AVICENNA (IBN SĪNĀ, ABŪ ‘ALĪAL-ḤUSAYN)

Arab physician, scholar, and philosopher, one of the greatest names in Arabian-Iranian Muslim culture; b. Afshana, near Bukhārā, in 370 of the hijra (a.d. 980); d. Hamadhān, 428 Hijra (a.d. 1037).

Life. Avicenna wrote an autobiography, completed by his pupil and secretary Jūzajāni after his death. He writes that he had an astonishing precociousness. Having surpassed all his teachers in the study of the Islamic religious sciences, logic, geometry, and astronomy, he pursued his work alone, notably in medicine and philosophy. Among the Arabian translations of Greek science, he encountered the works of Aristotle. After reading the Metaphysics 40 times without understanding it, he found help in the Arabian commentary of his predecessor alfarabi. For this help he gave thanks at the mosque and distributed generous alms among the poor.

He was not yet 20 years old when he healed the Sultan of Bukhārā, who, through gratitude, invited him to use his rich library. Within a few years, Avicenna acquired as complete a culture as possible for that time. He started to write on his own when he was about 21. An orphan and master of his fortune at 22, he led an agitated and dangerous life. The favorite and vizier (prime minister) of the Emir of Hamadhān, then of the Emir of Ispahān, he spent some time in prison. While he was engaged in military expeditions under the latter emir, his books were pillaged, and some of his MSS disappeared. In the course of such an expedition, an illness, long before contracted as a result of "excesses of every sort," became worse. He died after freeing his slaves, distributing his goods among the poor, and reciting the entire Qur’ān.

Works. Avicenna's bibliography, thoroughly examined by G. C. Anawati (in Arabic) and Yahra Mahdavi (in Persian), is immense. His great medical treatise is Qānūn fi l-Ṭibb. His best known philosophical writings are the Summa of the Shifā’ (Healing) and the compendium of the Najāt (Salvation). He left several small "treatises" (rasā’;’il ) exhibiting occasional gnostic characteristics. One of the treatises, al-Risāla al-aḍḥawiyya, teaches that the bodily resurrection professed in the Muslim faith has only symbolic value. His last great work, al-Ishārāt wa l-tanbīhāt (Directives and Remarks), goes beyond the Aristotelian structures of the Shifā’. The works of the last part of his life refer to an Oriental Philosophy (or Wisdom), al-Ḥikma almashriqiyya, left incomplete (or lost). What remains of this work are his logic and certain chapters included in the Ishārāt, as well as preliminary small treatises from other sources. Another work, the Insāf, refuted the Baghdad commentators on Aristotle; only a rough draft of this work survived a pillage. Then there are three commentaries extant only in rough drafts, namely, on Book V of the Metaphysics, the De anima, and especially the spurious Theology of Aristotle; the latter, comprising extracts from the Enneads of Plotinus, for many centuries was falsely attributed to the Stagirite.

Teaching. Avicenna is representative of the so-called school of the falāsifa (philosophers), namely, Muslim Hellenistic philosophers who were nourished with the thought of Plato and Aristotle (the latter called "the Prime Teacher") and wrote in Arabic and Persian. Others of this school are al-kindī, Alfarabi, avempace, averroËs, and Abū-Bakr Ibn-Tufail. Official islam took a stand against the falāsifa in the East during the second half of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th. algazel, an orthodox thinker—deemed an Aristotelian because of a misinterpretation of the Latin Middle Ages— tried to refute Alfarabi and Avicenna in his famous Tahāfut al-falāsifa (The Collapse of the Philosophers). A century later, Averroës gave his answer in his Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (The Collapse of the Collapse), where he took his great predecessor to task and made certain "errors" of Avicenna responsible for Algazel's criticisms. Despite such explanations, however, the falāsifa never fully recovered from the attacks of the Muslims, and the teaching of the great mosques manifests a solid distrust toward them to this day.

