luck (to coin a term) is required for
felicitous isomorphisms of this sort to emerge. Might this kind of virtue
concept have a strong probability of emerging naturally within certain types
of social structures or stages of social development? If it did, this would have
significant implications for the way we think about the relationship between
what is culturally contingent and universal in the concept.
In the absence of obvious isomorphic terms, there would still be another
possibility if our interest lay in carrying out a cross-cultural ethical conver-
sation. We might instead undertake a comparison not at the level of the
virtue term, but of what I earlier described as its core elements or stakes. In
the case of our specific virtue, this might mean investigating, for example,
whether in a particular ethical culture similar stances were adopted on stakes
such as the appropriate attitude to self-worth or to external goods, and
whether concordances in ethical stances can be discerned regardless of
whether these concordances were codified in a single corresponding term.
¹⁵ Kristján Kristjánsson, ‘Liberating moral traditions: saga morality and Aristotle’s mega-
lopsychia’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1 (1998), 397–422.
¹⁶ This has been the subject of some debate. As Margaret Clunies Ross notes, the simple
earlier view that ‘native traditions taught the Icelanders what to write, but foreign literature
taught them how to write it’ has given way among saga scholars to a more nuanced understanding
of the interplay between indigenous and foreign traditions: The Cambridge Introduction to the Old
Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48. See Annette Lassen,
‘Indigenous and Latin literature’, The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic
Sagas, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017),
for a helpful overview that highlights the importance of Latin literature as a background for the
sagas while also underscoring the challenges of mapping this relationship in detail. The view that
there are significant resemblances between Aristotle’s ethics and saga morality and that these are
not to be explained genetically—reflecting, rather, ‘the spontaneous combustion of the human
spirit . . . giving off identical heat, light, and power in places remotely separated in space and
time’—was clearly voiced by one of the earlier scholars to comment on the affinity. See Sveinbjorn
Johnson, ‘Old Norse and ancient Greek ideals’, Ethics 49 (1938), 18–36, 36 quoted.
12 
This is not the type of project I have pursued here. My investigation in

this book has been structured around virtue terms, rather than stakes,
though a focus on stakes also forms a building block of my discussion,
notably in Part 1, which considers al-Ghazālī’s substantive attitude to the
stakes of esteem and self-esteem as a context for his engagement with the
specific virtue of greatness of soul. There are certainly many interesting
comparative stories waiting to be told about the approaches taken by
Muslim thinkers to some of the other elements thematized by this virtue,
and to the broader ethical threads that entered into its skein—to questions
about the importance of external goods, about the role of luck in the good
life, or about the relation between dependence and the aspiration to self-
sufficiency. The results of certain comparisons seem more predictable than
others. The notion of fortune or luck, for example—such a potent element in
ancient philosophers’ confrontations with the fragility of the human good—
could hardly be approached in the same way by thinkers steeped in a theistic
world-view in which God’s determining influence on all events occupied a
pivotal place. The attitude to such events, by the same token, could not be a
proud avowal of independence but a sense of dependence embraced as a key
moral value.
For my purposes, it will be enough if the above has opened up the concept
of our focal virtue sufficiently to enable us to entertain the possibility of a
larger family of concepts—a family of which greatness of soul, as developed
in the ancient tradition, might not form the only member. That the Arabic
virtue of greatness of spirit has a good claim to be included within that larger
family is a more specific suggestion which can only be borne out through the
detailed story that follows, which will allow the pattern of affinities and
resemblances to stand out. To this task I now turn.
1
Greatness of Soul
The Reception of an Ancient Virtue
Among the many ethical ideas that thinkers in the Islamic world encoun-
tered in the Greek texts that reached them in translation, how did they
respond to—and make sense of—the ideal of magnanimity or greatness of
soul? A virtue codifying a conception not only of goodness but indeed of
greatness, it has often been regarded as one of the most distinctive elements
of ancient ethics. In its best-known version, Aristotle’s, it has also been
regarded as the element most redolent of the social and cultural contingen-
cies of the world in which it took shape. What story can one tell about the
reception of this aspect of the ancient ethical tradition in the Islamic world?
The aim of the investigation that follows (Part 1 of the book) is to answer
this question.
Before we launch into the main story, we need to first say something
about the identity of the ancient virtue of greatness of soul, and about the
textual sources that gave thinkers in the Islamic world access to it.
Ancient Approaches: One Virtue, Many Configurations
So what was greatness of soul, and how did ancient philosophers understand
it? For many readers, the primary reference point for answering this
question has been the account of the virtue offered by Aristotle in the
Nicomachean Ethics. There are certainly good reasons for giving this
account a central place in our engagement with the virtue and our effort
to map its meaning and conceptual frontiers. Yet in opening this discussion,
it will also be important to take a wider view, one that sensitizes us as much
to the openness of those frontiers as to their element of fixity. Because since
its earliest philosophical beginnings, greatness of soul is a virtue that has not
enjoyed perfect unity or stability but has harboured competing tendencies
and provoked different articulations, no less within the ancient context than
in later philosophical history. Even Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean
14   
Ethics has frequently been read as an attempt to adjudicate the different

meanings the virtue carried in his own time, as he had outlined them in an
oft-cited passage of his Posterior Analytics.¹
The different possibilities harboured by the virtue are already visible from
its earliest philosophical appearances. In the Republic, Plato names greatness
of soul (using the term megaloprepeia) as one of the chief qualities stipulated
in the philosopher, and in that context he forges a strong link between the
virtue and the pursuit of intellectual activity. ‘Will a thinker high-minded
enough to study all time and all being consider human life to be something
important?’ (486a; cf. 487a).² Offering his own account one generation later,
Aristotle conspicuously avoids this link, implicitly tying greatness of soul to
the perfection of practical rather than intellectual virtue. Greatness of soul,
as it emerges in the Nicomachean Ethics, may be characterized as a virtue of
self-knowledge or self-evaluation. In Aristotle’s well-thumbed formulation,
it is a quality that belongs to ‘the sort of person that thinks himself, and is,
worthy of great things’ (1123b1–2).³
Packed into this remark is an understanding of greatness of soul as a virtue
incorporating a relationship between three terms: a person’s actual worth, his
judgement about his worth, and (his judgement about) what his worth entitles
him to. The basis of this person’s worth is his virtue or excellence. ‘The truly
great-souled man must be good,’ Aristotle writes, indeed superlatively so:
‘greatness in respect of each of the excellences would seem to belong to the
great-souled person’ (1123b30). That to which it entitles him is honour, which
is the greatest of all external goods, the one we even bestow upon the gods.
The great-souled man is the person of great moral character who, knowing
his greatness, knows the recognition it entitles him to receive from others.
Greatness of soul is thus a virtue principally concerned with honour.
This thumbnail sketch of Aristotle’s view is worth holding on to. Yet for
the account that follows, it is also important to attend to some of the nuances
which shape its specific identity, and which open out to different ways of
configuring the latter. The passage of the Posterior Analytics just referred to
¹ For discussion of this point (and of Aristotle’s view of greatness of soul more generally) see
Neil Cooper, ‘Aristotle’s crowning virtue’, Apeiron 22 (1989); Michael Pakaluk, ‘The meaning of
Aristotelian magnanimity’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 26 (2004), 269–70; and Roger
Crisp, ‘Greatness of soul’, in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Richard
Kraut (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 169–70.
² I rely on the translation of the Republic by G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indian-
apolis: Hackett, 1992).
³ I draw on the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Christopher Rowe with commen-
tary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), with occasional modifications.
  15
offers a good handle for the purpose. There (II.13.97b15–25) Aristotle had
identified two key semantic strands of the virtue—‘intolerance of insults’,
notably exemplified by Achilles, and ‘indifference to fortune’, notably exem-
plified by Socrates. In crafting his own positive account in the Nicomachean
Ethics, he had preserved the first meaning by connecting greatness of soul to
honour, but he had effected a critical revision when it came to framing the
strength of attachment that honour should arouse. The great-souled man
should only be ‘moderately pleased’ when he receives the great honour he
merits; for it is after all only his due, and ‘there could be no honour worthy
of complete excellence’ (1124a6–8). And while his account focused on
honour, he had also preserved the second meaning by tying greatness of
soul to a similar stance extending beyond honour to encompass all external
goods, one that crucially mitigated the attitude of Socratic indifference by
the same emphasis on moderation. The great-souled man will be ‘moder-
ately disposed in relation to wealth, political power, and any kind of good or
bad fortune’, and he will ‘neither be over-pleased at good fortune nor over-
distressed at bad’ (1124a13–16). He is someone ultimately little given to
strong responses, whether of dismay or admiration: his sense of his own
greatness is partly expressed in the sense that ‘nothing is great’ (1125a3).
These moves would be negotiated differently at the hands of other thinkers
and other philosophical schools, resulting in competing configurations of the
virtue. The dominant Stoic approach notably reflected the more trenchant
stance these thinkers adopted on the overarching question of the value of
external goods for the ethical life and the role of luck in the human good.
Greatness of soul would thus be inscribed among them as a virtue embodying
the distinctive Stoic ideal of confronting vicissitudes of fortune with equanimity,
affirming the human ability to lead a life of virtue in the face of such vicissitudes
and treating external goods with a contempt that revived Socrates’ more
categorical indifference. Cicero provided a key expression of this view in his
On Duties when he described greatness of spirit as lying in ‘disdain for things
external, in the conviction that a man should admire, should choose, should
pursue, nothing except what is honourable and seemly, and should yield to no
man, nor to agitation of the spirit, nor to fortune’ (Book 1, 66).⁴
⁴ I draw on the translation by M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991). For further discussion of the Stoic approach to the virtue, see also René
Antoine Gauthier, Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie paїenne et dans la
théologie chrétienne (Paris: J. Vrin, 1951), pt 1, ch. 4; Gill, ‘Stoic magnanimity’.
16   
He also contributed another important element when fleshing out his

reference to the pursuit of ‘what is honourable’ as an imperative to ‘do deeds
which are great, certainly, and above all beneficial’. In doing so, he fore-
grounded an aspect of the virtue that has seemed more muted in some of its
configurations: its concern not merely with passive receipt (of honour) or
static endurance (of blows of fate) but with active aspiration (to great and
virtuous achievements, through which honour may then be deserved).⁵
‘Nature brought us forth magnanimous,’ as Seneca puts it in one of his
Epistles, and just as she ‘implanted in certain animals a spirit of ferocity, in
others craft, in others timidity, so she has gifted us with an aspiring and
lofty spirit, which prompts us to seek a life of the greatest honour’ (Epistle
104, 23).⁶ The admiration of virtue expressed in Cicero’s remark was
implicitly linked to an oft-voiced admiration directed to the human subject
in its ability to realize such lofty values, one that preserved Aristotle’s
emphasis on self-evaluation while delicately deflecting it from the individual
person (the bearer of this or that actualized character) to the human subject
in its higher capacity to actualize certain ethical and intellectual possibilities.
‘I am too great, was born to too great a destiny’, Seneca declares with
characteristic hauteur in one of his Epistles, ‘to be my body’s slave’ (Epistle
65, 21); and again: ‘Reflect that nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder;
for to the soul, if it be great, naught is great’ (Epistle 8, 5).⁷
This selective survey already suggests that greatness of soul was a virtue
containing a number of conceptual strands, strands that could be negotiated
in ways that yielded divergent articulations. While allowing for the deep
internal relations between these strands, we might heuristically pick out the
following three: one incorporating an attitude to the self (a judgement of
self-worth), another incorporating an attitude to external goods (honour but
also good and bad luck more broadly), and arguably a third incorporating an
attitude to (virtuous) activity. It is the reach and significance of these
strands, taken together, that is reflected in the remark made by the great
⁵ The element of activity seems muted, for example, in Aristotle, who paints a ponderous
picture of the great-souled person, describing him as ‘slow to act’ and ‘a doer of few things, but
great ones’ (NE 1124b24–6). Yet this interpretation has been contested by other readers, who
highlight the great-souled man’s quality as a benefactor to his community, thereby folding the
distance between Aristotle’s account and Cicero’s. See, for example, Ryan P. Hanley, ‘Aristotle
on the greatness of greatness of soul’, History of Political Thought, 23 (2002), 1–20.
⁶ I draw on the translation by Richard M. Gummere—Ad Lucilium Epistolae Morales, 3 vols
(London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918–25)—with modifications.
⁷ I draw on different translations of Seneca’s Epistles here, respectively by Robin Campbell
(London: Penguin, 2004) and by Gummere.
  17
French scholar René Antoine Gauthier that greatness of soul was the
battleground on which nothing less than ‘the relationship between human
beings and the world’ was decided.⁸
In moving to the Arabic context, this schematic overview of the plural
elements and identities of the virtue is worth keeping in mind. It is a
schematization, to repeat, and far from a nuanced account of the full
range of ways in which the virtue was approached in the ancient world. It
leaves out of view, certainly, the more eclectic moves that would be made by
philosophers working in later Hellenistic times, in whose thought diverse
intellectual influences—Platonic, Peripatetic, and Stoic—would interweave
to form a host of intricate new patterns. This point is especially relevant in
light of the textual sources that can be identified as having provided the chief
means of access to the virtue within the Islamic world. For these include, on
the one hand, some of the major works of Greek ethics in which greatness of
soul formed a significant element. On this list one would above all place the
Nicomachean Ethics, available in Arabic translation from around the second
half of the ninth century. The same applies (though to a lesser extent given
its more limited engagement with the virtue) to Plato’s Republic, available
not as an integral text but in the form of short quotations, excerpts, and
abridgements from a similar time.
Yet these sources also include a small flotilla of texts of varying length,
many characterized by a complicated textual history and elusive authorship,
whose philosophical identity was the product of various kinds of intellectual
syncretism. One of these is the Summa Alexandrinorum, an epitome of the
Nicomachean Ethics whose provenance has been the subject of extensive
speculation, with scholars debating whether it should be seen as a translation
from the Greek or as a text originally composed in Arabic. Several parts of
this work, including significantly the discussion of greatness of soul, are only
preserved in Latin. Other notable texts in this category include the pseudo-
Aristotelian De Virtutibus et vitiis, interestingly extant in two Arabic trans-
lations, and an additional ‘seventh book’ incorporated into the Arabic
version of the Nicomachean Ethics, which according to one conjecture
may derive from a lost commentary by Porphyry. They also include a
short treatise on ethics by a certain ‘Nicolaus’ which was found with the
manuscript of the Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.⁹ These
⁸ Gauthier, Magnanimité, 303.

