The Arabic Plotinus: A study of the ''Theology of Aristotle'' and related texts (PhD thesis)

THE ARABIC PLOTINUS: A STUDY OF THE "THEOLOGY OF ARISTOTLE" AND RELATED TEXTS Peter S. Adamson

UMI Co. Dissertation # 9971880

DEDICATION

This dissenation is dedicated to my grandparents, Anhur and Florence Adamson.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS AC KN OWLEDGMENTS

vi vii

INTR 0 D U CTI0 N

"

_ _

CHAPTER I: THE ARABIC PLOTINUS TEXTS AND THEIR ORIGIN 1.1 The Arabic Plotinus corpus 1.1.1 Th.A 1.1.2 DS 1.1.3 GS _ 1.1.4 The common Arabic Plotinus source 1.1.5 The nature of the paraphrase 1.1.6 The order of Th.A and its place in * AP 1.2 The origins of AP 1.2.1 The identity of the Adaptor 1.2.2 The role of Porphyry 1.3 Other texts related to AP 1.3.1 Early works related to AP _ 1.3.2 The later influence of AP

.

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9 9 11 II 12 14 19 39 40 42 .47 47 50

CHAPTER 2: THE PROLOGUE AND THE "HEADINGS" 58 2.1 The Prologue 58 2.1.1 Sources of the Prologue: the Metaphysics and AP ..__ mm.61 69 2.1.2 AI-KindT as the author of the Prologue 2.1.3 The conception of philosophy in the Prologue 76 2.2 The ..Headings··_ 79 2.2.1 The textual basis of the headings 80 2.2.2 The purpose of the headings 82 2.2.3 Philosophical views in the headings 85 CHAPTER 3: SOUL 3.1 Aristotelian influence on the Adaptor's theory of soul 3.1.1 Mfmar III and the question of enlelechia 3.1.2 Soul's relationship to body 3.1.3 AP and the Arabic paraphrase of the De Anima 3.2 Ethical Views in AP 3.2.1 Virtue and the cosmos

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87 87 88 94 105 113 114

3.2.2 Desire__. .._ _._ _. .__ 3.2.3 Memory and the fall of the soul_

_._._.__ .._._ _

._._

__ 122 -.--_.. 128

CHAPTER 4: INTELLECT__ _ _._ _._._._ _.._._.._ _._ __.__ __.139 4.1 Learned ignorance .._ . _. __ _._ _._._. _ _..__. . 139 _._ ...._..._.__ ._.140 4.1.1 The doctrine of mfmar [I..._._ __ _._. .._._. _ _.__.. ._._ 147 4.1.2 A potency higher than act._. 4.1.3 Porphyry and learned ignorance in AP .__ __ _._..__ __.157 CHAPTER 5: THE FIRST PRlNCIPLE _ _. __.._ ._.. _.. ._164 5.1 Oivine predication .. _._ _ _ ._._ . .__._.._164 5.1.1 Negative theology in AP ._.__.._._ _ _ _ _. _ 165 . J70 5.1.2 Positive theology in AP __ _ _._. ._._._. ._ _ 5.1.3 Predication by way of causality and eminence __._ _.._ _ 173 5.1.4 Is the First Principle "complete"?.._._._ ._ _ __..__ _.177 _ _ _ _. . ._. ._ __.._ __ 186 5.2 God and being..__.. ._.. 5.2.1 The terminology of existence.._ _.._ _ _. .._.._..__._.187 5.2.2 God as the First Being and only being_._ __ __ 193 5.2.3 God as pure actuality and Cause of being _.. _._ _.199 5.2.4 The background of the doctrine of attributes and God as anniyya faqa[ in AP .._ _.._. _._.__._._ _ __._.205 _ _ _.._.218 5.3 Creation __....-..... .....__.._._..._..._....._._ _._.._._. .__. 5.3.1 Mediated creation vs. unmediated creation _._ __ ._.219 _ _ _ _ _.._._. __.__..__225 5.3.2 Creation and time _.._.__._ 5.3.3 Creation and necessity.._.._ _._. ._.__..__ ._..__..230 5.3.4 God and thinking __ __._ __._._ ._._ _ 236 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ._ _ _.__ . _._. __ 244 6.1 The coherence of the Adaptor' s thought ._ _ _ _ _..245 6.2 What sources influenced the Adaptor?_ _ _.._._ __.._ _.._..__..__250 6.3 Who was the Adaptor?._.__._._ _ _. 256

APPENDlX A: AL-KINDI AND THE ARABlC PLOTlNUS.._ A.l God and be ing._ ._..__.__._._._. ._ _ _ A.2 The emanative hierarchy__ _ _._ _..__ _ _. A.3 Theory of the intellect _. .. ._ _ A.4 The soul and recollection _._. _ A.5 Astrology _ _ __ _ _.._.,.._ _'. _ _. _

_.260 _ _ __.267 _ 272 _ _._279 _ _..__.__285 291

APPENDlX B: IBN SINA AND THE '''THEOLOGY OF ARISTOTLE·~ B.I The treatment of soul in Ibn Slnff s commentary ._ __ B.2 Mystical knowledge in Ibn Srn~rs commentary _ B.3 Creation and emanation in Ibn SIna~s commentary

IV

_.. _.303 307 _ _312 319

APPENDIX C: TRANS LA TION OF IBN SINA ~S NOTES ON THE "THEOLOGY OF ARISTOTLE" _._._ __._ _ _._323 C.I Notes on MTmar 1 _._ _._._ _.._._._ _ __.__._ _323 C.2 Notes on MTmar If._.._ _ _ _ _ _ _ __.._ _333 C.3 Notes on MTmar IV. _.._ _ _. ._._._.._ _ 340 C.4 Notes on Mimar V _ _._ __.._ _ _._._ _..344 C .5 Notes on MTmar VII._ __.._ _.__._._ __ _ _._._._._ _ _ __.350 C.6 Notes on MTmar VIIf _._._ _._ _. .__ _ _.. _.355 C.7 Notes on MTmar fX 358 361

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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A NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

The following abbreviations have been commonly used in this dissertation: B:

References to the Anlbic text in Badawl. A. (ed.), AI-Aflatfinivva al-Muhdatha

"inda 31-' Arab, (Cairo: 1955). Lewis: References to the English translation in P. Henry & H.-R. Schwyzer (eds.), Plotini Opera. Tomus II: Enneades IV-V: Plotiniana Arabica ad codicum fidem anglice vertit G. Lewis (Paris & Brussels: 1959). Th.A: The '-Theology of Aristotle," Arabic text in B. GS:

The "Sayings of the Greek Sage," Arabic text in B.

DS:

The '"Letter on Divine Science," Arabic text in B.

All quotations from the Arabic Plotinus texts use section numbers from Lewis, with the page number from B given in brackets (e.g. Th.A IVA [B 44]). Enn:

References to the Greek text in Plotinus, Enneads, translated by A.H. Armstrong,

7 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966-1988). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Arabic and Greek terms are transliterated, with aspirated consonants in Arabic cnderlined (where the consonant would normally have been underlined, e.g. in the title of a book, I have not underlined the aspirated letters).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

[ would like to gratefully acknowledge the following people for their generous support of this project. First my advisors, David Burrell and Stephen Gersh, for their comments on the work and their enthusiasm for the project. I am equally grateful to my two ··unofficial" advisors: Richard Taylor of Marquette University, who first suggested the project. and Cristina 0' Ancona Costa of the Universities of Padua and Pisa. Both were extraordinarily supportive of the dissertation; indeed it would be difficult to imagine two distinguished scholars who would be more giving of their energy and time for the work of younger researchers like myself. [would also like to thank the Philosophy Department of Notre Dame in general, and Paul Weithman, David O'Connor, Michael Loux, Ken Sayre in particular for their advice during my graduate career. My biggest debt of thanks is, however, to my family. I dedicate this dissertation to my grandparents Arthur and Florence, in thanks for their support and encouragement before and during my studies. Likewise my parents Joyce and David could not have been more supportive, and I am thankful to them for more than I can say here. Above aU I would like to thank my wife Ursula, for her love and for her endurance and patience, without which I never could have completed this project or my degree.

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INTRODUCTION

Open any book on Islamic intellectual history, and you are liable to find a sentence or two on the so-called ""Theology of Aristotle. "I The importance of this text in the classical era of Arabic philosophy can scarcely be exaggerated. The '"Theology" was a translation or paraphrase of the writings of Plotinus, yet it was mistaken for a work of Aristotle. To imagine the importance that was attached to this text, one need only consider the situation of the earliest Muslim thinkers who described themselves explicitly as philosophers. They regarded Aristotle as the greatest representative of Greek wisdom, yet Aristotle's works fell far short of providing answers to some rather pressing questions. What did Greek philosophy have to say about the nature of God or creation, for instance? Philosophers from John Philoponus onwards sensed the inadequacy of the genuine Aristotelian corpus for answering these questions: thus Aquinas, for example, articulated how Christian revelation was needed to flesh out Aristotle's notion of God as a cause of motion. But in the "Theology of Aristotle:" the Arabic world found a text that ex pounded such topics at length. It is unclear when this text of Plotinus was first mistaken for one by Aristotle, and how long the misconception persisted. But whether or

J A representative example can be found in Alben Hourani. A History of the Arab Peoples (Warner Books: New York. 1991). 172-173: "The line of philosophers which culminated in Ibn Sina found the answer to questions [about God) in the Neo-Platonic version of Greek philosophy, made more acceptable by the fact that a major work of the school. a kind of paraphrase of pan of Plotinus' Enneads. was generally regarded as being a work of Aristotle (the so-called 'Theology of Aristotle'):' Compare Majid Fakhry. A History of Islamic Philosophy (Columbia U. Press: New York. 1970). 19-26.

not the first readers of the ""Theology" thought it was a genuine work from the Aristotelian corpus is beside the point, for as we shall see, at this period there was a tendency to see all of Greek philosophy as one harmonious piece. Thus Plotinus was used to extend and even complete the Aristotelian philosophical heritage. This is the standard picture of the historical relevance of the ""Theology," and it is correct as far as it goes. It is an understanding that underlies almost all of the work done on the ·'Theology" beginning in the late 19th century and continuing through the late 20th century. In general this work has focused on broadly philological issues relevant to the "Theology": who wrote it, when was it written, on what sources did it draw, and what did the original text look like? These are of course important issues, but for a long time they overshadowed another aspect of the text, namely the substantive philosophical changes that were introduced into Plotinus' thought by whoever translated it into Arabic. It is only within the last decade that these changes have been given serious study. At the risk of engaging in polemic, let me suggest a reason for this. Generally speaking, there is a tendency on the part of Western scholars to study Arabic philosophy from one of two points of view. Either it is seen as setting the stage for 12th and 13th century European philosophy, and particularly Aquinas, or it is seen as carrying on Greek philosophical ideas on as they became unavailable in Europe. It is the latter point of view which dominated studies of the ··Theology": the text was primarily seen as important because it conveyed Plotinus to the Arabic world, not as a work in its own right with original philosophical importance. To say that Muslim thinkers drew on the '"Theology" is, on this view, just to say that they drew on Plotinus.

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This way of approaching the ""Theology" has been challenged implicitly by recent studies of the text, especially by Cristina D' Ancona Costa and Richard Taylor. This dissertation is an attempt to carry the challenge further by providing a systematic study of what is philosophically new and interesting in the Arabic version of Plotinus. Before undertaking this task, it may be useful to give some background which would explain how a work that is, after all, just a translation could be of such philosophical significance in its own right. As we will see below, the Arabic Plotinus was produced in the translation circle of the first Muslim to think of himself as a

i"'philosopher~'~

ai-KindT (died shortly after 276

A.H./870 A.D.). What I have said above about studies of the ""Theology" could also be applied to studies ofal-KindT"s circle: it is only recently that scholars have provided satisfactory studies of the context in which this group of translators operated. Their devotion to Greek philosophy and its transmission is beyond question. But, in the words of one Muslim

scholar~ the

translation movement led by ai-KindT "was by no means an

'innocent' operation or 'neutral' educational endeavor naturally flowing from the intellectual evolution of the time. Instead, it was part of a broader strategy used by the newly established •Abbassid dynasty to confront hostile forces, namely the Persian aristocracy.":! This suggestion is fleshed out at much greater length in a superb recent work by Dmitri Gutas. 3 Gutas argues that the' Abbasid caliphate supported Greek philosophy as a rival intellectual tradition which could challenge the Zorastrian tradition :! Mohammed 'Abd al-labri. Arab-Islamic Philosophv: a Contemporary Critique. translated by Aziz Abbassi (Center for Middle Eastern SlUdies at U. Texas at Austin: Austin. 1999).49. See also Gerhard Endress. "The Circle of ai-KindT:' in The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism. edited by G. Endress and R. Kirk (Research School CNWS: Leiden. (997).45.

.l

Dmitri Gutas. Greek Thought. Arabic Culture (Routledge: London. 1998).

3

in their seat in Persia. Without going into the intricacies of his

argument~ let

us note the

importance of the idea that there was a political or ideological motivation behind the translation movement in the time of the· Abbasids. One effect of this motivation was a desire on the part of al-Kindf and others to present Greek philosophy as a unified whole. Given that their purpose was to set Greek philosophy over against other rival intellectual currents,4 it would have been counterproductive for them to acknowledge the tensions and debates within Greek philosophy that tend to occupy the modern historian of philosophy. In

addition~

the

translation movement was at least in part an attempt to provide answers to the pressing questions and problems of the historical context in which the translations were

made~

i.e.

9th century Islam. Again. this means that al-Kindf and his translators were keen to present Greek philosophy as answering such questions and as giving one coherent answer when possible. Gerhard Endress has captured this situation in saying that "The growing insistence on the essential unity of philosophical

truth~

on the harmony between Plato's

and Aristotle's doctrine... is indicative of an attitude of compromise which made philosophy fit to serve as a scientific interpretation of monotheistic and creationist religion.,,5 These pressures had the consequence that translators who rendered philosophical texts from Syriac and Greek into Arabic did not aspire to present "objective" or simply "correct" translations. Instead, they felt free to change the text at will and even to .: In addition to the intellectual threat posed by the Persian tradition. it is likely that al-Kindi was opposing anti-rationalist movements within Islamic theology. Thus he was to some extent sympathetic with the rationalist Mu·tazilites, whether or not he fully espoused their doctrines. The ideological struggle in favor of Greek philosophy was, then. being waged by ai-KindT and his circle on at least two fronts. 5

Endress ( 1997), 52.

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introduce completely original passages amplifying or interpreting the views of the original author. We find an extreme example of this in the Arabic Plotinus. but the case is not unique: another well-known example is the Book on the Pure Good. a paraphrase of Produs' Elements of Theology which would be known in the Latin west as the Liber de Causis. (Indeed. this text departs even more from its source than does the Arabic Plotinus, containing very little in the way of direct translation from the Greek source.) In accordance with the motivations described above. the changes are generally of two types: (a) [n order to present Greek philosophy as a unified whole, translators did not hesitate to alter their sources to bring them into line with other, authoritati ve Greek texts. Many examples of this strategy are provided in this dissertation, such as the alteration of Plotinus' theory of soul to make it accord with Aristotle's De Anima. (b) In order to answer problems from their own intellectual milieu. translators went so far as to construct original philosophical arguments and views that they introduced into the body of the paraphrase. Many of the mest interesting changes to be studied below. such as the theory of learned ignorance. the use of divine attributes. and the characterization of God as pure Being. fall into this category. This is not to say that the translators did not depend partially on other Greek sources such as Aristotle. Rather. it is to highlight the original way in which they took ideas from several Greek texts (as weB as their own ideas) and wove them into new and original positions relevant to the contemporary situation. 6

6 In a similar vein. Dmitri Gutas has described the translation activiry as ""a creative process": "The changes and additions that we frequently see in the translated text vis-a-vis the Greek original were either amplificatory and explanatory. or systematic and tendentious. This means that some of the translations were deliberately not literal because they were made for a specific purpose and to serve certain theoretical positions already held" (Gutas (1998), 146).

