Revolutionary Rhythmic River: THE SOUL AS BARZAKH :: SUBSTANTIAL MOTION & MULLA SADRA'S THEORY OF HUMAN BECOMING

The Soul as Barzakh:

Substantial Motion and Mulla Sadra’s Theory of Human Becoming

Maria Massi Dakake

George Mason University

Fairfax, Virginia

The problem of the nature of the human soul, its connection to both the physical and spiritual realms, and its apparently asymmetrical existence as an entity that is both created in time and eternally subsistent, has exercised the minds of nearly all the great theologians and philosophers of Islam. If one adds to this the intricacies of Suﬁ psychology, which often represents the soul itself as the great enemy to be vanquished on the road to spiritual realization, we can see the difﬁculties that any holistic discussion of the soul in Islamic thought must involve. But it is just such a project that is undertaken by Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the Isfahani school of Islamic philosophy, in the better part of the last two volumes of his magnum opus, The Four Intellectual Journeys (al-Asfar al-arba“ah al-“aqliyah).1 Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (or Mulla Sadra) is well known for his far-reaching synthesis of multiple strains of Islamic thought, and this is perhaps nowhere more evident or impressive (although not entirely unproblematic) than in his discussion of the soul in its origin and ﬁnal ends. By clearly identifying the soul as a “substance” rather than an “accident” (in the Aristotelian sense of these terms)2 and by further applying his unique theory of substantial motion — that is, motion or change in the category of substance itself — to the soul, Mulla Sadra claims to be able to account for the transformation of the soul along its existential journey without the ontological discontinuities entailed by previous philosophical theories. For Mulla Sadra, it is not a question of the soul moving across an immutable barzakh or barrier between the apparently mutually exclusive existential modes of immateriality and bodiliness, createdness and eternity, but rather for Sadra, the soul itself is the barzakh — a moving barzakh that traverses the various modes of being through its own inward process of transformation. For Sadra, spiritual realization does not have to do with conquering or subjugating the soul — at least these are not his primary metaphors3 — but rather with transforming the soul in its very nature and substance.

In this article, I will examine Mulla Sadra’s theory of the human soul and its existential transformation through the process of substantial motion in relation to earlier Islamic thinking on the issue. I will then demonstrate the way in which Sadra’s theory attempts to reconcile the old conﬂicts between the Islamic doctrine of the createdness of the soul in matter and time and the Platonic (and Neo-Platonic) conception of the soul as pre-existing the body, and between the Islamic theologian’s insistence upon the resurrection of the body and the philosopher’s argument for the immaterial nature of the soul’s subsistence after death. In the process, we hope to illustrate the extent to which Sadra is able to integrate the mystical and mythological conceptions of the soul that are found in Qur’anic verses, Prophetic traditions and Suﬁ sayings into his philosophical psychology and eschatology. Although Sadra’s theory of soul can be found in numerous works, including the Shawahid al-rububiyah, the “Arshiyah and his commentary upon Suhrawardi’s Hikmat al-Ishraq, this article will focus primarily on Sadra’s discussion of the soul in the Asfar, because it is here that we ﬁnd an annotated catalogue, so to speak, of all the major sources of his thought, from the works of Plato and Ibn Sina to Qur’anic and hadith material, and it is here that we see his own theory of soul emerge from the difﬁcult work of critiquing and/or re-interpreting these earlier sources.

The Sadrian Concept of the Soul

Mulla Sadra acknowledges the apparent contradictions involved in traditional Islamic discussions of the soul. Most Islamic philosophers agree, for example, that the soul must be a simple and non-composite reality, for this makes its eternal subsistence after the body both possible and necessary. Yet this simplicity would seem to indicate an eternal subsistence prior to the body as well, so how can this simplicity be reconciled with the doctrine that the soul is temporally created? Islamic philosophers likewise agree that the soul is a spiritual or intellectual (and therefore immaterial) reality — at least on some level — so how is it that it comes to be attached to the body and to depend upon it? Moreover, if the soul is immaterial in its essence, then how can there be multiple individuations of the soul, for such individuations are only conceivable in the context of matter?4 With a thorough understanding of these difﬁculties and the intellectual perspectives that have addressed them — Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Qur’anic, Avicennan, Ishraqi and Suﬁ — Sadra presents a grand theory of the soul and its spiritual and earthly journey that seeks to re-interpret, amend and ultimately harmonize the variety of Hellenistic and Islamic approaches to the issue.

Mulla Sadra conceives of the soul as a simple, holy and indivisible substance (jawhar) that has its origin in the immutable, immaterial, and purely intellectual or angelic realm of the malakut, but which nonetheless also exists in and journeys through the world of temporality and change.5 While he often speaks of the soul’s “descent” into matter and time from its original lofty and immaterial existence, he makes it clear in other places that he means this metaphorically, for there can be no meaning to a distinct and individualized soul existing as such in the unitive world of the intellect, nor can there be any discussion of such a lofty intellectual reality becoming embodied, and thus imprisoned, in material form.6 As he says in his commentary on the Hikmat al-ishraq of Suhrawardi, “It is inconceivable that something which exists in the world of the Intellect would separate itself from that beautiful and noble realm, or that it could somehow be forced to descend into the abyss of rampant beasts and the mine of all evil and ignorance.”7 Sadra prefers to say that the soul has an “existential root (kaynunah)” in both the world of the intellect and the world of nature and sense8 such that it is engendered, so to speak, on two different planes of existence. In its intellectual kaynunah, the soul is immaterial and possesses no individuated or separative existence, being one with the immaterial Intellect itself. In other words, it is not really “soul” as such, insofar as the term “soul” implies material individuation, although the being or wujud9 of the earthly individuated soul derives from this original, undifferentiated, intellectual wujud.10 In its earthly or temporal plane of existence, the soul is originated with the body, and has an essential and natural unity with the body that cannot be escaped on this existential level. The connection between the soul and its body is similar to the connection between form and matter in that the two are mutually dependent upon each other for their own realization.11 The soul, as deﬁning form for the matter of the body, represents the body’s ﬁnal perfection and, he says, is like its very “being” (wujud), while the body is the soul’s “existence or existentiation” (mawjudiyah)12; that is, the body facilitates the soul’s individuated and distinct existence apart from the undifferentiated wujud of the Intellect, just as the soul individuates and distinguishes the body from undifferentiated matter.13 The body is moreover the means through which the privative soul can reach its own perfection,although Sadra cautions that the body should not be understood merely as an“instrument” at the disposal of the soul, as most previous philosophers have argued, for the connection between the soul and the body is stronger and more essential than the relationship between an agent and the instrument of his action.14