⁹ For this textual background, good starting points are Douglas M. Dunlop’s introduction to
The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Anna A. Akasoy and Alexander Fidora
18   
short texts achieved wide circulation in the Arabic-speaking world among

authors approaching ethical subjects on a philosophical footing. Although
their treatment of greatness of soul does not compare to Aristotle’s in either
depth or length—a reflection, partly, of their overall brevity and epitomic
character—it is a theme in all of them.
Arabic Approaches: Defining a Virtue
There will be more to say about some of these sources and the uses made
of them by different authors as our discussion unfolds. Yet the above has
offered an overview in nuce of the identity of greatness of soul and the
routes by which thinkers in the Islamic world might have come to learn
about it. In doing so, it has also pulled into view some of the grounds for
the ambivalence with which this virtue has been met by numerous
thinkers of different times, and for the mixture of fascination and repug-
nance its larger-than-life éclat has provoked. The impossible hauteur
captured by Seneca’s turn of phrase—‘I am too great’—precipitates a
sense of discomfort that has typically pitted itself less against the Stoic
casting of the virtue than against its more individualistic Aristotelian
counterpart. Responding to features that came into view above, as well
as to some that didn’t, Aristotle’s modern readers have castigated his
portrait of the great-souled man on a number of grounds. They have
expressed dismay at his arrogance and almost stagnant sense of self-
satisfaction; at his leonine inability to rouse himself for anything but the
greatest deeds, being ‘slow to act’ and ‘a doer of few things, but great ones’
(NE 1124b24–26); and at his ungratefulness and inability to tolerate and
acknowledge debts, being the kind of person who feels ‘ashamed’ to receive
benefits and prefers to forget those he has (NE 1124b9–15)—an attitude
that ties in with the heightened concern with ‘self-sufficiency’ Aristotle
imputes to him (NE 1125a12). Taking such criticisms together, it may seem
little wonder that greatness of soul has enjoyed the dubious distinction of
(Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1–109; Manfred Ullmann, Die Nikomachische Ethik des Aristoteles in
arabischer Übersetzung, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011); Mauro Zonta, ‘Les Éthiques.
Tradition syriaque et arabe’, in Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques: Supplément, ed. Richard
Goulet with Jean-Marie Flamand and Maroun Aouad (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 2003), 191–98; and Anna Akasoy, ‘The Arabic and Islamic reception of the
Nicomachean Ethics’, in The Reception of Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Jon Miller (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 85–106.
  19
figuring as ‘the relativists’ favorite target’, as Martha Nussbaum notes—the

one virtue on Aristotle’s list that reeks of cultural contingency, implying
‘in its very name an attitude to one’s own worth that is more Greek than
universal’.¹⁰
Several of these qualms resonate with ones that have historically animated
the Christian reception of this virtue, set in the horizon of the broader
Christian engagement with pagan ethics. In spearheading this engagement,
Augustine himself had not singled out greatness of soul as an intrinsically
reprehensible trait. His few references to the virtue in the City of God, for
example, show him not so much contesting its status as a virtue as contesting
its proper application, in a way that presupposes its acceptance as a virtue or
term of praise.¹¹ Yet many of the faults he found with pagan ethics could be
said to be enshrined in this virtue, including the preoccupation with honour
or glory, the aspiration to self-sufficiency (present even more starkly in the
Stoic construction of the virtue), and the vice of pride that orders everything
to the self, to the extent that the great-souled man’s ‘consciousness of
his own moral worth infects his motivation’.¹² A sense of unease with the
ethical credentials of greatness of soul certainly stood in the backdrop
of one of the best-known engagements with the virtue in the medieval
Christian context, Aquinas’ account in the Summa Theologiae, which recon-
figured it in ways that served to embed it more harmoniously into the
Christian ethical standpoint.
This conflict, it is worth observing, was not necessarily brought out by
Christian thinkers in the explicit manner one might expect coming from the
more openly polemical reactions of modern readers. As Jennifer Herdt
notes, for example, even in the case of Aquinas there is room for debate
whether his reconstruction of the virtue was ‘intentionally subversive’ or
¹⁰ Nussbaum, ‘Non-relative virtues’, 38. For an overview of some of the most common
criticisms of Aristotle’s megalopsychos, see Crisp, ‘Aristotle on greatness of soul’, 169 ff., and
Howard J. Curzer, ‘Aristotle’s much-maligned megalopsychos’, Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 69 (1991), 131–51.
¹¹ A good example are his remarks in the context of arguing against the idea that suicide
displays this virtue. ‘Greatness of spirit is not the right term to apply’ to a person who killed
himself to avoid hardship or injustice; ‘we rightly ascribe greatness to a spirit that has the
strength to endure a life of misery instead of running away from it, and to despise the judgement
of men.’ At the same time, Augustine opens greatness of spirit to a kind of fallibility that will
certainly seem remarkable coming from Aristotle’s view of the virtue as presupposing consum-
mate goodness, as suggested by his remark that Theombrotus, who is said to have killed himself
to attain eternal life sooner, ‘showed greatness rather than goodness’. See Concerning the City of
God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), Book I, §22, 32–3.
¹² Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 50; and see more broadly her discussion in ch. 2.
20   
merely ‘an effort to employ a hermeneutic of charity’.¹³ Indeed, as John

Marenbon has shown in a panoramic survey of the reception of magnanimity
among a number of prominent medieval thinkers, those approaching the
Christian context with expectations of conflict are likely to be surprised
by the discovery that magnanimity was integrated into the Christian scheme
as readily as most other virtues. This, he suggests, was ‘facilitated by the
contingencies of textual transmission’, as the account of the virtue that was
liable to provoke the greatest tension, Aristotle’s, became available only in
the middle of the thirteenth century. By that time, Christian thinkers had
already assimilated the Stoic conception of the virtue, which was not
vulnerable to the same problems. Even after the arrival of the Nicomachean
Ethics, far from precipitating a dramatic clash, any tensions were ‘resolved,
or side-stepped or made manifest below the surface’, though there were also
instances in which this conflict broke out more openly, as illustrated by the
interesting case of Dante.¹⁴
Yet even if muted or implicit, the tensions were not entirely invisible.
In the Summa, notably, the question whether magnanimity conflicts with
humility comes up as an express objection that Aquinas articulates and
confronts. The conflict steps more directly into the open among later
Christian authors. When the eighteenth-century thinker John Witherspoon,
for example, sets out to recommend magnanimity as a ‘Christian virtue’
against the backdrop of David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s earlier approaches,
his engagement with the virtue is framed by an overt concern with the
problems it appears to pose from a Christian viewpoint, and by a worry
that the ‘worldly cast’ of the virtue and the standards of merit that govern it
are such that ‘the gospel seems to stand directly opposed to it’.¹⁵
Thus, whether muted or overt, conflict has been a central theme in the
reception of this virtue in both philosophical and theological circles. Coming
from this background, one can only approach the Arabic-Islamic encounter
with this virtue with a sense of high moment. The sense of moment will
seem higher still if we consider that, in the Arabic case, this is an encounter
that unfolded on very different terms—more abruptly and less organically—
than in the case of the Christian tradition, which developed in a cultural
¹³ Herdt, ‘Strengthening hope for the greatest things: Aquinas’s redemption of magnanimity’,
in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou.
¹⁴ John Marenbon, ‘Magnanimity, Christian ethics and paganism in the Latin Middle Ages’,
in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou.
¹⁵ See the discussion in Ryan P. Hanley, ‘Magnanimity and modernity: greatness of soul and
greatness of mind in the Enlightenment’, in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou.
  21
environment still suffused with the values of the ancient world. In the
Arabic case, by contrast, this encounter has the character of a sharper
linguistic and cultural confrontation, one more calculated to capture our
imagination and put us in the mind of the potential for collision. It is the
sudden encounter between a language and cultural domain that contains
the concept of megalopsychia and one that doesn’t, and needs to find the
resources for accommodating it.
Where to watch for this encounter? One of the first places we will think to
look is the work of al-Fārābī (d.950/1), who stands out as one of the few
major Arab philosophers to have taken an interest in the normative parts of
the philosophical curriculum. Al-Fārābī’s greatest achievements in this
connection lie in political philosophy rather than ethics, and in his political
works it is Plato’s rather than Aristotle’s influence that figures most visibly.
Greatness of soul appears at two significant junctures of his writings, once in
his celebrated political work On the Perfect State and once in the shorter
work The Attainment of Happiness. In both cases it appears as part of a list
of qualities required in the philosopher-king which mirrors the list Plato
had given in the Republic (486a, 487a), using the term megaloprepeia.
The adjectival Arabic term is kabīr al-nafs, which is a direct calque from
the Greek (literally, ‘large of soul’). The philosopher, al-Fārābī writes in On
the Perfect State, ‘should be great-souled (kabīr al-nafs) and fond of honour,
his soul being naturally above (takburu nafsuhu) everything ugly and
base’.¹⁶ One point to notice is that greatness of soul, which in Plato’s
discussion had borne a strong link to intellectual activity, is here connected
to ethical excellence and concern for honour in a way that gravitates more
heavily toward Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics.¹⁷ Yet such
observations to the side, these modest remarks seem to exhaust al-Fārābī’s
interest in the virtue. It is striking that in the detailed discussion of the
virtues provided in another of his major political works, Aphorisms of the
Statesman—a discussion which displays the unmistakable influence of
Aristotelian ideas—al-Fārābī remains wholly silent on greatness of soul.
When listing the virtues concerned with self-evaluation, it is in fact humility
¹⁶ I draw on the translation by Richard Walzer, On the Perfect State/Mabādiʾ ārāʾ ahl
al-madīna al-fādila (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), with a number of modifications. Cf. The
_
Attainment of Happiness/Kitāb Tahsīl al-saʿāda, ed. Jaʿfar al-Yāsīn (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus,
1981), 95. __
¹⁷ For more on Plato’s view of greatness of soul and the link to intellectual activity, see
Gauthier, Magnanimité, pt 1, ch. 2; cf. the discussion in my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic
Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), ch. 5.
22   
(tawāduʿ) that appears as the mean, flanked by the vices of arrogance

_
(takabbur) and abjectness or self-abasement (takhāsus).¹⁸
The natural place to turn in hopes of a closer engagement with the virtue
is a work which constitutes perhaps the most celebrated compendium of
philosophical ethics in the Arabic tradition, Miskawayh’s (d.1030) The
Refinement of Character. Among other distinctive features, this work con-
tains an extensive section dedicated to the discussion of the virtues and vices.
These are arranged in a manner which betrays the peculiar brand of
intellectual eclecticism at work among philosophers writing in Arabic—
one that, as suggested above, partly reflects the character of their textual
sources. Thus, Miskawayh relies on an Aristotelian principle to distinguish
between a virtuous mean and two vicious extremes, but then on a tripartite
faculty psychology inherited from Plato to identify the cardinal virtues and
map these onto the rational, appetitive, and irascible faculties. Wisdom is
the virtue of the rational faculty (or soul), courage the virtue of the irascible
faculty, temperance the virtue of the appetitive faculty, and justice the virtue
that results from the combination of these virtues.¹⁹ Yet the specific struc-
ture of the virtues, and in particular the distinction between a number of
cardinal virtues and a far larger number of subordinate virtues, speaks to a
practice associated with the Stoics.²⁰
Following one’s finger down Miskawayh’s tables of the virtues—past the
six virtues under wisdom, past the twelve virtues under temperance—one
will find greatness of soul under the irascible faculty, the first of eight virtues
presented as subordinate to courage. The entry reads as follows: ‘As for
greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs), it is the disdain for what is insignificant and
the capacity to bear honour and dishonour. The one who possesses this virtue
always judges himself worthy of great things while [indeed] deserving them.’²¹
¹⁸ Aphorisms of the Statesman/Fusūl muntazaʿa, ed. Fauzi M. Najjar (Beirut: Dar

