Janne Mattila at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
The large question going through the book is whether setting God as our moral exemplar makes much sense. If God is understood to set the ultimate criteria for goodness, the idea seems unproblematic: emulating God simply means becoming as good as possible. But when we look deeper into what these criteria entail—as the book’s chapters do from various perspectives—problems arise.
The big problem is that God is supposed to be completely unlike us—and nowhere more so than in the Islamic emphasis on divine transcendence. From God’s perspective, this risks turning al-Ghazālī’s project into an exercise of megalomania: how can a mere human being claim to be like God? From the human perspective, the problem is whether we would even want to emulate God. The point of moral exemplars is that, although better than us, they are also like us in some relevant sense. Even the annoyingly virtuous Socrates at least shares our human nature. How are we supposed to identify with a transcendent being of utmost perfection?
Many of the specific problems addressed by Vasalou arise from this incommensurability of the human and divine perspectives. Al-Ghazālī makes God the paradigm of moral virtues—whether in the form of Platonic cardinal virtues, or of God’s names.
more here.
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