Sadra integrates the four problematic and apparently contradictory qualities commonly applied to the soul — temporality and eternity, materiality and immateriality — in his famous formulation which declares that the soul is “bodily in its temporal origination and spiritual [and therefore immaterial] in its subsistence after death,” or, as he says elsewhere, the soul is bodily in its mode of action but spiritual in its process of intellection.15 Yet, it would be profoundly inaccurate to say that Sadra views the soul as a “composition” of spirit or intellect and matter, with the two elements co-mingled within the human substance.16 As noted above, Sadra considers the soul to be a simple,17 uniﬁed substance and so admits of no composite nature for the soul whatsoever, regardless of the diversity of its faculties or its ability, as we shall see, to receive the forms of multiple things. The soul is rather the meeting point of intellect and matter; it is, as he tells us, “the highest and terminal point of material forms and the lowest or beginning point of perceptible [i.e.,intelligible] forms; and its wujud at that point is the last of the bodily husks and the ﬁrst of the spiritual kernels.”18 The soul is the subtle substance that serves as the very barzakh (barrier or isthmus) between intellect and matter, between the eternal and the temporal. As the “barzakhi reality between the immaterial human intellect and the material body,19 the soul corresponds to the macrocosmic realm of the imagination, which is likewise a “barzakhi” world between the purely intellectual realm of the malakut and the physical world.20 At one point, Sadra describes the soul in Qur’anic terms as the “junction between the two seas.”21 The meeting point between the two seas and the “barzakh” that the Qur’an tells us in another passage lies between them,22 is an important symbol in the Qur’an. It is most importantly the place where the law-giving prophet, Moses, meets Khidr, that mysterious and ahistorical Islamic prophet, who teaches Moses the knowledge of the Unseen.23 If we consider the full implications of this symbol — and there is no reason to think that Sadra did not intend us to do so — then the soul, as representative of this barzakh, is precisely the meeting point of the Manifest and the Unmanifest, the “alam al-shahadah and the “alam al-ghayb.

The notion that there are three “realities” in man — the intellectual, the psychic and the physical — and that the psychic realm is “intermediate (barzakhi)” between the intellectual and the bodily, is hardly a Sadrian contribution. It obviously goes back to Platonic and Aristotelian discussions of the nature of human reality, and was adopted by Ibn Sina, as well. The only major divergence from the notion of soul as a kind of barzakh among Islamic philosophers seems to come in the works of the Ishraqi philosopher Shihabal-Din Suhrawardi, according to whom it is the body, rather than the soul, which is the barzakh — with the term serving as a technical reference to the body in many of Suhrawardi’s discussions.24

Sadra differs from his predecessors, however, in that for him, the soul is not a ﬁxed barzakh , but rather one that is constantly shifting through the process of substantial motion. “Substantial motion (al-harakah al-jawhariyah)” is the Sadrian term for the process through which all things come to be, in the course of their physical life, what they are in their purely intellectual being — that is, in the knowledge of God. It is a process undergone not only by human souls, but by all things — animate and (apparently) inanimate — for as Sadra tells us, every created thing is moving toward its own perfection: “[T]he contingent thing is not created for nothing (haba”an) or in vain (“abathan),25 but rather is returning to its original end. . . the [physical] elements were only created to receive life and spirit.”26 This motion toward perfection occurs within the very substance of the existent entity and is nothing other than an intensiﬁcation of the wujud of that particular entity. For Sadra, it is only through accepting the idea of substantial motion and a certain gradation within wujud itself that one can resolve the apparent contradiction between the soul’s created materiality and its ultimate immateriality:

. . . in the opinion [of earlier thinkers] the soul must be a body . . . even though they afﬁrm the immateriality (tajarrud) of the rational [soul] in origination and substance. This is not what we say, namely, that [the soul] is bodily in origination and spiritual in subsistence. This is one of the proofs for the varying degrees of intensity (ishtidad) in the category of substance . . . and through this many problems that arise regarding the origination of the soul and its subsistence after death are resolved. Most, since they do not understand this principle . . . are confused . . . such that some of them deny [the soul’s] immateriality and some [deny] its subsistence after the body and some speak of the transmigration (tanasukh) of spirits. . . . But those ﬁrm in knowledge (rasikhuna ﬁ”l-“ilm 27), those who combine speculation and logical demonstration, the unveiling [of hidden truths] with the investigation [of manifest realities], know that the soul has many levels and that despite its simplicity, [it has] existential states, some of which are prior to nature,28 some with nature and some after nature. . . . And that which is dependent upon the body is only one of [the soul’s] planes of existence. The predisposition of the body [to receive the soul] is a condition for the wujud of this lower, natural, earthly generation, and this is its aspect of poverty and privation and possibility and deﬁciency, not the aspect of its necessity and independence and completion. And were the body a condition for the perfection of its identity and the completion of its wujud — as is the case with the rest of the animals and vegetables — then the passing away of the body would be a cause for its passing away. . . .29

The “substance” of the human being is, of course, the soul, in other words, the very meeting point of spirit and matter, or intellect and body, which represent the two poles of human existence. It is this very substance — and not simply the accidents that subsist therein — that moves between these two poles and is transmuted as an individual passes from potentiality to actuality in the development of his/her physical, psychic and spiritual faculties. All movements from potentiality to actuality (and movement can only take place in this direction)30 represent an intensiﬁcation of the wujud or being of that particular entity, not an alteration of its identity or essence. Thus, even as an individual moves from potentiality to actuality, even as its very substance is transmuted, it remains a continuous essential reality subsisting through its own intellectual being or wujud, which is ultimately its reality in the knowledge of God.31 In other words, it becomes more and more intensely or actually what it is in its origin, “for verily the ends of things are their origins.”32

For Sadra, as the being of a human soul intensiﬁes, it becomes increasingly independent of the body and begins to pull away from the body — hence the gradual process of its decay, which is only given life by the soul — until the soul reaches its ﬁnal earthly perfection and so sheds the physical body entirely.33 But despite the soul’s ultimate independence from the body, Sadra avoids the dualism of his Platonic and Ishraqi predecessors, who would see the body as dark, dead, lifeless matter, or as something that imprisons the soul.34 Rather, for Sadra, the body has an organic connection with the soul until the moment of death, which can be viewed as positive and nurturing, rather than simply limiting and inhibitive. In order to explain this relationship, Sadra gives us the example of a fetus who is dependent upon the womb for its existence until birth, but then becomes independent of it, and is able to subsist despite the decay or perishing of the womb.35 If we examine this analogy further, we see that the womb is not simply a refuge — or much less a “prison” — for the fetus, but rather an organ through which the fetus is able to reach its maturity and to develop the faculties initially possessed by the womb itself — such as the provision of “breath” and nourishment — until the fetus eventually comes to possess these faculties independent of its mother and her womb. In the same way, the soul initially depends upon the body for the realization of its faculties. However, the soul eventually becomes independent of the body, such that the body’s passing away does not harm the soul, nor does it in any way compromise those faculties of the soul once facilitated by the body — such as the senses.36 For Sadra, those senses continue on the psychic plane, even after the death of the body. Thus, Sadra, as we will see, takes the position that the pleasures and torments of the next life will be experiences purely on the psychic level — not on the physical level as asserted by most Ash‘arite theologians, nor on a purely intellectual level, as asserted by many Islamic philosophers.