El-Mashreq, 1971), 36. _
¹⁹ I am simplifying certain things, as Miskawayh maps a pair of central virtues onto each
faculty. See The Refinement of Character/Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, ed. Constantine Zurayk (Beirut:
American University of Beirut, 1966), 16 ff. Note that Miskawayh interestingly only deploys the
mesotes scheme for the cardinal virtues, in contrast, for example, to al-Ghazālī.
²⁰ Cf. Richard Walzer’s remarks in ‘Some aspects of Miskawaih’s Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq’, in
Greek Into Arabic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 222–3.
²¹ Huwa al-istihāna biʾl-yasīr waʾl-iqtidār ʿalā haml al-karāma waʾl-hawān, wa-sāhibuhu
_ hqāqihi lahā. Tahdhīb, 21. In his_ transla-
abadan yuʾahhilu nafsahu liʾl-umūr al-ʿizām maʿa isti _
tion of this passage, Zurayk renders the_ last phrase: _he ‘is always preparing himself for great
deeds’: Refinement of Character, trans. C. Zurayk (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1968),
19. I believe this is unsound on both counts (‘preparing’, ‘deeds’), though it would take much
textual argument to fully unpack the point. Most importantly, this passage needs to be
compared with the corresponding passages of the Nicomachean Ethics, which, along with the
  23
One complication needs to be quickly mentioned and put aside: this list
in fact contains not one, but two, concepts that speak to the ‘greatness of
soul’ complex. A few lines below, another virtue makes an appearance,
designated through the compound ʿizam al-himma, which I will translate
_
as ‘greatness of spirit’. The entry reads: ‘A virtue of the soul through which it
endures both good fortune and its opposite, even the travails experienced at
the time of death.’²² There is an important question to be asked as to the
relationship between these two concepts. One thing seems clear: the latter
concept foregrounds what I earlier identified as the second strand of great-
ness of soul, an attitude to external goods, and appears to frame the right
attitude to such goods in terms reminiscent of the Stoic approach. The
correlation of greatness of soul with courage, we may note, was itself a
characteristic Stoic move.²³
I will be returning to the relationship between these two concepts in
the second part of the book. Putting this question aside for the moment,
here I will restrict my attention to the first concept. How to parse it?
Peering close, we will discern a focus on honour that seems reminiscent of
treatise by Nicolaus, suggest themselves as key influences on this configuration of greatness of

soul with its distinctive accent on merit and self-evaluation. The Arabic version of the NE reads:
al-kabīr al-nafs huwa alladhī yuʾahhilu nafsahu liʾl-umūr al-ʿazīma wa-huwa li-dhālika ahl
(p. 257.10 of the Arabic edition). For the related remarks in_ Nicolaus’ treatise, see ʿAbd
al-Rahmān Badawī, ed., al-Akhlāq, taʾlīf Aristūtālīs, tarjamat Ishāq ibn Hunayn (Kuwait City:
Wikālat_ al-Matbūʿāt, 1979), 408. The indeterminacy
_ _ _
of ‘great things’ _ preserved, but if we
is best
were to determine_ it, the most natural way of doing so would be as a reference to honour given
this context; reference to great action is present in the NE’s portrait of the megalopsychos (e.g.
1124b25–6), but it is not salient. Al-Ghazālī’s phrasing of his corresponding definition, which
refers to despising (istihqār) these great things, lends further support to this view (Scale of
Action/Mīzān al-ʿamal, _ed. Sulaymān Dunyā [Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1964], 277), though it does
so by throwing up a textual difficulty given the evident physical resemblance of the term istihqār
(contempt) to Miskawayh’s istihqāq (merit). Another edition of the Tahdhīb in fact replaces _
istihqāq with a term close in_ meaning to al-Ghazālī’s, viz. istikhfāf ([Cairo: al-Matbaʿa
_
al-Husayniyya, _
1911], 17; it is not the sole textual discrepancy. But any inclination to privilege
the _latter reading of the text must reckon with the fact that the former term appears both in the
NE (e.g. p. 257.11 of the Arabic edition) and in Nicolaus’ treatise.
²² Huwa fadīla liʾl-nafs tahtamilu bihā saʿādat al-jadd wa-diddahā hattā al-shadāʾid allatī
_
takūnu ʿinda al-mawt. _ 21. Zurayk translates ʿizam al-himma
Tahdhīb, _ _as ‘composure’, which
_ ethical texts, as I will show in Part 2
seems too restrictive in light of the uses of this term in other
of this book.
²³ As noted by M. C. Lyons in his remarks on this treatise: ‘A Greek ethical treatise’, Oriens,
13/14 (1960/1), 52, where he also suggests that the terms kibar al-nafs and ʿizam al-himma
correspond to the Greek terms megalopsychia and megalophrosyne. In appraising _ this sugges-
tion, one will need to take into account that both terms appear as translations of a single Greek
term in the two extant Arabic translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian De virtutibus et vitiis. See
the discussion in Part 2.
24   
Aristotle’s discussion in the Ethics, though we will also discern an emphasis

on unconcern (‘the capacity to bear honour and dishonour’) that seems
rather less so.²⁴ It is the last part of the statement that places the definition
more decidedly in the Aristotelian force field, with its evocative references to
self-judgement, worthiness, and desert. Yet what will also stand out is the
terseness of the remark, one that leaves plenty of room for ambiguity. What,
for example, are the ‘great things’ Miskawayh refers to as the correlate of
worthiness? Reading the expression against Aristotle (and indeed against the
vocabulary of the Arabic translation of the Ethics), the answer seems clear:
honour.²⁵ Yet Miskawayh notably does not volunteer this clarity. The words
he does volunteer are, on any estimate, exiguous. Coming from the history
of strained responses to greatness of soul in all its provocative brilliance, one
will be struck by the sheer procedural matter-of-factness with which this
virtue is casually brought up, briefly defined, and then dropped before
moving down the list. The only other appearance the virtue makes in the
rest of the work is in a passage addressing the impact of misfortunes on
happiness, one that mirrors its appearance at the same juncture of the
Nicomachean Ethics.²⁶
What to make of this offhand treatment? Before engaging with this
question more seriously, we need to allow it to deepen. We can do this by
turning to another ethical work featuring a prominent discussion of the
virtues, al-Ghazālī’s Scale of Action, composed only a few decades after the
Refinement. This is a work which claims our interest on a number of grounds,
not only as one of the outstanding ethical treatises in the Arabic tradition
attesting the influence of ancient philosophical ideas, but also as the work of a
thinker whose religious commitments stand out far more distinctly and
whose engagement with philosophical ethics thus demands to be located
more firmly within theological space. Al-Ghazālī’s ethics in the Scale, as
several commentators have highlighted, bears several debts. Among these, its
debt to Miskawayh competes in force with its debt to the literary and
religious scholar al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī, whose seminal Pathway to the
_
²⁴ Though note Aristotle’s remark at NE 1124a11: ‘he will treat dishonour in the same
way . . . ’.
²⁵ See n. 21. More could be said to unpack the somewhat cryptic reference to ‘disdain for
what is insignificant’, but this would be a long textual story. The definitions of the virtue offered
by different writers contain a few conceptual elements which my discussion has had to leave out
of view.
²⁶ Tahdhīb, 96, cf. 99 (compare NE 1100b32–3); the term ʿizam al-himma is interestingly
juxtaposed to kibar al-nafs in the first passage. _
  25
Noble Traits of the Religious Law had blazed a trail toward a more compelling
amalgamation of philosophical ethics into a Qur’anic framework.²⁷
Each of these thinkers provides his own taxonomy of the virtues and
vices, and the family resemblances between these taxonomies often jostle
with numerous divergences which no doubt provide the material for
more complex stories about their individual genealogies.²⁸ Yet whatever
al-Ghazālī’s debt to al-Rāghib’s work, in his discussion of the virtues and
vices, and in his discussion of greatness of soul in particular, it is his affinities
with Miskawayh that advertise themselves most strongly—though these are
indeed affinities that throw the delicate yet significant differences into even
sharper relief. Unlike Miskawayh, al-Ghazālī mentions not only the virtue
but also its corresponding vices, naming them as smallness of soul (sighar
_
al-nafs) and arrogance or presumption (takabbur).²⁹ Unlike Miskawayh,
he omits any reference to the second virtue, ‘greatness of spirit’ (ʿizam
_
al-himma). And here comes the formal definition, filed once again under
the cardinal virtue of courage. Greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs):
A virtue through which a person has the capacity to judge himself worthy
of grand things while despising them and caring little about them out of
delight in the value and grandeur of his soul. Its effect is that one takes little
pleasure in great honours bestowed upon him by scholars and one takes no
pleasure in honours bestowed by contemptible people, or in small things,
or in good things that are a matter of luck or fortune.³⁰
One thing that will instantly stand out are the rather firmer bridges this
remark throws to Aristotle’s discussion, as evidenced by the resumption of
Aristotle’s qualification about the great-souled man’s response to honour
²⁷ Al-Ghazālī’s debt to al-Rāghib has been emphasized by a number of writers, including

Wilferd Madelung in ‘Ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī und die Ethik al-Ġazālīs’, Islamwissenschaftliche
_
Abhandlungen: Fritz Meier zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Richard Gramlich (Wiesbaden,
1974), 152–63, and Yasien Mohamed in several pieces, including ‘The ethical philosophy of
al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī’, Journal of Islamic Studies 6 (1995), 51–75, and ‘The ethics of education:
_
al-Isfahānī’s al-Dharīʿa as a source of inspiration for al-Ghazālī’s Mīzān al-ʿamal’, Muslim
_ 101 (2011), 633–57.
World
²⁸ Among many other differences, al-Rāghib’s focal term is kibar al-himma, a concept I will
be exploring more fully in Part 2. For a quick comparison of the tables of the virtues provided
by some of our writers (al-Ghazālī, Miskawayh, and Avicenna, though not al-Rāghib), see
Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1975), app. II.
²⁹ Though note that al-Ghazālī gives the term tabajjuh as the corresponding vice a couple of
pages later (Mīzān, 279). _
³⁰ Fadīla yaqdiru bihā al-insān an yuʾahhila nafsahu liʾl-umūr al-jalīla maʿa istihqārihi lahā
wa-qillat_ mubālātihi bihā ibtihājan minhu bi-qadr nafsihi wa-jalālatihā ( . . . ). Mīzān,
_ 277.
26   
depending on the identity of its dispenser (NE 1124a5–11). The similarities

with Miskawayh’s account will be plain. They notably include the emphasis
on worthiness of great things (complete with the same reticence on what
those great things are), which highlights the first strand of greatness of
soul identified earlier—self-evaluation—and likewise situates al-Ghazālī’s
definition within the Aristotelian force field. At the same time, al-Ghazālī
incorporates a stronger emphasis on the second strand, the attitude to luck.
He also calls sharper attention to the element of self-evaluation by high-
lighting the double movement of exaltation of the self and contempt for
things external to it.³¹
What such a painstaking collation of differentiae points to, however, is
the similarity between the two discussions that is most basic—and to the
reader approaching these discussions with an awareness of the broader
history of the virtue, most surprising: and that is just how impassively and
cursorily both writers pick up greatness of soul only to drop it in their
forward-moving march down their table of definitions. The space al-Ghazālī
devotes to this virtue exceeds the space given to most other virtues on his list,
and it is almost double the size of Miskawayh’s. Yet that is to say very little
given the brevity of both sets of remarks.
What makes this offhand brevity even more striking is that, even in their
terseness, these statements have succeeded in giving voice to a conception of
the virtue that places some of its starkest and indeed most contentious
features on full display. Al-Ghazālī’s statement stands out here with the
almost gratuitous extravagance of its wording, picking out the element of
self-evaluation to parse it as the great-souled man’s ‘delight in the value and
grandeur of his soul’. The grandeur of his soul; or, as an alternative trans-
lation might have it, its majesty. For readers familiar with the chequered
history of this virtue’s reception, such electric terms will have the effect of
returning them to the grounds of this reception and to the moral discomfort
the virtue has provoked, particularly in its Aristotelian version. This dis-
comfort has centred on the attitude to the self and the view of the proper
way of relating to its merits that it codifies; and it has the strongest hold
on theorists whose religious commitments lead them to accentuate the
value of humility as an ethical ideal. Given the intellectual identities
of both writers, particularly al-Ghazālī’s, their appearance of offering a
³¹ For more on this double movement, see Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Stand-
point, 181 ff, and more briefly Vasalou, Wonder: A Grammar (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2015), 160–61.
    -:  27
matter-of-course welcome to this virtue will thus make us wonder, and will
call for deeper investigation.
The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Miskawayh
It is an investigation that requires placing the brief remarks of these two

thinkers in a more thoroughgoing conversation with their broader ethical
schemes. And to the extent that one of the main ethical stakes thematized by
the virtue concerns the proper attitude to self-esteem and to the esteem
bestowed by others, it is more specifically against these thinkers’ views on
those topics that their statements about greatness of soul need to be situated.
To understand the Arabic reception of greatness of soul, we thus need a
clearer picture of these thinkers’ substantive commitments on the ethics of
honour and self-esteem. My focus in the following will principally fall on
al-Ghazālī, who provides the richest though not the most unequivocal
contributions on the topic, and whose theological commitments give him
a higher stake in the subject. My argument, to preview it, is that on closer
scrutiny, the virtue of greatness of soul turns out to sit uneasily within these
thinkers’ positive morality, particularly al-Ghazālī’s, for reasons that resonate
with those of their Christian counterparts and of modern critics of the virtue.
The conflict with (one important strand of ) Islamic religious morality seems
no less real for being unvoiced; though if this is the case, it will then be an
interesting question why the conflict should be obscured.
Miskawayh’s broader work offers little sustained commentary on the
ethical stakes just isolated, and indeed some of the views he expresses
evoke the register of the ancient philosophical schemes in which the virtue
of greatness of soul thrived. Thus, the simple affirmations of the dignity of
human beings that are woven through his Refinement of Character—the soul
is ‘nobler’ in substance (akram jawharan) than all material things and
humans have the greatest dignity among mundane beings (ashraf mawjūdāt
ʿālaminā)³²—may remind us, minus the specific vocabulary of grandeur, of
some of the exulting expressions of human greatness found among Stoic
thinkers. ‘The human soul is a great and noble thing,’ Seneca writes in one of
his Epistles (102, 21)³³—a greatness partly grounded in capacities for moral
transcendence encoded in this particular virtue. Even more importantly,
³² Tahdhīb, 6, 36. ³³ Trans. Gummere.

