CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
The Arabs
PETER ABELARD WAS TRULY A PHILOSOPHER, NOT A
theologian with philosophical overtones. St. Anselm was both; St. Bernard, a theologian and mystic who occasionally wrote philosophy much as Moliére's bourgeois wrote prose, without knowing he was doing it. By the beginning of the twelfth century, there were some philosophical students and a growing awareness of philosophy in many western
European schools, that a century later developed into the universities or made way for them. Paris, where Abelard heckled and argued, was one such school; another was
Chartres, whence came such reputable men of learning as the Platonists Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, and Gilbert de la Porrée (1070-1154), who was an Aristotelian, and wrote a classic crib of Aristotle's Categories, called the Book of Six Principles. But John of Salisbury
(21115-1180), an Englishman, was perhaps the most indestructible writer of the school of Chartres. His Policraticus is one of the first primers of political science, and is still today required reading for the schools of Oxford University.
John was, incidentally, an excellent example of the true internationalism of medieval learning. He was a pupil of Abelard's, and later went to Chartres, first as student, then as bishop. He was a friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and for twenty years he lived at Canterbury as secretary first to Archbishop Theobald, and later to St. Thomas a Becket, with whom he went into exile, and whose death he witnessed. John of Salisbury visited Rome many times, and was an intimate friend of the only English Pope, Nicholas
Breakspear, who in 1154 became Adrian IV. John wrote
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a Metalogicon, a plea for the study of logic, and 329 of his letters have survived.
The following quotation from Chapter 21 of the Policraticus shows him wrestling with the problem of whether God can know the unknown. In it John of Salisbury shows his indebtedness to Abelard very clearly.
{ Behold the horns of another dilemma and wheresoever I turn I seem involved in error. For if things which are not nor will be, can be foretold, God can know what he does not know or something can occur without his knowledge.
For a naval engagement which is not to be can be waged so it can be known by those who wage it. Can that not be known by God which can assuredly both be and be known by man? If therefore God can know what he does not know he can assuredly also not know what he knows, for the reason that there can be no knowledge of contradictories, since one of the two must be false because it lacks the substance of truth. Besides, there is no knowledge of what is not true. How therefore can there be unvarying knowledge which is subject to increase and decrease of fact, and which can be ignorant of what it knows or can know that of which itis ignorant? ...
Hence the Stoic believes that all things are unavoidable for fear of bringing to naught immutable knowledge. On the contrary, Epicurus thinks that there are no events which are the result of the regulation of providence for fear of imposing necessity upon things subject to change.
They are both equally mistaken since the one subjects the universe to chance and the other to necessity. There is therefore a changeless disposition of changeable things.
Since this providence cannot be moved from its state of eternity, it has freed the train of events from all bond of necessity ...
For just as what I see is impending does not occur of necessity from the fact that I see it, so also what His eye contemplates is under no compulsion of coming to pass.
I know indeed that the stone or arrow which I have shot into the clouds will by nature's law fall back upon the earth as do all heavy bodies borne by their own weight;
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yet there was no compulsion that they fall onto the earth either naturally or because I know they do. For there is the possibility of their falling or not falling; one or the other, though not of necessity, is nevertheless true. That which I know will, in any case, be. For if it is not to be, though it is thought to be, it nevertheless is not known, since there is no knowledge of that which is not, there is merely opinion.* }
BY THE BEGINNING OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, THE
functional organs of Christendom included the hierarchy of the clergy, from the Pope to the humblest cleric in minor orders; the Holy Roman Empire, which protected and patronized both the Papacy and the priesthood; and the Universities. Of these Paris was foremost, and it was Paris to which all the greatest medieval thinkers came, and where they stayed and taught, from Alexander of Hales (c.11751245) to John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), although none of them were Frenchmen by birth. The speed of medieval communication and integration seems astonishing: twenty years after St. Francis, an Italian, had founded the Franciscans, twenty years after St. Dominic, a Spaniard, had founded the Dominicans, both orders were entrenched in Paris and dominating its teaching. And much of what was taught, the very texts that were commented on, of Plato and even more of Aristotle, were available only in translations made into Arabic from the original Greek, and translated from the Arabic into Latin. These translations came to Western Europe through the Mohammedan conquests, either from the Arabs themselves or from the Spaniards. Greek disappeared early from the West, and by St. Augustine's time even the educated were reading
Greek authors in Latin translations. Only the Irish, in their settlements such as St. Gall in Switzerland, kept the study of Greek alive, and in some cases they even spread the knowledge of Greek again. But by 917 it was hard to find anyone who knew Greek: Severus, Bishop of Ashmounein
* Salisbury's Policraticus, from Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers by Joseph Pike (University of Minnesota
Press, 1938).
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in Africa wrote, for example, "I asked among the Christian brothers for help in translating the document we found from Coptic and Greek into Arabic, which is the language of the people of Egypt, for most know neither
Coptic nor Greek." (Quoted by A. Mallon, in Mélanges de Université St: Joseph, Beyrouth, 1906.) These "Christian brothers" were Syrians, and it was they who acted as the agents, transmitting ancient Greek culture to Christian Egypt and later also to the Muslims. The translations they made had the most tremendous influence on European thought. Indeed, so tremendous was it, that it is thanks to them that the greatest figure of the thirteenth century
(the age above all others of great individuals) is not a man, but a ghost: the ghost of Aristotle whom both the Christian St. Thomas Aquinas and the Muslim Averroés were to call, simply "The Philosopher," as though there were none other. Nor was Aristotle only the Philosopher. He was also, for medieval man, the natural scientist, a sort of super Einstein-cum-Dewey, none the less alive for having been, at the time of his "recovery," dead for more than fifteen hundred years.