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The texts that resulted from this process -- and there is perhaps no better example than the Arabic Plotinus -- are thus important and interesting in two ways. First, the original arguments themselves are often quite sophisticated and should be taken seriously as positions on important topics in theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics and so on. Second, in many cases the version of the text produced by the translator is of immense historical importance. For one thing the text shows that Greek philosophy was already being interpreted and developed upon its first entry into the Arabic speaking world. Also, these translations and the Arabic Plotinus in particular were the source for Neoplatonism in Islamic philosophy. So we cannot properly understand the way that figures like ai-KindT, al-FambL Ibn STniL and the Persian Illuminationists drew on Greek philosophy unless we acknowledge that their engagement with these translations was

/lot

equivalent to a confrontation with the original writings of Plotinus and others. I have attempted to show how our understanding of these later figures might be enhanced by a study of the Arabic Plotinus in appendices included here, on ai-KindT and Ibn STna. So much, then, for the reasons why it is worthwhile to study the Arabic Plotinus and take it seriously as a work of philosophy in its own right. I close this introduction with a brief overview of the dissertation: • In Chapter I, I explain some of the vexed philological issues surrounding the text. This is a necessary preliminary to understanding the philosophical aspects of the Arabic Plotinus. However, I also try to engage these issues in such a way as to make plausible my interpretation of the Arabic Plotinus as an original, well-thought out adaptation of the

Enneads (it has often previously been thought of as the work of a sort of translator hack or dilettante).

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• In Chapter 2. I deal with two parts of the Arabic Plotinus materials that demand a separate treatment from the paraphrase proper: the Prologue to the "'Theology" and a set of "headings" which preface the "'Theology." Among other things, I argue that the former may have been the work of ai-Kindt. • The rest of the dissertation is arranged according to the ascending levels of the Plotinian hierarchy: Soul, Intellect, and the First Principle. In Chapter 3 on soul I examine how the Arabic Plotinus is affected by the author·s familiarity with Aristotle's De Anima. and also deal with a cluster of issues in the paraphrase relevant for ethics. • Chapter 4 is devoted to the study of one important theme in the Arabic Plotinus: the concept of an '"ignorance higher than knowledge." I suggest that this notion may have come to the author from a Greek source, but that his understanding of such ""learned ignorance" is an original one

ba~ed again

on Aristotle.

• Chapter 5 deals with the treatment of God in the Arabic Plotinus. In particular, I show that the author has original and systematic views on divine attributes and the metaphysics of God and creation, and that these views respond to contemporary debates in Islam. • After a brief conclusion. three appendices are devoted to (a) al-Kindrs use of the Arabic Plotinus. (b) a study of Ibn STna's commentary on the ....Theology."' and (c) a translation of Ibn SIna's commentary.

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CHAPTER I

THE ARABIC PLOTINUS TEXTS AND THEIR ORIGIN

The main purpose of this study is the examination of the philosophical doctrines presented in the Arabic Plotinus texts. This analysis requires, however, a discussion of the nature of these texts and of the complicated question of their origins. Indeed. it would be fair to say that the present study is only now possible because of decades of research into these issues. I do not hope to settle here most of the significant philological questions surrounding the Arabic Plotinus. and in fact I will argue in this chapter that several of these questions cannot be answered with certainty. at least in the absence of textual evidence that may yet be discovered. Still, as will shortly become clear. a profitable discussion of the philosophy in the Arabic Plotinus requires frequent reference to the history of the texts. With this in mind, in this chapter I wilJ first give a detailed description of the Arabic Plotinus corpus, and then go on to discuss some of the more important issues surrounding the origins of that corpus. The latter section may at the same time serve as a survey of much of the previous scholarship on these texts. since the bulk of research on the Arabic Plotinus has centered on these textual and historical issues. Finally. I will briefly address the later influence of the Arabic Plotinus in Islamic philosophy by mentioning some of the later sources that bear directly on these texts.

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1.1 The Arabic Plotinus corpus The Arabic Plotinus materials have come down to us in the form of three texts. The first, the most well-known and by far the longest of the three is the so-called Theology of Aristotle (hereafter Th.A). The second, and shortest, is the Letter on Oi vine Science (hereafter DS). The third and final ""text" actually consists of a number of fragments attributed to ""the Greek Sage (aJ-shaykh al-yfiniinf)," which are collectively referred to as the Savin2s of the Greek Sage (hereafter GS). These collected texts represent the Arabic Plotinus corpus (hereafter AP). An Arabic edition of almost all this material was published in 1955 by "Abdurrahman BadaWf, and this is the Arabic text which I use here. I The scholar Geoffrey Lewis, having completed an improved critical edition of the Arabic as his dissertation at Oxford, has provided us with an English translation of all three texts, which is available in the second volume of the Henry and Schwyzer edition of Plotinus' works.:! [will cite all three texts by the section numbers in Lewis' translation, though aU translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

1.1.1 Th.A

The existence of a '"Theology of Aristotle" was first made well-known last century with the publication of an Arabic text and subsequent German translation by F. Oieterici, though it was not at that time clear that the text was in fact a paraphrase of Plotinus' I Badawr. A. (ed.), AI-Atlatfiniyya al-muhdatha 'inda al-·Arab. (Cairo: 1955). For the Greek text of [he Enneads I have used volumes IV, V and VI of Plotinus. Enneads. translated by A.H. Armstrong. 7 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1966-1988).

9

Enneads. Dieterici's

version~

though it was based on manuscripts fewer than and inferior

to those used by Badawf and Lewis. has the same fonn as the text ofTh.A we have now: it is divided into ten so-called mayiimir, mfmar being a Syriac word meaning "chapter:~ The mayiimir vary in length, and cover parts, but not

all~

of Enneads IV-VI. As in all three

parts of AP, the text takes the form of a translation-cum-paraphrase of Plotinus: most sentences are at least in part direct translations of the

Greek~

but also contain original

material. There are also complete departures from the Greek ranging in length from one sentence to entire

paragraphs~

though the latter are relatively rare. The text includes the

occasional "title," sometimes based on a title of one of Plotinus' treatises, both at the beginning of some mayiimir and also, more unusually, in the middle of a mfmar. The ten mayiimir collectively make up the ··paraphrase" portion ofTh.A. There are two additional parts of the text: the first is a Prologue bearing an inscription attributing the text to Aristotle, and mentioning the names of the commentator, translator, and editor of the text. After this inscription. the Prologue gives a short explanation of the task to be undertaken in Th.A and finally a list of topics to be covered in the text. Between this Prologue and the paraphrase is a list of ru 'iis -- headings, or heads, or ··chief points" -which present themselves as an itinerary of issues to be raised in the text. However, the r1l "iis are in fact a series of short paraphrases. more or less in the style of the main

paraphrase, paralleling Enn IVA. 1-34. [n terms of content, Th.A raises, in the course of covering parts of eight treatises by Plotinus, many of the major issues familiar to readers of the Enneads, including Z P. Henry & H.-R. Schwyzer (eds.), Plotini Opera. Tomus II: Enneades £V-V: Plotiniana Arabica ad codicum fidem anglice venit G. Lewis (Paris & Brussels: 1959). Parts of the translation ofGS in this volume are by Rosenthal.

10

detailed discussions of the First Cause (Plotinus' One) and Intellect. The soul is, however, the level of Plotinus' cosmos which is treated at greatest length: of the ten

maylimir, six have soul has their main focus, and the remaining four each have significant sections devoted to soul. Below I address the question of whether this focus on soul is accidental or by design.

1.1.2 OS Though its title suggests that DS should be some kind of epistle, the text is in fact simply another continuous paraphrase of Plotinus, this time of Enn V.9, V.3, VA, and V.5 (in that order, with a concluding fragment from V.9). It contains two "titles" like those found in Th.A, corresponding to the titles ofEnn V.3 and VA (OS 47, (56). Unlike Th.A. OS has little to say about soul and concentrates on the Intellect and the First Cause. Its total length is about that of one of the longest of Th.A •s mayiimir. The text was originally misattributed to al-Farab.. but was sho\\ll by Paul Kraus to belong to AP. 3

1.1.3 GS The final surviving portion of AP is a set of fragmentary "sayings" culled from three sources, and generally exhibiting the paraphrastic style of Th.A and DS. Almost all of the sayings are taken from a manuscript discovered at Oxford. published and translated by Franz Rosentha1. 4 Further fragments from the Oxford MS were found and made available

., Kraus. P.. "Plorin chez les Arabes: Remarques sur un nouveau fragment de la paraphrase arabe des El1Ileades:' Bulletin de rJnstitul d·Egvple. 23 (1941).263-95 . .s Rosenthal. F.. 'Ash-Shaykh al-Yl1nani and the Arabic Plolinus Source: Orientalia 21 (1952), 461-92: 22 (1953).370-400: 24 (1955).42-66.

II

(in the translation mentioned above) by Lewis. s The remaining fragments (translated in Lewis' GS IX) are culled from the Muntakhab siwiin al-hikma and al-Shahrastanf's Kiliib ai-mila! ,va a!-niha!, each of which quote a body of sayings attributed to a "Greek sage,"

presumably drawing on the same source, the Siwiin a/-lzikJlla.6 Unsurprisingly, the two sets of quotes overlap to some extent. A number of passages in GS 1- vm also overlap with passages from Th.A, sometimes adding material to what has been preserved in Th.A. Neither of these two texts overlap with OS, however.

I. 1.4 The common Arabic Plotinus source

It is clear from the style and paraphrastic nature of these three texts that they all represent an original Arabic Plotinus source, which we may call *AP. 7 It is equally clear that our AP may lack a good deal of the material originally contained in *AP. Perhaps this material included the entirety of Enn IV-VI, though the extent of the paraphrase must of course remain a matter of conjecture. The consistency of style in what is left to us of the paraphrase, on the other hand, makes it virtually certain that one person composed the paraphrase in * AP, whether or not it was actually based directly on the Greek text of the Enneads. Much of the scholarship on AP has been devoted to speculation as to the identity of this author. The philosophical study of the text to be undertaken here will provide us with important evidence towards answering this question. For now, I will

5

See Henry & Schwyzer ( 1959). xxxiii.

6 The Mlmtakhab was originally attributed to al-Sijistani. which is why Rosenthal's translation marks one set of sayings as al-Sijistanrs. See F.W. Zimmerman. ''The Origins of the So Called Theology of Aristotle:' in Kraye et al. (1986).208-9.

7 I follow Zimmermann in marking non-extant texts with an asterisk. For the stylistic unity of the Arabic Plotinus text'i. see G. Endress. Proclus Arabus: Zwanzig Abschnitte aus der InstilUlio Theologica in

12

refer to the person who composed *AP as "the Adaptor. n It is worth noting that whatever the Adaptor had in front of him while writing the paraphrase, we can be certain that his source was ultimately based on Porphyry's edition of the Enneads. The restriction of AP to the latter three Enneads suggests this, since these treatises were taken out of chronologicaJ order and placed together by Porphyry. In addition, sometimes the paraphrase passes immediately from one treatise to another preserving Porphyry's order. For example, Th.A 1.20 parallels the ending of Enn IV.7 (Plotinus' 2nd treatise, chronologically), and Th.A 1.21 parallels the first sentence of Enn IV.S (6th chronologically). Even more convincingly, the beginning of Th.A II parallels the beginning of Enn 1V.4 and thus preserves a sentence break introduced by Porphyry. 8 What else can be said with certainty about * AP? [n short, not very much. On the basis of stylistic similarities, Gerhard Endress has shown that the AP texts belong to the body of translations and adaptations made by al-Kindi~s circle in Baghdad in the 9th century.9 This includes the well-known adaptation of Proclus' Elements of Theology, the Book on the Pure Good, known later in the West as the Liber de Causis. Since the Prologue of Th.A infonns us that aI-KindT '''corrected (a~la!laf' the paraphrase, this evidence confirms the testimony of the text itself. [t is tempting to think. on this basis, that the Prologue may actually have prefaced * AP in its entirety, and not just Th.A. Further evidence for this is provided by doctrinal and terminological parallels between the Prologue and AP. indicating that it was written by the Adaptor or one of his collaborators Arabischer Obersctzung (Beirut & Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag. 1973). 186. For the unity of DS and Th.A. see Kraus ( 1941). 292-294. For the unity of GS and Th.A. see Rosenthal (1952).465-468. 8 See Zimmermann (1986).228 fn.23. and H.-R. Schwyzer. "Die pseudoaristotelische Theologie und die PJotin-Ausgabe des Porphyrios:' Rheinisches Museum f"tir Philoloeie. 90 (1941),223.

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(ai-KindY being one intriguing possibility). For example. the Prologue uses the characteristic phrase "'Cause of causes" (ProI.14), and as we will see in chapter 2, generally fits the philosophical profile of the Adaptor. One might then further speculate that the attribution of Th.A to Aristotle would have been applied to the entirety of * AP. In fact, though, there is reason to think that this misattribution only occurred later.

lo

At

any rate, we can proceed on the assumption that all the elements belonging to AP mentioned above were originally united as a single work based either on Porphyry·s edition of the Enneads, or some later modification of that text. Further, the Arabic text

*AP \vas produced by al-KindTs circle~ though so far it is unclear whether this group was also responsible for the original changes from the Greek text: the Arabic text could simply be a translation of a paraphrase done in Syriac or Greek.

I. 1.5 The nature of the paraphrase

The paraphrastic nature of AP has been elegantly expressed with a device used in Lewis' translation. Those parts of the text which are based directly on the Greek text of the Enneads, as we have it today. are written in italics, and the rest in roman lettering. Merely by skimming through Lewis' translation, one can thus get a sense of how closely the Adaptor is sticking to Plotinus. own words: it is rare that he strays far from the task of translating, but even more rare that he restricts himself to translation. As helpful as Lewis' practice of italicizing direct quotation may be, it should also be said that the italic/roman distinction can be quite misleading. Even in the case of "direct" translation,


parallels~

and we have just seen that in at least one

case these themes seem to be those of Th.A. My own view is that the Treatise is intended as a summary of views found in the Arabic

Plotinus~

that appears in GS and the Treatise is, as others have

and that the sobriquet ""Greek sage'~ argued~ an

honorific name for

Plotinus. However, since the Treatise is not part of the actual paraphrase of Plotinus~ there is no reason to include it in AP or to think that it was authored by the

Adaptor~

therefore I exclude it from extensive consideration in this study. Finally, let us glance at the last text dealt with by Genequand, the supposedly Porphyrian Magalat fI

~1-Nafs.

This brief work contains one passage dealing with the

same issue of memory and he fall of the soul: 53

53

My translation of Arabic text in Kutsch (1954), with Kutsch's section number.

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Maqalat IT 'I-Nafs 4: There is no doubt that we are pure intellect (a/- 'aql al-naqf). This is the opinion of the excellent Aristotle. The proof of this is his statement [about] why we do not remember the higher world, when we have descended from it to this world? Then he answered and said: we come not to remember the intellectual world because we have come to be in this sensory world, and [because of] our mixture with material things, and we have separated from that world, because we cannot be there while the stain from the material things is in us. We come to be as if we were not there at all, due to matter's overpowering us. And we come to be as if we began from this world, due to the intensity of our deviation toward it and the impressions which are in it from us... The passage is clearly based on the discussion of memory in Enn IV.4, and begins with the same question that begins that treatise as well as mimar II. Oddly, however, the text attributes the discussion to Aristotle. This more or less proves that Maqalat fi 'I-Nafs is not a work by Porphyry, who would of course not make this mistake. 54 The passage also repeats the now-familiar claim that our immersion in the bodily world makes us forget the intelligible world, and uses more vocabulary reminiscent of AP ("·deviation," compare to Th.A II.33 and elsewhere; "'intellectual" or ·"higher world" and "'sensory world"; the metaphor of mauer's effect on the soul as a ·"stain" on its purity or as '''mixture,'' for which see above). This might also suggest that Maqalat IT "I-Nafs is based on Th.A, though the extensive suggestions made by Kutsch about sources for the work indicate that, at the very least, this Pseudo-Porphyrian work is not solely derived from the Arabic Plotinus.

5.1 A brief discussion of memory in Porphyry cited by Kutch (1954), 275 is Sentences 15: "Memory is not a saving-up of imaginations (phanrusion soleria). but a new self-presentation of things one was concerned with:' This seems to have little to do with the text in Magalat IT "I-Nafs, and it should be contrasted with a passage in Th.A H.40. which actually claims. as does Plotinus. that memory is a sort of imagining. This is another small point against the hypothesis that Porphyry was the Adaptor.

