Justified True Belief

(●) A Muslim physician on the edge of central Asia who worked out the metaphysics that Christian theology in the West would later run on. + His name was Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdallah ibn Sina, and when his books reached the Latin schools of Europe a century and a half after his death, the translators turned that last part into a name Christendom could pronounce: Avicenna. He is the reason a reader can open Thomas Aquinas and find a Muslim quoted respectfully at the hardest turns of the argument. Metaphysics is the word for the questions that sit underneath all the others. Not what a thing is made of, which is physics, and not how it behaves, which is science generally, but what it takes for anything at all to be there in the first place. That is the ground he worked, and what he handed the West was not an argument for Islam. It was a set of tools: a way of saying what it means for a thing to exist at all, a proof that runs from the fact that nothing around us had to be here to the conclusion that something does have to be, and a thought experiment about a man floating in the dark that has been argued over for a thousand years. Christian theologians took those tools and used them on their own doctrine of God, and in places they used them better than he had. One fact gives the measure of him. He wrote a five-book medical encyclopedia called the Canon of Medicine, and after Gerard of Cremona put it into Latin at Toledo it was still a set text for medical students at Montpellier and Louvain in the middle of the seventeenth century. A Persian doctor who died before the Norman Conquest was still being examined on in the age of Descartes. A note on the dates. The birth year of 980 comes from the medieval biographer Ibn Khallikan, who gives the month of Safar in the year 370 of the Muslim calendar, and it is the conventional date used here and almost everywhere else. Some modern scholars, working from the internal chronology of his own autobiography, argue he was born a decade earlier, in the 970s. Every age given for him is figured from the conventional date and should be read as approximate.

(●) c. 980 AD: Born in a village outside Bukhara, in a house where the arguments came with dinner. + His father had come from Balkh, in what is now northern Afghanistan, and had done well enough in the service of the Samanid rulers to be given the revenue district of Kharmaythan, outside the great city of Bukhara. In the neighbouring village of Afshana he married and settled, and there both his sons were born; a later tradition gives the mother’s name as Sitara. Bukhara in those years was one of the richest cities in the Muslim world, and the house was a place where visitors argued. His father was drawn to the Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam with a taste for philosophy, and so in time was his younger brother, born five years after him. Avicenna later wrote that he used to listen to them talk about the soul and the intellect without being persuaded. Most children that age are simply being told what to think. He was sitting in a room where grown men disagreed with each other, seriously and at length, about the shape of reality, and he was listening to every word of it. By ten he had the Qur’an by heart and a good deal of Arabic literature besides. A travelling scholar named Abu Abdallah al-Natili lodged with the family and started him on logic, Euclid, and Ptolemy’s astronomy. By Avicenna’s own account the pupil soon outran the teacher: he worked the geometrical figures out for himself and then explained the hard ones back to al-Natili.

(●) c. 997 AD: He cured the ruler of Bukhara before he was eighteen, and asked to be paid in books. + He had come to medicine at sixteen and found it, in his own judgment, not a difficult subject. Within a year or two established physicians were reading the medical classics under his direction. When the Samanid prince Nuh ibn Mansur fell ill and his own doctors were baffled, the boy was called in to treat him alongside them, and the prince recovered. Metaphysics, meanwhile, was the one subject that would not come. He had read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times, he says, until he knew the words by heart and still could not see what the book was for. Then a bookseller pressed a cheap little treatise on him for three dirhams, a short work by the philosopher al-Farabi explaining what the Metaphysics was trying to do. He bought it, read it, understood the whole thing, and went out the next day and gave much in alms to the poor in thanks. The reward he wanted for the cure was the palace library, and he got it. His own account of what he found there survives in the autobiography he dictated, and William E. Gohlman’s translation keeps its flatness: - "I saw books whose names had not reached very many people and which I had not seen before that time, nor have I seen since." Room after room of chests, sorted by subject, one room for poetry and Arabic letters, another for law, a room to a science, and a catalogue of the ancients to work through. He read what he needed and, he says, took the good out of it. Later writers report that the library burned not long afterwards, and that his enemies said he had set the fire himself so that no one could check his sources, which is the kind of accusation a man attracts when he is young, right, and unbearable about it.

