Seeker After Truth

By William Chittick

Iksir al-`arifin seems to be unique among Sadra’s works in that it is, in a certain sense, a translation of an earlier work in Persian. This is Jciwidnnama (The Book of the Everlasting) by Afdal al-Din Kashani (d. ca. 610/ 1213-14), commonly known as Baba Afdal. Although Kashani was a sophisticated and original philosophical thinker, he was largely ignored by the later tradition, at least partly because he wrote his works mainly in Persian. Sadra’s Iksir al-`arifin is one of the few instances in which Baba Afdal’s direct influence can be traced, though he does not mention him by name in the text (nor does he mention him in the Asfar).

In the introduction to Iksir, Sadra states that he has taken its pearls of wisdom from the books of “the folk of God” (ahl Allah). In the Asfar he uses this expression only seventeen times, invariably to refer to the masters of theoretical Sufism (`irfn)that is, to Ibn al-Arabi and his followers. He often tells us that he has been able to combine the “tasting” (dhawq) and “finding” (wijdn) of “the folk of God“that is, their intuitive and mystical perceptionwith the “investigation” (bahth) and “demonstration” (burhan) of the philosophers. The fact that Sadra includes Baba Afdal among the folk of God in the introduction to Iksir may at first sight seem curious. Ostensibly, Baba Afdal’s treatises are purely philosophical. They make little reference to theological issues and have practically no similarity with the writings of Ibn al-Arabi’s school of thought. However, closer study shows that they focus on achieving self-knowledge and human perfection in a style that could only have been dear to Mulla Sadra’s heart, and the simplicity, clarity, and even luminosity of Baba Afdal’s works have few parallels among other philosophical writings. It may have been these qualities that made Sadra place him in the same category as Ibn al-’Arabi. Only three passages in Iksir can be traced directly to anyone else whom Sadra may have considered one of the folk of God. One is a rather long section drawn from Ibn al-’Arabi’s al-FutdOt al-makkiyya, the second derives from the Rasa’il of the Ikhwan al-Safa’, and the third is borrowed from al-Ghazali’s Iltyd”uldm al-din. There is also a short passage apparently taken from Fakhr al-Din Razi’s commentary on the Qur’an. Several other passages have no exact parallels in Jiiwidiin-ndma or any other source that I was able to find, but their similarities with Sadra’s other writings make me fairly certain that they are his own compositions.

Relatively little of Iksir can be called a “translation” in the modern sense of the word. What Sadra has done is to write a new treatise, using Jciwidan-nama as his model, but revising the contents to fit his own teachings and adding ample clarification to the sections actually taken from Baba Afdal. The two books are structured exactly the same. Each has four parts for a total of thirty-five chapters, and the Arabic chapter titles are often translations from the Persian. However, the contents of the chapters can be quite different. Iksir is fifty percent longer than Jiiwidannma, which already suggests that Sadra added a good deal to it. But he also dropped about forty percent of the text. Hence, in reality, only about one-third of the passages in Iksir can be judged to be actual translations of passages from Jciwidan-nama, and even these are loose translations with commentary.

Sadra does not tell us why he rewrote Jawidan-nama in Arabic, so I can only offer tentative suggestions:

First, Sadra wanted to make some of the contents of this Persian work available to students of philosophy and the religious sciences. All the important texts of the philosophical curriculum were in Arabic, and few scholars bothered to look at the exceptional books that had been written in Persian.

Second, the general theme of Jawidan-netma is “the Origin and the Return” (al-mabdaa wa’l-maccid), one of Sadra’s constant concerns, and indeed the title of one of his earliest books.

Third, in all his writings Baba Afdal focuses with extraordinary clarity and simplicity on one issue, which is self-knowledge. He explains that training the intellect is the only way to achieve human completion and perfection. Perhaps his key teaching is the “unification of the intellecter, the intellect, and the intelligible” (ittibad wa’l-eaql wa’l-macard), one of the cornerstones of Sadra’s philosophy.

Sadra often invokes Porphyry, whom he calls “the most excellent student of . . . Aristotle, as the first to formulate this issue properly, and he frequently criticizes Avicenna for denying it. He must have appreciated the fact that Baba Afdal was one of his predecessors who highlighted this teaching and considered it the goal of the philosophical quest.

Fourth, Jawidcin-ndma has a strong Queanic flavor, and this would have attracted Sadra because of his own concern to bring the Qur’an into the center of the philosophical arena. In this use of the Qur’an, Jawidannama differs not only from most early works on philosophy but also from Baba Afdal’s other treatises, which rarely mention Quranic verses. He says in the conclusion that he has written the book “by way of reminding, not by way of argument and demonstration,” which is to say that he had his eye on the Qur’an and Hadith rather than on philosophical reasoning. This makes the text somewhat similar to Sadra’s Qur’an commentaries, which are philosophical but also written with attention to the rhetorical needs of readers without much philosophical training.

