The Elixir of the Gnostics

<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg" width="736" height="669" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p>There is a sentence that crossed every threshold the Islamic intellectual tradition ever built. As above, so below. As below, so above. It enters Arabic from Greek in the eighth century, attributed to a figure the translators call Hermes the Thrice-Greatest. It passes from the alchemists to the Sufis. It is cited by Jabir ibn Hayyan in his alchemical corpus. It threads through al-Ghazali, through Ibn Arabi, through the Persian poets. And it arrives, nearly a thousand years after it first entered Arabic, in a short treatise written by a man who had been in retreat for fifteen years in a village outside Qom. The treatise is called <em>Iksir al-’Arifin</em>. The Elixir of the Gnostics. The author was Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi, whom the tradition calls Mulla Sadra.</p><p>He wrote it after he had stopped writing for the court. He had been the senior philosophy student of his generation in Safavid Isfahan, trained under Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha’i, and he had taught at the Khan Madrasa under the patronage of Shah Abbas. He had also drawn the attention of the Akhbari ulama — the legalist clerics who could not abide his readings of Ibn Arabi, his treatment of the Light Verse, his refusal to confine philosophy to the rationalist boundaries Shi’i orthodoxy had inherited from Avicenna. Pressure mounted. The sources differ on the exact year. At some point Sadra left Isfahan and walked north into the mountains. He settled in Kahak, a small village about thirty kilometers from Qom. He stayed for roughly fifteen years.</p><div><div><div><p>Spiritualrelief's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div><p>The biographical sources for this period are thin. What is known is that he fasted, kept vigil, made dhikr, and wrote nothing. When he came back, he came back as a different writer. The <em>Asfar</em>, his nine-volume work on the four spiritual journeys of the intellect, dates from after Kahak. So does the <em>Mafatih al-Ghayb</em>, his Qur’anic hermeneutics. So does <em>Iksir al-’Arifin</em>, which he addressed to seekers rather than to the seminary.</p><p>He took the framework for the <em>Iksir</em> from a Persian writer four centuries dead. Baba Afdal Kashani — Afdal al-Din — was a thirteenth-century gnostic from the Maragha region whose <em>Jawidan-nama</em>, the <em>Book of the Everlasting</em>, had circulated in small Sufi-philosophical circles in Iran and almost nowhere else. Sadra took its four-part architecture, removed roughly forty percent of the original, expanded the remainder by half its length again, and rendered the whole into Arabic. Where Kashani had written in the Persian style of the early Mongol period, Sadra wrote in the Arabic style of late Safavid philosophy. Where Kashani had cited the Qur’an sparingly, Sadra wove some two hundred Qur’anic citations through eighty-seven pages.</p><p>He gave the new work a title that placed it in a different lineage altogether.</p><blockquote><p>The Elixir of the Gnostics.</p></blockquote><p>The lineage was alchemy. The Greek word for the philosopher’s stone in Latinate dress became the Arabic <em>al-iksir</em> — the substance that completes the transmutation. Jabir ibn Hayyan, the eighth-century Shi’i alchemist whose corpus shaped every alchemical writer who came after him, had taught that the greatest elixir was not extracted from metals. The greatest elixir, <em>al-iksir al-akbar</em>, was the perfected human. <em>Al-insan al-kamil</em>. The work was on the self.</p><p>Five hundred years later, al-Ghazali wrote <em>Kimya-yi Sa’adat</em>, <em>The Alchemy of Happiness</em>, in Persian for ordinary readers, after his own eleven-year retreat. He used the alchemy metaphor without apology. The heart is iron; the disciplines are abrasives; the polished heart reflects the divine light. <em>The aim of moral discipline</em>, Ghazali wrote, <em>is to purify the heart from the rust of passion and resentment till like a clear mirror, it reflects the light of God</em>.</p><p>Five centuries after Ghazali, Sadra returned to the metaphor in Arabic. He titled his text <em>The Elixir of the Gnostics</em>. Then he proceeded for eighty-seven pages without ever mentioning alchemy again. He did not need to. The text was performing what the title named.</p><div><hr></div><h2>What Is Being Worked</h2><p>The <em>Iksir</em> opens with the question of knowledge. Five chapters on what knowing actually is, divided into a hierarchy that Sadra inherits from the Persian philosophical tradition and reworks for his own purposes. There is the science of words. There is the science of practices. There is the science of thoughts. And there is the science of the afterworld.</p><p>The first three are real. Sadra is no enemy of grammar, jurisprudence, or theology. He had taught grammar at the Khan Madrasa. He had written on logic. The science of words helps the soul communicate. The science of practices helps the soul live correctly in a community. The science of thoughts helps the soul reason. All three are useful. None of them transforms the soul.</p><p>The science of the afterworld does.