The influence of Islam and Judaism:
God as His Non-Divisible Essence
God as His Non-Divisible Essence
The Early Islamic philosophy had more influence
on the Christians’ idea of God than theology has been prepared to accept. The
Early Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development
beginning in the second century AH (early 9th AD) and lasting until
the sixth century AH (late 12th AD). The period began with al-Kindi
in the ninth century and ended with Averros (Ibn Rushd) at the end of twelfth
century. Thomas Aquinas appears to have been familiar with Mutazilite work and
particularly Avicennism and Avorroism. The Kalam
appeared at the very beginning of this age.
The Kalam
theology resuscitated the Jewish-Christian debates on the problem of
monotheism. This time both Judaism and Islam joined hands and defined “one-ness
or unity of God as having to do with his non-material and therefore
non-composite and non-divisible essence.” In other words, the one-ness of God
was understood to be the common substance and the three hypostases reduced to
mere essential attributes.
The Christian-Muslim debates that dated from
the early ninth century indicate that the Oriental-Christian apologists tried
to explain the Muslims the concept of the Triune God using the attributes
ascribed to Allah in the Qu’ran. The early approach identified the being of God
with the Father. Then the Son and the Spirit merely became his attributes. This
approach is seen in the Al Kindi’s, Apology,
which introduces wisdom and knowledge (alternatively life and knowledge) as the
two essential attributes that together with the divine substance make a
Trinity. There are also instances where the Father is associated with one
divine attribute. For example, by 1150-1200 two Muslim works (Trinitizing the Unity and The Book of the Existing World) explain
that the Oriental-Arabic Christians taught that God’s essence has the three
attributes of Power (the Father), Knowledge (the Son), and Will (the Holy
Spirit).
The response of the Muslims and the Jews to
this type of polemics is interesting. The Kalamic School of the Mutazilites,
for example, denied the existence of attributes in God altogether. However, the
dominant Muslim group in the school of Asharism and the Jews accepted the
existence of the attributes but did not see how any of the attributes could
ever exist as Trinitarian personae.
Later in the high and late Middle Ages the Christian authors in the Latin West
would adopt many of the arguments earlier posited by the
Oriental-Arabic-Christian polemicists, who saw the one-ness of God as a common
substance with three essential attributes that (by necessity) belong to the
substance and are one with it. Some of the early Latin-Western-Christian
thinkers who used the Oriental-Arabic-Christian polemicists’ style of
constructing the doctrine of the Trinity and employed the substance-attributes
model are William of Conches (d. 1145) and Peter Abelard (1079-1142). In these
thinkers we see the triad Father = potential,
Son = sapentia, and Spirit = voluntas (in the case of William) and benignitas (in Abelard). The same triad
occurs in Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141), except that this time more flexibility
is accorded to the Holy Spirit: bonitas
sive benignitas, amor, voluntas. A similar trend is noticeable in the works
of Anselm. (James Henry Owino Kombo, Theological
Models of the Doctrine of the Trinity [Global Perspectives Series;
Carlisle, Cumbria: Langham Global Library, 2016], 56-58)