If we can only speculate on why Mulla Sadra rewrote Jawidan-nama, we stand on firmer ground in guessing when he accomplished the task. Nasr and others have discussed the difficulty of dating Mulla Sadra’s works. Sadra rarely provided dates himself, often composed works simultaneously, and added cross-references to later books in earlier books. In the introduction to his seven-volume edition of Sadra’s Qur’an commentaries, Muhammad Khwajawi claims to have made some progress in dating the works. He provides a table of twenty-five books in a rough sort of chronological order, though only half a dozen actually have specific dates. According to him, Sadra’s first datable book is al-Mabda’ written in 1015/1606-7. He then wrote Sharh al-hiddya, a commentary on a philosophical work by Athir al-Din Abhari (and in both of these early books, he refers to his Asfdr). Next he began writing his Qur’an commentaries. Khwajawi lists eight of these as Sadra’s next eight impositions (he mentions four others as written later). The first that Sadra himself dates is the third, that on dyat al-kursi, written in 1020/1611-12. The next dated commentary is that on dyat al-m-1-r, written in 1030/1621. Sadra also tells us that he completed the commentary on Sdra yasin in the same year.

All this allows us to be fairly certain that Sadra, had completed Iksir al-cdrifin by 1030/1621. In his commentary on Sdrat yOsin, he employs fourteen passages drawn from Iksir, usually in the context of a much expanded discussion. Eleven of these are in turn based on the text of liwiddn-ncima. It is unlikely that he wrote the commentary on Kirin before Iksir, because Iksir already modifies the text of Jawidan-nama significantly, and then the Yasin commentary modifies it even further. In fact, it would often be difficult to recognize Baba Afdal’s text in this commentary without the intermediary of Iksir.12 An exception to this is one of the few sections of the commentary to which Mulla Sadra gives a title”On how man receives inspiration and disquietening from the angel and the satan” (5:229 ff.). This might be enough to call to mind Jwidn-nma 3.8 and 3.9, “That inspiration and disquietening are in several respects” and “That just as benefit arrives from the angel’s inspiration, so also God’s saints take benefit from the devil’s disquietening.” And indeed Iksir 3.8 and 3.9 form the substance of the discussion. I conclude that Sadra probably wrote Iksir at the same time as or shortly before he wrote his commentary on Eisin that is, in the year 1030/1621. Another indication of its relatively early date is his denial of substantial motion in part 3, chapter 3. This doctrine was to become a centerpiece of his teachings in his later works (he also denies it in Sharh al-hidaya).

If this dating of Iksir is correct, Khwajawi may have to revise his dating of Sadra’s commentary on Surat al-jumuCa, which he places among his later works. Khwajawi gives it a late date because Sadra does not mention it in the introduction to the commentary on Surat al-sajda along with the other commentaries that he had written by 1030/1621. However, two pages from Sadra’s commentary on Surat al-jumuCa, explaining the three levels of perfection (kamal) possessed by prophets, are repeated almost verbatim in Iksir, part 1, chapter 5.13 The fact that the Iksir version is slightly expanded suggests that it was written later. Moreover, in his Shawahid al-rubftbiyya, Sadra provides a fifty-page enumeration of the teachings and proofs specific to himself, listing about 180 points. One of these teachings is stated in the same two-page passage from Surat alsajda that is also found in Iksir. He writes in Shawahid.

The substance of prophecy comprises three levels, each of which is a perfect individual of its kind. Thus the Prophet is an angel [inalak], a celestial sphere and a king [Malik], just as we have mentioned in detail and clarified in our commentary on Surat al juma. It is significant that Sadra mentions here the commentary on Surat al-jumu`a as the book in which he set down this teaching, because he rarely mentions the names of his books in Shawahid. One can reasonably conclude that he first put this teaching into writing in this commentary and later added it to Iksir Sadra’s Perspective Mulla Sadra is famous for the formulation of a number of issues, such as the “principiality” (ayila) of wujiid (existence or being) and its “gradation” or “systematic ambiguity” (tashkik). Neither of these expressions plays any role in Iksir, even though the text might be read as an analysis of their implications in philosophico-religious terms. Nonetheless, the underlying theme of Iksir is a teaching that stands at the heart of Mulla Sadra’s writings and those of many other Muslim thinkers, not least Baba Afdal and Ibn al-Arabi. This is the importance of self-knowledge. Ibn al-Arabi focuses on this topic by following the route of the prophetic saying, “He who knows himself [or 'his soul'] knows his Lord.” For him, knowledge of self and knowledge of God are inextricably linked, and the only way to find true and certain knowledge is by means of kashf or “unveiling,” that is, the “tasting and finding” that is given to the folk of God. For his part, Baba Afdal takes the route of the philosophical maxim “Know thyself,” and he rarely mentions God as essential to the philosophical quest. His tools are “investigation and demonstration.” Nonetheless, the ultimate state of self-knowledge for which he asks his readers to strivein which the knower, the known, and knowledge become one is difficult to differentiate from “tasting and finding.”

More than all the specific philosophical issues for which he is famous and all the technical arguments that he brings to support them, Mulla Sadra’s primary concern is self-knowledge, or knowledge of one’s own soulremember here that nafs literally means “self,” but in these sorts of contexts it has become customary to translate it as “soul.” This becomes most explicit, perhaps, in his repeated discussions of the Origin and the Return. Especially important here is his emphasis on the connection between knowledge of self and the situation of the soul in the afterlife. There is probably no issue that Sadra discusses more voluminously than ma `cad, the Return or eschatology. He takes as one of his starting points the eschatological events described in great detail in the Qur’an and Hadith, and he interprets these as descriptions of the unfolding of human selves in the next world. He is especially proud of the manner in which he is able to demonstrate philosophically the literal accuracy of the Qur’anic accounts. He takes a great deal of help here from Ibn al-Arabi, who covered much of the same ground but without the philosophical apparatus. For his part, Baba Afdal exhibits relatively little interest in the afterlife, and this helps explain many of the additions that Sadra made to Iksir.

