The attention to existence which we saw emerging in the early Christian Fathers was developed by the medieval Christian philosophers from Augustine to St. Bonaventure, basically in Platonic terms; it was a Christian Platonism. St. Thomas elaborated this further by integrating the contributions of Aristotle. At the time of the Renaissance the Platonic elements in philosophy were revived and might be said to predominate in modern thought, giving it a strongly formal character.

At the same time as Descartes, however, Mulla Sadra (1571/72-1640) was very conscious of the deficiencies involved in such a formalism which he criticized most strongly. He went about assembling the full resources of the Islamic heritage in philosophy to develop a philosophy of existence on a neo-Platonic basis.

To grasp the contemporary significance of Mulla Sadra’s existential philosophy, it seems necessary to begin with a review of the general crisis generated at this turn of the millennia by the reduction of reason to an interplay of clear but empty concepts. We live in our day Mulla Sadra’s description of the meaninglessness of the pursuit of essence alone. The general response must be a revival of the sense of existence, first uncovered by the early Church Fathers.

Next, we shall study the reality and internal constitution of finite beings as existing in their own right in order to capture the significance of Mulla Sadra’s existential philosophy for the proper autonomy of creatures.

Finally, in the light of the above, we shall review the role of existence in the medieval Islamic and Christian efforts to respond in philosophy to the requirements of eschatology for human persons who are real, free and responsible before God -- a matter of no less significance in social life today.

In sum, we shall move diachronically, reviewing once again the earlier discovery of existence, through an understanding of the proper autonomy of beings as creatures of God, to the human person as free and responsible. Synchronically, we will move first from essence to existence, second from existence to the subsistence of finite beings, and third from subsistence to the human person as free, responsible and creative in the work of creation. Throughout we will look for ways in which insights by Christian philosophers can cooperate and contribute in the effort of Mulla Sadra to develop an Islamic philosophy which can help in responding to revelation.

Mulla Sadra, Muhammad ibn-Ibrahim Sadr al Din Shirazi, a contemporary of Descartes (1596-1650), was trenchant in his description of the vacuity of essences when treated by reason in reductionist manner. Today, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is considered particularly clairvoyant for having predicted — 70 years after Mulla Sadra had done so — that the human race would be reduced by such abstractive reason to a race of intellectual brutes but brutes nonetheless devoid of sense of personal freedom or cultural creativity. In order to find an alternate way? Heidegger points out that each major step ahead implies a decision to develop one path which leaves alternate paths unexplored. Hence, the real step ahead consists in the step back (Schritt zurück) to that which thus far has been left undeveloped. This suggests that in order to understand Mulla Sadra’s penetrating and skillfully elaborated philosophy of existence it may help to review once again the sense of existence as it emerged initially among the Christian Church Fathers in the early centuries of this era.

Although Greek philosophy grew out of an intensive mythic sense of life in which all was a reflection of the will of the gods, it nonetheless presupposed matter always to have existed. As a result, attention and concern were focused upon the forms by which matter was determined to be of one type rather than of another. For Aristotle, this was the most manifest reality and his philosophizing began from there. By the end of his metaphysics he had come by a philosophical route to considerations of divine life as the principle of all.

I fear, however, that this response is too radical, for simply to reject the Greek pattern of reasoning to God is to lose the tools it provides for seeing the relation, or tieing back to God (re-tie or "re-ligatio" being an etymology of religion) each and every aspect of finite reality. This is the deeper and perduring significance of Thomas’s "five ways" as they proceed in terms of efficient (Ways I-III), formal (Way IV) and final (Way V) causality.

This said, however, the challenge of Ghazali and Iqbal remains, namely, is the human intellect sufficiently open to the divine in order for its work to be, not the creation of an idol in the place of God, but an opening to its own divine source, ground and goal? The Greek philosophical awareness of what it meant to be real would need considerable enrichment in order to be able to appreciate the foundational significance for human thought of its grounding in a fully transcendent and infinite Being.

It is possible to turn directly to revelation in the Holy Books which encourage one to look further into these issues. But if philosophy is to be a human endeavor with universal import then it cannot employ revelation as a premise. There are, however, two other approaches.

