Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s Philosophical
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all these complications? Why not simply create human souls and place them into paradise? For an Ash ¶arite, there is no answer to this question and thus no reason to ask. Yet in this particular question, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ clearly goes beyond the Ash ¶arite approach and ventures to answer the problem openly, albeit without discus- sion. The arrangements of the world in which we live are those of the best of all possible worlds. This world cannot be better, because it is already the best possible. It also cannot be worse, because God decided in His mercy not to satisfy Himself with less than what is the best. The arrangement is therefore determined by God’s decision to create the best possible world. In his Revival, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ states a few times that God’s actions are neces- sary. One of the most outspoken passages is in the thirty-fi fth book, which c a us e s a nd e ffe c t s in THE REVIVAL OF RELIGIOUS SCIENCES 2 3 3
focuses on tawh.ı¯d, shortly before al-Ghaza¯lı¯ writes that this creation is the best possible one. In this passage, creation is described as a necessary process: Everything between the heaven and the earth happens according to a necessary arrangement and a binding rightness and one cannot imagine that it would be different from how it happens or different from this arrangement that is found. What comes later comes later only because it waits for its condition. The conditioned ( al-mashru¯t. ) is impossible before the condition ( al-shart. ). The impossible cannot be described as being within God’s power. Therefore knowledge only comes after the sperm because the condition of life needs to be ful- fi lled, and volition only comes after knowledge because the condition of knowledge needs to be fulfi lled. All this is the way of the necessary ( minha¯j al-wa¯jib ) and the arrangement of the rightness ( tartı¯b al-
is through wisdom and ordering. 89
and contains a “binding rightness” ( h.aqq la¯zim ) that cannot be otherwise. The necessity of God’s actions exists “through wisdom and ordering” ( bi-h.ikma wa-tadbı¯r ); wisdom dictates the conditions of the best of all possible worlds, and God choose to abide by its precepts. The necessity of God’s creation also appears in the thirty-second book of his Revival. In a sentence that we have already quoted above, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ says that “nothing preceding precedes and nothing following follows except by means of the rightness and the necessity ( bi-l-h.aqq wa-l-luzu¯m ).” 90 The necessity of God’s order is also expressed in the passage where he describes the best of all possible worlds as created “according to the necessary right arrangement” ( ¶ala¯ l-tartı¯b al-wa¯jib al-h.aqq ) and “in accord to what should be” ( ¶ala¯ ma¯ yanbaghı¯ ). 91 The necessity in this passage need not be the absolute necessity of Avicenna, but rather a necessity relative to the deci- sion to create the best possible world. We have thus far given a relatively smooth interpretation of different motifs in the Revival. If these interpretations were all that have been proposed, however, al-Ghaza¯li would not be seen as such a controversial author. The above quoted passage includes at least one formula that cannot be explained by referring to the necessities that spring from the decision to create the best of all possible worlds. Whereas it is plausible that the best order requires that God’s actions abide with certain conditions, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ continues and says that any arrangement differ- ent from what exists is impossible, and “the impossible cannot be described as being within God’s power” ( al-muh.a¯l la¯ yu¯s.afu bi-kawnihi maqdu¯r
There are two ways to understand impossibility in this sentence, a strong way and a weak way. Triggered by this passage, Richard M. Frank proposed these two interpretations. 92 Frank prefers the strong way of understanding im- possibility, which suggests that God’s actions have to comply with the necessity of God’s nature. God must follow His generosity ( ju¯d ); God must create the best of all possible worlds. When al-Ghaza¯lı¯ says, Frank has argued, that God’s