28   
Miskawayh fails to follow al-Fārābī’s example with regard to humility and

gives it no place in his classification of the virtues.³⁴
Yet a closer look at a number of his remarks—isolated yet no less telling—
yields a complex picture that raises questions about the place that greatness
of soul, particularly in its Aristotelian modulation, could occupy within his
ethics. As regards externally bestowed honour, for one, Miskawayh’s moral
exemplar is a person whose pursuit of excellence for its own sake can survive
others’ complete ignorance of his merit (though Miskawayh underlines that
virtues ‘shine like the sun’ and in practice rarely remain undiscovered). The
right attitude to others’ failure to recognize one’s merit, he tells us in one
place, is indifference: one ‘should be unconcerned (lam yaktarith)’; he
continues, ‘for we know that it is a vice to seek to obtain and to love honour
(iltimās al-karāma wa-mahabbatuhā radhīla)’. While Miskawayh recog-
_
nizes the motivational value of honour and commends the pedagogical use
of honour as an incentive among those cultivating virtue, he disparages the
desire for it as a vice.³⁵ This last set of remarks is consistent with the guarded
attitude to honour expressed in the first part of Miskawayh’s definition of
greatness of soul (it involves ‘the capacity to bear honour and dishonour’),
yet it is less consistent with Aristotle’s framing of the proper attitude to
honour to the extent that this fought shy of Socratic (and later Stoic)
indifference. Similarly, unlike Aristotle’s great-souled man—who, if he
does not actively ‘look down on people’ in general (NE 1124b5–6), makes
a point of acting grandly toward the eminent (1124b18–19)—Miskawayh’s
paragon of virtue is explicitly said to be one who ‘behaves humbly toward
everyone (yatawādaʿu li-kulli ahad) and honours everyone he consorts with
_ _
(yukrimu kulla man ʿāsharahu)’.³⁶
Even more telling, however, are those of Miskawayh’s remarks that touch
upon the internal element of the ‘ethics of esteem’ plexus, that which
concerns a person’s own estimation of his merits. In this respect, the
³⁴ See Sherif, Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 53–4, for some brief but helpful remarks on the
topic.
³⁵ For the last quote, see Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī and Miskawayh, The Scattered and the
Gathered/al-Hawāmil wa’l-shawāmil, _ ed. Ahmad_ Amīn and al-Sayyid Ahmad Saqr (Cairo:
_ 300; and see 307 for the remark
Lajnat al-Taʾlīf wa’l-Tarjama waʾl-Nashr, 1951), _ _about excel-
lences shining like the sun (though see also 303, and also densely 192, for a seemingly more
positive comment on honour). On the pedagogical harnessing of honour, see e.g. Tahdhīb, 56
(talking about the education of the young).
³⁶ Tahdhīb, 60. As Pakaluk argues in the context of some broader remarks addressing the
putative ‘arrogance’ of Aristotle’s megalopsychos, the translation of kataphronei as ‘looks down
on people’ is misleading insofar as it introduces an object that the original text lacks. Pakaluk,
‘Aristotelian magnanimity’, 264.
    -:  29
significance of Miskawayh’s failure to include humility in his list of the

virtues needs to be calibrated by the observation that a quality which
represents the opposing vice does indeed make an important appearance
in his discussion. In a later chapter of the Refinement dedicated to discussion
of the maladies of the soul, one of the vices that Miskawayh brings up is
conceit (ʿujb), which he defines as ‘a false view that the soul deserves a
station it does not (zann kādhib biʾl-nafs fī istihqāq martaba ghayr mus-
_ _
tahaqqa lahā).’³⁷ The invocation of the notion of desert will remind us of
_
Miskawayh’s use of the same term in his definition of greatness of soul. The
conceited person, we learn, is the one who has an exaggerated view of his
deserts. The virtuous person, by implication, will be the one who takes a just
view of his deserts, and who thus only judges them to be great when they
really are great (as the great-souled man does). Yet Miskawayh’s continu-
ation, which offers a reflection intended to medicate the vice, is suggestive:
‘It befits one who knows his soul to know the multiplicity of flaws and
deficiencies that beset it.’ And it is suggestive for apparently leaving little
room for the possibility that self-knowledge could ever yield a judgement of
great merit—that it could ever produce legitimate self-satisfaction.³⁸
If this remark does not seem sufficiently conclusive, a pregnant statement
Miskawayh offers in another of his works, The Scattered and the Gathered,
drives the point more forcefully home. It is pregnant not least in appealing to
a term that has already appeared once in this discussion, ‘greatness of spirit’,
and whose fuller treatment I have deferred to Part 2. ‘The great-spirited
person (al-kabīr al-himma)’, Miskawayh tells us there, ‘belittles the virtues
he possesses on account of his aspiration to what surpasses them; for
however high the level (martaba) of excellence a person acquires, it is
nugatory compared with that which surpasses it’; and it is the limitations
of human nature that ‘prevent one from grasping it fully and attaining its
utmost degree’ and ‘seeking the highest level of the human excellences’.³⁹ It
is a part of virtue, Miskawayh suggests—indeed, part of a virtue of great-
ness—to never feel satisfied with the excellence of one’s character; because
complete perfection in fact lies outside our reach. The proper attitude
toward one’s own character is never a static sense of possession such as
³⁷ Tahdhīb, 196. This vice appears more specifically in Miskawayh’s discussion of anger,
where it is named as one of the causes of its pathology; we may recall that greatness of soul was
also subsumed under the irascible faculty.
³⁸ Ibid.; Miskawayh offers a second, slightly less transparent, therapeutic reflection, which
seems to centre on one’s dependence on others and the lack of self-sufficiency of one’s virtue.
³⁹ Hawāmil, 308.
30   
Aristotle’s great-souled man appears to evince. Moral greatness must always

figure in the content of a future-directed aspiration rather than as the
content of a factual judgement about one’s existing character.⁴⁰
Taken together, this evidence suggests that the virtue of greatness of soul,
particularly in its Aristotelian inflection, could at best occupy an ambivalent
place in Miskawayh’s broader ethical scheme. Although Miskawayh allows
for the importance of proper self-respect—one should not gratuitously
expose oneself to ridicule and dishonour, he notes at one place: ‘the virtuous
person . . . honours himself and protects his dignity (yukrimu nafsahu
wa-ʿirdahu)’⁴¹—his overall understanding would seem to bear an awkward
_
relationship to the view of the proper attitude to honour and self-esteem
embedded in Aristotle’s account.
The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Al-Ghazālī
In crafting this comparison, I have held Miskawayh’s ethical viewpoint

against Aristotle’s while allowing myself the liberty to look away from
Miskawayh’s schema of the virtue, whose bare simplicity and indeed stra-
tegic ambiguities make it a limited mirror of Aristotle’s account and present
its contentious elements in relatively muted form.⁴² In turning to al-Ghazālī,
these kinds of textual scruples loosen their grip given the boldness through
which such elements are placed on display. The great-souled man judges
himself ‘worthy of grand things’ while disdaining them ‘out of delight in the
value and grandeur of his soul’.
Now in seeking to situate this remarkable characterization within
al-Ghazālī’s broader ethical understanding, it will be instructive to note
that this is not the first time across the pages of the Scale that al-Ghazālī
⁴⁰ Note that the understanding of Aristotle’s megalopsychos in terms of ‘a static sense of

possession’ is open to debate. For a robust defence of the role of aspiration in Aristotle’s portrait,
see Pakaluk, ‘Aristotelian magnanimity’; cf. the discussion in Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the
Aesthetic Standpoint, 184–6.
⁴¹ Tahdhīb, 199.
⁴² This reflects a larger picture of sketchy engagement with the NE which has been the source
of enduring doubts as to the precise identity of the texts Miskawayh was using during his
composition of the Tahdhīb, and as to whether he had access to the entire text of the NE or was
instead using the Summa Alexandrinorum under the mistaken impression that this was the NE.
See Akasoy’s brief remarks in ‘The Arabic and Islamic reception’, 101–2, and references there.
Cf. Elvira Wakelnig’s remarks in A Philosophy Reader from the Circle of Miskawayh (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 18–20, with reference to a philosophical reader
which, as she convincingly argues, originates in Miskawayh’s circle.
    -: -̄̄ 31
has linked a person’s perception of his own character and of the quality of
his soul with the experience of a positive affective response. Envisaging the
life of sustained religious obedience a few pages earlier, he makes the
tantalizing remark that fulfilling this life will lead to greater reward and to
a state of greater purity for the soul such that ‘its perfection (kamāl) is more
complete, and the joy its owner takes in its beauty (ibtihāj sāhibihā
_ _
bi-jamālihā) upon release from the attachments of the body is more intense
and abundant’. This point is echoed later in the Scale where al-Ghazālī refers
to the way the veil that prevents a person from ‘perceiving his soul and its
perfection and beauty (mushāhadat nafsihi wa-kamālihā wa-jamālihā)’ will
be lifted upon death, allowing one to witness one’s perfection and to ‘rejoice
in it and experience never-ending bliss in it’.⁴³ The focal terms here, it will be
observed, are ‘perfection’ and ‘beauty’. These are notions that are organically
related and in turn directly linked both to the concept of character and to the
more solemn notion of ‘grandeur’ deployed in al-Ghazālī’s remark about
greatness of soul. The notion of beauty, al-Ghazālī explains in the Revival of
the Religious Sciences, is not confined to things we can perceive with the
physical senses but has wider application. In this wider sense, an entity is
beautiful when it is characterized by the perfection that is proper to it and
possible for it. It is in this wider sense, in which beauty is predicated not of
the ‘outer’ but of the ‘inner’ form, that we speak of beautiful or fine character
(khuluq hasan, akhlāq jamīla).⁴⁴ Having linked the good to the beautiful—a
_
link indeed catalysed by the Arabic term husn, which can signify both
_
‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’, and evoking a conceptual conjunction that was
likewise central to the pattern of Greek ethics—elsewhere al-Ghazālī links
the beautiful to the great by suggesting that beauty (jamāl) is but the
subjective correlate of grandeur or majesty (jalāl).⁴⁵
This last suggestion appears in a short but important work that al-Ghazālī
devotes to an investigation of the names of God, The Most Exalted Aim in
Expounding God’s Beautiful Names. The distinctive task of this book is to
⁴³ Respectively Mīzān, 256, 357.

⁴⁴ See the discussion in The Revival of the Religious Sciences/Ihyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Cairo: Lajnat
Nashr al-Thaqāfa al-Islāmiyya, 1356–7, 16 vols), vol. 14, 2577–81. _
⁴⁵ This not entirely transparent view is expressed in The Most Exalted Aim in Expounding
God’s Beautiful Names/al-Maqsad al-asnā fī sharh maʿānī asmāʾ Allāh al-husnā, ed. Fadlou
A. Shehadi (Beirut: Dar El-Machreq,_ _ use of the notion of ‘beauty’
1971), 126. The _ in connection
with the soul was certainly present in some of the Greek texts available in translation to Muslim
intellectuals. It appears e.g. in Galen’s compendium on ethics: ‘Mukhtasar min kitāb al-Akhlāq
_
li-Jālīnūs’, ed. ʿAbd al-Rahmān Badawī, Dirāsāt wa-nusūs fiʾl-falsafa waʾl-ʿulūm ʿinda al-ʿarab
_
(Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya _ _1981), 196: ‘beauty and ugliness bear
liʾl-Dirāsāt waʾl-Nashr,
the same relationship to the soul as do beauty and ugliness to the body.’
32   
provide guidance to the believer striving to model himself on the divine

names and fulfil the religious mandate indicated in a well-known hadith to
‘assume the character traits of God’ (takhallaqū bi-akhlāq Allāh). For our
context, it will be particularly relevant to note the appearance that the
notions of beauty and majesty make in al-Ghazālī’s framing of this ethical
pursuit. The person who has gained insight into one of the attributes of God
is struck by its grandeur and splendour (istiʿzām, istishrāq) such that he is
_
filled with ‘longing for that attribute, ardour for that grandeur and beauty,
and a desire to be adorned by that feature.’ It is the perception of God’s
beauty and majesty, this suggests, that arouses our moral aspiration and
drives us to imitate it; and what is crucial is that, in responding to that
stimulus, it is the desire to be beautiful—a longing to appropriate that beauty
as our own—that forms the content of our moral motivation.⁴⁶ Elsewhere
the same point is couched using the language of perfection, appearing as the
claim that ‘the perfection and virtue of one’s soul’ should form the content of
one’s aim in the mundane world.⁴⁷
Taken together, the above suggests that al-Ghazālī’s pithy statements
about the great-souled person’s delight in his own greatness betoken, and
mesh with, a broader readiness to give ethical sanction to the idea that the
perfections of one’s own character might show up as the object of positive
valuation. This indeed reflects a psychological truth that al-Ghazālī states in
universal tones in the Revival: perfection forms an object of desire, and the
attainment of objects of desire causes pleasure; thus ‘when the soul perceives
its perfection it is gladdened and moved by joy’.⁴⁸ The understanding of
moral aspiration as a self-referential desire for one’s future perfection would
appear to tie in with this larger picture. It is not incidental to further observe
that in his classification of the virtues and vices in the Scale, al-Ghazālī, like
⁴⁶ The quote is from Maqsad, 43; cf. the phrasing of 44: al-tahallī bi-mahāsinihā. See also the
remarks about God’s beauty_ as the stimulus of ethical pursuit _in Mīzān, _402–3. The virtue of
noble-mindedness (shahāma) as limned in the Mīzān also appears to incorporate a desire for
beauty in the content of motivation. It is defined as ‘alacrity for great deeds in the expectation of
beauty (al-jamāl)’; Mīzān, 277. Miskawayh, interestingly, has ‘a fine/beautiful reputation’
instead (uhdūtha jamīla: Tahdhīb, 22).
_ 361, in the context of discussing the tasks of the learner. As signalled in the vicinity,
⁴⁷ Mīzān,
this should be one’s object in the present life, whereas one’s object in the next should be
proximity to God. In fact, read more judiciously, this is the desire (the desire for God) to which
the desire for one’s own beauty must ultimately be understood to be ordered. Cf. the phrasing of
the Ihyāʾ at the same juncture (vol. 1, 89): the learner’s aim must be to ‘adorn his interior and
_ it through virtue’.
beautify
⁴⁸ Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, 1847. The context, importantly, is a discussion of the reasons we take
_ in praise.
pleasure
    -: -̄̄ 33
Miskawayh before him, not only fails to incorporate humility (tawāduʿ)

