Chapter III: God's Attributes - II
A. Power and Will
1. A Survey of Alternative Views
Since for Sadra, like the philosophers, creation flows from God's foreknowledge, God's power and will are identical with His knowledge; otherwise, a multiplicity will arise in God's being. God's power and will are, therefore, radically different from man's power and will which are over and above his being and also additional to his knowledge. Sadra opens the discussion of God's power with a general historical review. Historically, two definitions of power have been given. Most theologians define volitional power as “the possibility of an agent's doing an act or not doing it,” while for philosophers power means that “if the agent wills, he will do the act; if he does not will it, he will not do it.” Fakhr al-Din al-Razi thought that the two definitions are the same in essence since the philosophers also appear to concede that power itself - if we discount the will - hangs in the balance between the doing of an act and not doing it and that it is only the will that makes one side preponderate.
Sadra rejects this equation of the two definitions in the case of God, since “hanging in the balance between an act and its absence” is a clear sign of native contingency(al-imkan al-dhati)
which affects only contingents - in some of their actions - and not God. The theologians' definition, therefore, cannot hold with respect to God. But the philosophical definition is correct, since the conditional proposition, “If he wills the act, he will do it,” is fully satisfied also in a being like God who is eternally willing and so is the conditional “If he does not will the act, he will not do it,” fully satisfied in God's case even if He never stops willing. Yet, this does not imply that God's acts are determined and not free, because in the case of a being whose acts are necessary and determined, this conditional proposition is not satisfled, for one cannot say of fire, for example, “If it wills to burn, it will burn, otherwise not.”
Al-Razi, in fact, goes on to say that there is no disagreement between theologians and philosophers on the meaning of the terms “cause” and “will” for, on their part, the theologians also admit that if the world were eternal, it would have an eternal cause. But they reject the idea of an eternal cause because such a cause could not be a free will, since a will can at least delay its effect, whereas a cause cannot. For their part, philosophers also agree that an eternal act cannot be the result of a free will and yet they hold the world to be eternal. Al-Tusi characterizes al-Razi's statement as ''an agreement without the parties' consent,” for, to begin with, the theologians seek to prove the temporal creation of the world without even talking of God's free will and, secondly, many theologians reject the notion of cause-effect altogether. Sadra declares al-Tusi's statement to be “excellent”
but it is clear that it is not at all fair to the theologians. It is not correct that theologians only approach the question taking the world as their point of departure and certainly since al-Ghazali they discuss the question of the nature of God's will as well, accusing the philosophers of positing a God who has no free will worthy of the name. Besides, those theologians who deny cause-effect, deny it within the world and this they do in order to give the entire field to one Supreme Cause, viz., the Will of God.
Now Sadra, along with philosophers like Ibn Sina and al-Tusi, holds, and we shall elaborate this further below, that in the case of God and to an extent in some - perhaps even most - human actions as well, knowledge, power, and will are identical, and that the “will” is not a unique and specific act as it is generally supposed to be, but is rather part of a total cog-nitive-conative process. We shall also see that Sadra differs from these philosophers in that for him, knowledge, power, and will are factually reducible to existence and are hence universally present in everything, but in a systematically ambiguous sense like existence itself. This enables him also to differ from these philosophers' conclusions that man is not really free in his will but only has the appearance of the freedom of the will. Apart from these two crucial points, however, in his views on the nature of the will and power and the consequent view of the eternity of the world, Sadra closely follows the philosophers. But before we come to Sadra's own view, we have to follow his critical analysis of various other opinions held on the matter.
The three main adversaries in the field are the Mu'tazila, the Ash'aris, and the philosophers. The first two schools distinguish between God's power and will: since both believe that God's power being equally related to doing a thing and not doing it, will is required to tip the scale to one side. These two groups differ mutually, however, on two points. For the Ash'aris, God's will is the sole determinant of His acts, whose raison d'être does not go beyond that will: the question, that is to say, as to why God does or ordains something is an absurd one, since the only answer can be, “Because He so willed.” The Mu'tazila, on the other hand, think that God has always a purpose in His actions and the purpose is always the well-being(maslaha)
of the creation. Secondly, and closely allied to the first point, while most Mu'tazilites, particularly the later ones, believe that God's will, for its formation, needs an absolute determinant so that, given that determinant (e.g., a particular moment of time for the creation of the world rather than another moment of time), the will must be irrevocably formed, the Ash'arites say that since there are always alternatives open to God (of which some may be better than others) - of doing one thing rather than another - the reasons for the irrevocability of God's will do not lie outside that will but within it and that God's will itself is the closure of other alternatives.
The philosophers differ from the Mu'tazila in rejecting the view that God acts out of purposes beyond Himself, for example, for the sake of the world, since such a concept of purpose implies a certain imperfection in God, who thus seeks to perfect Himself by being conditioned by something outside Himself. Such a concept of purpose applies to man, not to God. Indeed, a basic principle of the philosophers is that nothing higher acts for the sake of the lower and that the perfection of the lower comes about as a by-product of the action of the higher. The purpose of God's action is, therefore, nothing but God Himself, i.e., His action is a necessary part of His nature which is goodness and perfection. From this point of view, therefore, the philosophers are, to some extent, in agreement with the Ash'arites.
Yet their disagreements with the Ash'arites are of far greater dimensions. They sternly reject the Ash'arite view that there are no absolute determinants for God's will, to which alternatives are always open and that cause and effect are really meaningless. While the philosophers say that God works within the framework of the causal process and, for example, He needs a seed and other necessary conditions to produce a mature plant, the Ash'arites hold that, if God so willed, He could produce a plant without any causes and prior conditions.
The gist of the philosophers' view of God's will and power is that these are distinguishable only in the case of man, where “power” means only something potential and is then actualized by will. In God's case, however, since there is no potentiality in Him awaiting realization, power and will are identical. They explain the production of the world by God, not on the ground that it is in the best interest of the world (although this interest is real, it is a by-product) - as the Mu'tazilites say, nor on the ground of a liberum arbitrium on God's part - as the Ash'arites hold - but on the basis of their doctrine of divine Providence (al-'inaya, literally: attention, care). As we have seen in the preceding chapter, 'inaya means that in God's self-knowledge, the knowledge of the world is given.
