Neoplatonism: Framework for a Bahá'í Metaphysics

Nima Hazini

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Islámic Neoplatonism

(i) Sources of Neoplatonic thought in Islámic Philosophy

The late second/eighth-third/ninth centuries witnessed a profuse flowering of learning in the Islámic world. Major Greco/Hellenistic scientific, mathematical, medical and philosophical texts (i.e. Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy, Theophrastus, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Simplicius and others) were translated, studied and commented upon in this period under the encouraging patronage of the Abbasid Caliphs al-Mansur, Harun ar-Rashid and Man'mun. This trend was facilitated by the encounter with Syraic Christians who maintained a rich, long-standing intellectual tradition of their own, had established Greek learning longe before the arrival of the Muslims, and were often called upon to translate these texts from Greek and Syraic into Arabic⁴³.

Among these translations were two pseudepigraphic works that were to exert a profound influence upon the development of all subsequent Islámic metaphysical speculations. The first was the Uthulijiyya Aristutelis, otherwise known as the Theology of Aristotle, translated by the Syrian Christain, `Abd'ul Masih ibn Na'imah al-Himsi⁴⁴, for the philosopher al-Kindi. This work, falsely attributed to Aristotle, is in fact a paraphrasic epitome of Enneads IV-VI, interspersed with a purported commentary of Porphyry's on a theological treatise of Aristotle (now lost)⁴⁵. The spurious nature of this work was never doubted. However, most peripatecized Muslim thinkers - perhaps due to religious or political reasons of their own⁴⁶ - insisted on attributing it to Aristotle or the enigmatic Shaykh al-Yunani (the Greek sage) - the name Flutinus, an Arabized from of Plotinus, occurs a few times in the later commentaries on the Theologia which proves of awareness that this work belonged, in fact, to other than Aristotle⁴⁷. The second work in question is the Kalam fi'l mahd al-khair (The Theology of the Pure Good)⁴⁸. Like the Theologia, the Kalam fi'l mahd al-khair is also a paraphrase: it is a paraphrase of thirty-two propositions of Proclus' Elements of Theology (Stoikheiosis Theologike), also ascribed to Aristotle⁴⁹.

Needless to say that both the Theologia and the Kalam are far removed from Aristotle's genuine teachings. The doctrine of entelechy, for example, so central to Aristotle's theory of the soul, is rejected outright. Both works expound at length a doctrine of emanation from the One (al-Ahad) who generates the whole order of existence in the cosmos through two lower, vertically graded hypostases and a cycle of return back to Him. In the Theologia, for instance, in a thoroughly Plotinian fashion, the author outlines his intention as being:

To discuss the divine nature and exhibit it, by showing that it is the First Cause and that time and the aeon [al-dahr] are both beneath it, and that it is the cause of causes and their author, after a fashion; and that the luminous virtue (of power) shines forth from it upon the universal and heavenly Soul; and from Reason, through the intermediary of the Soul upon Nature upon the objects of generation and corruption; and that this action [of the One] issues forth from it and through it; and that things gravitate toward it through a species of desire and appetite⁵⁰.

The Kalam fi'l mahd al-khair deals with the Proclian heptads (unities participating in the One) and the tetradic relation of the One with Being, Reason and Soul. Both works are the seminal blueprints of Muslim Neoplatonism.

(ii) Avicenna's Peripatetic Neoplatonism.

Owing to the influence he exerted upon the medieval Latin Scholastics (most noteably the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas), no other Muslim philosopher is perhaps as well known as Abu `Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (Avicenna) (d. 429 AH/1037 CE).

Even a cursory study of the subjects covered by Avicenna's works will reveal the encyclopedic range of topics covered by this great polymath. His massive philosophical summa, the famous Kitáb ash-Shifa' (The Book of Healing), includes chapters not only on metaphysics, but practical (ethics) and natural philosophy as well as medicine, optics, theology and astronomy.

A Neoplatonized peripatetic, Avicenna's point of departure is the system of al-Farabi. Al-Farabi had layed out the rudimentaries of the essence/existence (mahiyyah/wujud) question and as such this issue becomes the centrul crux of Avicennan metaphyscis. Ibn Sina, like most peripatetics, defined the study of first philosophy (metaphysics) as the investigation of Being qua being or of existent(s) (mawjud/mawjudat), since only they can be real objects of investigation and not God who transcends any objectification⁵¹. All objects of knowledge exhibit an essence which defines what they are in their thatness and existence/being which is accidentally⁵² added to them, their suchness. These objects, moreover, share in one of the three categories of participatory being: 1. necessity (wajibiyyah), 2. potentiality (imkaniyyah) - i.e. a thing which is necessary through another (viz. everything in the world), and 3. impossibility (mumtaniyyih). There must, however, be that which does not share in the bi-polarity of mahiyyah/wujud, whose essence (mahiyyah) is its existence (wujud) and its existence its essence, and who is completely necessary of-himself (wajib bi-dhatihi). There is such a being and this is Ibn Sina's God, the Necessary Being (wajib al-wujud).

