The spirit and the knowledge of it

Decorum is sweeter than what is eaten and what is bedded. So if for a man noble of soul (nafs) there arises a conflict between sensory pleasure joined with abasement and lowness, and sensory pain joined with honour, he gives preference to the pain over the pleasure; for the great-souled man counts hunger and thirst small when the water of his face is to be preserved, and holds death in contempt when a pleasure is in prospect. It is clear, then, that the inward pleasures prevail over the sensory pleasures, and that not only in the rational being (al-ʻāqil) but in the brute animals too: among hunting dogs there are those that take prey while hungry and then hold it for their master, and may even carry it to him; and a suckling animal may catch something and push it to its young and endure hunger, and may cast itself into destruction in defence of its young. So if the inward pleasures are greater than the outward, even when they are not intellectual, what will you say of the intellectual ones? Second: if happiness were to be found only in eating, drinking and intercourse, the donkey would be happier in its state than the angels brought near — and no one says that but a donkey. End.

Perhaps in our repeating the word spirit (rūḥ), and in our calling for its purification and for giving it precedence over its corpse, there is something to rouse you to know it and to grasp its reality. So let us relate to you of the tidings of the spirit what will cool your breast with the coolness of disclosure and clarification — even though grasping its reality is a thing not within the power of mortals, yet has not reached the degree of the impossible, as some have claimed. They said that the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, departed from this world without knowing the matter of the spirit, and they adduced His words, exalted be He, ( They ask you about the spirit; say: the spirit is of my Lord's affair ). We say that the verse does not indicate the impossibility of knowing it, nor a demand that one not delve into it; for the noble verse came down in answer to the question of the Jews, when they asked the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, having said among themselves: if he does not answer about the spirit, then he is a prophet. The Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, did not answer about it because God, exalted be He, did not give him leave; and his leaving the answer was only to confirm what stood in their books — that is, what they had said — not because it is impossible to delve into it on account of the impossibility of knowing it; and because the question about it was a question meant to confound and to entrap, since ‘spirit’ is a term shared among the human spirit, Jibrīl, another angel called by that name, a class of the angels, the Qurʼān, and ʻĪsā ibn Maryam. Had he answered about one of them, they would have said, out of obstinacy, that this was not what they meant. So the answer came in general terms, just as they had asked in general terms. (1)

As for the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace — and this is the position relied upon — he did not depart from this world until God had acquainted him with what has been and with what shall be, of that which suits the intellects of mortals.

And he has erred who said, by way of expounding the words (2) of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī in his saying « whoever knows his soul knows his Lord »: you do not know your own soul, so do not aspire to know the inmost reality of your Lord — for he has hung one impossibility upon another.

I say, apropos of the impossibility of knowing the spirit: ( As for the divine Essence, which is the principle of origination and of bringing into being, many of the learned have been thrown into confusion over it, and their views have differed concerning its apprehension. One holds it impossible (1), another holds it admissible — but he did not light upon the point that in the vision of Him in the abiding abode there is a kind of apprehension. So do not believe that God, exalted be His station, did not bar you from knowing Him, from grasping the whole of His reality and from encompassing the inmost reality of His Essence, for anything in your own want of capacity; for the disposing agent — that is, the Lordship bound up with the nurture of things — must needs realize its effect so long as the thing lies within the compass of possibility. Indeed, were it to turn thus, the matter would become equal, Lord and lorded-over alike. Understand, then, the secret of the constriction laid upon the circle of the intellect (ʻaql) against its passing beyond that circle: the wisdom, therefore, lies in the veils, not in the grasping. End.

al-Dihlawī said in his book Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bālighah, page 18: God, exalted be He, said ( They ask you about the spirit ) — the verse; and the reading of al-Aʻmash, on the transmission of Ibn Masʻūd, is ( and they have been given but little knowledge ) (2). From this it is known that the address is to the Jews and to the questioners, and that the verse is not an explicit text to the effect that no one of the community shown mercy knows the reality of the spirit, as is supposed. Nor is everything upon which the Law has kept silence a thing that cannot be known at all; rather it often keeps silence about a thing because knowledge of it is subtle, such as the mass of the community is not fit to handle, even if it is possible for some of them.