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CHAPTER 4

INTELLECT

4.1 Learned ignorance The theme of docta ignorantia, a ""leamed ignorance" or an ignorance that transcends knowledge, is a familiar one to students of Neoplatonism. It is perhaps most closely associated with the 15th century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, but of course appears much earlier in the Neoplatonic tradition. Among these earlier appearances is the discussion of a ""knowledge beyond knowledge and ignorance" (gnosin exo gnoseos kai aglloias) in a fragment of the Commentary on the Parmenides attributed to Porphyry. I In

the Arabic tradition. a doctrine of learned ignorance appears for the first time in AP, specifically in two passages: rll'tis 16 and a lengthy departure from the Greek text found in the second mlmar of Th.A. This parallel between the Parmenides Commentary and AP has been cited as a primary argument in favor of Porphyrian influence on AP. 2 This provides a philological motive for close inspection of the doctrine as found in AP. Perhaps more importantly. the notion of an "·ignorance more noble than every knowledge" is among the most striking additions made by the Adaptor in his paraphrase of Plotinus: it

I

P. Hadot. Pornhvre et Victorinus. volumes I-ll (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes. (968). 78. lines

1

See below. section 4.1.3.

10-11.

139

shows the Adaptor at his most

independent~ either

as an original thinker or as a

transmitter of non-Plotinian Greek philosophy.

4.1.1 The doctrine of mimar II A long passage in the second mfmar, almost completely independent from the Greek text. provides a developed discussion of the theme of learned ignorance. I quote the passage here in its entirety: Th.A [1.46-52 [B 36-7]: Someone may say: if the soul has imagined this [lower] world before it reaches it, then there is no doubt that it also imagines [the lower world] after it has left it, and reached the higher world. If it has imagined it, then there is no doubt that it remembers it. But you have said that, when [the soul] is in the intellectual world, it does not remember anything from this world at ail. We say that the soul, even if it has imagined this world before it came to it, nevertheless it imagined it intellectually, and this act is ignorance (jah/). not knowledge (ma' rifa). Except that this ignorance is more noble than every knowledge, and this is because the intellect is ignorant of what is above it through an ignorance which is more noble than knowledge ('Um). If it remembers the things which are there, it does not descend to here, because the memory of those noble things prevents it from coming down to here. If it remembers the lower world, it descends from the noble world, but that may be in various ways, and this is because the intellect is ignorant of its cause above it. namely the First, Ultimate Cause, and it does not know [its cause] completely, because if it knew it completely, it would be above [that cause] and a cause for it. It is absurd that anything be above its own cause and a cause for its cause, because then the effect would be the cause for its own cause, and the cause would be the effect of its own effect, and this is very repugnant. The intellect is ignorant of the things that are under it, as we have said before, because it does not need knowledge (ma'rifa) of them, because they are in it, and it is their cause. The ignorance of the intellect is not a privation ('adam) of knowledge~ but rather it is the ultimate knowledge, and this is because it knows the things not as with the knowledge the things have of themselves~ but rather [with a knowledge] above this, and more excellent and higher, because it is their cause. The knowledge that things have of themselves is, for ('inda) the intellect, ignorance, because it is not proper ~a!J.i!la) or complete knowledge. Therefore we say that the intellect is ignorant of the things that are under it. [and] we mean by this that it knows the things which are beneath it completely, not like the knowledge they have of themselves. It does not need knowledge of them, because it is a cause [for them] and in it are all its effects. If [all the effects] are in it, then

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it does not need knowledge of them. Likewise, the soul is ignorant of its effects in the way which we have mentioned above, and does not need knowledge of anything except for knowledge of the intellect and the First Cause, because these two are above it. The first thing to notice about this passage is that it is not completely independent from the Greek text, for it seems to be based on the following remark in Plotinus: Enn IV.4.4 : For it could happen, even while one is not conscious (me parakolout!lounta) that one has [something], that one holds [that thing] to oneself more strongly than if one did know. This text is certainly far from an endorsement of any ""learned ignorance. n Rather, here Plotinus makes a characteristically subtle distinction between knowing something and being aware that one knows something. Perhaps the distinction was lost on the Adaptor; at any rate, his paraphrase introduces the wholly different distinction of ignorance and knowledge (II.47). Certainly, then, the Adaptor did not take the notion of learned ignorance from the parallel text in Plotinus. Rather, one has the sense that he came to the text with this doctrine in hand, and saw the passage as an opportunity for a digression on the subject. This should encourage us to think that the Adaptor has another source in mind here, and is not just providing an unusually original interpretation of something in the Enneads. A second thing to notice about the passage is that it is not the only reference to learned ignorance in Th.A. As mentioned above, one of the "heads" refers to the doctrine as well: Th.A ru'iis.16: On the intellect, and that knowledge (ma'rifa) there is below ignorance (jah/), and ignorance is the glory of the intellect there.

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This heading is in fact a paraphrase of the very same text in Enn IV.4.4 quoted above. This is a significant fact for the question of the relationship of the ·'headings" to the main text of Th.A. It seems that one of two interpretations is open to us. The first is that the Adaptor wrote both paraphrases

himself~

and both times the passage reminded him of the

notion of learned ignorance. The second is that the Adaptor found the remark on learned ignorance already before him in a set of '·headings" in his source

text~

and translated

nt "tis" 16 more or less verbatim. The long passage in the second mfmar would then be a

sort of commentary on this earlier heading. This would be consistent with the idea that the "heads" are just an Arabic translation of Porphyry~s Greek keplzalaia~ and that Porphyry is thus the direct source of the doctrine of learned ignorance. We will have occasion to return to this point below ~ when we discuss the possible relation of this discussion of ignorance to that of Porphyry. But given that our current purpose is to analyze the theory as it appears in the

text~

the heading is of little value, if only because of

its brevity. It affirms only that at the level of intellect~ ignorance is superior to knowledge. without explaining why or in what sense this might be so. Let us move. then, to a careful analysis of the passage in mfmor IT. A key element of the passage is the fact that not one, but two sorts of ignorance are described here by the Adaptor. In both cases. despite the fact that the digression is introduced regarding the soul and its knowledge of this

world~

the ignorance is in fact associated with "the

intellect.·· The sudden transition from soul to intellect can be explained by the fact that the Adaptor does not always distinguish carefully between these two hypostases. Encouraged, perhaps, by Aristotle's use of the term nOlls in the De Anima as the highest faculty of the soul, the Adaptor is prone to collapsing these two parts of the Plotinian

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cosmos together. 3 One sort of ignorance described by the Adaptor is ignorance of "what is above it:' namely"the First, Ultimate Cause." The other sort of ignorance is "of the things that are under it," that is, objects in the sensory world. I will call these respectively "ignorance of the higher" and ....ignorance of the lower." The Adaptor himself does not seem to be keeping this distinction clearly in view: in ll.47, he shifts from describing the ignorance of soul as an intellectual imagination of things in ""this world," that is, ignorance of the lower, to the ignorance of the higher that is attributed to intellect. A similar shift occurs in U.49. Despite these shifts, the Adaptor does give two clearly distinct arguments for the two varieties of learned ignorance. The argument for ignorance of the higher is as follows: ""the intellect is ignorant of its cause above it, namely the First, Ultimate Cause, and it does not know [its cause] completely, because if it knew it completely, it would be above [that cause] and a cause for it" (II.49). Here, "'ignorance" refers to an actual lack of knowledge on the part of the intellect: it fails to have an exhaustive grasp of its cause, and necessarily so. For, according to this passage, there is an intimate link between the causal hierarchy and knowledge. In general, a cause can know its effect completely, but not vice-versa. This has the important immediate consequence that there can be no perfect knowledge of God by anything else, since God is the highest cause:~ One can hardly recognize this without thinking of the scholastic distinction between knowledge through causes, or propter quid, J See also below. 5.3.1. However. there is a distinction apparently being made between the ignorance of intellect and of soul at 11.52. -l As Cristina D'Ancona Costa has pointed out. the same doctrine can be found in the Liber de Causis. Prop. 5: ··And thus it happens that the First is the one for which description fails. And this is only like this because there is above it no cause through which it is known. And each thing is only known and described from its cause. And when the thing is only a cause and not an effect. it is not known by a prior

143

and knowledge quia, that is, knowledge of causes through effects. A common source for both doctrines readily suggests itself: Aristotle's theory of demonstrative knowledge. As Aristotle puts it, "'We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing... when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and, funher, that the fact could not be other than it is:,5 The same doctrine can be found in other Aristotelian works, notably the Metaphysics (see, for instance, 981 b: "the master workers in each craft are more honorable and know in a truer sense... because they know the causes of the things that are done"). The assumption behind this passage, that knowledge of a thing can only be through a perfect grasp of the cause of that thing, is cenainly an Aristotelian one. And we have already seen evidence that the Adaptor knew the Aristotelian corpus. 6 This seems a likely source, then, for at least part of the Adaptor's reasoning about the intellect's ignorance of the One. A related line of reasoning is developed with regard to "ignorance of the lower." At

U.s I. the Adaptor argues that the

intellect ··does not need" to know things in the

sensory world, "because they are in it, and it is their cause." Thus the intellect is ignorant in this sense as well. But in this case, the ignorance in question is no longer a deficiency of knowledge, but rather a transcending of knowledge: Th.A II.51: The ignorance of the intellect is not a privation of knowledge, but rather it is the ultimate knowledge, and this is because it knows the things not as with the knowledge the things have of themselves, but rather [with a knowledge] above this. and more excellent and higher, because it is their cause. The

cause, and is not described because it is higher than description. and speech does not reach it:' See D' Ancona Costa ( 1993). 18.

s Posterior Analytics. 71 b 1Off. (, For example. on the assumption that AP was produced in al-Kindls circle. the Adaptor would have known Us!ath's translation of the Metaphysics. See Zimmermann (1986). appendix III (136).

144

knowledge that things have of themselves is, for the intellect, ignorance, because it is not proper or complete knowledge. Again. the Adaptor is relying here on the notion that the intellect can Uknow" the lower things by knowing their cause, namely itself. In this sense, it does know these lower things. But in another sense, it does not: if by "knowledge" we mean the sort of knowledge that the lower things have of themselves and of each other, then the intellect "fails" to have this sort of knowledge, for it is above such knowledge. This lower knowledge is not described here, except that we may infer that it is not knowledge that proceeds from a complete grasp of causes. In Aristotelian terms. it is knowledge that falls shon of complete scientific demonstration, which the Adaptor calls "proper and complete." Again, this doctrine of ignorance of the lower would have a significant corollary regarding God: if the argument is extended to the level of the divine, God will be revealed to know His creation only by knowing Himself. This. of course, would later be the position of Ibn STna on the question of Providence. We will briefly return below to the consequences of the doctrine for God's knowledge in AP. Though one must acknowledge the Aristotelian premise employed by the Adaptor in these two arguments. one must also acknowledge that simple familiarity with the Aristotelian concept of demonstration would not be sufficient to inspire the doctrine. For, consider some of the un-Aristotelian aspects of the arguments just presented. Firstly, though Aristotle says that complete knowledge requires knowledge of causes, he does not conclude from this that if x has complete knowledge of y, then x is itself the cause of y. But this is exactly what the Adaptor seems to hold in his argument for ignorance of the higher: he says that if the intellect knew the First completely, it itself would be "a cause"

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for the First. 1 This is a crucial premise. for without this premise one need not conclude that effects can never know their causes completely. Secondly, a corresponding premise in the argument for ignorance of the lower seems manifestly contrary to Aristotle's intent. The Adaptor argues that if the intellect knows itself as the cause of lower things. it does !lO!

need to know the lower things. But on Aristotle' s account. to know the cause of a

thing just is to have the best sort of knowledge of that thing. The Adaptor. then. concludes that the intellect is in a sense ""ignoranC when a straightforward Aristotelian would have presumably inferred that we can only speak of knowledge in the case of the intellect. if intellect is the cause of what is known. Finally. and perhaps most significantly. there is nothing in Aristotle to suggest that one might call a certain type of knowledge ""ignorance'" because it is more complete than a more familiar. or lower. sort of knowledge. This terminological choice. almost rhetorical in its force, seems more at home in the Neoplatonic dialectic of affirmative and negative predication which is employed with regard to transcendent causes. None of this is to take away from the Aristotelian overtones of the Adaptor's thought process in this passage. Rather. what I want to suggest is that the arguments in U.46-52 are most likely the work of someone who is trying to write an Aristotelian gloss on a notion of learned ignorance which he has from somewhere else. No text of Aristotle states that there is a form of ignorance superior to knowledge. But it is quite plausible that a reader of 7 Richard Taylor has suggested to me that this conclusion could be reached from Aristotelian premisscs as follows. If (a) thc intcllect is identical to its intelligible object, and (b) the intellect could only have demonstrative propter quid knowledge of God by knowing the cause of God. then it follows (c) that the intellect would have to be the cause of God to know God demonstratively. (For the use Averroes makes of this line of reasoning. see Richard Taylor. "Averroes on Psychology and the Principles of Metaphysics:' Journal of the History of Philosophv XXVI. 4 (1998).507-523.) Even though point (b) is Aristotelian. as I argued above. point (a) is Plotinian as well as Aristotelian. See. for example. Th.A n.21. which follows

146

Aristotle might read somewhere else that the intellect is ignorant in the sense of having a transcendent knowledge, and conclude that this is because it is a transcendent cause. So with regard to this passage, we are left in the following predicament: we know that the Adaptor brought an Aristotelian sensibility to his interpretation of the ignorance of the intellect. But we do not know what motivates him to explain the intellect's cognition precisely in terms of ignorance, either with regard to his other philosophical views or his sources. To move towards an answer to the first part of this dilemma, a consideration of some further context from AP will be helpful.

4.1.2 A potency higher than act One of the few original passages in AP that can be compared to Th.A II.46-52 in terms of its complexity and length is Th.A Vill.52-68, a discussion of potency in the intellectual world. Although these two passages are far separated in the text of Th.A, a closer inspection of the text shows that they may be closely related. For the long section in mfmar vrn is not, in fact, entirely independent from the Greek. Rather, it is a sort of

commentary on a section of Enn IVA, in fact on the section immediately following that paraphrased in the passage from mimar II. In other words, these two long "independent" passages would together represent an uninterrupted commentary on Enn IV.4.4-5. (I call them a ··commentary" because their relation to the Greek is too loose to really make them a "paraphrase:') We may add into consideration the fact that Th.A Vrn.52ff is without doubt a loose fragment from AP, since it begins in several manuscripts with the heading

PIOlinus closely in asserting that the intellect takes on the form it knows. The Adaptor seems to recognize the Aristotelian heritage of this view, since he adds that the mind becomes like its object "in act:'

147

""This is a chapter (bab) for which no heading was found in the copy:,8 Further, as I wilJ show below, the philosophical themes pursued in the two original passages have certain important affinities. All of this suggests that this portion of mimar VIII may well have been originally attached to the material found in mimar U (see also above, 1.1.6). Just as the passage we have examined above argued that, in the intellect, there is an ignorance superior to knowledge, the passage in mimar vm contends that the intellect has a potency superior to act. This notion seems to have been inspired by the parallel text in Greek: Enn IV.4.4-5: But if [the soul], when it goes away from the [higher] place, recovers its memories, somehow it had them there. Indeed: in potency (dllnamel). But the actuality (energe;a) of those [intellectual things] obscured the memory. For [the memories] were not as present images (ke;meno; tllpoi). such as would perhaps lead to an absurd consequence, but rather there was the potency which was later set free into actuality. Thus, with the actuality in the noetic ceasing to be active, the soul saw that which it had formerly been seeing, before it came to be there. Well then? Now does this potency, through which there is remembering, bring [the things of the higher world] into actuality? Indeed, if we did not see these things, then by memory, but if [we did see] them, then we saw by what was there. For this is awakened by what awakens it, and this is the seeing of what we have mentioned. For, when describing [the higher world], one must not use an image or a syllogism taking its principles from somewhere else; but, regarding noetic things, even here one speaks by the same power (dlllZamill) which can contemplate them there. Here Plotinus is trying to explain how the soul could have had "memories'" in the noetic world without actually remembering the way it does when it has fallen into bodies. He suggests that, when it is in contact with 1l011S, the soul only has these memories in potency, but they are released into act when the soul falls. This in itself suggests a sense in which act could be worse than potency, insofar as the actualization of memory is an

S

See Badawi (1955),99 fu.9.

148

actualizing that only occurs with the fall of the soul. There may also have been some confusion on the Adaptor's part owing to the double meaning of dllnamis, which can mean both "power" and "potency." (Indeed, the corresponding Arabic term qu'tf.!a has precisely the same double meaning.) Though clearly the first use of dllnamis here means potency as opposed to actuality, the second use in the last sentence refers only to a power or capacity that the soul always has and can use to know the intelligibles. This could also have suggested to the Adaptor that the soul's task is to recover or use the

upotency~·

- the

dunamis -- which it had in the upper world.

