TY - JOUR
AU - Langermann, Y Tzvi
AB - This is a most welcome reissue of Davidson’s highly praised book, first published in 1987. The combination in a single book of arguments for the existence of God with arguments for or against the eternity of the universe is neither arbitrary nor a matter of convenience. As Davidson lucidly explains in his introduction, there was no ‘public atheism’ in the medieval period. All Jewish and Islamic thinkers accepted the existence of a deity. However, their conceptions of the deity differed, most critically with regard to the question, does the deity—in addition to other qualities—possess will? The answer hinges, as affirmed by Moses Maimonides—one of Davidson’s chief sources—on the question of the creation or eternity. A created universe is the product of a willful God. In kalām proofs for the existence of God, ‘the indispensable premise is creation’, a method that has been labeled Platonic (p. 2). Though distinguished from each other by a host of major disagreements, philosophy and kalām are coloured to some extent one by the other. From the perspective of both, an argument for creation is an argument for a willful deity. Davidson might also have added that a third major issue in theology is no less intimately woven in here: the divine attributes. Al-Ghazālī ‘stresses that volition is integral to an adequate concept of the deity, that unless a proof establishes a first cause possessed of will, it is not a genuine proof of the existence of God’ (p. 5). But every proof for existence, whether or not the world is thought to be created, ‘must at some stage … presuppose a definition of God, a set of specifications requisite and sufficient for the deity’ (p. 3). Hence, even thinkers like Maimonides, who firmly reject the assignment of any positive attributes to the deity, must find some way to attach a ‘set of specifications’ to the deity. I have tried to show that Maimonides does this chiefly by way of his thirteen fundamental principles of belief.1 The book treats medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy as a single philosophical tradition. The project is defined as an attempt ‘to trace the history of philosophic constructions rather than reproduce the complete system of any individual philosopher or philosophic school’ (p. 7). Davidson aims for complete coverage of all the arguments, though he admits that he may have overlooked some. The critical criterion for inclusion of an argument in the book—and this bears heavily on the kalām arguments—is that it answer Davidson’s standard for being classified as philosophic. Davidson is well aware of the difficulty of precisely demarcating the philosophical from the non-philosophical. He is nonetheless confident that ‘any thoughtful acceptation of the term will distinguish philosophy from pure theology, from speculation whose underlying premises are founded entirely on religious faith, and will also exclude from the domain of philosophy enunciations that fall below some minimal level of plausibility’ (p. 6). Clearly, Davidson will rely on his judgment and intuition, both of which have earned the respect of scholars over the last half-century, in deciding which arguments deserve a place in his book. The starting point for the arguments of interest is almost always Aristotle. However, the late Greek philosophers often played a decisive role in shaping the direction of the argument and the articulation of its components; Proclus and especially Philoponus are particularly important in this regard. Davidson labels fleshing out the role of those two thinkers as a ‘subordinate theme’ (p. 7) of the book. In fact, Davidson’s first major contribution on this front was his seminal study of the influence of Philoponus upon Saʿadya Gaon, published in 1965;2 in the limited space at my disposal, I will turn first to Philoponus. Although direct translations into Arabic of Philoponus’ writings on creation are few and usually fragmentary, there exists ‘ample evidence that Philoponus’ proofs were accessible to readers of Arabic’. Davidson further asserts that ‘Philoponus became a most important source for medieval proofs of creation’ (p. 94). Davidson is interested above all in the arguments. Philoponus distinguished, as one should, between arguments refuting those of the proponents of eternity from those that aim to prove creation. He constructs his own arguments with care, basing them upon Aristotelian principles which are creatively turned on their head. For example, in De Generatione Aristotle rejects the theory that the elements are transformed linearly ad infinitum, e.g., water becoming air, air becoming fire, and so on; his reasoning is that some of the elements would have to come into being after an infinite number of transformations, which would violate the rule that ‘the infinite cannot be transversed’. Hence, the four elements must transform, or revert, one into the other in a circular pattern. Philoponus counters: this solution accounts only for the matter underlying the four types of element. Nonetheless, any given particle of matter must still traverse an infinite series of transformations to become what it is at a given instant. Hence Aristotle’s rule that ‘the infinite cannot be transversed’ is violated nonetheless, and eternity is refuted. A second argument rests on the Peripatetic principle (Davidson observes that Aristotle himself appears to deny it) that the infinite cannot be increased; one infinite cannot be greater than another. But in an eternal world, the infinite number of previous motions (or events) is constantly being increased. Hence the number of past events must be finite. The third argument builds on the first two. Referring now to the heavens, Philoponus argues that the presumably infinite number of revolutions of an inner planet is forever being multiplied, since Jupiter completes about three revolutions for every one of Saturn. The infinite is always being traversed and