Islamic Occasionalism

and its critique by Averroes and Aquinas

Majid Fakhry

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134541546
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Teologia e religione
• Categoria: Teologia islamica

Originally published in 1958.
Occasionalism is generally associated in the history of philosophy with the name of Malébranche. But long before this time, the Muslim Theologians of the ninth and tenth centuries had developed an occasionalist metaphysics of atoms and accidents. Arguing that a number of distinctively Islamic concepts such as fatalism and the surrender of personal endeavour cannot be fully understood except in the perspective of the occasionalist world view of Islam, the volume also discusses the attacks on Occasionalism made by Averroes and St. Thomas Aquinas.

CHAPTER ONE

The Islamic Metaphysics of Atoms and Accidents

I

THE REACTION OF ISLAMIC SCHOLASTICISM TO HELLENISM

Like other forms of ‘scholastic theology,’ Islamic scholasticism— designated as Kalām—arose early in the history of Islam as a deliberate attempt to subject the data of revelation to the scrutiny of reason, especially where such data appeared to involve internal contradiction. The main impetus to ‘rationalize’ theology came from Greek philosophy, which was transmitted to the Arabs through the Christian, Syriac medium. The Syriac Christians had, at Antioch, Edessa, and other seats of Hellenic learning, recognized the need to turn to the Greek masters for the deepening of their understanding of some logical concepts underlying theological discussions. As early as the fifth century, Ibas (d. 457), the Nestorian bishop of Edessa, made Syriac versions of Theodore of Mopseustia’s theological works and, as a sort of propaedeutic to its study, he translated the Isagoge of Porphyry and the Hermeneutica of Aristotle.¹ By the beginning of the eighth century the Arabs were beginning to receive the impact of Greek ideas. Khālid b. Yazīd (d. 704), the Umayyad prince who dabbled in alchemy, is said to have provided for the translation of some works on alchemy, medicine and astrology from Greek into Arabic.² The impact of Hellenism, however, did not set in in full before the ninth century, which saw the setting up by Ma’mūn (d. 833), an enlightened but doctrinaire caliph, of a very active centre of translation.³ It is no coincidence that during that period Islamic scholastic theology displayed its utmost vitality; so that the ultimate form and content of theological discussion can be said to have been determined by the bold, and very often original, speculation of the theologians of this period. Under the influence of Hellenism, those theologians were beginning to subject the Koranic concepts of creation, predestination, divine justice and providence, etc., to the scrutiny of Greek dialectic. The Mu‘tazila (or at any rate their Qadari forerunners) are generally believed to have initiated serious theological discussion in Islam; probably in emulation of Christian theologians with whom they came in contact at Damascus, Basrah and elsewhere.⁴ Whatever the extent of Christian influence on the early Mu‘tazilite theologians of Islam, it is certain that they came decisively under the impact of Greek ideas, and it is significant that their Ash‘arite opponents taunt them continually with having studied the works of the (Greek) philosophers.⁵ We should guard, however, against the illusion that this influence was either uniform or systematic. Despite the fact that from the start the interest of the Syrian translators of the Greek masters centred mainly round Aristotle and his logical works for the reasons we have explained, the early Mu‘tazilite doctors who prepared the ground for the later development of Kalām and its occasionalist world-view, showed a greater predilection for the teaching of the pre-Socratics than for that of Aristotle or Plato.⁶

It should not be imagined, nevertheless, that the two great representatives of the Greek genius were completely left out of account. Within the properly philosophical movement in Islam, it was Plato and Aristotle who before long reigned as the two undisputed masters. Perhaps one should say it was a ‘Platonized’ Aristotle in a Syriac–Alexandrine garb⁷ who, though completely at one with his master Plato, it was thought, took the occasional liberty of differing from him on some secondary points but could not possibly be said to have seriously departed from him.⁸

One aspect of this ambivalent development in Islam was that there grew in the Islamic learned world two parallel currents: the one fundamentally Hellenic in spirit, the other fundamentally Islamic. Those two currents did intercross at more than one decisive point and this is what gave rise to scholastic theology in Islam. The main debt of theology to Hellenism, however, was one of method or technique rather than of substance or content. And even when the Muslim theologians, as we shall see, gleaned at random those of the ideas of the minor Greek philosophers, which they found suitable for the construction of their world-scheme—they continued to exercise a complete freedom of initiative in their eclectical undertaking. They refused consistently, however, to be accounted followers of Plato and Aristotle. In fact such allegiance as their fellow-Muslim philosophers paid the two sages became before long the stigma of heresy, so that by the end of the eleventh century the conflict between Islam and Aristotelianism was settled in a conclusive manner at the hand of al-Ghazālī, who dealt ‘philosophy’ in his Tahāfut its final coup de grâce.

Yet the impact of Hellenism on Islamic theology was not without its decisive and far-reaching consequences. The traditionalism of the early theologians and jurists, like Mālik b. Anas (d. 795), even when it was viewed with the utmost deference by the champions of orthodoxy, underwent considerable modification. Ash‘arism, which was committed to the defence of orthodoxy, found it impossible to do so without recourse to the weapons which its ‘innovating’ opponents had borrowed directly or indirectly from the Greeks. It was in this manner that scholastic theology, in its orthodox as well as semi-orthodox forms, developed by the middle of the ninth century a distinctive and elaborate metaphysics which we shall refer to as occasionalism.

II

MAIMONIDES AND HIS ACCOUNT OF KALĀM

The credit for transmitting the teaching of the Mutakallims (or loquentes in lege Maurorum) to the Latin west in the thirteenth century belongs to the famous Jewish philosopher and theologian, Musa b. Maimūn (Maimonides) (d. 1204). In his Guide of the Perplexed, which was translated into Latin as early as 1220,⁹ Maimonides sought to reconcile Mosaic teaching with Aristotelianism in a manner which would safeguard equally the claims of reason and of revelation. His procedure in this attempt at reconciliation was bound to strike the nascent school of Latin Aristotelianism, with Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas at its head. No wonder then that we find Thomas Aquinas invoking the authority of ‘Rabbi Moyses’ continually, on such questions as the creation of the world in time, the interpretation of scripture, etc.^9a

It is not, however, with this particular aspect of Aquinas’s methodological debt to Maimonides that we are concerned here; but rather with the role which the latter played in providing him with a comprehensive account of the tenets of Kalām which formed the basis of his critique of Islamic occasionalism.¹⁰ In order to determine the accuracy of this account we propose to examine here its salient features so as to be able more readily to determine the extent to which it corresponds to the original Islamic version, as we find it in the extant works of the classical Islamic authors of the tenth and eleventh centuries. We will confine ourselves in this undertaking, however, to those aspects of Kalām which have a direct bearing on the occasionalist metaphysics of the ‘Loquentes,’ which was the object of Averroës’ and Aquinas’ critique. Accordingly we will leave out of account a number of questions which are of definite interest in themselves but which are only of incidental relevance to our main theme; such as the ironical manner in which Maimonides dismisses the alleged arguments of the Mutakallims (both Christian and Muslim) purporting to demonstrate the existence of God from the beginning of the world in time (ḥadath).¹¹ Such arguments, Maimonides maintains, are completely futile, because the beginning of the world is not a matter which can be settled with complete certainty. In fact, it is a matter over which the philosophers have been at variance with one another for 3,000 years. Thus in claiming that they have proved the thesis...