Aristotle's recovery, which brought his influence from East to West, was a direct consequence of the Mohammedan conquests. It must be remembered that all the time the scholars were puzzling over the universe in the monasteries, and the philosophers were teaching about grace and free-will in the schools and universities, Christendom was fighting a life-and-death battle with Islam, at first on its outskirts, in countries such as Armenia and Spain, but later in the heartland, in Sicily and northern
Spain, at the very gates of Paris and Vienna.
And the most all the armies of Christendom could do, severally or together, beyond the frontiers of Arabia, for many centuries, was to contain the Muslim tide, so that the medieval world was divided into a rather larger Muslim half and a smaller Christian half. In fact, the situation for several centuries was rather like that in the early fifties of the twentieth century, when capitalist and communist powers exist side by side, with sporadic fighting between them in fringe areas, like Korea and Indo-China.
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To realize the immense contribution of Islamic thought to medieval philosophy—and it is only recently that historians have begun to become aware of its extent—it is necessary to understand the contrast between Christianity and Islam; first as faiths, and then as philosophies.
Mohammed, born of poor parents at Mecca, in Arabia, in 570, received what he declared to be a revelation from God when he was already middle-aged, and preached his message, called by him the "Koran" and written down by his followers, to the polytheist tribes around him. He fled on July 16, 622, from the persecuting Koreish, his kinsmen, to Medina, and this date, of the Hegira, or flight, marks the beginning of their era for some 400,000,000 Mohammedans today. Mohammed called the religion he had founded "Islam," or the Surrender (to God); his followers he called "Muslims," or those who have surrendered. Islam is a straightforward, uncluttered creed, based on the statement "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet."
Islam included in its tenets the duty of almsgiving, a minimum of a tenth yearly of all income and possessions, and the obligation to make once in a lifetime the pilgrimage to Mecca. To die in battle for Islam was the best death, and Jihad, or Holy War—war against the enemies of Islam—was given high priority as a religious activity. A Muslim has to pray five times daily, after ritual ablutions, and he may not drink wine, eat the flesh of pigs, nor shellfish. He may have up to four wives simultaneously, but must treat all alike, and a Muslim is responsible for every child he begets, or any wife bears, legitimate or illegitimate.
Already by the time of Mohammed's death, in 632, Islam had spread outside Arabia, and in its first two centuries the new faith had conquered Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia,
North Africa, Morocco and Spain. All Muslims are absolutely equal, and the conquered, whenever they accept
Islam, are integrated completely. Islam declared Jews and Christians to be "people of the Book"—they, too, had sacred scriptures, and were allowed to live and to keep their religion, upon payment of indemnities and taxes.
Two of the conquered countries, Egypt and Syria, had
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been profoundly Hellenized, with Greek-speaking schools, and strong philosophical traditions. The Arabs found the Syrians possessed of almost all of Aristotle, as we know him today, and a thorough knowledge of Aristotle's thought, as the late neo-Platonists understood it, is common to all Arabic philosophers from Al-Kindi (died after 870) to Ibn Rashid in the twelfth century.
The Arabs had found dualism in Persia, the country of Zoroaster. His theory of good and evil as comparable though conflicting powers, filtered through Manichaeanism, had strongly affected local Christianity. The Arabs found the Syrian Christians divided into three main groups
(Mohammed himself never met a Catholic, nor learned what was the Catholic faith) : the orthodox; the Nestorians, who divided Christ's nature so completely into two parts, human and divine, that the human Being, Willing and Acting were separated from and contrasted with the divine; and the Monophysites, who were most numerous in Syria, and who believed Christ to have but one nature, and for whom the Divinity absorbed the Humanity. The Sabaeans, or Harraneans, traced their beliefs back to Hermes
Trismegistus and other pagans and, although not Christians, were included by Mohammed as "people of the Book" together with Jews and Christians. The Sabaeans were interested in the mathematical and astronomical, as well as the medical studies of the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists. They prized the medical works of Hippocrates and Galen no less than the philosophical works of Aristotle and helped to transmit these to the West. The Syrian translations from the Greek extend from the fourth to the eighth century, from the time of Probus "priest and physician in Antioch" during the first half of the fifth century, to that of Jacob of Edessa (c. 633-708), who even after the Muslim conquest translated Greek theological writings, and insisted that it was permissible for Christian priests to teach Muslim children. St. John Damascene
(700-754) was born into a Christian family which held an important hereditary position under the Saracens in Damascus. John's Arabic name was Mansur, the Ransomed. In 735 he entered the monastery of St. Sabas, near
Lied tet B74
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Jerusalem, after ordination to the priesthood, and among his works is a Dialogue between a Christian and a Saracen; which is not the most original of his writings. But he is important as an example of the close cooperation, almost assimilation, possible between Christians and Muslims in the eighth century.
One of the best translators from the Greek was Sergius of Rasain, who died in Constantinople, aged about seventy, around 536. Sergius recast into Christian language much of what he translated, even turning Plato into a hermit, dwelling in the wilderness. Aristotle he regarded first and foremost as a logician. Sergius' contemporary,
Paulus Persa, who wrote in Syriac for Khosrau Anosharwan (521579), placed knowledge above faith, and defined philosophy as the process by which the soul becomes conscious of its own inner essence.
