De Lacy O'Leary

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He admits the attributes of God and regards them as eternal, but treats them on lines very similar to those employed by the Christians in dealing with the divine hypostases, that is to say, they are not external things possessed by God but modes or phases of the divine essence. The will of God for example, he treats as a mode of knowledge, that is to say that God wills what is good is equivalent to saying that God knows it to be good. ”

“ The new difficulties were especially concerned with the qualities of God and, later, with the Qur'anic promise of the beatific vision. The problem of the qualities of God is very closely parallel to the earlier difficulty as to the eternity of the Qur'an, indeed it appears as an enlargement of it. Christian theologians educated in the methods of Greek philosophy had already debated this matter, and in their hands it had taken the form of the question, "how many, and what, attributes are compatible with the unity of God?" ”

“ For the most part the Mu'tazilites took the lax view that these would be favourably treated as against the rigorist opinion which reserved eternal salvation to good Muslims, an opinion which appeared amongst the stricter believers during the 'Umayyad period. The two first named of an-Nazzam's pupils, however, introduced a new theory entirely repugnant to orthodox Islam, though familiar to the extremer Shi'ite sects, that those neither decisively good nor absolutely bad, pass by transmigration into other bodies until they finally deserve either salvation or damnation. ”

“ Abbad as-Sulami (d. 220) describes God as creating substances but not accidents, so that he produced a kind of universal matter common to all existing things and to this matter or essence the accidents are added, some produced by a force inherent in the essence created, others by free will on the part of the creature. Following the neo-Platonic commentators on Aristotle he treats the attributes of God as purely negative, so that God is unknowable by man. ”

“ Hence the attributes of God cannot be such as the positive qualities which exist in man, but only the negation of those which are distinctively human and dependent: we can only say that he is infinite, meaning unlimited in space, or eternal as unlimited in time, or other like terms negative of the known things which can be predicated of man. ”

“ The latter held that the attributes of God are distinct modes of being, we know the essence under such varying modes or conditions, but they are not states, nor are they thinkable apart from the essence, though they are distinct from it but do not exist apart from it. Against this his father objected that these subjective attributes are only names and convey no concept. The attributes are thus asserted to be neither qualities nor states so as to imply subject or agent, but they are inseparably united with the essence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Islam generally had expected the vision of God to be the chief of the rewards enjoyed in paradise, but the treatment of the attributes of God had been so definitely against the anthropomorphic ideas expressed in the Qur'an that it became difficult to explain what could be meant by "seeing God." ”

“ More or less directly prompted by the Mu'tazilite controversy we have three other lines of development: in the first place we have the "philosophers" as the name is used by the Arabic writers, meaning those students and commentators who based their work directly on the Greek text or at least on the later and better versions. In their hands philosophical enquiry took a somewhat changed direction as they began to understand better the real meaning of what Aristotle had taught. ”

“ The older Mu'tazilite tradition came to an end in the time of al-Ash'ari: men who felt the force of philosophical questions either adopted the orthodox scholasticism of al-Ash'ari and those who came after him, or followed the course of the philosophers and drift away from the traditional beliefs of Islam altogether. In the third place we have the Sufi movement, in which we find neo-Platonic elements mingled with others from the east, from India and Persia. ”

“ In this he was typical of the earlier Arabic philosophers whose endeavour was to apply Greek science to the interpretation of life and nature generally, an aim which necessarily tended to produce encyclopædic compilations rather than original studies in any one field of knowledge. Already the Mu'tazilites had reached the position that good and evil represent objective realities and that God, knowing the good, does not will that which is contrary to it ”

“ If God's wisdom, whether expressed in the Qur'an or not expressed, were eternal there was something which God possessed, and consequently something other than God which was equal to him in eternity and was not created by him, so that it could not be said that God was alone and that all other things proceeded from him as their cause as the eternal quality always was side by side with God, and so Wasil b. ”

“ These returned to a crude anthropomorphism and held that God not only has qualities of precisely the same kind as a man may have, but that he actually sits on a throne, etc., taking in plain literal sense all the statements made in the Qur'an. ”