(●) c. 1002 AD: His father died, the state he served had already fallen, and he left Bukhara for good. + He was about twenty-two, and one by one the things that had kept him in one city had come loose. The Samanid dynasty, which had employed both father and son, had collapsed under the Qarakhanid Turks a few years earlier, so the household’s living was already gone. Now his father was gone as well, and there was nothing left in Bukhara to hold him. What followed was more than twenty years of moving. He went first to Gurganj in Khwarazm, where he wore the gown of a jurist and drew a salary, and then had to leave in a hurry: the story is that Mahmud of Ghazna, the most powerful ruler in the region, sent word that he wanted this famous young scholar at his court, and the young scholar did not want to go. He crossed the desert to Nasa, Abiward and Tus, and turned up at Gurgan on the Caspian hoping for the patronage of a prince famous for supporting learning, only to find that the prince had been seized by his own troops and had died in a fortress. His own account of the disappointment is characteristically indirect. He records that al-Juzjani recited to him an ode about his situation, and quotes the one line in it that stung, a verse by an older poet, here in Gohlman’s translation: - "When I became great, no country could hold me; when my price went up, I lacked a buyer." At Gurgan he acquired something better than a patron. A young man named Abu Ubayd al-Juzjani attached himself to him and stayed for the rest of his life, taking dictation, nagging him to finish books, and eventually writing down the second half of his master’s biography because the master had only written the first half himself.

(●) c. 1015 AD: He became a prime minister at Hamadan, and the army mutinied and demanded his execution. + The pattern of his middle years is easy to miss because it sounds like a novel. He arrived at the Buyid court of Hamadan in western Persia, cured the emir Shams al-Dawla of a violent attack of colic, and was made his vizier, the head of the civil government. The soldiers, who did not want a physician-philosopher deciding their pay, rose against him, surrounded his house, took him off to prison, and pressed the emir to have him killed. The emir refused, and Avicenna went into hiding. Some months later the colic came back, the emir sent for him again, apologized, and reappointed him. The working day this produced is worth pausing over. Government business filled the daylight hours. In the evenings students packed into his house and al-Juzjani read aloud from the Cure, the vast philosophical encyclopedia he was then writing, while another student read from the Canon of Medicine, and Avicenna dictated answers and corrections to both. Then came supper, and music, and wine, and after that he wrote until he could not stay awake. A summa is a book that tries to take in the whole of a subject at once, start to finish, leaving nothing out, and he composed most of the greatest philosophical summa of the Islamic world in the margins of a political job he had not wanted. He was not a temperate man and did not pretend to be. Al-Juzjani, who lived beside him for twenty-five years, set it down without flinching: the master was vigorous in every faculty, the sexual appetite the most vigorous of them, and he indulged it often. Later admirers have tried to soften that line. It is easier to trust a portrait that keeps it.

(●) c. 1024 AD: Locked four months in a fortress for writing to a rival prince, he walked out of Hamadan in disguise and reached Isfahan, where the settled years began. + When Shams al-Dawla died in 1021, his son wanted Avicenna to go on as vizier. Avicenna refused, hid in the house of a friend, and used the time to write, finishing long stretches of the Cure at a rate al-Juzjani puts at fifty pages a day. He also wrote, in secret, to Ala al-Dawla, the ruler of Isfahan and his present master’s rival. The letters were discovered. The house was ransacked and he was locked in the fortress of Fardajan for four months. He did in prison what he did everywhere else: he wrote, producing among other things the visionary allegory Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which a traveller meets an ageless guide who explains the shape of the world he is walking through. He was let out when Ala al-Dawla marched on Hamadan, and back in the city he did not wait for permission to go. He dressed himself, his brother, al-Juzjani and two servants in the coarse wool of wandering Sufi ascetics. Sufis are the mystics of Islam, and men in that rough wool were a common enough sight on the roads that a party of them raised no questions at a city gate. Five of them walked out through it, and they kept walking until they reached Isfahan. Ala al-Dawla received him well, and the last thirteen years of his life were the settled ones: a fixed household, a Friday evening seminar at court, and books finished at last rather than begun.

