From the above it becomes clear that the occasionalism of al-Juweyni implied a certain skeptician regarding the capability of any finite being properly to cause an effect. This was extended to an inability of reasoning to generate valid and validated conclusions. This led Ghazali to follow the mystical path of the Sufis. But if one is to proceed with the consideration of the relation of faith and reason it becomes necessary first to establish the character of reason and especially its capability in relation to belief or religion. To do so three propositions become essential: (a) that reason emerged in, and from, a religious world view, (b) that reason in its first and basic philosophical articulation was religious; and (c) that reason was required for religious self-articulation. The first two points were developed above and yet more extensively in chapters II-V of Ways to God. Here I shall only summarize the main argument as background for (c).

The commonplace since the Enlightenment is that reason is the sole capacity of the authentically human spirit and hence that religion as transcending reason can be only superstition. In reality, however, M. Iqbal notes that reason was born from within a religious sense of life.

The development of human reason beyond myth to the level of philosophy, as all human transitions, was not univocally one of progress. It did bring something new, namely the capacity to grasp things not in allegorical, but in proper terms, based on their nature. With this the mind gained the capacity for precise and scientific reasoning. Nevertheless, it failed to carry forward some important elements from the totemic and mythic modes. Specifically, what was lost at this point was much that had to do with the personal, i.e., the affective relations of heart and will in terms of the emotions and bonds of love, the creative relations according to the imagination, and the unique relations to the freedom of other humans and to the purposes of nature. Today we begin to experience the lack of these elements; the search for them becomes the center of the process of humanization at this juncture. It is precisely in these matters that Iqbal would identify the most characteristic elements of religion as it goes beyond, but not against, philosophy.

Heidegger would consider this a matter of retrieve. He theorizes that every advance is at the expense of some factors which are left to atrophy. Hence, the most significant progress takes place not by going forward incrementally along paths which have long been trodden, but by going back to retrieve what was not chosen for development and hence holds much greater promise of being able to complement and enrich life as lived thusfar.

Especially, it is to be noted that the beginnings of Greek philosophy were intensively religious. Let us review this in Parmenides as noted above in Chapter I. Parmenides, in opening the field of metaphysics, came immediately to note that being had to be one, unchanging and eternal. He reasoned in Fragment 8 that if it were of the nature of being as such, and hence Being Itself, to be changing then being and Being Itself would need to include non-being. For it is the nature of change no longer to be what it had been and not yet to be what it is in the process of becoming. It is, then, essential for change to include non-being. But were being as such to include non-being then "to be" would mean also "not to be"; or, to put it in another way, "to be" would be the same as "not to be" and something would be the same as nothing.

Some would think that what Parmenides said above excluded any multiplicity or change in beings, but he went on to devote the remaining 80 percent of his Poem precisely to assembling and relating just such beings, using the scientific knowledge developed by his predecessors among the pre-Socratic philosophers. In other words he recognized beginning, multiplicity and change, but did not relate it to, or integrate it with, the nature of being as such. That task remained to be done and whoever accomplished it would be the father of philosophy in the Greek tradition.

Such integration was the work of Plato and especially important for the relation of religion to reason. First he did not deny the truth of Parmenides’s reasoning which was and remained essential: without it no reasoning could go forward. But, second, we live in the midst of — and indeed we ourselves are — beings which began, are limited and change. Plato reconciled these two by recognizing that the many limited beings were not alongside or equally original with the One, which was absolute and self-sufficient, but rather were derivative therefrom, grounded therein and oriented thereto. This is called "participation".

Further, it must be stressed that this relation is not something added over and above the substance of such beings like a coat of paint which could be changed on order or omitted. Rather this relationship is essential. By this they come to be; on this they depend for their existence (the truth in occasionalism); and toward this they are moved to dynamic life and action.

Hence participation in the absolute One is not something added to finite beings; it is what they are. This is the basis of the second insight of M. Iqbal’s Reconstruction, namely, that all, whether in being or in knowledge, depends upon a total absolute.

It is to be noted that Plato’s being was really form taken as the passive object of contemplation. Hence, most concur that God in his system corresponds to the highest soul or conscious which was an active being, rather than to the idea of the One or the Good which in their perfection were passive objects of contemplation. Aristotle corrected that by beginning from the active process of change experienced among physical beings and then reasoning to its highest principle as a correspondingly active consciousness that was living, indeed Life Divine (Metaph, XII, 7). To this all were related or bound — re-ligation or "bound back" being one of the etymologies of "religion".