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¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y decisions are made by pure free choice ( ikhtiya¯r mah.d. ), he simply means that God is not distracted from choosing what is truly benefi cial ( khayr ) for His creation. In reality, however, God cannot help choosing the good, which means that effectively He does not actually choose and cannot make free decisions about His actions. The creation of this world proceeds from His lack of lib- erty as a necessary act. Reading such strong sense into the words “impossible” and “necessary” assumes that the actions of al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s God—like the God of Avicenna—are determined by His nature. This is the God of the fala¯sifa whose will is identical with His knowledge and His essence. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯, however, rejected the idea that creation takes place as a direct and inevitable consequence of God’s being. In Avicenna, God’s knowledge is the origin of the best of all possible worlds. In al-Ghaza¯lı¯, however, it is God’s will. God chooses to be generous, and this choice is undetermined. God’s will is therefore the undetermined determining factor of creation. This idea is ex- pressed forcefully in many of his writings, and Frank acknowledges the impor- tance of this motif in al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s theology. 93 Failing to detach God’s will from His knowledge and thus constructing a God who acts out of necessity rather than out of His decisions is al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s main objection against the fala¯sifa in his Incoherence. 94 For al-Ghaza¯lı¯, it is an affront to reason to claim that it is not in God’s power to create this world differently from how it is. Because we can easily imagine this world to be larger or smaller, for instance, it is therefore not impos- sible for it to have been created larger or smaller. The world was possible before it came into existence, and God was never incapable of creating it. 95 In his Letter for Jerusalem, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ says that God chooses what He creates among the alter- native ( d.idd ) of not creating it. 96 In the context of Ash ¶arite theology, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ expresses the divine liberum arbitrium —the divine capacity to choose freely—in the tenet that God’s will and His knowledge are, like His life, power, hearing, seeing, and His speech, attributes that are not identical to but rather “additional to God’s essence” ( za¯ 7id ¶ala¯ l-dha¯t ). 97 The ubiquity and forceful presentation of this theological motif makes it all but impossible to accept Frank’s strong inter- pretation of why another creation would not be within God’s power to create. The impossibility of any other creation means—according to a second, weaker reading—that the existence of what God does not will to create (that which He knows will never exist) though possible in itself, is actually impos- sible. This formulation refers to the Farabian distinction between the two types of necessities, restated by al-Ghaza¯lı¯ in his Balanced Book. Any future contin- gency that God knows He will not create is “possible with regard to itself,” yet “impossible with regard to something else,” meaning impossible with regard to God’s foreknowledge. Creating what is not part of God’s foreknowledge can- not happen, even if it remains possible in itself. It would turn God’s knowledge into ignorance, and that is simply impossible. Therefore, one can say that what- ever is not part of God’s foreknowledge “is not within God’s power to create in the sense that its existence would amount to an impossibility.” 98 A creation different from this one is not impossible in absolute terms, as God could have chosen to create it. But it remains impossible relative to the choices God has already made.
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Cosmology in Works Written after The Revival At various points in his Revival, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ describes God’s creation as a network of conditions ( shuru ¯t. ). Only the fulfi llment of particular conditions enables God to bring new beings and new events into ex- istence. Humans understand these conditions as causal connections, in the way that God wishes humans to understand conditions; it is God who creates the human’s cognitions. Yet causal connections are not the only viable explanation for how God’s creation comes about. It may also be the case that God creates the fulfi llment of a condi- tion directly and mono-causally and that He produces the event that follows the fulfi llment of that condition in the same way. The condi- tion for the combustion of cotton, for instance, is that fi re touches it. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ maintains that God may actually create the touching of the fi re to the cotton and the combustion of the cotton as two inde- pendent consecutive events. Alternatively, it may be the case that God causally connects the cotton’s combustion to the fi re’s touching it. In both cases, however, God is the ultimate effi cient cause of the cotton’s combustion. In the fi rst explanation, God would be the im- mediate cause; in the second, He acts as the only effi cient cause at the head of a chain of secondary causes whose effect is the cotton’s combustion. Al-Ghaza¯lı¯ seems to have chosen this uncommitted position quite early in his career. Once he decided that there was no epistemo- logical criterion that could determine which of the two explanations was true, he no longer seemed bothered by the question. He only dis- cusses the equal possibility of these two explanations in his very last work, written shortly before his death, which I will discuss later in this chapter. In most of his writings, however, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ teaches an understanding of the universe in which the cosmological alternative