Know that the first thing apprehended of the spirit's reality is that it is the principle of life in the animal, that the animal is alive by the breathing of the spirit into it and dead by its parting from it. Then, if one looks closely in contemplation, it becomes clear to him that in the body there is a subtle vapour, generated in the heart from the finest part of the humours, which carries the sensitive, the motive and the nutrition-governing faculties, and upon which the rulings of medicine operate; and experience discloses that each of the states of this vapour — its fineness and its thickness, its clarity and its turbidity — has a particular effect upon the faculties and upon the acts that gush forth, that is, that branch off, from those faculties; and that the blight which befalls any organ, and which befalls the generation of the vapour proper to it, corrupts this vapour and disorders its acts; its coming-to-be entails life, and its breaking up, death. This, then, is the spirit at first consideration, and the lowest stratum of the spirit upon close consideration; its likeness in the body is the likeness of rose-water in the rose and of fire in charcoal. Then, if he looks closely again, it becomes plain to him that this spirit is a mount for the true spirit and the matter for its attachment (taʻalluq). For we see the child grow up and grow grey, and the humours of his body — and the spirit generated from those humours — change more than a thousand times; now he is small and now large, now dark and now fair, now ignorant and now knowing, and so on through the shifting attributes, while the person is that very same person. And if some of this be disputed, we say: let us posit those changes while the child is that same child; or we say that we do not decisively affirm that those attributes persist in their state, yet we do decisively affirm that he persists — so he is not perishing. That by which he is himself, then, is neither this spirit, nor this body, nor these individuating marks that are known and seen at first glance. Rather the spirit is in truth a singular reality and a luminous point whose mode is too exalted for the mode of these changing, mutually differing modes, some of which are substances and some accidents; and it is with the small as it is with the great, and with the dark as with the fair, and so on through the opposites. It has a particular attachment to the airy spirit first and to the body second, inasmuch as the body is the mount of the breath-soul (nasamah); and it is an aperture from the world of holiness, through which there descends upon the breath-soul everything for which it has been made ready. The changing matters, then, take their change from the earthly predispositions, after the manner of the sun's heat, which whitens the cloth and blackens the fuller. It has been established for us by sound immediate experience that death is the disjoining of the breath-soul from the body through the body's loss of the predisposition to generate it — the disjoining of the holy spirit from the breath-soul. And when the breath-soul dissolves in wasting diseases, it is required in God's wisdom that something of the breath-soul remain, in the measure by which the linkage of the divine spirit with it holds good; just as, when you suck the air out of a flask and the air rarefies until it reaches a limit beyond which there is no further rarefying, you can no longer suck, or else the flask gives way — and that is due to nothing but a secret arising from the nature of air. Just so there is a secret in the breath-soul, and a limit set for it beyond which the matter does not pass. So when a man dies, the breath-soul has another genesis, and the effusion of the divine spirit brings to be in it a power, in what remains of the common sense (al-ḥiss al-mushtarak), sufficient to do the office of hearing, sight and speech, by a number from the world of images (ʻālam al-mithāl), in place of the faculty intermediate between the immaterial and the sensible that is diffused through the spheres as one single thing. And it may be that the breath-soul is then made ready for a luminous or a dark garment, a number of the world of images; and from there the marvels of the world of the interworld (barzakh) are generated. Then, when the trumpet is blown, a general effusion comes from the Fashioner of forms, after the manner of the effusion that came from Him at the beginning of creation, when the spirits were breathed into the bodies and the world of generated beings was founded; and the effusion of the divine spirit requires that it put on a corporeal garment, or a garment between the imaginal and the corporeal, so that all which the truthful and trusted one announced is realized. And since the breath-soul is an interworld mediating between the divine spirit and the earthly body, it must have a face turned toward this and a face turned toward that: the face inclining toward holiness and angelic nature, and the face inclining toward the earth, which is the one inclining toward bestiality. Let nothing of the reality of the spirit be confined to these premises, that you should rest secure in this science and derive the derivations upon them, and then hold it impossible that the veil be lifted in a science higher than this science. And God knows best.

And let us add to your knowledge beyond what has gone before — perhaps in what follows there is what will help you with what preceded. We shall set out for you what al-Ālūsī and others established, quoting from the eminent scholars.

The spirit (1), with the physicians, is a subtle vaporous body formed from the subtlety of the humours and their vaporousness, as the humours are formed from their density; and it is the bearer of the three faculties. In this respect it divides into three parts: animal spirit, psychic spirit and natural spirit. Ibn al-ʻArabī said that they differed over the soul and the spirit: some said the two are one thing, others that they are distinct; and the soul is sometimes expressed by ‘spirit’ and the reverse — and this is the truth. It is said that the soul is a subtle body, subtle as the air, dark and unpurified, spread through the parts of the body like butter in milk and oil in the walnut and the almond — meaning that the soul's permeation of the body is like the permeation of butter in milk. And it is said that the spirit is a spiritual light, an instrument for the soul, as the secret (sirr) is also an instrument for it; for life in the body persists only on condition of the spirit's presence in the soul. The generality are agreed that the spirit is a meaning by which the body lives. And it is said that the soul is a dense body, the spirit within it a subtle body, and the intellect within it a luminous substance.

