The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
Dean
I am currently reading Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox by G.K. Chesterton. It's slow going in parts, but it often has fascinating observations. This one suddenly jumped out at me:
The Modern Girl with the lipstick and the cocktail is as much a rebel against the Women's Right's Woman of the '80s, with her stiff stick-up collars and strict teetotalism, as the latter was a rebel against the Early Victorian lady of the languid waltz tunes and the album full of quotations from Byron; or as the last, again, was a rebel against a Puritan mother to whom the waltz was a wild orgy and Byron the Bolshevist of his age.
That line about the "The Modern Girl with the lipstick and the cocktail is as much a rebel against the Women's Right's Woman of the '80s" gave me a start, since I grew up in the 1980s and am very familiar with modern young women's backlash against the strict authoritarian feminism that culminated in that decade--but Chesterton, writing in 1930 or so, was referring to the 1880s. Then I just started chuckling.
The more things change the more they stay the same, eh?
I do think Chesterton profoundly misunderstood Islam and Buddhism -- he thought all "Asian" religions were purely negative, world-negating. There is a section where Chesterton is describing a miracle of St. Thomas'. Thomas had written an interpretation of one of the sacrements, and threw it down by the altar and kneeled in prayer. Then, a voice came to him, told him he had written correctly, and offered him a choice of anything he desired in the world, to which the saint replied, "only thee." Chesterton described this answer as "uniquely Christian." But in fact that anecdote has an almost perfect match in al-Ghazali's "Alchemy of Happiness," (written well before Aquinas lived) in a chapter on the love of God. He described how the famous Persian mystic Bayizid al-Bastami was given a vision of being trasported above the seven heavens and the throne of God, and was asked to choose from anything he desired, and he answered, "nothing besides thee."
I'm only about halfway through. I'll probably finish it this weekend.
In modern times budhisms vary, though often they use the same language, at least.
And he never claimed that Islam was negative like budhism.
Similar to the Aquinas story, or similar to the al-Bastami story?
The problem with your last distinction is that you are comparing a story that Chesterton related about someone elses observation of Aquinas to a traditional story written in Persian by Ghazali about Bistami, translated (I believe) into Urdu and only after that into English. Who knows -- maybe Aquinas said "only" and Bistami didn't -- I don't think we can get too technical. Point is that both Aquinas and Bistami wanted God above all else. Bistami was certainly not a traditional ascetic -- when filled with the ecstasy of God, he is known to have uttered -- "Glory be to me!" Now that's audacity.
You are right that Chesterton did not describe Islam in the exact same terms as Buddhism, that is he described Buddhism as perfectly world-negating, and Islam as only partially so. But take this passage of Chesterton's:
In response to Chesterton, and in response to Chris' point, I would suggest reading more of al-Ghazali, especially his "On the 99 names of God," in which he describes how God, according to His names, is truly Just, Merciful, Creative, Powerful, etc., and how a man's (or woman's -- yes he wrote about women mystics too) happiness depends fully on his developing these characteristics within himself to the best of his ability. Specific among Ghazali's suggestions was studying the causal relations between events in this world, for the only way to be truly creative is to understand how one event begets another -- doesn't sound at all world-negating to me.
I don't even see the world-renouncing aspect.
And this same subject was picked up much later by a Christian poet:
Simple point is that similar thoughts find expressions in many cultures around the world. To say something is uniquely Christian or uniquely Muslim requires long and careful study, not only of Christianity or Islam, but also of all of the other major religions and philosophies, and quite a bit of history too.
Even more important point -- Chesterton wrote a very good book, but you just have to be able to understand, like Dean, what is merely prejudice, and what is true insight.
