22 - Naming the Names of God: Muslims, Jews, Christians

Naming the Names of God: Muslims, Jews, Christians
By David Burrell

IN QUEST of an authority to give credibility to the mission just accorded him, Moses asked the Lord how he should answer his people's inevitable query: "What is the name of the God of our fathers?" The Lord's response was: "Say this to the people of Israel: I am has sent me to you … the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Ex. 3:14-15). They could describe the Lord as the God of their fathers, and even name their fathers; what Moses needed was the added authority which attends the person who would be given that One's name. For names, unlike descriptions, cannot be discovered by induction.

In his early altercations with the authorities in Jerusalem, Peter was asked what Moses had anticipated the people would ask him: "By what power or by what name do you do this?" Peter's answer is not deliberately baffling, as the one given to Moses, yet the prophetic twist in his response indicates that recent events were more than the Caiaphas of John's Gospel (Jn. 11:49-50) had calculated them to be-or as John puts it, his cynical calculation was an unwitting prophecy. For Peter answers directly: "[it is] by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, [that] this man is standing before you well" (Acts 4:10). And the name's power is to be appropriated by believers as well: "To him who conquers … I will give him a white stone with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it" (Rev. 2:17); "1 will confess his name before my Father" (Rev. 3:5); "1 will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God,… and my own new name" (Rev. 3:12). It is as though one's name, ideally, incorporates one's individual destiny, here bestowed with special clarity on those "baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 19:5).

The Qur'an punctuates its deliverances with apposite reminders: "Lo! He is ever Clement, Forgiving" (17:44); "He, only He, is the Hearer, the Seer" (17: 1); and directs Muhammad: "Say [unto the people] cry unto Allah, or cry unto the Beneficent (Ar-Rahman), unto whichsoever you cry (it is the same). His are the most beautiful names" (17:110). And powerful as well, for they are given to believers as a way of responding to

David Burrell, C.S.C. is Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University. He is the author of Aquinas: God and Action (1979) and co-translator with Nazih Daher of AI-Ghazali on the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God (1990). On invitation, Dr. Burrell has served as editor for this Symposium on "Reflections on the Religions." The thesis behind the Symposium is perhaps best expressed in Dr. Burrell's final sentence: "The experience of complementarity may prove a more reliable guide than a quest for commonality, when it comes to understanding other religions, and our own."

23 - Naming the Names of God: Muslims, Jews, Christians

the inestimable gift of the Qur'an: a warning and a guidance from God. So the practice of reciting God's names becomes an act of gratitude, which, if sustained and appropriated, promises gradually to assimilate one's features to those of the One so named.

I

Each of these faith traditions sets great store by its distinctive reception of the name of God. And were one's own name-not merely the name each of us is given-to convey who one really is, then it would express more than any description ever could; even the privileged description crafted to articulate what a thing is, which Aristotle called the formula expressing its essence. For names attach to individuals rather than to kinds, so must give a destiny rather than a timeless nature. So the name of which we are speaking would express what an entire novel struggles to convey: the essence of an individual. No wonder, then, that people have come to regard the quest for so proper a name as chimerical or mythical and settle for conventional "handles" when it comes to names. Yet the aspiration is no more nor less illusory than Socrates' quest for self-knowledge, which Kierkegaard identifies as the imperative inherent in each person: to seek to know oneself "is to venture wholly to be oneself, as an individual…."1 Yet where he went "beyond Socrates" was to insist that this "tremendous exertion" take place "before God," so that the quest for one's own name and that of God mutually imply one another.