All of this was the occasion for the Adaptor to provide us with a systematic discussion of potency and act. He begins the passage by remarking: Th.A Vill.52-3 [B 99-100]: We say: act (ft'!) is more excellent than potency in this world. But in the higher wocld, potency is more excellent than act, and this is because the potency which is in the intellectual substances is that which has no need for act [going] from one thing to another thing other than itself. For they are complete and perfect, perceiving (tudrikll) the spiritual things as vision is aware of the sensible things. Potency there is like vision here, but in the sensible world, [potencyJ needs to come into act, in order to perceive of the sensible things. The cause of that are the shells of the substances, which they put on in this world. This is because they cannot achieve the substances and powers (quwan) of the things except by piercing the shells, and for this they need act. When the substances are stripped and the powers are revealed, then potency is sufficient in itself, and does not need act to perceive the substances. (quwa)

Here the Adaptor distinguishes between two ways of understanding potency. In the "higher" world, perception occurs without moving ""from one thing to another," that is, perception is completed all at once without any discursivity. Thus he compares it to vision, which can take in its entire object all at once. Because there is no change from potency to act, the Adaptor holds that perception occurs without any actualization:

149

potency just is perception.

9

Of course this account of intellection is completely Plotinian,

including the comparison of noesis to vision; the Adaptor is merely describing PIotinus' theory of intellection in a new way, by calling it a sort of potency. In this lower world, perception does require going through steps or stages, and it is this motion or discursivity that requires an actualization of potency. These same points are underscored in the passage as it continues: Th.A Vill.54 [B 100]: If this is the case, we return and say that the soul, when it is in the intellectual place, only sees itself and the thing which are there through its potency, because the things which are there are simple, and the simple is perceived only by what is simple like it. But when it is in this sensible place, it does not attain what is there except through severe exertion, due to the multiplicity of the shells that it has put on. And exertion is act, and act is composite (murakkab), and the composite does not truly perceive the simple things. The same reasoning is expressed somewhat differently here, as the Adaptor emphasizes the "simplicity" of what perceives through potency, and the ··composite" nature of anything that needs to go from potency to act. The tacit argument for this would seem to be as follows: whatever needs to go from potency to act has multiplicity, because the very process of actualization is a change from one thing to another. But what can perceive through potency undergoes no process or change at all in its perception, because its initial and permanent state is one of complete perception. Again, this seems to be a doctrine Plotinus could agree to, especially with its emphasis on bodies, or "shells," as inextricably linked to multiplicity in perception.

<J This is partially based on Aristotle's discussion of the grades of actuality in De Anima U.5: when a sighted person sees. or when someone with knowledge uses that knowledge, this is not a change in the person doing the seeing or knowing. As Aristotle puts it. the transition from potency to act here is "either not a being altered... or is some other lYpe of alteration" (417b). See also Arnzen (1998). 245.

150

As the passage continues, the Adaptor introduces further distinctions between potency in its higher manifestation, which grasps all at once, and the lower potency that requires act. At Vlli.55, he underscores the point that it is only actualization that accounts for this difference: "the act fills the potency in the sensible world, and prevents it from perceiving what it had perceived." And in the next sentence, he explains why a potency that receives act is different from one that does not: Th.A VIII.56: If someone says that when the perceiver perceives something through potency and then perceives it through act, this [latter form of perception] is more fixed and powerful, because act is completion (tamam) -- we say, indeed, if the perception has perceived the thing through receiving its impression. [In that case] the potency is as if it receives and inscribes the impression of the thing, and the act completes this impression. Then the act is the completion of the potency. Here, the Adaptor presents a possible objection to his own theory: act is the perfection or "completion" of potency, and that a potency will thus be superior when it does receive act. Note that this is an objection posed in Aristotelian terms, with its emphasis on the perfective role of actuality. The language used to describe this, famam, also echoes this sensibility, since the same word is used in Arabic translations of Aristotle in al-Kindrs circle to describe actualization. 1O In answering the objection, the Adaptor is careful to show that, in a sense, Aristotle's analysis of potency and act is correct. For a "lower" potency is indeed actualized by receiving an "impression" (arhar) from what it perceives. I I But the ""higher" potency does not need to receive such an impression, for reasons detailed above, so that there is a sort of potency not described by Aristotle's

III See the Arabic paraphrase of the De Anima. Arnzen (1998).215.5. 217.4ff. Unlikefi'/. which translates energeia both in Plotinus and Aristotle. lamii", is a piece of technical terminology taken from readings of Aristotle. But see also below, 5.1.4 for a study of another use of liimm proper to AP.

II Again. the language has parallels in the De Anima paraphrase: see for example Arnzen ( 1998). 255.15 and 17, which use the verb alhara to describe the influence of a sensible on the sense organ.

151

analysis. While this passage. and the way I have just described it, might suggest that these two different potencies are simply different phenomena. the Adaptor is clear throughout this long independent section that he is talking about one potency which works differently in the two worlds. Thus, at Vill.66 he says that '"the soul comes to see what is here through the potency through which it saw them there." In Vm.64-66, he also descri bes our coming to know the noetic world as a hraising" of our potency to the higher plane, where it need no longer receive actualization or impressions. The relevance of all this for the theme of learned ignorance becomes clearer when we examine another element of the Adaptor's theory of potency. He says: Th.A VIll.59-60 [B 100-1]: When the soul refrains from using act in the intellectual things and does not need thought in [its] perception of that world, that potency returns to it. or rather awakens. because it was not separate from the soul, and the soul sees the things which it saw before it came to this world without needing reflection or thought. If [the soul] does not need reflection. it does not need act... This is because the act either is in the thing reflecting or in the natural thing. As for the fixed potency, it is in the substances that become aware of the things properly, without reflection or thought. and this is because they view the things visually. Here. the Adaptor specifies the sort of discursivity that is lacking in the higher manifestation of potency_ At this level, perception can occur without '·reflection or thought:' This redundant phrase. rawryQ wafikr. occurs many times in AP, usually in contexts where the Adaptor is denying that God thinks. I:! Here the point is, again, a Plotinian one: the soul can rise above discursive thought if it ascends to the level of intellect, and attain a sort of intellection that is comparable to immediate vision. Here we have, then, another description of a transcendent form of perception, one which is described negatively (potency, instead of ignorance) because it lacks what is required in

11

See below. 5.3.4.

152

lower perception

(act~

instead of "knowledge"). Yet there remains something surprising

about the Adaptor's use of the terminology of act and potency to describe this fundamentally Plotinian conception of an intellection that lacks discursivity. For in fact, Plotinus himself is apt to describe the same thing as a pure actuality, as here in one treatise on 'lOllS: "for the noetic is some actuality (energeia). since it is manifestly not a potency (dllllal1lis)"' (Enn V.3.5). This is of course connected to Plotinus' view that the God described by Aristotle. the pure actuality of thought thinking itself, can only be the second principle because of its duality as thought and thinker. While we may not have expected that the Adaptor would grasp this historical dimension of Plotinus' thought, it should have been abundantly clear to him that. for the author of his source text, the intellect is associated primarily with act, and not potency. The puzzle deepens when we tum away from the passage from mfmar

vm we

have been studying. and look at other passages in which the Adaptor seems to follow a more traditionally Plotinian line of thought about potency and act. For example: Th.A V ill. 106-7 [B 109]: If [the soul] is intellectual. its intellect is only through thought and reflection. because it is an acquired intellect... The intellect is that which completes the soul, because it is that which procreated it. We say that the person (shakh~ of the soul is from intellect. and the reasoning (nll[q) existing in act 13 belongs only to the intellect, not to the thing falling under vision. Enn V.I.3: Being, then. from intellect, [the soul] is noetic (noera), and its intellect is in reasonings (logismois)~ and again, its perfection (te/eiosis) is from [intellect], as the father raises [a son] he procreated. who is imperfect (Olt te/eion) in comparison to himself. Then the hypostasis [of the soul] is from intellect. and its reason (logos) is in actuality by its seeing intellect. For when it looks into intellect, it has within and belonging to it that which it thinks and acts.

U

Here I read bi-a/-ft" with Lewis. which seems a better reading given the parallel Greek text.

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Here the Adaptor follows Plotinus in saying that the intellect is in act, and also by saying that the intellect is what "'completes" the soul; recall that we previously saw that completion was associated with the actualization that takes place in the lower world. How can we reconcile such passages with the doctrine of a potency higher than act? I~ One possible answer is to focus on the fact that, as mentioned above, the word quwa we have translated throughout as "'potency" can also mean "power." This makes possible passages like the following. which exploits the double meaning of quwa: DS 147-8 [B 177]: We must know that the First Cause originates the things without division, that is, it does not originate them one after another, but it originates them all at once, as if they were one thing. The reason for this is that the second cause is an act, and the first cause is a capacity (qudra). The actuality does not happen except in a divided way, that is, it only performs a divided act. As for the potency (al-qllwa), it is the power (al-qwva) which is able (taqwayu) to originate all the things at once, as if they were one thing. IS Enn V.3.15: But [The One] had [all things] such that they were not divided. They are divided in the second, in the logos. For this is already actuality, but the [One] is the potency (dunamis) of all things. This passage has an important implication. namely that the Adaptor may sometimes use the words "potency" and "act" relatively. By this I mean that he may call the source of any "actuality" a "potency," as here the One is described as a power or potency because it produces the "act" that is intellect. The same terminology is elsewhere applied the same way to intellect and soul, and their respective effects: OS 12 [B 168]: The intellect is the form for soul, and is that which informs [soul] through the various forms, just as the soul informs the bodies with various forms.

I': For other passages which associate actuality with the intellect. see Th.A X.51-2. GS 11.15. The first of these is especially emphatic: "it is repugnant that there be anything sensitive in potence [in the intellect I. and that it then be in this world sensitive in act." But this may not clash directly with Th.A VUL52-68. since it has to do only with sensation. not perception generally.

15 The verb raqwayu is the same root as lflln.'a. and more or less forces us to read the second qlln.'a as a reference to an ability or power.

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Likewise for the intellect: God has put the potency of the totality of the forms in it. OS 17: Therefore, it is impossible, if one thing is in another thing in potency, that the principles for living things are in the soul. This is because the things which go out from [the soul] are in it first in potency, and therefore they manifest in actuality. All this suggests that the Adaptor's apparently technical use of the words "potency" and "act'" is actually rather fluid. He will describe intellect variously as in potency or in act. because with respect to something below it, it is in potency in the sense that it is the "power" which produces that thing. Thus his insistence that intellection is a form of potency is primarily intended to point out that it is different than lower perception: it is simple, immediate, and involves no discursive thought. This use of terminology is exactly parallel to the use of the term ""ignorance" to describe the knowledge of the intellect. One could loosely say that both cases fall under the description of a via negativa: the Adaptor attributes some lack or deprivation to the intellect (ignorance. potency) to illustrate that it transcends the things we normally associate with the respective positive term (knowledge. act). In neither case does he mean that the intellect lacks these positive terms in the sense of a defect; rather, it posesses knowledge and act in a higher way, a way so transcendent that we can describe, for example. the knowledge of intellect as a sort of ignorance. To anticipate some of the findings to be presented in chapter five, this strategy is most important when it is applied to the highest, most transcendent principle: God. The close connection between the issues we have discussed in this section and those to be pursued in relation to the First are underscored in the following paraphrase: DS 123-5 [B 175]: If someone asks: if you make it so that the First Knower does not know, you make Him such that He does not sense either, and from this

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follows what is repugnant. We say: we only say that He does not know, not because He is ignorant, which is the opposite of knowledge. but [instead] we mean that He is above knowledge ifa~vqa al- 'ifm). This is because there is no knowing (al- 'iilim) except when there is a knowledge and an object of knowledge, and there is no intellecting (al- 'iiqif) except when there is an intellect and an object of intellect, so there is multiplicity with respect to this. But we have said that He does not receive multiplicity in any respect. Enn V.3.14: For we make it many by making it known and knowing (gnoston kai gnosin). and giving intellection (Iloein) to it, we make it have need of the intellection. This is one of two passages in AP which explicitly says that God does "not know" because His knowledge is higher than knowledge. 16 Though the doctrine is here applied to God instead of intellect, it is applied with the same logic: the Adaptor does not mean that God lacks knowledge, but that His knowledge is of a different, higher sort than that of the intellect. In this case, God does ··not know" if this is taken to imply some sort of multiplicity. such as that between the knower and known, Of course. Plotinus makes the same argument but draws the more radical conclusion, in the parallel passage. that the One does not have any knowledge or intellection of any sort. The Adaptor has supplied us with a hint as to why he did not follow Plotinus' doctrine fully, but instead resorted to the notion of learned ignorance. For he says that if the First does not think or perceive what is below Him. ··from this follows what is repugnant." Quite likely the repugnant result he has in mind is that Providence would be impossible. which is unacceptable given the religious context of AP (either Christian or Muslim). Of course. the same problem would exercise later writers in Arabic philosophy. This passage is then a

16 The other passage is GS 1.25 [8 1871: ""[The First Principle] has no motion. because He is before motion. before thought (fikr). and before knowledge ('ifm). and there is nothing in Him which He would want to know. as the knower knows. but rather He is the knowledge which does not need to know by any other knowledge. because He is the pure. ultimate knowedge containing all knowledge. and [is) the cause of the sciences (al- 'uliim: literally 'the knowledges' ):' See below. 4.1.3 for further discussion of this text.

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foreshadowing of Ibn Sina's attempts to explain how Providence is possible if God does not know particulars, and of al-Ghazalrs attack on these attempts in the eleventh discussion of his Tahafut al-Falasifa. 17

4.1.3 Porphyry and learned ignorance in AP We have now seen the philosophical motivation for the doctrine of learned ignorance in AP.

[r

falls into a general pattern of thought on the Adaptor's part in which he uses terms

implying deprivation in order to express transcendence. Let us, then, tum to the question of the sources of the doctrine of ignorance as used by the Adaptor. I argued above that a major source for his defense of the doctrine was Aristotelian, but that Aristotle could not have been the entire inspiration for the passage in the second mimar. As previously mentioned, many commentators have seen in this passage a reflection of Porphyrian influence. In particular. an article by Pierre Thillet which appeared in 1971, and which remains among the most forceful presentations of the thesis that Porphyry was the author of AP, takes as a major point of interpretation the use of the doctrine of docta ignorantia by the Adaptor. 18 He cites Th.A n.46-52, ru 'iis 16, and DS 123ff. (all cited above) as the appearances of the doctrine in AP, and compares these texts to a line from the Sentences of Porphyry: "One often speaks of what is beyond intellect (noli) in according to intellection (kala ten noesin), but one contemplates it with a non-intellection lY-tter than intellection (lhe6reitai anoesia kreittoni noese6s), just as one often speaks of someone 17 See Ibn STna, al-Shifir: al-Wihiyyiit. edited by G. Anawati (Le Caire. 1960). V1.8. French translation: La Metaphysigue du Shifii". translated by G. Anawati. (Paris: J. Vrin. 1978): aJ-GhmrliJT, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. translated by M. Marmura (Provo: Brigham Young University Press. 1997). 128-133. 18

Thillet ( 1971 ). 297-30 I.

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sleeping as if they were awake." 19 One might raise here the question of whether the tenus

noesis and anoesia, which I have translated quite literally as "intellection" and ··nonintellection," should be understood as knowledge and ignorance. respectively (as in ThilIet's translation). But any hesitance on this score may be forestalled by turning to another Porphyrian text, a set of fragments from his commentary on the Parmenides. 20 In this text. Porphyry does speak. literally of ignorance (agnoia) and opposes this, not to noesis, but to gnosis: In Parm. V.IO-15: [say that there is a knowledge beyond knowledge and ignorance (gnosin exo gnoseos ka; aglloias). from which there is knowledge. And how, if knowing, does [God] not know, or how, knowing, is He not in ignorance? Because He does not know. not as having come to be in ignorance, (15) but as transcending (huperechon) every knowledge. Just as, in the passage from the Sentences, Porphyry spoke of a "non-intellection better than intellection." so here he recognizes a "knowledge beyond knowledge and ignorance:' As Thillet points out, these are paralleled nicely in AP by the phrase "'an ignorance which is more noble than every knowledge" (Th.A 11.47), and the statement: "we only say that He does not know. not because He is ignorant, which is the opposite of knowledge. but [instead] we mean that He is above knowledge" (OS 124). Note that these passages actually speak of ignorance in two different senses. In the text from the Sentences cited by Thillet. Porphyry is speaking of an ignorance on the part of the intellect which tries to grasp the One -- in this case. ignorance is higher than knowledge

I')

Sentences 25.

