Philosophy Among the Muslims and the Jews

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Philosophy Among the Muslims and the Jews

The Influence of Aristotle.

While the Latin West was moving toward the triumph of scholasticism, other important developments were occurring in the territories under Islamic rule. Within a century of the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad, his followers had conquered all of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula (consisting of modern Spain and Portugal), which they called al-Andalus. Along with other spoils of conquest, the entire corpus of Aristotle's writings, minus the Politics, had fallen into their hands. Translated into Arabic with the help of Syrian Christians over a period of a century and a half (c. 750–900), Aristotle, virtually unknown at the time to the Latins, was to become, as it were, the "house philosopher" of the Muslim world. Philosophy for Muslim thinkers primarily consisted of comments on the writings of the pagan Aristotle. Sometimes these commentaries concentrated on explaining phrase by phrase the Aristotelian text. Sometimes the commentaries combined a literal explanation with a more expanded development of Aristotle's teachings. The commentaries could also assume the form of parallel treatments of topics suggested by the Aristotelian text. The prominent Islamic philosopher Averroës, whom Latin-speaking thinkers called simply "Commentator" (The Commentor, as if there were no other) practiced all three kinds.

Alkindi and Alfarabi.

The first important name in the tradition of commentators on Aristotle's work was Alkindi, who lived most of his years in Persia and in 873 died in Baghdad. In his commentaries on Aristotle's work on the soul, Alkindi elaborated on the philosopher's distinction between the passive and active intellect. According to Alkindi the latter was a single superhuman intelligence active for all mankind; it performed the function of abstracting universals from particulars and depositing them in the particular passive intellects, much like a bee sucks nectar from a flower and deposits it in a hive. An equally original thinker was Alfarabi, who lived his entire adult life in Baghdad, dying there in 950. He was, most notably, the first to distinguish between essence (what a thing is) and existence (that by which a thing is real). With this distinction he was able to account in metaphysical terms for the absolute otherness of the Creator and at the same time for the utter contingency of the creature (creatures may possibly exist, but may possibly not exist; they are, in other words, not necessary). Existence, claimed Alfarabi, was merely an accident of the essence; it did not belong to the nature of anything (except God) to exist rather than not to exist. On the other hand, Alfarabi borrowed from Alkindi (and ultimately from the Neoplatonists) the concept of a single active intellect, which provides for all human minds the intelligibilities of things; ultimately God, and not the senses, is the sole adequate cause of our coming to know the truth about things.

Avicenna and the Necessary Being.

A generation later there appeared on the scene the man who would become the most influential of all Muslim thinkers, the Persian Ibn Sina (980–1037) or Avicenna, as the Latins were to call him. He was a person of great learning; his Canon (meaning a "rule" or "measure") on the theory and practice of medicine, for example, was the single most authoritative work on the subject between the great physician, Galen (c. 129–c. 200), and the Renaissance. Moreover, his interpretation of Aristotle's thought—more faithful to the text than Alfarabi's—was destined to reverberate in the Christian as well as in the Muslim tradition. Avicenna, for example, was the first to distinguish necessary from contingent or possible being, thus providing St. Thomas Aquinas with one of his arguments for God's existence. The things that are encountered in the world exist, but they need not exist; they do not exist necessarily; there is nothing about their natures that demands that they exist rather than not. But if the universe were composed wholly of such beings, it would have already ceased to exist, given the Aristotelian conviction that the universe has existed eternally. One is therefore compelled to conclude that there is in the universe of beings at least one necessary being, a being which cannot not-exist, a being whom Avicenna called "Allah" or God. Although Avicenna's system had much to recommend it to Christian thinkers of the High Middle Ages, there were nonetheless elements of his teaching that could not be assimilated to medieval Christian theology, such as the eternal existence of the world and the necessary character of God's governance. According to Avicenna, the divinity creates out of necessity and rules the universe through the mediation of a hierarchy of intelligences, which are superior orders of angels, and spheres. God knows the sub-lunar world, the world of humans, only in general terms and does not know particulars. This is, of course, implicitly a denial of divine providence and also of free choice of the will, a doctrine firmly established in the Christian tradition by St. Augustine.

AverroËs.

The only Muslim philosopher to challenge Avicenna's preeminence was a polymath (one versed in many fields of knowledge) from Córdoba, Spain—then a part of al-Andalus or Western Islam—Ibn Rushd (c. 1126–1198), known to Latin thinkers as Averroës. Trained in medicine and in law, Averroës was not the creative thinker that Avicenna was, but he did have tremendous critical powers and took on the task of commenting on all of Aristotle's works with the purpose of making them more accessible to the Muslims. In this project he was indefatigable, writing over thirty commentaries on the man known simply as the Philosopher, sometimes as many as three different commentaries on the same work—an epitome or summary, a middle commentary, and a long commentary. Ultimately he fell out of favor with the religious leaders of the country, and by the time of his death in 1198 the Islamic world had begun to de-emphasize the philosophical system-building which had been inspired by Aristotle.

