I
Ash'arite causal doctrine was at first adopted largely
in opposition to
fundamental tenets of the most impor-
tant of
the earlier schools of kalām, the
Mu'tazilite.
This school attained the height of its influence in the
first half of the ninth century, a period caught in the
throes of the first
wave of the transmission of Greek
philosophy and science to the Arabs.
Although greatly
influenced by Greek thought, the Mu'tazilites
remained
essentially dogmatists, selecting and reformulating
philosophical ideas to serve theological ends. Now the
Islamic version of
atomism that underlies Ash'arite
causal doctrine had its origin with the
Mu'tazilite
school, many of whose members adopted varying oc-
casionalist views. There was, however,
no consensus
of opinion among the Mu'tazilites on causal questions,
their differences betraying the difficulties they encoun-
tered in reconciling the concept of divine
omnipotence
with the two cardinal principles of their theology,
those
of divine unity and justice. Ash'arite causal doc-
trine meant the rejection of these principles.
The first principle denied the distinction between
God's eternal attributes
and His essence. This raised
a question concerning the concept of divine
will in
relation to the doctrine of the world's temporal crea-
tion. Most of the Mu'tazilites rejected
Aristotle's theory
of the potentially infinite divisibility of
substance,
adopting atomism as the only view consistent with the
Qur'anic statement that God knows the determinate
number of all things.
Moreover, they transformed
Greek atomism into a doctrine of transient atoms
and
accidents, created ex nihilo, constituting a world cre-
ated in time. The doctrine of the world's eternity,
they maintained, deprived God of will. It meant the
simultaneity of cause
and effect which only obtains,
as in natural causes, when the effect is
necessitated by
the agent's nature or essence. Here, however, their
principle of divine unity faced a major difficulty: if
the divine will is
conceived as an eternal attribute and
hence not distinct from the divine
essence, God's acts
become in reality essential, not voluntary. This
led
many Mu'tazilites to argue that the divine will itself
is
created—a doctrine vulnerable to the Ash'arite criti-
cism that such a will requires another created will
to
create it and so on ad infinitum.
The principle of divine justice posed further diffi-
culties. Based on the premiss that some acts have in-
trinsic moral value, it asserted (a) that
God performs
only the just act and (b) that He performs it because
it
is in itself good. Al-Naẓẓām (d. ca. 848) argued that
it is impossible for God to act unjustly. Other Mu'ta-
zilites, rejecting this view as a denial of
divine omni-
potence, held that God has the
power to perform unjust
acts, but in fact never does. How then were they
to
account for evil without implicating God? In one at-
tempt to solve this problem, Mu'ammar (d. ca. 825)
maintained that God creates only bodies, imprinting
on them specific
natures: accidents (bad or good) are
either the necessitated effects of
these natures or the
effects of voluntary agents like man. This latter
point
entailed the doctrine of man's freedom of the will,
universally
endorsed by the Mu'tazilites who argued
that a just God can only judge men
for acts they
themselves initiate. They agreed that man
“creates”
his acts, but disagreed as to whether the
human will
is effective in the outer world. Is man the real author
of
“the generated acts” (al-af'āl al-mutawallida), the
events in the outer
world normally regarded as the
effects of his action? Some affirmed this
either wholly
or with qualifications; others denied it. Among the
latter, some held that the generated acts are necessi-
tated by the causal properties in nature; others,
de-
nying natural causes, attributed them to
direct divine
action. A curious position was attributed by Muslim
writers to Thumāma Ibn al-Ashras (d. 828) who was
alleged to have
argued as follows: since it is possible
for a person to will an act and
then die before the
consequent generated acts, and since action is not
attributable to the dead, generated acts cannot be
attributed to man. Nor
can they be attributed to God,
since they may be evil. Hence, generated
acts have
no author.
These inconsistencies, the Ash'arites argued, arise
from the erroneous
Mu'tazilite principles of unity and
justice. The eternal attributes, they
argued, are “addi-
tional” to God's essence and include His will. It is thus
that God's acts are voluntary, not necessitated by His
essence. As for the
second principle, all acts, the
Ash'arites argued, are in themselves
morally neutral.
An act is just simply because God performs or com-
mands it; unjust, because He prohibits it.
Divine deci-
sions are not conditioned by any
intrinsic values in acts
and the question of whether God has the power
to
act unjustly is redundant. Men do not create their acts.
Human
acts, like all other events, are created directly
by God. To avoid
identification with the Islamic deter-
minists (al-mujabbira) who held that human acts
are
“compelled” by God, the Ash'arites resorted to
the
proverbially enigmatic doctrine of “acquisition”
(
al-
kasb
). They distinguished between a compulsory act,
like a spasmodic
bodily movement, and a deliberate
act. While both kinds of acts are created
in man by
God, the second is created together with the
“power”
(al-qūwa),
which exists only with the act, not before
it. They also seem to have held that whatever is nor-
mally regarded as the effect of man's
deliberate act
is also created by God simultaneously with the power,
so that both “power” and “effect”
are acquired by man
from God. In other words, the relation between
man's
“created power” and the “created
effect,” as in all
sequences in the world, is that of mere
concomitance.
(But this point has been interpreted differently; see
Bibliography).