In an individual’s passage from one state of being to another or among the various faculties of the soul realized thereby, Mulla Sadra is particularly concerned to avoid any kind of ontological discontinuity, which he considers to be one of the shortcomings of earlier philosophical, particularly Avicennan, approaches to the nature of the human soul. Ibn Sina, like most Islamic philosophers, asserted that the human soul was a simple entity, but also held that it contained within it the vegetative, animal and rational souls. In Avicennan thought, these souls cannot be considered entirely uniﬁed within the supposedly ‘simple’ reality of the human soul, since Ibn Sina makes a clear ontological distinction between the vegetative and animal souls on the one hand and the rational soul on the other, indicating that the vegetative and animal souls, being connected with the body in an absolute sense, pass away with the body, while only the rational soul subsists “disembodied” after death.37 Sadra argues that the problematic elements of the Avicennan view can only be overcome by positing the notion of change in the very substance that is the soul itself. On the lower plane of existence, Sadra agrees that the soul can be said to encompass various faculties, from the lower vegetative faculties of growth and reproduction to the nobler animal faculties of sensation and imagination and ﬁnally the uniquely human faculty of rationality. But one should not imagine that the soul acquires these faculties in an accidental and purely external fashion, such that one would have to describe the soul as a “composite” reality composed of these various faculties. Rather, as the human soul on the temporal plane of existence moves up the ladder of its own ontological perfection, it realizes or actualizes these various faculties progressively, with the lower faculties being assumed within the higher ones as they are attained, such that the soul “becomes” these various faculties rather than simply “acquiring” them. He explains:

[The soul] includes . . . the various degrees of the animal faculty, from the level of imagination to the level of the deductive senses, which is the lowest of the animal degrees; and it is also in possession of the degrees of the vegetative faculty, of which the lowest is nourishment and the highest is reproduction; and it is also in possession of a faculty of natural motion, which subsists through the body. But this does not mean that it is composed of these different faculties, for [the soul] is simple (basi†ah) in its being (wujud). Rather, it refers to the perfecting of its substantive nature (kamal jawhariyatiha) and the completion of its wujud and the [increasing] comprehensiveness of its essence through these formal levels. And the diversity of its actions and their meanings are all present in a single wujud in the soul, but in a simple and subtle manner which gives rise to the subtlety of the soul. Just as the concepts of various types of bodies may be uniﬁed in the intellect, becoming themselves after rising from the level of the sensible to the level of the intelligible, and just as all natural types are found in the intellect in a higher and loftier manner [than they are found in their concrete, physical reality], so too do all of the natural faculties found in the wujud of the soul possess a psychic wujud, that is higher and loftier than their wujud in different [material] substrates. And, in general, the Adamic soul descends from its highest purity to the station of nature and the station of sensing and sensible forms, and its degree at this point is the degree of natures and senses; then it becomes, with touch, the very limb or faculty of touch and with smell and taste, the very faculty of smell and taste, and these are the lowest of the senses. And when it rises to the station of imagination it becomes the faculty of conception. And it is [the soul’s] prerogative to rise above these stations to the stations of the holy intellect and to unite with every intellect and intelligible.38

The unity of the soul despite its various faculties is, for Sadra, a reﬂection of the Divine unity,39 and it is somewhat reminiscent of certain traditional Islamic formulations regarding the relationship between God and his attributes. Sadra’s description of the soul becoming itself the faculty of touch,or smell or imagination upon the actualization of these faculties seems analogous to the earlier theological and philosophical theories that recognized no distinction between the essential attributes of God and God’s Essence itself, such that the God was considered to be powerful through a power which was nothing other than his essence, knowledgeable through a knowledge that was nothing other than his essence, and so on.40 (The only difference, of course, is that for God, these things are eternally present with him; there can obviously be no process of ‘becoming’ these things, as is the case with the human reality.) At the very end of the passage cited above, we can see that this process of “becoming” which characterizes the development and enhancement of the soul in its bodily and temporal existence is also the manner in which the soul will eventually ‘return’ to the abode of the immaterial intellect, by uniting “with every intellect and intelligible” as it has united with the various psychic faculties and levels below it. We will revisit and further elaborate upon Sadra’s view of the soul’s return to its intellectual origin in the ﬁnal section of this article.

We can say, then, that from one perspective, Mulla Sadra’s theory of human becoming has something of a circular and symmetrical quality to it in that the soul both begins and ends in the intellectual realm. From another perspective, however, he preserves something of the asymmetry of traditional Islamic notions of the soul — which generally denied any existence for the soul prior to the body, but maintained its eternal subsistence after death — in that he also afﬁrms the soul’s initial existential dependence upon and origination through the body, such that the soul can be considered to have, as we have seen, two existential roots or modes of origination and a single, uniﬁed existential end. What is important to note here is that there are indeed two perspectives to Sadra’s view of the soul — something he himself maintains as a means of avoiding the conﬂicts and confusions that have characterized other theories of soul. For Sadra, the soul has both an “immaterial” wujud and a wujud that is attached to or dependent upon matter; nearly all of the difﬁculties in the description of the soul are overcome for Sadra through his insistence that the soul be viewed from these two different perspectives or planes of existence. Again, however, he is careful to note that the fact that the soul exists on two different ontological levels — and what applies to the soul in one does not necessarily apply to it in the other — does not entail or imply any division or disjunction in the total reality of the soul, for originally, ultimately and actually, these two “wujuds” are one, distinguished only by their level of ‘intensity.’ One could make an analogy to the light of the sun, which is always and everywhere ‘sunlight’ but which in its various degrees of intensity may encompass different qualities. At its most intense, the light is blinding, while at a lesser intensity it is illuminating; in great intensity it may destroy, while in lesser intensity, nourish, etc. The soul likewise represents an extension or emanation of immaterial wujud into the material realm, and it likewise encompasses different qualities and characteristics at its different levels of intensity without this entailing any ontological disjuncture between those different levels. As it journeys in union with the body through the material realm, its wujud increasingly intensiﬁes until it reaches the point of its own substantial perfection such that it is no longer in need of the matter of the body and, at that point, returns to the immaterial realm through death.

The Pre-existence of the Soul

The issue of the existence of the soul prior to the body — even a purely intellectual pre-existence — is particularly problematic for Muslim theologians and philosophers for several reasons, since the necessary attachment of soul to body, or the inconceivability of a “disembodied soul,” is demanded both by certain logical deﬁnitions and by Islamic dogma. Insofar as the deﬁnition of “soul” implies individuation and distinct existence, and insofar as such individual distinction can only be realized through material differences, one can no more conceptualize soul without body than form without matter.41 Islamic dogma, for its part, asserted the necessary connection between a soul and its particular body as a way of refuting the notion of the transmigration of souls, or tanasukh — a heretical notion from the Islamic perspective which nevertheless seems to have enjoyed some circulation in early Islamic times, apparently stemming in part from Indo-Iranian religious sub-currents in certain Islamic intellectual circles. Arguing for the necessary connection between body and soul was also important as a support for the Islamic doctrine of bodily resurrection against the Platonic and Neo-Platonic belief — followed by the Islamic Peripatetics — of the eternity of the immaterial or disembodied soul.

