Chapter V: Eschatology
A. Impossibility of Transmigration
With rare exceptions like Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, Muslim philosophers have discredited the doctrine of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls. Sadra describes and supports the general anti-transmigrationist arguments of Peripetatics like Ibn Sina. According to these general considerations, the relationship of the soul with the body is an intimate relationship like the relationship of form and matter. In a form-matter complex, if the form or the matter is removed, its complement (matter or form) also goes out of existence, and it is absurd to say that either the form has transmigrated into another matter or a matter has transmigrated to another form: the whole disappears and, in its place, an entirely new whole is formed. In cases - such as the human soul - where the soul is an indestructable substance and, in particular, in the case of the actualized and developed human souls - which have become pure intellects - it would be still more absurd to talk of metempsychosis since such souls are no longer in need of a body at all.
But, in addition, Sadra gives his own “special” argument, based upon his conception of “substantive movement” to disprove metempsychosis. According to this doctrine, soul and body are both potential to start with. When these potentialities are gradually realized, both soul and body - as a complex whole - move upward by an evolutionary process: it is not the case that the soul alone moves while the body remains static or vice versa, but the whole moves through a gradual perfection to the new status of existence. When the embryo becomes a foetus, not only does life come into existence but there is a physical change as well, and this double-sided development continues through life.
Since this movement of being is irreversible, it is absurd to suppose that a developed soul, after leaving its own body, can enter into a new undeveloped body and then start developing once again from scratch. In other words, devolution, which belief in transmigration assumes, is impossible.
Denial of transmigration, however, entails certain serious problems, some of which arise from religious texts and others from certain philosophic views concerning the destiny of undeveloped humans, views held also by Sadra.
Among the religious difficulties are statements in the Qur'an that a group of human beings, because of their evil deeds, were changed into monkeys and pigs by God.
There are similar statements in the Hadith as well. And, on the whole, the popular doctrines of physical resurrection appear to imply transmigration insofar as they assume the reuniting of souls with bodies anew. So far as philosophic views of the hereafter are concerned, these posit that undeveloped souls, since they cannot be free from body and since the earthly body does not survive, have to be united with some other kind of body. Now transmigration just means this uniting of a soul with another body. Sadra says that it is because of these difficulties that it has been said that all doctrines (about a physical afterlife) are ineradicably based on transmigration.
Sadra replies to all these difficulties on the basis of his doctrines of “substantive movement” and the World of Images (Àlam al-Mithal). All undeveloped souls or souls which have done evil deeds in this life, since they cannot be free from the body and since this material body cannot be resurrected once destroyed, will create a body of their own by exteriorizing their inner psychic habits and states - acquired in this life - in the form of a body in the World of Images, where all psychic states and dispositions are transformed into concrete images, as we shall learn in greater detail when we discuss the question of resurrection below. Thus, a soul which has been guilty of excessive greed will see itself as a real pig, for example, while an unduly stubborn soul will become an ass - i.e., by projecting its disposition outward as a veritable body. When the Qur'an says that some people were turned into monkeys, it is not talking of an event that took place in this world but in the Realm of Images, where all the events of physical resurrection take place. In his work al-Shawahid al-Rububiya Sadra suggests that such people, even in this life, can come to resemble, in their appearance, such animals to which their inner characters have affinity (p. 233, line 9 ff).
This doctrine, according to Sadra, differs from transmigration in two important ways which set the two clearly apart.
First, the transmigrationist is not talking about an afterlife, i.e., in another world, but here, i.e., in this world. But life in this world, according to Sadra, is lived only once and cannot be repeated. This is because the opportunity for work and attainment is the essence of this life and this is given only once. Although change and evolution may and do occur in the next life, this is not on the basis of realization of potentialities, works and attainment but through other causes.
Working and earning of good and evil is characteristic only of this life.
Secondly, the transmigrationist talks of change in locus and person, whereas our doctrine calls for evolutionary change or change in the status of being only while the person remains the same. Thus, whereas according to us, it is the same person who grows from an embryo into a man and then keeps his identity after death, according to the transmigrationists, at death the soul wanders into another body somewhere else and hence loses its identity.