This is especially true in Muslim life, where it is common to give children one of the Qur'anic names for God, prefixing that divine name with the creature's epithet, Abd(servant), so that the construct form, as in "Abdal-Qadir," means "Servant of the Powerful One." Tradition has culled ninety-nine such names from the Qur'an, and arranged them in a quasi-canonical order, the first two of which, after Allah itself, introduce God as Ar-Rahman: the Infinitely Good, and Ar-Rahim: the Merciful One. (Hence the ritual introduction to any literary undertaking: B'ism Allah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim: In the name of God, the Infinitely Good, the Merciful). And the string of thirty-three beads (the subha), which most probably inspired the Catholic rosary, affords Muslims a practical way of ordering their recitation of these names in an array learned by heart. The presence of Muslims fingering their beads offers one more example of Islamic practices introducing a tangible sense of the presence of God into the midst of daily life.

One of Islam's most cherished religious thinkers, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, wrote a commentary on the "ninety-nine beautiful names of God" (the Maqsad), which he introduced by reflecting on our use of names to identify individuals, remarking how the act of naming may allude to or evoke certain features, yet seldom attempts a straightfor

1 Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941). Preface.

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ward description.2 And so it is with God, who gives us specific names in the Qur'an-names indeed associated with particular attributes, yet attributes so sublime that we could hardly confuse them with outright descriptions of God. So, faithful Muslims invoke the names, in order, to give praise and thanks to God, with the hope that continual repetition will gradually align those reciting the names with the divine features they are celebrating. What we have, in other words, is a sacramental practice, in which the words are empowered to render present what they signify; a promise which Ghazali addresses after commenting on each name separately, and which the commentary portion also furthers by offering a counsel for the believer appropriate to each name.

Ghazali's reflections on the "beautiful names of God" may actually lead us in the direction of Kierkegaard, but it were best if we began with the world which enveloped him. If knowing our proper name is quite beyond us, knowing God's name outreaches us in principle. For what-God-is resists any articulation, so that nothing like God's proper name could be available to human speech.3 The name we use for God will either have to be revealed to us, or will be a form of the abstract noun "divinity"-as in elohim or Allah; it is inevitable that so neutral a name will be supplemented by additional names or attributes conveying features of this One. And the combination of these two semantic facts results, in practice, in the single (or pseudo-proper) name assuming the meaning of one of the attributes. For Jews, the mysterious tetragrammaton (presumed to be truly proper) is always substituted by Adonai (Lord); while Christians (according to Aquinas) apply the word "God" to the One "because of the operation peculiar to him which we constantly experience"-that is, a creator's loving providence; and Muslims consider Ar-Rahman-the Infinitely Good (or Merciful)-to be the name most expressive of Allah.4 Yet if these attributes-Lord, love, infinitely good (or merciful)-begin to veer us toward philosophical or semantic analysis, we cannot overlook what a central role revelation plays in naming God in these three religious traditions. This fact is what religious thinkers in all three traditions in the time of Ghazali could presume: a community who had regular recourse to the language of revelation to invoke God and to seek guidance for their lives.

What a faith-community supplies is a use, before one has a clear meaning, and even in the absence of one in principle. Let us attempt to show how the presumption of such a community functions in three

2 AI-Ghazali on the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, trans. David Burrell and Nazih Daher, will be published by University of Notre Dame Press (U.S.)/Islamic Texts Society (Cambridge, U.K.) in 1990. Page references are to the critical Arabic edition by Fadlou Shehadi, AI-Maqsad al-Asnafi sharh maani asma' Allah al-husna (Beirut: Dar el-Mashreq, 197 1), indicated in brackets in the translation.
3 See the clear exposition of Fadlou Shehadi, Ghazalis Unique Unknowable God (Leiden: Brill, 1964).
4 Aquinas' treatment will be found in Summa Theologiae 1.13.9.3; Ghazali's under his treatment of Ar-Rahman, where we also give reasons for preferring "Infinitely Good" to "Merciful" as a translation of Ar-Rahman.

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thinkers-Jew, Christian, and Muslim-who concur in three related assertions from within their respective communities:

(1) God is unknowable.
(2) God is creator of all that is (and is not God).
(3) God reveals God's own self, albeit in diverse ways: in the Torah, in Jesus, in the Qur'an.