Since Ibn Sina's metaphysics is a metaphysics of Divine Necessity, in the Avicennan universe there is no such thing as the Qur'anic Creator paradigm of a pre-eternal fiat by God vis-a-vis the creation of the world. Hence, the Avicennan model is informed by the necessary emanation of the world by a transcendent God and the eternality (but dependance) of the world with Him - this was to be the single most controversial aspect of Avicenna's philosophy⁵³. God, the Necessary Being, much like Aristotle's model, is Divine thought thinking Itself. This self-thinking, the first emanation, constitutes the First Intelligence (al-aql al-awwalu), the beginning of the process of creation and the moving out from unity to multiplicity, since from the One only one can proceed. To summarize the Avicennan emanation scheme and the nature of the Ten Intelligences which proceed vertically from each other, Corbin says,

The First Intelligence contemplates its Principle ([the Necessary Being]); it contemplates its own Principle which makes its being necessary; it contemplates the pure possibility of its own being in itself, considered fictively as outside its Principle. From its first contemplation proceeds the Second Intelligence; from the second contemplation proceeds the moving soul of the First Heaven ([falak al-aflak, the Sphere of Spheres]); from the third contemplation proceeds the etheric, supra-elemental body of this first Heaven - a body which proceeds, therefore, from the inferior dimension, the dimension of shadow or non-being, of the First Intelligence. This triple contemplation, which is the origination of being, is repeated from Intelligence to Intelligence, until the double hierarchy of the Ten Cherubic Intelligences (karubiyun, angeli intellectuales), and the hierarchy of the celestial souls (angeli caelestes). These Souls do not posses any faculties of sense, but they do possess Imagination in its pure state, that is to say liberated from the senses; and their aspiring desire for the Intelligence from which they proceed communicates to each Heaven its own motion. The cosmic revolutions in which all motion originates are thus the result of an aspiration of love which forever remains assuaged⁵⁴.

This process of emanation "explodes," so to speak, with the final and Tenth Intelligence, the Agent or Active Intellect (al-aql al-fa''al, the nous poietikos of Aristotle), the soul of the sublunary region. It is the giver of form (wahib al-suwar) to the world of generation and corruption, from it the multiplicity of human souls emanate and "...its illumination (ishraq) projects the ideas or forms of knowledge into those souls which have acquired the ability to turn towards it⁵⁵." In his mystical treatises, Avicenna idetifies the Active Intellect with the Angel of Revelation, Gabriel, the Holy Spirit. Thus, reminiscent of the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, Avicennan cosmology becomes a metaphysics of angelology.

As mentioned before, Avicenna upholds the primacy of Being/existence. To demonstrate he posited the famous "floating-man" argument⁵⁶. Briefly, Avicenna says that were a man to be cut off and disengaged from his body, where all his organs of sense perception are made non-operative, he would still be aware of his existence.

Avicennism was to exercise not just an important influence upon the Latin Scholastics in the West but also on the peripatetic schools of the East. The philosophical terminology of Ibn Sina was to prove indispensable to the Illuminationists later on who, while generally critical of Avicennan rationalism, incorporated it into their own system.

(iii) Suhrwardi's Metaphysics of Illumination

Shihab ad-Din Yahya ibn Habash ibn Amirak al-Suhrawardi-i Maqtul (the murdered) (d. 587/1191), customarily refered to as Shaykh al-Ishraq (The Master of Illumination)⁵⁷ or Suhrwardi-i Shaheed (the martyred)⁵⁸ by his followers, next to Mulla Sadra stands as, perhaps, the most important Iranian Islámic theosopher since Avicenna and ancient Knosrowani sages of Persia.

The guiding motif dominating Suhrawardi's theosophy is the restoration of the illuminationist wisdom of the ancient Iranians. In the thirteenth century the Byzantine philosopher Gemistus Pletho would also embark upon a similar project of conjoining the names of Zarathustra and Plato. Suhrawardi's theosophy is an attempt at bringing together Hermeticism, Neopythagoreanism, late Neoplatonism (especially that of Proclus) and Zoroastrian angelology under the genral rubric of interpreting the Platonic theory of Forms/ideas, Qur'anic light imagery and the universal solar philosophy, which his system is the perfect exemplar of. He saw himself as heir to a philosophia perennis begun with the wisdom teachings of the Prophet Idris (sometimes identified with the Egyptian Thoth, the Prophet Enoch of the Old Testament and Hermes Trimigestus), transmitted to his son Seth (possibly the Hermetic figure Agathedemon), the Persian Priest-Kings known as the Knosrawani sages, the Greeks (viz. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists), culminating with Sufis (i.e. Dhu'l-Nun al-Misri, Abu Sahl al-Tusari, Husain ibn Masur al-Hallaj and Abu'l Hassan al-Kharraqani) and finally with himself.