Language is a funny thing,
Encompassing us all,
And yet it's what we say when we
Say nothing that is all,
For words are like a cunning snake
Who slithers here and yon,
Making trails upon the grass
Still dewy with the dawn,
Oh words they give us all so much
To argue so about,
And if we understood them true
We'd know how filled with doubt,
But words are like the craft we shape
When we misunderstand,
Making kingdoms in the air
And shadows on the land,
Forgive me if suspicion rules
Whenever others speak,
Forgive me if I doubt I know
If my own words are complete,
But words were never meant to be
A substitute for Truth
At best they are an Image dim
Of what lies at the Root,
So remember this my friend
When full with what you know,
We all are only human men
We know words, but not their Soul...
Heh.
I'll fix that, thanks.
The point upon which we disagree is that this:
Now, this could be a bad translation, but this isn't the audacious saying that he wants perfect and self-complete being, it's the statement that he won't be tempted from God. It's much more akin to when Christ was tempted by Satan.
Of course, it could be a bad translation, but what we have isn't at all the same thing. The one is a motion towards, the other is a refusing to be moved away.
But besides all this, frankly, if this is true:
He couldn't have been a very orthodox muslim, because that's not even the statement of an orthodox monotheist.
Another way to put it is that these two answers to the "you may have your choice of all the things of the world":
(1) I will have you.
(2) No thank you, you're all I want.
I don't think that you've gotten this far in the book yet, Dean. It's on page 109:
In some sense the key to understanding what Chesterton means about this story about St. Thomas is that there were no wrong answers. St. Thomas wasn't being tempted, had he asked for a lost manuscript or to understand how a flower works, or to know where the eagle makes his nest, he would not have been sinning.
The shape of this story, as Chesterton points out, is almost invariably the person playing a sort of shell game, where he has to pick the one thing of value, or as often see that none of the shells have anything under them.
What makes this particular story so uniquely Christian is that in Christianity the creator does not despise his creation; God became flesh and dwelt amongst us: flesh is worth something.
St. Thomas wasn't renouncing temptations, he was actively taking what he didn't deserve.
And still, if you think Ghazali is calling for world-renunciation, here is a passage from later in the chapter:
You keep quoting Islamic mystics, but that's a very tenuous ground. There were certainly muslim mystics. In China there are christian budhists and budhist christians. In america you can find materialist christians and materialist christians. Historically, the calvanists are in some sense christians. The arians, the gnostics, and the manichees were all christians, if christian heretics.
There are muslims who enjoy drinking alcohol and keep representational art in their homes. There have almost certainly been pantheist muslims. There are almost certainly people who believe that Muhamed was not the final prophet of the God who was directly given the Koran, but just a teacher.
Especially since there's no central authority to Islam, there's no good definition of Islam is. It's not very possible to talk about Orthodox versus heterodox Islam.
So when talking about Islam, Chesterton was talking about the broad strains of Islam which his audience was likely to run into or at least be mildly familiar with. This probably has a lot to do with what you'll find in a relatively straight-forward (i.e. unsophisticated) reading of the Koran. I think it very unlikely that Chesterton would have been overly concerned with esoteric persian mystics.
The Islam that bans whiskey and paintings and pigs — and I know that such restrictions are increasingly uncommonly followed in muslim countries, but no one believes that this is because people there are becoming stricter, more orthodox muslims — that does have the nature that Chesterton described of abstracting God from creation. The very beginnings of Islam were amidst a great deal of pagan idolatry, and so there was a very great effort of trying to keep people from confusing the creation with the creator. Chesterton's point, in the section that you cite, was that they succeeded.
But you're very much mischaracterizing Chesterton's views of Islam. He knew perfectly well that the muslims wanted to strip the world bare so that people might worship God. Covering people, abstaining from alcohol, destroying all statues and burning all paintings are all out of a fierce devotion to God. Chesterton recognized it as the same impulse which produced devotion to Jewish laws; the same impulse that made it a crime to utter the name of God. That is, a fierce and almost monomanaical worship of the one true God.
Chesterton never claimed that Islam was universally negative, any more than he claimed that the platonists / manichees / augustinians believed in the universal negation of the budhists. What he did claim is that all of them shared a certain world-renouncing aspect; a preference for the spiritual over the physical which tended toward almost a sort of disgust with the physical world.