Religion and Philosophy. Avicenna presents himself as a believing Muslim, but he places his philosophy and the "revealed law" (shar' ) expressed in the Qur’ān on the same level. He thought that he succeeded in reconciling the two because of his theory about prophetism, which was in turn dependent upon his theory of knowledge. All the falāsifa held that the human spirit rises to intellectual knowledge only by illumination received from a single, separated Agent Intellect. For Avicenna, philosophy, like prophecy, receives illumination from the universal Intellect, the summation of separated Intellects. Yet prophecy alone receives, in its imaginative power, added lights from the Souls of the Heavenly Bodies, and these lights enable it to adapt purely intelligible truths to the masses, under a veil of symbols and allegories. This explains how religious beliefs are formed. Moreover, this influx of the heavenly Souls enables prophecy to know and teach religious practices that most aptly guarantee the fidelity of hearts. On the basis of these postulates, the "philosopher" does not hesitate to "interpret" the scriptural texts in accord with his own view of the world.

Because his era was completely imbued with influences of Shī’ite Islam and esoteric and gnostic tendencies and there was no living teaching authority, one can conclude that Avicenna was sincere in claiming his "accord" between religion and philosophy. Yet one can also understand why Algazel later stated that such notorious theses as those about the temporal eternity of the created world, God's ignorance about the singular as such, and the allegorical interpretation anent bodily resurrection are "tarnished with impiety."

Being and Emanation. Avicenna's highly constructed view of the world is hardly consonant with the creationism and divine voluntarism of the Qur’ān. His cosmogony is related with the conceptions of time—the arranged tiers of eight or ten heavenly spheres, in successive triads of separated Intellects, Souls, and Heavenly Bodies, terminating in the Active Intellect of the sublunary world, in the multiplicity of individuated human souls, each having a passive intellect, and in the "world of generation and corruption." In this system, creation seems to be a necessary and voluntary emanation from the First Being, a necessary and voluntary participation of being and light, traversed by a returning movement of natural, necessitated love of the part for the Whole. Thus a universal determinism corresponds to the necessary participation; in Avicenna's universe, there is no place for existential contingency. Yet the notion of contingency is found on the level of essence, since Avicenna's "transunivocity" of being does not destroy a certain inferior analogy between the First Being and "possible" beings, in which not only is the essence really distinct from the existence, but the existence is, in some way, an accident of the essence. Finally, according to him, the human soul is the "form" of its body, but the body remains a mere instrument of the soul; a "form of corporeity" is joined with the soul, the subsistent form. Freed from the body through death, the soul "returns" to the world of the intelligibles to which it naturally belongs.

These ideas are based on notions contained in the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus, reexamined and coordinated according to Avicenna's own dialectic. In general, Avicenna's thought is more Plotinian than Aristotelian. Abetted by influences and myths from ancient Iran, his thought is decisively Plotinian in his aforementioned Oriental Philosophy (or Wisdom).

Influence. The most illustrious aspect of Avicenna's great and immediate renown is probably a result of his studies in chemistry, astronomy, and medicine. But his philosophical work was the most durable and had a profound influence even on Muslim thought, especially in Shiïte Islam. His adversaries in Sunnite Islam attacked it, but they became imbued with it, and many Islam "theologians" followed them. Later sufism (Muslim mysticism) derived its great theses on the monism of being from him. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Latin translations were made of the Shifā’ (Lat. Sufficientia ), the Qānūn fi l-Ṭibb (Lat. Canon ), and various commentaries or treatises, in Spain and Italy. Avicenna's thought made a deep impression on certain currents in medieval Christian scholasticism. thomas aquinas made use of Avicenna's philosophical structures, even though he criticized them. But possibly the most profound influence of Avicenna in the West was on John duns scotus.

See Also: arabian philosophy; emanationism; forms, unicity and plurality of.

Bibliography: Eng. selections in r. lerner and m. mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Glencoe, Ill. 1963). Avicenna's Psychology, tr. and ed. f. rahman (New York 1952). É. h. gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York 1955). a. m. goichon, Enciclopedia filosofica (Venice-Rome 1957) 1:525–535; La Philosophie d'Avicenne et son influence en Europe médiévale (2d ed. Paris 1951). m. m. anawati, Mu‘ allafāt Ibn Sīnā (Cairo 1950); "La Tradition manuscrite orientale de l'oeuvre d'Avicenne," Revue thomiste, 51 (Paris 1951) 407–440. y. mahdavi, Bibliographie d'Ibn Sina (Tehran 1954). l. gardet, La Pensée religieuse d'Avicenne (Ibn Sīnā ) (Paris 1951). m. cruz hernÁndez, La metafisica de Avicenna (Granada 1949). b. h. zedler, "Saint Thomas and Avicenna in the 'De potentia Dei,' Traditio 6 (1948) 105–159.

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