This knowledge, since it is perfect like God's being, reveals the entire cause-effect structure which then takes on external existence exactly on the pattern according to which it existed in God's mind. Now, the perfectness (al-atammiya) of this knowledge ensures that there will be no alternatives to the actual course existence takes; to falter, deliberate, and hence to choose and to intend (qasd) belongs to the human will, which cannot work by 'inaya but by deliberate choice, conflict, and decision. Yet, even in the human sphere there are certain indications of the 'inaya- type will; for example, when we normally work by routine or through an already settled purpose, we certainly work voluntarily, yet we work almost automatically as it were, not through deliberation and choice.
There follows the definition of will on the principles of the philosophers. Will par excellence is a process originating in knowledge and ending in an action which is not disagreeable to the agent. It must be noted that their definition leaves out “will” altogether and makes suffice with a cognitive-conative process; there is, therefore, no need to postulate a specific act of will clearly marked out and distinguishable from the knowledge-action complex. This is also applicable mutatis mutandis to the human will although one does speak of things like “decision,” “resolve,” etc., in the human case, since human beings, having only partial knowledge, are often exposed to the “making of choices.”
Al-Tabatabi'i criticizes this view by urging that since the idea of will is different from that of knowledge, the former cannot be reduced to the latter, neither in us nor in God - if, that is, there does exist a clearly discernible mental state expressed by the term ''will.”
But, surely, the whole point of Sadra and other philosophers is that there is no such unique and clearly discernible mental act called “will.” We shall resume this discussion further when we analyze Sadra's concept of the human will in particular. Here we note that Sadra simply states that a “willer is he who knows what he is doing and what he is doing is agreeable to him, i.e., he is not doing it under constraint.”
Finally, the philosophers hold that since the place of everything is unalterably fixed in the entire order, nothing is really free. The human will appears to be free, but, viewed in the entire context of God's will, it is predetermined.
This is explicitly stated by Ibn Sina and other Muslim Peripatetics. Al-Tusi, however, states that when a person looks at his own direct consciousness of freedom, he thinks he is tree, but when he puts his actions in the general context of past causes and conditions over which he had no control, he thinks all his actions are pre-determined. The truth, however, is that man “is neither absolutely pre-determined nor totally free but shares a part of both.”
What this really means is not clear, since philosophers hold that in case of the human will, when a certain motivation (da'i) comes to hold sway, free will disappears.
Further, this statement is somewhat confused. The point at issue here is not so much freedom versus causal determinism, but freedom versus theistic determinism, i.e., the determinism produced by the all-pervasive Will of God. Of course, the causal chain determines the content of the process, but God's will, or rather the knowledge-action complex that has produced this causal chain, has unalterably fixed the place of everything. Indeed, on this point, the language of the philosophers closely approaches that of the Ash'arites, who deny causation but affirm the omnipotent and all-pervasive Will of God. We shall see below how Sadra grapples with this problem of human determinism.
2. Sadra's Criticism of These Views and His Position
Sadra rejects Ash'arism for several reasons. First, to define will in terms of “the possibility of the agent's doing a thing or its opposite,” when applied to God, introduces into Him possibilities which may or may not be realized. This is untenable because it goes against the very notion of God's perfection which implies that everything in God is actual, not just possible.
The Ash'arites object that with the elimination of the notion of possibility and choice from God's will, God would become necessarily determined in His action and would not remain free since the world will become eternal, and both these propositions are unacceptable on religious grounds.
Sadra meets the second objection by saying that the world as a process is eternal but that since nothing in the world remains the same any two moments - as he has proved in his theory of substantive movement in Chapter V, Part I - the world ceases to be eternal in its contents and even the world's eternity as a process is not an independent one but derivative from God's being: the derivative cannot become a rival to the original particularly when the latter is stable and self-same, while the former is continually subject to change.
So far as the first objection is concerned, viz., that “God will act through necessity and will not be free,” Sadra says that the opposite of “freedom” is not “necessity,” as is commonly believed, but “constraint” i.e., lack of freedom.
God acts by necessity in the sense that He follows the best course of action which forecloses other less desirable alternatives, thanks to His Providence (' inaya), but He does not work under constraint and is, therefore, free and the counterfactual hypothetical is true of Him: “If He so willed, He would act otherwise” - which is the hallmark of freedom.
Sadra also criticizes his teacher, Mir Baqir Damad, for accepting the theologians' definition of free will in terms of the “possibility of doing or not-doing an action” and then seeking to defend himself against the introduction of the notion of Possibility in God by saying that what is possible is not the subject, i.e., God's will, but the object, i.e., the action and hence while the world is only possible (i.e., not necessary) when regarded in itself, it is necessary when related to God's will.
Sadra rejects this reply on the ground that if an effect is possible-in-itself (and necessary-by-its-cause), this does not render the cause necessarily a volitional cause (as distinguished from a natural cause); else all causes would become volitional. The best course, concludes Sadra, for those who prefer this definition of power and will, is to say that power is related to will as the imperfect is related to the perfect, but, of course, this too is obviously unsatisfactory, since it introduces at least a conceptual imperfection in God.
Sadra's second reason for rejecting the theologians' view of will as “at taching itself to one of the two sides of a possible act (i.e., of doing or not doing or doing one thing rather than another) by itself without any reason that would tip the balance on one side” is that this would do away with all notion of rational necessity and all certainty: “one could not even draw a necessary conclusion from premises.”
Further, if will were inherently characterized by “possibility,'' then one would have to seek for another act of will to tip the balance and so on ad infinitum. For it is certain that when will does translate itself into a particular actual action, other possibilities must be foreclosed at this point and will must become necessary; it then behaves like any other natural cause which necessarily produces its effect.
It has, therefore, to be reiterated that the inherent difference between a volitional cause and a natural cause does not lie in the fact that the one is “open” and the other “closed,” i.e., necessary, but in the fact that the one is volitional and the other is not.
That is, the one is a cognitive-conative type while the other is of a natural cause-effect type, or, in other words, the action of an actor who acts through rational necessity is not describable by any linguistic usage as “constrained” or “involuntary.”
Indeed, the highest and most perfect form of volitional action is this type of action, for this necessity of volition, far from detracting from its volitional character, strengthens it.
