We may at all events make this acknowledgement to Gazali, that Ibn Sina’s fantastic doctrine of Forms and Souls makes no stand against his criticism.
5. (2) We have now come to the idea of God. In the view of the Philosophers, God is the highest Being, and his essence is Thought. That which He knows, comes into existence, emanating from his abundance; but he has not positively ‘willed’ it, for all Willing presupposes a deficiency,—a need—, and is conditioned by some change in the Being that wills. Willing is movement in the material: completely real Spirit wills nothing. Therefore God beholds his creation in a contemplation which is undisturbed by any wish. He recognizes himself, or even his first Creature, or, according to Ibn Sina, the Universal, the eternal Genera and Species of all things.
But according to Gazali there must eternally belong to God a Will, as one of his eternal attributes. In a conventional way he grants, it is true, that in metaphysical and ethical considerations knowing precedes willing, but he is convinced that unity of Being does not more reside in knowing than in willing. Not only the multiplicity of the objects of knowledge, and their different relations to the knowing Subject, but even Self-Consciousness, or knowing about the knowing, considered per se, is an endless process. An act of will is absolutely necessary to bring it to a conclusion. In directing the attention and in self-communing an original “Willing” is in operation; and thus even Divine knowledge comes to a conclusion as a coherent unity, in its Personality, by means of an original eternal Will. In [[163]]place of the assertion of the Philosophers that God wills the world, because he thinks of it as the best, Gazali substitutes the statement: “God has cognizance of the world because he wills it and in his willing it”.
Must not then He, who wills and creates all, have cognizance of his work down to the smallest part of its material? Just as his eternal will is the cause of all individual things, so his eternal knowledge embraces at one and the same time every particular thing, without the unity of his nature being thereby taken away. There is consequently a Providence.
To the objection that Divine Providence makes every particular event a necessary event, Gazali, like St. Augustine, replies that this fore-knowledge is not distinguishable from knowledge in memory,—that is to say, that God’s knowledge is exalted above every distinction of time.
It may be questioned whether, in order to save the eternal, almighty, creative Will, Gazali has not sacrificed to that absolute might both the temporary character of the world, which he would like to prove, and the freedom of human action, from which he sets out, and which he would not altogether surrender. This world of shadows and images, as he calls it, vanishes for the sake of God.
6. (3) The third question, with regard to which Gazali separates himself from the Philosophers, has less philosophic interest. It refers to the Resurrection of the Body. According to the Philosophers it is only the Soul that is immortal, either in its individuality or as a part of the World-Soul: The Body on the other hand is perishable. Against this Dualism, which in theory led to an ascetic Ethics, but which in practice was easily converted into [[164]]Libertinism, the religious and moral feeling of Gazali rose in rebellion. If the flesh is to have its obligations, it must in turn be invested with its rights. The possibility of the Resurrection cannot be denied, for the reunion of the Soul with its (new) bodily frame is not more wonderful than its first union with the earthly body, which has been assumed even by the Philosophers. Surely then every soul at the resurrection-time may obtain a new body suited to it. But in any case Man’s real essence is the Soul; and it is of little consequence what the material is, out of which its heavenly body is formed.
7. Even from these last propositions it is clear that Gazali’s theology did not remain unaffected by philosophical speculation. Like the Fathers of the Western Church, he had, whether consciously or unconsciously, appropriated a good deal from philosophy; and for that reason his theology was long proscribed as a heretical innovation by the Muslims of the West. In reality his teaching regarding God, the World, and the human Soul exhibits many elements which are foreign to the oldest type of Islam, and which may be traced back,—partly through the intervening agency of Christian and Jewish writers and partly through that of more recent Muslim authors,—to heathen wisdom.
Allah, Lord of the Worlds, God of Mohammed, is for Gazali a living personality it is true, but yet far less anthropomorphic than he appeared to simple Faith or in the Antimutazilite dogma. The surest way of coming to know him must be to refuse to attribute to him any of the properties of his creatures. But that does not mean that he possesses no attributes: the very reverse is the case. The plurality of his qualities does not prejudice the Unity [[165]]of his Being. Analogies are presented in the bodily world: A thing certainly cannot be both black and white at the same time, but it may well be cold and also dry. Only, if the qualities of men are attributed to God, they must be understood in another and higher sense, for he is pure Spirit. Besides omniscience and omnipotence, pure goodness and omnipresence belong to Him. By means of this omnipresence this world and the next are brought in a manner nearer to one another than by the usual representation.
The conception of God is thus spiritualized. But resurrection and the future life are also regarded as being much more spiritual in character than the present life. Such a conception is facilitated by the doctrine of the Gnostic Philosophy, that there are three or four worlds. One above the other in regular order rise the Earthly and Sensible World of Men, the World of Celestial Spirits, to which our Soul belongs, the World of Supra-celestial Angels, and lastly God himself, as the World of purest Light and most perfect Spirit. The pious and enlightened Soul ascends from the lower world through the heavens till it is face to face with God, for it is of spiritual nature and its resurrection-body is of celestial essence.