To speak of sacred knowledge without mentioning the crucial...

To speak of sacred knowledge without mentioning the crucial importance of the virtues as the conditio sine qua non for the realization of this knowledge, is to misunderstand completely the traditional sapiential perspective.10 The virtues are so important that many a Sufi treatise which is concerned with gnosis deals most of all with the virtues rather than with pure knowledge itself,11 thus preparing the soul for the reception of pure gnosis which is then described in terms of Unity or tawḥīd.

The sapiential perspective reduces all sins or deformities of the soul to ignorance of one kind or another or false attribution whose cure is knowledge, but that does not mean that the illness is not present and that the cure must not be administered. The fact that the sapiential perspective sees the root of pride in our ignorance of the truth that God is everything and we are nothing does not mean that we can continue to be proud with this theoretical knowledge in mind.

That would be like reading in a book that a particular medicine is the cure for a certain illness. That knowledge in itself would not cure the…