The other approach is to examine the point at which Greek thought encountered a culture shaped by revelation in order to see the development which took place in philosophical insight at that point. It was the early Christian Church Fathers who developed an awareness of the meaning of being as existence. This consisted in transcending the Greek notion of being as form, which meant simply a certain differentiated type or kind, to an explicit awareness of the act of existence (esse) in terms of which being could be appreciated directly in its active and self-affirmative character. The precise basis for this step is difficult to identify in a conclusive manner, but some things are known.

Later, this would be the central insight also of Mulla Sadra. It is still being unfolded in the contemporary emergence of the existential sense of the human person. This directs the mind beyond form and species, that is beyond essence, and beyond place and time or any of the scientific categories. It centers instead upon the unique reality of each being, above all of the person as a participant in the creative power of God, as a being bursting into time who is and cannot be denied. It rejects the person being considered in any sense as nonbeing, or being treated as anything less than its full reality. The human person is a self, affirming its own unique existence, and irreducible to any specific group identity. It is an image of God for whom life is sacred and sanctifying, a child of God for whom to be is freely to dispose of the power of one’s new and unique life in union with all humankind.

This, however, urges the question of the reality of the horizontal causal line, of the human and of one’s interaction with other persons and with nature. Today these are the issues of social justice, the treatment of minorities, and the protection of the environment; they are the special human concerns at this juncture. We shall look next for ways in which these concerns can be grounded ontologically and then finally for ways to implement the free and creative possibilities of humankind opened by Mulla Sadra. As the project is vast we must proceed here in somewhat summary fashion to suggest issues and sources which merit subsequent development.

If attention during the first millennium was focused upon God, it can be said that for the second millennium it has been focused upon this world, especially upon the human person. During the first millennium it was sufficient to see these in some relation to God, to show with Plato that unity did not preclude multiple beings provided they be seen precisely as related by participation to God.

The issue of this second millennium has been rather the existence of creatures -- not by themselves, but in themselves. Since God exists, can there be room for the world, and particularly for truly free human beings? Here we shall look at two issues: (a) the subsistence of finite beings as existing in themselves, and (b) the internal constitution of such beings. The third issue, namely, the freedom and autonomy of the human person will be the subject of Part III. We shall treat each issue and its response in sequence; in fact, however, they constitute a cumulative problematic, just as their response also is cumulative.

In the first millennium of Christ and Mohammed, because human attention was quite absorbed in assimilating their teaching about God, the relative disappearance of the human was not considered to be a special problem, for humankind searched in God for its fulfillment. In the middle of this present millennium, however, attention shifted to the human. For some this was the person in search of God and for one’s proper role in His creation. Increasingly, however, philosophers took a Promethean attitude. Today they will not be satisfied unless the legitimate human question in religion is recognized and receives an answer, namely, the issue of the status and role of creatures and of the human person in God’s Providence.

Earlier medieval Christian philosophy, working on a Platonic and neo-Platonic model, experienced difficulty in asserting the distinct activity of finite beings. While benefiting from the mystical potentialities of the vertical line of causality from God’s existence, its Platonism left it poorly equipped to affirm the distinctive reality of the horizontal causal line between creatures. Hence, some form of divine supplement in the form of illumination or latent forms of seminal reasons was required as if creatures were not quite entitled to act -- and by implication to be -- in their own right.

For a distinctive step beyond the difficulties of this Platonic and neo-Platonic horizon one needs to turn to Aristotle who precisely went beyond Plato’s more passive sense of beings as images or shadows remembering what had been passively observed and now remembered. For Aristotle the point of departure was being as changing and hence as active and dynamic. Beings were ultimately substances standing in their own right and all depended not on a passively contemplated One, but on a quintessentially active divine life as the act of "knowing on knowing".

Paul Tillich notes that because Platonic formalism does not adequately establish the distinctive reality of the world and human beings, while nominalism and positivism do not establish the reality of God, philosophizing in a religious context has gravitated naturally toward an Aristotelian realism in recognition of both God and world. This was precisely the step taken by Thomas Aquinas.

In going beyond the Platonic thought of the Patristic age, and adding to it Aristotle’s scientific structures and active sense of being -- now intensified in terms of existence -- Thomas opened a new scientific philosophical age in which "theology", properly as a logos, could be born.