10 Here I will simply assume that this text has in fact been attributed correctly to Porphyry. which some have disputed. For a defense of its authenticity. see Hadot (1968). 102 ff. I will cite the passage by section and line number from vol. II of the same work: the fragments can be found in their entirety in that volume. 64-113. with an accompanying French translation.

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because it does not do violence to the nature of the One through the multiplicity of intellection. This doctrine is, of course, quite compatible with Plotinus. In the passage from the Parmenides commentary, on the other hand, Porphyry

undertakes a dialectical discussion of the knowledge of God (ho rheas). He first broaches the topic by remarking that God is never in ignorance (IV.34), but thell qualifies this by saying that God is neither in a state of knowledge nor in a state of ignorance, in the passage quoted above. If God is not knowing, this is only because He transcends knowledge in the sense of a knowledge that is multiple. This is underscored in what follows: In Parm. V.19-31: This is the knowledge of God, appearing (e/nphainollsa) without any otherness or dyad, and no difference in thought (eipnoian) between knowledge and object of knowledge, but, as being inseparable from itself, even though it is not in ignorance, it does not know. It is not ignorant, even if it does not know... Truly, if it is granted that in some way there is ignorance in Him, this is not according to contrariety (anli6sin) and deprivation (sieresin) ... Wherefore, if He is not ignorant then He knows. and in this way He is found to be superior (krei/ton) to knowledge and ignorance, and knows all things, but not in the way the other knowers do. 21 This too, is Plotinian insofar as it emphasizes the lack of duality on the part of the One. It strays from Plotinus somewhat more in its willingness to attribute knowledge of a more transcendent kind to God, yet there are of course passages in the Enneads that would countenance such a doctrine. Indeed, as Hadot shows in his study of the commentary fragments, this section is based on Enneads VI.9.6, in which Plotinus similarly argues that God transcends both knowledge and ignorance. 22 Porphyry departs from Plotinus only by

21 h should be noted here that the text in this section is largely corrupted. and [ am often following Thillefs conclusions as to the proper reading of the remaining Greek. The ellipses in my translation mark completely corrupted sections of the text. 21

Hadat ( 1968). voLI. 123.

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arguing that this transcendence may be tenned a type of knowledge~ whereas Plotinus concludes that '·What is thought [Le. the One] does not think (noesis Oll

noel)~

but is the

cause of thinking for something else... the cause of all things is none of them.'· Insofar as the Adaptor makes the same departure from his

source~ this

may argue in favor of

Porphyrian influence on AP. Further evidence for such influence might be seen in the following passage in Porphyry: In Parm. VIA-IO: There is also a knowledge which knows an object. going from ignorance to knowledge of the object of knowledge. and again there is another. absolute, knowledge, which is not knowing an object nor of an object of knowledge. Compare this to part of the text in DS quoted previously: DS 125 [B 175): This is because there is no knowing (al- 'iilim) except when there is a knowledge and an object of knowledge, and there is no intellecting (al- 'iiqil) except when there is an intellect and an object of intellect, so there is multiplicity with respect to this. These two texts show both Porphyry and the Adaptor thinking along Plotinian lines. and arguing thar knowledge or intellection (at least, the non-transcendent variety) inescapably involves multiplicity. Porphyry's argument for this is particularly interesting: he says that knowledge of an object must necessarily move from ignorance to knowledge. This is reminiscent of the argument we studied above. in which the Adaptor argued that purely noetic intellection does not go from potency to act (i.e. from ignorance to knowledge), but knows all things through a higher potency. All these points make the hypothesis of Porphyrian influence on AP seem rather plausible. I think. however, that a closer look at these parallels reduces the temptation to gi ve much credence to such a hypothesis. Let us begin by returning to the fact that

160

Porphyry's text on ignordllce in the Parmenides commentary was based on Enn. VI.9.6. This is significant because one of the key texts in AP dealing with God as a knower transcending intellection also comes from the same Plotinian source: GS 1.25 [B 187]: [The First Principle] has no motion, because He is before motion, before thought, and before knowledge, and there is nothing in Him which He would want to know, as the knower knows, but rather He is the knowledge which does not need to know by any other knowledge, because He is the pure, ultimate knowedge containing all knowledge, and [is] the cause of the sciences. 23 Enn. VI.9.6: There is no intellection [in the One], because there is no otherness, and there is no motion, for it is before motion and before thought. For what would it think? Itself? Then before thinking it would be ignorant (agnoon). The passage in Plotinus is followed by the brief meditation on the problem of ignorance, which was the inspiration for Porphyry in his commentary. Unfortunately no paraphrase of this following passage remains in AP, if it ever even existed. But it is clear from GS 1.25 that the Adaptor would have read Plotinus' comments on ignorance. These could

have been a source for his own doctrine. just as they were a source for Porphyry. It might be argued that the Adaptor makes the same departure from Plotinus as Porphyry, by reversing the sense of the passage and insisting that the First does have knowledge in some higher sense. But such a transformation was well within the bounds of the Adaptor's strategy in the paraphrase. There are similar transformations, for instance, regarding whether the One thinks. 24 And we saw above that there is a motivation for the Adaptor to make such a change, even without Porphyrian influence: if the First does not know, there can be no Providence. Thus it seems superfluous to suppose that the doctrine

23

For this passage see also above, fn.16 in section 4.1.2.

z': See C. D'Ancona Costa. "Divine and Human Knowledge in the Plotiniana Arabica:' The Perennial Tradition of Neoplatonism. edited by J.L. Cleary (Leuven: Leuven University Press. 1997).419442. See also below. 5.3.4.

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in AP represents, somehow, Porphyry's doctrines from the Parmenides commentary; these same ideas were available to the Adaptor from Plotinus himself, and their transformation falls into a pattern easily explicable without reference to Porphyry. This leaves us with the problem of the passage in mfmar n, by far the most developed text in AP dealing with ignorance. This passage does seem strikingly independent from Plotinus. Its doctrine seems unrelated to that found in the Parmenides commentary, since there Porphyry is describing the status of the One's knowledge, not the knowledge that the intellect has of the One. A more fruitful parallel is provided by the passage in the Sentences, which speaks of an anoesia kreitloni noeseos, a nonh

intellection better than intellection." Certainly, like the Adaptor, Porphyry is committed to the notion that one must accept a certain ignorance with regard to the First Principle. But again, this is an idea that is found in Plotinus. even if he does not use the language of docta ignorantia. More robust parallels would be needed to suggest Porphyrian influence

on mfmar

n.

Not only are such parallels lacking. but none of the details of the Adaptor's

argument in this mfmar seem to be explained at all by referring to Porphyry. The linking of knowledge and causality, as argued above, seems Aristotelian. The second notion of ignorance. namely that the intellect is ignorant of its own effects, is not explained by the Porphyrian hypothesis. Indeed, it seems that the only thing the PorphYrian hypothesis might explain is the use of the term ··ignorance" to describe such a higher form of knowledge. But, as 0' Ancona Costa has pointed out. there are other possible sources for this terminology, like the Pseudo-Dionysius. I myself would argue that, if all we are trying to explain is the appearance of the term "ignorance" in this context, that is too little information to reliably

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choose anyone source as the one used by the Adaptor. It seems likely that he took the notion of a transcendent ignorance from some other Greek source, though it is not impossible that it was suggested to him by Plotinus (for example, by VI.9.6). But what is much more important is how he developed that notion, especially in mfmar U. And this development seems to be best explained by a creative application of the Aristotelian doctrine of knowledge through causality. I would argue, then, that the theme of learned ignorance shows the Adaptor not as a slavish transmitter of views from other Greek sources. but as an independently minded philosopher combining the idea of learned ignorance (whatever its origin) with views taken from Plotinus and Aristotle to produce a largely novel doctrine. Other motivations peculiar to the Adaptor's situation may also have played a role; for example, we have noted that religious committments could have led him to reverse Plotinus' doctrine on God's knowledge or intellection. All of this is consistent with the idea that the Adaptor was a member of al-Kindrs circle. and that he was using sources we know would have been available to such a translator. If anything is surprising in the interpretation given here, it is the extent to which the Adaptor's own view on learned ignorance does not depend on prior sources.

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CHAPTER 5

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE

5,I Divine predication One of the most intriguing claims made in recent literature about AP is Cristina D'Ancona Costa's contention that the Adaptor was influenced by the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius. She has adduced a number of parallels between AP and Dionysius (especially the Divine Names) to prove this point: the description of God's relationship to His effects, I the view that God is "only being,.1 and creates "through being,',3 and the doctrine of docta ignorantia. ~ Of course, if D' Ancona Costa is right about this, we might most expect Dionysian influence to appear in AP in regards to the issue that is most central to the Divine Names: the problem of divine predication. s Thus a closer look at how the Adaptor conceives of such predications may shed light on a current debate over the sources of AP, At the same time. this problem serves as a background for many of

I "Esse quod est supra eternitatem. La Cause Premiere, r etre el r eternite dans Ie Liber de Causis et dans ses sources:' in D' Ancona Costa (1995). 65. :! "'Cause prime non est yliathim: Liber de Causis, prop. 8[91: Ie fonti e la dottrina:' in D'Ancona Costa (1995), 115-7.

-' "La doctrine neoplatonicienne de l'eU"e entre I'antiquite tardive et Ie moyen age. Le Liber de Callsis par rapport a ses sources:' in O'Ancona Costa (1995). 149. -l

0' Ancona Costa (1993).20-1.

S And indeed O'Ancona Costa has defended her thesis in this regard as well. See, for instance. "'Cause prime non est yliathim: Liber de Causis, prop. 8[9J: Ie fonti e la dottrina," in D'Ancona Costa

(1995), I 15-8.

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the most important modifications found in the paraphrdSe. which show the Adaptor consistently speaking of God in ways Plotinus almost never speaks of the One. Therefore a discussion of divine predication in AP is a propaedeutic for the other topics to be raised in this chapter. First I will address the general theme of divine predications, or as the Adaptor prefers to say. "attributes:' in AP. We will see that the Adaptor has a consistent theory of how such attributes work. which is perhaps inspired by but fundamentally different from that of Plotinus. Then. [ will show the application of this theory in a specific case: the question of whether or not God can be called ucomplete:'

5.1.1 Negative theology in AP The idea that the One cannot be described is a familiar theme in the Enneads. With the exception of a few scattered passages and the unusual Enn VI.8. Plotinus is adamant that we cannot say anything truly of the One -- not that it thinks. not that it exists. not even that it is "One...6 This is not to deny that Plotinus does speak about the One. Rather, he sums up his own position as follows: "How, then. do we speak about it ourselves? We do say something about it. but we do not say it itself (ou men auto legomen). [and] we have neither knowledge (gnosin) nor thought (noesin) of it" (Enn V.3.14). In keeping with this statement, Plotinus will often indulge in metaphorical descriptions of the One or its activities. but never with the confidence that he has said something unrestrictedly true of the One or named it in some way. The best way to think of the One. he suggests, is to not think anything of it at all. hence the famous ending to this same treatise: "We do not see

6

See Enn V.3.IO. V.3.13. See also H.A. Wolfson. "Albinus and Plotinus on Divine Attributes,"

Harvard Theological Review 45 (1952). I 15-130.

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[the One] by any other light. How does this, then, happen? Take away everything (aphele panta)" (Enn V.3.17). With the possible exception of VI.8,7 the Enneads give

then a generally negative view of the possibility of speaking or thinking of the First Principle.

In keeping with this view, the Adaptor denies repeatedly in AP that God has "attributes fdiflit)." For instance, we read that Uno one can describe Him with an attribute appropriare to Him, or know Him with a knowledge oftme nature (kunhY" (OS 133, paralleling the text in Enn V.3.14 cited above), 8 and that 6'whoever wants [to] describe ~i;;: Creator, may He be exalted, must remove from Him the totality of attributes'" (OS 224). The Adaptor recognizes two reasons for this lack of attributes in the First, both of them drawn from the text of the Enneads. First of all, possessing attributes implies multiplicity. The Adaptor is more specific than Plotinus in arguing that the fact that intellect and soul can be described (i.e. that they possess attributes) is the reason for their relative lack of simplicity: Th.A Vill.20-1 [894]: Although the things which are there are simple, you will not find anything among them except that it is varied through the plurality of attributes which are in it, except that it does not increase or grow, as the bodily things increase and grow. The intellect that is there is not simple, as if it were a thing with no thing in it, and the soul which is there is not simple according to this description ("alii hiidhihi al-~ifa), but rather the intellect and the soul and the other things which are there are simple, varied by the totality of the attributes appropriate for each one.

7 See below for funher discussion of mis treatise. Though the Adaptor may well have read VI.8. no paraphrase of the treatise has come down to us. !l [t should be noted that the verb "describe" (U'a~afa) used throughout AP has the same root as the noun ··attribute" (~ifa). so that texts that discuss ""describing·' the First may be taken to allude to the problem of attributes.

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The Greek text that inspired this passage is in fact rather vague: ·'For neither is naliS simple, nor the soul that is from it, but all are variegated according to [their] simplicity" (Enn VI. 7. 13). Still, while the Adaptor is departing from Plotinus in this text, his argument is in part based on a Plotinian view: if naliS is the object of its own thought, then it cannot be completely simple. For thought implies duality. In this sense Plotinus would also argue that the mere fact that nails can be described shows that it is multiple. But the specifics of the Adaptor·s view are not so clearly taken from the Enneads. The crux of the argument in the paraphrase is that only a "thing with no thing in it" can be utterly simple. The intellect does not have such simplicity, because the attribute is something distinct from intellect that is "in" it. The Adaptor makes a distinction, then, between an existent thing and that which is true of it, or attributed to it. To a large extent this way of putting the point is aJso Plotinian. In Plotinus' view, the multiplicity of forms (which correspond to attributes) in intellect is one indication that intellect is a "one-many" (hen polla). Similarly, the Adaptor sees the attributes of intellect as forming a unity and giving intellect its identity: Th.A V.37 [871]: Therefore [the intellect's] attributes come to be it, and it is named by the name of each one of them. If the intellect and its attributes are according to this description ~ifa), there is no need to say: why is this attribute in it, because it [the attribute] is it [the intellect] (hiya huwa), and all its attributes are together.

Like Plotinus, the Adaptor distinguishes even this unity of attributes from the purer unity of the First. This comes out clearly in the following passage: "the First Originator is one alone. I mean that He is only being (anlliyyafaqa[), having no attribute suitable to Him"

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(GS 1.11).9 For the Adaptor. being is the underlying subject ofa predication. and the predications or attributes determine what that being will be: But the First. as indescribable, remains "being alone," or "only being," because it can have no attributes which introduce multiplicity above and beyond its simple being. The Adaptor uses more Plotinian vocabulary to make the same point, and sometimes uses that vocabulary in a systematic way. Consider the following passage from the paraphrase: GS 1.32-35 [B 188]: The first originated intellect does not have a form. When it connects to the First Originator. it comes to have a form, because it is limited. For it is molded and comes to have a shape and a form. As for the First Originator, He has no form, because there is not something else above Him which He would wish to limit Him, and there is nothing below Him which He would want to limit Him. For He is without limit in every way. Therefore He comes to not have a shape or a form. If the First Originator were form, the intellect would be some logos (kalima). And the intellect is not a logos, and there is no logos in it, because it was originated without its Originator having an attribute or a form, so that he would have put that form and logos in it. For the intellect is not a logos nor is there a logos in it. but rather it makes the logos in the things. because it has an attribute and a shape. Here the Adaptor provides us with a hierarchy of terms for describing predication. The First has no predicates at alI -- it has "no shape or form" (this is taken frem Plotinus: the One is amorplzos kai alleidos, Enn VI. 7.17). As in Plotinus, it is through its relationship to the One that intellect comes to have a "limit" or form. But this form is different from the "logos" which is found in the effects of intellect, because only something that already has a form can give that form to something else. The Adaptor. then, uses "logos" here in the technical sense of a form impressed upon an effect by a cause that has the same form. Thus he distinguishes between the causality of something without attributes and the '} See below. 5.2 for an extended discussion of the phrase all1riyyafaqa[. its proper translation. and its relation to the problem of attributes.

