Avice

“ By Avicenna this Spirit is named the Soul of the World. For, as the Soul moves all the limbs of the Body, so also does this Spirit move all bodies. And as the Soul is in all the limbs of the Body, so also is this Spirit in all elementary created things. It is sought by many and found by few. ”

“ And, according to the Platonists, the order of forms corresponds to the order of those separate substances; for example, that there is a single separate substance, which is horse and the cause of all horses, whilst above this is separate life, or per se life, as they term it, which is the cause of all life, and that above this again is that which they call being itself, which is the cause of all being. Avicenna, however, and certain others, have maintained that the forms of corporeal things do not subsist per se in matter, but in the intellect only. ”

“ Glanvil do seem to agree, namely that the Soul may for a time depart forth of its Body, and return again. And to prove this the argument of Avicen is this: Superior things (he saith) have dominion over the inferior, and the Intelligences do rule and change corporeal things. And that the Soul is a spiritual and separable substance. And therefore after the same manner, may act in corporeal things, and change them as may be seen at large, with responsions in the book of Fienus. ”

“ Thus far Avicenna. Besides, he has given an account of those several steps and degrees by which a Man is brought to this perfection; till his Soul is like a polish'd Looking-glass, in which he beholds the Truth: and then he swims in pleasure, and rejoyces exceedingly in his Mind, because of the impressions of Truth which he perceives in it, When he is once attain'd thus far, the next thing which employs him is, that he sometimes looks towards Truth, and sometimes towards himself; and thus he fluctuates between both, till he retires from himself wholly, and looks only to-ward the Divine Essence ”

“ The merchant wondered at her eloquence and his affection for her increased and he said to her, "I cannot think but that men have abused thine understanding and sold thee for money. Tell me, dost thou know the Koran?" "I do," answered she; "and I am also acquainted with philosophy and medicine and the Prolegomena and the commentaries of Galen the physician on the Canons of Hippocrates, and I have commented him, as well as the Simples of Ibn Beltar, and have studied the works of Avicenna, according to the canon of Mecca, as well as other treatises. ”

“ Wherefore Avicenna also that he might avoid this difficulty, said that the soul separated from the body uses as an organ some part of the heavenly body, to which the human body needs to be conformed, in order to be perfected by the rational soul, which is like the movers of the heavenly body---thus following somewhat the opinion of certain philosophers of old, who maintained that souls return to the stars that are their compeers. ”

“ The rest of the book contained symbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution to divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape for any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among those who live under the roots of tears and of laughter. ”

“ Because, according to Avicenna, "the power that commands movement is the appetite; and the power that executes movement is in the muscles and nerves." But both powers are in irrational animals. Therefore command is to be found in irrational animals. ”

“ Avicenna was put in charge of a tutor, and his precocity soon made him the marvel of his neighbours,—as a boy of ten who knew by rote the Koran and much Arabic poetry besides. From a greengrocer he learnt arithmetic; and higher branches were begun under one of those wandering scholars who gained a livelihood by cures for the sick and lessons for the young. Under him Avicenna read the Isagoge of Porphyry and the first propositions of Euclid. But the pupil soon found his teacher to be but a charlatan, and betook himself, aided by commentaries, to master logic, geometry and the Almagest. ”

“ The first of the great Arabian philosophers, Alfarabi, had been Neoplatonist in thought, Aristotelian in method.74 His great successor, Avicenna, was Aristotelian both in the content and the logical scheme of his work.75 The distinctive teachings of Avicenna were, first, the nominalist doctrine that universality exists not in reality, but in thought only; secondly, that [Pg 60] matter is uncreated and eternal ”

“ He commends Pliny, quotes Hippocrates, Ætius, Paulus Ægineta, Celsus and Galen, but of mediaeval writers only Avicenna. His English style is simple, and resembles that of More, being as full of idiomatic expressions, but much easier and more refined than that of the English treatises of the surgeons of his time. ”