Sadra’s philosophical project, then, appears as a sort of marriage between the two routes to self-knowledge exemplified by Ibn al-eArabi and Baba Afdal. If he is constantly correcting or criticizing the experts in Kalam, or philosophers such as Avicenna, it is because they show few signs of having achieved true self-knowledge, the goal that was reached by the folk of God. True knowledge of the self, as he often tells us, is “the mother of wisdom” (umm al hikma).

The very title Iksir al-cdrifin suggests the importance that Mulla Sadra gives to knowledge of self. His use of the term iksir parallels al-Ghazali’s use of the word kimiye in his famous Persian work, Kimiyd-yi saccidat (The alchemy of felicity), the first section of which Baba Afdal epitomized in one of his works. The cdrifin or “gnostics” are those whose knowledge or “gnosis” (`irldn, macrifa) comes by way of tasting and finding, and these are precisely the folk of God.’ This sort of knowledge acts as an elixir to transmute their souls into mirrors reflecting God and the cosmos.

Sadra uses the term iksir only four times in the As:Jar (and he does not use the term kimiycn. On three of these occasions he is making passing reference to the activities of alchemists (ahl al-iksir, ashab al-iksir) in the context of the natural sciences, and on the fourth he uses the word in a manner that clarifies the significance of the title Iksir al-cdrifin. Knowledge of selfwhich is identical with knowledge of the soul’s Origin and Returnis the gnostic’s elixir, allowing him to reach the ultimate goal, which is human perfection (notice that the passage uses the word felicity, surely an allusion to al-Ghazali’s “Alchemy”).

[Philosophical] demonstration and the Qur’an agree entirely that learning the divine wisdom [al-hikma al-ilcihiyyal and the knowledge [ma `rifa] of the human selfI mean knowledge of the Origin and the Returnis to win endless subsistence, and rejecting it is the source of eternal loss…. This knowledge makes man the possessor of a great kingdom, because it is the most magnificent elixir. It necessitates universal unneedingness [al-ghina al-kulli], the greatest felicity, becoming similar to the Furthest Good [al-tashabbuh bi'l-khayr al-aqsci], and assuming as one’s own the character traits of God [al-takhalluq bi akhlaq Alla-41.18

In Iksir drifin itself, other than in the title, Sadra mentions the word iksir only once (4.11), in a context very similar to the passage quoted above. He uses it in the unusual expression "red elixir." He clearly has in mind what is commonly called "red sulfur," the rarest form of sulfur andthe most efficacious in bringing about alchemical transmutation. He identifies it with knowledge of the Origin and the Return. To sum up, Baba AfdarsJlvidcin-ncima explains the necessity for self-knowledge in the context of the Origin and the Return, and as such it coincides with Sadra's major focus of interest. Sadra liked the book, but he was not completely happy with it, so he dropped the parts that did not please him and added clarifications concerning those dimensions of the philosophical and religious quest that he felt it had ignored. The centrality of self-knowledge to Mulla Sadra's project means that he puts all his philosophical teachings at the service of the human quest for perfection. Human beings were created in the divine image with a purpose, i.e., to bring the image to full actualization through self-knowledge.
Philosophy is the most direct means, in Sadra's view, to achieve this purpose. Teachings like "the gradation of existence" illustrate how the one, simple reality of God, who is sheer wujud, embraces everything. As Sadra's famous dictum puts it, basil al-haqiqa kull al-ashya', "That whose reality is simple is all things." The multiplicity of created things is real enough, but it derives from the infinite gradations that issue forth from the One Wujdcl, whose utter simplicity and transcendence is never compromised.

If budding philosophers need to know how existence has come to appear in degrees of greater and lesser intensity, or how it displays its systematic ambiguity in the infinite beings of the cosmos, this is because they need to understand how their own souls originated with God and then came into the world. Without this knowledge, it will be impossible for them to undertake the return journey. By understanding wujiid's gradations, they can grasp how the soul came down on the arc of descent (qaws al-nuzdl), and how it has begun the process of climbing back on the arc of ascent (qaws al-sucad). Once they know where they stand on the ascending trajectory, they can undertake practices that will ensure a felicitous homecoming.

In a section of the Asfdr on evil, Sadra explains that evil's presence in the cosmos is necessitated by wujiid's gradation. In itself, wujad is the summum bonum, the Sheer Good (al-khayr al-maltd) that is the source of every good. Everything other than absolute wujzid is deficient in good. The levels of descent that stretch down to the corporeal world become differentiated to the degree in which they fall short of the perfect good of the First. Ultimately, when the lack of good reaches its fullest possible measure, we are dealing with a domain that is almost, but not quite, sheer evil. But this lack of good is itself the potential for good. Hence, good begins to appear once again, and this gives rise to the arc of ascent, which reaches its fulfillment in the Return to the One, a return that is the reestablishment of all things in Sheer Good. Most of this discussion takes place in terms of the word nags (and its virtual synonym nuggin), i.e., deficiency, falling short, imperfection. The deficiencies of the wujiid that is beneath the level of the First Wujiid are disparate, for the body falls short of the Necessary more than does the soul, and the senses fall short of the degree of the First Intellect more than does imagination. Were deficiency exactly similar in all the possible things, all the species would be one species, and all the quiddities [mcihiyyiit] would be one quiddity. And, just as the quiddities are disparate in their realities, so also the ipseities [huwiyydt] of the individuals included under one species are disparate. In short, innovation libdit7 necessitates that the innovated fall short of the Innovator. Otherwise, for one of them to be Innovator and the other innovated would not be more appropriate than the contrary.

