Averroist "Apocalyptic Humanism"

From Stuart MacClintock's article "Averroes" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Paul Edwards, 1967, p. 222):

From Aristotle, Averroes [Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198 C.E.] understood that the knowing process in man comprised a passive aspect--adumbrant concepts capable of being fully activated--and an active aspect--a power of dynamically activating such concepts. This power, termed during the medieval period the "active intellect," was taken to operate against a "passive intellect" to actualize concepts and thus constituted the thinking activity; and the resulting fusion of function was termed the "acquired intellect."... God, as the First Intelligence, provides through the next subordinate level of intelligences--the celestial bodies, upon which he exercises immediate control--activating power for the active intellect controlling man's thought.

It is difficult at this point in history to understand what was at stake for medieval thinkers in these abstruse speculations. Some insight may be gleaned from
Fazlur Rahman's analysis in Prophecy in Islam (1958, re-issued 2011 by the University of Chicago Press, p. 110):

... For Averroes, the eternal existence of the Universal Intellect and of thinking humanity are co-relates, as it were. This quasi-immanentism and humanism perhaps seemed to orthodox Islam even more dangerous than the temporary identity of the prophet with the divine in the act of revelation. For, even though the involvement of the divine in the creation and especially in man is great and, indeed, crucial for man's fate, to exhaust the meaning of the divine--the transcendent eternal truth--in man's destiny is even far more intolerable than the emptying of man's being in the divine [i.e., fana'].

The argument here must be viewed against the background of Islamic "orthodoxy's" desire to defend the position that the tradition had staked out centuries before vis a vis Christian orthodoxy. Unwilling to deify a proto-Rabbinic figure from an obscure Mediterranean backwater (i.e., Jesus of Nazareth), and yet equally unwilling to deny an active Divine presence in human life, the Islamic intellectual tradition followed the Qur'anic practice of endowing the prophetic lineage with a unique intimacy with the Divine--one that falls short, however, of incarnation or literal "sonship." Once established, this fine-line was vigilantly defended. Averroes, however, took no heed of this line--not because he wished to contest it but, rather, because it would not occur to him that anything he might think or write would be construed as crossing it. He was the commentator on Aristotle par excellence; Islam's radical (i.e., unitarian as opposed to trinitarian) monotheism was never in question for him. He honored Jesus as a prophet, not a god, and left it at that. But in speculating upon the ontologized Aristotelian epistemology of his day (i.e., Aristotle as read through a Neo-Platonic lens), he brought the Divine intelligence into contact not only with the prophets, but with all men--and not just for the purposes of producing revelation, but for thinking--something all men do all the time. From such a premise, one might draw the conclusion that Divine Reality is ever-present in the functioning of the human mind. If human beings may be said to reason "through" God, what becomes of the Divine-human distinction?

I have never encountered a comparison of Averroes to Blake--probably because of the latter's vehement anti-rationalism. But the parallel between Blakean Christology and Averroist anthropology is striking. For if Blake can be considered a Christian at all, it is only as a heterodox one. Blake's God is the imagination--the "poetic genius" as he would say--and every human being possesses such a genius. Christ, for Blake, was simply the paradigm case. Consequently, if we are willing to ignore all Blakean qualms and substitute reason for poetic genius, we find in Averroes a view quite similar to what Northrop Frye called Blake's "apocalyptic humanism." Fazlur Rahman called Averroes's position "quasi-immanentism and humanism." Pragmatically, I would suggest that the Averroist view anticipated Blake's.

Gilgamesh: the Invention of Humanism, the Invention of Literature

Given the manner in which I have defined humanism (see previous post), it should come as no surprise that its invention coincided with the invention of literature.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, first committed to cuneiform writing roughly 4,000 years ago, we encounter both. It is likewise a witness to the Mesopotamian birth of human civilization, i.e., the creation of large urban settlements (circa 3,000 BCE) made possible by the Neolithic or agricultural revolution that occurred among scattered human populations in the great river valleys (Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers) roughly 7,000 years before.

