"'Those who think that He had a beginning are in complete error, and those who think to describe Him fully are beside themselves. In relation to Him all description and comparison are impossible. Those who attempt to describe Him can only indicate the distance which separates Him from all human attributes; the beauty of being is represented in scriptural language by His Face and His infinite bounty by His Hand. If even one of the cherubims wished to contemplate His essence, he would be dazzled and frustrated by His glory. Since beauty is the veil of beauty, His manifestation must always remain a mystery, in the same way as the sun, when lightly obscured by a cloud allows its disc to be seen, but when it blazes forth in all its splendour, its disc is veiled from human eye by excess of light. The Lord, however, is always communicating His splendour to His creation without grudging or reserve; He imparts Himself generously and the plenitude of His bounty is without limit: He who has the least glimpse of His beauty remains entranced by it for ever; sometimes saints of extraordinary attainments who have given themselves up to Him and have been favoured by His grace, aware of the worthlessness of the perishable world, when, from their ecstatic state they return to it, are haunted for the rest of their lives by regret and sadness.'
"Here Hay ibn Yokdhan closed his discourse by adding:
"'If I had not, in thus addressing you, been acting in obedience to the commands of my Lord, I would rather have left you for Him. If you will, accompany me on the path of safety.'"
Thus concludes this brief allegory, which, like Avicenna's other mystical treatises, is concerned with the progress and development of the human soul. According to him, the soul is created for eternity, and the object of its union with the body is the formation of a spiritual and independent microcosm. During our earthly life we have but a dim presentiment of this future condition; this presentiment produces in different characters a lesser or greater desire for it, and the thoroughness of our preparation depends on this desire. This preparation is only accomplished by the development of the highest faculties of the soul, and the inferior faculties of the senses furnish the indispensable basis for this.
Every human faculty has some pleasure corresponding to it. The pleasure of the appetitive faculty for example, is to receive a sensation which accords with its desire; the pleasure of the irascible faculty is attack; the pleasure of the surmising faculty, hope; that of the recollective faculty, memory. Generally speaking, the pleasures attending these faculties consist in their realising themselves in action, but they differ widely in rank, the soul's delight in intellectual perception of realities, in which the knower and the known are one, being incomparably higher than any mere sensual satisfaction. By attaining to such perceptions, the soul prepares itself for the beatitude of the next life. The degree of this beatitude will correspond to the intensity of spiritual desire awakened in it during its earthly sojourn.[41]
It is extremely difficult, not to say impossible, to determine the degrees of beatitude of the soul after death. We may, nevertheless, understand that the various impediments of passions, prejudices, etc., to which its union with the body has given rise, are not immediately dissolved on its separation from the body. Souls thus hindered may pass into a state depicted by Plato and other ancient philosophers, in which they are still weighed down by the passions they indulged in. Every soul is eternal and imperishable, and will finally attain the beatitude for which it was created. But it may be punished after death by a shorter or longer exclusion from that beatitude. To suppose with Alexander Aphrodisius that an imperfect or ill-prepared soul may be annihilated, would be to admit a belief at complete variance with its eternal essence and origin.
But we may well conjecture that the punishment of such ill-prepared and refractory souls would consist in their being in a state in which after separation from the body they still pine after sensual enjoyments and suffer from the impossibility of such gratification.
It may also be supposed that such ill-prepared souls remember the notions that were current in this world regarding beatitude and damnation; their conceptions would in that case resemble dreams which are often more vivid than impressions received in waking moments. They would imagine themselves undergoing the examination in the tomb and all the other punishments depicted in the Koran, or it may be enjoying the sensual pleasures there described. On the other hand, the noble and well-prepared soul will pass at once to the contemplation of the eternal, and will be exempt from every memory and every conception relating to this world. For if anything of this kind remained in it as a reminder of its union with the body, it would so far fall short of the plenitude of its perfection.
Besides his mystical treatise "On the soul," Avicenna has left a short but remarkable poem on the same subject, which runs as follows:—