Philosopher · Early modern
Mulla Sadra
c. 1571–1640 · Hikmat muta'aliya (Transcendent Philosophy): Avicenna, Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi united
The last great synthesis of Islamic philosophy, written in Safavid Persia while Suárez was writing in Spain; Catholic readers have come to him late, chiefly through Thomists interested in the act of existence.
Sadr al-Din Shirazi, called Mulla Sadra, taught after years of retreat at Kahak that existence, not essence, is what is real (asalat al-wujud), that it is one reality present in degrees of intensity from God to dust (tashkik al-wujud), and that substances themselves are in motion toward higher being (haraka jawhariyya). In “The Four Journeys” and “The Wisdom of the Throne” he argued God's existence from existence itself (the “proof of the truthful”), held that the simple reality is in some way all things, that the soul is “bodily in its origination and spiritual in its survival,” that knower and known become one in knowing, and that the resurrection body is produced by the soul's own imaginative power. He read the Qur'an and the sayings of the Imams as philosophy in another idiom, criticized the court clergy of his day, and taught with Ibn Arabi that for most the torment of hell comes to an end as mercy prevails.
Why he matters: His primacy of existence and gradation of being are the nearest thing outside Christendom to the Thomist doctrine of the act of being, reached by a different road, and his account of the soul as the form that grows with the body offers a Shi'i answer to the Council of Vienne's question; Catholic philosophers of the Islamic world now read him with Aquinas. He also shows a Muslim tradition in which philosophy, mysticism and revelation were held together rather than set at odds.
Where to be careful
“The simple reality is all things” and the one gradated existence shade into the emanationism Vatican I rejects, and his eschatology leans toward the apokatastasis condemned in 543; his authority is the infallible Imam, not the Church, and he denies the Incarnation. Common ground: God as pure existence, really simple; the soul as the perfection of the body; the harmony of reason, contemplation and revelation.
Reading
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The Wisdom of the ThroneMulla Sadra, trans. James Winston Morris · His short late summary of God, soul and resurrection, with a full introduction; the best first book.
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The Philosophy of Mulla SadraFazlur Rahman · The clearest account in English of existence, substantial motion and the soul.
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The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mulla SadraChristian Jambet · A French philosopher reads him as a thinker of existence; the place to see how close he stands to, and how far from, the Latin doctrine of esse.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.