If the movement is evolutionary and is characterized by continuity, without ruptures - so that every single being keeps its identity and, further, it this process is unidirectional and irreversible - then all souls in the hereafter must be happy, by definition, as it were, and one should not speak of the unhappiness and torture of some souls. To this difficulty, Sadra replies that the unhappiness of the evil and imperfect souls is itself due to their evolution. For such souls, while they do not feel pain in this life by doing evil, they will feel pain after death, which constitutes a step forward.
Since the evil-doing souls come to have in themselves settled habits of carnal pleasure and since the material body will have been removed with death, these souls will have been deprived of the only source of pleasure they have known, viz., the body.
Another difficulty is that all men are members of the same species and as such partake of the same essence; but in the afterlife they will come to possess essential differences insofar as some will be incorporeal intellects while others will have some kind of body and will be in the World of Images and not in the Realm of Pure Intellect. This is a contradiction. Sadra once again meets this objection on the basis of his doctrine of the evolution of existence. All evolution of existence is characterized by moving from the less differentiated to the more differentiated - from the general and pure potentiality of the Prime Matter, through an ascending order of genuses, differentiae and species - until it reaches man. The species man, in turn, will, in the afterlife, behave as a genus which will become further differentiated in the measure of the acquisition of intellective forms.
At the end, we should reach a point where every human being will become a species in himself, like the transcendental intellects, each of which constitutes a species by itself.
Finally, the transmigrationist argues on the basis of the religious belief in the union of the soul with the body in the hereafter and asks whether this does not imply some kind of transmigration since, by the philosopher's own admission, it will not be the same body to which the soul was related in its earthly existence. Sadra replies that that body, being a symbolic expression of the soul's inner states, has no potentialities like the earthly body and Possesses no existence of its own. It is a mere symbol of the soul and is related to the soul as a reflection or a shadow is related to that of which it is a reflection or a shadow, or as a mere consequent is related to an antecedent; it has no independent status or nature of its own. The opponent then says that the statements of the Qur'an apparently say that the body in the hereafter will be the same earthly body and not a merely symbolic one. Sadra admits that this is so but adds that that body will have the same form as this earthly body and not the matter of the earthly body. Even in this earthly body, its identity is preserved by its form not by its matter, which is continuously changing. The body of a human at any given moment in this life is really its identical form plus an indeterminate (mubham) matter. In the hereafter, this body will be pure physical form without matter - but that physical form will preserve the identity of this body.
Those philosophers like Ibn Sina, who believe that undeveloped and evil souls require a body after death - since according to them all human souls, including undeveloped ones, survive because they are indestructable - but who at the same time do not believe in transmigration, nor accept an intermediate World of Images (or Symbols), face grave difficulties. Ibn Sina attributed to “some scholars” (i.e., al-Farabi) the view, apparently without committing himself to it, that such undeveloped or evil souls will, after death, attach themselves to some astral body. Ibn Sina himself seems to have believed that such souls will survive, along with their imaginative power which, after death, will take the place of sense-perception and these souls will, therefore, experience a kind of physical pleasure and pain.
It is clear that this kind of doctrine lent itself subsequently to being interpreted and elaborated into a doctrine of a full-fledged World of Images which, after al-Ghazali's nebulous remarks, al-Suhrawardi was the first philosopher to affirm explicitly.
Yet al-Suhrawardi subscribed to the doctrine of the attachment of these souls to an astral body or heavenly sphere. As has been pointed out before in our treatment of the soul-body relationship, Sadra strongly criticizes this view on the ground that it ignores the fact that between a soul and its body there exists a unique and intimate relationship which cannot obtain between a departed soul and an astral body. In any case, a heavenly body bas its own proper soul and when other departed human souls get attached to it, this would involve several souls being in one body - an accusation laid by the philosophers at the door of the transmigrationists!
As has been hinted above and as shall be detailed in Section C of the present chapter, physical pains and pleasures will occur to the soul, by the soul's being attached to an image-body, not in this world, but in the Realm of Images or Symbols.