The Arab translations of Aristotle began only in early Abbasid times—about the same date as the coronation of Charlemagne in the West (A.D. 800), and for the next three hundred years, there can be no question that, intellectually, Cairo and Baghdad far outshone any contemporary European city, including both Rome and Constantinople. Indeed they vied with one another as the greatest centers of learning in the world, with Cordova in Spain running a close third. The contacts and cooperation within the vast Muslim world were extended to Christendom even though the confrontation of the two entailed a struggle for the possession of Europe. To cite but one example (given by Christopher Dawson): A manuscript of the Greek Dioscorides was sent as a present by the Byzantine emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, to the Spanish Caliph Abd ar Rahman III (891-961). It was translated by a Jew called Hasday ibn Shapru, with the assistance of a Greek monk who came for the purpose from Constantinople to Cordova.
The Arab translators began with Ibn al-Mogaffa, a Persian, but none of his work has survived. During the reigns of Al-Ma'mun (813-833) and Al-Mu'tasim (833-842),
Yakya ibn Bitrip is said to have translated the Timaeus of Plato, and Abu Zaid Honain ibn Ishaq (809-873),
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working together with his son and nephew, was a prolific translator. Dr. Richard Walzer, in a chapter in The History of Philosophy Eastern and Western* notes that the Greek authors translated by the Arabic philosophers were those studied in the late Greek schools. In fact, the Greeks the Muslims studied were Aristotle and his commentators, and these were a splendid corrective to the Neo-Platonic texts almost exclusively used in early medieval Christendom. Dr. Walzer enumerates the Greek philosophic writers known to the Arabs, "Plato's Timaeus, Republic and Laws, which were textbooks of political theory in the school of Al-Farabi; Aristotle's treatises with the exception of the Politics, and the Dialogues." The Christian translators also
"smoothed the passage of Greek and Islamic thought to medieval Jewry, and eventually created in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for the first time, a Jewish philosophy superior to Philo's unsuccessful attempt." For the Arabs, as for the early Fathers, Greek philosophy provided a "natural theology," and they accepted, at least as a starting point, from which to comment, argue and develop, the basic premise of Greek philosophy, that of the eternal order of the universe, with "the stars in their stations set, and every wandering star." But Islamic thought is not plagiaristic; it is a "productive assimilation" of Greek thought. Given the entirely different background of Arab and Christian theology, and of the actual philosophers, the degree of interpenetration is surprising.
Qosta ibn Luga al-Balabakki (flourished about 835) wrote a brief treatise on the distinction between soul and spirit, which survives in a Latin translation. Spirit, ruh, is a subtle material, which animates the human frame and causes its movements and perceptions. But the soul is something else again; being incorporeal it is unchangeable, and does not, like the spirit, which acts as intermediary between body and soul, perish with the body.
By the tenth century, Islamic scholars divided the sciences into the Arab sciences, and the old, or non-Arab sciences: to the former belong grammar, ethics, history
* The History of Philosophy Eastern and Western, ed. Sir S. Radhakrishnan (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.).
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and literature; to the latter, philosophy, natural science and medicine. Arab philosophy stemmed partly from oriental Christian teachings, partly from gnostic and Zoroastrian sources, partly from Greek, Neo-Platonic elements.
According to tradition, Mohammed said "the first thing which God created was reason." This was widely quoted by those who found the Koranic precepts, although excellent ethics, lacking in dialectics. For example, the same teasing problem of free-will, which caused so many Christian arguments, also split Muslims into various groups.
The Mutazalites, and before them, the Qadarites, considered God had no property except essence, His essential nature could have no predicate; they declared that His holiness was incapable of causing man's sin, and also that, man is responsible for his actions. But the energy by which he acts, whether the action be good or evil, comes from God. Is this energy created previous to an action, or coincidentally and simultaneously therewith? God's omnipotence, it would seem, is limited by His goodness. Later, the Mutazalites went further and taught that God could not act in a way that was contrary to his nature. But the Traditionalists angrily maintained that God's might could not be limited, even by His nature. But the Mutazalites insisted on denying power, life, will, speech, sight and hearing to God, as they feared that He would become anthropomorphized if He were the possessor of attributes.
Indeed, a God whose Word was Himself was already at least an approximation of the Christian Trinity.
Al-Nazzam, who died in 845, declared God can do nothing evil, nor, indeed, anything but what He actually does. He rejected the Greek theory of atoms, and instead, postulated accidents as the components of corporeal substances. He thought of accidents as the substance itself or as part of the substance. Thus in a log of wood, for example, "fire" or "warmth" exists latently; it becomes actual only when, by means of friction, its opposite "cold" disappears. He considered color, smells, even intellects and souls as types of matter; everything created, visible or invisible, is material.
Al-Muammar, who is thought to have flourished around
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900, also denied the existence of any attribute in God, Who cannot know himself or any other being, for knowing would suppose a plurality in Him. In the problem of Universals, al-Muammar may be said to be a conceptualist: for him whiteness, fatness, etc., have only an intellectual existence. But so long as we discuss a white thing, the whiteness exists in our minds, The disciples of al-Ashari (873-935) elaborated the Muslim doctrine of atoms. This, derived from the Greeks, especially from Democritus (c.460 B.C.) via the Latin
Lucretius (?99-51 B.C.), was an explanation of creation that did not detract from God's omnipotence, and was favored by the later Mutazalites. All we perceive, al-Ashari declared, is but accident, and all accidents are in continual flux, according to the atomists. Since everything changes, everything has come into being, and therefore has been created by a necessary, and necessarily unchanging, God.
