The thesis of Samuel Gregg’s 2019 book Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization¹ is that Western Civilization is being crushed between two mistaken notions of reality. Externally, Western Civilization is assailed by an Islamic Fundamentalism which asserts that “Reason” must necessarily be subordinated to “Faith.” Internally, Western Civilization is being undermined by a Modernist Fundamentalism which asserts that “Faith” must necessarily be subordinated to “Reason.”
The human cost of both Fundamentalist movements as sketched out by Gregg are, sadly, all-too-familiar to faithful Catholics. The hard-won progress of more than 2,000 years of painstaking effort within the Catholic Intellectual Tradition – which holds that Reason and Faith are complementary modes of understanding reality – appears under mortal threat.
Most Catholic thinkers are intimately familiar with the critique of Modernist Fundamentalism, as well as the societal consequences which have arisen from it. Far fewer are familiar with the underlying causes of Islamic Fundamentalism, even if the death and destruction spawned by it have been inescapable for decades.
The purpose of this paper is to examine Gregg’s thesis concerning the antithetical conception of Reason and Faith in Islam more deeply. It is the contention of this author that Reason and Faith came to be considered antitheses in Islam because of an inevitable reaction between the constitution of Arabic culture which gave rise to Islam, an evolving understanding of Islam itself, and the way in which Aristotelian Epistemology was received into an explosively expanding, dynamic Islamic Empire. This reaction gave rise to a voluntarist Islam which, very quickly after its adoption as the dominant interpretive framework of Islam, repudiated the balance between Faith and Reason. The alleged process will be examined through a consideration of the failure of the “Muʿtazilite” movement in Medieval Islamic thought—a rationalist movement which attempted to assert that Reason and Faith were complementary.
Although we will see that one cause of the overthrow of the Muʿtazilah was their own sanguinity, it is the author’s contention that the movement was doomed by an irresistible undertow which Islam exerted – by operation of its central premises – against the notion of the complementarity of Reason and Faith as understood within the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and exemplified by the Christian concept of the Logos.
Ultimately, this paper contends that the Muʿtazilites were doomed because any system of thought which asserts that Reason and Faith are adversaries must inevitably close itself off to the virtues of the intellectual concept placed in subordination. Therefore, as Gregg argues, both Modernist and Islamic Fundamentalism are internally incoherent in a way that the Catholic Intellectual Tradition is not.
Structure of the Paper
In Section I, How Does the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Reconcile “Reason” and “Faith?”, we will explore the interaction of “Reason” and “Faith” within the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. This we will do by a very brief examination of the current teaching of the Catholic Church concerning Reason and Faith alongside brief examples of the role the Doctors of the Church played in forming that teaching.
In Section II, Intellectual Conditions in Pre-Islamic Arabia/Early Islam, we will explore why the concept of “knowledge” (ʿilm) became so central to the culture from which Islam arose and how – notwithstanding the efforts of the Muʿtazilites – Early Islam found itself increasingly “locked into” a particular conception of knowledge which conceived of Reason and Faith as inherently and necessarily in conflict.
In Section III, How (and Why) Did Greek Philosophy Reach (and Penetrate) Early Islam?, we will explore how Greek philosophical thought found its way to the Arabian Peninsula just as Islam began to make its explosive outward expansion. We will see that the reception of the Greek Philosophical Tradition into Islam played an instrumental role in further “locking in” the tendencies which existed before philosophy’s arrival.
In Section IV, The Muʿtazilites versus the Ashʿarites, we will look at the struggle for interpretive and theological supremacy in Early Islam between the two dominant schools of Theology in the Abbasid Caliphate (129-636 A.H./751-1258 A.D.)²: the Muʿtazilites (under the impetus of their founders, Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ (d. 131/748) and ʿAmr ibn ʿUbayd (d. 144/761)) and the Ashʿarites (under the impetus of their founder, the theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari (d. 324/936)). To do this, we will contrast Ashʿarite voluntarism and Muʿtazilite rationalism and then consider the consequence to Islam of the ultimate triumph of the Ashʿarite School.
Finally, in Section V, The Consequences of Fundamentalism, we will contrast the stabilizing effect the balance between Reason and Faith within the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and compare that balance with the intellectual instability which flowed from the evolution of Islamic Voluntarism as the dominant intellectual strain of the Islamic World.
This will allow us, in our Conclusion, to return to Gregg’s thesis and better understand why, when Reason and Faith are pitted against one another by Fundamentalism, the human mind is hopelessly divided against itself.