In the case of a human being, conation is often a complex process. A person knows something and may either have an appetition or desire (shawq) towards it or an aversion (karaha) for it. This desire may intensify and re-suit in a pursuit of action. Or, a person may be presented with several alternatives and he will make a decision (' azm) in favor of one course; under favorable conditions, this may result in action. Now, which part of this process is to be characterized as being uniquely an act of will? (It is to be noted that in God's case, this process as such cannot exist, for in His case there is a simple cognition-conation.) In the face of these difficulties, many [i.e., later] Mu'tazilites defined will as belief in utility (i'tiqaid al-naf'), which tips the balance towards the side of positive action. The difficulty, however, is that we often believe in the goodness or utility of something and yet do the contrary. Some Mu'tazilites say that will is the maximal point of desire and that when that fruition point is reached, it is called will and results in action. But the trouble is that we often have a strong desire for some things but we do not will them - for instance, such things as are forbidden by law. It is also true that we sometimes do things without any express will (but not involuntarily), as in the case of such habits as cracking one's fingers or stroking one's beard; or, we may will certain things against our desire, as when we take distasteful medicine.
Sadra's final answer to the theologians, to the difficulties in the foregoing Mu'tazilite views, as well as those of the philosophers (who deny that man is really free) is that all these people are talking about will in terms of straight jacket concepts: they are talking about a will-in-general which can be found anywhere as little as existence-in-general.
Sadra insists that will and knowledge are all grounded in and are concomitants (raliq) of existence, to which they are finally reducible.
Hence, will is as systematically ambiguous (mushakkak) as is existence itself.
Will in God is something basically different from will in man and will in man is similarly different from will in animals. This is because existence itself differs fundamentally at different levels of being. Indeed, will is in some sense present, just as knowledge is present, even in inanimate objects - in the form of a physical “tendency (mayl)” - although it may not be called by that name in linguistic usage (since will is always said to be possessed only by conscious beings). Thus, in inanimate objects it appears as a physical tendency, in animals as pure appetition, in man as rational appetition, and in God as pure rational providence:
“It is, therefore, clear that what is termed will, or love or desire or tendency, etc., exactly corresponds to [the nature of] existence in everything but in some cases it is not called by these terms in pure convention or linguistic usage.... It is just like a material form which, according to us, is one of the levels of knowledge but the term 'knowledge' is not applied to it but only to that form which is free from matter and any admixture of [material] non-being.”
Because will is a concomitant of existence like knowledge, its relation to its objects is absolutely specific and unique.
A will's relation to its object and a cognition's relation to its object parallels the relation of existence to an existent.
One can, therefore, as little talk of a will's attachment to an object and its contrary at the same time (as theologians say) as one can talk of an existence becoming equally attachable to A or not-A.
Indeed, there is no such thing as will-in-general, or knowledge-in-general, or existence-in-general: all are absolutely particular and specific.
The question, however, is whether this contention does not contradict our expressly stated view that God's unitary will is creatively related to all contingents just as His own unitary and simple knowledge is so related to the entire diversity of existence. The answer is that when we speak of “one simple and unitary will or knowledge,” we do not mean by that unity a numerical but a true creative unity which comprehends everything.
We must, therefore, state categorically that there is an absolute unity of subject and object in knowledge and complete identity of all will with the willed object, even as existent and existence are uniquely identical. It is, therefore, inconceivable that one will can be attached to more than one object.
Now, in the case of humans and animals, there is a continuous stream of consciousness in which all mental phenomena like cognition, volition, pleasure, and pain are immediately experienced. Further, in this continuous stream of experience (which as experience is essentially private and incommunicable), usually all mental phenomena are present together. There is no such thing as pure cognition or pure volition or even pure desire or aversion although in any given experience one or more of these elements may be prominent. It is because of this immediately experienced quality of mental phenomena (al-hudur bi'l-huwiyat al-wijdaniya li'l-kaifiyat al-nafsaniya) and their co-presence that we cannot distill their general essences or definitions (if they have definitions at all) from particular experiences, although one can point to certain general areas of conscious mental life by constructing ideas of a willin-general or a knowledge-in-general.
It has to be pointed out here that Sadra will give us in Chapter II of Part III of the present work, devoted to his theory of knowledge, a definition of knowledge, viz., that it is pure, self-intellective, and self-intelligible form, although he will affirm there again the identity of thought and existence. But he has also insisted throughout that there are other forms of unconscious knowledge pressent in lower forms of existence and there is a supra-conscious form of knowledge that belongs to God. The essence of what he is saying here, therefore, is that, like existence, will and knowledge do not have the same meaning everywhere because they are systematically ambiguous. Difficulties and dilemmas arise for all sorts of thinkers - philosophers, the Mu'tazilite and the Ash'arite theologians - when they try to illegitimately extend the meaning, for example, of will, obtaining at one level of existence, to another. In some ways they are all correct, in others they are all wrong and for different reasons.
3. Relationship of God's Will to Man
The most important point at issue is the relationship of the divine Will to the human will. The Mu'tazila, although they rejected all substantive attributes of God in the interests of a pure monotheism, nevertheless affirmed that God acted for the benefit and “in the best interests (al-aslah)” of His creation and, further, that God allowed man a totally free will so that man might be entirely responsible for Iris own actions and God might be free from the blame of determining men's behavior and then rewarding or punishing him. This view was untenable on two grounds.
First, because it portrayed God as willing and acting for purposes extrinsic to His own absolute being and, secondly, because it postulated two original and absoulte actors - God in the physical universe and man in the sphere of human actions. The Mu'tazila were rightly accused of being dualists or even polytheists.
The Ash'arite theologians, reacting to tiffs, went to the other extreme and held that God, being omnipotent, directly created everything - including man, his will and his actions; they denied all power to man, saying that man can be said to “act” only in a metaphorical, not a real sense, and they equally rejected the notion of causation altogether, saying that what we call causes are only seeming causes, since the only real and effective cause of everything is the Will of God. Since God wills and creates everything, He is equally “pleased'' with everything, whether it be good or bad, since good and bad are human categories which cannot be projected to God. In fact, in a pure state of nature there is nothing intrinsically good or bad; it becomes so only by God's declaration through revelations vouchsafed to prophets.