(●) c. 1030 AD: Ghaznavid troops plundered his baggage, and the book he thought his best was gone. + The house of Ghazna had wanted him for thirty years, and in the end its army got his luggage instead of the man. When Sultan Mas’ud of Ghazna’s troops reached Isfahan they rifled his baggage, and among the plunder was the only copy of a work called al-Insaf, Fair Judgment, in which he had arbitrated between the Aristotelian commentators of the West and what he called the Easterners. Al-Juzjani says it filled twenty volumes, and Avicenna himself is reported to have put its scale at something like twenty-eight thousand questions. He said he would write it again if he ever had the leisure. He never had the leisure. Only fragments survive. Medieval sources put the raid in different years, and the loss is sometimes dated as late as the mid-1030s. What is not in doubt is what was lost, and that the man who had once read a book forty times without understanding it lost the one book he could not replace.

(●) 1037 AD: He died at fifty-eight by his biographer’s count, having given his money to the poor and freed his household. + The colic that had made his career came back to end it. He treated himself hard, as he treated everything, giving himself eight enemas in a single day until parts of his intestines ulcerated. On a journey with Ala al-Dawla from Isfahan to Hamadan the attacks returned, and he arrived at Hamadan too weak to stand. Al-Juzjani wrote down his last medical judgment on his own case, which is the sentence of a man who has spent his life saying what things are: - "The governor who used to govern my body is now incapable of governing, and so treatment is no longer of any use." He stopped all treatment. Ibn Khallikan, writing two centuries later, fills in what followed: he washed, gave his wealth away to the poor, made restitution to the people he had wronged, freed the men and women of his household, and read the Qur’an through once every three days until he died. It was the month of Ramadan in the year 428 of the Muslim calendar, June or July of 1037, and he was buried in Hamadan, where his tomb is still shown. Al-Juzjani counted his years at fifty-eight, reckoned by that calendar, which is a year or so more than the Christian one gives. His detractors wrote an epigram: his Cure could not cure him and his Salvation could not save him. It was a good joke and it did not slow the books down for a moment.

What He Taught

(T1) What a thing is and whether it is are two separate facts, and everything but God has to be given the second one. + Take a triangle. You know exactly what a triangle is: a flat figure closed by three straight lines. You could teach it to a child, prove things about it, spot one across a room. Now answer a different question. Is there a triangle? Not a drawing of one, not the idea of one, but an actual triangle out there in the world. Notice that the first question was completely answered and the second was not even touched. Knowing what a thing is tells you nothing about whether it is. Avicenna gave those two questions their permanent names. The quiddity of a thing, from the Latin quid, "what," is its whatness: the answer to "what is it?" Later writers usually call this the essence. Its existence is the separate fact that it is actually there. In everything you have ever met, those two come apart. The horse has a nature, and the nature does not bring the horse with it; something else had to put the horse into the world. And Avicenna presses the point one step further than it looks like it goes: existence cannot be squeezed out of a thing’s own nature, because a cause has to be there before its effect, and nothing is there before existence. So a question opens that Aristotle had not quite asked. If nothing’s nature supplies its own existence, where does existence come from? The answer has to be something whose whatness and whether-ness are not two things but one, a being of which you cannot sensibly ask "yes, but does it exist?" because existing is simply what it is. That is where he goes in (T2), and it is the single idea Christian theology took from him and never gave back.

(Q) "You must know that you understand the concept of triangle while in doubt as to whether or not concrete existence is attributed to triangle." + Source: Avicenna, al-Isharat wa’l-Tanbihat (Pointers and Reminders), Part Three (Metaphysics), Fourth Class, On Existence and Its Causes (Shams C. Inati translation, 2014). The Isharat was the last of his summaries, written in a clipped style meant to be opened up by a teacher, so the sentences are short on purpose. This one is the essence-existence distinction in a single breath, using his own worked example.

