Muslim Theologians of the Middle Ages Eastern Philosophy

Their belonging to Islam remains, however, a fundamental fact. The Koran has not engendered, as we know, any dogmatic theology analogous to that which dominated Europe. There are several reasons for this; first, most of the theological controversies arose from questions that the doctrine of the Koran implicitly set aside: the Trinitarian and Christological controversies, no more than that of grace, have no meaning in a doctrine which admits the radical unity of God and ignores nothing similar to the sacrament; God and his prophet Mohammed, who consummated the work of the two prophets Abraham and Jesus, this is how the religion of Islam can be summed up: summary and clear as a desert landscape and not having the Hellenic taste for complicated speculations on the nature of divine reality. On the other hand, there is in Islam no spiritual power charged with stating dogma; The Koran does not burden itself with any addition that has binding force. Islam knows the prophets, men inspired by God, but there is none who can add to the letter of the Koran. The sacred book, much more practical and legal than theoretical, contains only one dogma, the idea of which Mohammed borrowed from Jewish monotheism: that of a unique God, absolutely simple in nature, and whose will is all-powerful and unpredictable. This dogma implies a representation of the universe, as contrary as possible to that of the neo-Platonism reigning in the countries conquered by the Arabs: on the one hand, it is the most complete divine arbitrariness; on the other, it is the idea of this rational order of development that Greek thought introduced into the world. It is this opposition which was the only theme of Muslim theology properly speaking, that of the Motekallemin, who strove to erect, against their adversaries, a coherent image of the universe according to the Koran.

All the reflection is concentrated around two purely theological questions: negation of multiplicity in God, negation of any power other than that of God. On the first point, it was asked how, if God were one, one could say that he was good, wise, just, etc. Some go so far as to deny all these properties of God: others, without denying them completely, consider them as modes or ways of being under which the divine essence appears, but which add nothing to it; but they are not qualities, and “he who affirms an eternal quality alongside God affirms two gods.” Others, finally, affirm them as eternal qualities subsisting through the essence of God.

Concerning the second point, theologians fear to see the power of God limited on the one hand by free will, and on the other hand by a determinism which would accept the idea of natural necessity. The negation of free will gives rise, by reaction, at the beginning of the eighth century, to the school of the motazilites (the separated ones), who, under the impulse of Wazil, son of Ata, grant man freedom to safeguard the goodness of God; he would be incapable of decreeing evil action, while he orders good; It is in the same conciliatory spirit that Wazil, the founder of the sect, admitted, between the just believer and the impious, the intermediate state of the sinful believer, an idea which recalls the moderate solution that the Stoic means gave to the problem of moral progress. As for natural determinism, it must be realized that it is indissolubly linked by the Greek tradition to the image of an eternal world with cyclical evolution and of a god acting in the manner of a natural force. On the other hand, the thesis of creation brings with it a radical indeterminism in the production of things not only at the first moment, but also in the course of time. Hence the atomism supported by the school of Acharî (876-935): the continuity of substance is impossible; because it would be necessary to admit that God was not free to create one part without the others; therefore bodies are made of unextended atoms floating in the void. There is no more continuity in time, formed of a series of indivisible instants, nor in movement, made of separate and indivisible leaps. No necessity either in the inherence of properties in the atom; for all atoms are identical; and their properties, color, life, are superadded accidents. No necessity finally for these accidents, existing in the substance at a given moment, to exist there at the following moment; they are, at each moment, the effect of a direct creation of God, and there is no natural law which necessitates the existence or non-existence of anything whatsoever. In this atomism, which is to the glory of Allah, one would seek in vain for anything which recalls the rationalism of Epicurus.