Simple Index of Course Webpages 2022 Fall MU & KUL
In addition to the lecture below, also see these video lectures for an account of the metaphysics of Ibn Sina / Avicenna:
Ibn Sīnā / Avicenna on Creation
In addition to reflection on Qur’anic texts since his childhood, Avicenna also had available to him the Plotiniana Arabica, possibly the Kalām fī maḥḍ al-khair or Liber de causis, works of al-Kindī, works of al-Fārābī, works of Greek commentators, works of Aristotle, and many other resources for his investigations and reasoning on creation. The Arabic root b-d-‘ is extremely important for philosophical discussion of creation, particularly in its fourth form as ibdā‘, origination or creation, and eighth form as ibtidā‘ with the passive participle as mubtada‘ (that which has been originated or created) or in the active participle, mubtadi‘, (that which originates or creates). These terms and related forms appear prominently in the Plotiniana Arabica and the closely related Kalām fī maḥḍ al-khair. The sense of the term in these works is that of the bringing about something from no preexisting potency by way of an emanative hierarchy. The One or First Cause brings things about in a way described by the use of the metaphor of emanation. As with Plotinus, this emanation is first of intellect and then through intellect of the rest of reality as a plurality is eventually poured forth into existence. In the Liber de causis special emphasis is put on the First Cause as sole mubdi‘ or Creator since it alone acts without any dependence or connection with anything above itself.
Other things are said to share in its making of things to be by way of providing form to things, while the Creator alone provides the actuality of being in reality to all things after or below it, doing this through intellect and through lower things such as soul and nature. Note the importance of mediation here insofar as the First Cause requires the mediation of intellect for its action, although the First Cause is said alone to be Creator. God or the First Cause has just one and only one act, the creation of the first created intellect through which the rest of the universe exists. In the Plotiniana Arabica and the Liber de causis there is only one act because a plurality of acts by the First Cause would abolish the perfect unity and simplicity of God as The True One. Al-Kindi takes this notion of ibdā‘ from the Plotiniana Arabica (which he himself edited to create the work called The Theology of Aristotle) and uses it as one of the ways to express creation ex nihilo. His treatise On the True Agent4 sets out a clear account of primary causality in accord with what is found in the Liber de causis, tracing all actuality-of-being-in-reality back to a first unique agent cause. But al-Kindi’s understanding of Divine creation as willed and as creation in time separates him from these works which deny will and choice of the First Cause. In the Plotiniana Arabica and the Liber de causis the Divinity is said in creation to act eternally and immediately in accord with its goodness and so to emanate and sustain all reality outside itself. With these metaphysical issues in his sources, let’s now proceed to consider Avicenna, Metaphysics of the Shifā’ books 6, 8 & 9.
Avicenna’s Metaphysics book 8 is about the existence and attributes (including unity and uniqueness) of the First Principle. In the opening paragraphs of 8.1 he gives a précis of what is to come later, particularly in 8.3. At 8.1(6) he reasons that there cannot be an infinity of intermediate causes: if the series of causes “is ordered as an infinite plurality and the extreme is not realized, then the entire infinite extreme would share in the special characteristic of intermediacy. . . . Hence, it is impossible for an aggregate of causes to exist without including an uncaused cause and a first cause.” After reasoning in 8.1.(7) that there cannot be an infinity of intermediate causes, he then concludes in (8) “Thus, it has become evident from all these statements that there is here a first cause. For, [even] if that which is between the two extremes were not finite and the extreme exists, then that extreme would be a first for what is infinite and a cause that is not caused.” He later explains,
“We are not speaking here about what in its individuality (not in its specificity) is a principle and what is accidentally (not essentially) a principle. For we allow that there are infinite causes in the past and future. But it is incumbent on us to show finitude in the things that are causes in their essences. This is the state of affairs in the second of the two divisions — [this] after we also seek assistance from what has been said in the Physics.”
