Islam and Logos Page 2

  The outcome of that meeting was by no means a foregone conclusion. It would take Christianity, which was rooted in Greek language and culture, roughly thirteen centuries to sort out the relationship between faith and reason and to come up with a measured response to the challenges of thinkers like Tertullian, who wondered famously, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

  Islam, which lacked the cultural patrimony of the Greek language, had to confront Hellenic thought less than a century after the first Hajj, which took place in 630 A.D., when Muhammed led his followers from Medina to Mecca, where he cleansed the Kaaba of its idols and rebuilt it as the house of God. Given the intellectual disparity between the largely illiterate conquerors and the philosophically sophisticated centers of Hellenistic learning that they conquered, conflict between faith and reason was inevitable. The surprising thing about early Islam’s contact with the realm of Greek thought is how well it went at the beginning.

  After Abū Ja’far Abdullāh al Ma’mūn ibn Harūn defeated his brother in a battle for the throne in Baghdad and became caliph in 813, he “took the title of imam, and chose a Shi’a as his successor.” The decision was significant because Shi’a Islam’s rationalist heritage would preserve it from the ravages of fideism which would soon sweep through the Sunni majority. Al Ma’mun gave his official protection to the Mu’tazilites,

  who created the first fully developed theological school in Islam, championed the primary role of reason; reason’s ability to know morality; the goodness and justice of God as required by reason; the unity of God; and the necessity of man’s free will. They represented the beginning of the Hellenization of Islamic thought insofar as they employed Greek philosophical concepts and logic in their consideration of theological questions.

  According to Robert Reilly's book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), from which the above quotations come, “Al-Ma’mun, strongly influenced by the Mu’talzilite movement, was the greatest patron of philosophy and science in the history of Islam.” The Mu’tazilites were rationalist theologians who felt that God’s power was equaled by his reason and that the one could not contradict the other. The Mu’tazilites, according to Reilly, “would have been in accord with Thomas Aquinas’s proposition that man can apprehend created things with his mind because they were first thought by God.” The Mu’tazilites felt that creation was intelligible because it was created by God, who left his indelible stamp on it. God, in turn, was “guided by the rationality of the universe he created,” which meant that man could apprehend the mind of God by studying his creation. The notion that “not acting reasonably” was “contrary to God’s nature,” was “a respectable theological position within Islam.”

  This happy state of affairs did not last long. The next two caliphs upheld al Ma’mun’s defense of Mu’tazilite doctrine, but:

  In the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja’afar al-Mutawikkil (847-861), the tables were turned. The mihmah was shut down and the Mu’tazilite judges responsible for the inquisition were cursed from the pulpits by name. Holding the Mu’talizite doctrine became a crime punishable by death. The Mu’tazilites were expelled from court, removed from all government positions, and their works were largely destroyed. Al-Mutawakkil released the aged Ibn Hanbal from prison and prohibited “discussing the intricacies of what is creed and what is uncreated in a copy of vocal recitation of the Qur’an.”

  The defeat of the Mu’tazilites would have far-reaching consequences for Islam. For one thing, it deepened the split between the Sunni and the Shi’a. That chasm exists to this day and brings with it major geopolitical ramifications, of which the civil war in Syria is just one manifestation. The Mu’tazilites “fled to the more hospitable Shi’a areas under the Buwayid rulers in eastern Persia” at around the same time that the 12th Imam went into the state of occultation that has lasted until this day. The absence of an infallible imam meant that “the Shi’a had to think for themselves,” something which prevented the excesses of fideism which would ravage their Sunni brethren for centuries thereafter. Eventually, according to Reilly, “the most widely accepted Shi’a teaching contained elements derived from the Mu’tazili school.” The expulsion of the Mu’talizites from Baghdad meant the end of theology (or Kalam) and its replacement by jurisprudence and casuistry. It meant the loss of Logos in public discourse, which meant the rise of fideism, a sola scriptura approach to the Koran, and the end of both philosophy and science.

  The anti-rationalist view never triumphed in Christianity because Christ’s identity as the Logos incarnate was firmly established in the first sentence of the Gospel of St. John, when the evangelist wrote “En arche een ho Logos,” In the beginning, there was reason and order (Logos). “If Christ is Logos,” Reilly writes:

  if God introduces himself as ratio, then God is not only all-powerful, He is reason. While the Mu’tazilites claimed something similar, they did not have a scriptural authority of similar significance to confirm their position in an unassailable way, while their opponents had ample scriptural material to oppose them.