B. Proofs of an Afterlife
Before establishing an afterlife both for the soul and the body, it is necessary to give Sadra's account of the various objections raised against an afterlife and of the views that have been held on this important matter. Some naturalists and medical men have denied the possibility of an afterlife by denying the existence of the soul as separate from matter, and then asserting that the body, once dissolved, cannot be recreated. It is reported about Galen that he hesitated about the afterlife of the soul because he was unsure of its separate existence. Our arguments so far, however, have clearly established that the human soul, while starting its career as a bodily form, can progress to a point of intellectual development where it is united with the Active Intelligence. This Active Intelligence exists, not by God's giving it existence but by God's own existence and hence is, in a definite sense, a part of God.
Some philosophers like Alexander of Aphrodisias have held the view, shared by Ibn Sina in some of his smaller works like al-Majalis al-Sabà, that whereas souls which have developed to the point of an acquired intellect survive without the body, non-developed souls perish with physical death and hence have no afterlife.
A refutation of this view will follow presently in this section. Again, some philosophers, among them Ibn Sina in most of his works, grant individual survival to all human souls since they regard every individual human soul as an indestructible substance, although they reject any afterlife for bodies on the principle that something that has been destroyed cannot recur in its identity.
This latter category of philosophers, in order to insure the survival of undeveloped souls, have, as indicated before, posited these departed souls' attachment to some astral or non-astral body above the earth. These views we have refuted before.
The Ashàrites, who are materialists and deny the spiritual character of the soul, and other scholastic theologians of Islam, believe in a physical afterlife. In order to defend this belief, they sometimes resort to the proof that the recurrence of the destroyed body is not impossible and sometimes say that not the whole of the body is destroyed after death but certain “essential” parts of it survive. Those theologians who are atomists like the Ashàrites hold that a body has no other form except continuity and that this form survives even when the body has fallen apart into atoms so that God can again bring together those atoms and reconstitute the body. Other theologians say that even if the body has a form of its own, when God once again brings together its parts, a form similar to the original one may emerge even if not identically the original one. These theories are liable to several objections. First, they imply that life is not something substantive but something relational, and consist merely in relationships of bodily parts. Secondly, if those disintegrated bodily parts still retain the capacity to become that body once again and should come together once again by chance, the dead person would become alive while he is still dead! Thirdly, this doctrine leads to the acceptance of transmigration in essence. For if the capacity of the bodily parts to become that original body once again remains unabated, the dead person would become alive while he is dead, as we have just said. But if these bodily parts have lost that capacity which comes back through a new factor, then tiffs new factor would call for a new soul and if we suppose that the old soul has also returned to it, then there will be simultaneously two souls in one body.
Fourthly, since even the memory will have perished, according to them, with the destruction of the body, how will the soul recognize its body?
And even when we suppose that memory comes back, the existence of mere memory is not a sure criterion of actual identity, (just as loss of memory does not necessarily mean that actual identity has been lost). This is because for identity, the one to one relationship must exist not only from the side of the soul to this body, but also from the side of this body to this soul.
Finally and most basically, the theologians are searching in the hereafter for an elemental carnal body, a body with potentialities to be perfected and hence subject to growth. But as we have said before and shall show again, this is not the case with the body of the hereafter since it is created instantaneously by the soul or by God through the soul, and it is not subject to change and growth. It is more like the body of the world taken as a whole.
Among the theologians, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi went to the greatest lengths to show that the body will be regathered from these elemental parts and he thought that this was required by the teaching of the Qur'an. Nothing is further from the truth than this claim, for the Qur'an repeatedly tells us that the afterlife is a ''new creation, new level of existence (khalq jadid; nash'a jadida).” This clearly means that we cannot look for a reappearance of earthly elemental bodies there.
Indeed, the banality of the theologians is that they try to locate afterlife at a point of time and at a point of place, whereas the Qur'an, with its doctrine of a “new form of existence,” is very clear that it is another kind of existence, radically different from the earthly existence; it is the “inwardness (batin)” of this external existence and is beyond space and time. Rather than concoct these silly theories, it would be better for the theologians simply to accept belief in afterlife on authority, like old women!
