The central gesture
Where The Four Journeys are an immense summa, al-Ḥikma al-ʿarshiyya — "The Wisdom of the Throne" — is a brief book: Mullā Ṣadrā's thought gathered to the essential. It is a work of maturity, written by a man who has argued everything and can now go straight to the heart.
The title evokes the divine Throne (al-ʿarsh) — symbol, in the Quran, of God's sovereignty over all creation. The "wisdom of the Throne" is knowledge seen from the highest point: that which embraces, in a single gaze, the origin and the end of all things.
The key concepts (made plain)
- To know God — The first part is devoted to the knowledge of the Principle: pure existence, Unity, the Names. Mullā Ṣadrā shows that the highest metaphysics and the simplest faith say, in their own way, the same reality.
- To know the return — The second part treats of the maʿād: the return of the soul towards God, the resurrection, the future life. A decisive question — and it is here that Mullā Ṣadrā is most original.
- The resurrection made thinkable — The religions promise a life after death; the philosophers often doubted it. Mullā Ṣadrā shows that the resurrection is not a fable: it is the metaphysical consequence of the movement of being. Since the soul is composed of what it knows and loves, it survives as the being it has become.
- The imaginal world — Between the world of bodies and that of pure spirits, Mullā Ṣadrā situates an intermediate world — the one where spiritual realities take form. It is there, and not "nowhere," that posthumous life unfolds.
The architecture of the work
Two illuminations (mashriq), like two slopes of a single mountain: the first on the origin — the knowledge of God; the second on the return — the destiny of the soul. From one to the other, the whole circle of existence is closed.
To read it
It is one of the best doorways into the thought of Mullā Ṣadrā: brief enough to be gone through, dense enough to give the essential. To be read before venturing into The Four Journeys.
Resonances
- The author: Mullā Ṣadrā
- The summa: The Four Journeys
- The doctrine of existence: The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations
- The Real and its degrees — see the theme