Introduction
Many Muslims, and all Islamic Fundamentalists, would argue that the West’s over-reliance on “Reason” to the exclusion of “Faith” is the proximate cause of the spiritual evils under which the West labors. In their critique, “Reason” is understood as “tending toward blind adherence to the secular materialism of the Industrial and Post-Industrial Era to the exclusion of the wisdom which predates that era.”
In its defense, the Islamist argument is not without merit. The growing areligiosity of the West has clearly left it bitterly divided against itself and struggling to reconcile the great material achievements of its civilization against the ennui and nihilism which have accompanied those achievements. As Gregg Easterbrook argues in his 2004 book, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse,³ Modernism is completely incapable of explaining why the citizenry of the West have reported steadily worsening rates of happiness for 50 years in the face of steadily improving data in virtually every metric by which Modernism measures “societal progress.” Modernists have consistently promised that humanity was on the verge of Utopia as a result of the material prosperity that Modernism inarguably delivers; but Utopia has, thus far, proved elusive.
Conversely, Modernism denounces those who would subordinate “Reason” to “Faith,” as understood as “tending toward a blind adherence to the received wisdom which predates the Industrial Era.” Modernists (correctly) assert that pre-Industrial life was far more nasty, brutish, and short for an overwhelming majority of humanity and (less coherently) that defense of anything pre-Industrial is a product of “false consciousness” on the part of those who have been conditioned to irrationality. Modernists would further argue that it is profoundly unwise to hew to a world of violent and cynical exploitation of the weak by the strong which characterized the human experience before, for example, the Enlightenment.
In its defense, the Modernist Fundamentalist position is also not without merit. In the pre-Industrial world, there were dramatically lower levels of material security, let alone comfort; autonomy was highly limited for the vast majority of the population; slavery was almost universally practiced, both for literal slaves and for women and children generally; medical care was rudimentary, if available at all; learning was available to a vanishingly small cross-section of the population; civil rights (as they are currently understood) practically non-existent for the powerless. Moreover, privations which were accepted as a matter of course in pre-Industrial times tend to erupt again when Western Civilization is displaced by other systems. Diseases which had been thought eradicated re-emerge, as does barbarism, cruelty, and ignorance.
Both ideologies consider the other to be antithetical to their own beliefs, yet – like squabbling siblings – both are also oddly solicitous of the other. Modernist Fundamentalists hold, as a central article of their faith, that as historical victims of the evils of pre-Modernist Western Civilization, adherents of Islam are inherently and essentially blameless for any ills within their own societies (excepting their ongoing reluctance to fully embrace Modernist Fundamentalism). Similarly, adherents of Islamic Fundamentalism crave the material prosperity of the West while simultaneously decrying the pluralistic liberalism without which Modernism is, apparently, incapable of functioning.⁴
But are they truly antitheses of each other? Both argue that the other “tends toward blind adherence” to its core principles, yet – just beneath the surface (and often not even deeply) – both insist on absolute fealty to their own articles of faith.
Section I: How Does the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Reconcile “Reason” and “Faith?”
There is a third universal tradition to Modernist Fundamentalism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition.⁵ Although the Catholic Intellectual Tradition certainly struggled to find (and define) the essence of its faith, it emerged from those struggles with an awareness of the essential philosophical incoherence of dogmatism concerning the relationship between Reason and Faith. The Catholic Intellectual Tradition holds that “blind faith” inevitably leads to an internal erosion (and eventual disintegration) of the thing seeking to be preserved.
As Blanchard notes: “The Catholic church is not anti-rational; it has a profound respect for reason. Any fair critic must admit that it has made larger use of reason, that it has a creed more closely articulated intellectually, and that it has engaged in its service a more distinguished succession of philosophic minds, than any other religious body, Christian or pagan.”⁶
The Catechism of the Catholic Church⁷ serves as a central reference work by which all can better understand the central teachings of the Church. In the Chapter on “Man’s Response to God: The Characteristics of the Faith,” the Church enunciates its general principles of the inter-relationship between Reason and Faith.