So, it is incontestable that no possible thing is empty of deficiency and inadequacy, and it is incontestable that deficiency is greater in the world of the souls than in the world of the intellects; that it is greater and more ample in the world of the natures than in the world of the souls; and that it is greater and more intense in the world of the elements than in the world of the celestial spheres.

So it continues, until it comes to an end at a common matter in which there is no good save the potency and preparedness to receive things. You will come to know that, although this matter reaches the utmost meanness and evil in its essence, it is the means for the approach to all good things, and, because of it, wujad goes back and returns to perfection after deficiency, nobility after meanness, and ascension after falling. Just as the doctrine of wujfid’s gradation serves to explain the ontological basis for the route that the soul follows in her Origin and Return, so also Sadra’s well-known concept of “substantial motion” (al-haraka aljawhariyya) demonstrates how the soul’s wujdd increases in intensity and undergoes an endless unfolding of possibilities, for the human essence, made in the image of God, is unlimited and indefinable. All creationrenders service to the soul’s devolution from the One and her evolution back into the One, helping her break her link with the material realm and gain independence in her own substance.

As long as the soul is in her body, she increases her substance and her actuality. Little by little she becomes something stronger in wujad and more intense in actual being [tahas-su/Jwhether in the last abodeshe is to be one of the felicitous or one of the wretched. The potency of wujiid necessitates independence in substantiality and not needing any locus or thing to which one is attached. Finally the conjoined becomes the disjoined, and the linked the separate.

In her embodiment in this world, the soul is conjoined with the body and linked to matter, and thus she dwells in the depths of deficiency and imperfection. In her ascent back to her Origin, she gradually breaks this conjunction and linkage. She returns to her own essence (dhat) and finds that she has no real linkage with anything below the First Intellect, because her essence is separate (mufdriq) and disengaged (mujarrad) from matter.

God created the human soul as an image [withal] of His Essence, His attributes, and His acts, for He is incomparable with any likeness NUN_ I, but not with an image. So, He created the soul as His image in essence, attributes, and acts, so that knowledge of her may be a staircase to knowledge of Him. He made her essence disengaged from beings, confines, and directions, and He made her become the possessor of power, knowledge, desire, life, hearing, and eyesight. He made her the possessor of an empire similar to the empire of her Author. He creates what He desires and chooses [Qur'an 28:68] for the sake of what He desires. However, although she derives from the root of the Sovereignty [malakfit, i.e., the spiritual realm], the world of power, and the mine of magnificence and ascendancy, she is weak in existence and establishment, because she has fallen into the levels of the descent, and she has intermediaries between her and her Author.’ Few terms are more important to the philosophers’ explication of the soul’s becoming and her ultimate goal than “disengagement” (tajarrud). Theterm has a long history of use, but its significance has often been missed in the secondary literature. The technical use goes back at least to the Theology of Aristotle, where Plotinus writes in a famous passage, “On occasion, I withdraw into my soul and discard my body off to the side. I become as if I were a disengaged substance without body.” Its centrality in Sadra’s teachings is suggested by the fact that he and his commentator use the word and its derivatives in this meaning several hundred times in the Asfar, while they mention the word ascila or “principiality” only forty-five times and the word tashkik or “gradation” (in the context of wujfid) only a handful of times. Even the expression “substantial motion” can give us no more than about two hundred instances. The secondary literature keeps on coming back to these three doctrinesprincipiality, gradation, and substantial motionbecause they appear as original contributions. The disengagement of the soul is more basic to Sadra’s teachings, but there is nothing unusual about it, except perhaps the degree of Sadra’s stress upon it, so the secondary literature tends to ignore it.

By suggesting that principiality and gradation are not quite as important to Mu11-a Sadra’s teachings as one might assume from reading the studies, I am not suggesting that existence itself is unimportant. Quite the contrary, as in much of Islamic philosophy, wujiid is the primary topic of discussion (in the Asir and its commentary the word itself is employed 15,000 times, not to mention its verbal forms and derivatives). The question is not about the significance of zend Cid, which is discussed at least implicitly in all issues. Rather, the question is this: Why is wujfid so important? And, why must we know that it is so important? It is certainly necessary to know that wujad is principial and gradational, but only because the human soul is the key to everything, and its ontological status can best be explainedin Sadra’s viewby reference to principiality, gradation, and substantial motion.

In one passage of the AsJr, for example, Sadra.. criticizes Avicenna and his followers for denying the unification of the intellecter and the intelligible. The reason they denied it, he says, is that “They did not firm up the foundation of the science of the soul, because they neglected the issue of wuj Cid, its deficiency, its origins, and its final goals.” In order to achieve this true and certain knowledge of the soul, one must grasp the true nature of the gradational, principial wujiid. But this knowledge can be actualized only by experiencing the soul’s disengagement from everything other than God.

In the purest sense of the term, “disengagement” is an attribute of the Divine Essence, which has no attachment or connection to anything other than itself. It is also an attribute of the First Intellect, which is the initial point on the descending arc that yields the created world. Disengagement enters into the discussion of the human soul in questions of the soul’s reality and essence, and also in questions of modalities of perception, knowledge, and understanding.

