Concepts & Definitions Flashcards
The encounter of early Islam with the philosophical and religious culture of Hellenism and Late Antiquity took a variety of forms and raised some difficult questions about the limits of Islamic orthodoxy.
(1) To what extent is it legitimate to employ rational argumentation in discussions of religious doctrine and law (shariah)?
(2) Does the Koran have multiple levels of meaning, beyond the literal and legal understanding? Does philosophy allow for a deeper interpretation of the meaning of scripture?
(3) What are those fundamental teachings of the Prophet, which should not be subject to philosophical debate, and which are deemed essential for Islamic belief?
(4) How should the authority of ancient sages, like Hermes Trismegistus, Plato and Aristotle, be weighed in comparison to the authority of the Prophet? Are their theories authoritative, or mere suggestive? Can these figures be regarded as inspired prophets in their own right?
Was alchemy a proper scientia or a lowly mechanical art?
As in the case of alchemy, the applied or operative aspects of medicine were sometimes regarded as undignified (it belonged to the domain of the mechanical arts, a form of experiential know-how, rather than a form of Scientia (explanatory, teachable knowledge).
Controversies about the Soul
From the Active Intellect also derives the human soul, along with its capacity for intellectual knowledge. The soul is an incorporeal substance, emanating from the universal Intellect, which becomes individuated through its instantiation in the body. This doctrine posed severe difficulties for accommodating falsafa and its Hellenic heritage to the Islamic faith, which took as a primary tenet the idea of personal immortality connected to God’s final judgment and the miraculous resurrection of the body. By contrast, the teaching of the philosophers tended to suggest
(a) that the soul is radically separate from the body in essence, and
(b) (b) that its immortality is not personal, but collective: the disembodied soul is absorbed into its source, the Active Intellect.
The falasifa began from the standpoint of experience and rational demonstration, and insisted that the teachings of the Koran must be interpreted by the elite to conform to the demands of reason. This led to some controversial claims touching on the authority of the Koranic revelation:
- That the content of revelation is the same as the truth of philosophy, but presented in symbolic and poetic form in order to appeal to the masses. The highest form of religion is pure philosophy, which operates independently of revelation, inasmuch as it taps into the source of Divine Wisdom directly. The philosopher has no need of scripture. This view was seen as promoting laxity in ritual and legal observances (shariah).
- The miracles recorded in scripture are capable of rational interpretation from the higher standpoint of philosophy. God cannot violate natural law—since this would be tantamount to a denial of his own will and essence. The philosophers developed a “psychological” interpretation of prophecy and miracles. The prophet doesn’t access divine wisdom by hearing a supernatural voice from beyond. Due to his inner sanctity he is able to “tune into” the Active Intellect. He translates this rational understanding of Divine Wisdom into the language of symbol and parable and presents it to the masses as a miraculous transmission. Likewise the miracles of the prophet do not contradict natural law, they simply operate at a level that transcends ordinary natural causality (and which appears miraculous to ordinary humans).
Al-Farabi: the ‘second Aristotle’
The distinctive character of Islamic falsafa was shaped by Al-Farabi (d. 950). He defined the metaphysical and cosmological framework that was assumed by the subsequent tradition (notably by Avicenna, d. 1037, and Averroes, d. 1198). Following Aristotle, he asserted the temporal eternity of the cosmos, which derives (at every ‘instant’) from the metaphysical realms through a series of emanations.
The One God (or First Cause), through an eternal and undivided act of self-knowing, emanates a hierarchy of 10 Intelligences. Each of these Minds emanates a physical image of itself: the First Intellect produces the outermost sphere of the cosmos, the Second produces the sphere of the fixed stars, the Third the sphere of Saturn, down to the ninth which produces the Moon. The Tenth and final Intellect, identified with Aristotle’s Active Intellect, produces the sub-lunar world, by infusing the eternal essences into matter.
Creation ex nihilo:
If God is omnipotent, then the Aristotelian belief in an eternal cosmos is impossible. The pre-existence of matter would limit God’s creative agency. There must be a temporal beginning to the cosmos—a “moment” at which matter, time and space were created from nothing. The Asharites held that this was the plain teaching of the Koran—a point that was (rightly) contested by the philosophers.
Occasionalism
The Asharite doctrine of “occasionalism” follows from an exclusive privileging of divine omnipotence and will over all other attributes (e.g. over wisdom and justice). From this absolute insistence on Divine freedom and omnipotence, the following principles are derived:
- God is the sole cause of all natural events—there are no secondary causes (physical or metaphysical). If two objects or events, X and Y, are connected, this is only due to Divine Will. There are no essential and necessary connections in the cosmos and thus a philosophy of nature in the Aristotelian sense is impossible. All of the qualities of natural beings are accidents created and recreated at every instant by God.
- Just as there can be no science of nature as an autonomous field of inquiry, so there can be no moral philosophy. The determinations of “good” and “evil” are known only through revelation—the Law (Shariah) is revealed by Allah through the Prophet. God determines what is good simply by willing it and is not subject to predetermined moral principles.