Accidents are divided into substances and qualities, which are the categories by which reality is perceived. Matter exists only in thought, and "time is nothing other than the coexistence of different substances, a simultaneity of accidents. Space, time and motion are atoms devoid of extension, moments without duration. Between each individual 'now' of time, there is a rest, or void." Goethe was to suggest some of these theories in his Faust:
All that passes Is but a likeness.
Al-Kindi (who died after 870) wrote the preface to the earliest metaphysical work in Arabic. "It is fitting to acknowledge the utmost gratitude to those who have contributed even a little to truth, not to speak of those who have contributed much. We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself: it never cheapens or abases him who searches for it, but ennobles and honors him." And he went on to describe
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his aim: "My principle is first to record in complete quotations all the Ancients have said on the subject, the second, to complete what the Ancients have not fully expressed, and this according to the usage of our Arabic language, the customs of our age, and our own ability."
But there was one exception to the general acceptance by al-Kindi of the basic tenets of Greek philosophy: the Greek "eternal creation" is denied and instead the Koranic creation of the world from nothing "in a single moment of time by the omnipotent will of God," is accepted.
A famous physician, Abu Bakr al-Razi (850-923), was a courageous and original thinker. He disapproved of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions, all of which he considered to have brought more evil than good into the world, and all of which he declared are to some extent selfcontradictory. For him it was only in the pursuit of philosophy that man could improve his lot: "whoever makes an effort and busies himself with study and research has set out on the way of truth. Indeed, the souls of men can be purged from the mud and darkness of this world and saved for the worid to come only by the study of philosophy."
Al-Razi's medical knowledge was considerable and was praised by Vesalius (1514-1564), and his autobiography is impressive. Both he and al-Kindi wrote treatises on popular ethics, now available in translation. Al-Kindi was an Arab, al-Razi a Persian, Al-Farabi (died 950) a Turk.
Al-Farabi was a philosopher anxious to separate philosophy from its theological swaddling clothes and to establish it as supreme in its own sphere. Dr. Walzer says:
"Aristotle's logic of demonstration, according to Al-Farabi, provides the key to the philosophical understanding of the universe which springs from the study of physics and metaphysics. ..
. There is one universal religion, but many forms of symbolic representation of ultimate truth, which may differ from land to land and from nation to nation.
There exists only one true God for the philosophical mind, but He has different names in different religions. AlFarabi's theory of human nature was fully and almost exclusively based on Aristotelian psychology. The faculties of nutrition, of sense perception, of imagination and
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intellect are described and their hierarchical order within the one and undivided soul is particularly stressed, as parallel to the order in the universe, and the order to be established in society."
Ibn-Sina (Avicenna)* (980-1037), born in Persia, passed all his life there, and held high political office at various times. He is the greatest of the early Muslim philosophers. He wrote 160 books and was besides a profound mystic. One of his best poems is a long account of the descent of the human soul into the body—an idea he got from the late Neo-Platonist pantheists. He is "a systematic thinker of the first order," wrote a medical and a philosophical encyclopedia, and was able to accept the Muslim belief in prophecy as the highest of God's gifts, by identifying it with sagacity, "the power of hitting the middle term of a syllogism in an imperceptible time . .
. the power of infallibly guessing the truth without the help of imagination."
His proof of the unicity of God was later found useful by St. Thomas Aquinas. Avicenna wrote his autobiography, and described how "I read the Metaphysica of Aristotle, but did not understand its contents and was baffled by the author's intention; I read it over forty times, until I had the text by heart. Even then I did not understand it, or what the author meant, and I despaired within myself." Then one day he found at a bookseller's Al-Farabi's
On the Objects of the Metaphysics. "I returned home and hastened to read it, and at once the objects of that book became clear to me, for I had it all by heart."
On the nature of God, Avicenna wrote:
{ That there Is a Necessary Being Whatever has being must either have a reason for its being, or have no reason for it. If it has a reason, then it is contingent, equally before it comes into being (if we make this mental hypothesis) and when it is in the state of being—for in the case of a thing whose being is contingent the mere fact of its entering upon being does not remove
* The names in parentheses are those by which the Muslim philosophers were phoneticized into medieval Latin.
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from it the contingent nature of its being. If on the other hand it has no reason for its being in any way whatsoever, then it is necessary in its being. This rule having been confirmed, I shall now proceed to prove that there is in being a being which has no reason for its being.
Such a being is either contingent or necessary. If it is necessary, then the point we sought to prove is established.
If on the other hand it is contingent, that which is contingent cannot enter upon being except for some reason which sways the scales in favour of its being and against its not-being. If the reason is also contingent, there is then a chain of contingents linked one to the other, and there is no being at all; for this being which is the subject of our hypothesis cannot enter into being so long as it is not preceded by an infinite succession of beings, which is absurd.
Therefore contingent beings end in a Necessary Being.
Of the Unicity of God It is not possible in any way that the Necessary Being should be two. Demonstration: Let us suppose that there is another necessary being: one must be distinguishable from the other, so that the terms "this" and "that" may be used with reference to them. This distinction must be either essential or accidental. If the distinction between them is accidental, this accidental element cannot but be present in each of them, or in one and not the other. If each of them has an accidental element by which it is distinguished from the other, both of them must be caused; for an accident is what is adjoined to a thing after its essence is realized. If the accidental element is regarded as adhering to its being, and is present in one of the two and not in the other, then the one which has no accidental element is a necessary being and the other is not a necessary being. If, however, the distinction is essential, the element of essentiality is that whereby the essence as such subsists; and if this element of essentiality is different in each and the two are distinguishable by virtue of it, then each of the two must be a compound; and compounds are caused; so that neither of them will be a necessary being. If the element of essentiality belongs to one only, and the other is one in every
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respect and there is no compounding of any kind in it, then the one which has no element of essentiality is a necessary being, and the other is not a necessary being.