While Sadra himself afﬁrms bodily resurrection42 and categorically denies the notion of transmigration of souls, he nonetheless acknowledges the insufﬁciency of the well known theological arguments against tanasukh. He notes, for example, the circular nature of theological arguments that refuted tanasukh on the basis of the temporal createdness of souls, and based their arguments for the temporal createdness of souls on the impossibility of tanasukh.43 Perhaps more difﬁcult for Sadra, who so meticulously sought to reconcile Platonic and Neo-Platonic paradigms with Islamic scriptural and traditional texts, was that both his Platonic sources on one hand and the Qur’an and hadith literature on the other contain explicit and implicit references to the pre-existence of the soul and to its embodiment, disembodiment and/or re-embodiment in the material world. The Platonic and Neo-Platonic myth of the pure soul “falling into matter” seemed to Sadra to be echoed in both the Judeo-Christian-Islamic story of the fall of Adam and the Zoroastrian story of the creation of evil — both of which he reads as allegorical references to the journey of the human soul.44 In addition to these allegorical references, Sadra also cites other Qur’anic passages which allude either to the existence of the soul prior to the body — such as Qur’an VII: 172, where God is said to have addressed all of the seed taken from the loins of a pre-existent Adam and asked them to conﬁrm that he was, indeed, their Lord — or to the soul’s “descent” into the world such as Qur’an XCV: 4–5 “We have created man in the highest of states and then cast him down to the lowest of the low.”45

Mulla Sadra also ﬁnds support for the notion of the pre-eternal reality of the soul or spirit in the hadith tradition. For example, he cites the well known Prophetic hadith in which Muhammad states that he “was a prophet while Adam was still between water and clay,”46 (thus acknowledging a certain existence for him before the bodily creation of the ﬁrst man himself) and the Shi‘ite and Suﬁ hadith which states that the spirits [of men] (arwah) were created “one thousand years before bodies.”47 In fact, references to a pre-existential life for the human soul seem to be particularly in evidence in the Shi‘ite hadith corpus. This is perhaps because Imami Shi‘ite doctrine is very much concerned with ontological distinctions between various levels of created beings: angels, prophets, imams, believers (i.e., Shi‘ites) and non-believers; and these distinctions, according to Shi‘ite tradition, are the result of events and determinations that appear to take place prior to the creation of the world itself. For example, Shi‘ite tradition considers the pre-eternal questioning of the seed of Adam referenced in Qur’an VII: 172 to have included questions regarding the prophecy of Muhammad and the walayah or esoteric authority of ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, with only a select group among the respondents acknowledging the latter. In fact, Mulla Sadra, himself a devoted Imami Shi‘ite, testiﬁes to the importance of the pre-existential realm in Shi‘ite thought, noting that the “traditions handed down on this subject by our fellow (Shi‘ites) are so innumerable that it is as though the existence of spirits prior to (their) bodies were one of the essential premises of the Imamite school. . . .”48 And in his own discussion of the issue of human cosmogony and ontology, Mulla Sadra relies to a signiﬁcant extent on the material contained in the traditional Imami Shi‘ite sources.49

In defense of the Platonic and scriptural allusions to a kind of existence for the soul prior to the creation of bodies, Sadra elaborates his theory of the origin of the soul in the realm of the intellect. As noted above, he is careful to indicate that the soul does not exist as “soul” in the realm of the intellect, but rather has its origin there. However, the terms of his discussion are not always precise, for even if he states explicitly that the soul does not exist “as soul” in the intellectual realm, he nonetheless continues to refer to it as “soul” when discussing its pre-existent state.50 Moreover, even though Sadra states that pre-existent “souls” can have no material reality and no essential or accidental distinction in the intellectual realm in which they subsist,51 he does not seem to mean that they are therefore necessarily devoid of all form or “bodiliness,” since they may possess bodies that are not corporeal or material in nature:

It is possible that [souls] could be existent before these [physical] bodies in another world, attached to bodies other than natural, corporeal bodies, whether they be elemental (“unsuriyah) or celestial (falakiyah), for verily the impermissibility of tanasukh is only a valid argument [against this notion] if it entails the moving of souls and spirits in this world between material, corporeal bodies. . . . [T]he human soul possesses varying stations and degrees, and it has previous and subsequent planes of existence (nash”at) and in every station and world it has another form. . . .52

Although Sadra usually speaks of souls possessing an “intellectual oneness (or unity)”53 in their intellectual pre-existence, he here leaves open the question of individual distinction among “souls” in pre-eternity, on the basis of the possibility of distinction through non-corporeal or immaterial “bodies.” Here again, Sadra resolves the logical difﬁculties entailed by the notion of “souls existent before (physical) bodies” by insisting upon a gradated view, not only of the wujud or being of the soul, but also of the basic concept of “body,” which for most other philosophers implies materiality and corporeality. As we have alluded to earlier, this nuanced view of the “body” is especially important for Sadra’s concept of the soul’s transitions in the afterlife.

The continuity between the soul’s intellectual, psychic and physical realities is facilitated by Sadra’s ﬂuid and unitive conception of wujud. For Sadra, there is only one “wujud” through which all souls subsist, differing only by the level of intensity with which they participate in this wujud. Every individual possesses three types (or really degrees of intensity) of wujud: active wujud, which constitutes its intellectual existence; contingent wujud, which constitutes its psychic existence; and passive or potential wujud, which is none other than the physical matter that receives its human form.54 For Sadra, each of the more intense forms of wujud includes all of the wujud or reality of those below them, and hence there is no contradiction. In fact, the relationship between the higher and lower levels of wujud, he says, is similar to the relationship between cause and effect, since cause and effect are hierarchically ordered, but not ontologically separate, in that the effect is always contained within the cause.55 Sadra also strenuously objects to the notion that movement between these three planes of existence, or intensities of wujud, constitutes an alteration of the ‘truth’ (haqiqah) of a thing, or of its quiddity (mahiyah). He argues to the contrary that denying gradation and hierarchy within the concept of wujud would itself lead to an alteration in the quiddity or mahiyah of a thing:

This [process of substantial motion] does not entail a change in the truth of a thing, for [such a change] would mean altering the quiddity (mahiyah) of that thing, by virtue of which it is what it is, such that it becomes the quiddity of some other thing in meaning and concept. And this is impossible, because the quiddity (mahiyah) is that by virtue of which [the thing] is what it is and [by virtue of which] it cannot be anything else. . . . But as for the intensiﬁcation of wujud in its movement toward perfection and the perfection of its substantive form in itself, through which it comes to include essential qualities other than those which it had possessed before, this is not impossible, because wujud precedes quiddity and it is the source of the quiddities which proceed from it. . . . Verily, various species of things and deﬁned concepts — such as man, sphere, earth, heavens, and so on — have multiple types of wujud and multiple modes of existence, some of them natural, some psychic, some intellectual and some Divine. Thus if you were to think ‘earth’ or ‘heaven,’ it would be present in your intellect as an intellectual heaven, [and if you were to imagine ‘heaven’] it would be present in your imagination as an imaginal ‘heaven’ — both of them being ‘heaven’ in reality, not just ﬁguratively. The same would be true of the concrete [material] heaven, but the ﬁrst two forms [i.e., the intellectual and the imaginal] would be more deserving of the name ‘heaven,’ because the concrete ‘heaven’ is mixed with, and concealed by, other things external to its essence, and by nothingness and darkness and by the continuous ﬂow of other things, and such is the case for every natural species. And all [these natural species] pre-exist in the Decree of God, in a holy, intellectual way. So what is wrong with souls — which are the forms of every natural species — having an existential root in a different mode in the intellectual world? And whoever claims that existence (kawn) has a single meaning in all multiple existents on different planes of existence, necessitates the transmutation of quiddity and the nulliﬁcation of the truth [of a thing] and so is prevented from knowing the true nature of anything.56

The “true nature” of things, for Sadra, is the nature of those things as they are in the mind of God — complete, immaterial and purely actualized. To claim that existence in the created world — in which all things exist imperfectly and only in potential — is the same as existence in the intellectual realm in the Divine Decree is clearly false. Without the possibility of a being existent in the created world intensifying in its own wujud through substantial motion such that it might come to exist on the purely intellectual level, there would be no way for that entity to realize its “true nature” in an integral way, without changing its identity. Thus, it is only a gradated concept of wujud that can account for the maintenance of the continuous identity of all things as they journey through the different planes of existence. As he states, it is his view that wujud precedes mahiyah and is fundamental in relation to it.57 Thus, any intensiﬁcation of wujud will naturally enhance the essential qualities that constitute the mahiyat or quiddities of distinct things; but he insists that this does not require an “impermissible” change in mahiyah, since it occurs through a process internal to the thing itself. Moreover, as we have seen, Sadra deﬁnes a more intense wujud as that which includes all of the reality or truth of the lower intensities of wujud, in which case the mahiyah is not “altered” between ontological levels, such that it becomes some other thing, but is rather enhanced, such that it comes to include additional qualities that it formerly only possessed in potentiality, while fully maintaining the integrity of its previous self.