</p><p>What Sadra means by the afterworld is not what the legalist tradition meant. The legalists meant the place of reward and punishment, the resurrection at the end of time, the books opened and the deeds weighed. Sadra meant something else. The afterworld is the world the soul is already constructing for itself with every act of attention. The afterworld is the place the soul will subsist in when the body fails, and that place is being made now, by what the soul knows.</p><p>This is where Sadra reaches back to his teacher’s teacher, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, who had distinguished two kinds of knowledge in twelfth-century Aleppo before being executed at the age of thirty-eight for the views in his <em>Hikmat al-Ishraq</em>. Suhrawardi called the first kind <em>al-’ilm al-husuli</em> — acquired knowledge, the kind that arrives by mediation, through concepts, through the senses, through inference. He called the second <em>al-’ilm al-huduri</em> — presential knowledge, the kind that arrives by the knower’s being-with the known. You know the meaning of pain by feeling it. You know the meaning of your own existence by existing. You cannot mistake presential knowledge because there is no distance in it for error to creep into.</p><p>Sadra takes Suhrawardi’s distinction and presses it further. All true knowing, he argues, is presential. The acquired kind is preparatory. The soul concepts its way toward the threshold and then, when it crosses, knows by becoming.</p><blockquote><p>And He taught Adam the names, all of them.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 2:31</em></h6><p>The first thing taught to the first human was names. Not facts about things — names. The names of the things and the names of God. To know a name in the Qur’anic sense is not to label. It is to participate. Adam knew the names because the names had been spoken into him. He was their first vessel.</p><p>The hierarchy of sciences in the <em>Iksir</em> ends where Adam began. The highest knowing is the knowing that transforms the knower. The vessel that knows the names becomes the place where the names speak themselves.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The Vessel</h2><p>The second part of the <em>Iksir</em> is the longest. Ten chapters on the soul as a receptacle for the sciences. Why she is impeded. What knowledge is necessary. The Adamic tablet. The divine vicegerency. The world of Sovereignty. The book of the soul. The structure of these chapters is the structure of the work itself, because the soul is what the work is on.</p><p>Sadra opens with the impediment. The soul does not start out clear. She arrives in the world clouded, accustomed to the senses, captured by what is nearest. She mistakes the appetites for herself. She mistakes the body for her home. The Sufi tradition before Sadra had a thousand images for this state — the cage, the prison, the dust on the mirror, the iron that has forgotten it was made to reflect. Sadra adds none of these. He moves instead to the question of why.</p><p>The Qur’an gives him the answer.</p><blockquote><p>We did indeed offer the Trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains. They refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof. But man undertook it. He was indeed unjust and ignorant.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 33:72</em></h6><p>The Trust — <em>al-amana</em>. The classical commentators offered several readings of what the Trust is. Sadra reads it as the capacity to be a vessel for the divine names. The mountains refused because to bear the names is to be undone by them. Man accepted because he did not yet know what he was accepting. Sadra does not soften the verse’s verdict — <em>zaluman jahulan</em>, unjust and ignorant. The acceptance was made in ignorance of the cost. But the acceptance is what the work is on. The soul that accepted the Trust is the soul that must now learn what it accepted.</p><p>This learning happens through what Sadra calls <em>al-khilafa</em> — the vicegerency. The chapters of Part Two cluster around this concept like iron filings around a magnet. The human soul is a <em>khalifa</em>, a deputy, the place where the divine names are made visible in the world. The verse Sadra returns to is the one in which God announces his intention before the angels:</p><blockquote><p>Verily, I am about to place a vicegerent on the earth.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 2:30</em></h6><p>The angels object. The earth, they say, will be filled with corruption and bloodshed. The reply they receive is short. <em>I know what you know not</em>. Then God teaches Adam the names. The angels are commanded to prostrate to Adam, who knows what they do not know.</p><p>The doctrine of the vicegerency is older than Sadra and older than Ibn Arabi, but it is in the Akbarian school — the school of Ibn Arabi — that it acquires the metaphysical weight Sadra inherits. The perfect human is the <em>barzakh</em>, the isthmus, the meeting place of the unseen and the seen. The names of God do not manifest themselves directly in the cosmos. They manifest through the vessel that can hold them. That vessel is the human soul that has been polished to receive what it was made to receive.</p><p>This is the structural claim that connects Sadra to a much older line. The Egyptians at Memphis had taught that the god Ptah created by speaking, that the heart conceived and the tongue uttered, and that what was uttered came into being. The Greeks at Alexandria translated this into a doctrine of <em>Logos</em> — the divine speech that mediates between the One and the world. The Hermetic corpus that traveled into Arabic in the eighth century carried the doctrine forward. Jabir ibn Hayyan worked with it. Ibn Arabi reworked it as the doctrine of divine names manifesting through <em>al-insan al-kamil</em>. Sadra inherited it through the Akbarian school and grounded it in his own metaphysics of being.