“ So the Soul being strongly elevated, and inflamed with a strong imagination, sends forth health or sickness, not only in its proper body, but also in other bodies. So Avicen is of the opinion, that a Camell may fall by the imagination of any one. So he which is bitten with a mad Dog presently fals into a madness, and there appear in his Urine the shapes of Dogs. So the longing of a woman with Child, doth act upon anothers body, when it Signs the infant in the womb with the mark of the thing longed for. ”

“ Avicenna and the later Arabian authors, with Theodoric, Lanfranc, and other European writers of the middle ages, express a similar belief in the hereditary transmission of the 121disease; and in the same spirit, our countryman Gilbert, writing, as we have already seen, in the thirteenth century, observes, “Lepra est interdum morbus primus, sicut ex spermatibus primis matris et patris Leprosis. ”

“ Avicenna endeavours to show that a material accompaniment is not necessary to the soul. It is not through the instrumentality of the body, or some power of the body, that the soul conceives or imagines; since if the soul necessarily requires a physical medium in conceiving other things, it must require a different body in order to conceive the body attached to itself. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I answer that, Some assert that the angels are composed of matter and form; which opinion Avicebron endeavored to establish in his book of the Fount of Life. For he supposes that whatever things are distinguished by the intellect are really distinct. Now as regards incorporeal substance, the intellect apprehends that which distinguishes it from corporeal substance, and that which it has in common with it. ”

“ These categories, therefore, cannot be applied to the soul. The truth is, says Avicenna, that body and soul are contiguous to each other, but quite opposite in their respective essences. The disintegration of the body does not necessitate the annihilation of the soul. Dissolution or decay is a property of compounds, and not of simple, indivisible, ideal substances. Avicenna, then denies pre-existence, and endeavours to show the possibility of disembodied conscious life beyond the grave. ”

“ But since mention is here made of Light and Splendour, for the more perfect understanding thereof I will show the difference between those words, according to the opinion of Avicenna. I say that it is the custom of Philosophers to speak of Heaven as Light, inasmuch as Light is there in its primeval Spring, or its first origin. They speak of it as a ray of Light while it passes through the medium from its source into the first body in which it has its end ”

“ As the influence of the Arab Aristotelians, Alfarabi, Avicenna and especially Averroes, began to make itself felt, the discussions about the Active Intellect and its relation to the higher Intelligences on the one hand and to the human intellect on the other found their way also among the Jews and had their effect on the conception of prophecy. ”

“ He developed remarkable genius in botanizing and in extracting the medicinal408 properties from plants, in which he was assisted, according to the popular idea, by supernatural agencies. When he was seventeen years old he was famous throughout the khanate of Bokhara, and was appointed official physician to the emir, who owed him his recovery from a dangerous illness. This appointment gave Avicenna, as he was known, leisure to study, means to purchase books that he required, and access to a library which was filled with important manuscripts on scientific and other subjects. ”

“ The prophet then turned to the king, who seems to have been completely subjected by this tremendous proof of the prophetic authority, and said: "Get thee up, eat and drink, for there is the sound of abundance of rain." And Ahab ascended the hill, to eat and drink with his nobles at the sacrificial feast,--a venerable symbol by which, from the most primitive antiquity to our own day, by so universal an impulse that it would seem to be divinely imparted, every form of religion known to man has sought to typify the human desire to commune with Deity. ”

“ Verily, I received thy letter, which showed that thou hast turned unto the Kingdom of God and advanced toward the Beauty of El-ABHA.
Verily, thy Lord hath chosen thee for His love, elected thee for His knowledge and selected thee for entering the Paradise of El-ABHA, so that thou mayest attain to the mightiest bliss and greatest honor: It is no other than the Light which is shining upon hearts and sights and the Spirit which is thrilling and flowing within veins and nerves! ”

“ So, my beloved, this Ahab has lost his head, as it might be the froth of thin ale. I am thirsty in the flesh! Will no man be a surety for a poor preacher of the Lord at the sign of Balaam's Ass? 'Tis hard by; and I would speak a few more words of grace on this soul-stirring occasion, but my tongue is parched. ”

“ When his son and the Eunuch stepped before him he gazed on Ajib and, seeing how very beautiful he was, his heart fluttered and throbbed, and blood drew to blood and natural affection spake out and his bowels yearned over him. He had just dressed a conserve of pomegranate grains with sugar, and Heaven-implanted love wrought within him; so he called to his son Ajib and said, "O my lord, O thou who hast gotten the mastery of my heart and my very vitals and to whom my bowels yearn; say me, wilt thou enter my house and solace my soul by eating of my meat?" ”

“ I have anointed thee king over the people of the Lord, even over Israel. 7And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may avenge the blood of My servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the Lord, at the hand of Jezebel. 8For the whole house of Ahab shall perish; and I will cut off from Ahab every man-child, and him that is shut up and him that is left at large in Israel. 9And I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasa the son of Ahijah. ”

“ He said, "O Abú Al Mandhar, dost thou know which verse from the Book of God which is with thee is greatest?" I said, "God, there is no God but He, the Living, the Self-subsisting. [1] "' Ubai said, 'And he struck me on my breast and said, "O Abú Al Mandhar, may knowledge be welcome to thee."'—Muslim.
It is related from Ibn ʿAbbás that he said, 'Whilst Gabriel was sitting near the Prophet he heard a sound above him, and raised his head. And Gabriel said, "This is a door of heaven which has been opened to-day. It was never opened before to-day." And an angel came down from it. ”

“ In Ahab, Obadiah, Elijah and Jezebel we see a fourfold type of human society. There is the speculator, the godly servant, the far-seeing prophet and the cruel persecutor.
Society has got no farther than this today. The Ahabs of the age are leading us away into speculation that ends in idolatry and in infinite provocation of the Lord; the Obadiahs of the age are still praying, and serving God, and saving even the worst households from the wrath of Heaven ”

“ As for the starry firmament and plants, the feeling power and the imagining power have not been imparted unto them, even though each one of them has a soul and though it has life: the firmament has not these powers, because of its loftiness; plants have them not, because of their abasement in comparison to it. ”

“ In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab. ”

“ Ahab most evidently wished him to alienate it finally, and this is what God's law had expressly forbidden; therefore he could not, consistently with his duty to God, indulge Ahab; and it was high iniquity in Ahab to tempt him to do it; and to covet it showed the depravity of Ahab's soul. But we see farther that, despotic as those kings were, they dared not seize on the inheritance of any man. ”

“ And there was a sore famine in Samaria.
3 And Ahab called Obadiah, which was the governor of his house. (Now Obadiah feared the LORD greatly:
4 For it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.)
5 And Ahab said unto Obadiah, Go into the land, unto all fountains of water, and unto all brooks: peradventure we may find grass to save the horses and mules alive, that we lose not all the beasts. ”

“ A leading priest, Abihu, said, This fellow is a menace to our nation and our laws; he makes himself to be a son of God; it is not meet that he should live.
30. But Jesus said, Abihu, Sir, you are a learned man; you surely know the law of life. Pray tell who were the sons of God we read about in Genesis, who took to wife the daughters of the sons of men? ”

“ And he prophesied concerning the going forth of the Gospel, saying, “The Law shall go forth from Zion, and the Voice of God from Jerusalem.” And he prophesied to Ahab, the King of Israel, saying, “Thou shalt die in the battle of Edom, King of Gilead.” And many years having been fulfilled to this prophet, and having reached a good old age, he departed to God, Whom he loved. And he prophesied eight hundred years before the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he was buried in the village the name of which is Merata. Salutation to Micah. Glory be to God Who is glorified in His Saints. ”