Mainstream Islam rejected Greek-derived philosophy at the turn of the 12th century, when Abu Hamid al-Ghazali established a theology of divine caprice. In the normative Muslim view of things, Allah personally and immediately directs the motion of every molecule by his ineffable and incomprehensible will, according to the al-Ghazali synthesis, directly and without the mediation of natural law. Al-Ghazali abolished intermediate causes, that is, laws of nature, leaving great and small events to the caprice of the absolute tyrant of the universe.
In place of Hellenistic reasoning, Islam turned to a literal reading of the Koran. Robert Reilly recounts Islam's abandonment of Hellenistic reason, and blames it for the subsequent decline of Muslim civilization and the rise of radical Islam.
Reilly argues that Western civilization, is founded on reason, whereas normative Islam embraces irrationality. Citing Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 address at Regensburg, he notes that the 11th-century Muslim theologianAhmad Ibn Said Ibn Hazm taught that Allah was not bound even by his own word, and should Allah will it, we should have to become idolaters.
The importance of this turn in Muslim thinking cannot be exaggerated. The absence of scientific accomplishment in the Muslim world after the 12th century should make clear that something is amiss in Islamic thinking. But there is something missing in Reilly's account. Even those who agree with his contrast of rational Christianity and irrational Islam may be baffled by his leap from 12th-century philosophy into 21st-century politics.
"What Thomas Aquinas did for Christianity, someone needs to do for Islam," Reilly concludes. Sound theology, he appears to believe, would fix the problems in the Muslim world. But the influence of doctrine on the daily life of faith communities is subtler than he suggests. We have to consider not only what people think, but also how they think.
Danish philosopher, theologian and psychologist Soren Kierkegaard distinguished between two kinds of thinking: objective knowledge (the way a doctor reads a dark spot on a patient's chest x-ray) and existential knowledge (the way the patient thinks about the dark spot on the chest x-ray). The doctor analyzes the spot with scientific detachment; not so the patient who is told that she has only months to live.
Our knowledge of God is existential, not objective (excepting of prophets who have direct communication with God, of whom none has walked the Earth since ancient times). The Catholic natural theology that Francisco Suarez taught during the Counter-Reformation claimed an objective knowledge of God, but has few defenders today. We do not recite the long-discredited proofs of God's existence, but stand in fear and trembling before our mortality and enter a faith community that promises to help us to defeat death.
Objective thinking does not persuade anyone to commit suicide (except perhaps at the point of capture by the Gestapo). Jihadis do not blow themselves up in mosques and marketplaces because they study al-Ghazali instead of Aquinas, but because they think that death is preferable to life in an alien civilization. Not only jihadis kill themselves. No one better exemplifies a life dedicated to reason than Western mathematicians. Yet a mathematical puzzle elicits a different kind of thinking than the question, "Is my life worthwhile?" A distressingly large number of great mathematicians committed suicide, including Alan Turing, Paul Ehrenfest, Ludwig Boltzmann and G H Hardy.
To make sense of what a religion teaches and what the faithful actually believe, we must both understand theology objectively - as a statement about God and the world - as well as existentially, that is, as the faith community lives its religion in ordinary life. There is a deep identity between al-Ghazali's rejection of rationality and the deterioration of Muslim life, but it is not as simple or direct as Reilly appears to think.
The doctrines taught by religious authorities may or may not penetrate into the life of that religion's adherents. The CatholicChurch teaches that all Christians are reborn into the People of God, and that this new spiritual allegiance takes precedence over their gentile origin. Nonetheless, the Christians of Europe slaughtered each other during the 20th century while the Church watched helplessly. Muslims well might retort that whatever their deficiencies, they never created a comparable disaster. Christian civilization survived the world wars and the expansion of communism only because America defeated first Nazism and then communism. Yet American Christianity does not quite fit the Hellenistic model that Reilly offers as the alternative to Islam.
Although Catholicism has become the largest American Christian denomination, in part due to Hispanic immigration, America's religious character remains Protestant, scriptural and enthusiastic rather than Catholic and philosophical. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is beside the point. The point is that a charismatic Biblical literalist in rural America has a great deal in common with an American Catholic like Robert Reilly, but neither has much in common with Muslims.
A rationalist (by which Reilly means a Thomistic and Aristotelian) approach to theology is not what distinguishes Massachusetts from Mecca. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by radical Protestants who poured contempt on "Popish Authors (Jesuites especially)" who "strain their wits to defend their Pagan Master Aristotle", in the words of the Puritan leader Increase Mather (1639-1723). American evangelicals, the most devout segment of the Christian population, tend to be fideist rather than philosophical.