increases to boot. So much for the refutation of eternity; the argument for creation is more complex. Aristotle showed that the finite universe, which is a body, must rely on an immaterial cause for its infinite motion; Proclus took the notion further, showing that the immaterial cause is needed for its infinite existence. But since the finite universe cannot sustain itself on its own, Philoponus said, it must be potentially destructible, hence, by Aristotelian principles, it will at some time be destroyed, and, again on Aristotelian grounds, whatever is destroyed must have been generated. Philoponus’ proofs are, of course, more detailed than this, and they are supplemented by auxiliary arguments. Davidson then matches the arguments displayed by the early Jewish mutakallim Saʿadya and Muslim philosopher al-Kindī (the labels are for convenience only), sorting out their arguments step by step, and showing why and how certain steps clearly derive from Philoponus, while others may do so or certainly do not do so. Davidson is sure that their proofs ultimately derive from Philoponus, though neither thinker mentions ‘John the Grammarian’ (as he was known in the Arabic-speaking world). Davidson is not particularly worried by his inability to trace a clear line of transmission, or by his need to speculate about hypothetical texts that conveyed Philoponus’ proofs. It is not that he doesn’t care about such things; it is rather his conviction that the resemblance between the arguments ‘is not fortuitous’ (p. 106). In his brilliant presentation of arguments from particularization—the claim that certain features of the universe can be accounted for only as the deliberate choice of their maker—Davidson closely compares the arguments of three thinkers: al-Juwaynī, whose thought is firmly within kalām; al-Ghazālī, a mutakallim whose major work on the topic, the Tahāfut, confronts Avicennan philosophy in its own terms, by means of arguments ‘that are purged of Kalam elements’ (p. 194); and Maimonides, who expressly rejects kalām physics. Davidson discerns a ‘progression … in the phenomena adduced as evidence’ (p. 202). Al-Juwaynī accepts evidence from the characteristics of individual objects, since, according to the kalām, these are not determined by natural forces. Al-Ghazālī ‘tacitly’ concedes the operation of natural forces, and finds his evidence in the ‘sheer arbitrariness … in features of the celestial region having nothing at all to recommend them over the alternatives’ (p. 203). For Maimonides, the irregularity in the structure of the world is paramount. But does this progression mean that each thinker was building on the ideas of his predecessor? There is no question that al-Ghazālī would have known the work of his teacher al-Juwaynī; and the century-old intuition of Martin Schreiner that al-Juwaynī was the mutakallim who exercised the greatest influence upon Maimonides was confirmed in a major study by the late Michael Schwarz.3 But did Maimonides know of al-Ghazālī’s contributions? This is a major focus of Maimonidean studies of late, and Davidson strongly indicates that the question is to be answered in the affirmative. ‘Maimonides rethinks al-Ghazali’s reasoning’ (p. 197), he avers, adding later that the ‘evidence of particularization adduced by Maimonides is unmistakably related to the evidence’ (p. 199) displayed by al-Ghazālī. Yet the differences between the two that Davidson so lucidly arrays cause me to question whether al-Ghazālī’s arguments are indeed the starting points for those of Maimonides. One example must suffice: the reason that Maimonides features the irregularity in the heavens rather than any arbitrariness therein is his investigation into the biblical sacrifices. Why were two sheep offered every Sabbath instead of, say, three? Since a choice had to be made between similar alternatives, it is senseless to ask why a given alternative was preferred. Is there anything at all to suggest this line of thought in al-Ghazālī? In fact, Davidson himself notes that a similar consideration had already been proposed by Philoponus (p. 199). This review has hardly done justice to Davidson’s achievement; I have not said anything about his penetrating studies of Avicenna, Averroes, and Crescas, as well as a host of lesser figures. The proofs that are closely examined in over four hundred dense pages are grouped into just twenty-five distinct arguments in the ‘Inventory of Proofs’ (Appendix B): two categories of proofs for eternity, listed with their sub-categories and the creationist responses, and two categories of proofs of creation and their subcategories, about half of which also have eternalist responses. As more texts become available—and much has been supplemented to the library of kalām texts in particular since 1980, the date of the books’ completion, seven years before its publication—this neat classification will make it easier for scholars to determine if anything new has been added in the way of an argument. Footnotes 1 Y. Tzvi Langermann, In and Around Maimonides: Original Essays (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2021), 28–32. 2 H. A. Davidson, ‘John Philoponus as a source of medieval Islamic and Jewish proofs of creation’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 89 (1969): 357–91. 3 M. Schwarz, ‘Who were Maimonides’ Mutakallimūn: some remarks on Guide of the Perplexed, part 1 chapter 73’ (First Part) Maimonidean Studies, 2 (1991): 159–209, at 161. © The Author(s) (2023). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. 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TI - Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy By Herbert A. Davidson
JO - Journal of Islamic Studies
DO - 10.1093/jis/etad004
DA - 2023-01-23
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/proofs-for-eternity-creation-and-the-existence-of-god-in-medieval-FjzIBFX5S9
SP - 247
EP - 250
VL - 34
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -