The Four Journeys (al-Asfar al-arbaʿa)

Introduction

The full title is “The Transcendent Wisdom concerning the Four Intellectual Journeys”. The four journeys come from Sufism: from creation to God, in God with God, from God back to creation, and in creation with God. Mulla Sadra uses them to structure a summa of philosophy in Arabic: general metaphysics and the theory of existence, substances and accidents, the knowledge of God, and the soul and its return in the afterlife. Here he develops the primacy of existence, its gradation and “substantial motion”, the idea that substances change from within. The work took shape over many years and in its modern edition fills nine volumes. It became the central text of later Iranian philosophy.

Connections

Builds on

• The Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa)c. 1027 · Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
• The Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-ishraq)1186 · Suhrawardi
• The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-hikam)1229 · Ibn Arabi

Taken up in

• Commentary on the Versified Treatise1845 · Hadi Sabzawari
• The Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism1953 · Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai
• Knowledge and the Sacred1981 · Seyyed Hossein Nasr