- There is no “free will”. If the human will were radically free, this would limit the omnipotence of God. Thus God creates in us not only the power to choose, but also the choice made. Although from our standpoint there is a distinction between involuntary and voluntary action and we are morally responsible for our voluntary acts, ultimately all acts are caused by God.
Translations from Arabic and Greek after Toledo was conquered and prior to it with more exposure to Arab and Latin Culture
- 12th century: With the conquest of Toledo in 1085 Western scholars embarked on a massive translation enterprise. The most prolific translator was Gerard of Cremona (ca. 1114-87): he translated all of Aristotle’s texts on natural science, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Euclid’s Elements, nine texts of Galen—in total around 80 seminal texts of Greek and Arabic learning.
- 13th century: Cultural contacts were also renewed with the Byzantine Empire, which led (among other things) to a complete translation of Aristotle’s corpus from the Greek, executed by William of Moerbeke (c. 1260-86).
Islamic Falsafa: Neoplatonized Aristotelianism
From Aristotle, the Islamic philosophers took their basic understanding of the physical cosmos, but they interpreted the Aristotelian cosmos within the wider framework of a metaphysical emanationist scheme deriving from Neo-Platonism.
- The forms or essences of natural substances are now understood to emanate from the “Active Intellect,” which is interpreted as the last of a series of Divine Intelligences (or “Angels”) emanating from the One God.
- The Active Intellect is the cause of Being and Knowledge: it emanates the forms of natural beings and illuminates the mind of the philosopher so that he can conceptualize these forms.
- Aristotelianism is interpreted in terms of a metaphysics of “light” and “emanation”.
Emanationism and Divine Freedom
This emanationist scheme, whereby divine creative power is communicated through a series of subordinate agencies, posed a number of difficulties for Islamic traditionalists:
(1) The idea of emanation, as a necessary unfolding of Divine Essence, seemed to contradict the unconditioned freedom of the Divine Will. If God’s creative activity is necessitated by His essence—if He must create according to His eternal and fixed Nature—then God is unfree.
(2) The idea that God’s creative power is mediated through secondary agencies—that He does not directly create the physical cosmos—seems to contradict His omnipotence.
On these grounds, in order to preserve the absolute freedom and omnipotence of the Divine, the school of the Asharites would later develop a doctrine of radical creation (creation ex nihilo) insisting the universe in its totality depends entirely, exclusively and at every instant on the will of the One God.
Inadvertent Effects of condemnations towards science?
- One of the inadvertent effects of the condemnations was to open up new possibilities for scientific speculation, competing alternatives to the Aristotelian framework, some of which already anticipate developments of the scientific revolution.
- The desire to free God from the demands of scientific logic entailed, conversely, a new sphere of freedom for natural science. God and Nature, Faith and Reason were becoming separate domains. While the claims of reason are now probable at best, the scope of science was enlarged, and new ways of thinking about nature were admitted as theoretical possibilities.
- But, where reason offers more than one possible theory, we now have to find a way to decide between them . . .
The early European reception of Aristotle was filtered through his Ismaili interpretation as a gnostic adept—a conceit reflected in the pseudonymous “Secret of Secrets”
•The Ismailis, like the Sufis, held to a gnostic interpretation of the Islamic religion, but they were much more controversial in the eyes of the Sunni majority of Islam.
- They often embraced pagan sages, like Hermes and Apollonius, as pre-Koranic prophets, figures with religious authority.
- Their esoteric interpretation of the Koran tended to privilege the inner meaning over adherence to the outer law (shariah), to such an extent that Islam could be regarded as fundamentally (i.e. esoterically) identical to the religions of antiquity.
- They argued that sacred and temporal authority was vested in the Imam, who belonged to the bloodline of the Prophet, and who was privy to the secret meaning (batin) of the Koran.
Thus Ismailism may be regarded as the most accommodating response to the philosophies and religions of antiquity—so accommodating and synthetic that it was regarded by the Sunnis as un-Islamic and essentially pagan.
Transition to the High Middle Ages
(c. 1000-1200 CE)
In this period the population of Europe doubled, leading to a new urbanization, & commercial expansion:
–technologies related to industrial and craft production
–Trade expansion, in both raw resources and manufactured goods, supported by advances in transportation technology
–Expansion of agricultural production
William Ockham
–Potentia absoluta vs. potentia ordinata
–Nominalism (universals are names, not essences or forms in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense)
–Voluntarism instead of essentialism: Will is not bound by Intellect (the universe is not a mirror of God’s mind, in Plato’s sense, but a creation of God’s free will)
All that exists are God (who is incorporeal and eternal), atoms (which are corporeal), and the qualities of material bodies (which are incorporeal but non-enduring).
There are no incorporeal substances other than God. Thus, contrary to the Hellenic philosophical tradition, the human soul is not an incorporeal and (potentially) immortal entity in its own right. The immortality of the person rests on Divine Will and is bound up with the Islamic doctrine of the final judgment and the resurrection of the body.