As for the Qur'an, it uses two types of argument to establish afterlife, both for the soul and the body, and these proofs possess complete demonstrative force in this field (as do mathematical proofs in their own),
but these proofs have not the slightest tendency toward a resurrection of the body in its elemental, earthly form. One of these two types of proof concentrates on the developmental and purposive side of human existence: it points out how man started as an embryo and then developed into a foetus, then a body, then a youth, and then a mature man. This shows that the Qur'an wants to tell us that man even in this life passes constantly through new and emergent levels of existence, and that in the hereafter he will have an altogether new mode of life, away from the world of space and time, until finally some men may unite completely with the Active Intelligence or God. In the second line of argument, where the Qur'an cites the examples of the creation of the heavens and the earth, the foremost idea is that God can create things, not necessarily out of preceding matter and its potentialities, but by a simple act of creation just as the heavens and this world as a whole have been created, not out of a pre-existing matter but all at once. So does the soul create its images, not out of a matter but by a simple act of creation, because the soul belongs to the Divine Realm in its substance. That is why the Qur'an speaks of the creation of the other world all at once “like the twinkling of an eye.”
The theologians' conception of a physical afterlife is, in fact, the same as the popular conception according to which the events and experiences of afterlife are physical in terms of the material body. More refined than this is the conception of afterlife constructed on the model of a dream. Just as in dreams we experience things and even intense pleasure and pain - we see ourselves, e.g., burning in fire or enjoying pleasurable things - without there being any counterparts to our dream objects in the outside world, so is the case with afterlife. Indeed, in the afterlife such experiences will be much more intense, as they will be enduring. This is because, compared to the afterlife, this present life will appear as a dream, as a tradition from the Prophet has it. Another fundamental difference is that whereas dreams in this life are beyond our control, experiences in the next life will be consciously controlled by the agent. This view of afterlife was quoted by Ibn Sina (with possible tacit approval) from al-Farabi, according to al-Tusi, and was adopted by al-Ghazali.
The third conception of afterlife is the philosophic one. According to this view, also described by al-Ghazali, the subject will see either real intelligible forms - which are universal ideas - or he will experience psychic states as though he is perceiving real universals. This view is applicable to such souls as have attained full philosophic development and have reached the order of Intelligences. After narrating all these views, al-Ghazali says: “Since all these views are possible, credence can be given to all of them (as a hierarchy). Thus each type of person will receive his share of the afterlife for which he is fit. Thus a person wedded to external form (will enjoy that form best), will be barred from perceiving true universal natures (of things)
... because the definition of Paradise is that it will yield to every person what he wants.”
Having described this three-graded view of the afterlife Sadra now states his own. This is that all the forms which will be experienced by humans in the afterlife will be existential realities, although they will not be material. The mistake of the theologians who represent the popular view is that they posit material objects in the afterlife. The error of dreamists is that they fill the afterlife with images, not concrete realities; even the illuminationists like al-Suhrawardi believe in “suspended” images and symbols and not in actual existents. The World of Images and its contents are real; there will be a real body, a real paradise with its contents, a real hell with its fire, but none of these will be material. The intellectualist doctrine of the philosophers is also untrue. The intellectual paradise cannot be peopled with mere universals; its contents must be real existents. This last is a net result of Sadra's doctrine that knowledge is a process of becoming or existence and that man, when he reaches the highest stage of pure intelligence, acquires a new, intelligible status of existence and becomes Intelligence or, in a sense, God. Knowledge, without transformation in existential terms, is unthinkable in Sadra's teaching.
Sadra, then, erects his proof of afterlife basically on the principle of knowledge and its equation with being, particularly applied to rational or rather supra-rational knowledge, but he cites eleven other principles which he applies in particular to physical survival in the Àlam al-Mithal, the Realm of Images. The knowledge principle states in substance that real pleasure essentially belongs to knowledge. In this life we get real pleasure from sensation and pleasurables are equated by us with sensibles. The reason is that our intellectual and rational knowledge in this life is only indirectly related to real existence and is primarily concerned with essences which are, indeed, not real existents. When, through a continuous intellectual development in this life and particularly after death - when our contact with the material body and through it with the material world is ended - we perceive pure existence directly, i.e., become identical with it, we reach the apogee of pleasure. But it is false to think that the object of knowledge at that stage will be any general intellectual ideas. Rather, these ideas will be identical with actual existence and will, therefore, be concrete realities. It is in this life that we know that real existence through general ideas (i.e., “essences”), that is to say, indirectly and in a mediated manner. This is the reason why in this life even though we come to possess some sort of knowledge of the Rational Realm, we do not feel that pleasure which we feel through direct sensual experience and are consequently insufficiently motivated toward the Rational Realm, except in rare cases. In the afterlife, however, that Rational Realm will be converted into an object of living experience - ideas will become real existences - for the pure philosopher.