Obviously the majority of adherents of the religion lived like normal human beings, and didn't perfectly carry out their beliefs. E.g. no determinists refuse to choose. And obviously a religion which let's a man have four wives can't despise the world completely.
This is exactly the opposite of the idea that when offered everything, there's no wrong answer.
This is a separate question, but what on earth is Ghazali's source for this?
Btw, I apologize for misspelling your name above.
Several points:
1) Just because Islam has less of a set hierarchy than Catholicism, it doesn't mean that Islam doesn't have a (generally) recognized orthodoxy -- order can arise spontaneously, after all.
2) Abu Hamid al-Ghazali wasn't just some "estoteric Persian mystic," but one of the most important orthodox, Sunni theologians. So if you are looking for an accepted interpretation, he's probably the best to go to. Perhaps it wouldn't be too far a stretch to call him the Aquinas of Islam.
3) You cannot infer from the fact that Muslims generally recognize that pigs and alchohol are forbidden (they are divided on paintings), that they are world-denying, even in a sense. Christians, after all, recognize bans on plenty of things, including sex outside of wedlock and blasphemy, meat on Fridays during Lent, etc.
4) Finally, you say that
But this is my point. Chesterton's Islam, which is perhaps the Islam his Western audience was "mildly familiar with," is based on an incorrect understanding of what Islam really is and has been. Further, I think this does present somewhat of a problem for Chesterton, who would have you believe that Aquinas had (almost) uniquely reached this world-affirming intellectual and spiritual perspective. However, I think that many Muslims, including and especially al-Ghazali, had reached a similar place before the time of Aquinas, and without believing in Jesus as the Word-made-flesh. Indeed, I believe that many Muslims (and Jews too -- don't forget Maimonides, after all) helped Aquinas see the way forward.
Oh and Chris, I should say that I agree with this statement completely -- that is how I read Chesterton too. I just don't think he was right about Islam (don't think about Buddhism either, but that's a different argument, and I am less knowledgeable on that one).
(1) My point is that talking about muslim orthodoxy is that absent any sort of organization, it's inherently a muddy concept. The result is that saying that somebody is mischaracterizing Islam is also a muddy concept. You're right that there are coherent strains absent authorities, but at the same time you can't pick which strain of Islam someone else is talking about.
(2) Abu Hamid al-Ghazali may be a widely respected sunni theologian, but "the famous Persian mystic Bayizid al-Bastami" was a persian mystic. And it was the persian mystic who had the vision.
(3) Sex outside of wedlock and blasphemy are both actions, not things. Paintings are things, statues are things, and wine is a thing. Abstaining from meat on fridays is inherently giving license to meat on every other day of the week. It's a discipline meant to be an exercise, just like picking up heavy things is an exercise. It's an exercise precisely because meat is good and should be eaten, that people sometimes go without meat to make sure that they understand the hierarchy of goods and aren't getting lost in the idolatry of putting subordinate goods above superior goods. But the church doesn't ban them; it doesn't say that there's anything wrong with it.
Banning wine and pork are at odds with "Can you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes through the stomach and is discharged into the sewer? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and it is these that make a man unclean. For from the heart come evil intentions: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander. These are the things that make a man unclean. But to eat with unwashed hands does not make a man unclean."
Jesus ate and drank with sinners, and the Catholic church, however much in the clutches of ascetics throughout history, have never called any wine or food bad in itself. No wine or food, apart from some action in its preparation (e.g. the blood of babies would be bad because you'd have to hurt the babies to get it), have ever been forbidden in the catholic church.
But that's not the same thing as saying that the catholic church gave everyone license to be gluttons. Food being good in itself doesn't mean it's the ultimate good.