(T2) Nothing around us had to exist, so the whole standing world hangs on one being that could not have failed to. + Look around the room you are in. The chair could have not been made. The window could have been glass of another size. You could have not been born, and the world would have gone on without noticing. Everything in view is what Avicenna calls possible in itself: taken by itself, it is equally happy existing or not existing, and something outside it had to tip the balance. Now run the whole thing as an argument, in his order: - Everything is one of two kinds. Consider anything at all, on its own, ignoring everything else. Either existing belongs to it just because of what it is, or it does not. There is no third option. Call the first kind necessary and the second possible. - The possible never starts itself. If a thing is equally poised between being and not being, then its being there is not explained by it. Something else made the difference. That is not a claim about the past; it is a claim about right now, the way a chandelier hanging from a chain is being held up at this moment rather than having been held up once. - Adding more of them does not help. Suppose you gather every possible thing there is into one great collection, however many there are. You might want to say that the items explain each other, and in a small way they do: the chair is explained by the carpenter, and the carpenter by his parents. But an explanation handed along is not an explanation produced. Couple a hundred railway carriages together, as neatly as you like, and you still have not got a train that moves; somewhere in the line there has to be an engine, and an engine is a different kind of thing from a carriage. The collection is made of items none of which accounts for itself, so the collection does not account for itself either. A cause has to come from outside it, and everything possible is already inside it. So what holds the collection up is not possible but necessary. - The necessary being is not one more item on the list. Its existing is not something added to what it is. It has no cause, because a cause would be prior to it, and nothing is prior. It is one, because there is nothing to distinguish two of them. And it is the source of the being of everything else, holding the world in existence rather than merely having started it off. This is the argument that came to be called the proof of the sincere, and its distinguishing feature is that it never looks at the world’s design or order at all. It does not need the eye or the orbit of a planet. It needs only the bare fact that anything at all exists which did not have to. Two things follow that Christian readers should notice, one welcome and one not. The welcome one: Avicenna’s God is not a very large object inside the universe but the reason there is a universe, which is exactly what Christians mean by Creator. The unwelcome one: on his account the world flows out of God the way conclusions flow out of premises, necessarily and without beginning, so the world has always been there. The name for that in his system, and in the Latin books that later argued with it, is emanation: the world overflows from God the way light comes off a lamp, not because the lamp decided to shine but because shining is simply what a lit lamp does. He is not saying the world is uncaused. He is saying it is eternally caused. That is the fault line his Christian readers kept coming back to.

(Q) "The necessarily existent is the existent, which when posited as not existing, an absurdity results. The possibly existent is the one that when posited as either existing or not existing, no absurdity results." + Source: Avicenna, Kitab al-Najat (The Book of Salvation), Metaphysics, second treatise, section 1 (Jon McGinnis and David C. Reisman translation, in Classical Arabic Philosophy, 2007). The Najat is his own shorter version of the Cure, made for readers who would never get through the long one. He opens the whole proof by defining his two words, which is why the argument that follows can be run without any appeal to what the world happens to look like.

(T3) A man who could feel nothing at all would still know that he existed, so a person is not the same thing as a body. + Here is the most famous thought experiment in medieval philosophy, the one later readers came to call the flying man, and it costs nothing to run. Imagine a man created this instant, full grown, with all his wits. His eyes are veiled, so he sees nothing. He is floating in air so still that he cannot feel it on his skin. His arms and legs are held apart so that no part of him touches any other part. He has no memories, because he has only just begun. He is receiving no sensation of any kind, including any sensation of having a body. Ask him whether he exists. Avicenna’s claim is that he will say yes without hesitating, and that he will say it without first having to establish that he has a heart, a brain, a hand, or anything outside him at all. He is certain of himself while being certain of nothing else. Avicenna draws the conclusion sharply: the thing he is sure of and the thing he is not sure of cannot be the same thing. So the self he is aware of is not his body, nor any part of it. The soul, for Avicenna, is a substance in its own right that has been given a body to use, not a pattern the body happens to be arranged in. He argues elsewhere that it therefore survives the body’s death, and survives as this particular person rather than being absorbed into some general mind. Two things are worth saying plainly. The argument has a known weak joint. From "I am sure of X and not sure of Y" it does not strictly follow that X and Y are different things, since a man can be sure he is looking at the morning star and unsure he is looking at the evening star while the two are one planet, and philosophers pressed exactly that objection against Descartes six centuries later, when he took the same route from the famous "I think, therefore I am" to a mind distinct from the body. What survives the objection is the narrower and still striking point Avicenna is really after: awareness of yourself is not one more thing you perceive, alongside colours and sounds. It is already running before any of them arrive. Plotinus had come near the thought centuries earlier, but nobody had put it as sharply or built as much on it. The Latin schoolmen, the university teachers of medieval Europe who worked every question over by formal argument in the lecture hall, read him and seized on it.

