The Medievals and Islam

This week I am presenting a short summary of the medieval Rishonim and Islamic thought on the value of the physical. Next week will be starting a new series of posts on a new subject. Stay tuned.

THE MEDIEVALS

Many of the medieval Rishonim were troubled by the overwhelming role physicality plays in Judaism. If Judaism is about becoming closer to G-d shouldn’t one neglect the body instead of being obsessed with it?

Indeed this perplexed many a Jew and the Rishonim sought to address this issue in a variety of ways. Some of them wrote philosophic works analyzing the pros and cons of the spiritual versus the corporeal. 

Some strove to find a psychological and social benefit to many mitzvoth. This helped because if the mitzvah was intended to better man it wasn’t so much an obsession with physicality per se as much as it was an obsession with improving man’s psyche and psychological orientation. The question then became why the commitment to improving man through constant physical rituals and mechanisms. Not that that doesn’t require a systematic answer but the harshness of the question was perhaps softened.

Others chose to delve into the meta-physical underpinnings of mitzvoth. Such a construct was very useful since it gave intrinsic meaning to the minutiae of the law. From this vantage point, putting teffilin on was not just a ritual act but one that took on massive proportions. Teffilin was an act that healed the cosmos, brought down light and order into a chaotic world and connected one to the chochma (wisdom) of the divine. As such the value and purpose in simple physical acts became tremendously meaningful and one could rest assured that they were indeed becoming closer to G-d. Again, this did not explain why one must use the physical spectrum in order to activate divine mechanisms of global healing and holiness but at least it gave one the confidence that the acts they took were essential and necessary.

In truth the philosophical Rishonim, the psychological Rishonim and the meta-physical Rishonim all ended up in similar places. They all undertook to explain the significance of the physical within Judaism in order to justify the overwhelming place that the material has in Jewish religious life. Each one in their own way. But ultimately they did not explain fully why the physical spectrum must be used instead of the spiritual. Instead they gave useful language for understanding and internalizing meaning in the material. But why G-d cares about physicality in the first place was not really discussed and analyzed in a systematic way.

ISLAM

Many Islamic scholars dealt with the conflict between the spiritual and the physical. In truth there were two very different schools of thought within the scholarly Islamic world. The Ash’arites and the Mu’tazalites. The Mu’tazalites were the rational school of the thought while the Ash’arites were profoundly irrational. To explain this would require us to go into some length on Islamic history and the evolution of their philosophic and theological world, but a quick summary shall have to suffice.

Put simply the Mu’tazalites stressed G-d’s justice and rationality while the Ash’arites stress His will and power. To give but one example:

The question of Man’s free will is an ancient one. In the Islamic world this question revolved around the nature of the Koran.  Was the Koran created in time? Or has it co-existed with G-d eternally?

The Ash’arites claimed that the Koran was eternal and outside the scope of history. 

There were two possible problems with this that the Mu’tazalites bitterly fought against. One was that if the Koran has co-existed with G-d eternally doesn’t that create problems concerning the one-ness and absolute unity of G-d? Wasil ibn ‘ata, one of the first Mu’tazalites said “He who affirms an eternal quality beside G-d affirms two gods”. Indeed the Ash’arites claimed that all of G-ds attributes such as kindness and strictness co-existed eternally within him. To the Mu’tazalites’ questions, they simply responded that it had to be accepted “bila kafya”. The Ash’arites had no problem with saying the Koran has existed co-eternally with G-d.

[Chassidus discusses at length a similar problem which is – how do the Sefirot exist within G-d yet not create any plurality within His being?]

The other possible problem was determinism. If the Koran was never created and instead is eternal then all the historic events it recounts were predetermined. But to the Ash’arites this wasn’t a problem, on the contrary, from their perspective everything is predetermined. Because if man has power to choose freely and not even G-d knows or can influence his decision then there is a sphere of power outside of G-d, something unthinkable to the Ash’arites.

At any rate, the Ash’arites espoused the idea that the physical has no intrinsic value just as the spiritual has no intrinsic value. This is because to them there is no set of values that can even be thought of outside of revelation. I.e. there was no epistemology in their world view. They held that revelation is everything. 

An important point though, is that to them, even the idea of revelation is wrong. Revelation implies that an act, say killing, is good or bad objectively, just that G-d is coming to reveal what is good and what is bad. To them the act has no value per se. Killing is bad because G-d said so and for no other reason.

In this they diverge from Chassidus which holds that there is much truth to that statement, just that the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. I.e. killing essentially is bad because G-d said so, just that there is room for the idea that killing should be seen as bad per se as well.

[I will write a series of posts on this in the near future since it is an intriguing concept and profoundly consequential in many areas of religious thought.]

Most of the Islamic research I did was based on (directly and from the bibliography of) a book called The Closing of the Muslim Mind which is an elaborate analysis of Islamic thought.

Good Shabbas and thanks for reading.