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causality of something with attributes. The same distinction is expressed in the Adaptor's more idiosyncratic language when he says: Th.A V.46: The totality of active things [perfonn] their acts only through attributes in them, not through their being. As for the First Agent, it makes the thing through none of the attributes, because there is absolutely no attribute in it, but it acts through its being (lllIwiyya). We can summarize the Adaptor's view, then, as follows: First Principle: Only being. Has no attribute. shape, or form. Acts "by being." Does not

make logos. Intellect: Being plus attribute, shape or form. Has no "logos." Acts ""by an attribute:'

Makes logos. All effect of intellect: Something that receives a '"logos" from intellect.

This takes us to the second argument the Adaptor gi ves for the absence of attributes in the First. We have just seen the Adaptor argue that, because the effect of intellect possesses logos, there can be no logos in the intellect. He applies the same principle when he argues that God can have no attributes, because He is the cause of what has attributes: ""None of the attributes of things are in the Creator, may He be exalted. And He is above all the attributes, because He is the cause of the attributes" (DS 225). This is taken almost directly from Plotinus: ""And we must, then, not add anything of the later and the lesser, but say that that moves above these and is the cause of these. but is itself not these" (Enn V.5.13). As in Plotinus, the basis of this argument is that the intellect is itself all things and has all attributes: ""The intellect only comes to be the totality of the things because in it is the totality of the attributes of things" (Th.A Vm.36). But if we assume that a cause cannot have anything belonging properly to its effect. then

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this means the One cannot have any attribute in it at all: "'the intellect became all things, because its Originator is not like anything. The First Originator comes not to resemble anything, because all things are from Him" (GS 1.10). The Adaptor goes even further than Plotinus by giving an argument for accepting this assumption as a general principle: ·'Necessarily, the oneness of the originated is not like (mith!) the oneness of the Originator, otherwise the Originator and the originated and the cause and the effect would be one thing" (Th.A X.93). This suggests, we may add, how seriously the Adaptor takes the idea that attributes determine the nature or being of a thing: the passage implies that two things that have the same attributes will in fact be the same thing.

5.1.2 Positive theology in AP So far we have seen that, on the basis of two general arguments found in Plotinus, the Adaptor rejects the possibility of describing or giving attributes to the First Principle. Now, let us turn our attention to passages which exhibit the opposite tendency. In Enn V.8.12, Plotinus remarks that, when speaking of the One, "we use [temporal] names out of the necessity to wish to signify (semainein ethelein):' The Adaptor's paraphrase is even stronger, as it does not include etJze/ein: "we only apply these names to that First Light because we are compelled to make them an indication" (Th.A Vill. 182). With Plotinus, then, the Adaptor holds both that the First has no attributes and that one must nevertheless speak of Him somehow. (t would seem that we must draw the conclusion that any names thus given to the First will be mere metaphor. But the Adaptor does not draw this conclusion.

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First of all~ the Adaptor often shows himself to be more willing than Plotinus to describe the First.

Consider~

for example~ the following passage as compared to its Greek

parallel: OS 117-120 [B 175]: Even though we say that He is other than them~ and other than substance, other than intellect, and other than all other things~ we do not say that He is not a substance~ and we do not say that He is lacking intellect~ lacking sighi~ and lacking knowledge. But we say that He is above substance~ and above intellect~ and above sight~ and above knowledge. And this is because He sees and knows His essence, which is the essence which is above every essence. Therefore He is the knowledge which is above every knowledge, because He is the First Knowledge, just as He is above every intellect as He is above every knowledge. because He does not need to know at all. Knowledge is only in the second substance, because it needs to know the First Substance.

Enn V.3.12: For what comes from [the One] (to ap' autou) is not cut off from it~ and again is not the same as it, nor is it such as to not be substance, nor is it such as to be blind, but it sees and knows itself and is the first knower. But [the One], as beyond intellect (to de osper epekeina nou), is also beyond knowledge. As it does not need anything at all, so it does not [need] knowing. But knowing is in the second. For knowledge is one thing, but it is one without the "something," for if it is one thing, it is not Oneness itself; for the "itself' (auto) is before the "something" (1i). Here the Adaptor has apparently made a crass translation error by taking the subject of the first sentence to be the

One~

instead of intellect. But can this have been mere error? In

Plotinus, it is quite clear that there is a change in subject halfway through the passage, so that the first remarks refer to the intellect and the latter remarks to the One. In DS the Adaptor glosses over this change in subject: the phrases which mark out each subject (to ap' autou and to de osper epekeina nOll) are both omitted in the Adaptor's version. This

is. then, no mistranslation, but a deliberate transfer of Plotinus' positive remarks on intellect to the First Principle. Also significant is the fact that the Adaptor seems to consider phrases like "above substance" ifawqa al-jawhar) to be compatible with (and

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not, as Plotinus implies here, contrasted with) being a substance in some sense ("'we do not say that He is not a substance"). We will see further use of this strategy below. Another tendency found in the paraphrase that tends towards a more positive attitude towards divine predication is the notion that some names are more appropriate to the First than others. Immediately following the passage just cited, we find the following in the paraphrase and its source: DS 121-2 [B 175]: The name ofrrue substance lO is not befitting for Him, but we find nothing similar to Him in all things, and no name which is befitting to nothing else but Him alone. Therefore we name Him with the most excellent of names by which it is possible to name Him. Enn V.3.13: Therefore it is truly unspeakable, for whatever you say, you speak of something. But "beyond all things and beyond the majesty Of,lI intellect is the only true one of all [ways of speaking about it], not as being its name, but because [it says that] it is not something among all things, and "has no name," because nothing is [said] about it. But as far as is possible, we try to signify (semainein) about it to ourselves. Even in this fairly negative passage, the Adaptor introduces a notion not found in the Greek: the "most excellent of names" (aidal al-asmii '). The same point is stated in a more general way in another passage with no Greek parallel: "the attributes (§.iflit) of the effect are more appropriately ascribed to the cause than to the effect; particularly when they are noble, they are more appropriate to the cause than to the effect" (Th.A II.76). These two passages imply a division between two types of attributes: those that are "noble" or "most excellent," and therefore may be more appropriately ascribed to the First. and other attributes, which cannot be used the same way. 12

III Ism al-jawhar al-!.!aqq: Lewis translates ··substance. properly so called:' I assume this is not based on a different manuscipt reading. but is an attempt to take the sense of al-!l.aqq differently. II

A quote from Republic VI: see Plotinus (1966-1988). volume V. 116. fn.1.

l~ For funher argument on the theological context of this doctrine. see below. 5.2.4.

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5.1.3 Predication by way of causality and eminence As we have seen. the Adaptor combines acceptance of Plotinus' relativelyapophatic attitude towards the One with a more kataphatic tendency to accept certain attributes of God. Given the sophistication the Adaptor brings to some of the passages cited above. it is not surprising to find that he tries to resolve this tension in the paraphrase. 13 He does this by arguing that the attributes of God's effects can be predicated of Him. with certain restrictions. There are two passages in AP which state this doctrine very explicitly. Especially noteworthy is the use of the same tenninology in both passages: Th.A X.154 [B 156-167]: All things are ascribed (tullsabu) to it because it is the Cause of causes. and the Wisdom of wisdoms, as we have said many times. For if the first Wisdom is the Cause of causes. then every act its effect does is ascribed to it also. in a loftier and more excellent way (bi-naw'in arfa'in wa-afdalin). OS 228 [B 183]: And the noble agent is more excellent than the effect of the act. and all the attributes of the effect of the act are in the agent. except that they are in it in a loftier and higher way (bi-naw';n arfa'in wa-a'liiin). In neither case is the doctrine espoused here taken from a parallel text in Plotinus. 14 D' Ancona Costa has spoken of a hvia eminentiae" in the Liber de Causis,I5 and argued

that this is a doctrinal parallel between the two texts, What is clear in both AP and the de Causis is that the First can only be named in relation to His effects, or, to put it more 13 Of course. it cannot be ruled out that the Adaptor is trying to reconcile tensions that he finds in the text of the Enneads itself -- particularly if he knew Enn VI.8. the Adaptor might be inclined to look for a way to accomodate both the positive and negative statements of Plotinus about the One. in addition to adding his own more positive claims about God.

1-1

Th.A X.154 is completely independent. DS 228 parallels the end of Enn V.5: "For the maker (to

paiaull. referring to the Good) is better than the made, for it is more complete." Note that this is another

case where the Adaptor has introduced the theme of the First's attributes into a passage about something else.

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accurately, that the attributes of the effects are transferred to the First but used of Him in a different way. 16 The view breaks down into two parts: (a) the First is in some way like what He creates, and therefore can be named according to the attributes of what He creates; (b) the First remains other than, or as the Adaptor often puts it, "above" ifawqa) His effects, so that these names must mean something different when used of Him. Strictly speaking, the first aspect could be called a via callsalitatis, and the second a via eminelltiae. (a) The way of causality is expressed in AP by the use of the catchphrase bi-nut'.,"in

'illatin, "'in the way of a cause." For example: Th.A IX.7l [B 130]: As for the First Cause, the excellences are in it in the way of a cause, not that it is the position of a receptacle for the excellences, but rather its entirety is a being (anniyya) which is all the excellences. Again. we have here the denial that the attributes, in this case the "excellences" (or "virtues") exist in the First. The same formulation accompanied many of the passages we examined above which denied attributes to the First. Yet the First has those attributes

15 '''Cause prime non est yliathim.· Liber de Causis. prop. 8(9): Ie fonti e la doltrina:' in D' An(;ona Costa (1995).99. Note the terminological parallel between the end of Liber de Causis Prop.5 and the two passages just cited from AP. Ib The main thrust of Prop.S in the Liber de Causis is in fact that the First is /lot describable. As we have seen. the Adaptor says the same thing in the paraphrase. despite subcribing to the via emillellliae. In the de Causis. the reasoning behind the indescribability of the First is as follows: '"The First Cause is higher than description (~ifa). and language is incapable of its description on account of the the description of its being. because it is above every single cause. But it is described only by the second causes. which are enlightened from the illumination of the First Cause. And this is because the cause which illuminates first illuminates its effect and is not illumined by another light. because it is the pure light above which there is no light- And thus it happens that the First is the one for which description fails" (Prop.5). For the Arabic text: O. Bardenhewer. Die pseudo-aristotelische Schrift tiber das reine Gute (Frankfun a.M.: Minerva. 1882). 69-70. It is wonh noting that the same argument could be extracted from a key passage in AP. At Th.A [1.49. while discussing the theme of docta ig/lorantia. the Adaptor argues that if the intellect knew the First perfectly. it would be its cause. This implies a linkage of knowledge and causality similar to that in the de Causis.

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insofar as He is the cause of what has them primarily. The same ambiguity is expressed in the following passages: Th.A X.153: All things are in it, and it is not all things,17 because it is the cause of all intellectual and sensible things. GS LII: all things are in it, and it is not in anything, except in the way of a cause.

An obvious interpretation of such passages would be the most reductive one possible: when the Adaptor says an attribute is in the First "'in the way of a cause:' he means simply that the First is the cause of what has the attribute, and nothing more. 18 The Adaptor himself suggests such an interpretation at times: GS IX.7 [B 197]: If we describe [God] with all goodnesses and excellences, we only mean by this that He is the cause of goodnesses and excellence, and that He put in them in the forms and is their Originator. But as we have already seen, the Adaptor seems to hold that a cause must genuinely possess whatever it gives to its effect, even if it does not possess it in the same way. He applies this rule to divine predication at least in part because it applies to the causal relations that obtain between intellect and soul, or soul and body. For example, the contrast made (at GS I.32ff.) between form and logos is based on the idea that the same thing cannot be in intellect and soul in the same way, since one is cause and the other

17 Lewis has "and all things are following:' Here. atypically. Badawls text seems more plausible. Though Lewis is following the nonnally laudable course of assimilating the paraphrase to the Greek as much as possible. the version in Badawl might itselfbe a reference back to the beginning ofEnn V.2: to hell panra ka; oude hell. The italics in Lewis' translation of Th.A X.IS3 are misleading: the Greek does not say that all things are in the One because it is their cause. IS Such an austere view of divine attributes is not unknown in Arabic philosophy. One is reminded. for example. of Maimonides' treatment of the same subject. insofar as Maimonides would argue that sentences like "God is all-powerfur' do not actually make a positive predication of God. Rather. such statements are either denials about God ('"There is no limit to Goo"s power") or about God's effects.

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effecl. I9 Yet the same thing must in some way exist in both cause and effect, or there would be no basis for the causal relationship. If the Adaptor is applying a set of general "rules" governing causality to the First, then he is in some sense departing from Plotinus, who would not necessarily agree, for instance, that the relationship between One and intellect is analogous to that between intellect and Soul. Again, we see the Adaptor moving towards a more positive doctrine of divine predication than that of Plotinus. (b) This impression is confinned when we tum our attention to the second aspect of this theory of predication, the via eminenriae. According to this mode of discourse, although the attributes are "in" the First, they mean something different when predicated of Him. The Adaptor expresses this in the paraphrase by routinely modifying attributes in some way when he ascribes them to the First. A common formula is to affix the word "pure" (mallf!) to such terms, for example by calling God the "pure Good.":w Other terms used

similarly are "First" (awwal) and "true" (haqq). Also common is the strategy of saying that God is "above" ifa ....,rqa) a given attribute. While this last might seem to amount simply to denying the attribute of God, the Adaptor suggests differently: ·'the good comes from a cause which is above the good, rather it is the pure good" (OS 227). And again, in a passage we have already examined: ·'we do not say that He is lacking intellect, lacking sight, and lacking knowledge, but we say that He is above substance, and above intellect, and above sight, and above knowledge" (OS 117-118). These statements suggest that the Adaptor uses fawqa much in the same way as a Greek writer might use !luper, as a prefix

19 See also. for example. Th.A IX.66: "we say that justice and righteousness and the other excellences are existent. whether the soul things about them or does not think [about them]. Indeed they are existent in the intellect in a higher and loftier way than that in the soul:'

10

Th.A 1.48; OS 227: GS 1.24. 36: 11.89: IX.2.

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which modifies an adjective without negating it.:!l Finally. the Adaptor frequently refers to the First using phrases like "Cause of causes," "Light of lights," and so on. 22 All these modifications show that the Adaptor. throughout the entire paraphrase, speaks of the First in a way that is infonned by the doctrine of via eminentiae that he espouses explicitly in a few passages. Insofar as the modifications are not based on parallel Greek passages, we can say that this doctrine was important enough to the Adaptor that he deliberately imported it into the paraphrase. 23 We have not shown, however. that the Adaptor necessarily thought that he was introducing language that was counter to the intentions of Plotinus. To get a better sense of the Adaptor's relationship to Plotinus on this issue, let us tum to the case of a specific divine attribute.

5.1A Is the First Principle "complete"?

At the beginning of EnnV.2, Plotinus raises a central question regarding the One: how does a multiplicity come from something that contains no multiplicity? His answer includes the following passage: "For, being perfect (teleion) by not seeking and not having and not needing, overflows, as it were, and its superfulness makes something other than itself." The passage is remarkable in that it apparently ascribes an attribute, "perfection," to the One without qualification. For a reader concerned with the problem ~I Obviously. if this is the case then it is a point in favorofD'Ancona Costa's Dionysius

hypothesis. 22 See Th.A Pro I. 14. X.91, X.154-5. X.181: DS 71,151,154; GS 11.87. Th.A. X.154. in particular. uses nearly all the strategies we have mentioned so far.

~J It is wonh noting here that the via causaliraris could be at least panially inspired by Aristotelian metaphysical views. Since. in Aristotle, an agent possesses in actuality what it bestows on its effect. it ....'ould make sense to reason from the nature of the effect to the nature of the cause. This may lie behind the Adaptor"s statement that God has the attributes found in His effects "in the way of a cause:' For a concrete example of such Aristotelian reasoning in AP. see below, 5.2.3.