For Mulla Sadra, thinking Platonically, these categories remained a passive function of essence and hence were seen as existentially empty. In contrast Aquinas, thinking in an Aristotelian manner, took them actively and in relation to existence. Hence a substance is that to which it pertains precisely to exist in itself, and a being possessing or exercising such existence would be a subsistent being. For Capriolus, in contrast to Cajetan, the proportioned existence itself, and not a mode, is the principle of subsistence. This insight regarding being as act and active made it possible to receive more fully the revelation of God’s creative act as making things themselves to exist (something that Mulla Sadra showed himself most anxious to do through his critique of essence). Thomas’s deployment of the Aristotelian category of substance in the existential context of creation makes it possible to appreciate the existence of finite beings as from, by, and for God, yet as lived by beings existing in themselves (in se).

Thomas agreed that God was indeed great, but not because he caused the finite effects of each human action, but rather because he caused finite beings who were themselves fully capable of carrying out all the actions and effects which corresponded to their nature. This is the proper autonomy of the human person; it is the implication of the participation of beings as act in Absolute Being as existence itself.

Based on his appreciation, like Mulla Sadra’s, of being as existing, Aquinas reasoned as follows:

(a) as existence is quintessentially affirmation, where it is not infinite but limited (that is, where existence is not absolute, but in part negated) this must be due to something other than existence;

(b) that "other" could not be merely outside of being such as its efficient cause, for being must have in, and as, itself whatever is required in order that it be what it is (it must be undivided in itself); further

(c) as "inside being" this "other" would have to be or exist; yet as "other than existence" it could not be of itself; hence the "other" as principle of limitation would have to be made to be by existence, in relation to which it stands as potency;

(d) this "other" must be then a determined and limiting capacity for existence, that is, a capacity for "this much of existence and no more"; and finally

On this basis Thomas expanded the meaning of Aristotle’s act and potency from merely form and matter as the internal components of changing beings, to express the relation between the internal components of limited beings: existence as act and essence as potency. Neither existence nor essence are things or beings, but are rather internal principles of being. Existence is that by which a being is -- which was Mulla Sadra’s great insight. But essence is also necessary, for it is that by which a being is what it is -- a limited and determined being distinct from all else.

The significance of revelation for philosophy becomes even more evident as one attempts to articulate philosophically a vision of the human person which can face the challenges of eschatology. This demands not only the full spiritual openness of the human to the Transcendent, but also, in view of personal resurrection and definitive judgment, an individual with personal freedom and responsibility subsisting in this world.

This challenge was central to the drama of the life of al-Ghazali as he described it in his Munqidh. The spiritual nature of humankind was the crucial issue for al-Ghazali and the one which moved him to break away from philosophy as developed by the great Islamic heirs of the Greek tradition, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina.

For Aristotle the discovery of form and matter as intrinsic principles of any changing being meant that the form was intimately, indeed totally, related to the matter it informed. But if so then how could this form be the source and foundation of spiritual activity? If matter was concrete and singular, how could the form of matter be a principle for the abstract and universal terms which were central to scientific thought or, even more, the principle for the free exercise of the human will?

Aristotle’s solution, taken up by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina almost 1500 years latter, was that such terms must depend on a form which was separated from matter — an agent intellect existing separately which could be drawn upon by many persons. But as this would need to be also the principle of free human actions, it would then be difficult to assess personal responsibility. This, in turn, constituted a difficulty in interpreting the Scriptural passages regarding personal immortality and the last judgment. As a result the Greek oriented Islamic philosophers tended to interpret final judgment and eternal reward rather as allegorical than objective statements of the reality of human life.

Christian philosophy took the opposite path; reflecting its sense of the autonomy of creatures under God, it placed the agent intellect in the individual human person. But there it encountered Aristotle’s original difficulty: if the soul was spiritual how could it also be the form of the body? In the Augustinian tradition up to Bonaventure this was resolved by positing multiple souls, but this created its own difficulties for the unity of the human person as identically bodily in nature and spiritual in dignity -- something of great importance in our day.

In a manner analogous to his work on the inner constitution of finite beings described above, Thomas approached the issue of the spiritual nature of the human person, of human freedom and responsibility. He reasoned in the light of being as existence that:

- one being could have but one existence;

- one existence could have but one essence, and

- one essence could have but one form.

Hence, there could be but one form (or soul) in the human person, whose nature is then neither beastly, nor angelic, nor both, but properly and uniquely human.