This notion of the fundamental nature of wujud in relation to mahiyah represents a profound difference between Sadra and his Ishraqi predecessor, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, who held that it was mahiyah that was fundamental, whereas wujud or “existence” was simply a mental construct. Suhrawardi also argues forcefully in his Hikmat al-ishraq against the notion of the pre-existence of the soul; in one lengthy section of the Asfar, Sadra examines and refutes Suhrawardi’s arguments point by point. Before comparing their arguments for and against the pre-existence of the soul, it should be pointed out that while there are some notable parallels between Ishraqi and Sadrian ontology, they remain two quite different systems. For Suhrawardi, all being should be understood as emanations of light upon otherwise dark, heavy and lifeless matter. God is the “Light of lights” and all light derives from this source and is differentiated by varying degrees of intensity and corresponding function — for example, the angelic or intellectual beings are referred to as “commanding lights” and human rational souls as “managing lights,” in the sense that they manage the otherwise inanimate matter of the body.58 To some extent Suhrawardi’s theory of light is analogous to Sadra’s conception of wujud as a single and unitive reality differentiated only by degrees of intensity and weakness — and Sadra himself alludes to the parallel nature of their thought in this regard.59 But, as noted above, for Suhrawardi, it is the body, rather than the soul, which is the “barzakh” or barrier, in the sense of being a barrier to light. As we have seen, Sadra’s philosophy rejects the dualism of light and dark matter characteristic of Suhrawardian ontology, and considers all bodies to have life and soul of some sort, however weak their degree of intensity.60 For Sadra, there is no meaning to something that acts as an immutable “barrier” to the ﬂow of undifferentiated being; rather all things emerge from and participate in this being or wujud. Even if one can make a distinction between the existence (wujud) and quiddity (mahiyah) of a given entity on some level, in reality, even quiddity emerges from wujud itself.

Suhrawardi begins his argument against the pre-existence of souls (or “managing lights,” as he calls them) by arguing that if souls existed in pre-eternity, they would have to be either one or multiple. If they were one, then they could not conceivably be divided into multiple entities after that, since such division or multiplicity requires the presence of the body or matter. If they were multiple, then they would have to be distinguished by intensity or weakness, and such distinctions could only be brought about by external accidents, which simply cannot be conceived of in the realms of eternity and immateriality.61 Sadra’s response is that there is more than one type of “oneness” and that the oneness that pertains to souls in their intellectual origin is not the same as the oneness that characterizes them in the realm of material existence. He notes that there are four types of “oneness” — intellectual oneness, oneness of species, numerical oneness and quantitative oneness — and that while every type of oneness is opposed by a kind of multiplicity, “not every oneness is opposed by every multiplicity. For verily, intellectual oneness might be the same as numerical multiplicity, and likewise what is one in nature might be multiple in parts.”62 For Sadra, while it is true that souls are one in species in the material world, they are characterized by an intellectual oneness in their immaterial and pre-eternal reality. In other words, they are not distinguished by external accidents and qualities giving them independent and individual mahiyat, but rather they exist as pure wujud or being, and as such have no individual mahiyah. In this realm, they are distinguished only by intensities of wujud, which does not imply ontological separateness or external causes, since a more “intense” wujud simply encompasses the lesser, allowing for a certain type of oneness in conjunction with a certain mode of distinction.63 All realities are differentiated, in other words, by the very thing that they have in common — wujud.64

Perhaps a more challenging argument presented by Suhrawardi has to do with the reason or cause for the “descent” of the soul into the material realm. Suhrawardi argues that the occurrence of such a descent would require that an accidental or incidental change take place in the eternal and immaterial realm in which those souls would presumably be located. But there can be no such accidental or incidental change introduced in the realm of eternity.65 Sadra answers this by arguing that the “cause” of this descent is not an external, accidental quality, but the inherent deﬁciency and imperfection of the soul in its particular existence in the world of the intellect, which arises from its being derivative of its “perfect and self-subsisting (qayyum) Maker.”66 There are, therefore, some perfections that it can only attain through a “descent” into the material body; and he cites numerous passages from the works of Greek philosophers and the canons of Islamic hadith to defend and explain the providential nature of the soul’s coming to exist in the material world.67 He further notes that Suhrawardi accepts that human souls can enter the realm of eternity and immateriality after death, presumably without this realm undergoing any change or transmutation thereby. If souls can ascend to this realm without ontologically disturbing it, then there is no reason that they cannot descend from it in the same way.68

Finally, Suhrawardi argues that if souls existed prior to bodies, there would either be some souls that would never come to “manage” a body — in which case they would not be “managing lights,” and so their existence as such would be nulliﬁed — or they would all eventually come to administer a body, in which case there would come a point in time when all of these souls would have “descended” and none would remain — and this would be absurd.69 Sadra responds to the ﬁrst part of this argument, characteristically, by distinguishing between the deﬁning elements of “soul” as such, and those of its counterpart in the intellectual realm:

The separative wujud of souls is not the same as their wujud ‘attached [to matter].’ Those ancient thinkers who held that souls have a wujud in the world of the intellect before bodies did not mean that the soul, insofar as it is a soul, has an intellectual wujud; rather they meant that it has another kind of wujud, not the wujud that belongs to it by virtue of its being a managing soul (nafs mudabbirah). Thus it does not follow that because it does not manage a body, it is therefore idle (ta“til); it would only be idle if it, insofar as it is a soul [and not a purely intellectual reality], did not manage a body. . . . [T]he state of idleness does not result from the fact that its intellectual wujud does not manage a body. Rather, by virtue of the fact that it is an intellect, it never enmeshes itself with the body; while the soul, as such, can never avoid this.70

As a refutation of the second possibility Suhrawardi raises — namely, that all such pre-existent souls should come to manage bodies and so “descend” from this intellectual realm, leaving it thereby depleted of souls — Sadra argues that the intellectual realm which generates souls is “unlimited in its existential potentialities,” such that as even as souls continue to “separate” from it, its potency is undiminished and never exhausted. Moreover, “souls” in their intellectual reality are not characterized by multiplicity (kathrah), and so it is absurd to speak about the intellectual realm being “depleted” of them,“one by one.”71

The Return of the Soul

As we have seen in the above discussion, Sadra’s theory of the soul and its transformation is characterized above all by the notion of ﬂuidity and the rejection of any notion of ontological divisibility or discontinuity for the soul in its many faculties and levels of existence. The same seamlessness that characterizes a human being’s progression from vegetative to animal to rational soul in the earthly realm also pertains to the soul’s ﬁnal transformation through which it abandons its physical body and enters into the realm beyond the sensible world through death. Moreover, the soul’s entrance or re-entrance into this non-material and non-temporal world is, like its initial emergence from it, something that occurs without that world undergoing any type of change or renewal.72 For Sadra, the soul’s transformation, even between the two radically opposed worlds of materiality and immateriality, temporality and eternity, results from the same process of lower forms of existence being assumed within higher ones, such that the soul is eventually able to unite with the intellect itself and so, by deﬁnition, become free of its material body:

. . . the sages have established that natural entities have a motion with a propensity toward their ultimate essential ends . . . and they have established that every deﬁcient thing has a strong inclination or desire for its own perfection. Every deﬁcient thing, when it attains its own perfection or reaches its essential reality (inniyah), is united with it and its wujud becomes another wujud. This human motion with a propensity toward the side of the holy is well known and obvious to those with spiritual insight (basirah). And when the soul, through its striving toward perfection, reaches the station of the intellect, it is transformed into pure intellect, is united with the agent intellect and becomes the agent intellect. Indeed, that which was passive intellect — that is the soul and the imagination — abandons matter, and it is stripped of potentiality and contingency and becomes subsistent through the subsistence of God.73

In this passage, Sadra mentions that in the process of the soul’s realization of higher states, and at every progressive stage, the soul’s wujud becomes “another wujud.” This new “wujud” is not really “new” in the sense of being created at every point of progress.74 Rather, for Sadra, all of the levels of wujud are integrally related to one another such that, as we have seen, the relationship between the higher and lower intensities or degrees of wujud is precisely the relationship of the cause to its effect. The lesser intensities of wujud are contained within and emanate from the higher, just as the effect is contained within and emanates from its cause. The movement through higher and higher intensities of wujud is ultimately nothing more than a re-integration of the lower levels of wujud within the higher ones from which they had originally emerged. The more intense levels of wujud therefore pre-exist the soul’s union with them, and what is created when the soul moves from one existential level to another is simply the relationship or connection between the soul and the more intense wujud.75

However, until this point of physical death, the human soul has always transformed itself within the context of the material body; and Sadra himself tells us that the connection between the soul and the body is an essential and not accidental one.76 If so, how can the separation of the soul from the body at death not entail a radical change in the very essence of the human being; and how can this radical change be accounted for by the same ﬂuid process of reintegration that characterized the previous earthly transformations of the soul that took place within the necessary substratum of the body itself? The answer, from the Sadrian perspective, is that the substratum for all of these transformations — from the vegetative to the animal to the rational to the incorporeal soul — is not, in fact, the body, but the human substance (jawhar) which is the soul itself. It is important to remember that substance, for Sadra, is not deﬁned as physical materiality,77 as it is in Ash‘arite thinking, but rather as the quality of passivity and receptivity in relation to various forms — and for Sadra, the soul is receptive of multiple forms. But one might further argue that the soul is itself “form” — the ﬁnal form and formal perfection of the material body, according to Sadra and most early Islamic philosophers — so how can it be also receptive to form? Sadra himself addresses this question, saying that it can only be resolved by understanding the difference between material and immaterial form. The soul in relation to bodily matter is “material form,” whereas the spirit/intellect is “immaterial form” in relation to the psychic or subtle “matter” of the soul.78 The soul, standing as it does at the meeting point or barzakh of the physical and intellectual/spiritual poles of human existence, is thus both perfect form or actuality in relation to the material of the body, and perfect, subtle “matter” or pure potentiality in relation to the spiritual/intellectual realm.79 Death, in other words, is the process by which the human substance or soul, having once been the active principle controlling the actions of the material body, now manifests itself as the passive recipient of the form given to it by its intellectual reality — a reality shaped by these same physical and earthly actions. And so again, by considering the soul from two different perspectives, or more speciﬁcally, considering its different functions in relation to the spiritual and material realms, even the transfer from the material and temporal realm to the immaterial and eternal is accomplished without any ontological discontinuity.

While the soul’s movement from the physical world to the intellectual world of the Hereafter through death is represented as simply the ﬁnal step in the seamless process of human becoming; it does entail some qualitative changes for the soul. In fact, Sadra refers to this ﬁnal transition as a “second birth,” in which the soul is reshaped according to a “second ﬁ†rah (mold or nature).” One of the important differences between the ﬁrst and second ﬁ†rahs is that the ﬁrst ﬁ†rah, into which all human beings are born in this world, is common to all human beings, such that they can be said to be multiple individuations of a single species. However, in the next life, human beings will be formed according to a ﬁ†rah speciﬁc to their own inner nature, such that human beings will, in effect, come to represent multiple species and take on multiple forms.80 According to his well known doctrine, human souls will take the form in the next life of an angel, a devil, a brute beast or a predatory animal,81 and may take various forms within these general categories. Thus, the soul will not be “disembodied” in the next life; rather, the “body” of the human being in the next world will be the subtle matter of the soul, itself, given particular form by the inner reality of the individual as realized through the works and actions of that individual in his/her earthly life.82 Moreover, given that the “form” of this subtle body in the next life is based on the inner reality of the individual, this second, other worldly formation or “ﬁ†rah” is permanent and not itself subject to further change or transformation.83

Sadra makes it clear that this process of otherworldly transformation is not tantamount to the heretical doctrine of tanasukh, or the transmigration of souls, for several reasons. First, tanasukh only pertains to the transmigration of a given soul from one sensible body to another — i.e., a person assuming different bodily forms within the material world. Sadra, however, is asserting a transformation that takes place between the sensible and suprasensible worlds, such that the new “body” of the individual in the next life is a subtle, psychic body, not one characterized by physical matter.84 Second, to the extent that tanasukh entails the transmigration of human souls to other physical (animal or vegetable) bodies, it clearly contradicts the Sadrian premise that all movement in the earthly realm is from potentiality to actuality — and for human souls, from complete dependence upon the physical body to complete independence of it. Transmigration from human to animal form on the physical plane would represent ontological regress, not progress, such that the particular human soul, having been material in action and immaterial in essence, now, in animal form, would become material in both action and essence.85 For Sadra, such a regression is inconceivable. All human beings may not be moving toward a felicitous end, nor toward a subtle form that is analogous to the physical human form they enjoy in this life, but they are all moving toward increasing immateriality and independence of the physical body.86 The notion of a human soul wandering among or condemned to physical, animal bodies completely contradicts the necessity of motion in the direction of the soul’s perfection in the sense of its ultimate self-sufﬁciency vis-à-vis the material world.87

This doctrine is essential to Sadra’s attempt to reconcile the various strains of philosophical and theological thinking that inﬂuenced his thought. It allows him, for example, to re-interpret and give new meaning to the Platonic belief in reincarnation or the transmigration of souls by asserting that Plato’s ideas were misinterpreted and that his apparent allusions to a type of transmigration simply refer to the transmutations in the human soul that take place after death, parallels to which are found, as Sadra declares, in all of the world’s religions.88 More importantly, Sadra sees this notion of the otherworldly transformation of mankind into multiple species on the basis of their respective inner characters as irrefutably supported by numerous Qur’anic passages and hadith. For example, Sadra cites Qur’anic verses that mention those who have incurred the curse of God being transformed into monkeys and/or pigs (Qur’an V:60; VII:166) as direct references to this process.89 Indirectly, he cites Qur’anic passages that state that one’s limbs and bodily parts will “testify against” one on the Day of Resurrection,90 understanding this to mean that it is the very form that an individual soul will assume after death, on the basis of his inner character, that will serve as the witness. In other words, a base person might take the form of a dog in the next life, and his canine form and faculties will themselves passively bear witness to the ignoble nature of his character and behavior in the world.91 He further interprets the hadith tradition which states that “people will be resurrected according to different faces” to mean that they will be resurrected in forms appropriate to their actions performed in the life of the world,92 giving the further example of a tradition which declares that whoever does not follow the Imam in prayer will be resurrected with the head of a donkey.93