According to Sadra, following neo-Platonism (i.e., Theologia Aristotelis), the body will also be there in the Rational Realm and it will accompany the Rational Soul; nevertheless it will be completely “interiorized” and consumed by the soul just as in this life the soul is, in a sense, “interiorized” and consumed by the body. This doctrine is Sadra's compromise between the doctrines of Aristotle as interpreted by Alexander and Ibn Sina concerning the survival of the Intellect, on the one hand, and the clear injunctions of the Sharià concerning physical survival, on the other.
For Sadra it is a necessary consequence of the principle that higher forms of existence do not exclude and negate but include and incorporate the lower forms; this is why he rejects the cognitive doctrine of abstraction, as we have seen in his theory of knowledge.
As for the ten points which constitute Sadra's proof particularly for physical afterlife, these are essentially a recapitulation of the main principles of his philosophy and their consequences. Sadra states them as follows: 1. The basic factor in reality is existence and not essence or abstract ideas.
2. The distinction of every thing from others, as an individual entity, is through its existence which constitutes its very being; as for what are called “individuating qualities and accidents,” these are mere “signs” of particular existence and are subject to displacement (while the individual entity endures and develops).
3. Existence, which constitutes the simple substance of a thing, changes and develops by itself and this change is from the less intense to more intense, i.e., existence is “more or less” of existence. During this change and movement, the parts of the movement - its moments or “periods” - have no real but only potential existence (i.e., as mere essences, their existence is only in the mind). The movement as a whole has existence and this existence is the existence of the whole which constitutes the unitary “entity'' of the thing.
4. and 5. Since what constitutes the entity of a thing is the totality of the movement and since the movement is developmental (i.e., from the less intense to the more intense), it follows that the entity is identical with the final form of a thing as terminus ad quem, and the previous terms of the movement, being potentiality and matter, do not constitute its identity. Thus, in those things which are composites of genera and differentiae, it is the final differentia, the concrete form which constitutes its real entity, as we saw in Chapter II of Part I on Essence. With regard to such things, the genera and differentiae will be mentioned when a logical definition is sought for; but from the point of view of the final simple emergent, no such definition can be given, but the thing can only be described by its necessary attributes and consequences. Simple existents - i.e., transcendental beings - and, indeed, existence itself, have no definition composed of logical parts but can be described only in the second way.
6. The unitary entity of things is not of the same order. As the scale of existence progresses, new possibilities open up.
For example, at the material level, parts are mutually exclusive so that, say, black and white cannot come together in a material thing. As existence progresses, its higher forms are increasingly capable of containing contradictions, and synthesizing them in a simple manner, until the human soul at the absolutely intellectual level, becomes the entire range of reality: “a simple nature is everything.”
7. From the preceding account of the entity-in-movement, it is clear that the identity of the body is due to the soul which is its final form. The body, although in constant movement, nevertheless remains the same body in a sense.
Even when the body turns into an image, as in a dream, it remains the same body. So also in the afterlife, the body keeps its identity, even though it has changed fundamentally, as, for example, it is no longer a material body. If the question is asked about A's body whether it is the same in A's youth and old age, then, from the point of view of the body as matter, it is obviously not the same, but from the point of view of body taken as a genus, it is definitely the same. But when the question is asked about A's person whether it is the same in infancy, youth, and old age, the answer is definitely “yes.” Thus, the body and the person of A in the afterlife are identically the same as in this life - and throughout tiffs life.
8. 9. and 10. The power of imagination, as has been proved in the theory of knowledge, is not a faculty inhering in any body, e.g., the brain. Indeed, it does not exist, any more than its objects, in this world of space. Therefore, as has been proved before, images - and, indeed, cognitive forms in general - do not inhere in the soul as their recipient; rather, they are creations of the soul. These images are created all at once by the soul, not gradually as in the case of material forms in the physical world. In the afterlife these images will be intense and enduring because the soul will be free from the material body. Hence heaven and hell will be enduring entities.
