Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute Over al-Ghazali's "Best of All Possible Worlds" (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 589 Maimonides and his successors were mainly interested in employing Aristotle to amplify certain theological convictions rather than to enter into pure philosophical problems on Aristotle's own terms. Booth's work concludes with an appraisal of St. Albert and St. Thomas, who undertook to adapt the Aristotelianism of the commentators to the existing Christian theology. Circumstances in the Christian West were stable and St. Albert and St. Thomas enjoyed greater fortunes in securing some kind of philosophical-theological synthesis on Aristotelian grounds than did their counterparts in the Islamic East or West. While the views of these two thinkers were considered principally Aristotelian by their contemporaries, Booth's "study has shown that, whatever their followers and opponents might have thought, they [Albert and Thomas] did not so much Aristotelianise the existing tradition as Dionysianise the newly appeared Aristotelian ontology " (269). Albert's Neoplatonic treatment of the Aristotelian aporia appears when he makes esse a primary emanant and universal in which all subsequent universals and individuals are logically derived as so many participants or subsequent emanants. Accordingly, Booth describes Albert aptly as a "logico-emanationist figure" (163). But, in Booth's judgment, it is Aquinas who seems to attain the insights (under Albert's influence-particularly through his lectures on Pseudo-Dionysius) requisite to resolve the Platonic -Aristotelian tension the aporia conveys. The principal insight at work here is St. Thomas' conception of esse. By making essesomething directly and divinely communicated to each individual, as its primarily real and actual intrinsic principle, Aquinas can escape to a considerable degree the emanationism and the essentialism which reduces the individual to a chimerical, distant vestige of the universal. In the end, Booth's achievement is a valuable compilation and interpretation of texts, illumining from a refreshing point of view the developments of medieval metaphysics and epistemology. His discussion of Islamic authors alone makes his effort a contribution to the literature on medieval philosophy. The work is also an addition to the labors of history, for it shows the intimate connections between Pagan, Islamic, Jewish and Christian theology, especially regarding the themes of creation, the intelligible and the individual existent. CURTIS L. HANCOCK Rockhurst College Eric L. Ormsby. Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute Over al-Ghazali's "Best of All Possible Worlds." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, 3o9 pp., $3o.oo. So ridiculed was Leibniz' thesis, "This is the best of all possible worlds," that even today fallout from Voltaire's opprobrium clings to some responses to Kripke's use of possible worlds. In an exemplary history worthy of a place beside Bell's Secular Love or Hourani's Abd al-Jabbar, Ormsby carefully tracks the debate about a kindred thesis from Ghazali's time (lO58-1111) down to the nineteenth century. Disentangling Arabic, Christian, Greek, and Islamic understandings and distortions, he uncovers 59~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:4 OCT 1987 the values in dispute but does not pursue a synthetic unity behind them, inclining rather to Benson Mates' skeptical "intelligible but insoluble." After introducing theodicy in Leibniz, Kant, Voltaire, Hume, Schopenhauer and the Stoics, Ormsby summarizes the Ash'arite-Mu'tazilite conflict, adding key variants and the pessimist poet al-Ma'arri. Ghazali's distinctive statement in the Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din, whose optimism suggests Alexander Pope, was often quoted as a couplet: Laysa fi 'l-imkan abda' mimma kan: "Nothing possible is more wondrous than what is." The context was a discussion of the trust of true moriotheism: perfect intelligence would comprehend the grounds and consequences of all God's determinations. Acceptance is our virtue, placing oneself in God's hands (not at the mercy of any lesser cause!) "as a corpse in the hands of the washer." Ghazali avoids saying that God could not have made a better world. He suppresses Makki's claim that men could not make the world better even with God's aid. In his Incoherence of the Philosophers Ghazali had criticized the Muslim neo-Platonists for excessive intellectualism: believing that God creates eternally by necessity of His wisdom, these philosophers are trapped in the belief that God could not have made the world larger or smaller by a gnat...