Sadra and a number of other philosophers see the soul’s climb to perfection as a gradual disengagement from all embodiment and materiality and a return to her transcendent essence. This does not mean that souls will no longer have any connection to the things of the world. Rather, it means that they gradually come to see things clearly. They no longer fall into the nearsightedness of seeing realities as embodied. They come to see that all realities and essences are found in the Intellect from which all things have descended, and that their embodiment in corporeal or imaginal appearance is a temporary affair.

The soul begins its sojourn in this world as a potential intellect. She must ascend on the trajectory of the Return in order to become an “actual intellect” (aql bi’l-fi’l). Once she does so, she will see that all realities are found in herself. The seer, what is seen, and the seeing will all be one. This is the “unification of the intellecter, the intelligible, and the intellect.” When she reaches the stage of what is usually translated as the “acquired intellect” (aql mustafdd), she “acquires,” or, more literally, “takes the profit” (istifdda) of intelligence directly from the Fully Active Intellect (aql fa “al). Sadra writes in the Asfar:

The human soul climbs from form to form and from perfection to perfection. At the first stages of configuration, she begins from unqualified bodiment and goes to the elemental forms, then from them to the mineral and vegetal, then from them to the animal, until she achieves fully all the animal potencies. Finally she reaches the essence from which derive the first things that are ascribed to bodily matter. When she begins to climb from it, she climbs to the first level of the existents that are entirely separate [mufdriq] from matter. This is the “acquired intellect,” and it is nearly like the Fully Active Intellect.

The difference between it and the Fully Active Intellect is that the acquired intellect is a separate form that had been linked linuqtarin] to matter. Then it became disengaged from matter after its transformation in the stages. But the Fully Active Intellect is a form that has never been in matter, and it is impossible for it to be anything but separate.

In short, all of Sadra’s teachings focus on the necessity of freeing the soul from ignorance and allowing her to rejoin the intelligence from which she emerged. In the process of proving that this is in fact what being human is all about, Sadra looks at the great intellectual authorities to illustrate the degree to which their teachings focus on the true goal of learning. His constant attention to the afterlife is nothing but his constant attention to the reality of the soul in her full actualization. As he puts it, “The key to knowledge of the day of resurrection and the return of the creatures [to God] is the knowledge of the soul and her levels.” His discussions of cosmology and psychology, under the rubric of the Origin and the Return, serve to illustrate how wujad unfolds through an infinity of gradational degrees until it reaches the nothingness of pure possibility; then it gathers itself once again as the soul goes home to her own essence, which is nothing but pure intelligence, the radiance of God.

If, as Sadra demonstrates, every human being becomes an independent world in the afterlife, it is because the divine image is nothing but a pure ray of wujud, the “simple in reality that is all things,” and hence it embraces all existence and is capable of indefinite intensification and diminution. Moreover, just as souls in the afterlife undergo a never-ending variety of manifestations, so also human beings in this life are necessarily ranked in degrees according to their actualization of wujad in themselves. From the womb ad infinitum, the soul experiences endless efflorescence. In Sadra’s famous dictum, the soul is “bodily in occurrence, spiritual in subsistence” Oismaniyyat al-hudath rahaniyyat:

At the first of its configuration, the human soul is only a material body, like other species-specific forms. Then she comes to be disengaged in essence, but not in act. Then at death she comes to be separate from sensory, dense, material bodies in both essence and act. So, she is either felicitous, orif her attachment to those bodies remainsshe is wretched. Or, she is one of those brought nigh [to God]if she is disengaged totally from the bodies and all her attachments.

As long as the human soul is an embryo in the womb, her degree is the degree of vegetal souls. When the infant emerges from its mother’s belly, its soul is like the souls of the other animals until the time of formal adulthood [bulugh sari]. Then she becomes rational Incitiq] after that. If she has the preparedness to climb to the limit of the holy soul and the Actual Intellect, then, when she reaches forty years of age, which is the time of supraformal adulthood [bulugh menawi], she becomes a holy soulif she is assisted by the divine success-giving. Hence, as long as it is in the womb, the embryo is actually a plant and potentially an animal. Once it emerges from its mother’s belly, before adulthood it is actually an animal and potentially man. When it reaches the limit of formal adulthood, it is actually man and potentially angel. As for the level of the holy potency, it may be that not one of thousands of human individuals reaches it.’

For Mulla Sadra, the discussions of the different degrees of the natural world, so popular with the philosophers, are nothing but an exposition of the different powers and potencies that are latent in the human soul. As a microcosm, the human soul embraces all the degrees of the descent from the One Wujad, and she has the potential to pass through all the degrees of the ascent. Thus she goes through stages of coinciding with the elements, the mineral kingdom, the vegetal kingdom, the animal kingdom, and the various degrees of humanness. When she knows theworld around herthe minerals, plants, and animalsin truth she knows herself. But it is necessary to know things by disengaging them from their matter and seeing them in the holistic perspective that is provided by a grand overview like the “transcendent wisdom.”

As long as the Adamic soul is an embryo in the womb, her degree is the degree of the vegetal souls in keeping with their levels, and she obtains the degrees of the mineral potencies only after having crossed over nature. So, the human embryo is actually a plant and potentially, but not actually, an animal, because it has no sensation and movement. The fact that it is potentially an animal is its specific difference [Iasi], distinguishing it from the other plants and making it a species different from the vegetal species.