In the Gilgamesh epic, we encounter a king (Gilgamesh, two-thirds divine, one-third human) who tyrannizes his subjects until a "wild man" (Enkidu)--something of a throw-back to the cooperative pastoral values of an earlier age--challenges him. The result of this conflict is, remarkably enough, mutual respect and friendship. Afterwards, Gilgamesh and Enkidu hit the road together in search of adventure. In the process, Gilgamesh is forced to endure Enkidu's death and then to contemplate his own--despite his two-thirds divinity. He eventually returns home to Uruk in southern Iraq, deprived of any hope that he might escape death and, presumably, chastened by his experiences.

The narrative pattern of the Gilgamesh epic is the prototype of the epic struggle that is humanism: the struggle, as Wallace Stevens phrased it, to forgo the wishful thinking that inspires leaps into an imagined transcendence in order to discover, instead, "what will suffice."

Humanism Revisited

Humanism is a practice of mental and emotional askesis, a mode of resistance to the temptation ever present to human fancy to imagine an escape from mortality and the life of this world into immortality and the life of another world. Humanism, even in its more charismatic formulations (Romantic humanism, religious humanism) is a sober insistence that, in the words of G. K. Chesterton's incredulous gum-shoe cleric Father Brown,"...it's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things. But though it wanted only a touch to tip you into preternaturalism about these things, these things really were only natural things" ("The Miracle of Moon Crescent").

The American Romantic poet Wallace Stevens characterized human existence as an epic struggle in which the hero successfully negotiates the pressures exerted upon him by what he called "imagination" and "reality." For Stevens, a "successful negotiation" of these pressures is one in which the escapist tendencies of the imagination are held in check (if not chastened) by the everyday demands of ordinary life on earth (i.e., reality); and yet, at the same time, reality is enriched and enlivened by the vivid hues of the imagination's palette. His life as an insurance company executive by day and modernist (though slyly Romantic) poet by night was a demonstration--one might even say an extreme demonstration--of the practical viability of his humanistic project.

The epic struggle that is humanism runs through all of the religious traditions that locate their original mythical impetus in the people called "Israel." In "ancient Jewish philosophy," the struggle took the form of the divergent ways in which the people's God was imagined: as immanent or transcendent (see Efros, Ancient Jewish Philosophy). During the Second Temple Period, political factions arose among the Judahist inhabitants of Palestine that were expressive of this tension: the Sadducees, representing the traditional priest-caste and sacrificial cult, resisted the Pharisaic party's introduction of "transcendentalist" notions imported from Iranian religion--e.g., bodily resurrection, an afterlife, angelology, a Satan figure, apocalypse. This is not to say that the Sadducees were the true humanists and the Pharisees something else: rather, the ideologies of both groups combined elements of humanist immanentism and transcendental speculation in different proportions and with often conflicting emphases. Such were the Palestinian parties and politics that shaped not only the "Old Testament" (as Morton Smith rightly argued) but also helped to determine the shape of the "New."

With the rise of the Jesus Movement among Second Temple Judahists and the introduction into the Near Eastern religious imagination of Graeco-Roman notions of apotheosis, the struggle continued in the articulation of incarnationist Christology and, eventually, trinitarian theology. What was originally at stake in the strange, post-mortem history of the Galilean proto-Rabbinic figure (Yeshua)--who, in his all too brief public career, attempted to forge an alternative to the predominant Judahist parties of his day--was the question of where to draw the line between human reality and an imagination given to flights of super-human fancy. In Wallace Stevens's words, it was a struggle to find "what will suffice."

With the Roman Empire's adoption, in the 4th century C.E., of Christianity as its official cult, the politics implicit in this struggle became not only explicit but were writ large in public life. By the mid-5th century (the Council of Chalcedon), a specific Christological formulation became a legally enforceable ideology and test of citizenship in the Empire. The specifics of that formulation marginalized those who felt it did not adequately express their own sense of "what will suffice" and so, for them, humanism--as they conceived it--became a matter of conscience. Such individuals and, unquestionably, groups of individuals, sought refuge in the Empire's hinterlands, and constituted, for the most part, informal communities of conscience. Too "Jewish" to be "doctrinaire" Christians (i.e., to consent fully to Chalcedonian Christology) and yet too Christian to be Rabbinic Jews, these individuals and groups languished on the periphery of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, unorganized and voiceless, until the early 7th century C.E. At that time, in oasis towns of the Red Sea basin, a new movement arose that would, within a century, reconfigure the religious and political landscape of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene: the movement that would come to be known in time as "Islam."