Concerning “Faith and Understanding,” the faithful are taught that what “moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe ‘because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived’.”⁸ It is especially emphasized that “the assent of faith is ‘by no means a blind impulse of the mind’.”⁹
Under “Faith Is Certain,” the faithful are taught that Faith “is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie.”¹⁰ While it is acknowledged that “revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience,”¹¹ the Church does not hold that revealed truths are irrational, or even could be. “Loyal Catholics would add that even today they are the true rationalists. Their allegiance to reason has remained unaltered while outside their borders, in theology, in science, even in philosophy, distrust of reason has become rampant.”¹² This conception is exemplified in the Christian conception of the Logos. For Christians, “Christ is reason incarnate…Jesus was the Logos made flesh: the reasonable God who stood at the beginning of time and who had entered directly into human history.”¹³
In the words of St. Anselm, the Catholic Intellectual Tradition is one of “Faith Seeking Understanding”¹⁴: “it is intrinsic to faith that a believer desires to know better the One in whom he has put his faith, and to understand better what He has revealed; a more penetrating knowledge will in turn call forth a greater faith, increasingly set afire by love.”¹⁵ “In the words of St. Augustine, ‘I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe’.”¹⁶
“Speaking of the main anti-religious factions of the century, Dr. D’Arcy has written: ‘They are all believers. The difference which I would maintain exists between their beliefs is that the Catholic one is founded on reason, the Nazi and the Communist on messianic expectation, and the Agnostic on disillusionment and an interior disharmony’.”¹⁷
In its consideration of the inter-relationship between Faith and Reason in terms of human scientific endeavors, the Catechism of the Catholic Church necessarily examines “Faith and Science.” “[T]here can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”¹⁸
For the Catholic Church, it is not a question that some things must be accepted on faith for the human being to function in the world. All systems of thought entail first principles. Rather, it is a matter of thoroughly and systematically determining which things? Under what bases? This allows the Catholic Intellectual Tradition to escape the self-refuting premises of Modernist ideologies like Scientism, which holds that “No claim can be held as true unless proved scientifically,” which itself cannot be proved scientifically.¹⁹ As a result, “methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God.”²⁰ The scientist, “the humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.”²¹
As alluded to in the beginning of this Section, Catholicism has had its struggles. From the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517 through the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, Western Civilization was convulsed by a series of bloody, sectarian civil wars which only ended when the Peace of Westphalia recognized three separate Christian traditions in the Holy Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.²² Regarding conflicts of this sort, Baron Antoine de Jomini in his The Art of War, observes that “[t]he wars of Islamism, the Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, the wars of the League, present nearly the same characteristics. Often religion is the pretext to obtain political power, and the war is not really one of dogmas.”²³
Why did Western Civilization evolve away from “Holy War?” In addition to the impossible difficulty of fitting Christ’s teachings into any violent ideology,²⁴ there were significant historical factors which militated against violence as a tool of religious policy in Western Civilization. The Wars of Religion, 1517-1648, ended in exhaustion; and from that exhaustion Western Civilization learned critical lessons concerning the costs of coercion. Moreover, the perceived failure of the Crusades to secure long-term strategic advantage, the deep political and confessional divisions which had emerged within Christianity by 1648, and the various alliances of convenience which transcended religious identity after the Thirty Years’ War all worked to ensure that Western Civilization shied away from military confrontation as a means of propagating the faith.
In reality, “Islam is generally less receptive than Christianity to theological reflection because of its conviction that true knowledge is restricted to revelation and that God’s way of being is simply beyond human understanding.”²⁵ The remainder of this paper will explore why this is so.
Section II: Intellectual Conditions in Pre-Islamic Arabia/Early Islam
“Civilizations tend to revolve around meaningful concepts of an abstract nature which more than anything else give them their distinctive character.”²⁶ Thus begins Franz Rosenthal’s Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam, which remains, fifty-one years after its initial publication, the most authoritative work on the subject.
Rosenthal was keenly mindful of the hazards of attempting to move concepts from language to language in the same way translators move words²⁷—condensing this truth into an aphorism: “Every term translated is a term distorted.”²⁸ But this insight also enabled him to conceptualize (and thus explain) how the “matter” of early Islamic belief (and pre-Islamic culture) and the “form” of Greek philosophy created a unique hylomorphism.
While the “Arabic ʿilm is fairly well rendered by our ‘knowledge’…[it] falls short of expressing all the factual and emotional contents of ʿilm. For ʿilm is one of those concepts that have dominated Islam and given Muslim civilization its distinctive shape and complexion…There is no branch of Muslim intellectual life, of Muslim religious and political life, and of the daily life of the average Muslim that remained untouched by the all-pervasive attitude toward ‘knowledge’ as something of supreme value for Muslim being.”²⁹
The unique position of “knowledge” in Arabian culture is exemplified by the fact that the root for “knowledge,” ʿ-l-m, is not shared with other Semitic languages.³⁰ Significantly, the Arabic word ʿalam means “mark, sign.”³¹ “It is therefore not unjustified to suggest that the meaning of ‘to know’ is an extension, peculiar to Arabic, of an original concrete term, namely, ‘way sign’”³² because “the connection between ‘way sign’ and ‘knowledge’ takes on especial significance in the Arabian environment. For the Bedouin, the knowledge of way signs, the characteristic marks in the desert which guided him on his travels and in the execution of his daily tasks, were the most important and immediate knowledge to be acquired. In fact, it was the kind of knowledge on which his life and well-being principally depended. Thus, it is easy to see how in a largely nomadic environment, the general concept of knowledge was able to develop from the concrete process of being acquainted with ‘way signs’.”³³
The probability of the alleged connection is deepened in the face of the Arabic root – also unique amongst Semitic languages – for “ignorance,” which is j-h-l.³⁴ “There is a good deal of plausibility to explaining j-h-l as a secondary formation from the well-known root j-w-l, meaning ‘to go around’.”³⁵ (Similarly, religious unbelief, kāfir, is literally “concealing.”)