  The turn against reason which began under the reign of Caliph Ja’afar al-Mutawikkil found its completion under the intellectual guidance of Islam’s Tertullian, Abu Hasan al-Ash’ari (873-935), founder of the eponymous Ash’arite school of Islamic thought which viewed God “as pure will, without or above reason.” Al-Ash’ari had been a Mu’tazilite until the age of forty. He then turned reason against reason by making God’s word an expression of his Will rather than an expression of his reason or Logos.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Logos Evaporates

  Logos, at this point, simply evaporated from the Islamic universe. As a result of this turn against reason, as Reilly writes, “there is no rational order invested in the universe upon which one can rely, only the second-to-second manifestation of God’s will.” As a result, “reality becomes incomprehensible and the purpose of things in themselves indiscernible because they have no inner logic. If unlimited will is the exclusive constituent of reality, there is really nothing left to reason about.”

  The triumph of the Ash’arite school of thought in Islam meant the end of a comprehensible universe. In the absence of Logos, which is to say, the evidence of reason in creation, everything from politics to physics became a function of will, because as Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. puts it in a passage quoted by Reilly:

  The rational creature can only “participate” in the eternal law of God if that law is itself founded in Logos, in Word [or Reason]. If it is grounded merely in will, even if it is God’s will, as various theologies and philosophies are tempted to maintain, there can be no real “participation” in the eternal law by the human being.

  Why? Essentially, because there is nothing to participate in if what is grounded in and known only by will can, at any time, be the opposite of what it is at first thought to be.

  Any notion that God was in any way bound by the rational nature of his Being became in the minds of the Ash’arites an affront to his omnipotence:

  The notion that God had to do something was anathema to the traditionalists and to the Ash’arites. For them, Allah is not bound by anything. Nothing is obligatory for Him. If it were, His omnipotence would be compromised. The Mu’tazilite response to this was that God must be consistent with Himself, and that in no way compromises his omnipotence. It simply defines who He is (Reilly).

  British-Lebanese scholar George Hourani

  claimed that "the turning point in the suppression of Mu’tazilism occurred in the 11th century with creedal proclamations of the caliph Qadir beginning in 1017, followed by Hanbalite demonstrations in Baghdad in the 1060s and the favor shown to the Ash’arites by the Seljuq sultans and their wazir Nizam al-Mulk.” “Thus ended,” writes Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, “the most serious attempt to combine reason with revelation in Islam.” “By the 12th century,” he concludes, “the conservative, anti-rationalist school of thought had almost completely destroyed the Mu’tazila influence. So hard was this
reaction, that al-Ash’ari is considered to be relatively moderate as compared with Ibn Hanbal and later the Wahhabis, who did not allow any form of speculation. (Reilly)

  One hundred and fifty years after al-Ashari’s death, al-Ashari’s disciple Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) completed the demolition of reason which his master began by claiming that “nothing in nature can act spontaneously and apart from God.” After abolishing secondary causality and Logos, al-Ghazali put will in their place. Will precedes knowledge. Like the German romantics and American adherents of that school like Ralph Waldo Emerson, “it is the act that produces knowledge” for al-Ghazali. Unlike St. John, who claimed that “In the beginning was the word,” al-Ghazali, like Goethe’s Faust, claimed that, “Am Anfang war did Tat.” Or as Reilly puts it:

  “In the beginning was the Word” is transformed into “In the beginning was the Deed.” This contrast captures the two radically different theologies of the Mu’tazilites and the Ash’arites. Fazur Rahman summed up the differences by saying that Ash’arism “had rendered God a concentrate of power and will, just as the Mu’tazila had made him a concentrate of justice and rationality.” In positing God’s will as the antithesis of his justice and rationality, al-Ghazali “broke the back of rationalistic philosophy and in fact brought the career of philosophy ... to an end in the Arabic part of the Islamic world.”

  In 1180, almost 100 years after the publication of al-Ghazali’s book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Averroes (1126-1198) tried to launch a rationalist counterattack against al-Ghazali’s defense of the Ash’arite creed with the publication of The Incoherence of the Incoherence, which is “an almost line-by-line refutation of al-Ghazali’s book.” But the attempt failed, and Averroes’s books were burned in the town square of Cordoba instead. After Averroes’s defeat, “the great majority of Islamic jurists adopted [al-Ghazli’s] ideas ... spurning deductive reasoning altogether” and producing ideologies like Wahhabism, which are “even more inimical to the primacy of reason than Ash’arism.” The result in the political realm was the degeneration of the caliphate into an inscrutable dictatorship in every Islamic country, except those which espoused Shi’ism, “which has not granted de jure legitimacy to any ruler after the occultation of the 12th imam.”