Despite this reconfiguration, however, the struggle between imagination and reality, i.e., the epic struggle that is humanism, continued apace. Among Muslims, it would take new forms--even as it had among the convictional communities that were now known separately as "Christianity" and "Judaism." But the struggle remained then as now, in its essentials, the same. As concisely expressed by the title of one Stevens poem, the struggle amounts to this: "How To Live, What To Do."

The Proper Study of Humankind

1. From Alexander Pope, An Essay On Man:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.

2. From Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p.28:

For the essence of humanism is [the] belief … that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.

COMMENTARY: Pater here echoes the Roman poet Terrence's declaration that Homo sum--"I am a man" (i.e., a human being)--and what follows from that fact is that "I consider nothing human alien to me" (nihil humanum alienum a me puto).

3. From Ralph Waldo Emerson,"History" in Essays: First Series:

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

COMMENTARY: If there is no history, only biography, we should not be surprised to learn that biography and autobiography are crucial genres for understanding the history of religions.

That does not mean that the academic study of religion becomes nothing but the memoirs of scholars; it means that the study of religion is a branch of aesthetics (as found in Walter Pater, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Santayana, and Wallace Stevens).

Humanistic Social Science

In my view, humanistic social science is best understood and appreciated as the hand-maid of the humanities proper (i.e., the study of texts, broadly construed, as the proper study of humankind). The great founding figure of humanistic social science was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 C.E.).

It would be centuries before any European intellectual would venture to theorize in a disciplined manner about human social organization and the effect of environment (natural and social) upon the construction of personal character. If I had to nominate a European for the honor of "founding figure" of humanistic social science in the so-called "West" (Ibn Khaldun, after all, was from Western North Africa), I would be tempted to name Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), although I would prefer to regard Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) as that figure.

While it is true that Montaigne wrote about himself, he did so, as Eric Auerbach rightly noted, in an effort to describe as accurately as he could the "human condition"--indeed, the latter phrase is Montaigne's. It is also true that few readers of Montaigne would ever accuse him of doing anything in a "disciplined manner," but that judgment is due, in part, to Montaigne's own self-effacing remarks about himself. The discipline one observes in Montaigne is his relentless self-scrutiny. Of course, one may object, this is not at all unprecedented--just read St. Augustine's Confessions! I am afraid I must disagree. St. Augustine engaged in self-scrutiny for the purpose of justifying his religious conversion--and to persuade his readers that they, too, were in need of salvation. Montaigne, on the other hand, was attempting to plumb the depths of the mystery of the self. He appears to have been innocent of any desire to justify himself or his way of life to his reader. What you see in the Essais is what you get--take it or leave it. The absence of a sense of sin and contrition in Montaigne infuriated Pascal; in Rousseau's eyes, his lack of self-justification must have appeared to be a missed opportunity--a "mistake" that Rousseau himself was determined not to make in his own Confession.



Among latter-day practitioners of this hybrid form of humanistic study, I am drawn to Max Weber, William James, C. Wright Mills, and Clifford Geertz. These four intellectuals appear to me to never lose sight of the fact that, by virtue of their practice as writers, their work contributed to the construction of a history of human subjectivities. In this respect, they are all worthy successors to Ibn Khaldun and Michel de Montaigne.

The Humanist Republic of Letters

"The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works,- if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off with fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the Germans are hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in the hills of the Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable, rich and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were any magnet that would point to the countries and houses where are the persons who are intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on the road today.

The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is a man who invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas,- the more, the worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think, nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence collected or distributed." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Uses of Great Men," from Representative Men

Why Stevens Matters

Wallace Stevens matters because he picked up the fallen standard of Walt Whitman (who had picked up the fallen standard of Dante) and endeavored to write a Commedia for his time and place.

His poetry as a whole (the "whole Harmonium"), though often difficult, stands next to Leaves of Grass as American scripture. It is, perhaps, commentary on Whitman in many ways, but commentary of such aesthetic strength that it achieved canonicity. Not bad for an insurance lawyer from Reading, Pa.