WorkAvicenna

A Treatise on Love

Love runs through everything that exists, from lifeless elements to the souls nearest God, and in the end every being loves the absolute Good.

by Avicenna27 passages held

Arabic, the original language

Original title: Risāla fī māhiyyat al-ʿishq
Original language: Arabic

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Overview

In 1947 Alexander Denomy, a Catholic priest and scholar of medieval literature, argued in The Heresy of Courtly Love that the troubadours' faith in a love that ennobles the lover came less from Arabic poetry than from Arabic philosophy, and above all from this treatise. Avicenna's Risāla fī al-ʿishq treats love as the pull of every being toward its own perfection. Its seven sections climb from simple bodies without life, through plants and animals, to human beings and to the souls he calls divine, and the last of them traces all that love to the absolute Good, which shows itself to each thing as far as that thing can receive it. The fifth section turns to the refined young men who are drawn to beautiful faces. Loving a beautiful form for the sake of animal pleasure deserves blame, Avicenna argues, but loving it with the regard of the mind is a means of rising toward nobility, since the rational soul loves whatever is well proportioned. He separates the wish to embrace and kiss, which can aim at closeness, from the wish for intercourse, which belongs to the animal soul alone. The closing section also compares the first receiver of God's self-disclosure to an image in a mirror, and uses the Sufis' word, union, for the nearest approach to him. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim translated the treatise into English in 1945. Gustave von Grunebaum, the Chicago historian of Islam, answered Denomy in 1952, pointing out that the treatise had not been known in medieval Europe, although Avicenna's psychology had.

Key concepts

What does ʿishq, love, mean in this treatise?

ʿIshq is the pull every being has toward its own perfection, together with its aversion to the lack that would undo it. It is not first a feeling between people. Avicenna finds it in lifeless matter, in plants, in animals, in human beings and in the souls nearest God, so that human love becomes one case of a force running through all that exists.

Why is the absolute Good loved by everything?

Because to exist at all is to have some perfection, and the absolute Good is perfection without any lack. Each thing loves its own good, and every particular good is a share in the Good itself. So all love, whether the thing knows it or not, is finally love of the absolute Good, which gives itself to each thing as far as that thing can receive it.

Why does a power become nobler when joined to a higher one?

Because the higher power's excellence flows into it. The animal soul in a human being sits next to reason, and its seeing, imagining and desiring take on a refinement they lack in a beast. This premise lets Avicenna say that a human attraction to beauty need not be merely animal, since in a human being even the senses can serve the mind.

Why do people love what is well proportioned?

Because the rational soul, and the animal soul in its company, love everything well ordered, balanced and harmonious: measured sounds, balanced tastes, well-formed shapes. Proportion is a kind of perfection the mind can recognise. That is why the love of a beautiful face can belong to reason and not only to appetite, and why the treatise treats it as a possible step upward.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Pull Toward Perfection

Is love a human passion, or the force that holds every existing thing together? The treatise argues the second, and climbs from bare matter to God to show it.

Every being, Avicenna argues, has some perfection, and so loves it and recoils from the lack that threatens it, the privation that comes from matter. Matter itself yearns for form and, losing one, hurries to take another. A plant's feeding, growing and reproducing are three loves; animals love what preserves them. At the summit stands the absolute Good, loved by everything, which discloses itself to each thing as far as it can receive. The first to receive it holds it as a mirror holds a face, and the nearest approach is what the Sufis call union.

love
teleology
metaphysics
desire
form
matter
substance
being
hierarchy of being
natural inclination
nutrition
reproduction
animal soul
causation
ontology
natural philosophy
motivation

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The Refined and the Beautiful

When a person of sense is drawn to a beautiful face, is it reason or appetite that is drawn? The fifth section takes the question seriously instead of condemning the attraction outright.

Avicenna builds the answer from four premises: a lower power joined to a higher one becomes nobler; some things in a person come from the animal soul alone; a good can harm when it is preferred wrongly; and the rational soul loves whatever is well ordered and proportioned. So loving a beautiful form for animal pleasure deserves blame, while loving it with the mind's regard is a step toward refinement. Embracing and kissing can aim at closeness, as with children, which is why no one suspects a kiss given to a child. Intercourse belongs to the animal soul alone.

beauty
likeness
imitation

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Within this work

passages held: 27
distinct concepts: 69
by passages held, corpus-wide: #745

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “love” and “metaphysics”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 5 concepts, joined by 7 pairings. 15 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
love	metaphysics	5
desire	love	3
love	teleology	3
first cause	love	2
first cause	metaphysics	2
desire	teleology	1
metaphysics	teleology	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

A Compendium on the Soul (Kitāb fī al-nafs ʿalā sunnat al-ikhtiṣār)
The earliest of his books, written for the Sāmānid court at Bukhara before any of the summaries of philosophy that made his name.
EN
A Treatise on Love (Risāla fī māhiyyat al-ʿishq) you are here AR
al-Najāt
Between the vast al-Shifāʾ and the allusive Ishārāt in both length and manner, and the usual way into his logic.
AR
al-Taʿlīqāt
A classroom companion to his metaphysics: short notes on its key terms, read today beside al-Shifāʾ.
AR
Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle (Fann al-Shiʿr)
Filed under logic, as the Arabic tradition filed Aristotle's Poetics, it closes the nine logical books of al-Shifāʾ.
AR
Kitāb al-Nafs
The fullest of his many accounts of the soul, written as natural science, and the one Latin Europe read.
AR
Kitāb al-Siyāsa
The household branch of practical philosophy, set out for a man, his family and his servants, in a short Arabic treatise.
AR
Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt)
Shorter than al-Najāt and far shorter than al-Shifāʾ, though written after both, as a statement of his mature philosophy.
AR
Risāla fī maʿrifat al-nafs al-nāṭiqa wa-aḥwālihā
A short epistle in three chapters and an epilogue, one of several treatises on the soul that circulate under his name.
AR
The Healing, Logic: Isagoge (al-Madkhal)
The first of the nine books of logic in al-Shifāʾ, and the place where the prologue to the whole encyclopedia stands.
AR
The Metaphysics of The Healing (al-Ilāhiyyāt)
His fullest metaphysics, known to Latin readers as the Liber de philosophia prima; it closes al-Shifāʾ after the logic, the physics and the mathematics.
AR

— or open another of their works