The Case for God (25 page)

Falsafah
was a valuable and instructive experiment. The Muslim philosophers were open to new ideas and had no qualms about learning from Greeks who had sacrificed to idols. “We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples,” al-Kindi had remarked.
²³
It is always dangerous to isolate religious ideas from contemporary thought. As one tenth-century
faylasuf
insisted, the seeker after truth must “shun no sciences, scorn no book, nor cling fanatically to a single creed.”
²⁴
Their stringent rationalism led some to develop a radically apophatic vision. Ibn Sina argued that God’s oneness meant that God was perfectly simple: Allah had no attributes that were distinct from his essential being, so there was absolutely nothing that reason could say about him, even though we could infer God’s goodness, life, and power from our own experience of these qualities. In the same vein, Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani (d. 971), who belonged to the Ismaili sect, developed a dialectical method similar to Denys’s, based on the affirmation and denial of the divine names.

But the God of the philosophers seemed dangerously close to the old Sky Gods, who had become so remote that they faded from the consciousness of their worshippers. Despite its desire to accommodate the faith of the masses,
falsafah
remained a minority pursuit and put down no roots in the Muslim world. Most Muslims found it impossible to engage with this distant God, who seemed a mere abstraction, was unaware that human beings existed, and could not possibly communicate with them. The
faylasufs
themselves may have found that the Sufi rituals helped to make this austere deity a more vibrant reality for them, and at the end of his life, Ibn Sina seems to have been evolving a philosophy based on intuitive insight as well as reason.

So did Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), an emblematic figure in the history of religious philosophy. A rising star in the intellectual establishment of Baghdad, he had made an intensive study of
falsafah
and could tackle the ideas of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina on their own terms. Finally, in
The Incoherence of the Philosophers
, al-Ghazzali declared that the
faylasufs
had contravened their own principles. Our rational powers could investigate only observable data, so while
falsafah
was competent in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, it could tell us nothing about matters that lay beyond the reach of the senses. When the
faylasufs
spoke of God, therefore, they were guilty of
zannah
, fanciful guesswork. How could they prove the theory of divine emanation? What was their evidence for saying that God knew nothing of mundane affairs? In going beyond their brief, the philosophers had been unphilosophical.

Al-Ghazzali was looking for certainty, but he could not find it in any contemporary intellectual movement. His doubts became so severe that he suffered a breakdown and was forced to abandon his prestigious academic post. For ten years he lived in Jerusalem, engaged in the rituals and contemplative disciplines of the Sufis, and when he returned to his teaching duties, he insisted that only spiritual exercises of this kind could provide us with certainty
(wujud
) about the existence of God. It was a waste of time to try to prove the existence of Allah, as
the faylasufs
had done: because God was being itself, an all-encompassing reality, it could not be perceived in the same way as the mere beings that we see, hear, or touch. But that did not mean that the divine was wholly inaccessible. We could, as it were, catch a glimpse of God by cultivating a different mode of perception, as the Sufis did when they chanted the names of Allah like a mantra and performed the meditative exercises that induced an altered state of consciousness.

But those who did not have the time, talent, or inclination for this type of spirituality could make themselves conscious of God in the smallest details of daily life. Al-Ghazzali developed a spirituality that would enable every single Muslim to become aware of the interior dimension of Muslim law. They should deliberately call to mind the divine presence when they performed such ordinary actions as eating, washing, preparing for bed, praying, almsgiving, and greeting one another. They must guard their ears from slander and obscenity, their tongues from lies; they must refrain from cursing or sneering at others.
Their hands must not harm another creature; their hearts must remain free of envy, anger, hypocrisy, and pride.
²⁵
This vigilance— similar to that practiced by Stoics, Epicureans, Buddhists, and Jains—would bridge the gap between outward observance and interior commitment; it would transform the smallest action of daily life into a ritual that made God present in the lives of ordinary men and women, even if they could not prove this rationally.

It has been said that al-Ghazzali was the most important Muslim since the Prophet Muhammad. After al-Ghazzali, one great philosopher after another—Yahya Suhrawardi (d. 1191), Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73), Mir Dimad (d. 1631), and his pupil Mulla Sadra (1571–1640)—insisted that theology must be fused with spirituality. The philosopher had a sacred duty to be as intellectually rigorous as Aristotle and as mystical as a Sufi; reason was indispensable for science, medicine, and mathematics, but a reality that transcended the senses could be approached only by more intuitive modes of thought. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased to be a fringe movement and remained the dominant Islamic mode until the nineteenth century. Ordinary laypeople practiced Sufi exercises, and these disciplines helped them to get beyond simplistically anthropomorphic ideas of God and experience the divine as a transcendent presence within.

The Jews in the Islamic empire, who were so excited by
falsafah
that they developed a philosophical movement of their own, had a similar experience. Writing for the most part in Arabic, they introduced a metaphysical dimension into Judaism. From the beginning, they were concerned about the contrast between the remote God of the philosophers and the highly personalized God of the Bible. One of the first Jewish
faylasufs
, Saadia ibn Joseph (882–942), for example, found the idea of creation ex nihilo fraught with philosophical difficulties. In the main, however, Jewish philosophers tended to be less radical than the Muslims, did not concern themselves with science, confined their attention to religious matters, and concluded in the main that reason’s chief use was to help the philosopher give a more systematic explanation of religious truth. Maimonides (1134–1204), the greatest of the Jewish rationalists, believed that
falsafah
was
unsuitable for the laity, but it could wean Jews from their more facile ideas of God. Maimonides developed an apophatic spirituality that denied any positive attributes to God, arguing that we could not even say that God was good or existed. A person who relied on this kind of affirmation would make God incredible, he warned in his
Guide to the Perplexed
, and “unconsciously loses his belief in God.”
²⁶

But again, for most Jews the God of the philosophers was too abstract, unable to offer any consolation in times of persecution and suffering. Increasingly they turned to the mystical spirituality of the Kabbalah, which was developed in Spain during the late thirteenth century. Some of the pioneers of this spirituality—Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Isaac de Latif, and Joseph Gikatilla—had been involved in
falsafah
but found its attenuated God empty of religious content.
²⁷
Yet they used philosophic motifs, such as divine emanation, to describe the process whereby the utterly unknowable Godhead, which they called En Sof (“Without End”), had emerged from its lonely inaccessibility and made itself known to humanity. Like Sufism, Kabbalah was an unashamedly mythical and imaginative spirituality. Until the modern period, it would inform the piety of many Jews and, as we shall see, would even become a mass movement.