In conclusion, Sadra states that the body as it will be “resurrected” (i.e., created by the soul) will be identically the same as this body, except that it will not be material. Sadra takes strong issue on this point with al-Ghazali and denounces his view of the resurrection of the body as a variant of transmigration.
This denunciation does not appear to be quite fair and is one of the many examples in Sadra's Asfar where he deliberately and with some manipulation carves targets out of his real or imagined opponents. Al-Ghazali, as Sadra himself quotes him, declares that since there is no constancy in the parts of the physical body in this life, it cannot be required that exactly the same body be resurrected in the afterlife, that this is not transmigration since in transmigration a new person is constituted but if someone chooses to call his (al-Ghazali's) doctrine transmigration, let him do so, since there is no quarrel in mere names. Of course, al-Ghazali goes on to say that philosophers have rejected the resurrection of the body in the name of avoiding transmigration and he himself proceeds to weaken the main argument against transmigration. Although al-Ghazali rejects transmigration as false, he considers the rejection of physical resurrection as more false. To us it appears that fundamentally al-Ghazali and Sadra are very close on the question of a physical afterlife. And, indeed, in his Shawahid (p. 232, line 4 ff.) Sadra himself talks of afterlife as “the transportation (intiqal) of the soul from this body into an eschatological body,” just like al-Ghazali whom he also quotes approvingly in that book (p. 286, line 10 if.) on the nature of pleasures and pains after death. The only difference is - and it is undoubtedly a big one - that Sadra rests his doctrine on the basis of his principle of substantive movement (haraka jauhariya) and his theory of the World of Images. The World of Images, although explicitly a post-Ghazalian development, nevertheless has its roots in both al-Ghazali and Ibn Sina, and Sadra, with all his refinements, is basically indebted to them. The principle of substantive movement is, of course, Sadra's own.
C. The Nature of Afterlife
“Afterlife,” according to Sadra, is a relative concept.
Intellect and soul have a transcendent existence before this world, but they are not human intellect and human soul. When a human soul comes into existence in this world, it is, therefore, genuinely an originated thing having its being in its initial career in matter and one cannot speak of its pre-existence, for what is pre-existent is not the human soul but the Universal Soul. Therefore, there is no such thing as “individuation” or “differentiation” of the Universal Soul into human individuals, although human souls have, in their origination, a metaphysical relationship to the transcendent principles, for although human souls are initially in matter, they are not of matter, as elucidated before in our discussion of the nature of the soul (Chapter I of this Part).
Since everything in this world moves and develops, including human souls, the orientation of everything being towards God, “afterlife” is a relative term: plant is the “afterlife” of inorganic matter, animal of plant, and man of animal. But there is a difference between man and lower beings: whereas lower beings, when they develop into higher modes of existence,
have to change their species, i.e., individuals in lower species cannot develop into higher species but only the species as a whole can do so (an individual ape, e.g., cannot become man, but ape as species can, Asfar, IV, 2, p. 25, lines 1-3), it is man alone who, in his individual existence, passes once again (i.e., apart from change in species - from lower species into human) through and experiences all the levels of existence - from an embryo to a mature intellect.
Individuals in lower species also move and develop, but each in his own species.
This is not quite true since just as man, at the embryonic stage, is like a plant, so must surely be the case with an animal embryo, although, of course, the end of man is to become Intelligence whereas an animal cannot transcend his species as an individual.
There is another basic feature characterizing this evolutionary process of life - and afterlife. Whereas in the lower rungs of existence, intra-species differences are not significant - all members of a species are about the same in value - as evolution proceeds upwards, these intra-species differences become greater and greater. This is particularly true with regard to man. The reason is that whereas, at the lower level the gap between potentialities and actualities is very little - at the lowest grades it is nil - this gap increases as we go higher. When we come to the human species, the gap becomes so large that you can literally speak of some men as being little of men and more of animals whereas other men are literally more of men, i.e., those who have actualized their intellects to the full. This view cannot be accused of violating the definition of man as “rational animal” wherein all members equally participate, since the definition refers only to potentialities, not to actualities.