(Q) "Then he considers whether he can assert the existence of his self. He has no doubts about asserting his self as something that exists without also [having to] assert the existence of any of his exterior or interior parts, his heart, his brain, or anything external." + Source: Avicenna, Kitab al-Shifa (The Cure), Book on the Soul, first chapter (Jon McGinnis and David C. Reisman translation, in Classical Arabic Philosophy, 2007). The bracketed words are the translators’, supplying in English what Arabic leaves implied. Avicenna sets the scene first, the veiled sight and the limbs held apart, and only then puts the question, so that the reader has already agreed to the conditions before seeing where they lead.

(T4) The soul came down into the body from somewhere higher, and it is going home. + Avicenna was a working physician who described the anatomy of the eye and mapped the chambers of the brain, and he was also the man who wrote a poem comparing the soul to a homing bird that fell into a cage. Both were sincere, and holding them together is the key to him. In his system the soul does not grow out of the body’s chemistry. Bodies are produced by the mixing of the elements, but when a body is fit to receive one, a soul is given to it from above, from what he calls the Active Intellect. Picture a staircase running down from God, whom the philosophers in his tradition called the One, to the world we walk around in, with a mind standing on every step. The Active Intellect is the mind on the bottom step, below God and above us, and it has two jobs. It hands out forms to matter, the natures that make a given quantity of stuff a horse rather than a heap, and it hands out knowledge to minds. Everything you have ever understood, on this account, was not squeezed out of your experience but lit up in you from that source, with experience merely getting you ready to receive it. That has a hard edge and a tender one. The hard edge is that Avicenna’s cosmos is crowded: God does not deal with the world directly but through a descending order of intellects, and the light that reaches a human mind has come a long way down. The tender one is the note the poem strikes, and it is the note Christian readers have always recognised. A human being is a stranger here. The homesickness is not a mood; it is information about where you are from. Augustine had said something close six centuries earlier, and would have known what the poem was about. Where a Christian must stop is at the return journey. For Avicenna the destination is reached with the body left behind for good, and the cage stays on the floor of the world. Scripture’s hope is that the body comes too, raised and not discarded. Two men can agree that we are strangers here and still disagree completely about what going home involves, and that is where these two part.

(Q) "It descended upon thee from out of the regions above, that exalted, ineffable, glorious, heavenly Dove." + Source: Avicenna, the Arabic qasida on the human soul (E. G. Browne translation, A Literary History of Persia, vol. II, pp. 110-111). The opening couplet of the best known poem he wrote. The whole runs to about twenty lines: the soul resists the body, grows used to "this desolate waste," forgets the gardens it came from, weeps, and at last sings on a height because the veil has been lifted. Ibn Khallikan thought it worth copying out in full two centuries later, and Arabic and Persian writers have been quoting it ever since.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Toledo put him into Latin, and for four centuries the Christian schools argued with a Muslim they could not do without. + In the twelfth century, in the Spanish city of Toledo recently taken from Muslim rule, teams of translators went to work on the Arabic libraries. Gerard of Cremona, an Italian who had come to Spain for exactly this, turned the Canon of Medicine into Latin. Dominicus Gundissalinus, archdeacon of Cuellar in the diocese of Segovia, worked with a Jewish collaborator known as Avendauth on the philosophical parts of the Cure, and it is worth pausing on that: a Christian cleric and a Jewish scholar putting a Muslim philosopher into the language of the Latin church, sentence by sentence, in a border city. What came across the language line was not scraps but a system, and it arrived while the Latin schools were still receiving Aristotle’s own Metaphysics in pieces. That timing mattered. When the schoolmen finally read Aristotle whole, they read him with Avicenna’s questions already in their heads. The results show up quickly, and they have the look of men taking a tool and leaving the box it came in. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, took over the essence-and-existence distinction while attacking the emanation scheme it had come wrapped in. Albert the Great worked him into the paraphrases of Aristotle he wrote for the Dominican schools, which is to say that a generation of friars met Aristotle with a Muslim already standing at the elbow. Roger Bacon called him the imitator and expositor of Aristotle, and the leader and prince of philosophy after him. Duns Scotus followed him on a point that shaped everything that came after, and it is worth slowing down for. Ask what metaphysics is a study of, and there are two possible answers. It could be the study of God, in which case it starts with him and can only go on to describe him. Or it could be the study of being itself, of what it takes for anything at all to be there, in which case God is where the argument arrives rather than where it begins. Avicenna gave the second answer. Scotus took it from him, and every later attempt to reason from the world up to God is standing on that decision.