(4) There have undoubtedly been muslim theologians who were to some degree world affirming. From what very little I know of non-modern Islamic theology, this was especially the case during the time around and before Aquinas. If you read the entired of "The Dumb Ox", you'll see that Chesterton points out that Aristotle was himself rather world-affirming, and Aquinas certainly learned from Aristotle. Chesterton's point was not that Aquinas was unique in being world-affirming, it's that the content of Aquinas' world-affirming theology was uniquely Christian. Aquinas never strove to be original, he strove to be correct, and Chesterton would never have slandered Aquinas by saying that Aquinas was original.
There's a reason why Chesterton said, "so uniquely Christian for those who can really understand it". One of the central points of Aquinas' theology is that subordinate things are not bad. The most startling fact of Christian theology is that when God chose to become incarnate, he chose to be a poor Jewish carpenter born in a manger in a cave that animals slept in.
The Lord of All Creation chose to be a poor blue collar joe in a poor, despised part of the world, and you think that Thomas Aquinas choosing something that would make him an even better philosopher would be bad? Do you think that the point of Christian theology is that God has bad judgment? That the King of Kings and Lord of Lords can't choose as wisely as his creatures?
This story, at least as Chesterton tells it, is all about Aquinas' audacity, not his simplicity or wisdom.
Yes but you said I was quoting "esoteric persian mystics," and al-Ghazali, in addition having been an important theologian, was Persian and was a mystic. Further, the Bistami quote was lifted from a chapter in Ghazali, so it certainly related back to the Ghazali work I was referencing.
Okay, but to get technical, Islam (at least in most interpretations) bans eating pork and drinking wine and carving statues.
But Jesus was a Jew who followed the Law. I highly doubt he ever ate pork. As he said "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." So I think the point of that other passage you quote from Matthew about cleanliness is that cleanliness of the heart (or spirit) is much more important than cleanliness of the skin; i.e. the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law -- it does not, necessarily, reject the letter of the law. It merely sets up an important hierarchy.
I agree, but subordinate things are subordinate -- and this is why Aquinas's choosing God was the best possible answer -- he did not choose something subordinate. I didn't mean that any other choice would have been absolutely wrong; it just wouldn't have been the highest goal, God. Ghazali made a similar point elsewhere that there is no thing in itself in God's creation that is bad -- and yet, because certain actions tend to cause more harm than good (to themselves or others), humans should (or obligated to) avoid them.
DanielH, you offer a disservice re: Thomas Acquinas and Chesterton:
The issue is uniquely Christian as it involves the Eucharist of the Christian faith and not as you suggest re: an almost perfect match in al-Ghazali.
It is not surprising to read in the biographies of St. Thomas that he was frequently abstracted and in ecstasy. Towards the end of his life the ecstasies became more frequent. On one occasion, at Naples in 1273, after he had completed his treatise on the Eucharist, three of the brethren saw him lifted in ecstasy, and they heard a voice proceeding from the crucifix on the altar, saying "Thou hast written well of me, Thomas; what reward wilt thou have?" Thomas replied, "None other than Thyself, Lord" (Prümmer, op. cit., p. 38). Similar declarations are said to have been made at Orvieto and at Paris.
Budhism originally was purely negative. The problem for sidharta guatama was eternal life, and the salvation that he was seeking was death. That is, we're all trapped in the cycle of reincarnation and the goal is to escape karma so that you can become nothing.
This statement is both culturally and scripturally ignorant - roughly equivalent to saying that the goal of Christianity is to die so we can go to heaven.
The aim of Buddhism is the cessation of Dukkha, usually translated in English as "suffering," but in reality is untranslateable. Dukkha can be best described as the misery or emptiness that accompanies compulsive or repetitive desire, or attachment to the material world. From its beginnings, Buddhism taught that one could escape from this desire through the Eightfold Path, encompassing moral behavior, meditation, and mindfulness.
If what you are saying were true, Buddhism would preach suicide. It does not. Indeed, like Christianity Buddhism has always emphasized that life must be lived despite its imperfections - and that perfection must be sought anyway.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.