</p><p>The metaphysics is what makes Sadra Sadra. The Avicennan tradition had treated existence as a kind of accident attaching to essences. A horse is a horse first, and then it exists or does not. Sadra reversed the order. Existence is the only reality. Essences are modifications of existence. Everything that is, is being — in some grade, at some intensity. The whole cosmos is a hierarchy of intensities of one thing.</p><p>Which means that when the soul knows something, the soul does not represent it. The soul becomes, at some grade, what it knows. Knowledge is being. The knower and the known share an existence; the act of knowing is the act of sharing that existence more completely.</p><p>This is the philosophical statement of what Memphis had said, what Hermes had said, what Ibn Arabi had said. The vessel that knows the divine name becomes the place where the name knows itself.</p><p>The elixir is doing its work.</p><div><hr></div><h2>Solve</h2><p>The third part of the <em>Iksir</em> turns to origins. Why is the soul in matter at all. Why must the vessel be broken before it is mended. Why is the work necessary.</p><p>Sadra walks through time, place, the beginnings of human existence, the prostration of the angels to Adam, and then, in three of the most striking chapters in the treatise, the question of Iblis.</p><p>Iblis refused to prostrate. The Qur’an names his refusal four times. He was commanded with the angels; he stood apart; he gave a reason — <em>I am better than him; Thou hast created me of fire, and him of clay</em>. The legalist tradition read this as the first sin and the origin of evil. Sadra reads it differently.</p><p>In Sadra’s account, Iblis is not an accident of the cosmos. Iblis is part of the wisdom by which the cosmos is constructed. The soul that descends into matter requires resistance to do its work. A vessel polished without friction cannot reflect, because there is no friction. A soul that meets no opposition cannot rise, because there is nothing to rise from. Iblis is the friction. He is the principle of refusal that the soul must learn to refuse in itself.</p><p>Sadra is careful here. He is not exonerating Iblis. He is showing that the existence of refusal is part of the divine wisdom — that the cosmos in which there is descent and ascent is a cosmos in which there must also be the principle of standing apart. The soul does not become a <em>khalifa</em> by being given the title. The soul becomes a <em>khalifa</em> by enduring what threatens to make it less than one.</p><p>The chapters on Iblis are followed by chapters on the angel’s inspiration and the satan’s disquieting. Every human soul, Sadra writes, lives in a field of two voices. One voice draws upward, toward the names. The other voice draws downward, toward the appetites. The work is to learn to distinguish them. The work is to align the soul’s own voice with the first.</p><p>What makes this work possible is what Sadra calls <em>al-haraka al-jawhariyya</em> — substantial motion. The doctrine is one of his signatures, and it appears in the <em>Iksir</em> in a compressed form. The Avicennan tradition had taught that the soul, once created, was a fixed essence. It might acquire perfections, but it remained what it was. Sadra denied the fixity. The soul, he argued, is in continual motion at the level of its substance. With every act of knowing, with every act of choosing, the soul is becoming. Its being shifts. Its intensity rises or falls. There is no still soul. There is only a soul that is rising or a soul that is sinking.</p><p>This is what the descent is for. The soul that begins in matter is compressed by it. The compression is a kind of pressure that forces the soul to use what is in it. Without the compression, the soul would never have to become anything; it would float in its undifferentiated potential forever. With the compression, the soul is forced to choose, forced to know, forced to move.</p><p>The image Sadra returns to is the womb. The soul in the womb is compressed by the body that is forming around it. The compression is the precondition of birth. Without the womb, the body could not take shape. Without the body, the soul could not be born into the world.</p><p>The same structure, Sadra argues, repeats at death. The soul has been compressed in the body for a lifetime. The body fails. The soul is expelled into the next world — born again, into a state made by what it has spent its life knowing.</p><p>The descent is the work. <em>Solve.</em> Dissolve the soul into matter so that it will have something to be drawn out of.</p><div><hr></div><h2>Coagula</h2><p>The fourth part of the <em>Iksir</em> is the part that gives the work its alchemical shape. Ten chapters on the ends. The highest knowledge. The final end. The soul’s imprisonment. Divine solicitude. The roots of felicity and wretchedness. The quiddity of death. The meaning of forgiveness. The soul’s subsistence. And a final chapter on the interrelation of the three parts of the treatise.</p><p>This is where Sadra’s substantial motion meets his eschatology. The soul that has been moving for a lifetime arrives at death already what it has made of itself. The grave is not a courtroom in which a verdict is pronounced from outside. The grave is the soul opening its eyes inside the state it has been building.