This entails, in turn, that the human mind is not dependent on a separated intellect in order to form universal concepts. Rather, the human intellect itself has the capacity to abstract universal natures from concrete sensed objects. Thus the agent intellect which for the Greeks, as for the Islamic scholars of Greek philosophy, had been separated from the human person and shared by many was now seen to be an internal capacity proper to each person. Each person is free, responsible and subject to judgement and reward for his or her actions.

There are other implications here of supreme importance for our present attempt to construct a world that is truly humane: the unique dignity and destiny of the human body; the properly sensual and engaged, yet transcendent, character of human consciousness; the role of the human person as the Cusan point of unity of all creation; and the social character of human rights and their extension to the right to food, to work, to one’s culture and religion, etc.

In sum, the participation that Plato saw only externally as between beings was now articulated in terms of the internal constitution of being. Finite beings and hence human persons could be seen as substances existing in their own right (in se), but not by themselves or absolutely (a se), as is God. As self-conscious and free, persons could act responsibly and hence be subject to final judgment, reward or punishment for lives lived well or ill. Their basic orientation as sharing in divine life is to the good and hence to resurrection and reward. This eschatology, insisted upon by revelation and all who would be faithful thereto, suggests that any theory is in need of further development which would deny creative freedom or responsibility to persons and peoples, either as an ontological or as a socio-political reality.

In the philosophy of this century the thought of Mulla Sadra is perhaps most reflected in that of M. Iqbal who wrote his thesis on Mulla Sadra and drew notably on Bergson and related thinkers, and in Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. It might be especially helpful to look at the concerns of the latter to uncover the special relevance of Mulla Sadra for our times.

Of course, an existential philosophy of being would respond that natures are markers of human dignity below which no one should be treated; that they are capabilities for conscious and free action according to the essence of each human person; that each concrete essence is unique, just as is each existence; and that the related actions as accidents are not merely external adjuncts, but make the whole person to be such. For example, they make the person to be kind and loving or the opposite. This seems essential for the eschatological human destiny to judgment, resurrection and life in divine goodness.

Nevertheless, each age has its own proper concerns and unfolds its own particular dimension of the human mystery. Contemporary culture is marked by dynamic change which intensifies the search for identity and purpose. Mulla Sadra’s process thought brings great richness to this search:

- his philosophy of existence focuses attention on the concrete particular person;

- his systematic ambiguity opens new horizons of diversity and unity in this age of cultural globalization.

All this must be harvested and applied in our present circumstances. However, my sense is that if we remain within the terms of scientific reasoning employed thus far we will fail to reap the rich harvest of needed insight that Mulla Sadra brings to our present task.

He points out rightly the limitations of conceptual reason and the need to move beyond this to intuition, but he sees this as otherworldly and characteristic rather of the Perfect Man. What is both needed and within reach is instead a new level of human consciousness while in this life, namely, an aesthetic awareness. In the structure of Kant’s Critiques this comes third. It goes beyond science and the universal and necessary categories of the Critique of Pure Reason, and beyond the universal categorical imperative of the Critique of Practical Reason. Yet, aesthetic awareness does not leave these behind, but integrates both in the third Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. This is understanding in terms of beauty and the sublime which mark an eschatology.

The aesthetic is able to grasp the higher principles which in their simplicity do not abstract from, but contain the multiple in their uniqueness. Creative intuition appreciates the dynamic process, but does so from the point of view of its aspiration for a goal in which opposition and conflict are overcome by goodness and love. For Mulla Sadra this is a realization which is beyond this life; it is had through reunion with the Perfect Man, become an attribute of God. However, the final cause is not only the last in realization, but the first in exercise in as much as it mobilizes and coordinates all the rest. Hence, eschatology is not only a time after this life, but shapes our life process from the beginning.

To appreciate this — which is to live life meaningfully and fully — calls for a mode of awareness that can appreciate the concrete particularity of acts of human freedom. It must do so in a way that stimulates, integrates and harmonizes them in intuitions united in terms of beauty and the sublime. To be lived consciously in time, eschatology requires an aesthetic mode of awareness.

