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the stream divides
[ 83 ]
Demiurge, imposing form on matter in the creation of the phenomenal world. This
view was incompatible with Muslim theology, which denied that God shared creative
power with any other being.
In the last half of the twelfth century, as new translations of Aristotle were
introduced to Latin philosophers, along with them came translations of the
works of several Arabic commentators on Aristotle, the most important of
which were Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroës (Ibn Rushd). Although Avicenna
(980-1037) influenced Averroës (1126-1198), as well as Latin thought, Averroës’
influence was almost exclusively on Jewish and Latin Christian philosophers.
Ironically, as a result of religious and political developments in Arab countries,
Arab Aristotelianism ceased to be a vital force in the Islamic world at the very
time that it began to become a vital force in the Latin Christian West.
In Avicenna’s view, the human soul and body are separate substances. Person-
ality resides in the soul, which is neither mixed with the body nor dependent on
it nor perishes with it. Rather, the soul, which has vegetative and sensitive, as
well as rational powers, animates the body and rules it. However, there are no
individual souls until a particular body is animated. Once this happens the soul
is then bound to that particular body until bodily death. Two souls never share
the same body nor two bodies the same soul. Each soul uses its own unique body
for self-actualization, after which it does not need a body to persist.
An individual soul comes into existence because certain matter is especially apt
to be animated by soul and used as its “instrument.” To perfect itself through attain-
ing theoretical knowledge, an individual soul must completely control the animal
passions. Initially, the soul is merely a pure potentiality analogous to prime matter,
ready for the reception of intelligibles. Subsequently, it acquires positive disposi-
tions. Its acquisition of theoretical knowledge consists in its reception, in various
stages, of intelligibles from the agent intellect, or Giver of Forms, which is the Intel-
ligence of the tenth and lowest celestial sphere. Some of these intelligibles are self-
evident truths, which the soul receives independently of sensation, memory, or
imagination, faculties that Avicenna assigns to particular regions of the body.
In Avicenna’s view, when the body dies the soul continues to exist eternally.
There is no bodily resurrection. Like his predecessors al-Kindi and al-Farabi, he
saw the agent intellect as an external intelligence that participates in human minds,
enabling them to function. Unlike his predecessors, he claimed that the knowl-
edge the individual human mind acquires through this activity becomes its per-
sonal intellectual possession, which it then takes with it into the next life. This is
how the soul leaves body behind without obliterating its personal individuality.
After bodily death, those souls that when animating bodies have led pure lives and
actualized their potentialities enter into eternal bliss, contemplating the celestial
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