Mulla Sadra

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Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi died near Basra on his seventh pilgrimage to Mecca, on foot, without reaching the city — Mulla Sadra to the seminaries that have argued over him ever since, Sadr al-Muta’allihin, the foremost of the theosists, to the school he founded. He had spent his life arguing that the same act of being which overflows from God to give the cosmos its degrees is the act by which a soul, intensifying from within, climbs back toward its source. A pilgrimage cut short on the road is, by that logic, not an interruption. It is the last increment of a motion that began before birth and does not end at death.

Sadra was born at Shiraz around 1571, into a prominent and wealthy family of southern Iran, the only son of a father who held high office and who endowed his education without stint. The world he entered was newly Shi’i: the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, had made Twelver Shi’ism the state religion of Iran, and under Shah Abbas I the capital at Isfahan had become one of the great cities of the age, its crown-endowed madrasas funding a revival of philosophy that the Mongol and Timurid centuries had narrowed into commentary on commentary. To Isfahan the young Sadra went.

Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the monumental heart of Safavid Isfahan, the city to which Sadra came to study. — Arad Mojtahedi, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Formation at the School of Isfahan

His teachers there were the two figures around whom the School of Isfahan — the Maktab-i Iṣfahān, modern scholarship’s name for that revival — coalesced. The first, Mir Damad, was a metaphysician who styled himself the Third Teacher after Aristotle and al-Farabi, and whose dense doctrine of atemporal origination tried to reconcile the philosophers’ eternal cosmos with the theologians’ created one. From him Sadra took the conviction that metaphysics could be reopened as live inquiry rather than glossed as inherited deposit; he would later count his teacher among the very figures he had to answer, for Mir Damad held essence the fundamental reality and Sadra came to argue the reverse. The second teacher, Shaykh Baha’i, was a polymath of the integrated type — jurist, traditionist, mathematician, astronomer, architect, poet — Shaykh al-Islam of Isfahan and emblem of a mind in which the rational and transmitted sciences sat without strain. The pairing set the program of the place: a curriculum, a city, and a method, not a banner the men themselves would have recognized.

The Shah Mosque, built under Shah Abbas I on Naqsh-e Jahan Square, emblem of the Safavid revival of philosophy and the arts that drew Sadra to Isfahan. — Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What Sadra absorbed at Isfahan was a triple inheritance, and his own work is the most consequential attempt to fuse it into one. From the Peripatetic tradition came the demonstrative apparatus of Avicenna — the syllogistic rigor, the distinction of essence from existence, the cosmology of intellects descending from the First — itself descended from the Hellenic falsafa that al-Farabi had naturalized into Arabic. From the philosophy of illumination of Suhrawardi came the doctrine that the highest knowledge is a knowledge by presence, al-‘ilm al-huduri, in which knower and known are not held apart by the veil of a concept, and the imaginal world, the ‘alam al-mithal, a real plane of subsistent forms standing between sense and intellect. From the Akbarian stream — Ibn Arabi read through his commentators, above all Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi and after him al-Qaysari and Jami — came the language of divine self-disclosure and the unity of being, the divine names as the structure of the cosmos, the heart as an organ of perception. And under all three ran the Shi’i scripture — the Qur’an, the vast corpus of sayings ascribed to the Imams — which the school read not as the rival of philosophy but as its deepest text.

The years of retreat

The fusion did not come easily, and not without cost. Sadra’s own preface to his masterwork records a long withdrawal in the face of hostile scholars — jurists of a literalist temper who suspected the mystical commitments of his teaching. Biographical tradition places this seclusion at the village of Kahak, near Qom, where for years he gave himself to ascetic discipline, retreat, and contemplative practice rather than to teaching. The retreat is no biographical ornament. By his account the doctrine that would organize everything — the primacy of existence — came to him there not as a conclusion reasoned out but as a thing unveiled, a seeing that argument afterward had to catch up with. It is the hinge of his whole method: that a proof never tasted remains hearsay about being, while a vision that cannot be argued answers to no one. Philosophy, on this account, must be both at once — burhan and ‘irfan, demonstration and unveiling, converging on a single truth and each disciplining the other. He emerged from Kahak to teach, first in his native Shiraz and at the madrasa endowed there by the governor Allahverdi Khan, building the body of students through whom the synthesis would reach later generations — among them Mulla Muhsin Fayd Kashani and Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji, the two who carried it forward.

The synthesis and its master-work

The synthesis took its name from the book that contains it: al-Hikma al-muta’aliya fi-l-asfar al-‘aqliyya al-arba’a — the Transcendent Wisdom concerning the Four Intellectual Journeys, known to its readers simply as the Four Journeys. The title is a manifesto in miniature. Al-hikma al-muta’aliya, transcendent theosophy, is wisdom both argued and lived; and the four journeys are the Sufi’s spiritual itinerary recast as a philosophical curriculum. The first journey runs from the creature to the Real — the ascent of the soul from the world to God, and the metaphysics of being it requires. The second is the journey in the Real, through the divine names and attributes. The third returns from the Real to creation, deriving the structure of the cosmos from its source. The fourth moves among creatures in the company of the Real — the domain of the soul, prophecy, and the last things. The order is not arbitrary. It is the architecture of the entire system, a map on which every doctrine has its place along an itinerary of descent and return.