Since each has a language to use of God, which contains names deemed appropriate for God, it remains for each to ascertain, as a philosophical theologian, how it is that we may use these names appropriately. In a context of actual use, this question becomes: what conditions must the user fulfill to speak them truthfully?5 This shift to the language user is particularly apposite with religious language, where the language itself contains specific stipulations for its proper use.

The thinkers we focus on shared in overlapping intellectual climates, however much their religious convictions may have been perceived to be mutually exclusive. Their lives did not overlap, though later ones were at times familiar with the work of those who preceded them. The period which their lives span was nearly coincidental with the crusades, but their relations to those of other faiths shared little of that context.6 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) comes first, reflecting the earlier sophistication of Islamic society; Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) follows, a Jew thoroughly immersed in that society; and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) is third and so in a position to profit from Islamic philosophical developments, and expressly from the religious use to which Maimonides bad put them. We shall see that their respective traditions delivered to each of them a somewhat different problematic or set of issues, yet their concurrence in the three propositions noted above testifies to the extent to which they were dealing with the same question.

II

Ghazali's task looks simple enough: God cannot be known by us-that is, the divine nature is beyond our powers of apprehension ([50]), yet God has given us names which we can use. While we cannot hope to use them in such a way as really to know God, we can nonetheless let them direct us to a fuller appreciation of the ways of God, by "closely scrutinizing the details of creation, inquiring into the fine points of divine wisdom" ([55]). That is certainly a manner of knowing, indeed of wisdom. Furthermore, we can learn from using them what sort of persons we should become if we hope to become more like God; and on Ghazali's experiential view of knowing, this path of assimilation to the

5 Shifting the focus from the language itself to conditions for one's using it properly responds to Wittgenstein's concerns, yet it also reflects James Ross's most recent work, Portraying Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), which shows how language will mean something, so I infer its correct use turns on the speaker.
6 For a fascinating account of the phenomenon and fact of "the crusades" from the Muslim side, see C. Cahen's contribution to Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983) 2.63-66.

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divine becomes our only hope of knowing what otherwise remains unknowable. So the path of assimilation offers the greatest promise, and explains why his commentary on each name incorporates specific counsels, in response to "the statement of the messenger of God… 'You should be characterized by the characteristics of God most high' ([162]). Yet it also poses the greatest difficulties, suggesting as it does two accounts derivable from Sufi literature-inherence [hulul] and identification [ittihad] both of which Ghazali finds theologically unacceptable or philosophically incoherent (or both).

But is there an acceptable account of the path of assimilation? Ghazali seems to think there is, but insists that it be affirmed in the teeth of the radical denial of any likeness between creature and creator:

The property specifying divinity is that God is an existent necessarily existing in Himself; such that everything which possibly exists does exist from Him according to the best ways of order and perfection. It is inconceivable that this specifying property be shared in at all, or that anything attain a likeness to it ([47]).

And since one knows only by likeness, "whoever is other than He cannot know Him." That is why "the ultimate knowledge of the 'knowers' lies in … their realizing … that it is utterly impossible for them to know Him; indeed, that it is impossible for anyone except God to know God with an authentic knowledge comprehending the true nature of the divine attributes" ([54]).

So, the only path open will be one of assimilation by way of "longing to possess these attributes of majesty in the measure possible… , indeed a passionate love for that perfection and majesty" ([43]), so that one will make "the effort to acquire whatever is possible of these attributes, to be molded by them and adorned by their good qualities, for in this way man becomes 'lordly,' that is close to the Lord most high" ([44]). The expressions "passionate love" [ishq] and "close" [qurb) are intended to inform us that the effort referred to here involves the Sufi path of purification, which he specifies in the epilogue by reference to being "on the way" (suuk) and "arriving" (wasl). Since the Sufi way is intrinsically related to its goal, "the one who arrives is one … who has been absorbed by … the clarity of truth so that all of him is taken up with the whole of Him" ([169]). And if that describes the way, "the end lies in being stripped of oneself totally, and to be devoted to Him-so that it is as though he were He…" ([170]). All this lies quite beyond efforts we might be able to make, and I take that to be the point of Ghazali's resolution of the problem posed by the "infinite qualitative difference" between creator and creature. Since "only God knows God ([47])," only God can bring us to know God; Ghazali endorses what the Sufis struggled to introduce into Islamic life and thought: a doctrine of grace.7

7 This shorthand statement clearly reveals a perspective of Christian theology, yet it faithfully summarizes the masterful study of Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).