And in the Kulliyyāt of Abū al-Baqāʼ: al-rūḥ, with u-vowelling, is the breath passing to and fro in the body's channels and its openings; it is a name for the soul, and a name also for the part by which life comes about, and the drawing of benefits and the warding off of harms. The animal spirit is a subtle body whose source is the cavity of the corporeal heart, and it spreads by way of the vessels to the remaining parts of the body. As for the human spirit, none knows its inmost reality but God, exalted be He. The doctrine of the people of the Sunnah and the community is that the spirit and the intellect are among the concrete entities and are not two accidents, as the Muʻtazilah and others held; and that they admit of increase in fair attributes and in foul, as the seeing eye admits of a film and of inflammation, and the sun of eclipse. It is for this reason that the spirit is described now as inciting to evil (ammārah bi-al-sūʼ) and now as at peace (muṭmaʼinnah).

God has joined the spirit and the animal soul: the spirit stands in the place of the husband and the animal soul in the place of the wife, and He set between them a mutual love. So as long as it is in the body, the body is alive and awake; and when it parts from it entirely, yet its attachment remains, the body is asleep; and when it parts from it entirely, the body is dead.

The human being (1) is the spirit that is in the heart. It is said that it is fiery parts mingled with the cardiac and cerebral spirits, which are called the innate heat; and it is said that it is the blood coursing in the body; and it was said, and said, to the tune of a thousand sayings. What the exacting scholars rely upon is two positions. The first is that the human being is a luminous, upper, living, self-moving body, differing in essence from this sensible body, permeating it as water permeates the rose, and oil the olive, and fire the charcoal; it admits of no dissolution, alteration, dispersion or rending; it confers on the sensible body life and life's attendants so long as the body is fit to receive the effusion, nothing having occurred to obstruct the permeation, such as thick humours — and whenever that occurs, death occurs, through the severing of the permeation. And the spirit is that body. The Imām approved of it and said: it is a strong doctrine and a noble position, deserving reflection, for it accords closely with what has come down in the divine books concerning the states of life and death. And Ibn al-Qayyim said in Kitāb al-Rūḥ that it is the correct view and that none other holds; the evidence of the Book and the Sunnah, the consensus of the Companions, and the proofs of reason and of innate disposition (fiṭrah) support it — and he adduced a hundred and five proofs; let them be consulted. Until he says, at no. 581: people have differed over the spirit and the soul, whether they are one thing or two things. Ibn Zayd related from most of the scholars that they are one thing, for it has been established as sound in the reports that each of the two is applied to the other. al-Bazzār transmitted with a sound chain from Abū Hurayrah that when death descends upon the believer and he beholds what he beholds, he wishes that his soul might go forth, and God, exalted be He, loves to meet him; and that the believer's spirit ascends to heaven, whereupon the spirits of the believers come to him and ask him for news of his acquaintances among the people of this world — the ḥadīth. This is plain in the matter.

Ibn Ḥabīb said they are two things: the spirit is the breath (nafas) passing to and fro in the human being, while the soul is something other than that, having two hands and two feet, a head and two eyes; it is that which takes pleasure and feels pain, which rejoices and grieves; and it is that which is taken in sleep, and goes out and roams and sees the dream-vision, while the body remains without it, with the spirit alone, taking no pleasure and feeling no joy until it returns. And he argued from His words ( God takes the souls at their death ). It is related from another that the soul is of human nature (nāsūtiyyah) and the spirit of divine nature (lāhūtiyyah). He mentioned that the people of tradition hold to their distinctness; that the soul's subsistence is by the spirit; that the soul is the servant's form, and that caprice, appetite and affliction are kneaded into it; and that there is no enemy more hostile to the son of Adam than his own soul, which wants nothing but this world and loves nothing but it, while the spirit calls to the hereafter and gives it preference. Until he says: the soul is the root in the human being, and when it is burnished by discipline (riyāḍah) and by the kinds of remembrance and thought, it becomes spirit, and then rises until it becomes a secret among the secrets of God. Until he says, at no. 583:

People have differed over the spirit, whether it is created before the body, or after it, or with it. Ibn Ḥazm claimed that it is in an interworld which is the cutting-off point of the elements; and when a body is made ready for something, it descends to it; and that it returns to that interworld after death. For this there is no evidence from Book or Sunnah. Some of them argued for it from the report ( God created the spirits two thousand years before the bodies ), and Ibn al-Qayyim followed it up with the remark that its chain is not sound. Until he says: the sound position, which Law and reason support, is that it is created together with the bodies, and that the angel breathes the spirit — that is, brings it to be by the breathing — into the body when four months have passed over the sperm-drop and it has entered upon the fifth.