When the infant emerges from inside its mother, it becomes a soul in the degree of the animal souls until the time of its formal adulthood. Then the individual is actually a human animal [hayawdn bashari] and potentially a soulish man [insdn nafsdni].” Then he becomes a soul that perceives things through reflection and deliberation and uses the practical intellect. He continues in this way until the time of supraformal adulthood and inward maturity [rushd btinq through the consolidation of inward habitudes [malakatJ and character traits [akhlaq]. This is usually around the age of forty.

At this level, he is actually a soulish man and potentially an angelic or a satanic man. At the resurrection, he will be mustered either with the party of the angels or the party and troops of the satans. If the [divine] success-giving assists him and he travels the pathway of the Real and the path of tawhid, if his intellect is perfected through knowledge, and if his intellect is purified through disengagement from bodies, then he becomes actually one of God’s angels, those who have the attributes of the knowers brought nigh. If he goes astray from the even road and travels the pathway of misguidance and the ignorant, he will become one of the satans or be mustered among the beasts and the crawling things.

In Sadra’s way of looking at things, everything in existence is traveling on a path that ends up at its rightful place with God. Like Ibn al-’Arabi, he understands divine mercy as the guiding force of creation. He sees the movement from Origin to Return and from First to Last as a great manifestation of God’s wisdom and compassion, all of it leading to a final fruition in which everything in the universe will find permanent happiness.

The root of innovation and giving existence Nadi is the Author’s munificence and mercy, His conveying everything to its perfection and utmost end, and His moving all things to their final goals and destiniesmaking the low reach the high, giving to every matter the form befitting it, and inducing each to become the most excellent of what can be conceived for it. Just as the natural moving thing’s arrival at its confines is its stillness, and just as nature’s arrival at the soulish potency is its final goal, so also the soul’s arrival at the degree of intellect is its stillness. This is the utmost end of the soul, just as the Author is the utmost end of the intellect and everything below it. At this there is perpetual ease, complete serenity, and the greatest good.

This is the furthest purpose in building the cosmos, moving the heavens, and setting in motion the stars, the orbs, and all the other transformations and vicissitudes; and in sending down the angels and the messengers from heaven with books, revelation, and news-giving. I mean that the whole purpose is for all the cosmos to become the good. So, evil and deficiency will disappear from it, and it will return to that from which it began. Thus its last will become joined with its first, and the utmost end of its cycle will bend back upon its origin. Wisdom will be completed and creation perfected. The world of being [kmon] and corruption [fasad] will be removed and this world [dunyd] will be nullified. The Greater Resurrection will stand forth, evil and its folk will be effaced, unbelief and its party will be toppled, the null will be nullified, and the Real will be realized through His words. This is the furthest goal and the most magnificent wisdom.”

Let me conclude this brief overview by letting Sadra expand upon the purpose and goal of his “transcendent wisdom.” The following passage is taken from his introduction to the Asfdr, in which he is explaining why it is necessary for all human beings to pursue wisdom. Understanding the nature of things, he tells us, is a precondition for and a concomitant of achieving human status. What we need to know and understand is outlined by the topics that designate the articles of faith in Islamic creeds. It is not sufficient simply to accept them. There is no “imitation” or “following authority” (taqlid) in matters of faith. Each person must under stand the truth for himself and commit himself to it by himself. The human species has an unsurpassed and unprecedented perfection specific to the substance of his essence and his true reality, and that is conjunction with the intelligibles, adjacency with the Author, and disengagement from material things. However, with respect to every faculty found within man, he shares with what is equal to him or near to him in that respect. With other bodies [he shares] coming to be within confinement and space; with plants nourishment and growth; and with dumb animals the life of breaths, volitional movement, and sense-perception. The human specificity is obtained only through sciences and knowledge along with cutting off from attachment to superficialities.

The sorts of knowledge have many branches, the varieties of perception are diverse, and encompassing all of them is impossible or difficult. Hence man’s aspiration has split into many branches, just as the feet of the world’s folk walk diverse paths in the crafts. The ulama have divided themselves into classes, and their concerns have split them into groups between the intellective [sciences] and the transmitted, and between the branches and the roots. Some concern themselves with things like grammar and astronomy, others with things like jurisprudence, biography, and Kalam.

It is incumbent upon the intelligent person to turn his full attention to occupying himself with the most important. He must resolutely avoid pouring away his lifespan in what does not pertain specifically to the perfection of his essenceafter he obtains the other knowledges and sciences to the measure of his need for them in livelihood, the final Return, and deliverance from what prevents him from reaching the station of integrity and the Day of the Rendezvous. The most important are the sciences that pertain to the perfecting of the first of his two potencies. These two are the direction of his essence, or his faceturned toward the Real, and the direction of his ascription or his face turned toward creation. “That first potency is the theoretical, which accords with the true substance of his essence without sharing in the ascription to the body and its passivities. Other than the divine wisdom and the lordly sciences,” every knowledge is needed only by virtue of the intervention of the body and its faculties and the pursuit of the flesh and its desires.