The third group, that of philosophers (like Ibn Sina) and “our top Shi'ite thinkers” (like al-Tusi) hold that existence flows from God in an order and not haphazardly; hence, although all existence comes from God, it comes through a mediating causal chain and due efficacy must be assigned to a cause. It is absurd to say that God can, for example, produce a tree without a seed. This is not because of a lack of sufficient efficacy on the part of God, but because it is inherent in the nature of the physical world that things should come into existence on the basis of proper conditions, antecedents, and causes. It is because of this fact, viz., that things in this world exist only piecemeal and seriatim, that evil enters into it, God's will and knowledge being absolutely free from it, since it is total and absolute, not piecemeal and seriatim. Evil is, therefore, of an accidental, secondary, and negative nature. It may, therefore, be said that “God intends, but is not pleased with, evil,” since evil is, at this level of existence, a necessary concomitant of God's maximal production of good.
This school of thought seeks to mediate between the absolute freedom of will granted to man by the Mu'tazila and the complete negation of freedom to man characteristic of Ash'arism and is, as such, better than the previous two views,
although sometimes representatives of this school - like Ibn Sina - also say that man is actually predetermined and only formally free.
There is, however, a fourth group of “inspired” philosophers and rare Sufis who hold that there is a real multiplicity of things which still contains and points to a unity, and a real unity which in its simplicity contains all multiplicity (wahda fi'l-kathra and kathra fi'l wahda, as Sadra usually puts it); this is nothing else but Sadra's principle of tashkik or systematic ambiguity of existence which maintains that existence by the very fact of its being the principle of unity is the principle of diversity - yet, the two must not be simply identified with one another nor confused with one another, nor substituted for one another, nor yet must one be negated in the interests of the other. Diversity-in-unity does not mean that God is a numerical composite of diverse parts, nor does unity-in-diversity mean that God is any and everything: it means that God is present in or “with” everything but not in the form of a mixture of two co-ordinate elements, and He transcends everything not in a way so that He is “removed” from it.
This means that when A acts, he produces his action in a real, not metaphorical, sense; yet the same act is also due to the omnipresence and omnipotence of God. But we must not say that this act is in part A's product and in part God's product, for the same act is exactly and in its sameness attributable to both - to A as his action and to God as His creation. This also shows the falsity of the philosophers' view according to which either man's freedom and will are only formal and apparent, the real determinant being God's eternal will, or man's action is in part free and in part predetermined as al-Tusi held. Man is literally and truly said to be free in his action, for this is what freedom and will in man's case mean, i.e., when man is said to be free, this does not mean or imply that man has no other determinants except his will and that his will is born ex nihilo and without any context. To demand this sort of freedom for man is simply absurd:
The saying attributed to the foremost monotheist, 'Ali, “There is neither total determinism [of human acts] nor total freedom,” does not mean that a given human action is a sort of composite of determinism and freedom; nor does it mean that it neutralizes both [by becoming a compound of them]; nor does it mean that from one point of view [ min jiha] it is by constraint while from another point of view it is free; nor yet does it mean that man is really determined and is free only in form - as the chief of the philosophers [Ibn Sina and indeed al-Farabi ] has expressed it; nor, finally, does it mean that man has a partial and deficient freedom and a similarly partial and deficient determinism. What this saying means is that in man's [voluntary actions]... freedom and determinism are the same. The adage, “In everything the golden mean is the best,” is truly realized in this view; [only we must make its meaning precise in this context]. For, the mean between extremes is some. times produced by a compounding of the two extremes in such a way that both sides lose their extremeness; for example, water may achieve such a balance between hot and cold that it is no longer either hot or cold actually, and yet it cannot go outside these two categories. In such a mean, it is said, the mean “cancels out” both sides. But there is another sense of “mean” [which is more appropriate in our case]; this means that in a simpler and higher level or mode of existence, both sides are actually present [and neither of them is removed], but they become identical with one another in such a way that they do not contradict each other [nor do they cancel each other out]. “Mean” in this sense is better than the “mean'' in the earlier sense.
This must also, then, be Sadra's answer to those theologians and philosophers who believe in psychological determinism. According to this view, when a certain motivation comes to hold sway over the human mind, the will and action become absolutely determined, and man “has no freedom any longer.” This view is expressed (although it ill accords with the Ash'arite view that will remains open and never reaches a point of closure of alternatives, as does a cause) by several theologians like al-Razi, the philosophers like Ibn Sina and his school. The answer, then, is that that determining motivation is part of what we call freedom of the human will; indeed, such motivations are the human will and to demand that human action be free from motivation in order to be “really free” is simply to demand the absurd. It should be noted, although this is not the place to go into details, that this attitude is common to and is expressed in various ways by many Muslim thinkers - theologians like Ibn Taimiya, philosophers like Sadra,, Sufis like Sirhindi, and other thinkers like Shah Waliy Allah of Delhi - in the post-Mu'tazila, Ash'arite and philosophical periods of Islam. That is to say, they all seek to combine the notion of a real and efficacious human will with the idea of an omnipotent and all-pervasive divine will. Their approaches are different, in accordance with their thought-systems, yet the result is basically the same. So far as Sadra is concerned, it is obvious that he bases his solution of this perennial problem of Islamic theology on his most characteristic principle of the simplicity and systematic ambiguity of existence and by extending it to knowledge and will, which for him are concomitants of all existence and like it, subject to tashkik: “Be not like those who are committed to the effeminacy of pure immanence (or anthropomorphism, i.e., of God's will) or the virility of absolute transcendence or the eunuchism of mechanically combining both, like a Janus-faced object, but be in your belief like the inhabitants of the sanctuaries of the Divine Realm, the lofty ones [i.e., those who believe that existence by its very nature is both unitary and diverse, and both in a real sense].”
Sadra also considers certain fresh problems arising out of this account,
viz., those of the entry of evil into the divine scheme (which we have already referred to above), of how man's will can be free in face of an omnipotent Divine Will and the characteristically Shi'ite doctrine of bada' or God changing His mind on certain things. The first question is: If God has an over-arching eternal Decree (Qada '), how can evil come into existence and how can we say that God's Decree is “good”? The Ash'arite theologians al-Ghazali and al-Razi reply that one must make a distinction between decreeing and the object of a decree. While the first is always good, because it occurs at the level of divine providence, which is tree from evil, the latter may or may not be good.
Thus, whereas God's foreknowledge of a man's disbelief cannot be bad, disbelief itself is bad.