Since it is thus established that the Necessary Being cannot be two, but is All Truth, then by virtue of His Essential
Reality, in respect of which He is a Truth, He is United and One, and no other shares with Him in that Unity: however the All-Truth attains existence, it is through Himself.
That God Is Without Cause A necessary being has no cause whatsoever. Causes are of four kinds: that from which a thing has being, or the active cause; that on account of which a thing has being, or the final and completive cause; that in which a thing has being, or the material cause; and that through which a thing has being, or the formal cause.
The justification for limiting causes to these four varieties is that the reason for a thing is either internal in its subsistence, or a part of its being, or external to it. If it is internal, then it is either that part in which the thing is, potentially and not actually, that is to say its matter; or it is that part in which the thing becomes actually, that is to say its form. If it is external, then it can only be either that from which the thing has being, that is to say the agent, or that on account of which the thing has being, that is to say its purpose and end.
Since it is established that these are the roots and principles of this matter, let us rest on them and clarify the problems which are constructed upon them.
Demonstration that He has no active cause: This is selfevident: for if He had any reason for being, this would be adventitious and that would be a necessary being. Since it is established that He has no active cause, it follows on this line of reasoning that His Quiddity is not other than
His Identity, that is to say, other than His Being; neither will He be a subsistence or an accident. There cannot be two, each of which derives its being from the other; nor can
He be a necessary being in one respect, and a contingent being in another respect.
Proof that His Quiddity is not other than His Identity,
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but rather that His Being is unified in His Reality: If His Being were not the same as His Reality, then His Being would be other than His Reality. Every accident is caused, and every thing caused requires a reason. Now this reason is either external to His Quiddity, or is itself His Quiddity: if it is external, then He is not a necessary being, and is not exempt from an active cause; while if the reason is itself the Quiddity, then the reason must necessarily be itself a complete being in order that the being of another may result from it. Quiddity before being has no being; and if it had being before this, it would not require a second being. The question therefore returns to the problem of being. If the Being of the Quiddity is accidental, whence did this Being supervene and adhere? It is therefore established that the Identity of the Necessary Being is His Quiddity, and that He has no active cause; the necessary nature of His Being is like the quiddity of all other things. From this it is evident that the Necessary Being does not resemble any other thing in any respect whatsoever; for with all other things their being is other than their quiddity.
Proof that He is not an accident: An accident is a being in a locus. The locus is precedent to it, and its being is not possible without the locus. But we have stated that a being which is necessary has no reason for its being.
Proof that there cannot be two necessary beings, each deriving its being from the other: Each of them, in as much as it derives its being from the other, would be subsequent to the other, while at the same time by virtue of supplying being to the other, each would be precedent to the other: but one and the same thing cannot be both precedent and subsequent in relation to its being. Moreover, if we assume for the sake of argument that the other is non-existent: would the first then be a necessary being, or not? If it were a necessary being, it would have no connection with the other: if it were not a necessary being, it would be a contingent being and would require another necessary being.
Since the Necessary Being is One, and does not derive Its being from any one, it follows that He is a Necessary Being in every respect; while anything else derives its being from another.
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Proof that He cannot be a Necessary Being in one respect and a contingent being in another respect: Such a being, in as much as it is a contingent being, would be connected in being with something else, and so it has a reason; but in as much as it is a necessary being, it would have no connections with anything else. In that case it would both have being and not have being; and that is absurd.
Demonstration that He has no material and receptive cause: The receptive cause is the cause for the provision of the place in which a thing is received; that is to say, the place prepared for the reception of being, or the perfection of being. Now the Necessary Being is a perfection in pure actuality, and is not impaired by any deficiency; every perfection belongs to Him, derives from Him, and is preceded by His Essence, while every deficiency, even if it be metaphorical, is negated to Him. All perfection and all beauty are of His Being; indeed, these are the vestiges of the perfection of His Being; how then should He derive perfection from any other? Since it is thus established that He has no receptive cause, it follows that He does not possess anything potentially, and that He has no attribute yet to be awaited; on the contrary, His Perfection has been realized in actuality; and He has no material cause. We say "realized in actuality," using this as a common term of expression, meaning that every perfection belonging to any other is non-existent and yet to be awaited, whereas all perfection belonging to Him has being and is present. His Perfect
Essence, preceding all relations, is One. From this it is manifest that His Attributes are not an augmentation of His Essence; for if they were an augmentation of His
Essence, the Attributes would be potential with reference to the Essence and the Essence would be the reason for the Attributes. In that case the Attributes would be subsequent to a precedent, so that they would be in one respect active and in another receptive; their being active would be other than the aspect of their being receptive; and in consequence they would possess two mutually exclusive aspects. Now this is impossible in the case of anything what-
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soever; when a body is in motion, the motivation is from one quarter and the movement from another.