Rather than calling Suhrawardi's system a philosophy, it is more appropriate to call it a theosophy (in the sense of the Greek theosophia and the Arabic hikmah [transcendent wisdom]), as Corbin and Nasr have many times pointed out, since a philosophy that does not ultimately lead to spiritual realization is a purely vain undertaking according to him. Discursive philosophy, therefore, must function as the handmaid to mystical unveiling, as spiritual realization alone can lead to dangerous flights of fancy and crude antinomianism, which, ironically enough Suhrawardi was himself accused of by the ulama of Aleppo at his trial.

Suhrawardi's works constitute a series of cycles culminating in his magnum opus, the Hikmat al-Ishraq (The Philosophy of Illumination).

As mentioned, the paramount leitmotiff of Suhrawardi's thought is ishraq (Arabic for illumination). The lexical meaning of the word literally denotes the illumination of the sun when it rises at dawn in the east (the Aurora Consurgens which Corbin likes reminding us of)⁵⁹. "Transposed to the spiritual plane, it means a type of knowledge which is the very Orient of knowledge⁶⁰," since it orients its subject toward the cosmic north of being (Mt. Qaf or na-koja-abad [nowhere land, viz. the placeless utopia of the illuminated soul]). Suhrwardi's doctrine, says Corbin,

...deals with a philosophy that is Oriental because it is illuminative and illuminative because it is Oriental. Between these two terms there is reciprocity rather than pposition⁶¹.

"Oriental" knowledge is essentially a direct, instantaneous and intuitive perception of things as they really are. Suhrawardi's epistemology rests upon this presential (hoduri) knowing of things, for instance of oneself during the acme of introspection, as opposed to the representational (suri) kind touted by the Peripatetics.

The Oriental nature of Suhrawardi's doctrine presupposes an ontological framework based entirely upon light. Light (nur) is the most basic and self-evident substance (actually a beyond or meta-substance) underlying existence, all reality is nothing but light in varying degrees of intensity. "In fact, all things are made evident by it and should be identified in reference to it⁶²." God, whose first attribute is unity, is pure light. He is described as the Light-of-lights (nur al-anwar) by which all things in existence subsist:

The Essence of the First Absolute Light, God, gives constant illumination, whereby it is manifested and it brings all things into existence, giving life to them by its rays. Everything in theworld is derived from the Light of His essence and all beauty and perfection are the gift of His bounty, and to attain fully to this illumination is salvation⁶³.

All beings share in His light, but their reality depends to large extent on how close in proximity they come to it: the closer they are the more real; the further, less real. Light, therefore, is existence and darkness (zolma), non-existence.

Proceeding from the Light-of-lights, Suhrawardi posists a pleromatic angelic order of longitudinal (vertical) and latitudinal (horizontal) lights who emanate from the Light-of-lights. At the top of this hierarchy, below the Light-of-lights, is the chief Archangel, the first emanant. This angel apprehends its dark nature which gives rise to the first shadow of the "highest empyrean heaven." Then, it contemplates its source which gives rise to the second Archangel of light⁶⁴, and so on until the generation of the latitudinal order which Suhrawardi calls the "Lord of the Species" and Perfect Nature (tabia at-tamm) - i.e. the Platonic Forms. Suhrawardi does not limit the number of angels to the Ten Intelligences of the peripatetics, however, which itself was based on the ten heavens of medieval astronomy⁶⁵. Rather, he determines them by the number of fixed stars; indefinite and therefore beyond practical enumeration⁶⁶. The identification of the latitudinal order with the Platonic Forms led Suhrawardi towards the opposite formulation of Avicenna in the essence/existence issue. Namely, he upheld the primacy of essence/quiddity (asalat al-mahiyyah) over being/existence (asalat al-wujud). This controversial point would again be reversed by Mulla Sadra in the sixteenth century.

A significant development for Islámic philosophy and Sufism issuing from Suhrawardi's ontological schema, is the notion of the `alam al-mithal (the World of Image Exemplars, what Corbin has dubbed the Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginal [not imaginary] World)⁶⁷. The Mundus Imaginalis is analogous to Plato's "World of Forms" and is situated as intermediary realm between the world of pure angelic intelligences (jabarut) and our sensible cosmos. It is an isthmus (barzakh), world of the Kingdom (malakut) and the plane where all visionary, mystical, eschatological and initial after-death experiences occur. As such, on this level "bodies are spiritualized and spirits corporealized⁶⁸."

Suhrawardi's theosophy gave rise to a current of Islámic spiritual philosophy quite distinct from kalam (dogmatic theology), falsafa (peripatetic philosophy) and Sufism. In the Muslim East ishraqi thought was to exert a tremendous influence upon all subsequent developments, especially since it was absorbed by Shi'ism and came to exert a pronounced influence upon both the sixteenth century "School of Isfahan" and Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai.

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