This view was attacked by al-Tusi and, following him, by Mir Damad on the ground that the distinction between decree and its object is illegitimate: thus, when we speak of a judge's decreeing something, the term decree applies equally to the judge's act as well as the object of that act.
Sadra supports the two Ash'arites on this point by saying that whereas “decreeing” as a relational concept cannot tolerate this distinction, “decree” in the sense of God's simple foreknowledge is capable of such a distinction. His contention is, as we have seen earlier, that at the level of the absolute simplicity of God's knowledge, there is no place for evil; evil, as a secondary, accidental, or negative factor, does enter and infect the level of multiplicity.
The difficulty is then raised at the level of God's fore-knowledge: If God knew in eternity that, for example, A would do an evil act, then it is difficult to save either God from the imputation of evil or man from determinism. Al-Tusi replies, in conformity with his views on God's knowledge in the preceding chapter, that things do not follow upon God's knowledge but God's knowledge follows upon things. Sadra, equally in conformity with his rejection of al-Tusi's views in the preceding chapter, holds that God has fore-knowledge of A's evil act but He also has the foreknowledge that A's act will proceed from A's free will, since A, at his level, is a free agent and hence is responsible for his act, even though his evil act is necessary when the reality as a whole is considered.
Sadra then gives a lengthy quotation from al-Razi's K. al-Mabahith al-Mashriqya in his own support, praises al-Razi for departing for once from his usual Ash'arite stand of negating the necessary connection between cause and effect,
and ends by affirming that there is a real difference between saying that there exists nothing without God's working and saying that it is only God's working that directly produces everything - the first statement being correct, the second erroneous because it rejects intermediary causes.
The second important question raised is closely allied to the previous one but has as its object determinism of the human will rather than the existence of evil. It man's will, it is asked, is a necessary consequence of certain antecedents ending up in the eternal will of God, how can one say that man's will is free in view of the fact that his will is not the result of his own will but of factors outside his control? The answer given by Sadra seems to be correct: a free agent is one whose action is the result of his own free will, not one whose will is the result of his own free will because this would involve a vicious regress.
Having given this sound answer, however, Sadra appears to go wrong by giving another answer to the effect that “willing a will” is like “knowing that one knows,” for in the latter case one can go on ad infinitum to higher-order acts of self-knowledge (one knows that one knows and one knows that one knows that one knows, etc.).
First, if “willing one's will” were analogous to “knowing that one knows,” then why should it involve a vicious regress, for in the case of self-knowledge, there is no vicious regress; it can stop at any point a person wishes to cut off this series of self-knowledge, as Sadra himself has said recurrently. But will to will is a different story altogether, because, if there is any such thing at all, this involves not just a subjective but a causal regress. Sadra's criticism, however, of the view expressed by his teacher Mir Damad on the point is correct.
Damad says that when a desire reaches a point where it becomes will and results in action, then we can analyze this will into any number of continuous prior and posterior parts, such that every one of them will be a will and yet all these parts will be comprehended by the same unitary act of will which immediately resulted in the action.
Sadra rejects this by saying that such mental analysis into parts is possible only in a case which affords some real basis for such analysis even though existentially the parts are indistinguishable: “black color,” for example, might be analyzed conceptually into a genus “color” and a differentia “black” even though what exists is just “black color,” not “black” and “color.” But this condition is not available in our alleged analysis of “will” into parts.
It is strange, however, that the same consideration did not prevent Sadra from drawing a false analogy between “knowledge of knowledge” and “the will to will.” For, when one knows that one knows, a higher-order act of knowledge does come into existence in the mind which permits us to speak of such higher-order acts of knowledge, while “will to will” is a meaningless phrase to which nothing in reality corresponds either in the external world or in the mind for, as said, this would be made impossible by a vicious regress as Sadra himself admits. Nobody can ever meaningfully say, for example, “I wanted to want to write, or I wanted to want to want to write,” etc.
4. Doctrines of Bada' (Change of Mind in God), Naskh (Abrogation of Laws) and Taraddud (Reluctant Decision)
Sadra discusses this theologico-juristic question both in connection with God's will and God's speech or Prophetic Revelation, which we will deal with in the next section of this chapter. But since this question is more importantly related to God's will than to His speech, we will discuss it here as Sadra's own treatment of it also appears in greater detail in relation to God's will than to His speech. Bada' is a Shiì theological doctrine and the term literally means “change of mind - either arbitrarily or on the basis of a better reason or a new truth,” and some primitive and “extremist” Shiì theologians are reported to have held this literal view. While the Sunnis reject this doctrine, among the Shià, the term has had several definitions and certainly the philosophic theologians have quite different and highly refined interpretations of it. It appears to this writer that, for example, al-Tusi's view of God's knowledge, which made that knowledge dependent on the object of that knowledge and his refutation of Ibn Sina's opposite view (as we saw in the preceding chapter) was at least partly related to the doctrine of Bada' even though he may have been influenced in his theory of God's knowledge by al-Suhrawardi, as Sadra alleges. There is another doctrine called naskh or abrogation of old laws by God and their replacement by new ones which is more juristic than theological and which probably originated early among Sunni circles but which the Shià jurists had also adopted. In Sadra's treatment as well as that of his teacher, Mir Damad, Bada' and naskh became more or less equivalent.
But the concept of “abrogation” cannot exhaust the whole problem, difficult though it is in itself. There are a number of Qur'anic verses
which speak of God as having a kind of “suspended decision” or “a wait-and-see attitude” until man takes a certain initiative in a certain direction. In the Qur'anic context itself, which has a practical psychological attitude and is anxious to maximize human moral action and initiative, such verses would appear to fit naturally. They are also in essential agreement with the Mùtazilite doctrine of human free will and action. The Ashàrite reply is simple: God, being absolute, can do whatever He likes and in His absoluteness He may even curtail, by self-imposition, His absoluteness and make it dependent on certain extrinsic factors. This reply may not be entirely out of line with the general Ashàrite doctrine of Divine Absolutism except that, in view of God's absolute will, it is difficult to see what these “extrinsic factors” (e.g., human will and action) might be. But in the context of the system of the Muslim philosophers, with its emphasis on rational, necessary, and eternal Divine Will, such Qur'anic verses are extremely difficult to explain. According to Ibn Sina, the affairs of the changing material world are under the direct management of some heavenly soul, not of God, for such soul is in contact, on the one hand, with God or the Active Intelligence (whence it derives universal principles) and, on the other, with earthly events and, as such, is subject to a succession of images.