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of divine attributes the passage is even more provocative because Plotinus more commonly ascribes "perfection" to 1l0llS. Many passages where he does

so~ indeed~ are

paralleled in AP (see below). The Adaptor was clearly intrigued by the term: the Arabic words tiimm (complete) and kamfl (perfect)~ two possible translations of teleios~ appear routinely in his paraphrase~ and especially throughout Th.A X. 24 I will argue below that in this mrmar, the Adaptor modified Plotinus' text to develop an original doctrine regarding the First's Hcompleteness:' Before taking a closer look at this

modification~

though, let us consider what the term "complete" means in the paraphrase. The primary meaning of liimm is found in passages that say that the intellect contains '"all things." At one point this is offered practically as a definition of the term: Th.A X.43 [B 140-141]: If you say "substance:' or knowledge, or something similar to these things, you find that this is in the first form. And from this we say that it [the first form] is complete~ because all things are found in it. Though the word te/eios does not appear in the passage parallel to this bit of paraphrase, other passages in the Enneads could have served as the source for this ·"definition": Th.A VID.116-7 [B 110]: AJI things are in [the intellect] and none of them is outside it... The upper world only comes to be complete and perfect because there is no thing in it which it does not encompass in knowledge. Enn V.1.4: Where would [intellect] leave to, having all things in itself?... And therefore all things are perfect (teleia) in it, so that it is wholly perfect (pante fe/eios), not having what is not perfect. 25

::!-l Often. the Adaptor uses the two words as a couplet. e.g. at Th.A X.38: the "Originator is complete (riimm) and perfect (kamlf) ..... He uses either both words to translate the one Greek word. teleion. or less commonly tiimm alone (e.g. at Th.A X.6). This leads me to think that. at least in the contexts relevant to our current concerns. the two Arabic terms are being used as synonyms. See also the discussion of Synonymenlziiujil1lgen in texts from al-Kindrs circle at Endress (1973). 155-162.

25 A similar source could be VUI.I 1-12. paralleling Enn VI.7.12. though the word there (again quoting Plato) is pal/teles. not teleiOlL See also Th.A X.48 ('"the intellect is complete and perfect in the totality of things'·). paralleling Enn VI.7.3: "if [nails) is perfect (teleios), it has the causes in itselC'

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The Adaptor closely associates the word tiimm with the word niiqi$.., ··deficiency." This is treated in a number of passages as the contrary of "complete," to the point where the Adaptor is even willing to paraphrase a Greek text denying that there is deficiency in the First (meden elleipsolltos) by saying that the First is "complete and perfect" (Th.A V.20).26 This. then. is the basic sense of the term tiimm: to have all things, which is the

same thing as not having any deficiency. The Adaptor sometimes uses tiimm to mean only this sort of complete existence or lack of defect, for example at Th.A

n.64 where he

says that the soul is ··complete and perfect" in the limbs of the body, simply because it exists throughout the entire body. But we can see from other passages that, in some cases. liimm can have a more technical meaning. One aspect of this more specific meaning is that, if something is ··complete,·· then not only does it have all things, but it must have them ··simultaneously" or "all at once." In a passage original in the paraphrase, the Adaptor says: Th.A X.38 [B 139-140]: But as for the things which are in the higher world, they do not admit of increase and decrease. because their Originator is complete (tiimm) and perfect (kiimil), and originates their essence (dhiit) and attributes Cdifii/) together, simultaneously. so that they thereby become complete and perfect. And if they are thereby complete and perfect, then they are therefore eternally in one state. and are all things in the sense which we mentioned above, and this is that none of the attributes and none of those forms can be mentioned without you finding them in it. Completion precludes change, and also requires that "all the things" contained in intellect came to it ··simultaneously." rather than one after another. Often. when the Adaptor introduces the word tiimm into his paraphrase without a parallel fe/elon in the Greek, it is because the passage deals with a lack of change or with the idea that something has all

:!6

See also Th.A V.39ff.. X.5. 96. 121.

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things in it at once. In doing so he associates the following ideas with the claim that something is ··complete n : (a) The complete is eternal or atemporal (Th.A V.17ff., 33, XAO). (b) The acts of a complete thing are not one after another, nor do they have a ··beginning and end:' but rather they are all at once (Th.A V.47, X.39). (c) As a corollary of this, the complete cannot think discursively, because this involves a "transfer" from one thing to the next (Th.A Vill.52, 115-7, X.40). (d) The complete must be one, not many: the many is ··deficient" (Th.A X.96, 126). All of these features are attributed to both intellect and the First, suggesting that, at least to some extent, the Adaptor follows Plotinus in applying the notion of "completeness" to both hypostases. But a final theme which the Adaptor associates with the term tiimm complicates this neat picture considerably. This theme is the relationship of the attribute ··completeness" to all the attributes as a whole. In the passage just cited above (X.38), the Adaptor holds, as a sort of corollary to the idea that "all things" are in what is complete, that ··all attributes" are found in the complete. No attribute or form can be ··mentioned" which does not exist in intellect. 27 This is because these attributes are made simultaneously with the essence (dhiil) of the intellect. This is of course one basis for the claims (a)-(d) we have just seen

in other parts of the paraphrase: if the intellect's very essence is the same as what it contains. it cannot change, so that it is (a) atemporal and has no transition (b) between its acts or (c) its intellection. Finally, (d) the intellect is one, because all the forms or

27 That the "higher world" in question refers to intellect, and not God. is clear from the context as well as the Adaptor's routine practice of using this sobriquet for the world of intellect.

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attributes in it are united in one essence. All this seems to be taken directly from Plotinus' descriptions of nallS, though Plotinus does not seem to use the word teleios in the complex sense that the Adaptor uses tiimm and kamil. The intellect, then, would seem to be the primary subject for the attribute ··complete." This impression, though, is apparently contradicted by the following passage, also original with the Adaptor: Th.A V.39-41 [B 71]: And the intellect only comes to be according to this description fdifa) because its Originator originated it completely, because He is also complete. with no defect. When He originated the intellect He originated it complete and perfect, and made its quiddity (mil 7ya) the cause of its generation. The First Agent acts likewise: because when He does an act, He makes "why is itT' (lima kana) enter into "what is itT' (rna "ul...·a) Thus when you know "what is it:' you know "why is if' (lima hllwa) also. And the complete agent acts in this way. The complete agent is the one that does its act through being alone (biannihi faqaO, through none of the attributes. As for the defective agent, it is the one which does its act not through being alone, but through some one of its attributes. Therefore, it does not do a complete, perfect act. And this is because it is not able to do its act and its end together, because it is defective, not complete. Here we have some of the familiar features associated with completeness: the simultaneity of beginning and end and opposition to "deficiency." Yet here, it is the First, not intellect. Who is said to be primarily complete. Indeed, the Adaptor says that the complete agent acts through "being alone," and not through "attributes," which can be true ollly of the First, as we saw above. Here, then, the Adaptor actually denies that the intellect should properly be called "complete," reserving this term for the First. Nor is this passage an isolated exception in the Adaptor's theory of completeness: GS 1.12-14 [8 185]: As for the intellect, the things are in it, and it is in the things. And the things only come to be in the intellect because their forms are in it, and scattered forth from it, because it is the cause of the things which are below it. However, though the intellect is the cause of the things which are below it, it is not the complete cause of a thing, because it is only a cause of the form of the thing, not the cause of its being (hllwiyya). As for the First Agent, He is a complete cause (' ilia liimma). This is because He is the cause of the being of the

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thing and its form without an intermediary. and the cause of the being of the soul 28 and the form of the things through the intermediary of the intellect. In this passage, also original in the paraphrase. the Adaptor repeats that it is only the First that is a "complete" cause, and that the causality exercised by something complete has to do with being, rather than form. One might be inclined to say that, in these two passages. we have simply caught the Adaptor in an embarrassing self-contradiction. Though he normally applies the term tiimm to intellect, and even has a developed idea of what this means which he derived from Plotinus, in these two places he gives up that use of the term in his zeal to praise the First Cause. A critic of the Adaptor might accuse him of self-contradiction on this point, or say that he is equivocating on the term ucomplete." We can best defend the Adaptor from these charges by finaJly turning our attention to mimar X. The beginning of this mimar parallels the beginning of Enn V.2, a passage we looked at above. The Adaptor finds in Plotinus the somewhat surprising claim that the One is "perfect (teleiOlz) by not seeking and not having and not needing." He paraphrases the text in this way: Th.A X.6 [B 135]: And the indication that the pure One is complete and above completeness (tammfawqa a/-tamam) is that it has no need of anything and does not seek the acquisition of anything, and because of the intensity of its completeness and excess another thing comes to be from it. Remarkably, the Adaptor corrects Plotinus here by saying that the First is not just complete, but both complete and above completeness. A similar correction begins the mTmar:

2ll See below. 5.3.1 for a funher discussion of this key passage. which also introduces a distinction between creation of being and creation of form. Rosenthars translation. which is the one found at Henry & Schwyzer ( 1959). 281. is misleading here. because he translates 'il/a tiimma as "final cause." rather than "complete cause:' As Pines (1954). 306. points out. this phrase sometimes means "final cause" in Arabic philosophy. but there is no reason to translate it that way here.

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Enn V.2.1: The One is all things and not one of them. Th.A X.l: The pure One is the cause of all things. and is not like any of the things. This correction also bears on the issue of completeness. of course. since the Adaptor is rejecting the statement that the One is ""all things:' which is equivalent to saYing that He is complete, as we saw above. In X.6. he seems to have a more nuanced reaction to Plotinus' text: rather than simply negating the statement that the One is complete. he says that the First is somehow complete and not complete at the same time. This is the first of several attempts in mfmar X to correct Plotinus' text in favor of an original view regarding the First's completeness. The Adaptor lays out his view in more detail in an original passage that immediately precedes the correction in X.6: Th.A X.4-5 [B 134-135]: And I say that the pure One is above completeness ifa~vqa al-tamam) and perfection (ai-kamal), and as for the sensible world. it is deficient (niiqin. because it is originated from the complete thing, which is the intellect. 29 And the intellect only comes to be complete and perfect because it is originated from the true, pure One, which is above completeness. It is not possible that the thing that is above completeness originates the defective thing with no intermediary, and it is not possible that the complete thing originates something complete like itself. because origination is deficiency.3D I mean the originated is not in the rank of the originator. but is beneath it. This passage is unique in its explicit assertion of a hierarchy based on completeness, applied to the Plotinian cosmos. Here the First is said to be above completeness, while the sensible world is. as it were. ""below" completeness. that is to say deficient. It is intellect that is complete. and this is because it is caused by what is above completeness. This is further explained shortly afterwards:

29 Reading with the version in Badawr (1955). 34. th.1. In the main text he has ""...because it is originated. and the complete thing is intellect:" Jll

Reading with Lewis. Badawl has /ianllllhll.li alibdii' llaqi~lm.

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Th.A X.7 [B 135]: ... because the thing that is above completeness cannot produce unless the thing is complete. Otherwise it is not above completeness. And this is because, if the complete thing produces anything, then a fortiori the thing which is above completeness produces completeness, because it produces the complete thing than which no produced thing can be more powerful, more splendid or more high. Here the Adaptor is applying the via causalitatis that we saw above: a cause must be unlike its effect, or it would be the same thing. The principle is applied both to the causal relationship between the One and intellect and to that between intellect and the sense "'orld. In both cases, the effect falls short of its effect in terms of completeness. This in itself suggests that when the Adaptor says the First is "above" completeness, he is not simply denying that the First is complete -- for the mere absence of completeness is the deficiency that is found in the sense world. Rather, he is saying that the First cannot be properly described as "complete:' because it is intellect that is complete. If the First is complete in some sense. then He has a completeness that somehow goes beyond that found in intellect. This interpretation is confirmed by passages inserted by the Adaptor through mfmar

X. and elsewhere in AP. many of which have already been cited. 31 These passages

imply both that the First is complete and perfect (Th.A V.17. 39; VIII. 16. 98; X.38. 40, 47,89,96,185; DS 178; as I.12ff.) and that the First is above completeness. so that properly speaking, it is the intellect that is complete (Th.A V.33; VIll. 11-12; X.4-8, 88,

~I The relevant passages I have found in Th.A X are X. 4, 6. 38.43.47. 88-89. 96. 121. and 185. The distribution of these passages tends to suggest that. as [ argued in chapter I. X.137ff. was not originally attached to Ihe rest of X. because in this latter section there is only one passage that might be relevant. and even it does not use the word liimm (X.18S). The fact that the "completeness" question unifies X.I-33 with what follows might be a weak argument for thinking these first two pans of m'imar X (i.e. 1-33 and 34-136) were originally joined. But the presence of the same themes in other parts of AP gives all of this a limited imponance for reconstructing the textual order. [think it is more likely that the theme of completeness was of concern to the Adaptor throughout the pans of the paraphrase deal ing with the First.

184

121). I would suggest that these apparently contradictory sets of passages are united by the idea that the intellect can be called complete because the First is complete. and viceversa: Th.A V.17 [B 68]: "We say that every act (fi'1) the First Creator does (fa 'ala) is complete and Perfect. because He is a complete cause ('illa liimma) with no other cause beyond Him. The intellect, as act of the complete First, is also complete. But the very fact that the intellect is complete implies that., strictly speaking. the First must be uabove" completeness, at least in the sense in which completeness is ascribed to intellect. We have here, then, a clear application of the twofold theory of predication we saw the Adaptor articulate in some other passages. According to this doctrine, there is a sense in which the attributes had by intellect are shared by the First., and a sense in which they are transcended by the First. This double use of the attributes is based on causality and eminence: the First is both complete and above completeness, insofar as it must be both similar to and different from its effect. The kind of "correction" we saw in Th.A X.I-8 shows. I think, that the Adaptor was concerned to import this doctrine into parts of the Enneads which seemed not to use such a theory of predication. At the very least, then, the Adaptor took it upon himself to modify examples of discourse about the First Principle that he found in his source text. Whether or not he thought he could do this and remain true to Plotinus is less clear. Certainly, it does not seem that any text paraphrased in AP was the source for the Adaptor's theory of divine attributes. For in the passages we have examined, the most crucial statements regarding divine attribution in general. and completeness in particular, are independent from the Greek text. Yet this does not yet rule out the possibility that the

185

Adaptor was influenced by other parts of the Plotinian corpus. Specifically. he may have been trying to import the more positive doctrine of divine attribution he found in Enn VI.8 into other parts of the Enneads. On the other hand. D' Ancona Costa has argued that the sources of this theory of predication in AP are to be sought in the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius. We will be in a better position to assess these claims after turning our attention to another. more straightforwardly ontological. aspect of the Adaptor's theology.

5.2 God and being We have just examined the Adaptor's understanding of theological discourse, that is. the status of attributes or names given to God. The following section, as will become clear, will have close ties with the preceding discussion. Here [ will take up the issue which is. perhaps, the most philosophically significant theme proper to AP: the idea that God is "only being." ill a recent article. Richard Taylor addressed the presence of this theme in AP and showed that it may stand behind the well-known medieval tradition that describes God as being itself (esse ipsum), which finds its way into the Liber de Causis and ultimately Thomas Aquinas. 32 Given that the characteristic terminology of being in AP appears in later Arabic philosophers, we might add that al-Hirabr and Ibn srna may also be examples of the direct or indirect influence of AP in Arabic Neoplatonism. 33 The

l! Taylor (1998). It should be noted. however. that the phrase esse ipsum does not appear in the Latin Liber de Causis: as Taylor points out (217). the phrases used are ells {alllum and ellS primum. We cannot go here into the complexities of this translation issue. though some of the terminological considerations presented below. 5.2.1. have obvious relevance.

3] In both authors we have the assertion that for God. miihiyya ("'essence") is the same as a1l1liyya or Iwwiyya ("being"): see M.-T. d·Alvemy. "Anniyya-Anitas:' in Melanges offens a Etienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute. 1959). 71. citing al-Farabrs Fusi,s al-hikma (Pearls of Wisdom). and 77. citing Ibn STna in a/-Shi@'. See also F. Shehadi. Metaphysics in Islamic Philosophy (Delmar, New York: Caravan Books. 1982). 55 and 84.

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theme of God as pure being has also been treated in a number of other articles on AP. including several by D' Ancona Costa. 3~ In this section I will build on the work done in these articles, beginning with an overview of the relevant terminology used by in AP.

