Yet More on Limits to the Divine Will

Islam

Bowing to Allah's Arbitrary Will?

(Image from Wikipedia)

By looking around more at the Chiesa website, I found a fuller version of Aref Ali Nayed's views. These occur in the same passage that I quoted from yesterday, but on a different Chiesa webpage, "Two Muslim Scholars Comment on the Papal Lecture in Regensburg" (Sandro Magister, Chiesa, October 4, 2006), where Nayed comments upon a passage from the Pope's Regensberg lecture:

Benedict XVI, being a scholar of medieval theology knows that he can not deny certain facts:

"In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions."

This passage, while serving its author's ultimate goal of undermining the theologies mentioned in it, does at least show that Benedict XVI is somewhat aware that other possible theologies do exist, and that Muslim theologians were not alone in caring about the affirmation of God’s sovereignty against human pretensions to govern Him with human criteria.

Here, Nayed appears to be affirming that the voluntarist views of such Nominalists as Duns Scotus are precisely the same as the Muslim view of Allah, and if that is so, then Islam does hold that Allah can willfully flout that principle of noncontradiction. Nayed then dryly observes of the Pope that, "Unfortunately, he goes on to totally undermine such theologies as not being the true 'faith of the Church'." I can see that this is unfortunate for Nayed's claim that the Christian and Muslim views of the deity are identical, but it's certainly not 'unfortunate' for the Pope's argument.

Nayed's larger article is worth reading (despite its strongly ironic but misplaced jabs at Catholicism for its violent history and its deplorable Eurocentrism) but still doesn't seem to me to directly engage with the Pope's point about reason and the nature of God . . . or Allah.

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.

A Rational God?

Jürgen Habermas

Pope Benedict XVI

Katholischen Akademie in Bayern, 2004

(Image from Ignatius Press)

Some of what I've recently been dancing around concerns the relation between faith and reason.

This issue gets oblique attention in several posts, e.g., "Koons on 'logical dilemma' vs. 'paradox' (re: grace or works)" "A Gnostic Detour," "Gearing up for Koons...", and perhaps other posts.

I thus grew very interested when I happened across a response to Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address of September 12, 2006 by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, expressed in an article, "Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt: Über Glauben und Wissen und den Defaitismus der modernen Vernunft," a Teutonic mouthful of a title to a piece published on February 10, 2007 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

For those without German language skills but interested in knowing anyway, the German title of Habermas's article translates as "A Consciousness of What is Missing: On Faith and Knowledge and the Defeatism of Modern Reason," and "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" means "New Zurich Newspaper."

In this article, Habermas suggests a rapprochment between secular and religious reason, whereby each takes the other seriously -- though Habermas gives precedence to secular reason because it is available to all, whereas religious reason has an opaque core, a critique of religious reasoning that one might expect from one who has emphasized the openness of interpersonal secular reasoning in his philosophy of communicative action.

The Catholic Cardinal Camillo Ruini has replied to Habermas in a March 2, 2007 address with the provocative title "Reason, science, and the future of civilization" -- which seems also to have served as the theme of a recent Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), a Catholic conference of Italian bishops to which various Catholic intellectuals and scientists were invited.

The highlights of Ruini's address have been translated by Sandro Magister into English for an article in the Espresso's Chiesa, "Habermas Writes to Ratzinger, and Ruini Responds. Allies against the 'Defeatism' of Modern Reason."

For that general theme, the defeatism of modern reason, one can go directly to Magister's translation of Ruini, but I'd like to focus upon a specific point broached by Ruini because it had been on my mind even before my encounter with his discussion. Concerning the concept of the rational God emphasized by Pope Benedict in Regensburg, Ruini states:

Here I am prompted to clarify a question, advanced above all in Catholic circles, on how to reconcile the assertion according to which the phrase "In the beginning was the lógos" is "the definitive word on the Biblical concept of God" with another, used as the title for the encyclical by Benedict XVI "Deus Caritas Est," that God is agápe (1 John 4, 8:16) and that in concrete terms "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (Deus Caritas Est, 1).

Of course, one can and must first of all specify that in God, lógos and agápe, reason/word and love are one and the same, but Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI does not limit himself to this.

For him, the intrinsic link between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry is only half of the issue: the other half is constituted by the radical novelty and the profound difference of biblical revelation with respect to Greek rationality, above all concerning the central theme of religion, which is God.

The God of the Bible, in fact, radically exceeds what the philosophers had thought about Him, not only because He, as the supremely free Creator, is distinct from nature in a much more decisive way than could be conceived by Greek philosophy, but above all because this God is not a reality inaccessible to us, which we cannot encounter and to which it would be useless to turn in prayer, as the philosophers maintained.

On the contrary, the biblical God loves man, and for this reason enters into our history, gives life to an authentic love story with Israel, his people, and then, in Jesus Christ, not only extends this story of love and salvation to all of humanity, but carries it to the extreme, to the point of "turning against himself" in the cross of his own Son, in order to raise man up again and save him, and even to call him to an intimate union of love with Him.

This is the sense in which the biblical God is agápe, a love that gives itself gratuitously, and is also eros, a love that wants to unite man intimately to itself (cf. Deus Caritas Est, 9-15).

Thus biblical faith reconciles these two dimensions of religion that before were separate from each other; that is, the eternal God of whom the philosophers spoke and the need for salvation that man carries within himself and which the pagan religions tried in some way to satisfy.

The God of the Christian faith is, therefore, the God of metaphysics, but is also, at the same time, the God of history, the God who enters into history and into the most intimate relationship with us.

This, according to Joseph Ratzinger, is the only adequate reply to the question of the God of faith and the God of the philosophers.

Ruini's point is that God is a 'person' in whom reason and love are combined in a radically intimate manner, i.e., God is a rational being who loves.

This gets at a point that I've recently been reflecting upon. The evangelical tradition emphasizes a "personal relationship with God," and I've noticed that many of those evangelicals who stress this point seem to understand "personal" as "emotional," and emotional in a very individualistic sense, an intimate friendship that one has in an intensely subjective, private way. Yet, I'm not sure that this view is actually grounded in scripture, regardless of the evangelical emphasis upon basing all beliefs directly on the Bible. My impression, from an admittedly cursory reading on these points, is that the New Testament passages about a relationship with God through Christ are not intensely subjective but are mediated through the Church.

I suspect that evangelicals have slipped in their thinking from affirming that Christians have a relationship with a personal God to believing that Christians have a personal relationship with God. And they misunderstand this as meaning that one has primarily an emotional relationship with God.

Such an emphasis upon emotions downplays God's nature as a rational being.

Otherwise put, evangelicals tend to overemphasize God as agápe (in a very subjective, emotional sense of love) and radically underemphasize God as lógos (which, in any case, they understand more as word than as reason).

Such an 'evangelical' God can often appear rather irrational.