Sadra himself seeks to draw support from such passages from Ibn Sina, as we shall see presently.
Sadra first states and rejects his master's view
that such “hesitation” or “reluctance” on God's part really means that there is sometimes a kind of conflict between a lesser and greater good. Sadra rightly points out that there can be no conflict here for a lesser good cannot stand in the way of a greater good prevailing in God's wisdom. Sadra then proceeds to outline his own view, which may be clearly divided into two parts. The first part states that God has an eternal, unalterable will and knowledge which is termed “absolute decision (qada'). It is this which the Qur'an portrays by terms like “the Pen,” “the Preserved Tablet,” ''the Root of all Books,” etc. This level of knowledge and will - qada' - is simple, unitary, and unchangeable. But, as we have shown in detail in our discussion of movement (Part I, Chapter V), everything outside God's being and His Attributes is subject to constant substantive change, both the material world and the heavens with their souls. The heavenly souls, therefore, represent another kind of “writing” or “book” whose texts are constantly changing, thanks to substantive change. It is this sort of writing called “qadar (something which is 'measured out', limited and not absolute or eternal)” which the Qur'an is talking about when it refers to a book where “God erases things and replaces them with others.”
While the Realm of Qada' is constituted of Higher Angels or Intelligences or God's Attributes, the Realm of Qadar is identical with the Lower Angels or souls of the heavenly bodies, which are not pure intellects but are subject to a succession of images as well. In the Qadà Realm, since it is simple, all contradictions are unified and all contrarieties are resolved, but the world of change is the home of contradictions and contrarieties.
Since the real basis of change lies in the possibility or potentiality (in a seed lies the possibility of a tree) and the basis of unchangeability is absolute necessity and since the material realm and souls - whether human or heavenly - are the home of possibilities and potentialities, at any given point in the world-process, one may view the future as a number of possibilities, not just a single-track possibility, although with a view to the entirety of the antecedents, the future may be said to be determined. But even this determination is the determination of a possibility, not an absolute determination excluding the notion of possibility altogether, as is the case with the Divine Realm of Qada'. The indeterminacy of God's will, therefore, is an indirect way of expressing the fact that the Qadar Realm is the realm of possibility, not necessity.
Quite apart from the difficulty, in this view, of how possibility in things can be interpreted as “God's hesitancy,” it does not answer the original question: for that question was about God's “reluctance” or “wait-and-see'' attitude in certain cases, more especially cases of human moral action, whereas according to this explanation the entire world-process will be covered by this “hesitancy” of God and “abrogation” of His laws, including natural laws!
If someone asks, why the world of change at all? and why could not God be content with the Realm of Necessity?, the answer is that much good would have been lost without the world of change. For, this substantive change, being always from the lower to the higher, from the imperfect to the perfect, and from the self-alienated to the self-integrated, ensures the redemption of the world, finally resulting, as we shall see further in the chapter on eschatology, in Part III of this work, in a state of affairs where every intellectually developed human being will, in the afterlife, become a species unto himself and will pass the stage where, as in this life, all humans are members of the same species. In other words, like the Intelligences, such human beings will share the Divine Realm. This would not be possible without the substantive movement from the lower to the higher which is the essence of this world.
This is the first part of Sadra's argument for change and abrogation. This account appears sound or at least consistent enough with his general theory of substantive change in which it is rooted. It is also coherent with his belief that this change governs not only the material world but the heavenly souls themselves: indeed, this change first appears in the heavenly souls and then results in change in this world of matter according to its potentialities. (That events in this world follow upon events in the heavenly bodies and their souls is a belief shared by all medieval Muslim philosophers as inherited from Hellenism, but is rejected by the Islamic orthodoxy.) But the second part of this account, which appears to be designed to cover miracles and “arbitrary” happenings in nature and where naskh and bada' seem to take on a supernatural meaning, does not seem to be congruous with Sadra's naturalistic account of substantive movement.
According to this account, the souls of the heavenly bodies - the Lower Angels - not only act as agencies of change in the material world, but also as agencies of counter-change, i.e., they not only act as catalysts for the realization of potentialities in matter but even produce phenomena opposed to these potentialities. The proof Sadra gives for this is essentially borrowed from Ibn Sina who, in order to prove the possibility of “certain miracles” starts out by showing the dominance of the soul over the body: by sheer will-power, for example, a sick person can become well and by being obsessed with the thought of being ill a healthy person can really, physically become ill. Ibn Sina then asserts, through a series of examples, that a pure soul transcends its own body and, by becoming identified with the World Soul, as it were, can produce strange phenomena in nature and in men.
After a similar statement of the soul's effects upon its body,
Sadra goes on to say that the heavenly soul (or souls) can exert a similar effect on the World-body.
No, when a Prophet's (or an Infallible Imam-Waliy's) mind contacts the heavenly soul or souls - strictly speaking, it should be the soul of the lowest heaven, which is directly in contact with the sublunary world - and witnesses a certain writing there, he announces it to the world exactly and with certainty, not like a soothsayer or an astrologer whose pronouncements are mere guesswork. When he contacts it again, he sees a different writing which might be either due to the changed conditions of the world
(i.e., due to the substantive change) or due to a new idea or image that arises in the world-soul ab initio, and without any basis in the world conditions - indeed, against the sum total of the world potentialities at that time. As a result, an entirely new species of being may arise by spontaneous generation, not through procreation or emergence, for example, as Ibn Sina puts it.
When the Prophet sees this new writing, this constitutes bada' or naskh and is attributable to God as well, since the heavenly souls are absolutely obedient servants of God.
Sadra quotes
at length from Ibn Sina to confirm his view. But to begin with, Ibn Sina never says that these new happenings or “miracles” are contrary to the course of nature, as Sadra has it. Ibn Sina believes only in such miracles as are explicable psychologically or parapsychologically. Secondly, for Ibn Sina, it is the Prophet who “performs” these “miracles,” not the world soul. Thirdly, this doctrine is apparently irreconcilably contrary to Sadra's teaching on the world movement, particularly with its emphasis on the continuity of the world-order, thanks to this substantive movement (ittisal al-haraka al-jawhariya). How can one reconcile this supernatural notion of the rise of images and ideas in the heavenly soul de novo and without any preconditioning and their intervention in the world process with Sadra's otherwise highly naturalistic doctrine of world movement?