Only the sheer intellective sciences are able to undertake the perfecting of the human substance and the elimination of its blemishes and uglinesses when it cuts itself off from this world and everything within it, returns to its true reality, and turns totally toward its Author, Configurer, Existence-Giver, and Bestower. These sciences are knowledge of God, His attributes, His angels, His books, and His messengers; the manner of the emergence of things from Him in the most perfect mode and the most excellent arrangement; the manner of His solicitude toward and knowledge of them; His governance of them without defect, incapacity, blight, and slackening; and knowledge of the soul, its path to the afterworld, its conjunction with the Higher Plenum [the angels], its separation from its shackles, and its distance from hyle. For, through all this she is completed by being released from the constraints of possibility and saved from calamitous mishaps; she is plunged into the oceans of the Sovereignty and strung on the string of the inhabitants of the Jabarat.36 Thus she is delivered from captivity to the appetites, confusion by appearances, passivity before the effects of movements, and domination by the revolution of the heavens. Jawidan-nama and Iksir al-ccirifin

Readers who want to know exactly how Mulla Sadra revised Jawidtin /lama in writing Iksir al-cdrifin can compare this translation with the translation of Jawidan-nama that I have provided elsewhere.” Here I offer summary of how he dealt with the text.

Part One

Sadra revises Baba Afdal’s first four chapters simply by expanding hi& classification of knowledge. Chapter five, however, “On the science of the afterworld,” contains one of Sadra’s major additions to the text. In Jawidnndma, Baba Afdal merely points out that knowledge of afterworldly things has a benefit that transcends this life, whereas knowledge of worldly things is like a dream that ends with death. Knowledge of the afterworld is “knowing the horizons and the souls,” that is, the macrocosm and the microcosm; the first profit of this knowledge is tawhid, the recognition, and acknowledgment of God’s unity. Its second profit is knowing the self’s place of return (ma o odd) after this life. But this is all that he says in the chapter. For the rest, he refers the reader to the next three parts of the book. And notice that he lists two of the three principles of Islamic faithtawhid and ma cadbut he does not mention the third, prophecy (nubuwwa), though he speaks of its importance later on. He leaves the: implications of these two principles to the later text. In contrast, Sadra provides several pages of explication concerning the three principles of faith, devoting the largest amount of space to the third, that is, the Return to God. He does not mention the other two principles added by Shiites: imamate and justice.

Part Two

In chapter one Sadra translates the first half of Baba Afdal’s chapter, which explains the four roots of disagreement among schools of thought. He drops the second half, which traces these roots to the nature of language. Chapter two is half expanded, half dropped. Chapter three is partly revised, mostly dropped. Chapter four entails a total revision of the discussion. There is much more reference to Queanic verses, a more systematic classification of the sorts of subjection, and several of Baba Afdal’s points are dropped. Chapters five and six contain translation and revision. Chapter seven is dropped; the argument is replaced with a shorter, parallel discussion. Baba Afdal provides what may be an original explanation of the correspondences between seven macrocosmic signs (heaven, fire, air, water, earth, plants, animals) and seven microcosmic signs (hearing, eyesight, smell, taste, touch, rational speech, writing). Mulla Sadra may have found this discussion too far from the mainstream of Islamic philosophy. Most of chapter eight is dropped, but what is kept is elaborated upon in detail. The dropped material explains the correspondence between the four levels of numerals (units, tens, hundreds, thousands) and four levels of the microcosm (reflection, memory, rational speech, writing), and then expands on the microcosm/macrocosm correspondences begun in the previous chapter. In chapter nine Sadra expands on some of Baba Afdal’s points, adds some material, and drops the one-third of the chapter that deals with the number correspondences discussed in chapter eight. About half of Sadra’s chapter ten expands on a few of Baba Afdal’s points, and the other half summarizes, in quite different language, a rather long discussion on understanding tawhid through macrocosm/microcosm correspondences.

Part Three

Chapter one adds a good deal of material and drops some.

Chapter two is retained basically the same, with the exception of the last paragraph, which makes a point that Sadra mentions in Shawhid as among his own contributions to philosophy. About half of the original chapter three is dropped and replaced by a different discussion.

Chapter four is revised.

Chapter five is revised, with two short additions.

Chapter six is half revised, half dropped. The dropped section discusses the four archangels and their microcosmic correspondences (Seraphiel = reflective thought; Michael = memory, Gabriel = speech; Azrael =writing). In later chapters, however, Sadra keeps the discussion of these angels.

Perhaps he dropped this section because of the odd classification of hum faculties, in particular the inclusion of “writing,” concerning which B5, Afdal has already said a good deal in passages that Sadra has not translated. In chapter seven Sadra adds a definition of Iblis and drops most the chapter. In the dropped portions Baba Afdal compares “the folk the Sunnah and Congregation” (i.e., the true Muslims, the Sunnis) to earth that gives fruit or fails to give it on the basis of the activity of th angels and satans. He also interprets various Qur’dnic references to lb in philosophical and spiritual terms.

Chapter eight is revised and expanded.

Chapter nine has been mostly dropped. The first half of Sadra’s cha ter is a much expanded version of Baba Afdal’s first paragraph, and th second half is his own addition.

The first six paragraphs of chapter ten translate and expand upo Baba Afdal’s points, but most of this chapter is added by Sadra.

Part Four

Only about one-third of the lengthy first chapter is based on Bata Afdal. The paragraphs on demonstrations, the unification of the intetk lecter and the intelligible, the movement of existence toward strength, th final goal of movement, and the blights of the path are all additional. Chapter two is revised and expanded.

About half of chapter three is additional (from 4.36-41).

