Biography
(980
– 1037)
Ibn Sina was an important thinker in
Islamic history. A child prodigy who was raised in a family of Shiite
Muslims, he mastered mathematics, physics and logic at an early age.
Later, as a physician, he traveled through the Islamic world, and he
reportedly died because of his weakness for the pleasures of wine and sex.
He followed al-Farabi in the pursuit
of a synthesis of philosophy (Falsafah) and religion, partly
through the work of Plato and Aristotle. Ibn Sina is credited with 292
volumes of work, including exhaustive commentaries on Aristotle’s
metaphysic, physics and logic (Kitab al_Shifa), and the development
of a proof of God based on Aristotlean principles. Ibn Sina believed that
human beings should use reason to the extent possible in understanding
God. Reason could lead a person toward God, and should be used to
eliminate superstition and falsity in religion, but it was ultimately
limited in the total knowledge of God. Muhammad was superior to
philosophers because he had a direct intuitive knowledge of God, beyond
reason.
Like Plato and Plotinus, Ibn Sina
believed that the idea of an Unmoved Mover, an essence at the source of
all things, Creator yet uncreated, was the “necessary being” that was
the source and cause of all other beings. This highest “God” was
supremely Good, beyond our conceptions of time, space, and form, without
the qualities that define the realms of existence and being below it.
To relate his ideas to Sufis and other
Muslims, Ibn Sina defined a cosmology, based on Plotinus’ doctrine of
emanation, including a hierarchy of ten Intelligences, along with the
celestial Souls or angels that together form the successive levels of
reality between man and God. Existence proceeds from Creation, out of
“the divine thought thinking itself, and this consciousness that the
divine Being has eternally of itself is none other than the First
Emanation, the First nous or First Intelligence” (Corbin, Histoire,
page 240). The Out of the
Intelligences are manifested in succession the multiplicity of beings, the
motive Soul of the first Heaven, the ethereal body of the first Heaven,
and finally, through the Tenth Intelligence comes the material world and
human souls. Thus, through the Intelligences human souls are endowed with
the immortality of the First Intelligence. The practical intellect
comprehends things in the created, finite world, but human beings also
have a contemplative intellect that allows them to perceive higher
knowledge along the chain of emanation, including knowledge of God that is
beyond practical reason.
In
his later years, Ibn Sina emphasized the synthesis of philosophy and
mysticism, of imagination and reason. He became critical of the strictly
rational approach to God and emphasized the mystical experience made
possible by the ten Intelligences (he wrote about his own three mystical
experiences in his book Mystical Accounts).