Al-Sabzawari has also criticized
Sadra, but his criticism is not addressed to this point, on which he apparently endorses Sadra's view, but is directed against Sadra's attribution to the philosophers the belief that in the heavenly souls changes can occur. This criticism seems strange to me, since even in the text of Ibn Sina quoted here by Sadra it is explicitly stated that such heavenly souls must know particulars,
and even otherwise it is the standard Ibn-Sinaian doctrine that images come to the souls of the heavenly bodies in succession. That is why they are called “souls” and not “intellects.” What Ibn Sina and other philosophers say is that the heavenly souls do not employ bodily organs as do human souls, and they differ from human souls in various other respects - for example, their bodies are indestructible, etc. As for Sadra himself, not only are heavenly bodies not eternal - since they are subject to the law of substantive mutation - neither are their souls in which there is an incessant stream of images and, strictly speaking, these souls are the world of Images (' Alam al-Mithal) and, indeed, they are the World of Measurement (' Alam el-Qadar) as well.
B. Divine Speech and Revelation
Sadra's teaching on Divine Speech and Revelation is heavily dependent on Ibn 'Arabi's doctrine, on the basis of which he draws a close parallel or analogy between the ontological structure (in terms of the Logos doctrine reminiscent of the Christian school of Alexandria) and the Prophetic Revelation and is materially different from the theory of Prophethood constructed by Muslim Peripatetics like al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. This analogy enables him to seek to mediate in the controversy between the Mùtazila and the Ashàrites, the one holding that the Quràn is created while the other insisting that the Quràn represents the unchangeable and Eternal Speech of God: in the Mùtazila view, says Sadra, God brings the Quràn into existence (awjada), while according to the Ash'arites, it is an eternal act of God inhering in Him.
The purpose of speech is simply “to make something known to someone (i'lam).” Now, the highest level of speech is that where this “making known” is an end in itself. The fact that this “making known” may also entail certain other subsidiary purposes - like a command or a prohibition - is secondary. Within this secondary category, again, we may distinguish two levels, one where the secondary purposes are automatically carried out without any possibility of disobedience, and two where the purposes may or may not be carried out - in this second subdivision, even where obedience occurs, the possibility of disobedience always exists unless an Infallible Imam (àsim) is available. Now, when we apply this three-tiered structure of Divine Speech to the ontological structure of reality, we find that they exactly correspond to each other. The highest grade of contingent (or, rather, necessary contingent) or created reality is the Intellect called the “World of Command (Àlam al-Amr),” where the Intellect emerges through the sheer command of God “Be.” Now, although other levels of existence also come into existence by this command to be, the difference is that whereas at this level the command to “be” is an end in itself, at the other two levels this is not the case. After the realm of the Intellect, identified by Sadra with the realm of Qada' or God's eternal Decree, comes the level of the heavens and heavenly souls which, as we have seen already, contitute the “world of Qadar or 'measured out' entities.” The existence of this realm is not an end in itself but beings therein have to obey and carry out other commands of God: namely, to perform revolutions and thus to worship God and to supervise and direct the day-to-day happenings in this world down below. But the Angels of Qadar, the heavenly souls, obey God perfectly and without the possibility of disobedience. Last comes the world of matter where, besides the command to “be,” certain other orders and prohibitions are also issued by God for man - through the intermediacy of the heavenly souls and the Prophets. In this realm, since it is subject to conflict (not just change, which also characterizes the heavens) between contradictions and self-alienation - thanks to matter - not only do commands have to change according to times and climes through naskh, as we have seen, but both obedience and disobedience are to be found: men may obey or disobey these commands. It should be noted that this disobedience is limited to humans and does not extend to material objects. This realm, constituted by the Shari'a commands, is by its very nature the lowest form of Divine Speech.
This entire creative propulsion expressed through the word “be” is thanks to the “Breath of the Merciful (Nsfas al-Rahman)” which we discussed briefly towards the end of Chapter IV of Part I, and which Sadra borrows from Ibn Àrabi. The “Breath of the Merciful” is the first substance which God emits when He says “Be” (and the two are existentially identical), analogous to our own breath which we emit when we speak. This is why the entire universe is the Speech of God, since the Breath of the Merciful is a kind of Intelligible Matter, as it were, which constitues the existence of all things, whether eternal or temporal, intellective, psychic, or material: it is called ''The [Second] God through which all is created.”
This creative ontological process is the “descent (tanazzul)” of God. The Prophet comes into the picture in the “ascent (sù-ud)” or return-process when the material world is redeemed and goes back to God. This occurs due to the substantive movement of the material realm (Àlam al-Khalq), through the “measured out” realm or the realm of determination (Alam al-Qadar), to the Realm of the Intellect (Alam al-Aql) - which is united with God but is not identical with His being - via and in tile form of the Perfect Man (i.e., the person of Muhammad), who combines in himself all the three realms.
Thus, the process which starts with God or rather with the issuance of “the Breath of the Merciful” from His absolute Being ends, upon its return journey, with the Perfect Man: the Breath of the Merciful and the Perfect Man parallel each other.
The manner in which the Perfect Man performs this function of identifying himself with the ontological structure of reality is as follows. Through his divine election, the Prophet contacts or is united with the Active Intellect or the High Angelic Being from whom he receives the unchangeable, divine intellective knowledge. This intellective knowledge is both a Speech and a Book: at this level the inner being of the Prophet is illumined not only intellectually but also in terms of sensory knowledge and he “sees” and “hears” the Angel in an intellective form. This knowledge then descends from the Prophet's intellect to his other faculties and he actually sees and hears the Angel, not just in an intellective mode, but also in a sensory mode - not with physical senses, since these are ever subject to change, but through an imaginative mode. This is because at the level of pure imagination (as in a dream), one equally hears and sees things. One must not think, however, that this “sensory” appearance of the Angel is only subjective, as many Muslim Peripatetics like Ibn Sina have held: it is absolutely objective and real.
This is because the Angel himself does not move down from the upper in-tellective level to the lower, sensitive-imaginative level: the truth is that the Angel has an absolute being-in-himself and a being relative to the lower level.
