Occasionalism
OCCASIONALISM. [This entry deals specifically with Islamic occasionalism.]
The adjective occasional, as applied to causes or events, is used by medieval European theologians such as Thomas Aquinas to mean an "indirect cause which determines any disposition to any effect" (Summa theologiae 1.114.3, 2.1.88.3, 2.1.98.1–2, 2.1.113.7, et passim). In modern philosophy, the term occasional and its derivatives are used by Cartesians such as Malebranche (d. 1715), Guelincks (d. 1669), and Cordemoy (d. 1685) to refer to the relations between the modifications of mind and those of body, as well as to natural occurrences in general. Malebranche in particular denies any necessary connection between those two classes of modifications and refers all natural occurrences, human actions, and other events to God's direct intervention, of which the manifest or natural causes are nothing but the "occasions" (Entretien sur la métaphysique 7.11, 7.13).
In the history of Islamic theology (kalām), an "occasionalist" tendency is clearly discernible from the eighth century on. The earliest writers on theological questions, such as al-Ashʿarīand his followers, were overwhelmed with the Qurʾanic concept of God "who is unlike anything else" (surah 42:11) and whose decrees are irreversible and inscrutable. Accordingly, they attempted to formulate a cosmological view that would justify the referral of all activity or development in the world to this God, whom they called the "Lord of the worlds" and the "Lord of the heavens and the earth."
By the eighth century the Muslim theologians (mutakallimūn) realized that Aristotelian physics, which presupposes a necessary connection between natural events or entities, is incompatible with the concept of God's lordship or sovereignty in the world. In its place they proposed a more theologically acceptable metaphysics of atoms and accidents in which every entity or event comes into being and passes away at the behest of God. According to this metaphysics, probably derived from Greek (Democritean) sources with certain Indian modifications, everything in the world is made up of substance and accident. The majority of the mutakallimūn define substance (jawhar) as that which bears the accidents, although some argue that this is the specific characteristic of body. Substance and accident, however, always exist in conjunction. Some accidents are more primary than others and include the "modes" or original properties of unity, motion, rest, composition, and location. A body can never be divested of these accidents, although it can be divested of the other "secondary" accidents, such as weight and shape. Most of the later mutakallimūn appear to have held that no substance can be divested of the accident of color, so that they define substance as "anything endowed with color."
The most characteristic feature of substance is its indivisibility; hence the majority of the mutakallimun identify substance with the atom (juzʾ) and dwell on its relation to the primary and secondary accidents. Thirty positive accidents, or their opposites, are said to inhere in each substance. When God wishes to create an entity, by "commanding" it to be (as the Qurʾān has put it), he first creates the atoms, then the accidents making up its physical or biological nature or character. But since accidents cannot endure for two moments of time, as a leading Ashʿarī theologian of the tenth century, al-Bāqillānī, put it, this entity will not continue to exist unless God constantly recreates the atoms and accidents it is made of. This theory of "continuous recreation" (Macdonald, 1927) constitutes the basis of Islamic cosmology and moral theology, especially in its Ashʿarī form. It presupposes, in addition to the duality of atom and accident, the atomic composition of time and that of the soul. Should God decide to put an end to the existence of a particular entity, the theory requires that he either cease to recreate the "accident of duration" in it (the Muʿtazilī view) or simply stop recreating the stream of atoms and accidents making it up (the Ashʿarī view), whereupon the particular entity would cease to exist at all.
This theory had its critics in subsequent centuries, the most important and vocal of whom was probably the great Aristotelian commentator, Ibn Rushd (Averroës) of Cordova (d. 1198). In general it might be said that the theologians were sympathetic to the occasionalist view of the universe or some aspects of it, whereas the philosophers as a rule were either hostile or critical.
Descartes, René; Scholasticism.
Bibliography
One of the earlier studies of Islamic occasionalism and its theological implications is D. B. Macdonald's "Continuous Recreation and Atomic Time in Muslim Scholastic Theology," Isis 9 (1927): 326–344. The standard work on Islamic atomism continues to be Salomon Pines's Beiträge zur Islamischen Atomenlehre (Berlin, 1936). My Islamic Occasionalism and Its Critique by Averroës and Aquinas (London, 1958) deals in a preliminary way with the implications of occasionalism for the struggle between the theologians and the philosophers. Max Horten's Die philosophischen Systeme der spekulativen Theologen im Islam (Bonn, 1912) includes a discussion of Islamic occasionalism and atomic theory. Moses Maimonides' summary in the Guide of the Perplexed, translated by Salomon Pines (Chicago, 1963), should also be consulted for the major propositions of kalām and their occasionalist significance.
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