Scott E. Hicks 2023
Davidson wrote the following in his excellent book on Averroes, Avicenna, and Alfarabi:
"In the medieval Aristotelian universe, a series of incorporeal intelligences parallels the series of celestial spheres, the transparent spherical bodies that carry the planets and stars around the Earth. In the version of the Aristotelian scheme of the universe endorsed by Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, the active intellect, the factor leading the potential human intellect to actuality, is added as a final link to the chain of intelligences. It therein parallels the sublunar world, which stands as the last and least cosmic body, at the end of the series of celestial spheres." (p. 13)
We can connect our contemporary spiritual scientific worldview with this older cosmic schema, in the following way: the I AM is now able to self-consciously think and see its thinking both on Earth and in the sublunar world, which is now becoming visible through our Imagination that can see the Etheric. This is now available because of the Etheric appearance of the Christ Being, which began in 1933. The teaching that we have received from Rudolf Steiner enables us to interpret Aristotle's statement from his the Generation of Animals that our thinking capacity and reason is a divine element that enters into the soul from outside of it, namely from the Spirit proper. The etheric world is the first world that we can now enter, when we have enlivened our thinking, our morality, and our imagination through anthroposophy and the Christ Impulse.
Thinking penetrates into all parts of the corporeal body of the human being, but also exists in its supersensible elements outside the body, linking up with the celestial living spheres in a way that can now arise in our consciousness in a healthy manner. In this way, the Michaelic mission begins to take on form, because thinking is lifted up once again into the celestial spheres, but now having taken the extract from mineralized thinking, death, clarity, and earthly science and having woven this together with the strong sense of Ego that has arisen through perception in our earthly incarnation. Through the spiritualized memory substance, and the spiritualization of our sense of I and our thinking, we can now become conscious in our superlunary extensions.
In addition, Alfarabi speaks from experience of the fact that in the same way that the sun creates the light which permits vision to take place, "an emission from the active intellect...illumines the human material intellect." (p. 50 in Davidson) Today, through the inspiration we have received from Ben-Aharon and Rudolf Steiner, we can take the illumination from the world-mind as it thinks in me, and bring it down into the cold grave of the brain, feeling its powers becoming icy and dead. But we use the warmth of the original inspiration from my Spiritual Self, to pull its energy down into the heart and there to wage the battle in the heart discussed by Ben-Aharon in Chapter 5 of The Modern Christ Experience and the Knowledge Drama of the Second Coming (Expanded edition of New Experience of the Supersensible). Here we take what is true in materialism, what is healthy in perception, and what is solid in the creation of our I AM, and we work with devotion and also wait with patience for "a connection with a matter different from and more divine that the so-called elements" to appear (Aristotle, Generation of Animals 736b30). This quintessence is the bridge that can become now a self-conscious "resonant chamber" (I borrow this from Torbjorn Eftestol's work on Deleuze and music) and a living garden of lights in which we pray to open our self-consciousness with full awareness to the knowledge process as a whole to appear as new heavens and new earth. Let us also follow Christ and build this bridge of knowing and actively-seen-thinking down into the sub-earthly - to spiritualize fallen matter, electric and symbolic logic, tech and the immoral egotism living in us and in our bodies, minds, souls, and spirits.
Alfarabi says that "the rational part of the soul is very similar to the incorporeal beings" and the "soul joins the company of incorporeal beings." For the soul has become "free of matter", can "dispense with matter", and no longer "requires matter for its existence." Since immortality means simply the ability to exist independently of a body, immortality is thus a concomitant of the stage of acquired intellect. The soul liberates itself from matter even before the body dies and "remains in that state perpetually, its eudaemonia (blessedness or theoretical bliss) being complete." (Davidson p. 56)
'The imagination, Alfarabi explains, is a faculty of the soul located in the heart and standing immediately below, and serving, the rational faculty. It stores sense perceptions, or the impressions of sense perceptions, when the objects of perception are no longer present. It manipulates sense perceptions, disassembling them or combining them into configurations...It can create figurative images...that symbolize, rather than strictly represent, a given object.' (D, p. 58)
He also said that imagination can lead to clairvoyance in divine matters, where the imaginative faculty 'sees figurative images of incorporeal intelligible beings and other supernal beings.' The active intellect (nous poetikos) gives the imaginative faculty, and the imaginative faculty receives and sees figurative images of the incorporeal intelligible beings and other supernal substances. (p 59-60 D) For Alfarabi, the active intellect emanates from the First Cause.
For Avicenna, memory provides a gateway to understanding the nature of the active intellect. Sense perceptible contents can be stored at least partly in the body. But intelligible contents, which are concepts, are indivisible and therefore cannot be stored in the body. He says that the active intellect emanates such concepts down into the soul, where the soul can remember their thought content.
About Avicenna, Rudolf Steiner makes the following points:
"Through Avicenna and Averroes, something was introduced that was to enter human civilization with the beginning of the fifteenth century, namely, the struggle for the consciousness soul. After all, the Greeks had only attained to the intellectual or rational soul. What Avicenna and Averroes brought across, what Aristotelianism had turned into in Asia, so to speak, struggles with the comprehension of the human I, which, in a completely different way, has to struggle upward through the Germanic tribes from below to above...In Asia, on the other hand, the I was received like a revelation from above as a mystery wisdom. This gave rise to the view that for so long provoked such weighty disputes in Europe, namely, that man's ego is not actually an independent entity but is basically one with the divine universal being. The aim was to take hold of the ego. The I was supposed to be contained in what the Greek beheld as the being of body, soul, and spirit.
"Yet, people could not harmonize the above with the I. This is the reason for Avicenna's conception that what constitutes the individual soul originates with birth and ends with death. As we have seen, the Greeks struggled with this idea. The Egyptians viewed it only in this way — the individual soul is enkindled at birth, extinguished at death. People were still wrestling with this conception when they considered the actual soul element between birth and death, the true soul element. The I, on the other hand, could not be transitory in this manner. Therefore, Avicenna said: Actually, the ego is the same in all human beings. It is basically a ray from the Godhead which returns again into the Godhead when the human being dies. It is real, but not individually real. A pneumatic pantheism came about, as if the ego had no independent existence but was only a ray of the deity streaming between birth and death into what the Greeks viewed as the soul-spiritual nature. In a manner of speaking, the transitory soul element of man is ensouled with the eternal element through the ray of the Godhead between birth and death. This is how people imagined it." (GA 204)
But now the situation is totally different, and can be transformed more and more deeply, the more we individually develop self-consciousness, love of inner freedom, and our sense of an I AM who is independent. Now we are capable of awakening to the individually thinking I, the human active intellect, in a way that brings it not only into the head, but into the heart, and connects earth with heaven in a Michaelic way. Although still feeling our connection to the whole world of nature and spirit, we grow beyond our old pantheism. The individual spirit is raised to full self-consciousness through the intuitive experience of the I AM, grasped through pure thinking as an inner perception. This happens in the moment of instant understanding of the contents of a thought that you created AND which is perceived as existing before the body, outside the body. There is a GIANT difference between representative image thinking, taking place within the skull, and intuitive self-conscious, spiritualized thinking that is observed at the same moment as my I AM, before the concept of inner and outer is formed. In addition, now the spiritual relationships between individual humans arise in fuller consciousness. Individual human spirits can now unite with each other in a free community, but indeed given their inspiration and power of freedom through the activity of the universal I AM of Christ - He who belongs to all nations.
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