Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/260

Rh 242 THEISM above all, the nature and essence of man s spirit, must bear witness to it. At least one good result followed. Those who exercised their minds on the doctrine of the Trinity were necessarily led in some measure to form another idea of God than that of either an indeterminate unity or a confused synthesis of attributes, to think of Him, with some clearness and steadiness, in an organic and harmonious manner, as absolute being, absolute life, absolute spirit, absolute intelligence, absolute love. Such thought as this distinctly appeared in Anselm, the St Victors, Aquinas, Bonaventura, Dante, &c. The omni presence, omnipotence, and omniscience of God, and, generally, what are called His metaphysical and intellectual attributes, were discussed with excessive elaborateness and subtlety, while His moral attributes were left in the back ground, or considered without sufficient earnestness or insight. The problems regarding the relationship of the Divine attributes to human agency, and, in particular, as to the compatibility of Divine prescience and predestina tion with human freedom and responsibility, were even too laboriously and minutely debated between the mediaeval Augustinians and their opponents. What the disputants on both sides lacked was intellectual humility. They strode along &quot; dim and perilous ways &quot; as if they were in plain and safe paths, or as if their own faculties were superhuman. As to the general relation of God to the universe, few, if any, of the schoolmen can be charged with deism. While assigning to God a being and life transcending the universe, they also affirmed that He was everywhere in the universe, everywhere wholly present, everywhere essentially and actively present. Pantheism was prevalent all through the Middle Ages, but only two of its representatives, perhaps Erigena and Eckhart, showed much speculative capacity. 1 Moham- Mohammedan theism drew chiefly from faith and fana- medan ticism the force which carried it onwards with such rapid- theism. j ty - n - tg ear jy career O f con q ues t. At the same time it powerfully stimulated reason, as soon appeared in remark able intellectual achievements. Of course, reason could not fail to reflect on the contents of the faith by which it had been awakened. The result was the formation of many schools of religious opinion. So far as our subject is concerned, however, all mediaeval Mohammedan thinkers may be ranked as philosophers, theologians, or mystics. The philosophers derived little of their doctrine from Mohammed. Even in what they taught regarding God they followed mainly Aristotle, and in some measure the Neoplatonists. They maintained the unity of God, but conceived of it in a way unknown to Mohammed, namely, as a unity allowing of the reality of no distinctions, quali ties, or attributes in God. Then, although they affirmed the unity of God in the strictest abstract manner, they were not monists but dualists, inasmuch as they denied creation ex nihilo, and asserted the eternity of matter. The mode in which they supposed the multiplicity of finite 1 For the history of mediaeval theism may be consulted the histories of philosophy by Tennemann, Ritter, Erdmann, &c. ; the special histories of mediaeval philosophy by Stockl and Haureau, and of later scholasticism by K. Werner; the histories of the Trinity and of Christian doctrine already mentioned; and a multitude of monographs, e.g., those of Christlieb, Huber, and Stoekl on Erigena; of Hasse, Reinusat, Bouchitte on Anselm or his ontological argument ; Delitzsch s Krilische Darstellung der Gotteslehre dfs Thomas Aquinas; Ritschl s &quot;Gesch. Studien z. ch. Lehre von Gott,&quot; iu Jahresb. f. deutsche Theol., x., referring chiefly to Aquinas and Scotus, &c. Mediaeval mysticism has found in Schmidt, Lasson, Preger, Jundt, admirable historians. On Eckhart there are good works by Martensen, Lasson, and others; see also a paper by Prof. Pearson in Mind, No. xli! On mediaeval predestinarianism consult chapter in Mozley s Treatise on the Augitstinian Doctrine of Predestination. The keenest hostile criticism of mediaeval theism is that of Pasquale D Ercole, 11 Teismo Filosofico Christiana, 1884. things to have been produced from God was by a series of emanations originating in Divine intelligence, not in Divine will. Their proofs of the Divine existence were, for the most part, founded on the principle of causality. The philosophers did not openly oppose the theism of the Koran, but they ignored it or set it aside, and represented it as only a useful popular faith, not a response to the demands of cultured reason. The &quot; theologians,&quot; on the other hand, took their stand upon the Koran, sought to defend and develop into doctrine its representations of God, and to show the inconclusiveness and inconsistencies of the teaching of the philosophers regarding God. Even those of them, however, who exalted faith and revelation most the orthodox Motakallemin or Asharites by no means dispensed with philosophy and reason. It was chiefly on the metaphysical hypothesis of the atomic consti tution of matter that they rested their proofs of the Divine existence. It was by subtle reasonings that they sought to establish the non-eternity of matter and the unity and immateriality of God. It was on speculative grounds that they contended God had eternally possessed all the attri butes ascribed to Him in the Koran. Their predestina- tionism was as logically elaborated as that of the Augus- tinian scholastics. There flourished for a short period a school of liberal Mohammedan theologians, the Motazil- ites, who, while accepting the two fundamental doctrines of Islam the unity of God and the divine mission of Mohammed, refused to regard the Koran as an absolute religious authority, and sought to transform Mohammed anism into a reasonable and ethical monotheism. They insisted on the rightful conformity of faith to reason, on human freedom, and on the righteousness as well as the unity of God. They endeavoured, in fact, to substitute for a God whose essence was absolute or arbitrary will a God whose essence was justice. This meant, however, not to develop or even reform, but to subvert and displace the Mohammedan idea of God, and the wonder is, not that they failed in so arduous a task, but that they had the courage to undertake it. Mohammedan mysticism (Sufism) was a reaction, chiefly of the Persian mind, against the narrowness and harshness of the monotheism of the Arabian prophet. Unlike philosophy, it was not a mere exotic, but an indigenous growth within the Mohammedan area, and hence orthodoxy has never been able to eradicate it. It has been the chief support of spiritual feeling and the chief source of poetry in Mohammedan lands. It still flourishes, has branches innumerable, and through its poets has shed seed widely even over Christendom. The mystics refuse to think of God as an arbitrary unlimited Will, separate and apart from everything ; as one who reveals Himself clearly only through the words of a prophet ; as a being before whom man is mere dust and ashes, and who demands no higher service than fear, unquestioning faith, and outward obedience. In their view God is immanent in all things, expresses Himself through all things, and is the essence of every human soul. There is not only no God but God, but no being, life, or spirit except the being, life, and spirit of God; and every man may be God s prophet, and more even than His prophet. For a man to know God is to see that God is immanent in himself, and that he is one with God, the universal life which breathes through all things. Such knowledge or vision must glorify all nature, and must dilate and rejoice the heart of him who possesses it. Joy and ecstacy must characterize the worship of the Sufi. A religious scepticism based on philosophical scepticism disbelief in the existence of God grounded on disbelief in any truth not guaranteed by sense or mathematical demonstration was not unknown among the Saracens, although no work in defence of it has come down to us, and perhaps none may have been written.