BIOGRAPHY

Ab 'Al al-Husayn Ibn 'Abd-Allh Ibn Sn, better known as Avicenna, was a Persian born near the capital of the Samnid dynasty, Bukhr (today part of Uzbekistan). As a boy, Avicenna showed exceptional intellectual abilities. By the age of ten, he had learned Arabic and studied the Qur'an; by age sixteen, he had finished his study of medicine; and by age eighteen, he had read and mastered all the philosophy available. Only with Aristotle's Metaphysics did he meet his match. He claimed he read it forty times without comprehension before finding al-Frb's clarifying commentary. Beginning at age eighteen, Avicenna became a physician and aide to a series of princes and ministers. His associations often proved short-lived, and his fortunes waxed and waned with those of his patrons. During this time, he wrote extensively on varied topics, including a medical book, The Canon of Medicine, which served as a reference work in Western Europe clear into the seventeenth century. He died at the age of fifty-eight, reportedly from a profligate life.

BASIC THOUGHT

A page from an early medieval copy of the Qur'an. According to Avicenna, uses symbolic or metaphorical language and only the multitude take it literally.

Using Aristotelian categories, Avicenna held that the study of "Being" is the proper study of metaphysics, and that this study applies in its fullest sense only to Allah. Only God has existence as a part of His nature. We could, for example, describe the characteristics of a given species without knowing whether such creatures actually exist; their existence is only possible, not necessary. But God's essence includes necessary existence. This means that whatever is a part of God's essence is also necessary, and so all of God's attributes are necessary. By implication, then, God did not freely choose to create the world, since a necessary attribute of being God is being Creator. And if being Creator is a necessary attribute of the eternal God, then the world must have existed eternally and everything in the world must be exactly as it is, by necessity.

Using Neoplatonic categories, Avicenna explained that God did not create the world directly but through a series of intermediate Intelligences. The last of these Intelligences, "Active Intelligence" (associated with the moon), "created" the physical world by putting form onto matter. Our individual souls are also emanations from Active Intelligence, and Active Intelligence "imprints" forms into our souls, giving us the rational principles that are the basis of our knowledge.

Although Avicenna used Aristotle's division of the soul into vegetative, animal, and rational parts, he held that the individual soul is separate from the body and that it is immortal--a view never explicitly stated by Aristotle. Because the soul can conceive of itself apart from a body, the soul must not be a material thing (thus anticipating Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" by six hundred years).

These three beliefs--that God acts out of necessity, that God emanates through intermediate Intelligences, and that the soul is immortal apart from the body--are all contrary to the teachings of the Qur'an. Avicenna dealt with this problem by explaining that the Qur'an uses symbolic or metaphorical language and that only the multitude took it literally.