Read in these terms, Mulla Sadra’s work on existence and process can be appreciated in its full inspiration. It states life with a holy awe, is buoyed up and drawn forward with confidence, and opens to that commitment of love from which peaceful progress proceeds. Deeply understood, his philosophy emerges as a work of the Spirit — of faith, hope and charity — which can turn hatred into love, conflict into peace, and death into eternal life.

1. M. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

2. There is a similarity here to social contract political theory which sees all in terms of a supposed original position, that is, a social contract hypothetically conceived. All such social theory is developed within the framework of that original contract. Our position differs, however, in that it proceeds not on an hypothesis, but by returning to the earliest character of human thought as anthropologically established.

3. Plotinus, Enneads II, 5 (25), ch.5.

4. Maurizio Flick and Zoltan Alszeghy, Il Creatore, l’inizio della salvezza (Firenze: Lib. Ed. Fiorentina, 1961), pp. 32-49; Mulla Sadra, Livre des Penetrations Metaphysiques, ed. H. Corbin (Teheran: Inst. Franco-Iranien, 1964), VII. (Henceforth LP.)

5. Fazlur Rahman, The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Albany: SUNY, 1975), pp. 74-75. (Henceforth FR.)

6. Mulla Sadra, Asfar, I, 2, pp. 320, 339-341; FR p. 89.

7. FR, p. 176.

8. Asfar, IV, 2, p. 115; I, 3, p. 429; FR, p. 238.

9. Parmenides, fragments in G. McLean and P. Aspell, Readings in Ancient Western Philosophy (New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1970); Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides: A Study of Work, Images, and Argument in the Fragments (New Haven: Yale, 1970).

10. LP VIII, n. 8.

11. Asfar, I, 2, pp. 308-318; FR, pp. 30-31, 38.

12. Exploring the possibilities of consciousness, Paul Tillich suggested a reverse phenomenological approach proceeding through human concern to God as "Ultimate Concern." Systematic Theology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1951), vol. I; The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952).

13. Asfar, IV, 2, p. 116; I, 3, p. 213; FR, p. 30, 238.

14. Shankara, Vedanta Sutras, Introduction; LP VIII, n. 8; Asfar, I, 2, p. 292; FR p. 38, 237-238. "The relationship between theology and philosophy is best construed as a circle. Theology’s source and starting point must always be the word of God revealed in history, while its final goal will be an understanding of that word which increases with each passing generation. Yet, since God’s word is Truth (cf. Jn 17:17), the human search for truth -- philosophy, pursued in keeping with its own rules -- can only help to understand God’s word better. It is not just a question of theological discourse using this or that concept or element of a philosophical construct; what matters most is that the believer’s reason use its powers of reflection in the search for truth which moves from the word of God towards a better understanding of it. It is as if, moving between the twin poles of God’s word and a better understanding of it, reason is offered guidance and is warned against paths which would lead it to stray from revealed Truth and to stray in the end from the truth pure and simple. Instead, reason is stirred to explore paths which of itself it would not even have suspected it could take. This circular relationship with the word of God leaves philosophy enriched, because reason discovers new and unsuspected horizons." John Paul II, Encyclical Letter: Fides et Ratio, n. 73.

15. Aristotle abandoned the use of mimesis after the very first books of his Organon, seemingly for fear that it did not assure the reality of finite things.

16. FR, p. 178.

17. G. McLean, Introduction to al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error and Mystical Union with the Almighty; Al-Munqidh min al- Dalal (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1999), p. 50.

18. LP V; FR, pp. 32-33.

19. Ibid., pp. 31, 39.

20. Asfar, I, 3, p. 83; FR, p. 114; C. Fabro, Participation et causalité selon S. Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Pub. Univ. de Louvain, 1961).

21. Ibid.; La Nozione metafisica de partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Torino: Societa Ed. Internazionale, 1950), 75-122.

22. Ibid.

23. FR, pp. 36-37.

24. Fazlur Rahman, "Sadra’s Doctrine of Being and God-World Relationship" in Essays in Islamic Philosophy and Science, ed. George Hourani (Albany: SUNY); FR, pp. 34-37.

25. Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error and Mystical Union with the Almighty, III, p. 93.

26. FR, p. 77.

27. See note 8 above.

28. FR, p. 171.

29. Ibid., pp 97-98.

30. Asfar, I, 2, pp. 263 and 273; FR, p. 80

31. FR, pp. 94-108.