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Characteristically, Ghazali employs just enough metaphysical and semantic sophistication to bring us to this point, which surely exceeds reason but just as surely does not contradict it-as the two rejected solutions do. That suffices for Ghazali's task, as he construed it, since he began with names, not attributes. Yet the fact that "the beautiful names" express divine attributes led him to explore our competency in using them. He showed how we can improve in doing so, even to the point of employing as names for God attributes which we deem appropriate to the task-so long as they are not expressly prohibited by the tradition. Yet the most significant development possible will be that commended by the Prophet: "You should be characterized by the characteristics of God most high" ([162]). For assimilation of that sort carries with it the promise which inspired Ghazali to adopt the form he did, offering counsels appropriate to each name: "whoever is characterized by one of these ninety-nine names enters paradise" ([162]). And he has shown how the Sufi path makes it possible to speak coherently of such characterization.

III

Maimonides spends most of the forty-five initial chapters of the Guide for the Perplexed showing how one might properly use of God the anthropomorphic expressions found in the Bible, and in the spirit of a psalmist directs us away from trying to penetrate the meaning of God's attributes to a "knowledge of the works of God [which] is knowledge of His attributes, by which He can be known, [since] all attributes ascribed to God are attributes of His acts" (1.54).8 And that is all we need to know, after all, to recognize and respond to God: to be able to identify the actions of God in our world. For it is those divine actions, recounted in the Scriptures, which offer us the pattern we need: "You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy" (Lev. 19:2), which the Talmud specifies: "He is gracious, so be you also gracious; He is merciful, so be you also merciful" (1.54). So long as we can identify the actions of God, and God by those actions, we need no further gnosis of the nature of God, "for the chief aim of man should be to make himself, as far as possible, similar to God: that is to say, to make his acts similar to the acts of God" (1.54).

Maimonides, realizes, of course, that in us actions presume powers, and consistent actions require the formation of these powers into virtues-but that is a requirement of our created nature which we need not presume in the creator. If one wishes, one may certainly describe the process of assimilation as Ghazali did: acquiring the characteristics of God. For that, of course, is as expressly a "manner of speaking" for Ghazali as it is for Maimonides. Indeed, each of these religious thinkers

8 References will be given in text (by book and chapter) to the Guide, cited here in the Friedlander translation (New York: Dover, 1956). For details and supporting argumentation, see my Knowing the Unknowable God. Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).

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is faithful to his respective tradition in allowing his analysis to be governed by the primacy of practice: a wholehearted response to the God who gifts people with the Torah and with a Qur'an-for their warning and their guidance in returning to their God (cf. Qur'an 7:203, 35: 18). If Maimonides does not specify the way here, that is because he had done so in his Mishneh Torah, as Ghazali had in his Ih ya' Ulum ad-Din.9

IV

The goal of the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas is a more systematic one than either the Guide or the Maqsad, for the West had by this time elaborated a way of thinking about theology as science, which incorporated Aristotle's logical and methodological inquiries, along with considerable reflection on ways of interpreting the language of Scripture.10 By linking Aristotle's observations about language with twelfth-century reflections on the senses of words in Scripture, Thomas honed our native sense for analogous discourse into a fine art. Acting on the clue provided by Socrates, who could suffer being named the wisest man in Athens only when his inquiry made him realize that he could be called so precisely because he alone realized he was not wise, and assisted by a distinction developed in the "speculative grammar" of his immediate predecessors, Aquinas could state that we may assert that God is wise or just, and mean it, without, however, claiming to understand how God is wise or just. What we assert, the "thing signified" (res significata) may be asserted truthfully without knowing the manner of signifying (Modus significandi), so long as the term we use is a perfection-term and free of presuppositions-say, corporeal or temporal ones-which would restrict it to the created sphere.11