  The triumph of Ash’arism had incalculable consequences because it made

  moral philosophy, as in Aristotle’s Ethics, impossible. There is no sense in this form of Islam of man fulfilling his nature, or of the “good” as that which aids him in doing so, or of the fulfillment of man’s nature as defining his “good.” Rather, the good is understood only as a matter of obedience to the external commandments of God — whatever they may be — unrelated to any internal logic in man himself or in creation.

  That means there is “no entelechy, no such thing as ‘having one’s end within,’ as Aristotle put it. Just as God does not act teleologically, His creatures have no telos.” Everything that resolves itself into will, as Shakespeare pointed out, becomes a function of appetite, which eventually destroys itself. In Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory (1903), Duncan B. Macdonald came to the same conclusion as Shakespeare: Al-Ghazali’s

  primary conception is, volo ergo sum. It is not thought which impresses him, but volition. From thought he can develop nothing; from will can come the whole round universe. But if God, the Creator, is a Willer, so, too, is the soul of man. They are kin, and therefore, man can know and recognize God.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pope Benedict XVI and the Regensburg Speech

  In his Regensburg speech, Pope Benedict couched his critique of Islam’s “relation to reason” in terms of Logos, the Greek term for both human reason and the order of the universe. Unlike Christianity, Benedict said in Regensburg, Islam is not docile to Logos, nor for that matter is Islam’s God; God’s will is arbitrary, inscrutable.

  According to Benedict’s reading of Emperor Manuel II Paleologos, “the decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” This idea cannot be found in Islam. “The noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez,” Pope Benedict continued, “points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.”

  Christianity is different from Islam: The Christian God acts with Logos. In using the term Logos, Benedict situated Christianity and, by extension, the European culture which grew up under its influence, in the tradition of Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy is part of God’s plan for humanity, something that became clear when Paul had to change his plans and travel to Macedonia. Greek philosophy is, in other words, not just Greek; it is universal.

  Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: In the beginning was the λόγος logos. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word — a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. … In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.

  The marriage of Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy that begat Christianity and Europe is not mere coincidence, nor is Greek philosophy some adulteration of an otherwise pure Gospel. Europe means Biblical faith plus Greek thought; Europe is based on Logos. “The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought,” Pope Benedict continued,

  did not happen by chance... Biblical faith ... encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident in the later wisdom literature... A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place there [in the Septuagint], an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith, and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith. Manuel II was able to say: “Not to act ‘with logos’ is contrary to God’s nature.”

  This means that Logos, far from being some cultural accretion, is part of the nature of God and, therefore, part of creation. The European, and by that term I include both North and South America and Australia, is born into a world that is radically reasonable, radically logical, because that world mirrors the mind of God, who behaves in ways that sometimes go beyond what human reason can comprehend but never in ways that contradict that reason:

  The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love transcends knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone; nonetheless, it continues to be love of the God who is logos.

  God is Love, but the manifestation of both to the human mind is Logos. Our faith as Christians is grounded in Logos, and that means that any culture which grows out of that soil will be rooted in Logos. Europe is rooted in Logos; if Europe abandons Logos as transmitted by its Christian roots, it will no longer be in any sense Europe, which is precisely what we are witnessing today in cities like Leicester in England, which is now predominantly Muslim, or Berlin, which is neopagan. European culture is culture saturated in Logos. What Europe now lacks is Logos because it has cut itself off from its Christian roots. Pope Benedict made the connection clear in his speech:

  The inner rapprochement
between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history; it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

  So far so good. We agree wholeheartedly with what Pope Benedict said about Logos, and we can see without too much effort that Islam has a radically different attitude toward the relationship between faith and reason. Europe has dealt with this threat for centuries, but from an historical perspective, the Islamic threat to Europe is only half the story.

  This is precisely the flaw with Benedict’s speech. He ignored half the story, namely the Israeli half of the equation. When a neocon commentator on Benedict's speech like Fr. James Schall, S.J., wrote in his book The Regensburg Lecture (2007) that the “real root of terrorism” lies in the “logic of sola voluntas as the definition of Allah,” he was misrepresenting the issue both metaphysically and historically. Historically, modern terrorism began when Russian Jews blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem to drive the English out of Palestine. Schall could have incorporated this fact into his definition of terrorism by showing how the Talmud is every bit as antagonistic to Logos as the Koran, but he chose not to do so. This sin of omission undermines his entire book, especially when he attacks political correctness, “whose effect is in fact to prevent us from naming exactly what we are dealing with.”