The earlier part of this work established that reason emerged from a religious worldview and in its basic philosophical articulation is essentially religious. It should then be able to engage, and be engaged by, faith. This indeed was the case prior to Islam both during the third to the fifth centuries in the time of the Church Fathers and in a more elaborate way in the Christian philosophy/theology of Thomas Aquinas. This becomes clear upon reflection on the efforts of both Christian and Islamic scholars to understand two points on which they concur, namely, the human nature of Christ and the spiritual nature of the human person. Both are essential to the theologies of both faiths. It could be helpful then to look at the role of reason with regard to these essential components of the both faiths.

That Christ is properly and fully human in nature. Islam affirms this to be the whole truth of the nature of Christ: "Christ Jesus, son of Mary, was merely God’s messenger and His Word which he cast into Mary and a Spirit proceeding from Him (IV:171)." A Christian would want to look closely at the term "word" and "spirit" here, where a moslem might look more to the term "merely". But, in any case, both would agree that Christ is fully human.

In this precise regard the note that Christ is son of Mary is significant. Indeed this is reinforced by the saying of the Prophet that no child is born in this world but with a touch of evil except Mary and her son, Christ Jesus (Bukhari). A Christian would want to know what was special about Christ and his mission that called for this unique position in God’s love and providence. But all see that in order to preserve Christ from evil, it was fitting that Mary also be so preserved. This could be important only provided Christ was really born in the flesh from Mary — human in nature and in matter. The reasoned necessary implication is that Christ was really and fully human.

Some centuries before Mohammed the Christian church in Solemn Council at Chalcedon (following the route traced out by the preceding Councils of Constantinople and Nicea) proceeded along the same line of reasoning and added a philosophical turn. First it affirmed the real humanity of Christ and did so by referring centrally to Mary as Christ’s mother. (It carried this reasoning further in its incarnational context, but that is not essential to our present philosophical concern.)

An additional philosophical concern arose in relation to the terminology to be employed. Some of the Fathers at these Councils wanted to employ only terms drawn from Scripture. Others, however, noted the increasing sophistication of the human mind and its ability still to misinterpret or reinterpret the implications of Mary’s motherhood for the human nature of her son. The proper technical term, philosophically elaborated, for nature was physis, and the human nature of Christ could be directly and properly affirmed only by the use of that philosophically elaborated term. After ardent debate the decision was made: the philosophical term had to be employed in order for the faith to be transmitted and lived integrally. Hence, they declared both that Christ was born of Mary according to the flesh as would the Qu’ran some centuries later, and also that he was properly of human physis, the direct, proper and technical statement that Christ was integrally human in nature.

Note that this was a decisive decision on the part of the Church Fathers taken after full, open and even impassioned debate among the Council in Fathers for over a century. They agreed that precisely in order to protect and communicate the faith it was necessary to employ philosophical reasoning and its products.

With particular regard to our theme, "Faith and Reason," it is to be noted further that this is contrary to the later more fundamentalist Christian position that human reason is corrupted, not to be trusted, or incapable of being engaged in stating the faith, and hence not to be employed in religious matters. On the contrary, it was precisely concern for the integrity of faith that urged — even necessitated — the Councils to conclude that philosophy as the work of human reason needed to be engaged.

The Spiritual Nature of Humankind. This was the crucial issue for al-Ghazali and the one which brought him to break away from philosophy as developed by the Greeks and by the great Islamic heirs of the Greek tradition, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. It was a point on which the Greeks had real accomplishments — Plato’s work will remain always a monument to the ideals of human life and to the human spirit which could focus thereupon. But the Greeks were taking only the earliest steps in philosophy; much that was important remained to be done — perhaps most especially on the issue of how the human person could be both physical and spiritual in the distinctive unity that is human nature. It was an issue of decisive importance for understanding and hence implementing both the full dignity of the human body and of the physical world of which it was part, and the significance of time and history for the exercise of human freedom.

