On account of the opposition offered by matter, the freedom of man, as thus conceived, can only imperfectly vindicate its lordship over the Sensible. It does not become perfect till the rational soul has been enfranchised from the bonds of matter and the wrappings of error,—in the life of the Spirit. But that is the highest blessedness which is striven after for its own sake, and consequently it is plainly the Good. Such good the Human Soul is seeking, when it turns to the Spirit above it, just as the Spirits of the heavens do, when they draw near to the Highest.
12. Even in the Ethics little regard is had to actual moral conditions; but in his Politics Farabi withdraws still farther from real life. In his oriental way of looking [[123]]at things, the ideal Republic of Plato merges into ‘the Philosopher as Ruler’. Men, having been brought together by a natural want, submit themselves to the will of a single person, in whom the State, be it good or bad, is, so to speak, embodied. A State therefore is bad, if the head of it is, as regards the principles of the Good, either ignorant or in error, or quite depraved. On the other hand the good or excellent State has only one type, that namely in which the philosopher is ruler. And Farabi endows his ‘Prince’ with all the virtues of humanity and philosophy: he is Plato in the mantle of the Prophet Mohammed.
In the description of rulers representative of the ideal Prince,—for there may be more than one existing together, and Prince and minister may divide governing-virtue and wisdom between them,—we come nearer the Muslim political theory of that day. But the expressions are wrapped in obscurity: the lineage, for example, which is proper for a Prince, and his duty of taking the lead in the holy war,—are not clearly signified. All indeed is left floating in philosophic mist.
13. Morality reaches perfection only in a State which at the same time forms a religious community. Not only does the condition of the State determine the temporal lot of its citizens, but also their future destiny. The souls of citizens in an “ignorant” State are devoid of reason, and return to the elements as sensible Forms, in order to be united anew with other beings,—men or lower animals. In States which are “in error”, and in those which are “depraved”, the leader alone is responsible, and punishment awaits him in the world beyond; but the souls which have been led into error share the fate of the ignorant. On the [[124]]other hand, if the good and ‘knowing’ souls only maintain their ground, they enter the world of pure Spirit; and the higher the stage of knowledge to which they have attained in this life, the higher will their position be after death, in the order of the All, and the more intense their blessed delight.
In all likelihood expressions of this kind are only the outer wrapping of a mystico-philosophical belief in the absorption of the Human Spirit into the World-Spirit and finally into God. For,—as Farabi teaches,—although the world, deductively considered (i.e. logically and metaphysically), is something different from God, yet inductively the present world is regarded by the soul as being identical with the next, because in everything, even in his Unity, God is himself the All.
14. If we now take a general survey of Farabi’s system, it exhibits itself as a fairly consistent Spiritualism,—or,—to be more precise,—Intellectualism. The Corporeal,—that which appeals to the Senses,—as it originates in the imagination of the Spirit, might be designated “a confused presentation”. The only true existence is Spirit, although it assumes various degrees. God alone is entirely unmixed and pure Spirit, while those Spirits, which eternally proceed from him, already have in them the element of plurality. The number of primary Spirits has been determined by the Ptolemaic cosmology, and corresponds to the celestial hierarchy. The farther any one of them is removed from the first, so much the less part has it in the Being of the pure Spirit. From the last World-Spirit Man receives his essential nature, that is—Reason. There is no gap in all the system; the Universe is a beautiful and well-ordered [[125]]whole. The Evil and the Bad are the necessary consequence of finiteness in individual things; but the Good which characterizes the Universe is set thereby in bolder relief.
Can this fair order of the Universe, from all eternity emanating from God, ever be destroyed, or can it even flow back to God? A sustained streaming-back to the Godhead, there doubtless is. The longing of the Soul is directed to what is above and advancing knowledge purifies it and leads it upwards. But how far? Neither philosophers nor prophets have been able to return a clear answer to this question. And the wisdom of both of these,—both philosophy and prophecy,—Farabi derives from the creative World-Spirit above us. Now and again he speaks of prophecy as if it represented the highest stage of human knowledge and action. But that cannot be his real view;—at least it is not the logical consequence of his theoretical philosophy. According to it everything prophetic,—in dream, vision, revelation and so on,—belongs to the sphere of the Imagination or Representation, and thus takes an intermediate position between Sense-Perception and pure Rational Knowledge. Although, in his Ethics and Politics, he attaches a high educational importance to religion, it is always regarded as inferior in absolute worth to knowledge acquired through pure reason.
Farabi lived perpetually in the world of the Intellect. A king in the mental realm, a beggar in worldly possessions, he felt happy with his books, and with the birds and flowers of his garden. To his people,—the Muslim community,—he could be only very little. In his political and ethical teaching there was no proper place for worldly matters or for the ‘holy war’. His philosophy did not [[126]]satisfy any need appertaining to the senses, while it spoke against the life of imagination belonging both to the senses and the intellect, as that life gives special expression to itself in the creations of Art and in religious fancies. He was lost in the abstractions of pure Spirit. As a pious, holy man, he was an object of wonder to his contemporaries, and by a few disciples he was honoured as the personification of wisdom; but by the genuine scholars of Islam he was always decried as a heretic. There was, of course, ground enough for this: just as Natural Philosophy easily led to Naturalism and Atheism, the Monotheism of the Logicians imperceptibly conducted to Pantheism.
15. Farabi had no great following of disciples: Abu Zakariya Yakhya ibn Adi, a Jacobite Christian, became known as a translator of Aristotelian works; but a pupil of Zakariya’s came to be more spoken of, called Abu Sulaiman Mohammed ibn Tahir ibn Bahram al-Sidjistani, who gathered about him in Bagdad, in the second half of the tenth century, the learned men of his time. The conversational discussions which they conducted, and the philosophical instructions which were imparted by the master, have been to some extent preserved, and we can clearly see the outcome of the school. Just as Natural Philosophy drifted into a secret lore, and the school of Kindi abandoned Philosophy for the separate branches of Mathematical and Physical Science, so the logical tendency of Farabi passed into a philosophy of words. Distinctions and definitions form the subject of these conferences. Individual points in the history of philosophy and in the several sciences are discussed also, without any systematic connection; but almost never does any positive interest in these subjects [[127]]appear. The Human Soul occupies the foreground entirely, just as in the case of the Faithful Brethren, except that these last dealt rather with the marvellous operations of the Soul, while the Logicians pondered over its rational essence and its elevation to the Supra-rational. The Sidjistani Society trifled with words and concepts, instead of with numbers and letters after the fashion of the Brethren; but the end in both cases was—a mystical Sufism.
It is therefore no matter of astonishment that in the learned meetings of Abu Sulaiman, as reported by his pupil Tauhidi († 1009), Empedocles, Socrates, Plato and others are oftener mentioned than Aristotle. A very miscellaneous society came together in those meetings. No question was asked as to the country from which any one came, or the religion to which he adhered. They lived in the conviction,—derived from Plato, that every opinion contained a measure of truth, just as all things shared in a common existence, and all sciences in an actual knowledge which was one and the same. On that assumption alone could they have conceived that every one might start with maintaining that his own opinion was the true one, and that the science which he cultivated was the science most to be preferred. And for that very reason there is no conflict between Religion and Philosophy, however vehement the assertions may be on these two sides. On the contrary Philosophy confirms the doctrines of Religion, just as the latter brings the results of Philosophy to perfection. If Philosophical Knowledge is the essence and end of the Soul of man, Religious Belief is its life, or the way to that end; and as Reason is God’s vicegerent on earth, it is impossible for Reason and Revelation to contradict each other. [[128]]