_
among the virtues, but, unlike Miskawayh, goes further in identifying
humility as one of the vicious extremes of a virtue named as ‘dignity’
(waqār) and defined, in terms highly reminiscent of greatness of soul, as
‘assigning one’s soul the status it deserves due to one’s knowledge of its
worth (qadr)’.⁴⁹ And whatever we make of Miskawayh’s or Fārābī’s stances
on the topic, this understanding of the proper way of relating to one’s merits
would in turn appear to connect al-Ghazālī to a view voiced by other
stakeholders of the same ethical tradition, albeit with varying degrees of
directness. These include the Christian philosopher Yahyā ibn ʿAdī (d.974),
_
who, opening his own work on the virtues, The Refinement of Character,
would commend it both to the reader who lacks the virtues and to the one
who possesses them and who may thus taste ‘a wondrous pleasure and
delighting joy’ upon recognizing his own perfections in the ethical ideal
extolled in the work. The Shiʿite writer Nasīr al-Dīn al-Ṭ ūsī (d.1274) would
_
later echo this thought in the overture to his celebrated compendium The
Nasirean Ethics.⁵⁰
Yet this understanding of the broader ethical tendencies animating
al-Ghazālī’s thought on this subject turns out, on closer consideration, to
carry tensions that make it difficult to simply rest with it. The invocation of
merit or desert (istihqāq) in al-Ghazālī’s statements about the virtues of
_
dignity and greatness of soul should be one of the first things to give us
pause, given what we know about al-Ghazālī’s theological identity. For
among Ashʿarite theologians, who vociferously rejected the kind of moral
objectivism defended by Muʿtazilite thinkers, the notion of moral desert had
a highly contested status. Similarly, it will be noted that al-Ghazālī’s above
remarks about the joyful perception of one’s beauty pertain to the posthu-
mous domain. Yet of course this domain is governed by moral conditions so
different from those that apply to the mundane one—it is the domain in
⁴⁹ Mīzān, 277–8. An alternative translation for waqār might be ‘gravitas’. Sherif ’s translation
as ‘correct evaluation of self ’ (Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 53) seems infelicitous, inter alia, in
insulating the term from its ordinary linguistic meaning. Yet note the apparently praising
reference to humility in Mīzān, 252.
⁵⁰ Yahyā ibn ʿAdī, Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, ed. Nājī al-Takrītī (Beirut and Paris: Editions Oueidat,
_ this joy is compared to the pleasure taken in praise. Nasīr al-Dīn al-Ṭ ūsī, The Arabic
1978), 70;
Version of Ṭ ūsī’s Nasirean Ethics, ed. Joep Lameer (Leiden: Brill, _2015), 90. Yet in fact Yahyā,
like al-Ghazālī (as we will see), turns out to take a more qualified view of the ethics of self- _
esteem, reserving strong words against the vice of pride, which involves a sense of one’s
grandeur and satisfaction in one’s virtue: see Tahdhīb, 96–7. He also elsewhere dismisses the
love of honour and praise as a vice, even while recognizing that it has an important develop-
mental role to play: ibid., 101.
34   
which ethical exertion comes to a rest and its harvest can finally be enjoyed as
a sure possession—as to raise a question, at the very least, whether the joyful
contemplation of one’s soul in the next world could automatically translate
into a model for the right relationship to one’s soul in this one. In the same
vein, to acknowledge that we are driven by a desire for our own beauty is not
the same as to assert that we should rejoice in the confident certainty that we
have realized it. And even the lightest reading of al-Ghazālī’s theological
remarks, including his remarks about beauty in the Revival, raises questions
about how seriously he might mean to ensconce the notions of perfection,
beauty, and indeed grandeur within the self-regard of human beings. For
‘perfection belongs to God alone’, he trenchantly declares in one place, with
an exclusivity that recurs in a statement appearing in the same vicinity:
‘To Him belong beauty and splendour, greatness and magnificence
(al-ʿazama waʾl-kibriyāʾ).’⁵¹ And again, in The Most Exalted Aim, invoking
_
the term that features in his definition of greatness of soul: ‘The only being
that is absolutely great (jalīl) is God.’⁵² Meditation on God’s greatness and
majesty, we hear elsewhere in the Revival, is one of the chief spiritual tasks of
the believer, and anyone who apprehends God’s majesty ceases to perceive
beauty in all other beings.⁵³
Such observations will immediately make us wonder how deeply to read
the significance of the brief remarks surveyed above, and how seriously
to credit them as a guide to al-Ghazālī’s considered ethical views on
the topic. Where to look for stronger evidence? The obvious place to turn
is al-Ghazālī’s multivolume magnum opus, the Revival of the Religious
Sciences. Divided into two halves focusing respectively on the external and
internal dimensions of the religious life, the Revival offers, in the second half,
a detailed discussion of the ethical and spiritual traits that need to be
cultivated and avoided within this life. The topic of honour occupies a
salient place in this discussion, as do the ethical traits that concern the
attitude to self-worth, with an entire book devoted to the former under the
title On the Condemnation of Status and Dissimulation, and another book to
the latter under the title On the Condemnation of Pride and Conceit.
⁵¹ Ihyāʾ, vol. 14, 2588; the first remark continues: ‘ . . . and the degree of perfection that other
beings_possess depends entirely on what God has conferred on them’.
⁵² Maqsad, 126.
_ task of meditating on the greatness of God—a task that, significantly, entails self-
⁵³ On the
forgetfulness in the meditating subject—see briefly Sherif ’s remarks on tafakkur and fikr in
Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 122–3; and for the next point, see Ihyāʾ, vol. 13, 2390.
_
    -: -̄̄ 35
The relationship between al-Ghazālī’s ethical thought as expressed in the

Scale and as expressed in the later Revival has formed the subject of
considerable commentary among al-Ghazālī’s readers, given the more
overtly philosophical character of the former and the more palpable Sufi
commitments of the latter. Al-Ghazālī’s description of his ‘spiritual crisis’ in
his celebrated autobiography, The Deliverer from Error, has drawn many
readers toward an understanding of his intellectual development as one
governed by decisive moments of rupture. Querying these traditional
literal-minded readings of al-Ghazālī’s autobiography, recent scholarship
has placed the accent on the stability of his intellectual commitments and
the continuity between his ethical works, with one commentator describing
the Scale as ‘a sort of first draft of the Revival’ and suggesting that its key
concepts and ethical views survive in the Revival ‘largely unchanged’ despite
perceptible differences in both form and substance between the two works.⁵⁴
In taking the Revival as a document that can be naturally placed in conver-
sation with the Scale in piecing together a fuller picture of al-Ghazālī’s
ethical views, my emphasis also falls on the continuities. Yet this emphasis
is compatible with keeping an open mind regarding the precise balance of
continuities and discontinuities, and with remaining attuned to interpretive
tensions between the two works; as it is compatible with remaining attuned
to tensions to be found even within the body of a single work.
It is an attunement called into service from almost the very first pages of
the remarkable account of honour that al-Ghazālī offers in his book On the
Condemnation of Status and Dissimulation. In its basic or original sense,
he notes in opening the book, status or standing (jāh) refers to fame.
Yet this definition gives way to a more striking formulation a few pages
later: the meaning of ‘status’ is ‘possession of the minds of people, from
whom one desires aggrandisation and obedience’.⁵⁵ ‘Possession’; or in
another, starker translation, ‘mastery’. The concept of mastery continues
to play an organizing role in al-Ghazālī’s ensuing exposition. To have
⁵⁴ The quoted remarks are respectively from Garden, First Islamic Reviver, 31, and Garden,
‘Revisiting al-Ghazālī’s crisis through his Scale for Action ( Mizān al-ʿAmal )’, in Islam and
Rationality: The Impact of al-Ghazālī, ed. Georges Tamer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 228. Garden
offers a careful reappraisal of al-Ghazālī’s autobiography, drawing on an extensive body of
recent work. Debates about al-Ghazālī’s continued commitment to the philosophical ethics
articulated in the Mīzān date back several decades, as can be seen from the brief overview in
Muhammad Abul Quasem, ‘Al-Ghazālī’s rejection of philosophic ethics’, Islamic Studies 13
(1974), 111–12. They also provide the context for the above-cited study by Sherif, who stakes an
implicit claim for al-Ghazālī’s enduring philosophical commitments by seamlessly treating the
Mīzān and the Ihyāʾ as equal partners in building his account.
_ 1835: mulk al-qulūb al-matlūb taʿzīmuhā wa-tāʿatuhā.
⁵⁵ Ihyāʾ, vol. 10,
_ _ _ _
36   
status is to dispose over people’s minds in ways that allow one to use them
in pursuit of one’s ends.⁵⁶ Human minds submit to a person when they
form the belief that he is characterized by certain perfections, a class that
includes—notably for our purpose—good character but also physical
strength, beauty, knowledge, and piety. The person who seeks status seeks
to produce such beliefs with a view to producing the state of submission and
subservience that results from them. Properly speaking, it is the internal
state of judging and believing that constitutes status, which is then out-
wardly expressed through honour and different forms of service.
Coming from many other accounts of honour, this presentation will seem
remarkable. Honour emerges here as a special kind of exercise of power; it is
a form of mastery or domination, with all the violence these concepts
incorporate. To exact honour from people is indeed in a real sense to enslave
them.⁵⁷ This way of collapsing the quest for honour into the quest for power
will appear particularly striking set against some of the salient moments in
the history of the Christian engagement with pagan ethics. It was a crucial
distinction between these two drives, for example, that formed the backbone
of Augustine’s proposal that pagans can develop virtue ‘insofar as they
move from the pursuit of dominium, driven by the desire to impose their
own will on others, to the pursuit of glory and honor’. For there is a
‘clear difference between the desire for glory before men and the desire
for domination’, he had observed, even if in practice there is a ‘slippery
slope’ from one to the other.⁵⁸
It will also appear striking coming from Aristotle, for reasons that help
bring out the structure of al-Ghazālī’s reasoning more distinctly. For in
characterizing honour as the greatest external good and ‘the one we mete
out to the gods’ (NE 1123b18) in his remarks about greatness of soul,
Aristotle had suggested an understanding of honour as something possess-
ing intrinsic value and desired for its own sake. Al-Ghazālī’s account, by
contrast, reduces this value to purely instrumental terms: if we desire
people to honour us, it is because we have other separate ends that this
enables us to achieve and other goods we want to obtain. In this respect it is
⁵⁶ Ibid.: li-yastaʿmila bi-wāsitatihā arbābahā fī aghrādihi wa-maʾāribihi.

_ ‘The seeker of status seeks
⁵⁷ The language is al-Ghazālī’s: _ to subjugate and enslave free men
(yastariqqu al-ahrāra wa-yastaʿbiduhum)’ (ibid.).
_
⁵⁸ The first quote is from Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 48; the latter from City of God, Book V,
§19, 212.
Another random document with
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ja vastaus Köökarista saapui jääsuhteiden tähden vasta keväällä.
Kirjeessä vanha Apelblom sanoi arvanneensa asiain kallistuvan
siihen suuntaan, toivotti Jumalan siunausta ja ilmaisi selvään
mielihyvänsä tämän käänteen johdosta. Fransilja ei tulisi katumaan
naimiskauppaansa, Hambergista hän saisi hyvän ja kokeneen
miehen eikä siinä talossa tarvitsisi nälkää nähdä, sen hän ainakin
tiesi. Kirjeeseen, jonka varmaan Johannes-lanko oli piirustanut, oli
äiti liittänyt helliä terveisiä ja toivotuksia, joita lukiessa Fransiljalle
tulivat vedet silmiin.
Kun kauan kaivattu avovesi oli ehtinyt Sälskärin pohjoisreimariin ja

teiret olivat alkaneet kuhertaa salmen takana, kuulutettiin avioliittoon
kalastaja Petter Valfrid Hamberg ja neitsyt Fransilja Apelblom. Jäät
olivat jo niin huonot etteivät ulkosaarelaiset päässeet kirkkoon sinä
sunnuntaina. Hamberg oli herännyt varhain aamulla teirien
soitimeen, mennyt mäelle tunnustelemaan ilmaa ja seissyt siellä
kuuntelemassa kuinka jää rannoissa porisi ja suli ja katsellut, kuinka
pienet vihaiset kareet kuin suvisilla selillä kulkivat sumppurailossa.
Silloin oli häneen keveästä aamuilmasta ja teirenkuherruksesta tullut
kuin hiukaiseva ikävä. Sieltä ulempaa missä meri jo vapaana nousi
ja laski oli lentää hyryyttänyt koskelopari ja pyyhkässyt niin matalalta
hänen päänsä yli että siipien suhina kuului. Kuville, kuville! Sitä se
tiesi se ikävä. Ja hän oli mennyt aittaan, missä seinällä riippuivat
töyhtöniskaiset isot koskelot ja sepelkaulaiset pienet ja telkät
valkeine siipipeilineen ja valinnut niistä koiraksen ja pari naarasta
kutakin. Ja kun pyssyt ja eväät olivat kunnossa oli hän Jannen
kanssa lähtenyt pienen ruuhen avulla yrittämään avoveden laitaan.
Sieltä oli saatava vuoden ensimäinen lintupaisti, oli päästävä tuoreen
makuun pitkän talven ja suolasilakan jälkeen.
Mäellä odotti uusi silakkavene kevään ensimäistä paahdepäivää
saadakseen tervaa pintaansa ja päästäkseen halkomaan suolaisia
laineita.
IV.
Hauki oli kutenut, koivunurvut puhjenneet ja rantarysät tuoneet kalaa

enemmän kuin moneen vuoteen. Kesävieraat olivat palanneet
huviloihinsa ja istuivat nyt kuisteillaan valoisina, tyyninä iltoina
kuulemassa laulurastaan juoksutuksia metsässä tai rantasipin
valitusta kiveltä, väliin laulaen surumielisiä lauluja, väliin
hämmennellen totilasejaan. Merellä vilkkui valkoisia purjeita,
hiekkarannoissa neitosten kylpylakanoita.
Häät olivat olleet helluntaina. Nuoret olivat tarpeekseen tanssineet

silakkakalliolla, jossa Kalle-Kustaa hanurillaan ja Husön Joonas
viulullaan vuorottelivat. Herrassöötinki oli ollut kunniavieraana,
istunut punakkana pöydän päässä ja sekoittanut sokerista, viinistä ja
konjakista ämpärillisen hääjuomaa, josta Kalle Krokström, Bergin
Kalle, Frans Vesterberg, Sepetin torppari ja muut ikämiehet olivat
juoneet morsiusparin maljan. Oli syöty ja juotu ja hurrattu ja
viimeisessä polskassa oli Hamberg itse pää kenossa ja jalallaan
polkien ankaraa tahtia pyörittänyt Fransiljaa, joka hikoili uudessa
leningissään ja joka hetki pelkäsi kruunun putoovan päästään.
Fanny ja Emil olivat kutsutut, mutta eivät tulleet. Fanny ei ollut

näyttäytynyt isälleen senjälkeen kun oli oltu herrassöötingin puheilla.
Häiden jälkeen palasi elämä entiseen uomaansa Tallskärissä.