For Aristotle the discovery of form and matter as intrinsic composite principles of any changing or physical being meant that the form had to be intimately, indeed totally, a relation to the matter it informed. But if so then he could not see how that form could be the source and foundation of human spiritual activity. In particular, if matter was concrete and singular, how could the form of matter be a principle for the development of the abstract and universal terms essential to the properly human working of the mind or to the freedom characteristic of the will.

The Greek solution, taken up by al-Farabi and Avicenna almost 1500 years later, was that such universal terms could be produced only by a spiritual form or principle which was therefore quite separated from matter which was the principle of individuality. The task of such a principle was to produce a form for the mind which was not determined to any one thing (e.g., this or that person), but stated the nature of the species or genus (e.g., human, rather than horse) which was able to be stated universally and univocally of each and all members of the species. This productive or active principle, called an active or agent intellect, could be drawn upon by many persons. A special difficulty came with regard to the principle for free human actions, for if the principle of these actions was common to many persons it is difficult to assess truly personal responsibility. This, in turn, raised questions regarding the interpretation of the Qu’ranic passages regarding personal immortality and the last judgement. Hence the Islamic scholars of Greek philosophy as well as the Latin Averroists tended to interpret these rather allegorically than as objective statements of the human reality.

Thomas was a monk, one of those of whom it is written in the Qu’ran:

you will find the most affectionate of them towards those who believe, are those who say: "We are Christians." That is because some of them are priests and monks and they are not given to arrogance. When they listen to what has been sent down to the Holy Messenger (Peace and Blessings of Allah be upon him), you will see their eyes well up with tears because of the Truth they recognize. They say: "Our Lord, we believe, so enroll us among the witnesses. Why should we not believe in God and any Truth that has come down to us? We yearn for our Lord to count us among the religious (5:28, 83, 84). And for this belief of theirs, God will reward them with gardens through which rivers flow, therein to abide forever, for such is the requital of doers of good (5:85).

 

Among the people of the Book, there are some who are upright, who recite God’s verses through the small hours of the night as they bow down on their knees. They believe in God and the Last Day and enjoin the doing of what is right and forbid the doing of what is wrong, and vie with one another in doing good works; and these are among the righteous. And whatever good they do they shall never be denied the reward thereof, for God has full knowledge of those who are conscious of Him (3:113, 114, 115).

 

As a Christian monk Thomas had the advantage of the discovery by the Christian Church Fathers regarding the central notion of being. Briefly, the Greeks had supposed matter to be eternal; hence for them existence was simply taken for granted. Their focus was upon form, but not existence. In contrast, the Christian Fathers applied to matter the biblical notion that all depended on God. Matter too was made to be. In this light the issue was no longer merely what kind of form some matter possessed at any one time, or how it changed from one form to another. Instead they were able to consider the issue of existence, its source, characteristics and goal. It was then that "to be or not to be" became truly the question.

This insight made possible two further progressive steps. The first concerned the issue, lively at the time of Avicenna, Ghazali and Thomas and renewed in our day, of how the existence or "to be" (esse) of a thing related to its essence or nature. Coming later than Ghazali, Thomas had the benefit of time and personally resolved the issue by extending the notions of act to existence and of potency to essence. Any limited being was composed of two principles: existence as act and potency as its limiting capacity.

In the aftermath of modern rationalism, today there is great concern to recapture the vital existential sense of human freedom and creativity. Thomas’s insight provides a way of relating the two in a mutually complementary and enhancing way.

This entails, in turn, that the human mind is not dependent on a separated agent intellect in order to form universal concepts that are not composed of single instances as is sense knowledge. Rather, the human intellect itself has the capacity to abstract universal natures from concrete sensed objects. Thus the agent intellect which, for the Greeks as for the Islamic scholars of Greek philosophy, had been separated from the human person and shared by many, was now an internal capacity proper to each person.

Moreover, this pertained to the will as well. The principle of freedom could now be understood as personal; hence responsibility was decidedly personal. This philosophically more adequate understanding of the person made it possible to assimilate more fully the Qu’ranic eschatology of resurrection and personal reward.

Ghazali’s life differed in this precise regard. Though he avows to vanity during his period of teaching, the crisis of his life was precisely the point of rejection of such motivation in order to devote himself fully to God. There followed a two year retreat, spent in significant part in the minaret of the mosque of Damascus. He would appear to have undergone a deep conversion from which followed the writing of the great Ihya in order to explore and describe for others the content of the Sufi way.