At the beginning of a man's career, his soul is “in the body,” as it were, but as the soul actualizes itself, the body gradually dwindles until at the purely intellectual level, the body is literally “in the soul.”
This doctrine may shock a Muslim in view of the egalitarian nature of Islam; however, that egalitarianism does not refer to the inner worth of individuals. And, certainly, the Qur'an and the Hadith often speak of the infinite grades of inhabitants in Paradise and Hell and Sadra exploits these materials to the full. Indeed, even in this life the Qur'an speaks of most men who are obdurate to Truth as ''animals - nay, worse than animals” (VII, 179). The Scriptures speak, of course, not so much of intellectual worth but moral worth, but for Sadra moral worth and virtue ultimately depend upon intellectual value.
The process of evolution, since it proceeds from the more general to the more concrete, from the more indeterminate and the undifferentiated to the more determinate and more differentiated - from less of existence to pure existence - must end up at a point where every human being - particularly those who have become actual intellects like the transcendental intelligences - will be a species unto himself. Nor does the process of evolution stop after death. For although there is no “becoming” there, no passage from potentialities to actualities (since “potentialities” as we know them here, exist only in matter), nevertheless there occur changes in afterlife (i.e., after bodily death), instantaneous changes. Undeveloped souls can still evolve there, thanks to the torture they will experience in the other world for not having developed here below.
Sadra, therefore, strongly rejects the view according to which there is no individual survival.
For him, the differentiating factors are imagination and intellect, the latter even more so than the former. This is in complete contrast to all Greek doctrines - Platonic, Aristotelian, and neo-Platonic - according to which individuation is a function of matter and, with the disappearance of matter, no individuality can survive. For Sadra, on the contrary, individuation is a function of the evolutionary process of existence itself. The highest point of evolution, the possession of pure being, means absolute individuality; hence God is the supreme individual.
The first stage after death is that of the “grave” i.e., the stage intermediate between bodily death and “resurrection.”
For Sadra “grave'' means the envelopment of the soul in the physical or rather imaginative faculties, since in the common run of mankind, the intellect is not fully actualized and hence imagination and even certain bodily dispositions will persist, even though the material body is gone. For those who have actualized their intellect, the stage of the “grave” will either be bypassed or will be passed through very quickly. The stage of the “resurrection” means the shedding, on the part of the soul, of all that is physical by way of dispositions or memory.
Sadra narrates various interpretations of a tradition according to which in a human “the root of the tail” (àjb al-dhanab) will survive, from which God will recreate the whole human being. Some philosophers interpreted this expression to mean “soul.” The theologians take this to mean the basic atom in the human body, while Ibn Àrabi says it means the “essence of man.” According to Sadra, the expression means the power of imagination, because it is the “root of the tail” connecting man with the world of nature, i.e., matter.
It is this imagination which takes the place of matter in the next world. That is why in the afterlife there is no process of becoming or the passage from potentiality to actuality, but an instantaneous creation, since imagination creates its objects all at once.
Those humans who achieve a pure intellectual being in this world - these actualized here but will become pure intellects soon after death, will share are rare beings like the Prophets - or those whose intellects are very nearly in Divine Life as members of absolute being. There will remain no difference between them - although as individuals they will be distinct - except insofar as pure existence is capable of “more or less.” That is to say, in the realm of pure existence, the what or the quiddity of a thing and the why of it, i.e., formal and final causes, coalesce.
This progressive hierarchy of pure beings is in itself a unity just as the continuous parts of an extended body form a unity.
The goal of this hierarchic progression is the Godhead who is infinite both in duration and intensity and number of actions; the rest will be infinite in duration but not in the intensity of their actions, since they are intermediate between the Necessary Being - God - and the contingent world. It is difficult to see, however, how these pure Intellects who differ, according to Sadra, from God, and also within themselves in terms of “more or less of existence,” can at the same time be described as “pure existences and absolute beings (al-wujud al-Sarf; al-anniya al-mahda)” - and Sadra, indeed, often describes them as part of God - since it is clear that they must bear within themselves something of the contingent. Their position seems to be the same as that of the Attributes of God who are also said by Sadra to be intermediate between the absolute being of God's Essence and the World of Contingency.
