More on Limits to the Divine Will

Pope Benedict XVI

Open to dialogue...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Concerning yesterday's blog entry on God's will being bound by limits that are grounded in God's nature, I've done a bit more digging about online and found an interesting exchange at the Chiesa website between a Catholic scholar of Medieval philosophy and theology, Alessandro Martinetti, and a learned Muslim theologian Aref Ali Nayed: "The Church and Islam: A Sprig of Dialogue Has Sprouted in Regensburg" (Sandro Magister, Chiesa, October 30, 2006)

On this site, Sandro Magister posts material from both Martinetti and Nayed. Apparently, Nayed maintains a website of his own and had responded to Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Ibn Hazm's supposed 'voluntarism', namely, the view that Allah's will is supremely unlimited -- that He is free to contradict himself if He wishes. Nayed's initial response is not cited in full by Magister, but Martinetti quotes from it in his article:

"Unbridled will or Logos? The God of Islam and the Christian God," Alessandro Martinetti

In this article, Martinetti first quotes Nayed's own words:

Reason as a gift from God can never be above God. That is the whole point of Ibn Hazm; a point that was paraphrased in such a mutilated way by Benedict XVI's learned sources. Ibn Hazm, like the Asharite theologians with whom he often contended, did insist upon God's absolute freedom to act. However, Ibn Hazm did recognize, like most other Muslim theologians that God freely chooses, in His compassion towards His creatures, to self-consistently act reasonably so that we can use our reason to align ourselves with His guidance and directive.

Ibn Hazm, like most other Muslim theologians, did hold that God is not externally-bound by anything, including reason. However, at no point does Ibn Hazm claim that God does not freely self-commit Himself and honors such commitments Such divine free-self-committing is Qur'anically propounded 'kataba rabukum ala nafsihi al-Rahma' (Your Lord has committed Himself to compassion). Reason need not be above God, and externally normative to Him. It can be a grace of God that is normative because of God’s own free commitment to acting consistently with it.

A person who believes the last proposition need not be an irrational or un-reasonable human-being, with an irrational or whimsical God! The contrast between Christianity and Islam on this basis is not only unfair, but also quite questionable.

Granted that the Pontiff is striving to convince a secular university that theology has a place in that reason-based setting. However, this should not go so far as to make God subject to an externally-binding reason. Most major Christian theologians, even the reason-loving [Thomas] Aquinas never put reason above God.

Martinetti then observes:

In Nayed's view, then, saint Thomas "never put reason above God." But not placing reason above God is not the same thing as asserting, as Nayed does, that "God is not externally bound by anything, including reason," and that reason "can be a grace of God that is normative because of God's own free commitment to acting consistently with it."

Saint Thomas would never have subscribed to these assertions; on the contrary, he vigorously opposed them. And together with him, the Catholic magisterium does not agree with them, but disputes them. It thus rejects the depiction of a God who "freely chooses, in his compassion towards his creatures, to act reasonably in consistency with himself so that we can use our reason to align ourselves with His guidance and directives."

If asserting that reason is not normative for God, and that God is consistent with himself only out of a supremely free decision and is not externally bound to reason; if this is the same as asserting -- as it seems to me that Nayed does -- that God could exist and act in disdain of reason if only he wished to do so by an act of supreme and limitless freedom, then it is opportune to clarify that Thomas, and with him the Catholic magisterium, rejects this conviction, glimpsing in this an irrational voluntarism incompatible with right reason and with the Catholic faith, as the pope himself remarks in his "lectio" in Regensburg....

Martinetti's point would seem to be that in the Catholic view, reason is not something external to and higher than God that God must submit to, nor is reason merely a means of relating to humanity that God arbitrarily, and in an utterly unconstrained fashion, chooses to adopt.

Rather, God is rational because He is consistent with His own nature, which is a rational nature.

To Martinetti's point, Nayed responds in a follow-up article:

"Our God and Your God is One," by Aref Ali Nayed

In this, he insists that Aquinas and Ibn Hazm agree on God's unconstrained will:

Aquinas affirms, just as most Muslim theologians do, that God is omnipotent and that His Power and Will are utterly efficacious: "God is bound to nobody but Himself. Hence, when it is said that God can only do what He ought, nothing else is meant by this than that God can do nothing but what is befitting to Himself, and just".

"Although this order of things be restricted to what now exists, the divine power and wisdom are not thus restricted. Whence, although no other order would be suitable and good to the things which now are, yet God can do other things and impose upon them another order".

Nayed's citation of Aquinas here misses the point made by Martinetti. I think that when Nayed says that Islam maintains that 'Allah is bound to nothing but Himself' (if I may slightly paraphrase Nayed's citation of Aquinas), he means that Allah is bound by nothing but His own divine, unconstrained will. This is not what Aquinas means. When Aquinas says that 'God is bound to nothing but Himself' (again, my paraphrase), he means that God is bound by nothing but His own nature, which is rational.

Nayed has thus misunderstood Aquinas and thereby missed Martinetti's point.