I can't speak to the author's historical claims; you can all speak to his doctrinal ones if you wish. I can say, however, that philosophically he is correct. During the Medieval period there was a time when all three of these Abrahamic religions had adopted a broadly Aristotelian, somewhat Neoplatonic metaphysics following the influence of Avicenna. At that time, in other words, philosophically all three religions believed mostly the same things about God's own nature and our ability to understand or approach it. All three took Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover" to be a reasonable first-pass approximation, and then used Neoplatonic insights to try to tackle the parts of God that prove ineffable, and to the same basic effect: mostly we can only speak negatively about what God isn't ("limited," "bad," etc.), but we can make some positive claims that, whatever God is like, he roots our basic ideas of the good, the worthy, the noble, and so forth.
The one thing that the philosophers really couldn't come together on, however, was the Trinity. There's actually a pretty good pre-Christian Neoplatonic number theory argument for how One necessarily implies Three; in other words, even before the debate passed into the Abrahamic religions, the subject was already under discussion and fully grounded. Those of you who remember our discussion of the Parmenides might recall some of how this works; it's a genuinely ancient problem about the One and the Many, or whether there is in fact only one thing or many, or what would be necessary for something that is One to give rise to things that are apparently many.
Nevertheless, by the time we get to the period of Maimonides, who was a contemporary of the Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroes -- the latter very regularly cited by Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae as "the Commentator" on Aristotle -- we can see that the Jewish philosopher could find a lot of agreement with several Islamic schools, but found the Christians to be incoherent. Avicenna's arguments, as well as Averroes' commentaries on Aristotle, demonstrated clearly the need for the ultimate mover to be a Unity.
Having accepted all of that, there just wasn't room for a Trinity. Avicenna gives this argument explicitly; in easy-to-digest form it is this:
Assumption: The ultimate mover could be one thing or more than one.
A: If it were one thing, it would be simple in the sense of having no parts but being just one thing.
B: If it were more than one thing, there would have to be a third kind of thing holding the other things together.
C: In the case of (B), the third kind of thing would actually be prior to the ability of the other things to interoperate.
D: In the case of (C), then, the third kind of thing would be a better candidate for the real ultimate mover than the other things it brings together and unifies.
Sub-Conclusion 1: To reach the real ultimate, we have to go through this cycle to the bottom.
E: A 'third kind of thing' like the one mentioned in (B-D) could either be one thing or several things, but this repeats the cycle.
F: Such a repetition of cycles could happen once or many times, potentially infinitely.
G: It is not possible to go through an actual infinite series (this is proven twice in Avicenna).
H: Thus, there must be a finite number of cycles before we reach a thing that is simple and serves as the ground for all of the other things.
I: From B-D, we know this ultimately prior thing is the best candidate for the real ultimate mover.
∴: The ultimate mover is one simple thing.
Aquinas accepts the simplicity of God and argues for it right at the beginning of the Summa in Question 3 of the whole work. But he also wants it to be three things. For Maimonides, this whole Christian approach is nonsense: it's basically incoherent. He lists his objections to all the other nearby schools of philosophy, but the Christians are the ones he thinks are just out to sea.
Islam too insists on the ultimate unity of the One that is its god. Christianity doesn't. In this basic way, the Orthosphere is right: Islam's and Judaism's ideas about God are much closer metaphysically than either are to Christianity's.
4 comments:
The similarity exists because Islam is an ideology based on a unitarian Christian foundation. After the defeat of the Sassanids by the Byzantines, and the Byzantine abandonment of the Holy Land to deal with the threat of the Avars, the local Arabs filled the power vacuum. They regarded Trinitarian Christianity as heresy, seeing Jesus as just a man, a Prophet, and nothing more.
When Abd al Malik had the Dome of the Rock constructed o/a 692 AD, he had the shahada placed on the inner ambulatory to that effect. I believe that when the Abbasids took power from the Umayyads, they sought a unifying narrative for their empire, and so Islam was developed. They rejected any link with Christianity at all, placing Islam as the last and greatest revelation from God. Quran, hadith, etc... were developed to support the Caliphate and to give it legitimacy and a "mandate of Heaven." That's why Islam is really more of an ideology than a religion.
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-Grim
Sorry!
Bones
He claims that "The Abrahamic religions are Judaism and Islam, respectively born of Isaac and Ishmael, half-brothers and Abraham’s sons. Christianity was not born of a son of Abraham, but was more auspiciously born of the only begotten Son of God."
What a strange claim! As a son of Mary, whose lineage goes back through David to Abraham (if we believe Scripture, of course), Christianity was most certainly born of a son of Abraham who was also the only begotten Son of God.
God founded one religion. Before Christ, we call that Judaism. Then Christ came as a Jew, as their Messiah, and fulfilled the Torah, transforming it, and added "the nations" -- the Gentiles -- to Israel. We now call this Christianity, but it is the same faith.
Some Jews rejected Christ and, after the destruction of the Temple and the Roman ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel, they developed Rabbinic Judaism. It became rather different than the ancient Judaism, and sometimes those changes were intentional attempts to distinguish them from Christians, so the beliefs grew further apart. This is one reason why Maimonides's conception of God was closer to the Islamic conception; he was using Rabbinic conceptions of God developed after AD 70 instead of the conceptions of God common to Judaism before AD 70, which even before Jesus's birth included the idea that there could be multiple persons of God (although most Jews who thought this thought there were two persons of God).
Then: It is sometimes said that Christianity is Judaism dumbed down for gentiles, but Islam is very obviously much closer to the original religion of laws and prophets and a holy nation at war with the world. Islam extends Mosaic Law to the nations, exalts the sons of Ishmael, adds one last name to the roster of prophets, but is otherwise Judaism 2.0. It has the same primitive monotheism, the same totalitarian legalism, the same ferocious hatred of the infidel.
What an odd description of Judaism! Israel was supposed to be a light to the nations, not at war with them. What totalitarian legalism? That's nonsense. Hatred of the infidel? Nonsense. Unless you think God got it wrong the first time, of course. I mean, did God found a faith of totalitarian legalism? Really? God founded the faith of the ancient Jews; did God screw it up and have to start a second religion?
There is no conflict and no difference between the God of the Old and New Testaments. They are the same. Christians worship Jehovah, the same God as the ancient Jews. The later Rabbinic Jews just got the idea of God wrong. As did Mohammed, so they do have that in common.
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