In the Muslim world, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were able to collaborate and learn from one another. But in Western Europe, during the last years of Anselm’s life, the first Crusades were launched against Islam. In 1096, some of the Crusaders attacked the Jewish communities along the Rhine valley, and when they finally conquered Jerusalem in July 1099, they massacred some thirty thousand Jews and Muslims; the blood was said to have come up to the knees of their horses. Crusading was the first cooperative act of the new Europe as it struggled back onto the international stage. It appealed to the knights, who were men of war and wanted an aggressive religion, and would remain a major passion in the West until the end of the thirteenth century. This was, of course, an idolatrous catastrophe and one of the most shameful developments in Western Christian history. The Crusaders’ God was an idol; they had foisted their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto a deity they had created in their own likeness and thus given themselves a sacred seal of absolute
approval. Crusading made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe and would indelibly scar relations between Islam and the West.

But it was not the whole story. At the same time as Christians were slaughtering Muslims in the Near East, others were traveling to Spain to study under Muslim scholars in Cordoba and Toledo. Here they discovered the works of Aristotle and other Greek scientists and philosophers whose work had been lost to them after the fall of Rome. They also encountered the work of the Jewish and Muslim
faylasufs
. With the help of the local Jews, European scholars translated these writings from Arabic into Latin, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century, a wide array of Greek and Arabic scientific and philosophical works had become available to Europeans. This influx of new knowledge sparked an intellectual renaissance. The discovery of Aristotle in particular showed theologians how to present their doctrines in a coherent system.

This reminds us that in any age, the religious life is always multifarious, varied, and contradictory—even within a single individual. One of the most famous Europeans of the period was Francis of Assisi (1181–1226). His life and career show us that while some Europeans were engaged in scholarly rationalism, others like Francis had no time for theology of any kind and were far more literal-minded than the apophatic Anselm. Yet Francis’s literalism, like that of the pilgrims, was neither intellectual nor doctrinal but practical. He represented a strand of popular piety that saw the life of Christ as primarily a
miqra
to be imitated literally down to the last detail. Francis emulated the absolute poverty of Christ in his own life; he and the Franciscan friars who followed him begged for their food, went barefoot, owned no property, and slept rough. He even reproduced the wounds of Christ in his own body. And yet this gentle saint seems to have approved of the Crusades and accompanied the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, though he did not take part in the fighting but preached to the sultan.

As I explained at the outset, my aim is not to give an exhaustive account of religion in any given period, but to highlight a particular trend—the apophatic—that speaks strongly to our current religious perplexity. This was, of course, not the only strand of medieval piety, but it was not a minor movement; it was promoted by some of the
most influential thinkers and spiritual leaders of the time. In the Eastern Church, it had been crafted by Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and Maximus, who were revered as heroes of Orthodoxy. In the West, we see it in both Augustine and Anselm, as well as in the towering figure of Thomas Aquinas (1225–74).

Nobody did more to absorb Aristotelian rationalism than Thomas. Destined for a monastic life, at the age of fourteen Thomas was attracted to the Dominican friars he encountered at the University of Naples, the only school in Christendom at that time to teach Aristotelian logic and philosophy. Like the Franciscans, the Dominicans were the men of the hour; these friars were not monks sequestered in a monastery but lived a life of evangelical poverty in the world, putting themselves at the service of the people. After a struggle with his family, Thomas threw in his lot with the Dominicans, studied in Paris under Albert the Great (1200–80), who was completing his magisterial commentary on Aristotle, and at the tender age of thirty-two, succeeded to his chair. Like the
faylasufs
, Thomas was wide open to change and new ideas. He quoted Arab and Jewish philosophers while most of his contemporaries were still committed to crusading, and his voluminous writings integrated the new sciences with traditional faith at a time when Aristotle was still a controversial figure.
²⁸

It is difficult for us to read Thomas today. He wrote in the technical language of the new metaphysics, and his style is dry, understated, and dense. But it is also confident. Within a hundred years, the intellectual climate would change and theologians would become warier of the intellect, but Thomas had no qualms about making affirmative, positive statements about God. He thought Maimonides was wrong to insist that it was only appropriate to use negative terms that said what God was
not
. For Thomas—as for Denys, whom he greatly revered—affirmative speech and the silence of denial were both essential to God talk. As Being itself
(ipsum Esse subsistens)
, God was the source of everything that existed, so all beings made in God’s image could tell us something about him. It was also permissible to exploit the exciting new techniques of logic and inference—but with one important proviso. Whenever he made a statement about God, the theologian must realize that it was inescapably inadequate. When we contemplate God, we are thinking of what is beyond thought; when we speak of God, we are talking of what cannot be contained in
words. By revealing the inherent limitation of words and concepts, theology should reduce both the speaker and his audience to silent awe. When reason was applied to faith, it must show that what we call “God” was beyond the grasp of the human mind. If it failed to do this, its statements about the divine would be idolatrous.