Fransilja laski verkkoja Hambergin kanssa ja mittasi emäntänä
maitoa kesäasukkaille. Mutta kun Jannen Mari ja Stiina tekivät
kiusaa ja kuiskuttivat korvan juureen, katseli hän hämillään
esiliinaansa pitkin… Se oli siis totta, mitä hän oli itsekseen ajatellut,
kun ei saanut enää hamettaan kiinni.
Eräänä päivänä, vähää ennen heinäaikaa, kun Hamberg lojui kala-

aitassa tuli hänen mieleensä vanha kehto, joka oli säilynyt hänen
omasta lapsuudestaan. Hän nousi ylisille, jossa muisti sen joskus
nähneensä muun joutotavaran kanssa. Mutta kehtoa ei näkynyt
enää.
Fransiljalta sai hän kuulla että Fanny oli luvannut sen Marille.
Varmaankin oli Mari käynyt hakemassa sen sieltä ylisiltä.
Hamberg meni oikopäätä toiselle tuvalle. Nähtyään kehdon

porstuankomerossa otti hän sen syliinsä, tarkasti jalaksia ja kuluneita
laitoja, joissa yhdessä kohden oli kirjaimet P.W.H., ja sanoi Marille:
— Kehto on minun! Fannyllä ei ollut lupa lahjoittaa sitä muille!
Ja kun Mari rupesi väittämään vastaan ja sanomaan sitä

omakseen, suuttui Hamberg, nosti kehdon kahdesta korvasta
selkäänsä, katkaisten sillä kaikki puheet. Hänkö olisi lahjoittanut
semmoista tavaraa, josta ei tiennyt minä päivänä sitä itse tarvitsisi!
Ei koskaan! Niin eteensä katsomaton hän ei ole. Kehto on hänen ja
hän sen vie! Siinä hän itse oli aikoinaan maannut ja siinä oli
makaava hänen poikansa, niin totta kuin hänen nimensä oli Petter
Valfrid Hamberg!
Ja hän vie saaliinsa mennessään laskien sen Fransiljan eteen

keskelle tuvan lattiaa.
— He, tuoss' on kehto, joka kestää vielä yhden ihmisiän! Soudata
siinä sitten poikaa! hän sanoo istuen pöydän ääreen kahvia
odottamaan.
KALLE-KUSTAAN TUPA
Kuu näytti sinä iltana eriskummalliselta. Se oli kääntynyt selälleen

niin että sakarat viittasivat suoraan ylöspäin ja makuusijan se oli
valinnut juuri Varsalön kokkakuusien latvoilla, josta silmä ei sitä heti
omaksunut. Tuntui kuin ei kuu olisi oikealla paikallaan.
Valoa oli liian paljo tavalliseksi kuutamoksi. Sitä virtasi saarien ja

kaikkien esineiden takaa näköpiirissä ja mökit nienten nenissä ihan
vierastivat kulkijaa. Tuli Varsalön akkunassa loimotteli niin oudosti
että olisi luullut koko tuvan olevan yhtenä tulimerenä. Mutta kuka
niitä ymmärsi näitä maaliskuun iltoja!
Tie kulki suuressa kaaressa pitkin jäätä, kadoten hiukan

tuonnempana saaren taakse. Kalle-Kustaa oli istahtanut kelkan
nokalle lepäämään.
Hän katseli vuoroin kuuta, joka oli kuin punainen paperilyhty,

vuoroin tupaa rannalla, vuoroin taakseen tietä pitkin, tulisiko sieltä
joku ajomies, jonka reen perään saisi kelkkansa kiinnitetyksi. Mutta
ei tullut.
Kalle-Kustaa alkoi taas saapastaa etukumarassa, vanha

karvareuhka korville painettuna. Vaivaloista se oli ja hitaasti matka
edistyi; hän potkaisi kiukkuisesti hevosenkokkareen tieltään. Myöhä
nyt harmitella että kaupungissa oli tullut anniskeluun mennyksi ja
siellä viipyneeksi niin kauan, että oli jäänyt kaikista kotiinpalaavista
tukinvetäjistä. Olisipa kelvannut tyhjässä reessä loikoa ja saada
perunakuormansa perille siinä sivussa, ilman omaa vaivaa! Piru
vieköön koko Hartinin rouvan perunat, paleltuneet, pilaantuneet
roskat! Mutta sitten hän muistaa laihan porsaan, joka nälissään
vinkuu ja haistelee ihmisiä kuin koira ja silloin herää
kiitollisuudentunne Hartinin rouvaa kohtaan, joka oli ajatellut heidän
naskuaan ja lahjoittanut sille suuren vasullisen syötävää… Ja ties
vaikka niitä porsaan perunoita ihmisetkin saisivat vielä pitää
hyvänään. Talvi oli ollut kova ja pahin syrjä köyhälle kalastajalle oli
nyt vasta käsissä. Kunhan jaksaisi avoveteen…
Mutta ei se sittekään ollut se ajatus, jota Kalle-Kustaa oli hautonut

kaupungista saakka. Ei se se ollut, joka karvasteli jossain syvällä ja
teki mielen niin oudoksi ja autioksi kuin tämä talvi-ilta ympärillä.
Olisivat ne Petter ja Abel saaneet jäädä kohtaamatta, kun ne aina

siitä uutistuvasta… Olivat tietysti hiukan humalassa, niinkuin hän
itsekin, kun heille vastasi ja lasketti… niin, eikö hän taaskin ollut
lasketellut liikoja… kehunut, houkkio.
Nyt vasta alkoi Kalle-Kustaan pää olla oikein selvänä. Hän tunsi
korviansa kuumottavan ja jonkun äkillisen tunteen vallassa silmäsi
hän kuin häpeissään taakseen, olisiko siellä joku kuulemassa hänen
ajatuksiaan.
Kajastus taivaan rannalla oli vähitellen häipynyt ja kadonnut, kuu

loikoi yhä entisellä paikallaan. Varsalön tupa oli jäänyt niemen
taakse. Hän oli nyt kahden varjonsa kanssa, joka uskollisesti väänsi
hänen rinnallaan pitkin tiensyrjää.
Oliko sittekin niin, että hän uskoi ja toivoi mahdottomia? Oliko hän
sittekin vain kerskuri tomppeli… Tähän asti hän oli uskonut
onnenpotkaukseen, joka auttaisi hänet jaloilleen. Hän muisti joskus
syysyönä, maatessaan ulapalla silakkaveneessä, rukoilleensa:
Potkase, hyvä Jumala, vielä kerran, niin sitten jo autan itseni… Hän
oli miettinyt verkkoja laskiessaan: kun antaa veneen, niin antaa
purjeenkin, kun antaa padan, niin antaa lusikankin. Ja liikkuessaan
vesillä oli hän tähystellyt rantoihin, kolunnut kaikki kivikot ja sopivat
kallionrotkot, jotka olivat kuin luodut kaikenlaisen kulkutavaran
kerääjiksi. Siitä edellisestä onnenpotkusta oli jo neljä vuotta… neljä
vuotta hän oli odottanut, aina yhtä vahvassa toivossa ja
luottamuksessa.
Olivat tänään pistäneet häntä arkaan kohtaan. Olivat nauraneet

hänelle ja se rysävaras Petter oli kysynyt, joko »ruokasali» on
kunnossa ja »saisko tulla tanssimaan harjakaisia juhannuksena».
Hän tunsi vihaavansa sydämensä syvyydestä Petteriä, ja jos hän
siellä kapakassa olisi tehnyt niinkuin sisu käski, olisi hän vetänyt sitä
vasten turpaa niin että veri olisi purskahtanut. Tuli sitten mitä tuli,
vaikka selkäänkin, vaikka Sipirja.
Niin, hän oli jo ennen pannut merkille sen rysävarkaan kateuden.

Kieroa peliä se oli pitänyt siitä perin, kun Bertta lähti vihille hänen,
Kalle-Kustaan, kanssa. Se oli katsellut sitä omalle kohdalleen… oli
mielestään muka vankempi, parempi mies, kun oli peritty tupa ja
kolme isoarysää ja muutenkin noin yli nokan otettuna. Hyh! Hän,
Kalle-Kustaa on tosin pieni ja kevyt ja sanovat vääräsääreksi, mutta
— ja tässä meni mieli melkein hyväksi taas — hän muisti miten viime
keväänä oli Tarantellallaan laskettanut kaikkien kalastajaveneiden
ohi ja Petterinkin. Semmoisen veneen hän oli rakentanut — menihän
siihen osa kiireimmästä kala-ajasta ja saihan joukko tyytyä
vähempään särpimeen, mutta paras vene hänellä oli näillä vesin! Ja
kuosikkaimmat purjeet! Se nimikin oli harmittanut naapureita:
Tarantella! Onko siitä silakkalotjan nimeksi, olivat sanoneet, mutta
hän pitää vaan minkä nimen tahtoo! Tarantella oli konsulinkin kilpa-
aluksen nimi! Ja olivathan ne räkättäneet kun hän lapsilleenkin oli
antanut omasta päästään nimiä: Bror Birger, Ebba Eleonora… Kun
ei köyhällä ole muutakaan lapsilleen, antaahan häntä edes kauniita
nimiä, oli Kalle-Kustaa vastannut naapurin akoille.
Mutta ei ajatus hyvästä veneestäkään tällä kertaa paljo ilahuttanut

hänen mieltään. Kuukin katseli korkealta paikaltaan vieraasti ja
kylmästi kuin aavistus lähenevästä onnettomuudesta. Koira ulvoi
jossain pitkään ja surullisesti… Se oli Tallskärin Patu.
Kalle-Kustaan ajatukset kulkivat taaksepäin, niihin aikoihin kun

hän kalasti yhdessä Hambergin kanssa ja vielä kauemmas, aina
lapsuuteen saakka, kun hän pahaisena lauantaipoikana kieppui
äitinsä hameissa. He olivat tulleet jostain lännestäpäin, äiti ja poika;
äiti, Eeva, oli kova työihminen, liukas liikkeiltään ja kieleltään ja
kahdella kädellään hän oli elättänyt itsensä ja poikansa, kalastaen
yhdessä milloin minkin kalastajan kanssa. Kaunis hän ei ollut,
Jumala paratkoon, pitkine nenineen — häntä sanottiin
»naaraskoskeloksi» — mutta hyvä verkonkutoja hän oli ja Kalle-
Kustaata hän piti kuin paraskin äiti lastaan. Sanottiin että poika oli
jäänyt hänelle muistoksi Storön räätälistä, joka hukkui…
kuulutuksiinpano-matkallaan kuten Eeva kertoi, mutta Hambergin
Rosina, joka myös oli tuntenut räätälin, sanoi ettei siinä puheessa
ollut perää… Oli sen laita miten tahansa, Eeva hoiteli ja melkein
hemmotteli poikaansa; Kalle-Kustaa sai kaikki mitä muutkin lapset:
voita leivän päälle, punaisen kaulaliinan, nimikkoverkkoja,
huuliharpun. Ja kun Eeva vei kaloja kesähuviloihin, sai hän lasten
kenkiä ja leluja ja kerran kuluneen samettitakinkin pojalleen. Siitä
samettitakista oli Kalle-Kustaa pitänyt enemmän kuin mistään
muusta. Semmoista ei ollut kellään toisella pojalla ja hän muisti
kuinka ylpeä hän oli siitä ollut. Hän muisti että hänen mielensä oli
aina tehnyt korkeimpiin puihin, kun kerättiin munia variksenpesistä ja
kauneimman kaarnaveneen hän oli aina tahtonut itselleen ja hän
tappeli suurimpien poikien kanssa, vaikka oli kasvultaan pienin,
oikea pipana, tahi ehkä juuri sentähden: hän tahtoi näyttää että oli
yhtä hyvä kuin muut ja voittaa heidät missä voi… Se oli kuin joku
syntinen halu hänessä, vaikka siitä oli koitunut paljo mielikarvautta.
Sitten hän muisteli sitä aikaa, jolloin he olivat olleet osamiehenä

