Soul (nafs) in Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi's Thought

Abstract

The present paper intends to clarify some aspects of the idea of soul (nafs) of Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1640), commonly known as Mulla Sadra. The discussion is focused on the Elixir of the Gnostics concerning the Gnosis of the Path of the Truth and certainty (Iksir al-'arifin fi ma'rifah tariq al-haqq wa al-yagin).
In his understanding of the soul, its original abode is in the divine world of unity and comprehensiveness. Due to the sin of Adam and Eve or to a natural process, the soul falls in this material world, in which it is imprisoned. With the help of God's prophets and their books it wakes up from the slumber of nature (tabi'ah) and starts returning to its original state (al-halah al-asliyah), which is finally realised at the stage of pure intelligence. The return is the process of the soul's purification from matter and simplification through the activity of its intellective faculty as a spark of the divine light in man.
The soul's movement of ascent from matter to the pure intelligence is well explained by Mulla Sadra's original theory of the substantial movement (al-harakah al-jawhariyah), which he builds on Ibn 'Arabi's basic insight of the Oneness of Being (wahdah al-wujud). Thanks to this theory, the soul's ascent is directly based on the perpetual flux of Being.