5.2.1 The terminology of existence Scholars have long been struck by the presence in AP of terms which are apparent neologisms introduced into Arabic at the time of al-Kindrs circle of translators in 9th century Baghdad. Already in the 19th century, Gennan scholars speculated about the derivation of two key terms, anniyya and Izllwiyya. 35 As we will see, in the context of AP both of these terms should be translated as ··being," though Lewis in his English translation renders huwiyya as ··identity:' To these we can add the term ann. which will be explained below, and a few other terms for "being" or hexisience" in AP. A brief discussion of each of these will be required before we can move on to an analysis of how the Adaptor uses them. Of particular interest, of course, will be the Greek words they are used to translate. (a) AllIziyya

(~I):

this is the term used most commonly in AP when speaking of God as

pure being, or, more accurately, ··only being" (anniyya faqa[). As Endress remarks, it would seem at first glance to be an abstract noun based on anna, an Arabic particle

3-l See D' Ancona Costa, "Esse quod est supra etemitatern. La Cause Premiere. retre el retemite dans Ie Liberde CaCtsis et dans ses sources:' in D'Ancona Costa (1995).63: "La doctrine Neoplatonicienne de r etre entre r Anliquite tardive et Ie Moyen Age. Le Liber de Callsis par rapport a ses sources:' in D' Ancona Costa ( 1995).139-152: "'Cause prime non est yliathim: Liber de Causis. prop. 8[9]: Ie fonti e la dottrina:' in D'Ancona Costa (1995),107. .:15 See R.M. Frank. '"The Origin of the Arabic Philosophical Tenn amriyya:' Cahiers de Byrsa 6 (1956), 181-182.

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usually translated "that'~ (as in "it is true that ai-KindT is a philosopher,,).36 In general~ the ending -iyya is used in Arabic to form abstract nouns of this sort (see below for another example~ huwiyya).

A slightly different conjecture is that the word should be vocalized

inniyya. as an abstraction of the assertive particle inna ("verily," or ··indeed,,).37 BadawI has suggested that anniyya could be a transliteration of the Greek einai, ··to be. ~,38 Finally, a more fanciful derivation found in some later Arabic literature would have the term as an abstraction of the first person prounoun ana, so that anniyya would literally mean "I-ness:,39 We need not enter into this debate here; I will follow the majority of scholars (including Taylor, D' Ancona Costa and Endress) and vocalize the term anniyya, though without presupposing any particular etymological derivation. As remarked above, this

term~

like

hlllviyya~ appears

in Arabic for the first time in

ai-KindT's circle, and AP may be the oldest extant text to use the word. It also appears in the Book on the Pure Good (later the Liber de Causis), Us!ath's contemporaneous translation of Aristotle's

Metaphysics~ the

works of aI-KindI himself. and many later

Arabic texts"~o But the earliest appearances of the term are all in translations of texts from the Greek philosophical tradition. This suggests that the meaning of alll1iyya can be fixed by the Greek terms it translates. In AP and other texts, anniyJ'a is used as a translation both for 011 ('·being") and einai C·to be..):H The plural, anniyyiit, sometimes is

36

Endress ( 1973), 80.

3;

Shehadi (1982), 9-10.

38

For Badaw-ls clai~ see Frank (1956), 182 and 183 fn.l. Against this. see Frank. 192.

.19

Against this possibility, see Simon van den Burgh's article on "all/liyya" in EI:!. vol.l.

-to See Endress (1973).95-106. The later uses of amliyya include those in sufi literature. which is a source for the aforementioned derivation from ana. See d' Alvemy (1959). 65. ':1

See Endress (1973).92-94, and also the many examples given in this section of the dissertation.

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used to translate ollta ("·beings"). Now. it has been suggested by Frank that these translators. including the Adaptor. would not have used the same term to translate on and einai if they had had the Greek text in front of them:~2 He suggests. therefore, that these indiscriminate translations are the result of conflation of on and einai in intermediary texts composed in Syriac:B While I am not in a position to deal with the complexities of his argument, I will note two points against this possibility. First. unlike Greek, Arabic does not have separate words for the participle and infinitive of "'to be:' Thus it is hardly surprising that translators would have failed to translate on and einai with separate terms. Second, Frank makes the crucial assumption that the Arabic texts in question (and AP in particular) were. in fact, based on Syriac intermediary texts. This is what leads him to inquire into possible Syriac origins for the term in the first place. Given the more recent arguments of Zimmermann to the effect that there was no such Syriac intermediary text in the case of AP. Frank's view comes to look less likely.~ (b) HuwiYJ'a

(~."...):

Like anni})'a, this term looks like an abstractive noun, in this case

based on the word huwa, meaning or "'he" or "'it:' This would yield a literal meaning something like the Latin tenn ipseiras. Later in Arabic philosophy, the term is used to mean '''identity,'' or '''individua1ity:~5 And in fact, there is one passage in AP where Izuwiyya is used to translate lautotes, '''identity'' or '''sameness'': Th.A Vm.125 [B 112]: If this is the case, then we consider and say that the principles are intellect, being (anniyya), otherness. and identity (hu,viyya). -1Z

Frank (1956), 192.

-1~ See Frank (1956). 192-199. His analysis is difficult [0 follow for readers who are, like myself, innocent of Syriac. However. a useful summary of his view is given by Endress (1973),82-83. -1':

Zimmermann (1986),113-118.

-15

See d'Alvemy (1959), 66.

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Enn V.1.4: Therefore the first things (Ia proIa) are sameness (nolls, on, heleroles, tautotes).

intellect~

being, otherness, and

Note that here, Jlllwiyya is treated as having a different meaning from anniyya. Despite this, elsewhere throughout AP, Illlwiyya is used to mean "being," usually translating on but in one case translating einai (Th.A X.179).46 Indeed, it seems that with the exception of Th.A VHLI25, the Adaptor uses huwiyya and anniyya as synonyms. This tendency was carried forth past the time of al-Kindi: aI-Farabi says explicitly that the two words mean the same thing, and opposes them to miihiyya, ··essence.,.47 I have found no literature speculating on why the term hu,viyya. despite evidently being derived from the term "it," would come to mean "being" in the early Arabic period. However, one relevant consideration might be that existential sentences can be formed in Arabic without a verb, using only a pronoun, as in a locution that sometimes appears in AP: huwa Izuwa or Jziya hUH:a,

"it is if' (for example~ at Th.A V.3?, X.186, OS 116).

(c): Ann: The most vexing of the terms to be taken up here is transliterated anl1,

Wln,

wI,

which could be

or anna. The question of how to transliterate this word is of

considerable moment. It is raised in reference to passages like the following: Th.A X.175 [8 160]: ...their Originator is one and simple, originating the simple things all at once, through being alone (.k.&i ~'-:a). Here we want to understand what the final phrase in Arabic means. I have translated it as '"through being alone," as would Badawf. His interpretation of this construction. which appears frequently in AP, is that linn is a transliteration of the Greek on. Another ';6 Il is interesting that though neither translation is consistent. the Adaptor is more likely to use mmiyya when the parallel Greek term is ei1lai. and Illl,,:iyya when it is Oil. For texts showing the use of IWH'iyya in AP. see Endress. 94-5. and of course passages presented below in this section.

190

possible interpretation would be bi-annihi jaqal: "through the fact that it is, alone," treating the word in question as anna, the conjoining particle mentioned above with reference to anlliyya. In support of the latter possibility. we may note three things: first, the Adaptor already uses two other words (anniyya and Imwiyya) to translate on. Second. scmetimes the word in question is used as a translation of eina; (as at Th.A X.88). which makes little sense if it is a transliteration of a different word. Third, and most convincingly. there are other passages in AP where the Adaptor uses anna in constructions like the one proposed here. For example: OS 105 [B 174]: [The intellect] acts by the fact that it is intellect (bi-anllahu 'aq£). These points suggest strongly that Badawl is wrong to see the term as a transliteration of Oil,

and others have disagreed with him for similar reasons:~8 But unfortunately. other

passages in AP prevent us from reading all these instances as anna: Th.A VID.186 [B 120]: As for the intellectual world. it is governed by the First Being (JJ'i1 u'il), and He is the First Originator... (See also GS IX.Sij.2 [B 196].) Here, the word for God I have translated as "Being" is clearly not a conjunction. but a noun. Therefore we cannot read all such occurrences as the ordinary connective particle an/la. The solution I will adopt here will be that of Endress: to reject (for the first two

reasons given above) BadawI's interpretation of the word as a transliteration of on. and instead read ann. a noun derived from anna and serving as an exact synonym with a/l/liyya:~9 Still. it is worth bearing in mind that at least occurrences of this phrase could

-17

See d'A)vemy (1959). 71.

-IS

See Frank (1956). 200-20 I.

-19

Endress (1973). 83-84.

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be read bi-allnalzufaqa!.. "through the fact that He is. alone." I think that such readings are compatible with the interpretation to be offered below. (d) Other terms: There are two remaining terms that refer to existence or being, neither of them presenting particular difficulties of interpretation. The first is the verb "to be" itself,

kana. 50 Here we need only single out for special mention the noun kawn based on this verb. This can, and in AP often does. mean "existence" (for example at Th.A X.179). But it can also mean "generation:' and in this sense is sometimes opposed to fasiid. "corruption" (as at Vll.19). In one case (Th.A VU.6) the Adaptor uses the phrase "the path of existence and beings" (a/-kaum wa '/-anniyyal), which suggests a close relationship between kawll and anniyya. The second group of terms to be mentioned are those based on the root w-j-d, such as wlIjiid, "existence," and mauiz/d, "existent." Appearances of these forms in AP, as far as I can make out, are in accordance with the usage familiar to students of Arabic philosophy in general, though the term """ujiid does not attain anything like the prominence it receives in Ibn

SIn~

for example.

On the basis of the above remarks. I will treat anniyya, huwiy)'a, and ann as synonyms, and translate all of them as "'being" (or in plural. "beings"), except when context dictates otherwise. I reserve "existence" and "existent" to translate kawn and l1'ujiid / mmtjl1d. though again context may dictate alternate translations, especially

"generation" in the case of kall/n. It is tempting to also translate anniyya as "existing," rather than "being;' and to translate allniyyafaqaf. as "simply existing." The reason this is tempting is that it does not seem to reify God as some sort of Platonic form of Being. or suggest that the Adaptor simply assimilates the First to Plotinus' intellect. In fact his

50

For a general discussion of kana. see Shehadi (1982),4-9.

192

doctrine is both more subtle than this and less committed to an ontological substantification of the First (he does not hold. for example, that God is just a "thing" which is equivalent to "being" with no other features; such a view would clearly compromise God's transcendence). Despite these advantages. I prefer to retain "being" as a translation for amziyya, huwiyya. and ann, for the following reasons. First, these terms are used to translate einai and on, and this suggests a corresponding English translation as ....being" (in Greek '''exist'' would be closer to the semantic range of huparchein). Second, anniyya is sometimes used as a singular noun, and it is felicitous that "being" can also be used in this sense, even if the Adaptor does not want to suggest that God is "a being." Third, and most important, I do not want to suggest that we find an existence/essence distinction in AP. In some ways, the Adaptor's position anticipates Avicenna in this regard, but as we will see the doctrine of AP has less to do with a metaphysical characterization of God, and more to do with a discussion of theological discourse.

5.2.2 God as the First Being and only being It was mentioned above that the plural anniyyiit is sometimes used to translate onta, "beings." This suggests that when the Adaptor refers to God as anniyya, he might mean only to indicate that God is something that exists, a being or an entity. Now, one common phrase used by the Adaptor to refer to God in AP is "the first being:' al-anniyya al-iilii or, more rarely, ai-ann al-awwal (as at Th.A Vlli.186 [B 120]), and once even alIwwiYJ'a al-iilii (OS 39 [B 170]). If we adopt an understanding of alZlliyya as meaning only something like "a being:' or "an entity," we can interpret this to mean that God is

193

simply the highest of the things that exist. Saying that he is the First among existents distinguishes Him from created things, but only because He is prior, not because He has or is "being n in some radically different sense. Such an interpretation fits passages like the following: Th.A VII.21 [B 87]: It is [the First Creator] Who is holding the totality of things, even though the intellectual things are true beings (anniyyiit l!aqqiyya), because they are originated from the First Being (al-anniyya al-ii/ii) without an intennediary.

If this were the only context in which the Adaptor referred to God as anniyya, we might content ourselves with such a reductive reading: God is the first being, meaning only that he is a primus inter pares. 51 As we will see, other passages indicate a much richer understanding of God as being. But let us pause, before looking at these passages, to note that even such a modest view of God as alllliyya would be a considerable surprise in the context of AP. For, famously. in Plotinus the One cannot even be said to exist, transcending as it does all being. Properly being is equivalent to nous in the Plotinian system. Plotinus argues that if the One were to exist, then it would be permissible to say"the One is," but this would already allow some sort of duality to exist at the level of the purely One. 5:! He says explicitly at one point that "being itself is multiple in itself' (auto to einai en hallto polu esti: Enn V.3.13), and is fond of using the phrase from Republic, "beyond being" (epekeina ousias), to refer to the One (e.g. at V.6.6). Now, of course things are rarely this simple with Plotinus, and we will see that there are indications, especially in the remarkable treatise Enn VI.8, that Plotinus accepts some form of existence, actuality. or

51

As Taylor (1998), 219, points out, this is essentially the view of God found in Aristotle.

194

being for the One. Nevertheless. the Adaptor adds many references to the

Fi~~

as

alllliyya. even though he is clearly aware that Plotinus holds being to be associated

primarily with intellect. That he is aware of this is clear from more faithful paraphrases like the following: Th.A VID.122-124 [B 111-112]: Each one of the things which are in [the intellectual] world are intellect and being (anniyya). and the whole (a/-kul£) of them is also intellect and being. The intellect and being there do not separate. and this is because the intellect is only intellect ("aql) because it thinks (va "qilu) being. and being is only being because it is thought by the intellecL. The intellect and being (al-anniyya) were originated (ubdi"an) together; for this reason one of these two does not separate from the other. However, even though the intellect and being are two, they are intelJect and being together. and are thinking and thought together. Enn V.1.4: Each of them is intellect and being (on). and the whole is universal intelJect and universal being (pan on), the intellect making being exist through thinking (kata to /loebt hllpizistas to on). and being giving thinking and being (to einai) to intellect by being thought... For they are together and exist together (sll1luparclrei) and do not leave one another, but this one is two beings. at once intellect and being, thinking and thought. intellect as (kata) thinking, and being as thought. There are other passages that are even more straightforward in denying being to the First. At one point (Th.A V ill. 135 [B 113]), the Adaptor refers to the intellect. not the First, as "the first being (al-anniyya al-iilii)." and at another he accepts one of Plotinus' rejections

of being in the One: Th.A X.2 [B 134]: Because it is pure One, all things flow forth from it. and this is because, even though it has no being (huwiyya), being (huwiyya) flows forth from it. 53

5:!

See Enn V.3.l3.

53 This is the most explicit denial of being [0 the First in AP. and one might well wonder whether the Adaptor chose the term Illlw;yya here because he did not want to deny the term allll;yya to God. so that perhaps he is making some distinction between the two. [think this is tempting. but should be rejected since he actually prefers to translate 011 with hllw;yya generally. Also. he elsewhere calls God hllU'(rya faqa[. with no reason to do this in the parallel Greek text (OS 100 (8 174]).

195

Enn V.2.1: It is because nothing is in [the One] that all is from it, and it order for being (to on) to be, this is not being (ollk on), but its generator. Note that even though the Adaptor is willing to follow Plotinus here, he does not follow him completely. For, rather than rendering the text accurately and saying that God is not being (touto autos ollk on). he says that God has no being (lam takun Ii-hi huwiyya). Here one might speculate that the Adaptor is trying to hold on to the idea that God is being. though he is prepared to admit that God does not have being, perhaps thinking that this would imply that God has being as something external attributed to him. This will become more plausible in consideration of the analysis to be given below. Let us proceed to examine passages that refer to God as anniyya, and go beyond the simple assertion that God is the ··First Being." Another favorite phrase of the Adaptor's using alllliyya to describe God is to say that He is or acts through anniyya

faqar, "only being," or "being alone." The same phrase appears using both ann (Th.A V.14 [B 67]) and hlll,v;y)'a (DS 100 [B 174]). A useful passage that may help us in

understanding this concept is the following one, which has no Greek parallel: OS 99 [B 174]: Then the intellect is multiple, as opposed to ('inda) the high thing which is only itself (al-ladhi huuJajaqa[). Here. the Adaptor says that God is nothing other than what He is. This, [ would argue, is principally what he intends by saying that God is "being alone": that God has no additional or multiple features in addition to the fact that He is. This introduces the dominant theme associated with the phrase "being alone" in AP: that God has no attributes. We saw some passages to this effect above in section 5.1. Let us consider another in greater detail:

196

as 1.10-11 [B

185]: He said that the intellect became all things, because its originator is not like anything. The First Originator does not resemble anything, because all things are from Him, and because He has no shape