Illuminationism

Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi trained as an orthodox Avicennan Peripatetic philosopher before turning against the school that had formed him. His objection was methodological as much as doctrinal: definitions built from genus and differentia, he argued, can never actually capture the reality of a simple thing, because a definition is composed of parts and the simplest realities have none. In their place he proposed knowledge by presence, an immediate self-awareness that light has of itself, and built a cosmology graded by intensities of light and darkness rather than by the Peripatetic ladder of substance and accident.

He wrote in both Arabic and Persian, and drew deliberately on pre-Islamic Persian wisdom literature and Hermetic material alongside the Neoplatonic inheritance every falsafa thinker shared, presenting himself as reviving an ancient wisdom rather than founding something new. The Safavid philosopher Mulla Sadra took Illuminationist metaphysics as a serious rival to Peripatetic philosophy and answered it in his own transcendent philosophy, one reason later tradition remembers Suhrawardi as the founder of a distinct Ishraqi school with its own lineage of commentators.

Recent scholarship is more cautious. Suhrawardi's harshest modern readers treat Hikmat al-Ishraq as an internal critique of Avicenna rather than a wholesale departure from Peripatetic philosophy, and question whether a coherent, continuously transmitted Illuminationist school existed before later interpreters, Corbin prominent among them in the twentieth century, made it one. Executed at about thirty-six on charges that mixed philosophy with heresy, Suhrawardi left too small and too difficult a corpus to settle the question himself.

Where Peripatetic philosophy populated the space between God and the material world with a strict, linear chain of ten separate intellects, Suhrawardi replaced that architecture with a cosmology built entirely out of light, graded by intensity rather than arranged in a fixed sequence of discrete beings. At the summit sits the Light of Lights, pure and self subsisting illumination from which every other light in existence derives, growing progressively dimmer and more differentiated the further a given light stands from that source, with ordinary material bodies understood as the point where light has become most obscured by darkness. The intellects of Peripatetic cosmology reappear in Suhrawardi's system as a vast horizontal array of what he called the lords of species, archetypal lights he explicitly identified with the angels of Zoroastrian and Quranic tradition alike, each ordinary kind of thing on earth answering to its own governing light above it, a deliberate fusion of pre-Islamic Persian angelology with the philosophical vocabulary falsafa had inherited from the Greeks. Human knowing, on this picture, is itself a kind of illumination: the soul is a fragment of light temporarily obscured by its attachment to a body, and mystical experience is what happens when disciplined practice thins that obscuration and lets the soul's own light apprehend other lights directly, knowledge by presence rather than knowledge assembled from definitions. Suhrawardi presented this entire architecture as a recovery of an ancient wisdom he believed had passed from the sages of Persia through the Greeks and into Islamic philosophy, rather than an invention of his own.