What is it that unites Catholic Thomists and evangelical fideists (as well as observant Jews), but divides all of them from Muslims? It is the Biblical belief that God loves his creatures. Heavenly bodies are not deities, but rather lamps and clocks for human benefit. That is a dogmatic assertion on the strength of Biblical revelation, not a logical conclusion. A loving God, in the Biblical view, places man in a world that he can comprehend, which is to say that God establishes order in the universe out of love for humankind. We live in the best of all possible worlds (that is, a comprehensible one), Leibniz argued, because a good God would not maroon us in the second-best version. This implies that if God were not good, the world might not be as hospitable to humans as it is. This is unimaginable to Christians or Jews, but not to Muslims, who think that Allah can make any sort of world he wants, or indeed a different world from one day to the next.
Reilly is well aware of this, but wades into deep water in addressing it. Al-Ghazali (Reilly notes) abhors the idea of divine love: "When there is love, there must be in the lover a sense of incompleteness; a recognition that the beloved is needed for complete realization or the self," he wrote. But since Allah is perfect and complete, this notion of love is nonsensical. "There is no reaching out on the part of God ... there can be no change in him; no development in him; no supplying of a lack in Himself." The trouble is that in this case, al-Ghazali simply reproduces Aristotle's definition of God as the unmoved mover. In this case it is Reilly who must fall back on scripture, and al-Ghazali who defends the rational view of Greek philosophy.
Objectively speaking, the answer to the question, "Are Muslims less rational than Christians?," is a flat "no". The Jewish idea that the maker of heaven and earth cares with his creatures and suffers along with them seemed idiotic to the Greeks, and still seems idiotic to the vast majority of philosophers today.
The trouble is that we cannot speak objectively about human reason. Reason is not an abstraction floating in some intellectual ether, but rather our reason, the reason of our lives. Whether it is demonstrable or not, the Judeo-Christian notion of divine love is what makes possible the rational ordering of human existence. Whether al-Ghazali was a bad philosopher compared to Aquinas is beside the point: Muslim life is irrational because of the concept of divine love as expressed in the covenant between God and man. Existential rationality, the rationality of ordinary life, proceeds from the Biblical concept of covenant.
Paradoxically, the weaknesses of Christianity and Judaismilluminate the existential irrationality of Islamic civilization. Reilly asserts that Christianity (and Judaism) embrace reason whereas Islam rejects it. But that surely has not been true under all circumstances. Muslims well might argue that nothing was less rational than the self-destruction of European civilization in the world wars of the past century.
The Vatican abhorred the world wars but was powerless to stop French priests from blessing guns to kill German Catholics and vice versa. Catholicism preaches the universal communion of humanity and the rebirth of the gentiles into the Church as the People of God. But the Europeans finally eschewed Christian universality for a nationalism that in all cases had a pagan impulse, and in the case of Nazi Germany became a conscious form of neo-paganism.
As the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig argued, the trouble with the Europeans was that they could not tell Christ from Siegfried: in the human figure of the crucified Christ, the Christians of Europe worshiped their own image. The Christian lives in two worlds: the gentile nation of his birth, and the People of God into which he is adopted. Blood, however, turned out to be thicker than water and the Holy Spirit, and the lightly-baptized peoples whom the Church had converted after the fall of Rome betrayed Christianity and reverted to their pagan roots.
When it had the power to do so, Christianity employed drastic methods to suppress the reappearance of pagan elements that threatened to undermine the Christian order. Twelfth-century crusaders killed up to a million people in the parts of southern France held by the Albigensian heresy, with Aquinas' fervent blessing. And Christian magistrates executed between 50,000 and 100,000 witches, that is, suspected adepts of the old pagan nature-religion. Ancient Israel, if we believe the Hebrew Bible, entered the Land of Canaan with precise instructions to exterminate several of the pagan peoples they encountered.
This seems harsh, but given the sad experience of the 20th century, one can only wish that Christian Europe had done a more thorough job of extirpating paganism. When it returned under the swastika, paganism perpetrated horrors unimagined by the bloodthirstiest crusader. The petty wars of tribe and clan, as Nicholas Wade informs us in Before the Dawn, killed two-fifths of the males of every generation during 40,000 years of prehistory. When men worship themselves rather than a universal God, they have no qualms about murdering their neighbors - and that includes the Athens of Socrates and Aristotle.