If it were to be stated that His Attributes are not an augmentation of His Essence, but that they entered into the constitution of the Essence, and that the Essence cannot be conceived of as existing without these Attributes, then the Essence would be compound, and the Oneness would be destroyed. It is also evident, as a result of denying the existence of a receptive cause, that it is impossible for Him to change; for the meaning of change is the passing away of one attribute and the establishment of another; and if He were susceptible to change, He would possess potentially an element of passing-away and an element of establishment; and that is absurd. It is clear from this that He has no opposite and no contrary; for opposites are essences which succeed each other in the occupation of a single locus, there being between them the extreme of contrariety. But He is not receptive to accidents, much less to opposites. And if the term "opposite" is used to denote one who disputes with Him in His Rulership, it is clear too on this count that He has no opposite. It is further clear that it is impossible for Him not to be; for since it is established that His Being is necessary, it follows that it is impossible for Him not to be; because everything which exists potentially cannot exist actually, otherwise it would have two aspects. Anything which is receptive to a thing does not cease to be receptive when reception has actually taken place; if this were not so, it would result in the removal of both being and not-being, and that is untenable.
This rule applies to every essence and every unified reality, such as angels and human spirits; they are not susceptible to not-being at all, since they are free from corporeal adjunctions.
Demonstration that He has no formal cause: A formal, corporeal cause only exists and is confirmed when a thing is possessed of matter: the matter has a share in the being of the form, in the same way that the form has a part in the disposition of the matter in being in actuality; such a thing is therefore caused. It is further evident as a result of denying this cause to Him, that He is also to be denied
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all corporeal attributes, such as time, space, direction, and being in one place to the exclusion of all other; in short, whatever is possible in relation to corporeal things is impossible in relation to Him.
Proof that He has no final cause: The final cause is that on account of which a thing has being; and the First Truth has not being for the sake of anything, rather does everything exist on account of the perfection of His Essence, being consequent to His Being and derived from His Being.
Moreover the final cause, even if it be posterior in respect of being to all other causes, yet it is mentally prior to them all. It is the final cause which makes the active cause become a cause in actuality, that is to say in respect of its being a final cause.
Since it is established that He is exalted above this last kind of cause too, it is clear that there is no cause to His
Attributes. It is also evident that He is Pure Benevolence and True Perfection; the meaning of His Self-Sufficiency likewise becomes manifest, namely that he approves of nothing and disapproves of nothing. For if He approved of anything, that thing would come into being and would continue to be; while if He disapproved of anything, that thing would be converted into not-being and would be annulled. The very divergency of these beings proves the nullity of such a proposition; for a thing which is one in every respect cannot approve of a thing and of its opposite.
It is also not necessary for Him to observe the rule of greater expediency or of expediency, as certain Qualitarians have idly pretended; for if His acts of expediency were obligatory to Him, He would not merit gratitude and praise for such acts, since He would merely be fulfilling that which it is His obligation to perform, and He would be to all intents and purposes as one paying a debt; He would therefore deserve nothing at all for such benevolence. In fact
His acts proceed on the contrary from Him and for Him, as we shall demonstrate later.
His Attributes as pmerpreted According to the Foregoing Principles Since it is established that God is a Necessary Being, that
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He is One in every respect, that He is exalted above all causes, and that He has no reason of any kind for His
Being; since it is further established that His Attributes do not augment His Essence, and that He is qualified by the Attributes of Praise and Perfection; it follows necessarily that we must state that He is Knowing, Living, Willing, Omnipotent, Speaking, Seeing, Hearing, and Possessed of all the other Loveliest Attributes. It is also necessary to recognize that His Attributes are to be classified as negative, positive, and a compound of the two: since His Attributes are of this order, it follows that their multiplicity does not destroy
His Unity or contradict the necessary nature of His Being.
Pre-eternity for instance is essentially the negation of notbeing in the first place, and the denial of causality and of primality in the second place; similarly the term One means that He is indivisible in every respect, both verbally and actually. When it is stated that He is a Necessary Being, this means that He is a Being without a cause, and that He is the Cause of other than Himself: this is a combination of the negative and the positive. Examples of the positive
Attributes are His being Creator, Originator, Shaper, and the entire Attributes of Action. As for the compound of both, this kind is illustrated by His being Willing and Omnipotent, for these Attributes are a compound of Knowledge with the addition of Creativeness.
God's Knowledge God has knowledge of His Essence: His Knowledge, His Being Known and His Knowing are one and the same thing.
He knows other than Himself, and all objects of knowledge.
He knows all things by virtue of one knowledge, and in a single manner. His Knowledge does not change according to whether the thing known has being or not-being.
Proof that God has knowledge of His Essence: We have stated that God is One, and that He is exalted above all causes. The meaning of knowledge is the supervention of an idea divested of all corporeal coverings. Since it is established that He is One, and that He is divested of body, and His Attributes also; and as this idea as just described supervenes upon Him; and since whoever has an abstract
AVICENNA
idea supervening upon him is possessed of knowledge, and it is immaterial whether it is his essence or other than himself; and as further His Essence is not absent from Himself; it follows from all this that He knows Himself.
Proof that He is Knowledge, Knowing and Known:
Knowledge is another term for an abstract idea. Since this idea is abstract, it follows that He is Knowledge; since this abstract idea belongs to Him, is present with Him, and is not veiled from Him, it follows that He is Knowing; and since this abstract idea does not supervene save through Him, it follows that He is Known. The terms employed in each case are different; otherwise it might be said that Knowledge, Knowing and Known are, in relation to His Essence, one. Take your own experience as a parallel. If you know yourself, the object of your knowledge is either yourself or something else; if the object of your knowledge is something other than yourself, then you do not know yourself. But if the object of your knowledge is yourself, then both the one knowing and the thing known are your self. If the image of your self is impressed upon your self, then it is your self which is the knowledge. Now if you look back upon yourself reflectively, you will not find any impression of the idea and quiddity of your self in yourself a second time, so as to give rise within you to a sense that your self is more than one, Therefore since it is established that He has intelligence of His Essence, and since His Intelligence is His Essence and does not augment His Essence, it follows that He is Knowing,
Knowledge and Known without any multiplicity attaching to Him through these Attributes; and there is no difference between "one who has knowledge" and "one who has intelligence," since both are terms for describing the negation of matter absolutely.