At 8.3(5) Avicenna begins his argument for a first efficient cause by drawing on his discussion from Book 1 on the Necessary Existent and at (6) he explicitly references it writing,
“we have previously explained that the Necessary Existent is numerically one . . . [E]verything, with the exception of the One who is in His essence one and the existent who is in His essence an existent, acquires existence from another . . . .” He then writes, “This is the meaning of a thing’s being created — that is, attaining existence from another. It has absolute nonexistence which it deserves in terms of itself; it is deserving of nonexistence not only in terms of its form without its matter, or in terms of its matter without its form, but in its entirety. Hence, if its entirety is not connected with the necessitation of the being that brings about its existence, and it is reckoned as being dissociated from it, then in its entirety its nonexistence becomes necessary. Hence, its coming into being at the hands of what brings about its existence is in its entirety. No part of it, in relation to this meaning, is prior in existence — neither its matter nor its form, if it possesses matter and form.”
That is Avicenna’s third definition of creation. The other two are in 6.2. He writes at 6.2 (9):
“[I]f something by virtue of its essence is a cause for the existence of something else that is permanent, then it is its permanent cause as long as its essence exists. If [the cause] exists permanently, then its effect exists permanently. Such a thing among causes would then have the higher claim to causality because it prevents the absolute nonexistence of the thing. It is the one that gives complete existence to the thing. This, then, is the meaning that, for the philosophers, is termed ‘creation (ibdā‘).’ It is the giving of existence to a thing after absolute nonexistence. For it belongs to the effect in itself to be nonexistent and [then] to be, by its cause, existing. That which belongs in the thing intrinsically is more prior in essence for the mind ([though] not in time) than that which belongs to it from another.”
Avicenna goes on at 6.2 (11), “If its existence were after absolute nonexistence, then its proceeding from the cause in this manner would be ‘creation (ibdā‘an),’ and it would represent the highest mode of the giving of existence, because nonexistence would have been utterly prevented, existence being fully empowered over it. . . .” And in 6.3 (7) he adds,
“Hence, the whole, in relation to the first cause, is created. Its act of bringing into being that which comes to be from it would entirely rule out nonexistence in the substances of things. Rather, it is an act of bringing into existence that absolutely prevents nonexistence in things that bear perpetualness. This, then, is absolute creation. Bringing into existence [in the] absolute [sense] is not any kind of bringing into existence. And everything is originated from that One, that One being the originator of it, since the originated is that which comes into being after not having been.”
And in 6.3(8) he concludes chapter three writing,
“[T]he state of affairs that a thing possesses from itself precedes that which it has from another. If it has existence and necessity from another, then from itself it has nonexistence and possibility. Its nonexistence was prior to its existence, and its existence is posterior to nonexistence, [involving] a priority and posteriority in essence. Hence, in the case of everything other than the First, the One, its existence comes about after not having been [a nonbeing] that it itself deserves.”
Book 9 is on emanation from God and the return to God, and Ch. 1 is entitled, “On the attribute of the efficacy (or agency, fā‘ilīyah) of the First Principle.” For our concerns here, the key teachings are in chapter 1, paragraphs (19) and following which constitute a critique of the notion of a creation in time. Avicenna writes at the beginning of (19),
“Moreover, by what does the First precede His created acts? By His essence or by time? If only by His essence, as one is to two (even though both are simultaneous) and as the movement of the thing in motion in that it moves by the motion of that which moves it (even though both are simultaneous), then it follows necessarily that both are temporally originated — [that is,] the eternal First and the acts generated from Him.”
The issue is one of conceptual and real coherence: was there a time before the creation of time and motion? To this Avicenna responds in (21):
“[Now,] if He did not precede by some past thing the first temporal moment of the origination of creation, then He would have come into being in time with its temporal coming to being. How, according to the [things] they had posited, would He not have preceded the first moment of creation by some state when He “was” and there was no creation, and [then] He “was” and there was creation?”