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Sadra himself, this theory allows him to reconcile both the philosophically undeniable immateriality of the soul, and its subsistence after death, with the Islamic doctrine of the resurrection of the body. If Sadra criticizes the Peripatetic and Ishraqi notion of the disembodied state of the soul after death and the challenge it poses to the Islamic doctrine of bodily resurrection, he would also object to Abu Hamidal-Ghazali’s notion that the physical material of the soul will be recomposed by the will of God at the time of resurrection, in order to embody the soul once more and allow it to experience the pleasures of paradise or torments of hell — pleasures and torments which are described so clearly in the Qur’an, and which Ghazali and his fellow Ash‘arites understood literally. For Ghazali, a renewed physical body was needed to realize the literal meaning of an individual’s physical pleasure and suffering in the afterlife; whereas for Ibn Sina, the pleasures or torments of the next life were intellectual in nature — with the Qur’anic descriptions serving as mere metaphors — and thus required no physical body for their realization. For Sadra, most human souls will continue to reside in the “barzakhi” world of the psyche or imagination, which, like the intellectual realm, is non-corporeal and stands hierarchically between the intellectual and purely physical realms. The Qur’anic descriptions of sensible experiences in the next life are not merely metaphors for Sadra, but rather things that will be experienced in a very real way on the level of the imagination and through the medium of a subtle, not material body.94 Thus he afﬁrms the Islamic dogma of “bodily resurrection,” with the caveat that this resurrected body is not a physical body, but a subtle and psychic one, whose experiences of the pleasures and torments of the next world are made all the more real by its freedom from the limitations and distractions of the physical senses.

Mulla Sadra’s combination of an emanationist ontology — common to many other Islamic thinkers — with a unique theory regarding the internal transmutation of the substance of the soul in relation to the multiple planes of existence within this emanationist scheme, allows him to develop the ﬂuid and internally consistent theory of human becoming that seems to have eluded his Peripatetic and Ishraqi predecessors. His theory of the relationship between individuated human souls and the pre-eternal, intellectual wujud from which they all originate ﬁrst enables him to account for some type of existence for human souls as realities in the realm of the spirit, prior to their temporal origination in matter or the body — an idea alluded to in the Platonic texts for which Sadra has so much respect and in a wealth of Shi‘ite hadith and Suﬁ sayings which speak at length of the world of “pre-eternity” and its role in human destiny. At the same time, he denies the “pre-existence” of the individuated soul that is only later “embodied” in physical matter, a notion that too easily leads to the idea of tanasukh (or the transmigration of souls), which Islamic dogma strongly rejects. Second, by arguing that the soul is an incorporeal substance or jawhar necessarily originated in conjunction with the physical body, but increasingly detached from it through the process of substantial motion, he is able to reconcile the Islamic dogma of bodily resurrection with the Islamic philosophical opposition to the idea of the eternity of bodily matter. In his theory, the resurrected bodies are not the physical or material bodies of our earthly existence. Rather, they are subtle and psychic bodies, but individuated bodies nonetheless — not disembodied souls or realities absorbed into undifferentiated intellect. The individual forms of these subtle and psychic bodies are determined by the particular individual’s actions and intellectual activity in this life, which, in altering his/her internal nature or psychic substance, also alters his/her outward form in the next life — where the inward will become the outward.

Endnotes

1. Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, al-Hikmah al-muta“aliyah ﬁ”l-asfar al-arba“ah al-“aqliyah,(9 vols.) (Beirut: Dar Ihyaal-Turth al-‘Arabi, 1990).

2. Asfar, v. 8, 318–319. Although Sadra tells us that “most later thinkers” consider the soul to be an accident, other Islamic philosophers, such as Ibn Sina likewise considered the soul to be a substance (see, e.g., Ibn Sina, Avicenna’s De Anima, ed. F. Rahman, (London:Oxford University Press, 1959), 9–10. Some Ash’ari theologians, such as Abu Hamidal-Ghazali, also seemed to view the soul as a substance, although this presented some difﬁculty for them, given their position that all substances, as created realities, must “occupy space” or inhere in something which occupies space (see, e.g., T. Gianotti, Al-Ghazali’s Unspeakable Doctrine of the Soul (Leiden, Brill, 2001), 80–81. In the passage just cited, however, Sadra criticized al-Ghazali for considering the qualities of “human-ness” or “animal-ness” (something obviously facilitated by their “souls”) as being “accidents” (Asfar, v. 8, 318).

3. Sadra does cite such metaphorical imagery from ‘Umar b. Muhammad Suhrawardi and certain other Suﬁ thinkers in the context of his discussion of the soul, and seems to agree with their general perspective, but as noted above, he does not speak in these terms himself. In particular, see a long passage he cites from ‘Umar b. Muhammad b. Suhrawardi’s “Awarif al-ma“arif, in which the three elements of spirit, soul and body are allegorized as a husband, wife and child, respectively. The righteous soul/wife obeys and is submissive to the spirit/husband and is thereby able to competently guide her body/child (Asfar, v. 8,321–324). Sadra clearly endorses the allegory, but again, does not offer such imagery of his own.

4. Asfar, v. 8, 344.

5. Ibid., v. 8, 134.

6. He explains the apparent Pythagorean and Platonic assertions of the existence of disembodied souls descending into matter as the result of misinterpretations of their works that fail to take into account the fact that the soul can be discussed from two perspectives: that of its spiritual reality (tarawwuh) and that of its incarnated reality (tajassum) (Asfar, v. 8, 308). He also quotes a tradition from Ibn ‘Abbas which states that the spirit moves “without changing its place and without bodily incarnation (tajassum),” as an argument against the notion of the unembodied spirit becoming “embodied” in matter (v. 8, 319).

7. Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, Ta“liqat“ala Hikmat al-ishraq (on the margins of Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, Sharh Hikmat al-ishraq), Lith. Tehran, 1898, 479.8.See, for example, Asfar, v. 8, 353.

8.See, for example, Asfar, v. 8, 353.

9.From this point on, the term “wujud,” meaning “being” may be rendered without translation as a technical term.

10. Asfar, v. 8, 366.

11. Ibid., v. 8, 382. While the relationship between soul and body is analogous to that between form and matter, the analogy is not perfect. Technically, Sadra deﬁnes the connection between form and matter as the connection between a given wujud and its eternal individuation; whereas the connection between soul and body is the connection between a given wujud and its non-eternal individuation (v. 8, 326–327).

12. Ibid., v. 8, 376. Sadra is careful to assert, however, that the body is not the “material” cause — or indeed a cause of any type — for the soul (v. 8, 383).

13.Ibid., v. 8, 352. While there is a certain reciprocity between soul and body in this sense, the two are not symmetrical in their relationship, for soul is situated above body on the hierarchy of existence (v. 8, 14).