It is a fundamental article of faith in Islam that “[a]ll human knowledge specifically comes from God. Thus, it is evident that human beings could not know more than God (2:140/134).”³⁶ But an overwhelming implication underlies this seemingly innocuous article of faith: “Nothing of the divine knowledge can be known except if God wills it (2:255/256). Much more important, however, is the obvious assumption throughout the Qurʾân that human knowledge, that is, true human knowledge, is to be equated with religious insight.”³⁷
This was more than just a statement of God’s omnipotence. Numerous passages of the Qurʾân “show clearly that in Muḥammad’s view, ‘knowledge’ was to be equated with the divine revelation he himself, and his less successful predecessors among the Biblical prophets, had received.”³⁸ “The accumulated evidence is striking and persuasive. Right from the start, the student of the Qurʾân finds himself confronted with the thought presented forcefully and inescapably that all human knowledge that has any real value and truly deserves to be called ‘knowledge’ is religious knowledge. Moreover, it is not just vaguely some general religious information, but it is specifically identical with the contents of the divine message transmitted by the Prophet.”³⁹
The existence of human knowledge is not denied in Islam. However, “religious human knowledge…constitutes the highest development of knowledge attainable to man.”⁴⁰ “The most important feature of these aspects of knowledge is that they are felt and represented by the Prophet as interlocking and interdependent. There can be no human knowledge secular or religious without the knowledge possessed by the deity…Knowledge may be acquired by human action, but it would seem to be within the power of God to bestow it upon man in any degree and to any extent he chooses. The worth of knowledge and, indeed, the mere fact that something can be considered knowledge depend on the existence of a relationship between such knowledge and what is thought of as God’s knowledge or as being in harmony with it.”⁴¹ “Knowledge appears as something varied and immense, but it is in a sense finite and monolithic. Above all, however, knowledge remains the goal of all worthwhile aspirations of mankind, the true synonym of religion.”⁴²
“These were the ideas that determined the development of Muslim knowledge and with it, of all Muslim intellectual life and, in fact, all Muslim religious and political life. From the Qurʾânic attitude toward knowledge, it would be possible almost to predict the course that Muslim theology, mysticism, jurisprudence and the like were to take, as well as the fate that had to befall the liberating influences set in motion by the reception of the Classical heritage in the 9th century. The triumphs and defeats of Muslim civilization are foreshadowed in Muḥammad’s understanding of knowledge.”⁴³
“The radically opposite view that religious writings should not be consider ‘knowledge’ and that this word should be reserved for the works of secular scholarship could hardly be expected to make any headway…In the Muslim mind, these distinctions rarely if ever loomed as important as they do in our own way of thinking. This by itself is a characteristic aspect of the Muslim concept of ʿilm in general.”⁴⁴
For obvious theological reasons, therefore, a tremendous amount of effort was made by Islamic theologians to define “knowledge,” including many whose proper definition was that it was undefinable. “Ibn al-ʿArabî (d. 543/1148) expressed this idea on his commentary on the Ṣaḥîḥ of at-Tirmidhî in these words: ‘Knowledge is too clear a concept to require an explanation, but heretical innovators have wished to complicate the understanding of the term ‘knowledge’ and of other religious and intellectual concepts, their aim being to lead people astray’.”⁴⁵ Here we see that “knowledge” is, seemingly unconsciously, presented as simply one “religious concept” among many.
“The majority consensus was again expressed clearly and forcefully by al-Ghazzâlî [the bête noire (or Tomás de Torquemada, depending on one’s perspective) of Islamic philosophers]: ‘The knowledge about (maʿrifah) God is the end of every cognition (maʿrifah) and the fruit of every knowledge (or science, ʿilm) according to all schools of thought’.”⁴⁶
Section III: How (and Why) Did Greek Philosophy Reach (and Penetrate) Early Islam?
