AVICENNA

Avicenna was an Islamic philosopher and scientist. Avicenna’s  versatility,  imagination, inventiveness, and prudence shaped philosophy into a powerful force that gradually penetrated Islamic theology and mysticism and Persian poetry in eastern Islam and gave them universality and theoretical depth. His own personal philosophic views, he said, were those of the ancient sages of Greece (including the genuine views of Plato and Aristotle), which he had set forth in the Oriental Philosophy, a book that has not survived and probably was not written or meant to be written. 

They were not identical with the common Peripatetic (Aristotelian) doctrines and were to be distinguished from the learning of his contemporaries, the Christian “Aristotelians” of Baghdad, which he attacked as vulgar, distorted, and falsified. His most voluminous writing, Kitāb ash-shifā’ (“The Book of Healing”), was meant to accommodate the doctrines of other philosophers as well as hint at his own personal views, which are elaborated elsewhere in more imaginative and allegorical forms.

THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION 

Avicenna had learned from certain hints in al-Fārābī that the exoteric teachings of Plato regarding “forms,” “creation,” and the immortality of individual souls were closer to revealed doctrines than the genuine views of Aristotle, that the doctrines of Plotinus and later Neoplatonic commentators were useful in harmonizing Aristotle’s views with revealed doctrines, and that philosophy must accommodate itself to the divine law on the issue of creation and of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which presupposes some form of individual immortality. 

Following al-Fārābī’s lead, Avicenna initiated a full-fledged inquiry into the question of being, in which he distinguished between essence and existence. He argued that the fact of existence cannot be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence.

To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect. The universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and responsible for the existence of the rest of the chain below. Because an actual infinite is deemed impossible by Avicenna, this chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple and one, whose essence is its very existence, and therefore is self-sufficient and not in need of something else to give it existence. Because its existence is not contingent on or necessitated by something else but is necessary and eternal in itself, it satisfies the condition of being the necessitating cause of the entire chain that constitutes the eternal world of contingent existing things.

All creation is necessarily and eternally dependent upon God. It consists of the intelligences, souls, and bodies of the heavenly spheres, each of which is eternal, and the sublunary sphere, which is also eternal, under-going a perpetual process of generation and corruption, of the succession of form over matter, very much in the manner described by Aristotle.

THE IMMORTALITY OF INDIVIDUAL SOULS 

There is, however, a significant exception to this general rule—the human rational soul. The individual can affirm the existence of his soul from direct consciousness of his self (what he means when he says “I”) and imagine this happening even in the absence of external objects and bodily organs. This proves, according to Avicenna, that the soul is indivisible, immaterial, and incorruptible substance, not imprinted in matter, but created with the body, which it uses as an instrument. Unlike other immaterial substances (the intelligences and souls of the spheres), it is not preeternal but is generated, or made to exist, at the same time as the individual body, which can receive it, is formed.

The composition, shape, and disposition of its body and the soul’s success or failure in managing and controlling it, the formation of moral habits, and the acquisition of knowledge all contribute to its individuality and difference from other souls. Though the body is not resurrected after its corruption, the soul survives and retains all the individual characteristics, perfections or imperfections, that it achieved in its earthly existence and in this sense is rewarded or punished for its past deeds. Avicenna’s claim that he has presented a philosophic proof for the immortality of generated (“created”) individual souls no doubt constitutes the high point of his effort to harmonize philosophy and religious beliefs.