14. Ibid., v. 8, 327. Sadra here notes that all other philosophers held the body to be the mere instrument of the soul, and this appears to have been al-Ghazali’s view as well. (See, Gianotti, 74).

15. Asfar, v. 8, 347.

16.See Ibid., v. 8, 318. Here, Sadra cites the position of certain theologians, and Abu Mu’alla al-Juwayni in particular, that the spirit is a subtle body “interspersed within coarse bodies as water is interspersed within green wood,” and notes that this opinion results from the fact that the body is one of the loci for the manifestation (mazahir) of the spirit. However, even if such “interspersion” appears to be the case, Sadra says, it is ultimately an inaccurate description of the relationship between spirit and body.

17. The notion that the soul is simple and non-composite is not unique to Sadra, but was long viewed as a logical necessity in Islamic philosophy, given the widely accepted philosophical principle that all composite entities eventually “decompose” and thus that only non-composite entities could conceivably be eternal.

18. Asfar, v. 8, 330.

19. Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, Wisdom of the Throne, trans. and ed., James W. Morris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 142.

20. Asfar, v. 8, 372.

21. Ibid. 148

22.Qur’an LV: 19–20.

23.Qur’an XVIII: 60–68.

24.See, Suhrawardi, The Philosophy of Illumination, ed. and trans. J. Walbridge andH. Ziai (Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), 75, 195.

25. This is apparently an indirect reference to Qur’an XXIII: 115: “Do you reckon that We have created you in vain (“abathan), and that you will not be returned to Us?” The term “haba”an” is also Qur’anic; its primary meaning is “dust particles,” and it can also ﬁguratively be used to refer to that which “comes to nought.” It is used in the Qur’an to describe the deeds of the unbelievers and the fate of the great mountains of the earth on the Day of Judgment (Qur’an, XXV: 23, LVI: 6).

26. Asfar, v. 8, 5.

27. A reference to Qur’an III: 7.

28. I.e., physical existence.

29. Asfar, v. 8, 345–46. A similarly explicit argument for the logical necessity of substantial motion can be found in v. 8, 388.

30. Ibid., v. 9, 2.

31. It is interesting to note that the idea that the essences of all things are contained in immutable form in the knowledge of God was also posited by al-Ghazali as a way of maintaining the continuous identity of human beings between the decay of the body after death and the reconstitution of the body on the Day of Resurrection. (See Gianotti, 72).

32. Asfar, v. 8, 332.

33. See, e.g.,Ibid., v. 8, 395.

34. See Sadra’s critique of Suhrawardi on this point, Ibid., v. 8, 26–27.

35. Ibid., v. 8, 392–393.

36. Ibid., v. 8, 320.

37. For a discussion of the apparent incongruities in Ibn Sina’s doctrine of the soul and the tension in his writings between the physical soul that originates and ends with the body and the “spiritual” soul that continues after death, see P. Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Ibn Sina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 55–59.

38. Ibid., v. 8, 134. See also Ta“liqat (482) where he makes a similar argument against Suhrawardi’s assertion that the successive acquisition of higher levels of soul would necessitate the presence of multiple souls in a single body.

39. Asfar, v. 8, 134.

40. Sadra himself makes a similar comparison, but with regard to the relationship between the soul and the body, saying “[t]his quality of being a soul is not an accident that attaches to [the body] after the perfection of [the soul’s] essence . . . just as God’s status as Creator, All-Knowing, All-Powerful, and so on are not accidents added to His Essence [but his very essence].” (Ibid., v. 8, 383.)

41. Ibid., v. 8, 330.

42. Ibid., v. 9, 4, 12.

43. Ibid., v. 8, 335–336.

44. Ibid., v. 8, 355, 366.

45. Ibid., v. 8, 355.

46. Ibid., v. 8, 350.

47. Ibid., v. 8, 306. For further Suﬁ traditions implying a pre-existence for the human soul, see v. 8, 310–312.

48. Wisdom of the Throne, 141.

49. For example, see Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, Kitab al-masha“Ir, ed. with French translation, Henry Corbin, (Tehran: Institut Francais, d’iranologie de Teheran, 1982), 58–63, where he quotes the Shi‘ite theologians Ibn Babawayh and al-Shaykh al-Muﬁd, and the works of numerous Imami traditionists, such as, al-Saffar al-Qummi’s Basa”ir al-darajat, Kulayni’s Usul al-kaﬁ and al-Sharif al-Radi’s Nahj al-balaghah. See also, Wisdom of the Throne, 141.

50. See, for example, Asfar, v. 8, 331–332.

51. Ibid., v. 8, 340.

52. Ibid., v. 8, 342–343.

53. See below, 23.

54. Asfar, v. 8, 367–368.

55. Ibid., v. 8, 378.

56. Ibid., v. 8, 368–369.

57. Ibid., v. 8, 339.

58. See, e.g., Suhrawardi, Hikmat al-ishraq, 124–132.

59. Ibid., v. 8, 371. Here he questions how Suhrawardi can argue varying levels of intensity as distinguishing elements between different kinds of light, but cannot accept varying levels of

wujud as functioning in a similar way.

60. Ibid., v. 8, 26–27.

61. Ibid., v. 8, 348. See also, in the original, Hikmat al-ishraq, 132.

62. Ibid., v. 8, 352.

63. Ibid., v. 8, 349–350.

64. S. H. Nasr and O. Leaman, History of Islamic Philosophy, part I

(London:Routledge, 1996), 647. Here Nasr notes that this Sadrian idea is analogous to, and in fact based upon, Suhrawardi’s doctrine of gradation pertaining to light.

65. Asfar, v. 8, 353; Hikmat al-ishraq, 132.

66. Ibid., v. 8, 358, 364–365.

67. Ibid., v. 8, 353.

68. Ibid., v. 8, 354.

69. Ibid., v. 8, 366; Hikmat al-ishraq, 133.

70. Asfar, v. 8, 366.

71. Ibid., v. 8, 367.

72. Asfar, v. 8, 395.

73. Ibid., v. 8, 395.

74. Ibid., v. 8, 389.

75. This is something Sadra sometimes calls “relational wujud,” Ibid., v. 8, 395.

76. Ibid., v. 8, 12.

77. Al-Ghazali, given his Ash‘arite theological perspective, is inclined to view jawhar as a material reality, and on this basis rejects the notion that the soul is a “substance,” although as Gianotti has observed, Ghazali, in his more mystical writings, does not cling so absolutely to this notion of the materiality of substance (see Gianotti, 71, 81).

78. Asfar, v. 8, 330.

79. Ibid., v. 9, 19–20.

80. Wisdom of the Throne, 144–145.

81. Asfar, v. 9, 19–20; Ta“liqat, 476.

82. Ta“liqat, 476.

83. Asfar, v. 9, 5.

84. Ta“liqat, 476.

85. Asfar, v. 9, 2. Since animal souls do not survive the death of the body, according to Sadra (and Ibn Sina before him), they are material in both action and essence, as opposed to the human soul, which is material in its earthly existence, but immaterial in essence.

86. Ibid., v. 9, 2, 18–19.

87. Ibid., v. 9, 16.

88. Ibid., v. 9, 5.

89. Ibid., v. 9, 4–5.

90. See Qur’an XXIV: 24, XXXVI: 65.

91. Asfar, v. 9, 4.

92. Ibid., v. 9, 4.

93. Ibid., v. 9, 4.

94. Ibid., v. 8, 320.