We know that “Aristotelian logic was probably among the earliest Greek materials made available in Arabic translation.”⁴⁷ “As a consequence of translations of Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic during the 8th and 9th centuries and the controversies of Muslims with dualists (e.g., gnostics and Manichaeans), Buddhists, and Christians, a more powerful movement of rational theology emerged.”⁴⁸ This movement became known as the Muʿtazilites. For reasons which were explained in the preceding section, Islamic thinkers took “the possibility of knowledge for granted”; consequently, “Muslim philosophers focused their epistemological efforts on the nature and sources of knowledge.”⁴⁹
Greek philosophy “stayed on to form the only systematic scientific framework available to Muslim scholars for intellectual expression from that time on.”⁵⁰ There was nothing naïve about the capacity of thinkers within the rapidly expanding empire to assimilate Greek philosophical insights, or even to expand upon them.
The important question that concerned Muslim philosophers is that how the universals of forms that are essential to the natures of things arrive at the human mind before it has the chance to employ the explanatory phrase and proof to compose known conceptions and known judgments from them. In order to answer this question, Muslim philosophers first discussed the structure of the human soul and then the steps through which the universals pass on their way to the place of knowledge.⁵¹
“The discussion of epistemology thus…spread to form the foundations of systematic theology and jurisprudence, and in this way penetrated right to the core of Muslim thinking.”⁵²
“Logic in Islam was, of course, Aristotelian logic. It is safe to say that it never broke through the basic configuration of its origin…The quest of what knowledge was assumed major significance in the religious realm, because much of the methodological approach to Muslim theology and law came to depend upon the answer to it.”⁵³
It is not as if philosophers in the Islamic world of that era consciously chose to defer to the theologians. It was more the case that the culture from which they sprang offered them an already-constructed reality matrix into which they needed to fit their philosophical insights. “Al-Farabi’s and Ibn Sina’s general view, however, is that these imagined universals only prepare the theoretical intellect for the reception of the universals from the agent intellect that already contains them. When expressing this view, Ibn Sina states that it is not the universals in the imagination themselves that are transmitted to the theoretical intellect but their shadow, which is created when the light of the agent intellect is shed on these universals.”⁵⁴ Of course, in a religion as rigorously monotheistic as the Islamic one, the agent intellect could have no source other than the Almighty; and, thusly, a clearer case could not be hoped for to establish the trap into which the philosophers fell.
In Muslim intellectual life, the “constant restatement of the fundamental importance of logic was in large part apologetic. Many other Muslims, who were not logicians themselves, among them the majority of the representatives of a simplistic religiosity and piety who grew steadily more numerous over the centuries, held a very different view of the position of logic in human civilization…In short, logic, like all the other Greek sciences, has come into the world through the machinations of Satan, and it was one of the means by which the true faith of pious believers could be undermined and Islam, perhaps, eventually be destroyed. These attacks on logic…started out early in Muslim history, certainly as early as the ninth century, but by then, logic had already deeply penetrated into the inner recesses of Muslim civilization.”⁵⁵
Section IV: The Muʿtazilites versus the Ashʿarites
“Within Sunni Muslim ethical theory⁵⁶ in the Middle Ages two major alternative ways developed of thinking about the relation between morality and religion. The first, the Muʿtazilite, was given its most developed statement by ‘Abd al-Jabbar from Basra (d. 1025). ‘Abd al-Jabbar defines a wrongful act as one that deserves blame, and holds that the right and wrong character of acts is known immediately to human reason, independently of revelation. These standards that we learn from reason apply also to God, so that we can use them to judge what God is and is not commanding us to do. He also teaches that humans have freedom, in the sense of a power to perform both an act and its opposite, though not at the same time.”⁵⁷
According to the Muʿtazilah Judge ʿAbd-al-Jabbâr (d. 415/1025), “‘Knowledge’ (ʿilm) is identical with ‘belief’ (iʿtiqâd)…However, it does not include belief based upon a blind adherence to tradition or haphazard guessing. It is a belief that satisfies (sukûn an-nafs) the believer. The necessity of rational speculation is indicated by the belief that God is not known either of necessity or through observation of the senses, nor is continuous information based on the reports of numerous reliable authorities a source of the knowledge of God. The way to know something, unless it is known of necessity, is through argument and proof (dalîl, dalâlah).”⁵⁸
In contraposition to the Muʿtazilah, Hare offers that the “second alternative was taught by al-Ashari (d. 935), who started off as a Muʿtazilite, but came to reject their view. He insists that God is subject to none and to no standard that can fix bounds for Him. Nothing can be wrong for God, who sets the standard of right and wrong. This means that ‘if God declared lying to be right, it would be right, and if He commanded it, none could gainsay Him.’ With respect to our freedom, he holds that God gives us only the power to do the act (not its opposite) and this power is simultaneous to the act and does not precede it.”⁵⁹
