Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation by Barry S.

Kogan
Review by: Eric Ormsby
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 372-373
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Journal of Religion
a consequence, the book serves several audiences: that of the general reader
who will learn much about this culture and its art; the historian or sociologist
of religion, who, although interested in Byzantium, may have been deterred
in the past by the recondite scholarship on Byzantine history and art; and,
finally, the historian of the art of many civilizations, including, most
definitely, the Byzantine Empire. For the latter, Cormack's self-conscious
discussion of method, his thoughtful, probing questions, and even his occa-
sional jabs at other approaches ought to provoke renewed consideration of
how and why we study Byzantine art.
ROBERT S. NELSON, Universityof Chicago.

KOGAN, BARRY S. Averroesand the Metaphysics of Causation. Albany: State Uni-

versity of New York Press, 1985. xi + 348 pp. $39.50 (cloth); $14.95
(paper).
The study of Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198) is a discipline in its own right
and requires formidable linguistic, textual, and interpretative skills. Like his
compatriot Maimonides, Averroes has increasingly attracted scholarly
interest, but this interest has often been of a highly technical nature. There has
long been a need for a sound study of Averroes'sthought that would do justice
to its subtlety and complexity and yet remain open to the scholarly reader in
other disciplines. Barry S. Kogan has met this need and more. His work is
easily the best philosophical study of Averroes to date and one of the finest
studies of medieval Islamic thought to have appeared recently. Averroes is not
merely a great commentator on Aristotle but an original and demanding
thinker in his own right. Kogan demonstrates this by concentrating on one
central aspect of his thought: the problem of causation. By approaching
Averroes's philosophy through a close-indeed, tenacious-reading of his
writings on causation (with occasional ingenious extrapolations and shrewd
inferences), Kogan succeeds in illuminating a number of issues. His discus-
sion of miracles, for example, is especially persuasive (pp. 79-86). The
cardinal issue, however, is that of the world's eternity. Kogan's discussion
(pp. 47 ff. and 203-65) is masterful. The difficulty is to show how Averroes
could have upheld the doctrine of the world's eternity while simultaneously
claiming that the universe was divinely created. For Kogan, this is not internal
contradiction in Averroes's thought, nor a mere "deceptive tissue of names"
(p. 203), but must be understood within the broader context of Averroes's
conception of causation.
Kogan draws on a wide array of texts in treating Averroes'smetaphysics of
causation, but inevitably depends heavily on the Tahafutal-tahafut("Incoher-
ence of the 'Incoherence"'), itself a response to the Tahafutal-falasifah("Inco-
herence of the Philosophers")of the earlier theologian al-Ghazali. He also
draws on the works of the great philosopherAvicenna (Ibn Sina), who with al-
Ghazali represents the main opposing positions. For Kogan, al-Ghazali
representsa traditionalAsh'ariteposition toutcourt,with the conventionalocca-
sionalism this entailed (or "punctiformontology,"as Kogan, rather preciously,
terms it on p. 136). The issue is more complicated than this, but to have con-
veyed the intellectualshifts and shadings of so mercuriala figure as al-Ghazali
would have required a longer (and much different) book. Kogan tends to see
mattersvery much from Averroes'sperspective;he cites widely from Averroes's

372

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 Book Reviews
works but restricts himself to a rather narrow compass in discussing
al-Ghazali or Ibn Sina. The main strength of the work, therefore, lies in its
engagement with, and profoundunderstandingof, Averroes'sthought. Even so,
it is also a major contribution to the understanding of the dispute between
Averroes and his predecessors. Sometimes this strikes the reader as a dispute
among shadows, and Kogan is very good at identifying the tacit antecedentsof
particularpositions or arguments; his identificationof the Ghazalian position
with what Averroes considered the sophistic Heraclitean view is especially
interesting (p. 126).
This is a difficultwork, full of dense argumentation,but it will amply repay
the assiduousreader. Kogan engages the issues philosophicallyand brings them
to life - a refreshingand long overdue approachto the study of medieval Islamic
philosophy. He is completely at home in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin texts
and has a sure command of the enormous secondary literature. The book is
scrupulouslywell edited; I noted only a few typographicalerrors (e.g., p. 149,
line 21). There are extensive and apposite endnotes and an excellent
bibliography(pp. 313-32) and index.
ERICORMSBY, McGill University.

OBERMAN,HEIKO A. The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and

Reformation. Translated by JAMESI. PORTER.Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1983. 163 pp. $13.95 (cloth).
This translation of Heiko Oberman's WurzelndesAntisemitismus (Berlin, 1981)
makes an erudite and provocative essay on the intellectual history of anti-
Semitism accessible to a broader readership. Against the background of the
quincentenary birthday of Martin Luther and the general currents of post-
Holocaust historiography, Oberman reassesses the contribution of sixteenth-
century theologians (Johannes Reuchlin, Johannes Pfefferkorn, Erasmus of
Rotterdam, and Luther) to the evolution of Christian anti-Judaism. Redress-
ing the tendency to exclude the Jews from studies of the Reformation-or
merely to indict its anti-Semitism as offensive to our sensibilities-Oberman
demonstrates the need to consider early modern attitudes toward the Jews as a
symptom of the essential character of their age.
In part 1 of the book, Oberman argues that hostility toward the Jews inte-
grates ostensibly conflicting outlooks of his sixteenth-century subjects. While
remembered for his Hebraic Humanism and-in Jewish history-for his
defense of the Talmud against Pfefferkorn, Reuchlin actually shared the
latter's belief in the collective guilt of the Jews and an impulsion to use any
means to expedite their conversion. For Erasmus, the issue of the Jews
bespoke "the tension between the superficialexpression of religious sentiment
and the inner search for truth, between lighted candles and burning hearts"
(p. 40). And if Martin Luther decried all coercion in the conversion of the
Jews, "notthe 'late'or the 'middle,'but even the 'youngest'Luther known to us
believed that the Jews as Jews had no future"(p. 46).
The anti-Judaism of the Reformation, Oberman concludes in part 2, can
thus serve as a mirror of the socioreligious climate of its time. Whether in the
expulsion of the Jews from Regensburg, in the diatribes of Pfefferkorn, or
even in the seemingly conciliatory posture of the early Luther, one must
recognize the turbulence of a society obsessed with its self-criticism and its

373

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