His resolution picks up a strain of the traditional Islamic resolution regarding our statements attributing features to God. Whatever we say about God we say without knowing how it is true of God (bila kayf).12 He also acknowledges what both Ghazali and Maimonides insist upon, that we will never reach to true statements about God by comparison with human features. Aquinas differs from them, however, in exploiting the fact that we realize this to be so. His example is telling: precisely because we know (as Maimonides insisted) that the ordinary predicative

9 Maimonides Mishneh Torah is available in translation: The Code of Maimonides (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949). Ghazali's lhya' Zya' Ulum ad-Din [Revivification of Religious Sciences] has been rendered in parts; a complete translation is being prepared by the Islamic Texts Society in Cambridge.
10 The sense of "science" used here has been elaborated in M-D Chenu, Theologie comme Science au Trezieme Siecle (Paris: Vrin, 1943). The text of the Summa Theologiae used here is the translation by Herbert McCabe, O.P.: Knowing and Naming God (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964). References to part, question, article (and response to objection) are given in text as (1. 13.4.3).
11 This is a summary of 1.13.1-6; see my Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
12 See Encyclopedia of Islam 3.1145a (article on 'ilm al-kalam by Louis Gardet). Aquinas' concurrence with kalam was coincidental, as Gardet has shown in "S. Thomas et ses predecesseurs arabes," in St. Thomas Aquinas (1274-1974) Commemorative Studies Vol. I (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), pp. 419-48.

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form-"God is just"-must be misleading by presuming that God "possesses attributes," we deliberately complement it in use with the unusual identity statement "God is justice." That is, whenever we say it one way, we understand that it must be able to be put the other way as well. Neither suffices, since the "abstract nouns indicate his simplicity and [the] concrete nouns … his subsistence and completeness." And we need to speak deliberately in this complementary fashion as a way of reminding ourselves that "in this life we do not know him as he is in himself" (1.13.1.2). It would be difficult to find a more vigorously "agnostic" assertion, yet Aquinas' views on language and human understanding allow him greater leeway than Maimonides while respecting the same concerns: certain privileged expressions may indeed be asserted truly of God in affirmative propositions (1.13.12) because we can show by our use of them that they can "imperfectly signify" divinity.13

What Aquinas fails to underscore, however, as the history of misunderstanding of "analogy" shows, is the personal or interior development required to engage in so demanding a use of language. Although he was himself thoroughly engaged in a way of life which embodied spiritual disciplines, the "scientific" mode of presentation of the Summa Theologiae did not lend itself to incorporating them into his treatment of proper language use. Yet since his exploitation of analogous terms leaves so much to the judgment of the language user, it should be clear that only one who is undertaking to be like God can keep from misusing language about divine things."14

The spiritual path to which Ghazali alludes, and the practical goal of "making oneself, as far as possible, similar to God," which Maimonides asserts to be "the chief aim of man" (1.54), must be operative if Aquinas' treatment of the "names of God" is to serve as an illumination of Christian practice. So, we may see how one tradition can profit from reflections based on the practices of another, if only to realize the import of its own life and practice. The experience of complementarity may prove a more reliable guide than a quest for commonality, when it comes to understanding other religions, and our own.

13 On "signifying imperfectly," see McCabe (note 10), Appendix 3 (104-5); for a corroboration of the congruence of their concerns, see Alexander Broadie, "Maimonides and Aquinas on the Names of God," Religious Studies 23 (1987), pp. 149-70.
14 Gregory Rocca, O.P. recently completed a doctoral dissertation at Catholic University of America, which amply explicates this point: "Analogy as Judgment and Faith in God's Incomprehensibility: A Study in the Epistemology of Thomas Aquinas" (1989).