Sadra expressly states that the admission of the intellect's continuity with God's being is necessary in order to avoid the acceptance of an infinite “bounded on both sides.” That is to say, since any intellective being which is supposed to be next to God can always be supposed to be transcended by a still higher one which will then be next to God - and so on ad infinitum - this infinite regression can be cut at the upper end only by the concept of direct continuity. For God, being the top of a continuity, is Himself infinite.
The intellects, being, as we have noted above, of the status of or identical with Divine Attributes, constitute a manifestation (mazhar) of God. The “mirror” in which this manifestation or reflection takes place is no other than the being of God. God, therefore, contemplates Himself through this manifestation. Intellects are, therefore, forms or images of God, from this point of view. This proximity and presence of the intellects to God constitutes their “resurrection” and “afterlife.” The same result is reached from the point of view of the theory of knowledge which requires the identity of the intellect and its objects - God in this case being the subject and the intellects the object of intellection. This, despite the principle that nothing higher contemplates the lower, but, then, these Intellects are parts of God Himself (taken as parts they are inferior, taken as being of God they are God Himself).
These intellects also contemplate God, but in a deficient manner - through their self-contemplation as effects of God - for otherwise they will have to become absolutely identical with God.
Since Sadra holds that imagination also survives, he believes that all higher animals whose imagination and memory are developed have individual survival. These animals will remain perpetually in the “grave” stage or Àlam al-Mithal (the Realm of Forms or Images), since they had no intellectual potentialities. As for ordinary humans, and these constitute the bulk of humanity (common folk, women, children, and Sadra repeatedly asserts, people of ordinary professions and crafts, including medical men, and in this connection he lets loose a storm of bitter sarcasm against Ibn Sina who, while being [or trying to be?] a philosopher, thought fit to practice medicine!),
they will remain in the Àlam al-Mithal for a long time, depending on the amount of their immersion in the physical dispositions. All such souls will instantaneously create image-bodies, real bodies but non-material. These bodies, which will be related to the souls like shadows or reflections, since they are no longer instruments for the souls to perfect themselves with, as were earthly bodies, will mirror the souls' dispositions, whether good or evil, acquired on this earth. Since these bodies do not occupy space, they will no longer hinder each other and an infinity of them can co-exist.
Sadra is not very decisive about the causation of these projections of psychic dispositions into the image-bodies. He sometimes says that they will be caused by the soul thanks to the acquisition, on this earth, of certain dispositions, but sometimes declares that these images - good and bad - exist in the Àlam al-Mithal as such, will appear in the soul after death, will be reflected or projected by the soul into the body, and then the soul will experience pleasure or pain (as the case may be) “just as physical health and sickness in this world originate from the soul [into the body] and then the soul itself experiences either pleasure or comfort or pain and anguish.”
The reason for this ambiguity seems to be that Sadra believes in two kinds of Àlam al-Mithal: an absolute ontological one, independent of the soul, and a restricted one, created by the soul itself; he seems never to have been sure about the relation between the two.
That body is itself infused with life and cognitive power, since it is a reflection of the soul, unlike this earthly body which in itself is dead and receives life and cognitive faculties only indirectly.
The good ones among these souls will sooner or later join the intellectual realm, having been chastened by the fire of purgation, if they had had a taste of intellectual life at all in this world. Otherwise, they will simply enjoy the sensual-imaginative pleasures. So for the bad ones: their souls will project awesome and horrendous sensation-images. They will become pigs, tigers, or wolves, etc., according as they were greedy, pugnacious, licentious, etc. This does not mean that they will become real, material animals, since neither reversion nor transmigration is possible. What this means is that since the human species, as has been said before, displays in the range of its intra-specific differences, the whole spectrum of lower forms of existence, its bad specimens will, although they will have human bodies, see themselves as real animals of various kinds. These people, after burning a long time in the fire of animality, will generally be delivered, except for the few who were incurably evil. These latter ones may also perchance be transformed or lose the desire for intellection altogether.
Lower animals and natures will also be “resurrected” not as particular or individual existents, but as species. They will be lifted up and will revert to what Plato called the World of Ideas and what the ancient Persian sages called the “Guardians” (or Masters, Lords) of dead images, i.e., material bodies (arbab al-asnam).
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Author: Dr. Fazlur Rahman