But how is this to be understood? Jabre would seem to interpret this simply as a natural psychological process. In this light the basic pattern was set in Ghazali’s younger psychological crisis of which the second was a repetition. This approach considers all that could happen in the life of Ghazali as a merely human effort. But that, of course, is in direct contradiction to Ghazali’s own experience of the divine acting in him.

We might put aside for the moment the occasionalism of al-Juweyni and Ghazali and follow the lead of Thomas Aquinas. His resolution of the problem of the agent intellect, succeeded in placing it within the human person. We can ask why Jabre did not employ this insight to develop an elegant and progressive understanding of Ghazali’s mystical experience in which this would be truly both the action of God and that of the human person — the latter because of the former.

I would suggest that the reason is a theological one, pointed out by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. It has been customary in Catholic theology to distinguish a natural order corresponding to the natures of created beings and including human knowledge of the existence and character of God. This is set in contrast to a supernatural order as the intimate mystery of divine life and its plan for the salvation of humankind. In this context it was then considered that participation in the supernatural order was by baptism. Hence, a non-baptized person remained in the natural order only, and his or her capabilities for mystical union in the divine were limited to what could be achieved by natural reason.

In this light the capabilities of Ghazali could exceed those of Ibn Sina not substantially, essentially or qualitatively, but only accidentally or quantitatively in terms of the intensity of the application of his natural powers of reason and of understanding.

In itself this is of considerable scientific interest as a chapter in the scholarly interpretation of the work of al-Ghazali, but it is much more. For from the general effort to achieve a more adequate theological understanding not just of the distinction, but of the relation of the natural and the supernatural, and indeed of the adequacy and appropriateness of the distinction itself, there came the convocation of the Second Vatican Council of the Church, an event that occurs on the average of only once in two centuries. In that context De Lubac now appeared as a guiding spirit. In that solemn session the bishops assembled from all parts of the world took the decisive step beyond the supposition of the natural-supernatural distinction, and the supposition that the supernatural path was the exclusive possession of any one group of human beings, including the Church. On the contrary, it recognized the Spirit to be at work in all religions, all of which are authentic ways to God.

With particular reference to Islam the Council stated:

The implications of this for world peace and progress have hardly begun to be appreciated. If wars have been fought in the past over religion then this is a declaration of peace. If walls to separate religion from public life were the only possibility of peace in the 17th and 18th centuries, even at the cost of a secularization of life in modern times, then this document implies that they are no longer appropriate and must come down. If scholars have been separated in different schools to the disadvantage of all, then this is a directive to come together to share our experiences in faith. Each will bring, not only its failures and frustrations, but its lessons of fidelity learned from long and holy efforts. Together there is better opportunity to identify the divine roots of peace and to travel, each along one’s proper but convergent path, to the one Holy mountain, where the One God will be all in all (Isaias 27:13).

1. M. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: Ashrof, 1944).

2. Ways to God, ch. II.

3. Ibid., ch. III.

4. Ibid., pp. 171-175.

5. The Munqidh, ch. III.

6. G.F. McLean, "Editor’s Introduction" to al-Ghazali, pp. 31-60.

7. Ernan McMullin, "Medieval and Modern Science: Continuity and Discontinuity" in Philosophy in a Technological Culture, ed. George F. McLean (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1964), pp. 55-87; James A. Weisheipl, "The Continuity of Ancient and Modern Science," ibid., pp. 88-92.

8. L. Gardet La Connaissance Mystique chez Ibn Sina et ses presupposés philosophiques (Cairo: Inst Francais d’archeologie Orientale du Caire, 1952).

9. S.H. Nasr, Knowledge of the Sacred (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).

10. Surnaturel (1946); see also J. Alfaro, "Lo naturel y lo sobranaturel," Gregorianum 38 (1957), 5-50; and von Herbert Vorgrimler "Henri de Lubac" in Bilanz der Theologie im 20, Jahundert, ed. H. Vorgrimler and R. Vander Guelt (Frieburg: Herder, 1970).

11. Richard Joseph McCarthy, Freedom and Fulfillment (Boston: Tuayne, 1980).

12. Nostra aetate, The Documents of Vatican II, eds. Walter M. Abbott and Joseph Gallagher (New York: Guild Press, 1966), n. 3.