In response to Muʿtazilite rationalism, the Ashʿarites advanced an almost pure voluntarism. When the Ashʿarites triumphed, the dominant Sunni branch of Islam adopted Ashʿarite voluntarism. “Islam, especially Sunni Islam, has long held what is called a highly ‘voluntarist’ view of God. To put it simply, voluntarism accords primacy to the will (voluntas) over reason when trying to understand the nature of being and actions. God’s essence, then, is some form of will—a very different view from God as Logos.”⁶⁰ “A thoroughgoing philosophical or theological voluntarist holds, as James Schall, S.J., writes, that ‘behind all reality is a will that can always be otherwise. It is not bound to any one truth’.”⁶¹
The Muʿtazilites argued that “attainment of knowledge” generates it. “The Muʿtazilah explained away the apparently predeterministic verses of the Qurʾān as being metaphors and exhortations.”⁶² This argument was bitterly contested by Imâm al-Ḥaramayn in his Irshâd. “For the Muʿtazilah, rational speculation is necessitated by reason, whereas for the Imâm al-Ḥaramayn, it is necessitated by the religious law (sharʿ).”⁶³ Even authorities outside of the Ashʿarite school fell into line. “The [Ṣûfî] mystic Abû ʿAlî Ibn al-Kâtib, who lived in the first half of the 10th century [observed] ‘The Muʿtazilah declared God to be remote rationally, and they proved wrong. The Ṣûfîs declared God to be remote for knowledge, and they proved right’. The intellect itself was unable to state who God was, until God anointed its eyes with the light of divine uniqueness, for, as al-Kalâbâdhî developed this theme, the only guide to God and the knowledge of God is God Himself.”⁶⁴
What did Ashʿarite voluntarism entail? “A voluntarist has no difficulty, then, in maintaining that two times two can sometimes equal five. He also holds that God can simply will that what is good today is evil tomorrow and vice versa. This willfulness and its implicit relativism sharply contrasts with a conception of God that stresses his rationality and with the idea that both divine and human rationality are bound up with goodness.”⁶⁵
“Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, as well as many Protestant confessions, have formally maintained an understanding of God as Logos. By contrast, as Robert Riley underscores in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, voluntarism is the dominant position of much if not most of today’s Islamic theology.”⁶⁶
The Ashʿarites “emerged as a reaction against the Muʿtazilites’ perceived rationalism. The Ashʿarites, holding a voluntarist view of Allah, denied any connection between divine or human reason and the Koran, and believed that Allah could, if he wished, punish the virtuous and let the wicked enter paradise. For Ashʿarites, any science of scholarship that did not promote the religious regulation of everyday life was to be viewed with suspicion.”⁶⁷
Because the Ashʿarites did not emerge until the 10th century, the Muʿtazilites – with their project to reconcile Greek Reason and Islamic Faith – initially dominated. “[I]n the early 9th century, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn raised Muʿtazilism to the status of the state creed.”⁶⁸
But the Muʿtazilites were holding a losing hand. Gradually, the Ashʿarites prevailed over the Muʿtazilites, who did not help their cause when they “showed themselves to be illiberal and persecuted their opponents. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (died 855), an eminent orthodox figure and founder of one of the four orthodox schools of Islamic law, was subjected to flogging and imprisonment for his refusal to subscribe to the doctrine that the Qurʾān, the word of God, was created in time.”
Section V: The Consequences of Fundamentalism
From the fact that hundreds of millions of Muslims are not Fundamentalists, it does not follow that Fundamentalism is not the natural consequence of Islamic principles. But in this sensitive and often-uncharitable era, it is needful to observe that, “[o]f course, the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. Like many Christians and Jews, many Muslims are not especially knowledgeable about their faith, and their choices and actions are often at wide variance from Islamic beliefs…That said, most of today’s terrorists are Muslims whose religious convictions are a major reason why they torture and murder others, including other Muslims.”⁶⁹
In Sunni Islam, “the argument of authority prevails (‘God established this’) over that of rationality (‘reason allows man to meet knowledge of the moral law’).”⁷⁰ The implications are obvious: “If God commands x, or if you believe that God commands x, then you must do it—no matter how irrational or immoral x might be. This voluntarist vision of God has also inhibited the development in Islam of a strong tradition of natural law.”⁷¹
“Orthodox (small ‘o’) Christianity teaches that all men can know a great deal of truth without the aid of revelation because the light of the Logos is reflected in their intellect. Intensely voluntarist positions cannot help but weaken this teaching, for if God is essentially will, the idea of natural law as a reflection of God’s rational essence becomes hard to sustain.”⁷²
As a consequence of a voluntarist dogma, it has become “inconceivable” in Islam “to speak of the natural law apart from the religious law (shariʿa) given by God to man…In the classic Islamic conception revelation comes before reason, prevails upon it, engulfs it.”⁷³ “This is a relationship of strict subordination.”⁷⁴
How did the defeat of the Muʿtazilites cripple Islam? St. Thomas Aquinas provides a hint: “Having placed creatures outside himself by creation, God has the same time endowed them with a spontaneous tendency to return to him by resembling him as far as possible.”⁷⁵ By advancing an ideology by which man only participates passively in the Divine Mind, Islam removes agency from the human being, thereby reducing man to a passive spectator in his own reality. But this is utterly irreconcilable with the obvious propensity of all created beings to strive to return to their Creator. We are not merely passively observing God thinking for us; we are imperfectly striving to replicate God’s perfection. With the Epistemology that came to dominate Islamic thought, free will becomes impossible and man is misled to a wasteful passivity.