At 9.4 (11) Avicenna provides an account of the necessary and the possible which finds emanation as the installation of plurality in the world by God. He then goes on in (12) to assert that origination or creation as ibdā‘ — which was reserved by the earlier tradition of the Plotinina Arabica and Liber de causis to God alone — as creation can appropriately be asserted in the description of the activity of the mediate intellects in the Avicennian emanative hierarchy. That is, Avicenna teaches mediate creation though he also continues to hold the doctrine of primary causality tracing every entity back to the First. He does so by allowing that creation as ibdā‘ is the origination of something by an efficient cause without any pre-existing external substrate in which that origination takes place. This sense of ibdā‘ suits both God and the hierarchy of emanated intellects. However, a more strict sense of ibdā‘ denotes Divine creation which depends on nothing prior and presupposes nothing prior to its act. In contrast, the created and emanated intellects presuppose something prior to its existence, a higher intellect or the Deity Itself. In this way Avicenna presents a distinction between Divine creation ex nihilo and mediate creation ex nihilo.
What we see in the preceding texts of Avicenna is a clear insistence that creation necessarily requires efficient causality even if that efficient causality is eternal. There is nothing outside of the First Cause or God as prior either as a cause above God or as a material substrate in which the Divine action of creation comes to be. While Avicenna certainly holds for a final causality that draws all things to perfection, his understanding of creation is that of a procession of all created things from God by efficient causality. Creation cannot take place without Divine efficient causality. No activity can properly be denominated creation in the absence of efficient causality.
On the issue of Divine Will, Avicenna absolutely contradicts the Plotinian Arabic texts which denied will of the Creator when he writes,
“If [someone] says of Him “willer,” he would mean only that the Necessary Existent’s being with His intellectuality — that is, the negation of matter in Him — is the principle of the entire order of the good, and that He intellectually apprehends this. This would, hence, be composed of a relation and a negation.” (8.7, M 296)
Now in Metaphysics 8, c.4, Ibn Sīnā speaks of certain necessary concomitants (lawāzim) that proceed from the Divine essence. He writes,
“The first and essential act of the First Truth, however, is to intellectually apprehend His [own] essence, which in itself is the principle of the order of the good in existence. He thus intellectually apprehends the order of the good in existence and how this ought to be-not [however] through an intellectual apprehension that moves from potentiality to actuality, nor [through] an intellectual apprehension that moves from one intelligible to another (for His essence is free from what is potential in all respects, as we have previously made clear), but by one act of intellection.” (9.4, M 327)
He then adds,
“It becomes a necessary concomitant of what He intellectually apprehends of the order of the good in existence that He apprehends intellectually how [this order] is possible and how the best thing to take place is for the existence of the whole to come about in accordance with what He intellectually apprehends. For the reality that is intellectually apprehended with Him is itself, as you have known, knowledge, power, and will.” (9.4, M 327)
In this way the bringing about of good in existence is a necessary concomitant of the Divine essence just as is will and this is brought about by the Divine essence itself.
Finally, let me mention that the teaching of Ibn Sina on the unitary and singular action of the First or God as a manifestation of the good of God which can be described as willing God’s first action of creating the first created intellect and all else through that interestingly reflects what is found in Plotinus Enneads 6.8. There Plotinus discusses the freedom of the One as pure actuality (energeia) denying that its action is through an external cause or through an internal necessity of its nature. In that section of the Enneads Plotinus goes on to reason in his post-Stoic context that the action of the One unburdened by external or internal necessity can suitably be described as an actions of boulēsis or will. The account of Ibn Sina is remarkably similar in several respects to what is found in Enneads 6.8. This is quite interesting since at present we have evidence of parts of Enneads 6.7 and 6.9 in extant Arabic texts though not of Enneads 6.8. I am inclined to think that Ibn Sina had access to the thinking found in Enneads 6.8 because of the similarities of discussion and doctrine but this remains a matter of further research. Plotinus himself initiates the discussion with a consideration of human freedom and willing and proceeds to reason that will should not be denied of the One though that willing is not an action distinct from the unitary and single action of the One. Avicenna reasons in a like manner.
R. Taylor