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."