(†) Thomas Aquinas built his whole doctrine of God on the distinction he learned from Avicenna. + Aquinas is the reason an ordinary Christian reader has any business knowing this name. In On Being and Essence, written while he was still a young man, he sets out the whole architecture of his theology by way of Avicenna’s point (T1): you can know perfectly well what a man is, or what a phoenix is, and still not know whether there is one, and therefore existence is something other than essence, unless there is something whose essence simply is its existing, and that thing must be one and first. Everything follows from that. God is not the largest being in a list of beings; God is subsistent existence itself, ipsum esse subsistens, which is the Latin for existing that belongs to nothing else and simply stands on its own. Every other thing has its being on loan. Creatures are not merely less powerful than God, they are borrowers from him, and the borrowing is happening now rather than at some first moment long ago, the way a song exists only while somebody is singing it and stops when the singer does. When Aquinas lists five short arguments for God’s existence in the Summa Theologiae, the third runs from things that are able not to be, up to something that must be, and it follows the road Avicenna opened, with the Christian doctrine of creation built into it. Aquinas was no disciple. He corrects Avicenna repeatedly, sometimes sharply, and on the largest questions he flatly refuses him. But he quotes him hundreds of times, and he quotes him the way one quotes a colleague rather than an opponent. General revelation, the theologians’ term for what can be known of God through creation and reason without Scripture, has few better test cases: Paul said the invisible attributes of God have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20), and here is a man with no Bible in his hands reasoning his way to a single, uncaused, simple source of all being, and getting a great deal of it right.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a world that had to flow out of God, a God who does not know your name, and a salvation with no body in it. + The other column of the ledger, and it is a long one. These are Avicenna’s own positions, taught in his own books, and they cost him at home as well: al-Ghazali, the greatest Muslim theologian of the next generation, singled out three of them in The Incoherence of the Philosophers and declared that holding them put a man outside the faith. Christian readers had to answer the same three, and one more besides. - Creation. For Avicenna the world proceeds from God necessarily and eternally, the way a conclusion proceeds from premises. God does not choose; God overflows, and could not have done otherwise. Scripture has God create freely, in the beginning, by decision: "by your will they existed and were created" (Revelation 4:11), and see also Genesis 1:1 and John 1:3. The difference is not merely about the calendar. A world that had to come out of God is not a gift, and nobody thanks a syllogism. - Whether God knows you. His God is perfectly simple and unchanging. Simple is a technical word here and does not mean easy: it means having no parts, nothing in him that could shift while the rest of him stayed put, the way a man’s mood can change while his height does not. From that Avicenna held that God knows things "in a universal way": he knows the natures of things and the whole ordered system, but he does not know this man, at this hour, in this trouble, because knowing changeable particulars would make the knower change. Jesus said the opposite in the plainest words available: "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father" (Matthew 10:29). The God of Scripture numbers the stars and names them (Psalm 147:4) and knows a word before it reaches the tongue (Psalm 139:4). - The body. Avicenna taught the soul’s immortality and did not think the resurrection of the body could be demonstrated by philosophy, accepting it, where he accepted it at all, on the authority of revelation rather than on his own principles. Christianity has never had that option. The whole faith is staked on a body that came out of a tomb, and on ours following it: "in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19:26); "in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20). - How the gap is crossed. In his system the distance between God and a human mind is bridged by a descending series of intellects, and what reaches us at the bottom is illumination from the last of them. The Christian answer is not a chain but a person, and the traffic runs the other way: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and "there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). None of that cancels the debt. Avicenna gave Christian theology the language in which it says that God alone exists of himself and everything else is held in being, and it has never found better language. He shows what a first-rate mind can reach by argument alone, and precisely where argument alone runs out: at a God who is a necessary conclusion rather than a Father who knows your name.