Proof that He has knowledge of other than Himself:
Whoever knows himself, if thereafter he does not know other than himself this is due to some impediment. If the impediment is essential, this implies necessarily that he does not know himself either; while if the impediment is of an external nature, that which is external can be removed. Therefore it is possible—nay, necessary—that He
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should have knowledge of other than Himself, as you shall learn from this chapter.
Proof that He has knowledge of all objects of knowledge: Since it is established that He is a Necessary Being, that He is One, and that the universe is brought into being from Him and has resulted out of His Being; since it is established further that He has knowledge of His Own
Essence, His Knowledge of His Essence being what it is, namely that He is the Origin of all realities and of all things that have being; it follows that nothing in heaven or earth is remote from His Knowledge—on the contrary, all that comes into being does so by reason of Him: He is the causer of all reasons, and He knows that of which He is the Reason, the Giver of being and the Originator.
Proof that He knows all things by virtue of one knowledge, in a manner which changes not according to the change in the thing known: It has been established that His Knowledge does not augment His Essence, and that He is the Origin of all things that have being, while being exalted above accident and changes; it therefore follows that He knows things in a manner unchanging. The objects of knowledge are a consequence of His Knowledge; His
Knowledge is not a consequence of the things known, that it should change as they change; for His Knowledge of things is the reason for their having being. Hence it is manifest that Knowledge is itself Omnipotence. He knows all contingent things, even as He knows all things that have being, even though we know them not; for the contingent, in relation to us, is a thing whose being is possible and whose not-being is also possible; but in relation to Him one of the two alternatives is actually known. Therefore His Knowledge of genera, species, things with being, contingent things, manifest and secret things—this Knowledge is a single knowledge.
Acts Emanating from God Since you now know that He is a Necessary Being, that He is One, and that He has no Attribute which augments
His Essence (for that would imply a succession of various acts, whereas the Act of God is the vestiges of the Perfec-
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tion of His Essence); this being so, it follows that His First Act is one.
For if there had emanated from Him two acts, the emanation would have been in two different manners, for duality in the act implies duality in the agent. He who acts by virtue of his own essence, if his essence is one only one act emanates from it.*}
IBN-RUSHD
(AVERROES)
(1126-1198) WROTE COMmentaries on Aristotle, and "for more than three hundred years western scholars read Aristotle mainly with the help of these commentaries of Averroés." As for the medieval world in general, and for St. Thomas Aquinas in particular, Aristotle was "The Philosopher," for them
Averroés was The Commentator. His most famous and original book is called The Incoherence of Incoherence, in which he defended philosophy against al-Ghazzali who wrote The Incoherence of Philosophers. Avicenna came from one extreme limit of the Islamic world, Central Asia
(near Bokhara); Averroés came from another—Spain.
Al-Ghazzali (Algazel) (1058-1111), as great a theologian as Averroés was a philosopher, was a Persian. Averroés used against him the whole "arsenal of Aristotelian philosophy to prove that only philosophy can give a satisfactory answer" to all those "questions that we do not know." Avicenna was a Neo-Platonist, while Averroés, the last of the Muslims who dared stand up for philosophy against orthodox theology, was Aristotelian to the core;
"the last great representative of Greek philosophy in medieval Islam." For orthodox Islam did not hold with the pantheist inclination of some of the Muslim commentators of Aristotle any more than did Christian orthodoxy, and ibn-Hazm, who was to the West what al-Ghazzali was to the East, comments bravely but ruefully after trouble with the authorities: "Trouble me not regarding this burning of books and papers, but rather say 'now we shall see what he knows.' If they have burned the paper, they have not burned what the paper contained. That is in my breast, and * Avicenna, On Theology, trans. A. J. Arberry (John Murray Ltd.,
Publishers, 1951).
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I carry it whithersoever my horses take me. It stays where I halt, and it will only be buried in my tomb."
Averroés declared that philosophy was an investigation into the nature of the existent. But the existent is the created, and the created leads at once to the Creator. The entire problem of the eternity or newness of the world, he went on to say, resolved itself into a mere difference of words: essentially the philosophers agree. There were, for Averroés, three categories of existence, two extremes and a mean. The first existence is caused by an agent, composed of matter and form and generated in time, for example, the various bodies, water also and air. The other extreme is uncaused, made out of nothing, and not subject to time—i.e., God. The mean is made out of nothing, not preceded by time, yet created by an agent—i.e., the world in its totality, and it is this existent that has occasioned much strife and discussion. All men posit future time as endless, but there is a division of opinion with respect to past time. The school of Plato holds that past time is finite, while Aristotle and his school hold that it is infinite. Fundamentally, concluded Averroés, it is a question of terminology.
As in Europe, so also in Islam, side by side with the theoretical philosophers were to be found the mystics, who agreed with St. Augustine that "to Him Who is everywhere present, one comes by love and not by sail" nor even by thought. These Sufis, as they were called (from suf, the white woollen gown they wore), were persecuted generally by the more orthodox Muslims. It must be admitted that many of them used language that seemed blasphemous to their co-religionists: al-Hallaj (died 921), for example, cried out in ecstasy "I am the Truth! I am He" and was executed for his audacity. But al-Ghazzali was a philosopher as well as a sufi. Born at Tus in Khorassan in A.D.
