De Lacy O'Leary

“ It is this spirit, the rational soul which has entered from outside and exists in man alone, which is immortal. Such a doctrine sets an impassible gulf between man and the rest of creation, and explains why it is impossible for those whose thought is formed on Aristotelian lines, whether in orthodox Islam or in the Catholic Church, to admit the "rights" of animals, although ready to regard benevolent action towards them as a duty. ”

“ Even in speculative matters a surer guidance is often furnished by religious tradition than by the speculations of philosophers. God created all things from nothing; the attempt to explain the presence of imperfection and evil in the world by the theory of the eternity of matter, or by the operation of laws of nature is futile; those laws themselves must refer back to God. The difficulty arising from the mingling of evil with good in creation is admitted; the real solution is unknown, but it must be maintained that creation was the work of God in spite of the difficulties which this presents. ”

“ He agrees with al-Ash'ari in holding that the world and all it contains have been created by God from nothing: it consists of substances and attributes. The substances exist in themselves, either as compounds, such as bodies, or as non-compounds, as essences which are indivisible. Attributes have no separate existence, but depend for their existence on bodies or essences. God is not essence, nor attribute, nor body, nor anything formed, bounded, numbered, limited, nor compounded. ”

“ But this culture came as a living thing with an unbroken and continuous development from what we call the "classic" age. As the philosophy of the great classic schools passes down to these later periods it shows great modifications, but this alteration is itself a proof of life. Philosophy, like religion, in so far as it has a real vitality, must change and adapt itself to altered conditions and new requirements: it can remain pure and true to its past only in so far as its life is artificial and unreal, lived in an academic atmosphere far removed from the life of the community at large. ”

“ By this time, some three-quarters of a century after the death of Ibn Sina, Arabic philosophy was almost extinct in Asia and was treated as a dangerous heresy. In Egypt, it is true, there was a greater degree of toleration, though less than in the golden age of the Fatimids, but Egypt was regarded with suspicion as the home of heresy and of forms of superstition which were uncongenial to the philosopher. Spain thus becomes the place of refuge for Muslim philosophy as it had already become the nursery of Jewish speculation. ”

“ Under the head of Physics Ibn Sina considers the forces observed in nature, including all that are in the soul, save only that which is peculiar to the rational soul of man. These forces are of three kinds: some, such as weight, are an essential part of the body in which they occur; others are external to the body on which they act, and are such as cause movement or rest; and others, again, are such as the faculties possessed by the non-rational souls of the spheres, which produce movement directly without external impulse. No force is infinite ”

“ On closer examination, however, it does not appear that Buddhist influence can have been very strong, as there are essential differences between Sufi and Buddhist theories. A superficial resemblance exists between the Buddhist nirvana and the fana or re-absorption of the soul in the Divine Spirit of Sufism. But the Buddhist doctrine represents the soul as losing its individuality in the passionless placidity of absolute quiescence, whilst the Sufi doctrine, though also teaching a loss of individuality, regards everlasting life as consisting in the ecstatic contemplation of the Divine Beauty. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas must be regarded as the prince of the Latin scholastics, for it is he who first draws freely upon metaphysics and psychology and co-ordinates them with theology—the psychological analysis given in the Secunda secundae of the Summa is one of the best products of the Latin scholastics—and also he was the first to appreciate correctly the difficulties of translation and insist on an accurate rendering as essential to an understanding of Aristotle. ”

“ Like many who have been bred in poverty and have afterwards suddenly come into great wealth, the Arabs behaved as though their wealth was inexhaustible: each governor bought his appointment from the state and it became a recognised custom for him to exact a cash payment from the outgoing governor, and then he was free to raise what he could from his defenceless subjects to prepare for the day when his opportunities of exaction came to an end. The thoroughly unsatisfactory condition of the 'Umayyad financial system was one of the leading causes of their fall. ”

“ The popular beliefs he does not accept, but he regards them as wisely designed to teach morality and to develop piety amongst the people at large; the true philosopher allows no word to be uttered against established religion, which is a thing necessary for the welfare of the people. Aristotle he regards as the supreme revelation of God to man: with it religion is in total agreement, but as religion is known to the multitude it only partially discloses Divine truth and adapts it to the practical needs of the many ”