Hambergilla, saaden kolmanneksen saaliista. Hän oli silloin jo
aikamies, Kalle-Kustaa, ja ne muistot eivät olleet kaikki mieluisia
Hänen oli ollut vaikea tottua Hambergin työkomentoon: se vanha
kaappari nousi jo kolmelta ja nosti hänet pystyyn lattialle ellei hän
muuten herännyt. Vesillä koluttiin jäänlähdöstä jääntuloon, kaloja
saatiin ja rahoja kasattiin. Kalle-Kustaa ei ollut ennen eikä jälkeen
nähnyt niin paljo rahoja, hänessä heräsi outo halu saada niitä
käsiinsä ja tulla rikkaaksi voidakseen tehdä mitä tahtoi. Hän alkoi
vainuta että Hamberg rikastui heidän kustannuksellaan; hänhän otti
kaksi kolmannesta ja antoi heille yhden. Veneille ja pyydyksille laski
muka yhden kolmanneksen. Mutta välit ukon kanssa kiristyivät;
Kalle-Kustaa katsoi usein salaa raudoitettua kirstua kamarin
nurkassa ja laski mielessään paljoko siellä oli seteleitä ja markkoja.
Riidan aiheita karttui. Kalle-Kustaa viipyi maanantaihin

tanssiretkillään, niin ettei päästy nuotan vetoon, vaikka tuuli oli
itäinen ja paras lahnan aika käsissä. Sama juttu kun hän alkoi lähteä
lintuun: ukko ilmoitti että oli mentävä verkoille ja näistä kohtauksista
kehittyi salainen ja kestävä vihamielisyys heidän välilleen. Äitimuori
koetti välittää, hankkia helpotuksia pojalleen, kutoi itse kahden
edestä ja elettiinhän sitä niin, vaikka sopu oli laihaa.
Pahin tuli vasta sitten, kun Kalle-Kustaa pääsi viinan makuun ja

alkoi retkillään viipyä poissa päiväkausia. Palatessaan oli hän kahta
rohkeampi ja humalapäällä se sitten kerran puhkesikin, se kipeä
pahka.
He olivat olleet paluumatkalla kaupungista. Pohjoisesta puski

tuima tuuli — Kalle-Kustaa muisti sen kuin eilisen päivän. Ukko oli
äkeissään kun oli saanut odottaa kauan kalarannassa, hän istui
ääneti perässä ja tuijotti kokkaan, ohi Kalle-Kustaan. Silloin juuri
siinä istuessaan oli hän saanut halun tehdä ukolle jotain kiusaa, kuin
helpoittaakseen omaa ärtyisää mieltään: hän tahtoi ohjata venettä,
niin, piru vie, tahtoikin! Ukko puisti päätään; Kalle-Kustaa yltyi: hän
koetti riuhtasta peräsimen käteensä, ukko survasi hänet menemään
niin että hän kompastui tuhtoon. Silloin hän kimposi ilmaan kuin
rakki, pui nyrkkiään, nimitti ukkoa kaappariksi ja roistoksi, hyppi
hänen edessään, nyhtäsi parrasta ja säälitteli: »Voi sinua äijäraiska!
Olisipa mulla kultakaivos, antaisin sulle pienen kimpaleen! Silloin
vasta saisit kehua itseäsi rikkaaksi ja sanoa multa saaneesi!» Ukko
ei tuntunut hänestä suuresti välittävän, virkkoi vain: »Älä vedä
parrasta! Se on vanha ja voi lähteä!» Mutta kun oli päästy
ensimäisen saaren suojaan, jossa hän sai kädet vapaaksi
jalusnuorasta, oli hän tarttunut Kalle-Kustaata niskaan ja toisella
pehmittänyt häntä äyskärillä ja lopuksi pistänyt penkin alle kuin
kirveen loveen. Kustaa oli silloin kuin rääsy ja sinne hän nukahti.
Kotirannassa hän hiipi takateitä kala-aittaan ja makasi siellä

seuraavaan aamuun asti. Mutta vähän sen jälkeen hän äitineen
muutti Storöhön.
Sitten tulivat ne ajat, jolloin hän alkoi soudella, päivin ja öin,
Aspöhön. Bertta oli silloin yhdeksäntoista vuotias hoikka piikatyttö,
silmät sinersivät päässä kuin aurankukat. Ne ajat olivat kaikkein
hauskimmat! Sunnuntai-iltoina keinuivat he yhdessä muiden nuorten
kanssa Storön keinulla ja tanssipaikoissa liikkui Kalle-Kustaa
vormusaappaat jalassa ja kainalossa neljänkymmenen markan
hanuri. Ne ajat olivat sittenkin kaikkein hauskimmat!
Ja sitten menivät he naimisiin ja asettuivat kaukaiselle

kalliosaarelle. Kalle-Kustaa oli vuokrannut kalaveden omaan
laskuunsa, mutta lujalle otti joka kerta kun arenti oli maksettava: tänä
talvena oli täytynyt myydä lehmäkin. Ja rahaa olisi tarvittu lankoihin,
sillä pyydyksiä ei ollut tarpeeksi. Lapsia oli neljä, viides tulossa…
Onni ei ollut vielä ollut oikein myötäinen; olipas sentään kerran
potkaissut — silloin kun Kalle-Kustaa löysi sen ampumalautan. Kaksi
kerrosta hyviä hirsiä, viisikolmatta tyhjää tynnyriä ja parikymmentä
leiviskää vankkaa köyttä — se oli suuri tapaus hänen elämässään ja
se muutti tulevaisuuden hänen silmissään valoisaksi ja
toivorikkaaksi. Nyt hän voisi rakentaa oikean tuvan itselleen mäen
päälle sen ahtaan, matalan hökkelin sijaan, joka häthätää oli kyhätty
kaikesta vanhasta roskasta ja rantapuusta ja joka oli harva kuin
variksen pesä.
Neljä vuotta sitten, kun hän Bertan ja äidin kanssa oli hinannut
lautan kotiin Skälskäristä, oli sydän hyppinyt hänen rinnassaan. Hän
ei puhunut silloin lähemmin tuumistaan, alkoi vaan vääntää kiviä ja
kaivaa perustuksia mäen päälle ja Bertta ja lapset seurasivat
jännityksellä hänen toimiaan Kohta he saisivat asua oikeassa
korkeassa, valoisassa tuvassa, jossa oli hella ja leivinuuni ja voisi
olla oikein kukkia ikkunalla. Isä myhäili tyytyväisenä siinä
vääntäessään hiki päässä. Hän ei muistanut poiketa Malakias-
suutarin luo, joka asui toisella puolen salmen ja toi aina kaupungista
viinaa.
Kun Kalle-Kustaalla oli kehyshirret paikoillaan, tuli Malakias

katsomaan hänen puuhiaan. Hän vihelsi pitkään ja löi kämmenellä
reiteensä. Kalle-Kustaa ei ollut millänsäkään.
— Kuules Kustaa, sanoi suutari, sinä näyt rupeevan kovin

leventelemään.
Tästähän tulee tupa kuin kirkko ja kaksi kamaria perään!
Kalle-Kustaa hymyili tietäväisen näköisenä. Silloin alkoi suutari

sättiä häntä hulluksi ja ennustella ettei talosta koskaan tulisi
valmista. Pienemmän tuvan hän olisi saanut noista meren tuomista
hirsistä, mutta tämmöiseen rakennukseen korkeintaan kaksi seinää.
Ja mitä hän semmoisella komealla huvilalla tekisi…
Mutta Kalle-Kustaa kyllä tiesi mitä hän tekisi. Vuokraisi kesäksi

herrasväille, jotka samalla ostaisivat maidon ja joilta saisi hyvän
hinnan kalasta ja munista. Hän osaisi rikastua hänkin! Ja puuttuvat
hirret ja muut tarpeet… Ken tietää vaikka hän pian saisi semmoisen
silakkasaaliin kuin viime syksynä Hamberg, jolta pytyt ja nelikot
loppuivat niin että kalat olivat suolattavat vanhaan nuottaveneeseen.
Ja jos ei sitäkään… ken tietää vaikka ajelehtisi siellä paraillaan jo
toinen lautta tännepäin. Kuuluvat ne ryssät ammuskelevan
Suomenlahdella koko kesän… Voisi se onni toisenkin kerran
potkaista ja varmaan potkaiseekin!
Nyt törrötti Kalle-Kustaan uutistupa keskentekoisena mäen päällä

kuin purjehdusmerkki. Se näkyi kauas meren selälle ja saaristolaiset
sanoivat sitä Jerusalemin temppeliksi. Kaksi seinää oli pystyssä,
kolmas alulla ja toissa keväänä oli alettu uunia muurata, mutta jätetty
kesken, kun tiilet loppuivat. Hirret olivat jo mustuneet tuulesta ja
sateesta, muuriin oli ilmestynyt halkeamia ja sitä suurta
kalansaalista, yhtävähän kuin uutta tukkilauttaa ei kuulunut. Mutta
Kalle-Kustaa ei välittänyt naapurien pilapuheista: se oli pelkkää
kateutta. Ensi kesänä hän näyttäisi heille!
Ja taas hän oli uhannut ensi kesänä päästää kurkihirteen.
Mutta istuessaan kelkan nokalla siinä keskellä lumista aavaa,

valtaa hänet kumma autius, aivankuin talvi-ilta olisi astunut hänen
mieleensä. Ehkä olivat ne sittenkin oikeassa, jotka sanoivat ettei siitä
koskaan tulisi valmista. Eihän häneltä voisi mitään onnistua, eihän
onni kahta kertaa voinut potkaista semmoista vaivaista kuin hän!
Asukoon sikolätissä ja pysyköön köyhänä, kun on köyhäksi syntynyt!
Perkele, jos olisi ollut selvää viinaa, olisi paremmin saanut sen
nielaistuksi!
Samassa kuului laulun renkutusta jäältä päin. Sieltä oli tulossa

ajomies ja kun tämä ehti kohdalle, tunsi Kalle-Kustaa hänet torppari
Söderbergiksi. Torppari oli iloisimmalla tuulellaan, hänellä oli
kahdenlitran pullo reessään ja hän otti Kalle-Kustaan mielellään
kolmanneksi. Kelkka sidottiin reen perään ja sitten sai tamma
hölkytellä tietä mieltään myöden, punaisen kuun kurkistaessa
Varsalön kuusien takaa.
Lähellä kotisaartaan erkani Kalle-Kustaa kyytimiehestään. Hän oli

saanut monta ryyppyä, mutta ei päässyt entiselle keveälle
viinatuulelleen vaikka yritti.
Kun hän sai kelkan nuoran käteensä, katsoi hän ihmeissään

kuormaa. Vasussa oli vain muutama peruna: kelkka oli ajettaessa
kallistellut puoleen ja toiseen ja kylvänyt kaksi pitkää vakoa talvitien
sivun. Sinne meni porsaanruoka! Kalle-Kustaa kirosi pahan
kirouksen; tuntui kuin kuu olisi hänelle nauranut äänettömästi, silmät
kyhnyssä…
Oli onni että leipäkimppu oli ollut kelkkaan sidottu. Kimppu

kädessä astui hän vanhasta hytinovesta mökkiinsä. Sieltä kuului
lapsenitkua. Se näytti hänestä nyt entistä viheliäisemmältä koko
hökkeli; seinärakoja oli paikkailtu vanhoilla aironlavoilla, tuhdoilla ja
muulla meren tuomalla. Sisässä oli niin ahdasta että tuskin pääsi
kääntymään ja pahansiivoista siellä oli, sen pani Kalle-Kustaa ensi
kerran nyt merkille. Hän työnsi lapset luotaan ja istui äänetönnä
syömään perunaa, silakkaa ja leipää. Bertalle hän ei maininnut
mitään Hartinin rouvan perunoista, pudotti vain sanan silloin, toisen
tällöin ja tuijotti mietteissään posliiniseen ovennuppiin. Oven oli hän
tuonut hylkyhuutokaupasta, siinä oli hytinnumero 14 ja oikea
posliininen nuppi.
Kun oli syöty, paneuduttiin mökissä levolle. Kalle-Kustaa odotti

kunnes joka nurkasta kuului tasaista hengitystä, sitten hän nousi,
veti vaatetta päälle ja meni ulos mäelle. Hän suuntasi askeleensa
uutisrakennukselle.
Aavemaisina ja surkeina törröttivät seinät kuutamossa heittäen

mustan varjon hangelle. Hän pyyhkäisi lunta uunin suulta ja hapuili
kädellään… Aivan oikein, sinne oli ilmestynyt uusi halkeama!
Kivijalasta hän veti esiin kirveen ja koetteli alushirttä. Siinä oli
yhdessä kohden jo lahonvika!…
Silloin hän tunsi että nyt siitä ei enää tulisi mitään… ei koskaan
hän jaksaisi ostaa hirsiä, ei koskaan hän löytäisi uutta tukkilauttaa!
Kaikki tämäniltainen viina nousi vihdoinkin päähän ja hän iski
kirveellään sokeasti, raivoisasti eteensä, katsomatta sattuiko se
alushirteen vai seinään vai kiveen.
Kuu oli noussut ryntäilleen ja katseli kuusen latvasta miestä, joka

riehui talviyössä hajoittaen oman tupasalvoksensa.
MESTARIVARAS
Kun lounaistuulella nousee Skoglannin vesiltä aavalle merelle ja on