Thus, the same Angel who appeared to the Prophet as pure intellect, in his absolute being in the realm of Qada' or eternal knowledge, will also appear in the Realm of Determination or Qadar as heavenly soul or the World Soul. It is the Prophet who moves down from the eternal Intellective Realm, through the Realm of Determination, to the World of material creation.
Whereas at the intellective level, the Prophet receives eternal knowledge, both as Speech and as Book (which the Qur'an calls the “Mother of all Books,” or their unchanging “Model”), but both are spiritual (mànawi), his reception of Speech and Book at the level of Determination is in the form of a Book, for this Speech is not like the Speech of the intellective level; and, finally, at the sensory-imaginative level, he again receives both as a Book, which is nothing else than the Qur'an, which people see, read and touch. The last two stages are characterized by the Sharià-law or legal determinations. On the Night of the Ascension (lailat al-Mìraj), for example, the Prophet had all the three experiences - intelective, purely imaginative, and sensory (or rather, sensory-imaginative).
This is how Sadra interprets the famous Qur'anic verse concerning the three modes of Revelation: “It is not up to a human that God should speak to him [directly, i.e., by His Essence] except through inspiration [i.e., at the intellective level, as Sadra would say], or from behind a veil [i.e., a spiritual veil which, for Sadra, occurs at the level of Determination] or that He send a Messenger who inspires him by God's permission [i.e., at the level of Sharià-ordinances as Sadra would have it]” Qur'an VIIIL, 51).
Sadra, however, emphatically adds, “But you must not imagine that the Prophet's reception of God's Speech through the intermediacy of Gabriel and his hearing from the Angel is like your hearing from the Prophet, nor must you say that the Prophet is a blind follower (muqallid) of Gabriel as the Muslim community is the blind follower of the Prophet. Far be it from being so, for these two are utterly different kinds [of hearing].... Blind following can never constitute knowledge at all, nor can it ever be called 'true hearing.'“
This means that the Prophet, thanks to his contact with the Intellective level of the Angel, does not simply follow the Angel's words or the “Book,” but knows the very objectives of these words, since he knows the mind of the Angel. In other words, as Ibn Sina says, the Prophet has a reasoned knowledge, not just an imitative one. The Prophet, thus, correctly, interprets the verbal message and, therefore, cannot err either in thought or in action. But those who read and hear the Prophet's words, i.e., the physical Qur'an, are no longer in this position of immunity from error, since at this level there is not just a “spiritual veil (hijab mànawi)” but a physical veil (hijab suri), due to the Prophet's physical intermediacy. Hence, to interpret this physical Qur'an, which is read and written by people, an Infallible Imam is necessary. But since the Infallible Imam must also be a person who cannot blindly follow the Angel's words, the question arises, but cannot be answered on the basis of Sadra's doctrine itself, whether such a personage can abrogate the Sharià commandments of the Qur'an ; or, it may simply mean that since the Infalliable Imam can go behind the words to the Mind of the Intellect, he can correctly understand the Quràn, even though he cannot abrogate the Sharià law and substitute them with new laws.
Sadra sometimes differentiates between the Speech and the Book of God, the former emanating from the high source, while the latter originates from the lower or “relative” being of the Angel, as we have seen.
Sometimes he distinguishes between a “heard Speech,” which belongs to the lower level and a “directly understood Speech,” which belongs to the higher.
But in general he thinks that the Speech and the Book are not two different things, but the same thing viewed differently and that at all the three above described levels both the Speech and the Book are present.
Even at the human level, someone's book can be called his speech and vice versa (although this latter usage is not conventionally correct).
Let us illustrate this by an example. When a man speaks, he emits breath from his interior, this breath being the human counterpart of the “Breath of the Merciful,” and at the same time forms and imprints words, which also emanate from his interior, i.e., the rational soul. Now, if one views this breath and the words imprinted upon it by themselves, this represents a book which is a writing-material on which words are imprinted. In such a situation, there must be assumed a separate “writer” who has inscribed these words on this material. There is, therefore, a kind of separation or duality between the writer and the book. But if the same breath emitted by the soul and the words produced by it are viewed not as a separate entity from the producer but as his action, then, being inseparable from the actor, it becomes his speech, since speech cannot be conceived to exist apart from the speaker.
This is what, for Sadra, the entire controversy between the Mùtazila and the Ashàrites essentially boils down to; for the former viewed the Quràn as separate from God (or the Intellect) and thus called it a “creation (makhluq),” like a book, while the latter viewed it as God's action and hence eternal and inseparable from Him.
In a sense, therefore, both parties were right, but in another both were wrong, since the Qur'an is different from other Revealed Books, for they are, strictly speaking, only Books, not the Speech of God. This is why also the Qur'an calls itself both Qur'an (inseparable speech) and Furqan (separable, i.e., as a Book), while all other Revealed Books are only Furqan and not Qur'an.
One must never say, however, that other Books are not God's Speech since, as we have indicated, all Books are, in a sense, also God's speech. But the Qur'an is most truly both. It is because the Qur'an is both part of God and, as such, Uncreated and part of creation and, as such, created, that it, in numerous passages where it mentions the Revelation of the Qur'an, also talks about the creation of the Universe by God. This is, in fact, so consistently and palpably done by the Qur'an that it cannot be regarded as fortuitous. Sadra then refers to numerous passages of the Qur'an where Revelation of the Qur'an and the Creation are mentioned together.
This is because the Creation itself, as we said earlier on in this discussion, is also both the Speech and the Book of God, thanks to the rise from God's mind of the “Breath of the Merciful,” which is nothing but the principle of existence, or “the Intelligible Matter,” upon which or through which God “inscribes” all creation or emits existential logoi in an order and with all the systematic ambiguity implied by the term “existence.” The Qur'an and the Universe, or rather “the Breath of the Merciful,” therefore, run parallel and, indeed, are in a definite sense identical. The entire drama begins with God as the “Merciful” and ends with the “Perfect Man.” This is why when the Qur'an talks about its revelation, it also almost invariably talks about the creation of the Universe as well and Sadra once more cites a host of Qur'anic verses to prove his thesis that the frequent mention of the two together cannot be accidental.
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Author: Dr. Fazlur Rahman