Here there is a knot: namely, that when the spirit clothes itself in the body decreed for it and settles in it, after its shrinking back and its aversion, it grows familiar with it, comes to love remaining in it, and comes to loathe going out of it. To this Ibn Sīnā alludes in his celebrated ʻayniyyah:

It descended to you from the loftiest station — a dove possessed of pride and of unapproachableness Veiled from every beholder's eye — yet she it is who journeyed unveiled and wore no veil She came to you unwillingly, and it may be — she loathed your parting, and she is one given to anguish

( Until he says, at its end: )

If God sent her down for a wisdom — folded away from the singular, keen, noble mind then her descent is beyond doubt a fixed necessity — that she might come to hear what she had not heard and return knowing every hidden thing — in the two worlds, her rent unpatched She it is whose road time cut short — until she set at other than her rising-place As though she were lightning that flashed over the sanctuary — then folded away as though it had never gleamed Be gracious with the return of an answer to what I search out in it — for the fire of knowledge is a radiant blaze

And for the untying of this knot, together with the cause of man's aversion to death — that is, to the undoing of the frame, though she abides — we shall lay out for you the wording of al-Asfār; and God undertakes your guidance.

A knot and its untying (1)

If the death of the body in this second genesis is the life of the soul in the abiding genesis; and if the soul has an innate orientation toward passing from this world over to the world of the hereafter, and an essential, substantial motion toward nearness to God, exalted be He, toward entry into the world of spirits and toward being veiled from the abode of darknesses and the corporeal veils — for embodiment is the very veil, and darkness, and ignorance — then what is the cause of souls' aversion and their shying away from death and from the casting off of the body, in which lies the soul's stripping off of the body's weight and density, its deliverance from confinement, and its release from the prison and the prison's fetter? We say: in the human souls' aversion to bodily death there are two things, an efficient and a final. As for the efficient cause, it is that the soul's first genesis is this natural, bodily genesis, and this has the upper hand over souls so long as they are joined to the body and dispose of it; so the rulings of bodily nature run upon the soul, and there affects it everything that affects the substantial sense and the natural animal by way of the bodily agreeables and repugnants. For this reason it suffers pain and harm from the sundering of continuity, from burning by fire and the like — not inasmuch as souls are rational substances and intellectual essences, but inasmuch as they are sensitive substances and faculties of attachment. So its shying from bodily death and its aversion are only on account of a love proceeding from the natural genesis; and these vary according to the intensity of immersion in the body and of absorption in it. Though we do not concede that there is aversion in the case of the natural death that comes at the end of the natural lifespans, as against terms cut short by sudden seizure. As for what the complete intellect requires, and the strength of the inward, and the prevailing of the light of faith in God and in the Last Day, and the sovereignty of the dominion — that is love of worldly death, and yearning for God and for the neighbourhood of those He brings near and of His dominion, and a shying away from the life of this world, from the company of darknesses and the neighbourhood of hurtful things. The knower shies from the company of this world's animals as a living man shies from being coupled with the dead and the denizens of the graves. As for the final cause and the wisdom in the aversion to death, it is the soul's safeguarding of the body, which stands in the place of the mount upon the road of the hereafter, and its protection of it from the blights that befall, so that the predispositions and the perfections of knowledge may be possible for it until it attains its possible perfection. So too the will of God, exalted be He, attached itself to the origination of pain and of the sensation of it in the instincts of the animals.

— Notes —

[13] (1) From al-Bannānī on Jamʻ al-Jawāmiʻ, volume two.

[13] (2) It has become widely current among authors, the masters of glosses, and the Sufis that it is a ḥadīth; but it is not a ḥadīth. It is rather from the words of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, as in al-Durar al-Muntatharah of al-Suyūṭī and the Fatāwā of Ibn Ḥajar.

[14] (1) The truth is impossibility, in view of what the outward sense of the Book bears witness to, and the words of the Infallible, who is the most knowing of people concerning God and His attributes.

[14] (2) This is an anomalous transmission, as al-Qasṭallānī pointed out in his commentary on al-Bukhārī, saying that he found it only in the books of the commentaries. End, abridged.

[17] (1) Quoted from the Dāʼirat al-Maʻārif of al-Bustānī, in summary.

[19] (1) From volume 4, no. 583, summarized from al-Ālūsī.

[22] (1) Summarized from the book al-Asfār al-Arbaʻah of Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, in the art of rational philosophy and of the special affirmation of unity mingled with the Sufism of the masters of the art and its men. Take to it, then — and then, wonder upon wonder in the investigations and the subtleties.