Three doctrines carry that system, and they are best taken in the order in which they build on one another.

The primacy of existence

The first and most fundamental is the primacy of existence — aṣālat al-wujūd. The post-Avicennan schools had inherited a distinction between a thing’s essence, what it is, and its existence, that it is; and they divided over which of the two is fundamentally real and which a mere concept the mind abstracts. Suhrawardi, and Sadra’s own teacher Mir Damad, and by his own report the younger Sadra himself, had held essence the reality and existence a secondary notion. The mature Sadra reversed the verdict. What is fundamentally real, he argued, is the act of being itself — wujud, existence — concrete, particular, self-individuating; essences are so many limits the mind reads off it after the fact, the shapes that being takes, not things that being is added to. Existence is the principle of individuality, the source from which a thing’s whatness is abstracted, not the other way round.

From this follows the doctrine’s second face, the gradation of being — tashkīk al-wujūd. If existence is the one reality, it is not a uniform reality but a single thing realized at differing intensities, as the candle’s light and the sun’s are one nature unequally given. Being is a continuum graded by degree of perfection, descending from the absolute intensity of the Necessary Existent through the ranks of intellects and souls to the faint existence of prime matter. This is the architecture of metaphysics that Sadra inherits from the long family of Neoplatonic thought — the descent of all things from a first principle through ranked levels of a hierarchy, the emanation that reached Islamic philosophy through Avicenna and the Arabic Neoplatonism of the Theology of Aristotle. But where the strict Akbarian held that only the One truly exists and all else is illusion, the gradation of being preserves a real plurality: the many are not nothing, they are degrees of the same single act of being, each genuinely existing at its own pitch.

Substantial motion

The second great doctrine pushes change beneath the surface of things. Aristotle and Avicenna had allowed motion only in four of the categories — quality, quantity, place, and position — while holding substance itself, the underlying what of a thing, fixed beneath its changing accidents: the bronze endures while the statue is shaped. Sadra denied the exemption. Substance itself is in motion — al-ḥaraka al-jawhariyya, substantial motion — the very being of a thing renewed at every instant, the world quietly recreated moment by moment in a continuous welling-up of existence. Nothing in nature stands still at its root; the cosmos is not a set of fixed things undergoing surface change but a continuous flowing-forth, a sarayan al-wujud, the penetration of being through all that is.

This reconceives time itself. Time is not a container in which substances sit; it is the measure of substantial renewal, the dimension of a world perpetually becoming. And it reconceives the soul. For if substance climbs the scale of being from within, then the human soul is not a fixed essence dropped into a body but a trajectory — a thing that intensifies in existence across its life, beginning low on the gradient and ascending. Sadra’s celebrated formula compresses the whole psychology: the soul is jismaniyyat al-huduth, ruhaniyyat al-baqa’ — corporeal in its origination, spiritual in its survival. It arises as a bodily power, a faculty of the organism, and through substantial motion it intensifies by degrees, abstracting and gathering itself, until it becomes a substance subsistent in its own right, capable of outlasting the body that bore it. Knowing is itself part of this ascent: in the union of knower and known, ittihad al-‘aqil wa-l-ma’qul, the soul does not merely register its objects from across a gap but becomes, in the act of intellection, the very forms it knows — so that to understand more deeply and to be more fully are one motion. The seminarian who follows the proof of the primacy of existence is, on the school’s own account, intensifying in existence by the act of understanding it.

The imaginal afterlife

The third doctrine carries the soul past the body’s death. Sadra placed the whole drama of the last things — the matters of eschatology, al-ma’ad — in the imaginal world, the ‘alam al-mithal he took from Suhrawardi and made carry an immense weight. Between the world of pure intellect and the world of sensible bodies lies a real intermediate plane, al-barzakh, where forms have shape and figure and vividness but no gross matter — the ontological register of dreams, of mirror-images, of the forms seen in visionary ascent, real without being physical. It is here, Sadra argued, that resurrection occurs, and bodily resurrection at that: not the reassembly of the scattered atoms of the buried corpse, an idea he found incoherent, but the soul’s own production of a subtle imaginal body answering exactly to what that soul has become.

The afterlife, on this account, is not a place one is sent to but a condition one has grown into. Through a lifetime of substantial motion the soul has been forming its own faculties, intensifying toward intellect or sinking toward the appetites, and at death it unveils the body its inner life has shaped. Paradise and hell are the imaginal disclosure of a self already made: the Bridge, the Balance, the gardens and the fires that the Qur’an and hadith describe are real events in the barzakh, the soul meeting in concrete form what it has become. Fear and desire take on shape; the inner life stands revealed as a world. Because the body is the soul’s own, transmigration into another body — tanasukh — is impossible: a soul cannot wear a form it has not grown. The eschatology thus completes the metaphysics. The same gradient of being down which the cosmos overflows is the gradient up which the soul is carried, and the last things are simply where the journey of substantial motion arrives.