Just what is paganism? It is the social order that underlies idolatry: the primacy of the animal ties of ancestry, in which the family is a small clan, the clan is a small tribe, and the tribe is a small nation. Pagans worship their own blood and soil at the altar of their nation. The attraction of self-worship is so strong that ancient Israel again and again fell back into pagan practices, while the self-styled "new Israel" of the Church was gutted in its home continent of Europe. America, a new people composed of individuals who abandoned ethnic allegiance, survived as the last home of Christianity in the industrial world.
The Jewish (and later Christian) alternative to pagan social order is the Covenant: God in his love assigns rights to every human being, and establishes laws for the protection of the weak and helpless. Covenant is a concept alien to Islam, for by definition a God of covenants places a limit on his own power and enters into a partnership with a human society. The all-transcendent Allah does not stoop to make covenants with mere humans; not so YHWH of the Hebrews. No longer can the Roman paterfamilias command the death of his own children in the little empire of his home; the covenant protects every member of society directly. Because the covenant is expressed through laws, and laws require reasoning, the God of covenants must be a God of reason.
Pagan society worships itself, its blood and its land. Jews and Christians worship a God who cannot be like them, for their God is perfect and incapable of doing evil. For Christians, the incarnate God Jesus Christ is without sin. God thus is wholly other, for we are imperfect: frail, mortal, and prone to sin. God does nothing without a reason, and his reasons always are good, even if they remain beyond our understanding. Not so Allah, who is beyond good and evil. His cosmic caprice determines everything, and who if he so wishes can make us commit acts of evil, even the ultimate evil of idolatry. For all his supposed absolute transcendence, Allah is rather more like us.
That is why Rosenzweig qualified Islam as a pagan parody of Judaism and Christianity, and Allah as the "colorful panoply of the pagan Olympus rolled up into one", that is, "a monistic paganism". Christianity and Judaism fought against the pagan impulses of their adherents, with varying degrees of success. Christianity lost decisively in Europe, but maintains a strong if chaotic position in the United States. Most American Jews appear to have abandoned the God of Abraham for a pagan deity who goes by the odd name of "Ethical Monotheism", although a minority thrives of traditional Jews. By contrast, Islam adapted the outer forms of revealed religion to suit the requirements of an unmolested paganism; this has led to one of its greatest modern scandals, that is, the refusal of Muslim authorities to repudiate wife-beating. As I wrote in a May 25 essay [1]:
More than the Koran's sanction of wife-beating, the legal grounds on which the Koran sanctions it reveals an impassable gulf between Islamic and Western law. The sovereign grants inalienable rights to every individual in Western society, of which protection from violence is foremost. Every individual stands in direct relation to the state, which wields a monopoly of violence. Islam's legal system is radically different: the father is a "governor" or "administrator" of the family, that is, a little sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife and children.
There is no Islamic society in the Western sense of the society, only nested layers of blood loyalty. Three-fifths of Iraqi (and two-thirds of Saudi Arabian) marriages are between cousins, for the object of the institution of marriage is to maintain the political integrity of the clan. Consanguineous ties are the pagan's only source of protection. The covenantal concept of politics, in which individuals assign powers to a stranger sitting in a legislature far away, and agree to stand by the compromises this stranger might make with other strangers, appears as strange to Muslims as political discourse with space aliens. Reason becomes irrelevant within the magic circle of blood and soil.
We know that the God of Abraham whom Jews and Christians worship cannot be a projection of ourselves, for we are not infinitely loving and absolutely good. Not so Allah, whose will overrides any criteria of right or wrong. It is not necessarily the case that Muslims understand Allah as a projection of their own will to power, but there is nothing in Islam to discourage this sort of projection. Al-Ghazali's irrationality and the most intimate relations of the Muslim household thus converge into a single portrait of residual paganism persisting under a monotheistic veneer.
Reilly's focus on 12th-century Islamic irrationality might lead to the optimistic conclusion that if only we could persuade Muslims to read Aquinas, the war of civilizations might be averted. The trouble is that the Muslim embrace of irrationality is not only objective (at the level of theology), but also existential: it is infused into the entire complex of social relations in the Muslim world which allow untrammeled exercise of the will without covenantal constraints. This includes Koran-sanctioned wife-beating and, by extension, honor killings, genital mutilation, child marriages and other relics of paganism.
To transform Muslim societies into something approximating the covenantal model of the West would require nothing less than unraveling the whole web of relationships that bind families and clans. To traditional Muslims this appears as an existential threat. Many of them would rather die than submit, which is why to so many Muslims suicide seems attractive as an existential choice.