which we come to know internally through self-knowledge. Ibn Sina’s
thought reverberates with the Brethren of Purity’s thirty-sixth epistle,On
the Essence of Love. They defined love as the desire for unification with the
object of love such that the body simply serves as a vehicle for the proximity
of souls.^62
Ibn Sina’sEpistle on Love(Risale-i‘Ishq) describes love as the motile
force of the world. He explains that“every being which is determined by a
design strives by nature toward its perfection,”^63 identified as the natural
flow of the Pure Good away from the evil inherent in materiality and non-
being. He explains that love is implanted in all things: in matter in its
yearning toward form; in movement in its yearning toward the mover; in
voluntary love yearning toward perfect love in God. Form thus represents
not a thing, as in a visual image, but the efforts of matter to be. A romance is
not the love of a person, but a worldly vehicle for the experience of longing
for God. Considering the object that embodies matter, or the beloved who
embodies love, we might conceive of love less as an emotion than as a verb.
Ibn Sina describes love, central to the existence of matter, as a part or
even the cause of the existence of all things that emanatesfirst from God to
the Intellects, and then to all other beings. For him, research-oriented
philosophy and internal witnessing complement each other as a means of
gaining knowledge of the intelligibles. He proposes:
The purification of the rational soul through knowledge of God consists in its
gaining a habitude by means of which it becomes prepared to make present all the
intelligibles whenever it wishes, without the need for acquisition. At that point all
the intelligibles become present to it in actuality, or in potentiality that is extremely
close to actuality. The rational soul becomes a polished mirror upon which the
forms of things become impressed as they are [in reality] without distortion.^64
For ibn Sina, vision takes place when the sensory information from each
eye“impresses”itself on the crystalline humor of the eye, described as
“polished and luminous”like a mirror. These sensory images are in turn
impressed on the“composite sense”(hiss al-mushtarik; translated into
Latin assensis communis), which is“the mental faculty which collects
and records the sense-data transmitted to it by thefive external senses.”^65
As Priscilla Soucek explains,“the images received by the eye and the
‘composite sense’are called‘impressed images’(al-suwar al-muntabi’a),”
known in Persian asnishan, the common word for target and for sign.^66(^62) Fackenheim, 1945. (^63) Elkaisy-Freimuth, 2006 : 83. (^64) Treiger, 2012 : 62.
(^65) Goichon, 1938 : 70; see also Beeston, 1963 : 57,n19. (^66) Soucek, 1972 : 14.
124 Seeing with the Heart