The Shi’i binding and the wariness of the jurists

Sadra worked inside a particular setting, and it shaped the thought. In the Shi’i frame the prophet receives revelation and the Imam preserves its inner sense, and the philosopher’s contemplative ascent is understood as continuous in kind with the Imam’s inherited knowledge, differing in degree. Sadra read his own metaphysics as the explication of scripture rather than its rival: he left an incomplete philosophical commentary on the Qur’an and an unfinished gloss on the great hadith collection Usul al-Kafi, presenting philosophy as the deep reading of revelation. This binding is part of why the work mattered where and when it did — and part of why some jurists regarded it warily. The traditionist scholars, and the Akhbari current that came to dominate the seminaries later in the seventeenth century, distrusted any path to religious knowledge that did not run through the transmitted reports of the Imams. The more legalist jurists distrusted the mystical commitments as a door to the Sufi orders that Safavid clerical policy increasingly opposed. Sadra answered both in polemical works — defending against the first the legitimacy of the rational and contemplative sciences, and against what he saw as the pretended or corrupt Sufism of his day a disciplined gnosis grounded in argument and law. He stood, characteristically, in the contested middle, and the contest over his legacy has returned in every later generation of the seminaries — the rationalist-mystical current against its traditionist and legalist critics, an intra-Islamic argument that neither side has conceded.

Reception, transmission, and the living school

Among early-modern philosophies the school Sadra founded is unusual in that it never closed. Through his students Fayd Kashani and Lahiji the transcendent theosophy became the backbone of advanced religious education in Iran. After a post-Safavid eclipse it was revived in the Qajar period — Mulla Ali Nuri’s marginal glosses accompany every printed text of the Four Journeys; Mulla Hadi Sabzavari’s versified textbook became the standard seminary introduction to Sadrian hikma for the better part of a century. In the twentieth century the philosopher Allamah Tabataba’i supervised the modern critical edition of the work and wrote the textbooks that reorganized the curriculum; his student Murtada Mutahhari carried it to a wider Persian public; and among those who studied and taught the tradition in that century was Ruhollah Khomeini, who lectured on Sadrian philosophy and ‘irfan before his political career. Sadrian metaphysics remains a living curriculum in the seminaries of Qom and Mashhad, disputed in classrooms where the Four Journeys is opened and the itinerary begun again.

The Chaharbagh madrasa in Isfahan, a great Safavid theological college, in an 1840 lithograph by the French traveler Eugène Flandin — the kind of seminary world in which Sadra’s philosophy was revived and taught in the Qajar period. — Eugène Flandin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Western readers received the work late, chiefly through the labor of Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, whose rendering “transcendent theosophy” — meant to preserve hikma’s sense of a wisdom both argued and lived — has no connection to the modern Theosophical Society. The earlier metaphysics of light on which Sadra drew had a powerful precedent within Sufism in al-Ghazali’s Mishkat al-Anwar, the Niche for Lights, whose exegesis of the Qur’anic Light-Verse climbs a hierarchy of lamps and lights to what the hosted translation calls the Light of lights — the kind of graded luminous reality that Sadra would absorb and rebuild on the foundation of existence rather than light.

Texts and scholarship

The Arabic critical edition of the Four Journeys, in nine volumes with the accumulated marginalia of the school, remains available chiefly through library holdings rather than open hosting, for copyright reasons. The standard free overview in English is Sajjad Rizvi’s entry “Mulla Sadra” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which sets the biography and the gradation of being within current manuscript and argument-history scholarship; Rizvi’s Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics (Routledge, 2009) and Mulla Sadra Shirazi: His Life and Works (Oxford, 2007) are the standard Anglophone monographs. A second free and substantial overview is Muhammad Kamal’s article “Mulla Sadra” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which concentrates on the ontology, epistemology, and psychology. The reconstruction of the system for Western readers began with Fazlur Rahman’s The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), still the most rigorous single account of the metaphysics in English, and S. H. Nasr’s Sadr al-Din Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy (Tehran, 1978), which set the Persian-school context. James Winston Morris’s The Wisdom of the Throne (Princeton, 1981) and William Chittick’s The Elixir of the Gnostics (Provo, 2003) translate central works with commentary; Ibrahim Kalin’s Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy (Oxford, 2010) treats the union of knower and known; and Muhammad U. Faruque’s Sculpting the Self (Michigan, 2021), available in open access, reads Sadra’s account of the soul alongside later Islamic and modern Western thought.

The whole system rests, in the end, on a single equation between knowing and being. To understand the primacy of existence is not to acquire a fact about the world but to intensify, by that very act, in the existence the doctrine describes; the proof followed to its end leaves the one who follows it higher on the gradient than it found them. Sadra built a metaphysics in which the cosmos is being in perpetual motion and the soul a fragment of that being learning to move upward — corporeal at its origin, gathering itself through a life of substantial renewal, and arriving at the imaginal threshold as exactly the body its inner motion has made. The pilgrim on the road to Mecca was, on his own teaching, never standing still: existence does not pause, and the soul that has spent itself ascending toward God is, at the moment the road ends, precisely where its motion has carried it.

→ In the library: Gairdner — al-Ghazālī's Mishkāt al-Anwār (The Niche for Lights, 1924)

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