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¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y between occasionalism and secondary causality does not appear. For instance, when he teaches that there is a causal connection between the human’s knowledge and the way the human acts, such a connection is viable in both kinds of universes. In his Revival of the Religious Sciences , al-Ghaza¯lı¯ wishes to convey the understanding that one bears responsibility for one’s place in the afterlife and that this care requires focusing on one’s actions. However, actions are triggered by a will and motives, which in turn depend on one’s knowledge. Consequently, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ wishes his readers to acquire the kind of knowledge that can turn this causal chain toward the right direction. This perspective is different from that of earlier Ash ¶arites, who taught that ful- fi lling the prescriptions of Shari’a can gain one a place in the afterlife. The Revival ’s underlying assumption is that the right kind of knowledge leads to the development of a good character ( khalq ), which will almost automatically lead to good actions and redemption in the afterlife. The connections between these elements—including the connection between human actions in this world and redemption in the afterlife—may be described as causal. God’s Creation as an Apparatus: The Simile of the Water Clock The theological notion that God creates and controls everything in His crea- tion through a network of harmoniously interdependent events was more im- portant for al-Ghaza¯lı¯ than committing himself to one specifi c cosmology. In many books of the Revival, the connections between events are referred to as “conditions” ( shuru
( asba¯b ) because that is how most readers are familiar with them. God creates a network of causes and effects in order to accomplish a goal, and that network can be likened to an apparatus that produces a certain outcome. In his com- mentary on the ninety-nine names of God titled The Highest Goal in Explaining
in his Book of the Forty ( al-Arba ¶ı¯n ), al-Ghaza¯lı¯ introduces a key metaphor and compares God’s creation to the apparatus of a clepsydra, or a water clock. In both books, the water clock is used as an explanatory simile for how God’s creation is an expression of His will and how it gives evidence to His wisdom. In The Highest Goal, the simile is used to clarify the divine name al- H . akam , a word that originally referred to God’s role as an arbitrator of human actions but that al-Ghaza¯lı¯ uses to refer to God as the holder of absolute wisdom. In the relatively long chapter on the divine attribute of will ( ira¯da ) in the Book
1 This latter work must have been composed slightly before the Book of Forty . Both works fall in the period after the Revival when al-Ghaza¯lı¯ taught at his own small madrasa in T.a¯bara¯n-T.u¯s. They were written some time after 490/1097 and completed before al-Ghaza¯lı¯ began teaching at the Niz.a¯miyya madrasa in Nishapur in 499/1106. 2
familiar from the Revival, such as God being the one “who makes all causes c os m olo g y in wor k s w r i t t e n a f t er THE REVIVAL 2 3 7
function as causes” ( musabbib kull al-asba¯b ) and who creates an orderly arrange- ment of causes ( tadbı¯r al-asba¯b ). Yet, he also presents something new here: the idea that God’s arrangement is the “origin of the causes’ positioning in order for them to lead to the effects.” 3 The causes are positioned so that they “turn toward” ( tawajjaha ) the effects; they are brought in an alignment ( tawjı¯h ) with the effects. 4
terrelated movements, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ says in this passage, identifying the universal causes ( al-asba¯b al-kulliyya ) as the celestial spheres. As elsewhere, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ avoids using technical terms from the lexicon of the astronomers and philoso- phers and lists the celestial bodies in a language that borrows from the Qur’an and h.adı¯th . The universal causes are “earth, the seven heavens, the stars, and the spheres”; they are not subject to change and will never cease to be “until what is written is fulfi lled” (Q 2:235). 5 Next, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ explains the three divine actions that determine God’s creation: God’s judgment ( h.ukm ), God’s decree ( qad.a¯ 7) , and God’s predestination ( qadar ). The divine judgment is the initial design of the world; it is “the universal fi rst arrangement and the eternal com- mand ( al-amr al-azalı¯ ), which is like a momentary glance.” The divine decree is the concrete creation of the world, the “positioning” (or laying down, wad. ¶) of the universal and constant causes, meaning the celestial spheres. Divine pre- destination ( qadar ) “is the alignment ( tawjı¯h ) of the universal causes by means of their decreed and calculated movements towards their effects.” These ef- fects are “temporal events” ( h.awa¯dith ) implying—in contrast with the teach- ings of the fala¯sifa —that all effects, even those in the heavens, are generated in time and will corrupt. The effects are numbered and limited and have a known measure that neither increases nor decreases. 6