1058 he studied at Nysabur, and later at Baghdad, where he acquired great renown as lawyer and theologian. Then suddenly, he experienced so great an onslaught of doubt that it caused a breakdown in his health: "the bond of blind conformity was loosed from me, and the beliefs I had inherited were broken away," he relates of himself.
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In his initial process of doubt al-Ghazzali adumbrates Descartes, but in his view of causality he anticipates the Scotsman, David Hume (1711-1776): If God is the ultimate cause, al-Ghazzali asked, why should there be a causal connection in the succession of events? Nothing, he replies, causes anything. Antecedents have consequence.
God alone is the efficient cause. Al-Ghazzali turned the tables on the Christians by using Aristotelian arguments and methods when arguing against them. In the Al Rad al Jamil a "refutation of the divinity of Jesus Christ from the text of the Gospel," al-Ghazzali wrote that Christians were divided into two kinds, those who blindly lean on tradition, and clutch with tooth and nail to the literal sense, and those who have a minimum of intelligence and of scientific knowledge, and refer to the authority of the Philosopher on the divine vision, and are impressed by the consequences of this doctrine established by so many authorities, so they are convinced that the Philosopher has penetrated the darkest recesses and obscurities and has made them as clear as day. These latter link up the question of the divine union with the linking up of body and soul, and make an analogy when referring to the essence of the necessary Being. But how wrong they are! For the Philosopher insisted that for body and soul to be united there must be a certain correspondence between them—but how far from this is God. The Philosopher says the bond between body and soul is one of government, and the pleasure-pain impressions are conveyed from the soul to the body. But there can be no comparison between such a relationship, and that of the soul with its creator, for He cannot experience sensible pleasure or pain.
Al-Ghazzali also came into conflict with Aristotle, as taught by al-Farabi and Avicenna, for he insisted on the principle of contradiction, to which, he declared, God Himself submits. He denied the eternity of the world, and his theories of space and time much influenced those of the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), who was a physician at the court of Saladin in Alexandria. According to al-Ghazzali:
"He who believes in endless time must, to be consistent,
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also assume the existence of infinite space. To say that | space answers to the external sense and time to the internal, does not alter the case. For just as space bears a relation to body, so does time to the movement of body. Both are merely relations between our conceptions, which God creates in us."* Only God is limitless in His causative activity; He is the only "willing" being. The philosophers who refuse to believe that God made the world out of nothing by an absolute act of creation, because they recognize only an exchange of accidents in the one material, a passing of the actual from possibility to possibility, do not recognize that every apprehension of the sensible, and every spiritual perception, is entirely new. For the definite, final existence, that is necessary to causation, as to space and time, is God's eternal will. "God has cognizance of the world because He wills it." Like Augustine, al-Ghazzali insists that this divine creative will is compatible with man's freedom, for His foreknowledge is not distinguishable from His memory
—His knowledge is outside of time or space.
The Jewish philosopher Saadya of Fayum, an author who lived early in the tenth century, also denied that God was in space, to the point, indeed, of denying the divine omnipresence, for if God is everywhere, then He must be in space also. But for Saadya, God is in the universe as conscience is in the body: "Cut off a limb from the living body, and the soul is not lessened; annihilate half of the universe, and the deity is unimpaired." This is positing an "abstracted spatiality" which René Descartes would have declared a nonsensical contradiction. For Descartes "space is that attribute of things without which their existence is impossible"; space is the one "absolute and unconditioned reality." Immanuel Kant, however, returned to a position nearer that of Saadya: for him space was not necessarily an external reality, it is rather the mental condition of perception. Things-in-themselves are beyond the category of space; things as we perceive them must be in space.
Besides the Arab Aristotelians, there were several great * et de Boer, The History of Philosophy in Islam (Luzac,
MAIMONIDES
medieval Jewish philosophers, who, following upon the work of the early and not entirely convincing Philo, thought out a synthesis of Jewish and Greek thought. Of these ibn-Gabirol (Avencebrol), a Jewish philosopher living in Spain in the eleventh century and much quoted by St.
Thomas Aquinas, had suggested that the intellect, like material things, was composed of matter and form, but that the form and matter both were spiritual and emanated from God, rather than were created by Him. God alone is active, all things are passive, and the divine will, the only active force in the universe, traverses bodies and performs all the actions bodies seem to perform. This was, of course, untenable for Christians, but Moses Maimonides suggested a compromise. Maimonides, commenting on Aristotle, wrote that "the twenty-five propositions which are employed in the proof of the existence of God, or in the arguments that God is neither corporeal nor a force connected with material being, or that He is one, have been fully established, and their correctness is beyond doubt.
There is, however, one proposition which we do not accept, namely, that proposition which affirms the eternity of the universe." (Moreh, Book II, from the Introduction. )
The proofs so confidently adduced by Maimonides were finally reduced by him to three:
1. God's existence follows from the Aristotelian principle of motion.
2. If one component exists separately, the other must also. Therefore the "causing motion" must exist separately.
3. If there is a possible existence there must also be a necessary existence and therefore God's existence follows from the Aristotelian principles of potential and actual.
Motion, causality and contingency; these were to be accepted later by St. Thomas Aquinas as the first three of his famous "five proofs" of God's existence.