“ The fall of the 'Umayyads and the replacing of the Arabs by the Persians commences the golden age of Arabic literature and scholarship. The older Arabic literature, that namely which was written by Arabs as yet untouched by external influences, consists entirely of poetry, the work of professional bards who sing of desert life and warfare, lament over the deserted camping grounds, boast of their tribe, and abuse their enemies. It forms a distinct class of poetic composition, which has developed its own literary standards, and attained a high standard of excellence in its way. ”

“ The culture of modern Europe derives from that of the Roman Empire, itself the multiple resultant of many forces, amongst which the intellectual life of Hellenism was most effective, but worked into a coherent system by the wonderful power of organization, which was one of the most salient characteristics of that Empire. ”

“ He attempted to reproduce the ancient doctrine that the soul is the form of the body, as had already been asserted by Aristotle, but he misunderstood the terminology employed and represents the soul as of the same shape as the body. This implies that the soul is a very subtile kind of substance permeating the whole body in the same way as butter permeates milk, or as oil permeates the sesame: both soul and body are equal in size and alike in shape. Freedom of the will is peculiar to God and man, all other created things are subject to necessity. ”

“ Thus the scholastic theologians, both of Islam and of Latin Christianity, attack the philosophers as undermining belief in individual personality and in opposing the doctrine of the resurrection, and in this latter, it must be remembered, Muslim doctrine is committed to cruder details than prevail in Christianity. But al-Farabi did not see where the Aristotelian teaching would lead him: to him Aristotle seemed orthodox because his doctrines seemed to prove the immortality of the soul. ”

“ The substances perceived by us are atoms which come into existence from vacuity and drop out of existence again. Thus, when a body moves from one position to another the atoms in the first position cease to be, and a group of new similar atoms come into existence in the second position, so that movement involves a series of annihilations and creations.
The cause of these changes is God, the only permanent and absolute reality. There is no secondary cause, as there are no laws of nature; in every case God acts directly upon each atom. ”

“ The doctrine of an Absolute Reality as the necessary cause of all that is variable, something like the fulcrum which Archimedes needed to move the world, was one to which all philosophy, and especially the Plantonic school, was tending. But, as causation to some extent implies change, this First Cause could not be regarded as directly creating the world, but only as the eternal source of an eternally proceeding emanation by means of which the power of the First Cause is projected so as to produce the universe and all it contains. ”

“ This was inevitable, for Jewish thought had as yet been much less influenced by philosophy than was the case with the Muslims. He objects also to the description of the soul as intellect, more it would appear because common usage confined "intellectual activity" too much to philosophical speculation, and especially he protested against the implication that only souls of philosophers were finally united to the Agent Intellect. The soul of man is a spiritual substance and imperishable; it does not win immortality by intellectual activity but is necessarily immortal by its own nature. ”

“ Throughout the whole 'Umayyad period we see the conquering Arabs, so far the rulers of the Muslim world, in contact with those who, though treated with arrogant contempt as serfs, were really in possession of a much fuller culture than their rulers. In spite of the haughty attitude of the Arab there was a considerable exchange of thought, and the community of Islam began to absorb Hellenistic influences in several directions, and so the canon law and theology of the Muslims was beginning, at the end of the 'Umayyad period, to be leavened by Greek thought. ”

“ As other than God is merely illusive it is obvious that a knowledge of God the Reality cannot be attained by the medium of created things, and thus the Sufis were led, like the neo-Platonists, to attach greater value to immediate intuition by the rational soul than to the use of arguments, and so to place direct revelation above what is ordinarily described as reason. This is a line of development common to all forms of mysticism, and results in a preference for ecstasy or similar spiritual experience above the record of past revelation as given in the Qur'an. ”

“ It is the end of all philosophy to know this first Cause, which is God, because as He is the cause of all, all can be understood and explained by understanding and knowing Him. That the first Cause is single and one and the cause of all agrees with the teaching of the Qur'an, and al-Farabi freely uses Qur'anic phraseology in perfect good faith, supposing that the Aristotelian doctrine corroborates the doctrine of the Qur'an. ”

“ In the case of wisdom or knowledge, that which is known must either be identical with God, or external to him: if God is the agent who knows and that which is known as object is also himself, there is a distinction between God the agent and God the object which implies two persons, and this is subversive of the divine unity: but if God is the agent and knows something external to himself, that knowledge depends on the external object, and God therefore is not absolute but in some sense dependent on something other than himself. ”