päässyt Husön reimarin tasalle, jonka itäpuolella kyömyselkäinen
laine ilmaisee Pirunkiven kätköpaikan, alkaa Husön ja Ormgrundin
välistä punertaa kalastajatupa eräällä rantakalliolla. Kun viimeisellä
luovilla laskee Husön ohi, aukee karien välistä tyyni sisäsatama
veneineen, ranta-aittoineen, verkkosalkoineen. Lampaat, jotka ovat
Ormgrundin puolella suolaheinää syömässä, kokoontuvat tavallisesti
ulkonokkaan purjehtijaa katsomaan, vesikarilla tiirat nousevat
pesiltään vauhkoina ilmaan kuullessaan veneenkeulan kohinan ja
kirkuvat siipien varassa kunnes vene on kadonnut nokan taakse.
Mutta tuvan ikkunanpielestä tähtää ohipurjehtijaa usein musta,
ilkeästi tuikkiva silmä.
Tämä on Husön Vesterbergin eli Varas-Vesterbergin koti, vaikka

siinä nyt asuvat mestarivarkaan jälkeläiset toisessa ja kolmannessa
polvessa.
Entiseen aikaan oli puheentapana että siinä talossa elettiin toisten

leivillä ja varastetuilla siankinkuilla ja että Husön hevonen ja lehmät
syötettiin varastetuilla heinillä ja tupa lämmitettiin varastetuilla
haloilla. Ja Vesterbergillä oli jo puolet ikäänsä ollut saaristolaisten
kesken nimenä Varas-Vesterberg, vaikkei sitä saanut sanoa hänelle
vasten naamaa, kun todistukset näet puuttuivat. Sillä Vesterberg oli
mestari peittämään jälkensä ja pitämään varansa niin että hän pääsi
livahtamaan joka kiikistä kuin kettu. Häissä ja hautajaisissa hän istui
täytenä miehenä Kalle Krokströmin ja Hambergin rinnalla ja kilisti
partaansa pyyhkien heidän kanssaan, niinkuin ei koskaan olisi
kajonnut heidän tavaraansa. Mutta toisten sisuksissa kierteli kiukku
ja posket alkoivat usein elää.
Naapurit häntä pelkäsivät kuin ruttoa. Jos Vesterberg oli saaressa,

ei saanut olla varma mistään, ja sillä aikaa kun hän oli tuvassa
siirrettiin usein omat veneet syrjemmälle ettei niistä katoaisi köysiä ja
ankkureita. Vanhalla Hambergilla oli tapana äännähtää
verkkokuteensa takaa, kun hän ikkunasta näki Husön mustan
tamman talvitiellä:
— Pidä varasi, muori, Vesterberg on liikkeellä!
Ja muori pistäytyi hyvissä ajoin pihalla kokoomassa lukkojen

taakse semmoista irtainta tavaraa, joka olisi voinut kelvata varkaan
rekeen.
Hänelle kelpasi muuten kaikki — mitä hän kulloinkin sattui

tarvitsemaan. Hän vei läpi käsien ja lukoista ei ollut paljo haittaa, sillä
hän avasi ne jollain salaperäisellä tavalla, useimmiten rikkomatta.
Krokströmin aitasta hän eräänä yönä otti kaksikymmentä kyynärää
eukon kutomaa villakangasta leikaten sen tukilta niin sievästi että
temppu huomattiin vasta, kun kangasta mitattiin piian
palkkahameeksi. Vähän senjälkeen katosivat Bergin Kallen
hylkeennahat, joita Kalle oli säilytellyt aitassaan, viedäkseen
keväämmällä karvari Rosenbergille. Rosenbergille ne kylläkin
joutuivat, mutta kun Kalle keksi ne karvarin aitan seinältä ja väitti
omikseen vedoten erääseen harpuuninreikään hartiain välissä, sanoi
ukko Rosenberg että siihen kohtaan on joku toinenkin voinut iskeä ja
ettei se ole mikään todistus. Kalle palasi kotiin karvaalla mielellä. —
Perkelekö hänet oli pidättänyt niitä nahkoja viemästä, silloin kun ne
vielä olisivat kulkeneet hänen omassa nimessään hän sanoi
Stiinalle. — Nyt se Husön susi sai niistä rahat! Mutta hän päätti
kostaa. Ja kun hän tapasi Vesterbergin rysät kuivamassa eräällä
kalakarilla katkoi hän niistä kaikki kaaret. Tämä tapahtui siihen
aikaan, jolloin hän ei vielä ollut herännyt synnintuntoon.
Toisen kerran katosi joulun korvissa parhain kartanon kinkuista

lukituilta aitan ylisiltä. Varsalön kapteeni oli repiä silmät voudin
päästä, niin vihanen hän oli ja oli luvannut hyvän palkinnon varkaan
ilmiantajalle. Kaikki ajattelivat Vesterbergiä, mutta kukaan ei ollut
nähnyt häntä liikkeellä sinä yönä, vieläpä saattoi Grisön suutari
todistaa että Vesterberg oli myöhään yöllä ollut Grisössä
otattamassa mittaa uusiin saappaisiin.
Loppiaisen jälkeen oli Vesterberg kaupunkimatkalla poikennut

Hambergin luo hevosta syöttämään ja silloin hän oli aukaissut
eväspussinsa ja suurustanut tuvassa. Pussista ilmestyi
läskinkimpale, jossa rasvaa oli ollut viiden tuuman vahvalta, kuten
vanha Hamberg kuuluu sanoneen.
— Onpas Vesterbergillä komeata läskiä tänä vuonna, oli hän

ihmetellyt, jolloin toinen oli pala suussa tokassut: "Kun hyvin syöttää
niin hyvää saa!" Mutta silloin oli Hambergia ruvennut pistättämään
varkaan julkeus, hän kun tiesi ettei Vesterberg kyennyt porsastaan
niin ruokkimaan, koska oli jättänyt perunamaansakin kesannoksi. Ja
hän oli sanoa pamauttanut vasten toisen mustaa naamaa:
— Ei se sika ole sinun lättiäsi nähnytkään! Mistä lienet
kähveltänyt!
Jolloin Vesterberg oli niin hölmistynyt ettei saanut sanaa suustaan

eikä löytänyt lakkiaan ja vasta porstuassa oli muistanut yhden ja
toisen haukkumasanan ja uhannut kysyä kunniansa perään. Mutta
kysymättä se jäi.
Vesterberg oli pitkä mustapartainen mies, jonka jalat käydessä

niksahtelivat kuin vuohen nilkat. Pitkät viiksihaivenet haroittivat suun
päällä ja nauraessa välähteli niiden välistä jotain valkoista. Mustissa
silmissä oli ilkeä tuike. Oikea suurkelmi näköjäänkin.
Eräänä maaliskuun aamuna kun Hamberg oli pistäytynyt mäelle,

luomaan silmiä uuteen silakkaverkkoon ja oli tuvan ovelta päässyt
alas kala-aittaan, näkyi Vesterbergin tamma tulevan talvitietä
kaupungista päin vetäen suurta heinäkuormaa.
— Hoi Vesterberg, varhainpa sinä olet liikkeellä ollut, huusi

Hamberg miehelle, joka pysytteli kuormansa suojassa. — Mistäs
heinät ovat?
— Kaupungin torilta, vastasi Vesterberg rykäisten rohkeasti, mutta

Hamberg nauroi partaansa liikkuessaan keväisellä hangella, joka
häikäisi silmiä. Vesterbergin kuormaan oli ahdettu irtoheiniä suoraan
ladosta, jotavastoin torilla myydään niputtain! Se kettu ymmärsi
palata retkiltään kaupungin kautta, jolloin kaikki mitä kuormassa oli,
kävi ostoksista! Vaan eipäs ymmärtänyt aina pitää varansa
puheissaan!
Toisen kerran oli Vesterbergin naapuri Husössa, Mattson, jonka

kanssa hänellä oli yhteinen navetta ja kahtia-jaettu lato sen edessä,
poikennut Krokholmiin ja kertonut kuinka hänen akkansa oli aamulla,
navettaan mennessään, nähnyt köydenpään longertavan esiin
heinien alta, Vesterbergin puolella. Akkapas ei malttanut olla
kiskaisematta köydestä, jolloin heinistä ilmestyi julma leipäkimppu.
Varmaankin satakaksikymmentä leipää hän oli laskenut ja oikeita
suuren talon leipiä olivat olleetkin! Ja sen tiesi ettei niistä rahaa oltu
maksettu!
Poika Frans tuli isäänsä sekä ulkomuodossa että kaikessa

muussakin, sanoivat ihmiset. Hän oli tämän oikea käsi, joka ei
tiennyt mitä vasen teki. Fransin toimesta paloi Husössä tuli silloin
kun Vesterberg oli öisin liikkeellä — että muka oltiin kotona! — ja
Fransin avulla hän saattoi toimia yht’aikaa kahdella taholla, siten
sekoittaen jälkensä.
Vaikka Vesterberg oli mestari ammatissaan ja oli osannut livahtaa

monesta vaarasta, sai kun saikin hän lopulta selkänahallaan maksaa
julkeutensa. Tarina siitä elää vielä vanhan polven muistona
saaristossa.
Skoglannin Rosenberg oli pannut toimeen perunannostotalkoot,

joihin väkeä oli saapunut salmen takaa Krokholmista ja Aspöstä Emil
Andreas molempine poikineen. Oli ollut semmoinen sinisenkorkea
syyspäivä, jolloin kurjet oikaisevat etelään, halki saariston, ja
puolukan toinenkin kylki kypsyy.
Silloin siinä peltoa kuokkiessaan oli vanha Hamberg saanut

käteensä oudon perunan. Se oli näköjään kuin ihminen ja vähän
puuttui ettei sillä ollut silmät ja korvatkin oikealla kohdallaan. Kun
Ulla toi sahtia talkooväelle ja istuttiin pientareella, kulki peruna
kädestä käteen ihmeteltävänä ja lopuksi leikkasi Hamberg
puukollaan siihen puumerkkinsä arvellen että semmoinen kummitus

Virtues of Greatness in The Arabic Tradition Sophia Vasalou All Chapter

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Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic

Tradition Sophia Vasalou

Many of the writings and rewritings of the status of philosophy in the

such a story would seem calculated to engage it especially strongly. For

al-himma, which I translate as ‘greatness of spirit’—was on right desire or

works. There are delicate interpretive issues to be navigated in piecing

These are interesting questions, and they point on to larger questions

This is not the type of project I have pursued here. My investigation in

Ancient Approaches: One Virtue, Many Conﬁgurations

Ethics has frequently been read as an attempt to adjudicate the different

⁴ I draw on the translation by M. T. Grifﬁn and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge

He also contributed another important element when ﬂeshing out his

⁸ Gauthier, Magnanimité, 303.

short texts achieved wide circulation in the Arabic-speaking world among

Arabic Approaches: Deﬁning a Virtue

ﬁguring as ‘the relativists’ favorite target’, as Martha Nussbaum notes—the

merely ‘an effort to employ a hermeneutic of charity’.¹³ Indeed, as John

(tawāduʿ) that appears as the mean, ﬂanked by the vices of arrogance

¹⁸ Aphorisms of the Statesman/Fusūl muntazaʿa, ed. Fauzi M. Najjar (Beirut: Dar

treatise by Nicolaus, suggest themselves as key inﬂuences on this conﬁguration of greatness of

Aristotle’s discussion in the Ethics, though we will also discern an emphasis

²⁷ Al-Ghazālī’s debt to al-Rāghib has been emphasized by a number of writers, including

depending on the identity of its dispenser (NE 1124a5–11). The similarities

    -:  27

The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Miskawayh

It is an investigation that requires placing the brief remarks of these two

³² Tahdhīb, 6, 36. ³³ Trans. Gummere.

Miskawayh fails to follow al-Fārābī’s example with regard to humility and

    -:  29

signiﬁcance of Miskawayh’s failure to include humility in his list of the

Aristotle’s great-souled man appears to evince. Moral greatness must always

The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Al-Ghazālī

In crafting this comparison, I have held Miskawayh’s ethical viewpoint

⁴⁰ Note that the understanding of Aristotle’s megalopsychos in terms of ‘a static sense of

    -: -̄̄ 31

⁴³ Respectively Mīzān, 256, 357.

provide guidance to the believer striving to model himself on the divine

    -: -̄̄ 33

Miskawayh before him, not only fails to incorporate humility (tawāduʿ)

    -: -̄̄ 35

The relationship between al-Ghazālī’s ethical thought as expressed in the

⁵⁶ Ibid.: li-yastaʿmila bi-wāsitatihā arbābahā fī aghrādihi wa-maʾāribihi.

Kun kauan kaivattu avovesi oli ehtinyt Sälskärin pohjoisreimariin ja

Hauki oli kutenut, koivunurvut puhjenneet ja rantarysät tuoneet kalaa

Häät olivat olleet helluntaina. Nuoret olivat tarpeekseen tanssineet

Fanny ja Emil olivat kutsutut, mutta eivät tulleet. Fanny ei ollut

Häiden jälkeen palasi elämä entiseen uomaansa Tallskärissä.

Eräänä päivänä, vähää ennen heinäaikaa, kun Hamberg lojui kala-

Hamberg meni oikopäätä toiselle tuvalle. Nähtyään kehdon

— Kehto on minun! Fannyllä ei ollut lupa lahjoittaa sitä muille!

Ja kun Mari rupesi väittämään vastaan ja sanomaan sitä

Ja hän vie saaliinsa mennessään laskien sen Fransiljan eteen

Kuu näytti sinä iltana eriskummalliselta. Se oli kääntynyt selälleen

Valoa oli liian paljo tavalliseksi kuutamoksi. Sitä virtasi saarien ja

Tie kulki suuressa kaaressa pitkin jäätä, kadoten hiukan

Hän katseli vuoroin kuuta, joka oli kuin punainen paperilyhty,

Kalle-Kustaa alkoi taas saapastaa etukumarassa, vanha

Mutta ei se sittekään ollut se ajatus, jota Kalle-Kustaa oli hautonut

Olisivat ne Petter ja Abel saaneet jäädä kohtaamatta, kun ne aina