Conclusion
The Catholic Intellectual Tradition is not a voluntarist one. Quite the contrary, it embraces a balance between Faith and Reason which is exemplified by its conception of the Logos bridging the vast – but not inseparable – gulf between God and man. As we have seen, both Modernist and Islamic Fundamentalism are strongly voluntarist, even if their focus on the indomitability of the will focuses on a different will at the top.
Nevertheless, the complications which flow from voluntarism are inescapable. By 1648, the Catholic Intellectual Tradition had firmly rejected voluntarism because of the unique historical conditions it experienced, combined with the understanding within the Catholic Intellectual Tradition concerning the Logos.
With the triumph of the Ashʿarite movement in the Medieval Islamic world, a dogma of voluntarism gained ascendency in Islam. The cultural milieu from which Islam arose and the constitution of Islam itself both created conditions which were favorable to the reception of Greek philosophy in early Islam, but only on Islam’s terms. However, those conditions caused Greek philosophy to interact with Islamic culture in a manner profoundly different than the interaction of Greek philosophy with nascent Christianity. Not coincidentally, the adoption of voluntarism within Islam (and the suppression of the rationalist Muʿtazilite movement) almost precisely coincided with the beginning of a period of cultural stagnation within Islam which plagues it to this day. By suppressing Reason in favor of Faith, Islamic culture became imbalanced.
In a similar manner, it would appear that the adoption of voluntarism in Western Civilization and the attendant eclipsing of Faith by a certain understanding of Reason appears to almost precisely coincide with the period of cultural and moral stagnation under which Western Civilization has labored for the past century.
Only time will tell whether Modernist Fundamentalism will fare better than its Islamic sibling; but one thing appears certain: After approximately 600 years of cultural stagnation, the voluntarism of Islamic Fundamentalism does not appear capable of extracting Islamic culture from the stagnation into which voluntarism led it.
Logical Argument of This Paper
P1. In any system of belief, either human Reason & Faith can be treated as complementary aspects of human understanding or human Reason & Faith can be treated as adversaries. P2. Islamic Fundamentalism is a system of belief in which human Reason and Faith are not treated as complementary aspects of human understanding. TC1. In Islamic Fundamentalism, human Reason and Faith are treated as adversaries.
P3. If human Reason & Faith are treated as adversaries within a system of belief, then either human Reason or Faith must be allowed primacy. P4. In Islamic Fundamentalism, human Reason is not considered primary. TC2. In Islamic Fundamentalism, Faith is considered primary.
P5. If either human Reason or Faith is granted primacy in a system of belief, then the subordinated quality will be masked by the primary quality. P6. If the subordinated quality is masked by the primary quality, then voluntarism becomes inevitable. C3. In Islamic Fundamentalism, voluntarism is inevitable.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Footnotes
¹ Samuel Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2019) (hereinafter, “Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization”).
² It is customary in Islamic scholarship to list dates in reference to the Western calendar and from the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Year 1 is dated from 622 A.D. when Muḥammad and his followers emigrated from Mecca to Medina. The event itself is known as the Hijira, thus “A.H.” Since many of my direct quotes include both dates, I have attempted to do so consistently.
³ Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York, NY: Random House, 2004).
⁴ Competing ideologies – like Russian and Chinese Hyper-nationalism – are inherently limited by the very nationalism which provides their ability to exercise influence within their own countries. Conversely, functionally extinct trans-national ideologies like Communism have delegitimized themselves by their inability to deliver prosperity, stability, or happiness for their subject populations.
⁵ As noted by Brand Blanshard, “There are advantages in beginning with the Catholic position. For one thing, it has been defined with care and precision by the doctors of the church. No similar statement is possible for Protestantism, since there are more than two hundred Protestant sects, each varying slightly in doctrine and attitude from its neighbours.” Brand Blanshard, “Catholic Teaching on Faith and Reason,” The Gifford Lectures.