</p><p>The Qur’an gives him the verse he needs.</p><blockquote><p>Thou wast heedless of this. Now We have removed from thee thy covering, and thy sight today is piercing.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 50:22</em></h6><p>The covering is not a veil over reality. The covering is the inattention of the soul to what it was doing while it was alive. The piercing sight is not a new faculty given at death. The piercing sight is the soul finally seeing what it has been all along.</p><p>Sadra calls the soul’s final state <em>sa’ada</em> — felicity. The word carries the Aristotelian inheritance of <em>eudaimonia</em> and the Qur’anic inheritance of <em>sa’id</em>, the blessed one. But Sadra means something specific. Felicity is not pleasure. Felicity is the soul subsisting in what it has loved. The dhakir who has spent her life in remembrance becomes remembrance. The contemplative who has spent his life in <em>fikr</em> becomes contemplation. The miser who has spent his life in his accounts subsists, after death, in the state of accounting. Each receives what they have made.</p><p>This doctrine is harder than it sounds. The legalist tradition could promise paradise as a reward and hell as a punishment, both administered from outside. Sadra’s account requires no administration. The soul administers itself. The soul has been administering itself the whole time. Death simply removes the body that was concealing what the soul was doing.</p><p>The chapter on forgiveness is short and weighted. Forgiveness, in Sadra’s reading, is not the cancellation of a debt. Forgiveness is the divine solicitude that makes possible the soul’s return to its origin even when the soul has wandered far from it. There is a current in the cosmos that runs back toward the source. The soul that does not actively oppose that current will be carried by it. Forgiveness is the name for the current. It is what the cosmos is doing, all the time, in favor of the soul that does not refuse.</p><p>The closing chapters bring the soul into its subsistence — <em>al-baqa</em>. The Sufi technical vocabulary is being used carefully. The soul has been <em>fana</em>, annihilated, in the sense that what it had been at the start has been undone. What subsists is what the soul has become through the work. The vessel has been broken; the vessel has been remade; what is left is the elixir.</p><p><em>Coagula.</em> The dissolved matter takes its final shape.</p><p>The transmutation is complete.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The Hidden Treasure</h2><p>There is a saying that the Sufi tradition has carried for as long as it has been a tradition. It is not in the Qur’an. It is not in the canonical hadith collections. The transmitters call it <em>hadith qudsi</em> — a sacred saying — and Ibn Arabi was already quoting it as old by the early thirteenth century.</p><blockquote><p>I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the creation, that I might be known.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Hadith Qudsi, transmitted in the Akbarian tradition</em></h6><p>The saying gives the <em>Iksir</em> its frame. The cosmos exists because the One sought to be known. The vessel that comes into being in the cosmos is the place where the knowing happens. The work of polishing the vessel is the work of completing the knowing. The elixir that the gnostic becomes is the medium through which the hidden treasure is uncovered.</p><p>Hermes had said it in different words. The Memphite priests had said it in different words. Jabir had said it. Ghazali had said it. Ibn Arabi had said it. Sadra said it in the metaphysics of his own century — that existence is one, that the soul rises through the grades of existence by what it knows, that the soul’s knowing IS its being, and that the perfected soul is the place where being knows itself.</p><p>The treatise ends without spectacle. There is no ecstatic close, no rhetorical climax. The last chapter is on the interrelation of the three parts. Sadra is doing what he has done throughout the <em>Iksir</em>. He is showing the structure of the work and trusting the reader to walk it.</p><p>The work is not on metals. The work is on the self. The elixir is not extracted from substance. The elixir is the substance that the gnostic, through the long alchemy of attention, has himself become.</p><p>He who knows himself knows his Lord.</p><p>The hidden treasure has found its mirror.</p><div><hr></div><h6><em>Mulla Sadra, Iksir al-’Arifin (The Elixir of the Gnostics), composed in Arabic in the early seventeenth century. The standard English translation is by William C. Chittick, parallel Arabic-English, Brigham Young University Press, Islamic Translation Series, 2003. The Persian source-text adapted by Sadra is Afdal al-Din Kashani’s Jawidan-nama, translated by Chittick in The Heart of Islamic Philosophy, Oxford, 2001. For Sadra’s larger system, see al-Hikma al-Muta’aliya fi’l-Asfar al-’Aqliyya al-Arba’a, with vols. 8 and 9 translated by Latimah-Parvin Peerwani as Spiritual Psychology, ICAS Press, 2008.</em></h6><div><div><div><p>Spiritualrelief's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div> <p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/the-elixir-of-the-gnostics" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/f1mRvU2 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>