AverroËs and the "Theory of Double Truth."

Averroës himself can be seen as a rationalist, in much the same vein as Scotus Eriugena. There are three classes of people, he claimed in The Decisive Treatise: the simple uneducated workers, the moderately educated people, and, finally, the exclusive coterie of philosophers—a division no doubt reflecting Plato's division of society in the Republic. For members of the first class, only authoritative and emotional arguments are effective, and these simple and uneducated people have no choice but to interpret the Koran literally. Members of the second group are capable of probable or rhetorical arguments, and these people are called "theologians." Finally, the rare geniuses, the philosophers, are able to follow—and must follow—demonstrations in the strict sense, even though their conclusions may seem to contradict the teachings of the Koran. In such cases of conflict, says Averroës, they are to read the Koran figuratively, so that they agree finally with the findings of their reason. Here can be found the roots of what will later be dubbed the "theory of double truth."

MAIMONIDES' "NEGATIVE THEOLOGY"

introduction: Moses Maimonides, in his greatest philosophical work, The Guide for the Perplexed, addresses himself to what is now referred to as God-talk, that is, the question of how we talk about God. His conclusion is that we are unable to affirm anything positive of God; we are capable only of negations. Even the metaphors employed by the Bible tell us only something of ourselves. This passage is an argument for what is termed "negative theology."

You must bear in mind, that by affirming anything of God, you are removed from Him in two respects; first, whatever you affirm, is only a perfection in relation to us; secondly, He does not possess anything superadded to this essence; His essence includes all His perfections, as we have shown. Since it is a well-known fact that even that knowledge of God which is accessible to man cannot be attained except by negations, and that negations do not convey a true idea of the being to which they refer, all people, both of past and present generations, declared that God cannot be the object of human comprehension, that none but Himself comprehends what He is, and that our knowledge consists in knowing that we are unable truly to comprehend Him. All philosophers say, "He has overpowered us by His grace, and is invisible to us through the intensity of His light," like the sun which cannot be perceived by eyes which are too weak to bear its rays.

source: Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed. Trans. M. Friedländer (New York: Dover, 1956). Reprinted in Medieval Philosophy, Vol. II of Philosophic Classics. 4th ed. Ed. Forrest E. Baird (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003): 271–272.

Moses Maimonides.

The greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, arguably the greatest Jewish thinker of all time, was also from Córdoba. His given name was Moses ben Maimon, but was known to the Latins as Maimonides or simply Rabbi Moses. Like the great Muslim thinkers, he was a polymath, and for much of his adult life was court physician to Saladin, the Muslim ruler of Egypt. As leader of the local Jewish community, he was also learned in Jewish law or Torah and wrote a voluminous legal codification known as the Mishnah Torah. The work, however, for which he is most widely known was written in Arabic and addressed to a young protégé named Joseph, The Guide for the Perplexed. There can be no conflict between faith and reason, Maimonides writes to Joseph, and any apparent conflict is the result either of misinterpreting the philosophers or misreading the Scriptures. The latter contain manifold metaphors, which are not to be taken literally; these predicates (words that affirm or deny something about the subject), in fact, tell us nothing about God, but only about God's influence on us. For example, to refer to God metaphorically as a mighty fortress, as the Psalmist does, is merely to express the comfort and security the believer feels as a result of his faith.

Maimonides and the Metaphysics of Existence.

On the thorny question of the eternity of the world, Maimonides reasons both that Aristotle's arguments in favor thereof are not conclusive and that, in any case, his position is not incompatible with God's creation: it is possible, given divine omnipotence, that God created the world eternally. God can create a world of any duration he wishes. It was an argument that was later to be taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas. Three of Maimonides's arguments for God's existence—from change, from efficient causality, and from contingency and necessity—were also to find echoes in Aquinas's Summa of theology. But the most profound influence of the Jewish thinker upon the Christian was in the interpretation of the text in Scripture where God names Himself in response to Moses's question. Written in four Hebrew letters and thus called the Tetragrammaton (meaning simply "four letters"), the name was never uttered, but Maimonides believed it to mean "existence itself." In other words, God's very nature is to exist whereas in all other things—following Avicenna—existence is merely an accident. This insight would later be at the heart of Aquinas's metaphysics of existence.