What beauty is there for an existence that is simple…what deficiency in God’s world is greater than this? (Incoherence VI:48).
Abstract
I reconstruct and analyze al-Ghazali’s arguments defending a plurality of real divine attributes in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. I show that one of these arguments can be made to engage with and defend Jeffrey E. Brower and Michael C. Rea’s “Numerical Sameness Without Identity” model of the Trinity. To that end, I provide some background on the metaphysical commitments at play in al-Ghazali’s arguments.
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Notes
For further examples and an anthology of contemporary sources, see (Vallicella 2015).
For a comprehensive treatment of al-Ghazali’s life and works, see (Griffel 2009).
Burns (1989) agrees that al-Ghazali’s treatment of the divine attributes renders God complex.
In The Incoherence, al-Ghazali presents his Interlocutor opponent (“al-Falasifa” or “the Philosophers”) as an accurate portrayal of the views of his real-life opponents. Suspending judgment, in this paper I consider “al-Falasifa” only as an imagined interlocutor.
Al-Ghazali points out that the Mu’tazilite school of Islamic theology held a similar view to al-Falasifa concerning the Divine Attributes. Of the errors al-Ghazali identifies in The Incoherence, the error concerning God’s attributes is regarded as among the least severe (Griffel 2009 ch. 3).
“For whatever is in need of another, that other would be its cause, since, if that other is removed [from existence], the existence [of the former] would become impossible. Hence, its existence would not be of itself, but through another” (Incoherence VI:5).
I was aided by the formulations of existence dependence in Tahko and Lowe (2015).
Let us take for granted that things don’t need themselves. But if we wanted to say that things do need themselves, we could augment our definition to read: x exists, and there exists no y such that x needs y and y is not identical to x.
“…what cannot be otherwise we say is necessarily so. It is from this sense of ‘necessary’ that all others are somehow derived.”
“The term ‘possible’ has two meanings. ‘possible’ may apply only to those things which are not impossible. The class of contingent statements falls under this kind of possible. ‘Possible’ may also refer to things which may exist or may not exist. This is called the ‘Real Possible,’ and contingent propositions do not fall under this class. In ordinary language the term ‘possible’ is used in the second sense.”
Averroes contrasts Avicenna’s cosmological argument, which relies on the ontological dependence relation, with what he considered the superior position of the Mu’tazilite theological sect. This sect endorsed possibility in Avicenna’s first sense. See (Averroes 1954, p. 152).
Al-Ghazali and al-Falasifa held that brute contingency is impossible. See (Abu Zayd 1970, p. 5).
For example in (Metaphysics V:1013b).
By form, I just mean the property of being organized according to some pattern or principle, taking this handy definition from (Brower and Rea 2009, p. 131).
Avicenna held that absolutely un-formed or “prime” matter does not exist in reality: This is because prime matter is pure potentiality, and pure potentiality cannot exist; there is always some form or other ordering existent matter and rendering it active. As a result, Avicenna held that all material objects are hylomorphic. See (McGinnis 2006, p. 60).
Al-Ghazali was intimately familiar with the works of Avicenna, who was himself familiar with Aristotle’s accidental unities and spoke about them in his primary logical treatise: So, it’s fair to assume that al-Ghazali was also familiar with Aristotle’s accidental unities. Avicenna uses the accidental unity examples of “Young Zid” and “Old Zid” in (Avicenna, p. 17).
See especially (Metaphysics V:1014a, 1015b–1025a).
In his work The Golden Mean in Belief, al-Ghazali is reluctant to use the term “accidental” to describe these attributes. He fears this will imply there are times at which these attributes do not exist. Despite his protestations, there doesn’t seem to be any substantial difference between his “non-accidental” attributes and accidental attributes. See (Abu Zayd 1970, pp. 81–89).
Not all activities are accidental, of course. Fire, for example, is essentially characterized by the active state of burning.
Responding to al-Ghazali, Averroes notes that “the Ash’arites,” al-Ghazali’s sect of Islamic theology, considered God’s attributes to be additional to God’s essence; Averroes contrasts the Ash’arites with “the Christians,” who hold that God has a plurality of essential attributes. In (Averroes 1954, p. 193).
See Marmura’s footnote 3 to (Incoherence VII:2) in Marmura (2000, p. 235).
“According to Avicenna… God’s essence is a total unity, and it is not possible for there to be division or change within something that is totally unified in nature” (Griffel 2009 ch. 5).
Averroes adds that al-Falasifa took an object’s being composed as entailing that an object has a material substrate, which they further took to imply an external composer. In (Averroes 1954, p. 195).
Synthesized from (Incoherence VI:9, 14, 18).
Earlier, al-Ghazali argued that “necessary of existence” is a negative property. He is not contradicting himself here, however, as he is distinctly referring to those properties in virtue of which something is necessary of existence.
Synthesized from (Incoherence VI:10, 12, 17, 18).
Griffel (2009 ch. 6) suggests that al-Ghazali comfortably resorts to an established accident-essence distinction in The Incoherence.
Al-Ghazali’s distinction between how an object is in the world versus possible division via conceptual analysis bears some resemblance to Duns Scotus’s formal distinction. Both consider the distinction between form and matter in existing compounds to be one of real difference without division in reality. See (Dumont 2005), especially (pp. 40–41).
Cohen (2013) seems to endorse this as a plausible reading of Aristotle’s own understanding of accidental unities. He writes: “A pale horse is no more capable of existing in a world in which pallor does not exist than a cube is capable of existing in a world in which there are no squares, but that does not deprive the compounds [i.e. accidental unities] of their ontological priority. Just as cubes are not constructed out of squares, neither is a pale horse constructed out of pallor. A pale horse may be analyzed, à la Lewis, as this horse + pallor, but it is not constructed out of those ingredients. The accident is only a definitional, but not an ontological, constituent of the compound. The accidental compound is ontologically prior to the accident that is one of its (definitional) constituents.”
“…we can regard the divine essence not as an individual thing in its own right but rather as that which, together with the requisite “Form”, constitutes a Person. Each Person will then be a compound structure whose matter is the divine essence and whose form is one of the three distinctive Trinitarian properties.”
This was also anticipated in Christian circles by Palamas (1988), especially (p. 233).
References
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Acknowledgments
This study would not have been possible without the contributions and guidance of Hud Hudson. I also owe this paper to my independent study partner, Danielle Payton, for her insightful and rigorous comments and revisions. I also offer my thanks to all colleagues and staff of the Western Washington University philosophy department. My blind reviewers are to be thanked for their knowledgeable recommendations, prompting me to re-examine Frank Griffel’s foundational study of al-Ghazali, and to consider how Duns Scotus’s formal distinction relates to the Aristotelian “division in contemplation” seemingly employed by al-Ghazali. Finally, Jon McGinnis’s clear, concise Avicenna paper (McGinnis 2006) loosely inspired the organizational structure of my paper.
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Martin, N. Simplicity’s Deficiency: Al-Ghazali’s Defense of the Divine Attributes and Contemporary Trinitarian Metaphysics. Topoi 36, 665–673 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9400-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9400-5