In chapter four most of Baba Afdal’s discussion is dropped, and only the first paragraph represents a revision of one part of it. The dropped,- sections explain the need for prophets in terms of the earlier discussio of the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. Mulla Sadr has already given his own explanation of prophethood in 1.5.

In chapter five Sadra expands on Baba Afdal’s four paragraphs, but most of the chapter, on the descending order of the cosmos, is take from Ibn al-Arabi.

Chapter six has been revised and expanded.

About half the text in chapter seven is additional, specifically the explanation that prophets do not gain knowledge by following authority or “imitation” (taqlid), and the paragraph explaining the meaning of the “Faithful Spirit” and “John.”

The first part of chapter eight and the first subsection are based on Baba Afdal, and the second and third subsections are added.

Most of chapter nine is additional; only the third paragraph and part of the fourth are from Jawidan-nama.

The first half of chapter ten is from Baba Afdal, the second half is Mulla Sadra’s own conclusion. Most of Baba Afdal’s final chapter, explaining the usefulness of the book, is dropped.

The Arabic Text

Iksir al-ccirifin was first published in 1302/1885 along with eight other treatises in the Rasddil of Mulla Sadra. It was given a critical edition, based on the printed edition and two manuscripts, by Shigeru Kamada, who published it along with a Japanese translation in 1984. This is a good edition, but not without defects, such as dropped phrases and sentences. The Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute turned the task of preparing a definitive edition over to Yabya Yathribi, but as of this writing, his edition has not appeared. The Institute sent me a copy of Yathribi’s manuscript, which was a thoroughly corrected version of the Kamada edition, employing seven additional manuscripts. It also sent me a copy of one of the manuscripts Yathribi employed (number 10602 from the library of the Majlis-i Shawra-yi Islami), which is said to be an autograph. However, the manuscript lacks several pages of the text and has numerous minor errors and differences with the other manuscripts, so it was not as useful as could have been hoped. If it is in fact in Sadra’s hand, it was probably done quickly without being checked carefully against the original.

Despite the great pains that Yathribi has put into collating the manuscripts, his edition in the form I have seen still has a few errors. Some of these will no doubt be corrected by the time it appears in print. For many of them, it is sufficient to know that Sadra was revising Jawidannama and quoting a long passage from the Futitlyitfacts that I have communicated to Yathribi and that he has acknowledged. Even so, his edition will still not be as critical as it might be, because he appears to be using the Qur’an to correct all Qur’an citations, despite the fact that the manuscript evidence shows that Sadra sometimes modified the text to make his pointas is commonly done. My edition, then, is based on the Yathribi manuscript, with a number of minor changes. I have mentioned several of these in the notes, even though some of them will probably coincide with Yathribi’s text once it finally appears in print.

My translation follows the Arabic as closely as I could manage wt out seriously damaging readability. Even though the original words c be checked in the facing text, I assume that a good number of those w read the book will know little more than a smattering of Arabic. F them in particular, consistency and accuracy are important, especially they want to read the book with some of the care that was traditiona given to works of this sort. Hence I have tried to choose a single Englis equivalent for each technical term, and I have attempted not to use t same equivalent for other Arabic words. My index of terms includes t Arabic words, thus functioning as a sort of glossary. I have added explan tory notes both to indicate parallel passages in some of Sadra’s othe works and to clarify references or obscurities. However, I have restrain the impulse to explain the text in detail, or to analyze the manner i which Sadra. modifies Baba Afdars Jciwidn-ndma. I have avoided neologisms as far as I could, but on occasion I hav adopted terms because the ordinary translations are not adequate. At least the word “soulish” for nafsani, though not especially felicitous, is neither neologism nor archaic. I use it because the alternativessuch as psych logical and psychichave been preempted by modern usage and obscur the connection with “soul.” Soulish means simply “pertaining to the soul. The word is needed for the same reason that we need the words intellec tine, spiritual, and bodily. Given the central importance of nafs in Sadra’s philosophy, it seems wrong to dilute attention to the word by translating its adjectival form with a term that does not reflect the derivation. Some expressions may be unfamiliar to readers who do not kn Arabic, and these I try to explain in footnotes. A pair of terms that especially common is malakfit and mulk, which designate the world spirits and the world of bodies and which I translate as “Sovereignty” a “Kingdom.” These are Qur’anic terms that are typically employed synonyms for two other common Qur’anic pairs, “Absent” (ghayb) an “Witnessed” (shahada); and “Command” (amr) and “Creation” (khalq). Sadra also mentions the still higher world known as Jabarut, the worl that displays the attributes of God as al-jabbar, “the Compeller” or “the Mender.” He identifies it with the world of the First Intellect. I translate wujiid as “existence” and kawn as “being”; the latter might also be translated as “generation” or “engendered existence.” Wujiid in the strict sense pertains only to the Necessary Existence (al-wujiid al-11)(0bl), which is God or the First Real (al-haqq al-awwal). The existence that is ascribed to the world and all things within it, which are called “existents” (nawjiidt), is ambiguous or gradational. “Being,” in contrast to “existence,” refers strictly to the world, which comes into existence when God says to it, “Be” (kun). Hence the “beings” (akwein, kadindt, mukawwanat) are the existents, that is, the created things. God is not called kawn, but He is wujud by definition. Since the introduction is in rhymed prose, I have arranged the first part of the English translation to reflect this fact.