Kalām
Defending faith with the weapons of reason, to the point of dismantling the very idea of natural necessity.
c. 750 – c. 1210 · living tradition
("discourse", "speech") is the rational theology of Islam, born in the eighth century from controversies over human freedom, the divine attributes and the nature of the Qur'an. It is a plural tradition: the , among them , make divine justice and human demands of reason; the , heirs of , subordinate everything to divine omnipotence; the , followers of , hold a middle course. On freedom and the grounding of morality, these schools diverge so deeply that no shared position can be stated. With , Ashʿarite kalām took to task in The Incoherence of the Philosophers; with , where the period recorded here ends, it absorbed a large part of the philosophy it had fought; post-classical kalām then carried on, rich and inventive, in the great summae and the commentary tradition (al-Ījī, al-Taftāzānī, al-Jurjānī). Ashʿarism and Māturīdism remain the reference theologies of Sunni Islam, and the so-called "kalām" cosmological argument, reconstructed in the twentieth century by from its medieval sources, is debated in contemporary philosophy of religion.
The world began: a beginningless series of past events is impossible, so it needs an author who brought it into being.
God has nothing in common with his creatures, and the world holds only through him: for the Ashʿarites, to the point of leaving nature no causality of its own.
Reason can prove God but not fathom his will: beyond it begins a knowledge by experience.
Justification
The theologians' classic proof is the argument from the (). In its medieval forms it starts from an analysis of bodies: they are never free of accidents (motion, rest, composition), these accidents are originated, and what is never without originated realities is itself originated; yet a beginningless series of such realities is impossible. The world therefore began and requires an author who brought it into being. Against the eternity of the world professed by the philosophers, kalām makes that beginning the heart of the demonstration. The formula "whatever begins to exist has a cause" is a contemporary reconstruction, popularized by .
al-Ashʿarī, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, ch. 1 · al-Ghazālī, Moderation in Belief (al-Iqtiṣād fī l-iʿtiqād), I.1 · al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, First Discussion
Justification
God has nothing in common with his creatures (, the affirmation of his absolute otherness): the Muʿtazilites push this principle so far as to deny God any attributes distinct from his essence. All the schools hold the world to be created and wholly dependent on its creator, but they do not conceive that dependence in the same way. The Muʿtazilites grant that things and human acts produce effects (the doctrine of generation, tawallud). The radicalize the dependence into : for them accidents do not last two instants and God creates them ceaselessly, so that fire does not burn cotton by nature; God creates the burning on the occasion of contact. What we take for necessary causation is only a habit that God can suspend, which leaves room for miracles.
al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Seventeenth Discussion · al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn (The Doctrines of the Muslims)
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Justification
Kalām argues: all its schools grant reason the power to establish God's existence and to defend dogma, the even holding that reason knows good and evil before Revelation. The question is how far reason can go on its own: shows that the philosophers' metaphysical demonstrations fail by their own standards, while himself wielding logic, which he urges theologians to use; beyond reason he recognizes a knowledge by "taste" () granted by prophecy and mystical experience. Hence a dominant harmony, with a modest share left to what exceeds reason.
al-Ghazālī, Deliverance from Error · al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, introduction
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↓ Influence exerted
- challenged byMaimonidesMaimonides sets out and then refutes the premises of the kalām theologians (atomism, the continuous re-creation of the world, the possibility of everything imaginable), which he judges to rest on imagination rather th…Read