⁶ Blanshard, “Catholic Teaching on Faith and Reason.”
⁷ “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” accessed April 14, 2021 (hereinafter, “CCC”).
⁸ CCC, no. 156, citing First Vatican Council, “Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith Dei Filius (1870).”
⁹ CCC, no. 156, citing Dei Filius, §§3008-3010; Cf. Mk 16:20; Heb 2:4.
¹⁰ CCC, no. 157.
¹¹ CCC, no. 157.
¹² Blanshard, “Catholic Teaching on Faith and Reason.”
¹³ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 40.
¹⁴ CCC, no. 158, citing Anselm, Proslogion, trans. Robert Theis (Stuttgart, GE: Reclam, 2005).
¹⁵ CCC, no. 158.
¹⁶ CCC, no. 158, citing Augustine, “Sermon 43 on the New Testament,” trans. R. G. MacMullen, Church Fathers, accessed April 30, 2021.
¹⁷ Blanshard, “Catholic Teaching on Faith and Reason,” citing Martin C. D’Arcy, Belief and Reason (Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1944), 49. Cf. Lunn, Arnold. The Flight from Reason. New York, NY: The Dial Press, 1931.
¹⁸ CCC, no. 159, citing Dei Filius, §3017.
¹⁹ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 77.
²⁰ CCC, no. 159.
²¹ CCC, no. 159, citing Second Vatican Council, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes (1965).”
²² Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, “Which Countries Have State Religions?” (University of Chicago, March 2004), 7.
²³ Antoine Henri de Jomini, The Art of War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996), 25.
²⁴ To St. Thomas Aquinas, the essential truth of Christianity is that love is superior to the knowledge of God. Armand A. Maurer, Medieval Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982), 187.
²⁵ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 116.
²⁶ Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Danvers, MA: Brill, 2007), 1 (hereinafter “Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant”).
²⁷ “Being an integral and intimate part of their particular civilization which was molded as it were to their specific specifications, such concepts present members of other civilizations with great difficulty in the way of achieving a correct understanding and appreciation of them” (Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 1).
²⁸ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 3.
²⁹ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 1-2.
³⁰ Other Semitic languages use y-d-ʿ (Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 6).
³¹ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 9.
³² Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 10.
³³ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 10.
³⁴ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 10-11.
³⁵ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 11.
³⁶ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 29.
³⁷ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 29.
³⁸ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 29.
³⁹ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 30.
⁴⁰ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 31.
⁴¹ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 32.
⁴² Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 32.
⁴³ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 32.
⁴⁴ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 44-45.
⁴⁵ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 50-51.
⁴⁶ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 142.
⁴⁷ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 195.
⁴⁸ Muhsin S. Mahdi, “Islamic Thought,” accessed May 4, 2021.
⁴⁹ Shams C. Inati, “Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy,” 1998, accessed January 19, 2021, 1 (hereinafter “Inati, ‘Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy’”).
⁵⁰ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 195.
⁵¹ Inati, “Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy,” 4-5.
⁵² Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 195.
⁵³ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 207.
⁵⁴ Inati, “Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy,” 5.
⁵⁵ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 205-206.
⁵⁶ Given what we have noted of the extraordinary interpenetration of every concept of Islamic life by Religious Islam, which brook no challengers to God’s dominance, it is difficult to divide Islamic thought into categories that might be comfortable to the Western mind. Specifically, “theology” and “philosophy” in Islam have never truly existed as separate dominant conceptual framework within Islamic culture, as everything is ultimately subordinated to theological considerations. Therefore, although the Muʿtazilite Movement could best be characterized as a “theological” school, the term (as we in the West understand it) can hardly do justice to the ubiquity with which theology has enmeshed itself in Islamic society to the present day.
⁵⁷ John Hare, “Religion and Morality,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, August 8, 2019).
⁵⁸ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 211.
⁵⁹ Hare, “Religion and Morality.”
⁶⁰ Samuel Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 111.
⁶¹ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 7.
⁶² Muhsin S. Mahdi, “Islamic Thought,” accessed May 4, 2021.
⁶³ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 217-218.
⁶⁴ Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 140.
⁶⁵ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 112.
⁶⁶ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 112, citing Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2015).
⁶⁷ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 113.
⁶⁸ Muhsin S. Mahdi, “Islamic Thought,” accessed May 4, 2021.
⁶⁹ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 121.
⁷⁰ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 114, citing Samir Khalil Samir, 111 Questions About Islam: A Series of Interviews Conducted by Giorgio Paolucci and Camille Eid (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2002), 91.
⁷¹ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 114.
⁷² Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 114.
⁷³ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 114, citing Samir Khalil Samir, 111 Questions About Islam, 201.
⁷⁴ Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, 114.
⁷⁵ Armand A. Maurer, Medieval Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982), 186, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 19, 20.
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