appear in other parts of the commentary on the divine names. 7 In order to explain them better, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ presents his reader with a simile ( mitha¯l ). ”Per- haps,” he addresses his reader, “you have seen the clock ( s.andu¯q al-sa ¶a¯t ) by which the times of prayer are announced.” The clock to which he refers is likely not an imaginary one, but rather a real clepsydra with which many of his initial readers were familiar. For those readers who may not have seen it, al-Ghaza¯lı¯ describes the sight: There must be in it a device in the form of a cylinder containing a known amount of water and another hollow device placed within the cylinder [fl oating] above the water with a string attached. One end of the string is tied to this hollow device while its other end is tied to the bottom of a small container ( z.arf ) placed above the hollow cylinder. In that container is a ball, and below it there is a shallow metal box ( t.a¯s ) placed in such a way that if the ball falls down from the container it falls into the metal box and its tinkling is heard. Furthermore, an aperture of a certain size is made in the bottom of the cylindrical device so that the water runs out of it little by little. As the water level is lowered, the hollow device placed on the surface
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¯ ’ s ph ilosoph ic a l t h e olo g y of the water will be lowered, thus pulling the string attached to it and moving the container with the ball in it with a movement which nearly tilts it over. Once it is tilted, the ball rolls out of it and falls into the metal box and tinkles. At the end of each hour, a single ball falls. 8
This water clock is of a quite simple design (fi gure 9.1). A fl oat swims on the surface of a basin of water, connected by a string to a half-open container above it. Once the water level has fallen to such a degree that the string stretches, the string draws on the container and tilts it to one side. When it is tilted to a horizontal position, a metal ball falls into a metal box and makes a noise. Like most clocks of this period, it did not measure equal hours but rather measured a time span determined by the time of daylight; an “hour” was likely the span figure 9.1
Al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s water clock (s.andu¯q al-sa¯ ¶a). Container (zarf)
Metal Ball (kura) Cylinder
(ustwana) Water
Aperature (thagb) Metal Box (tas) Hollow Device (ala mujawwafa) String
(khayt) c os m olo g y in wor k s w r i t t e n a f t er THE REVIVAL 2 3 9
between two prayer times. Since the time intervals vary in length throughout the day and from day to day throughout the year, the clock needed to be set again after each “hour.” Historians have documented the existence of far more advanced water clocks from this time. For instance, an impressive water clock of unknown design is said to have been among the presents Charlemagne received from vassals of Ha¯ru¯n al-Rashı¯d in 191/807. 9 When in 478/1085, Castilian troops conquered Toledo in Spain, they were impressed by a large and complex water clock although the new rulers destroyed its mechanism in 538/1133–34 when they began to study it. 10 Because al-Ghaza¯lı¯ expected his readers to know the device to which he refers, we can assume that his water clock likely stood in T.u¯s or in Nishapur. Abu¯-l Fath. al-Kha¯zinı¯, a Greek slave by origin, worked in Khorasan as an astronomer at the court of Sanjar and left us a chapter in his book on technical devices on the construction of water clocks. Al-Kha¯zinı¯, however, begun his activity in the decade following al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s death, and the water clocks he describes are much more complex than the one sketched out by al-Ghaza¯lı¯. In his 515/1121–22 book, for instance, we read about a steelyard clepsydra that worked equal hours. 11 The early sixth/twelfth century was a high period for clock-making in Khorasan. Muh.ammad al-Sa¯ ¶a¯tı¯ (d. 569/1174), for instance, the builder of a famous water clock in Damascus at the Jayru ¯n Gate, east of the Umayyad Mosque, moved to Damascus from Khorasan in 549/1154. 12
In al-Ghaza¯lı¯’s clock, the time between the set-up and the falling of a ball is determined by the speed with which the water level in the basin falls. That speed, in turn, is “due to the determination ( taqdı¯r ) of the size ( sa ¶a ) of the ap- Download 4.03 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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