“ The current philosophy had changed from the older standards, not because the degenerate people of those days could not understand the pure doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but because they took philosophy so seriously and earnestly as an explanation of the universe and of man's place in it that they were bound to re-adjust their views in the light of what they regarded as later information, and the views had altered to adjust themselves with the course of human experience. ”

“ Al-Ghazali, following al-Ash'ari, taught that philosophical theory cannot form the basis of religious thought, thus opposing the position of the philosophers. By revelation only can the primary essentials of truth be attained. Philosophy itself is no equal or rival of revelation: it is no more than common sense and regulated thinking, which may be employed by men about religion or any other subject ”

“ The activity of brain and nerves, according to Ibn Rushd, are due to the presence of an external force; not only, as Aristotle teaches, at least according to Alexander Aph.'s interpretation, is the highest faculty of the reason due to the operation of the external one Agent Intellect, but the passive intellect on which this agent acts is itself part of a great universal soul, which is the one source of all life and the reservoir to which the soul returns when the transitory experience of what we call life is finished. ”

“ To free will he gives rather a new bearing. The will he regards as simply a manner of knowing and so as an accident of knowledge; a voluntary act he defines as one known to its agent. Those who are condemned to the fire of hell do not suffer eternally by it, but are changed by its purification. The term "Muslim" must be taken to include all who believe that God has neither form or body, since the attribution of a human form to God is the essential mark of the idolater, that he is just and wills no evil, and that Muhammad is his prophet. ”

“ As it is used in the history of Christian monasticism, or of the devotees of several Indian religions, or even of the latter Sufis, it implies a deliberate avoidance of the normal pleasures and indulgences of human life, and especially of marriage, as things which entangle the soul and prevent its spiritual progress. In this sense asceticism is alien to the spirit of Islam, and appears amongst Muslims only as an exotic. ”

“ It was impossible for churchmen, educated in this atmosphere, to do otherwise than accept these principles, just as it is impossible for us to admit that the body of a saint can be in two places at once, our whole education training us to assume certain limitations of time and space, although a devout Muslim of Morocco can believe it and honours two shrines as each containing the body of the same saint who, he believes, in his life time had power of over-passing the limitations of space. ”

“ Comparing it with Sufism the superficial resemblances are very close, the more so as Sufism borrows a great deal of philosophical, i.e., neo-Platonic terminology, but in fact there is an essential divergence: the Epistles of the brethren represent the emancipation of the soul from matter as the aim of life, and the final result is re-absorption in the Universal Soul, but they represent this emancipation as due to an intellectual force, so that the soul's salvation lies in wisdom and knowledge; it is a cult of intellect. ”

“ The pen, tablet, etc., mentioned in the Qur'an are not mere allegories; they belong to the world of reality, and so are something other than what we see in this world of perception. These three worlds or planes are not separate in time or space, they are rather to be considered as modes of existence.
The theories of the astronomers as to movements of the heavenly bodies are to be accepted—al-Ghazali adhered, of course, to the Ptolemaic system—but these deal only with the lowest plane, the world of sense. Behind all nature is God, who is on the plane of reality. ”

“ Creation meant that God brought in movement so that things began to exist in time and space, and the universe comes to an end when it returns again to the state of absolute rest in which it was at the beginning. ”

“ We cannot say definitely that the doctrine of the unitive state is borrowed from neo-Platonism, from Buddhism, or from Gnosticism; it is the common property of all, and is the natural conclusion from the mystics premises as to the nature of God and of the human soul. It may well be that certain presentations of this doctrine show Indian details, but in this as in all other parts of Sufi speculation it seems that the constructive theory employed in forming a theological system was neo-Platonic: even in mysticism the Greek mind exercised its influence in analysing and constructing hypotheses. ”

“ To begin with there are no degrees in eternity: but, most serious error of all, this idea made God liable to variation, at one period of eternity he had been alone, and then he had become a father: philosophy taught that the First Cause, the True God, is liable to no change, if he is Father now, he must have been so from all eternity: we must understand the Son as the Logos for ever eternally issuing forth from the Father as source. ”