al-Hadaiq fi al-Matalib al-Aliya al-Falsafiya al-Awisa
- Author died
- 521 AH
- Editions
- Dār al-Fikr
al-Hadaiq fi al-Matalib al-Aliya al-Falsafiya al-Awisa (The Enclosures on the Lofty and Abstruse Philosophical Inquiries) is a philosophical and theological treatise by the Andalusian scholar Abu Muhammad Ibn al-Sayyid al-Batalyawsi (444–521 AH / 1052–1127 CE), devoted to clarifying complex metaphysical and cosmological doctrines held by the philosophers .
Purpose and Inquiries
Al-Batalyawsi composed the work in an epistolary format in response to an interlocutor seeking the elucidation of several intricate metaphysical questions, which the author describes as narrow pathways that frequently lead those who tread them into peril . The treatise addresses seven core inquiries:
- The philosophers' thesis that the emanation and ordering of existents from the First Cause forms an imaginary circle starting from a point and returning to it in the form of the human being .
- The claim that an individual's essence after death ascends to wherever their knowledge reached during life, and that human knowledge likewise traces an imaginary circle .
- The capacity of the particular human intellect to receive and reflect the form of the Universal Intellect .
- The depiction of numbers as cyclical series or imaginary circles, such as the circles of units, tens, hundreds, and thousands .
- The doctrine that the attributes of God can only be properly affirmed via negation (negative theology) .
- The proposition that the Creator knows only His own essence .
- The rational proof for the survival and immortality of the rational soul after bodily death .
Method and Philosophical Themes
In his exposition, al-Batalyawsi employs Neoplatonic and Aristotelian cosmological frameworks to expound the chain of being, attributing these foundational ideas to figures such as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates . He illustrates the descent of existents from God through nine incorporeal secondary intellects associated with the celestial spheres down to the tenth intellect—the Active Intellect—which oversees the sublunary world of the elements . Below this level, existence descends through the Universal Soul, prime matter (hayula), the four primary elements (earth, water, air, fire), minerals, plants, and non-rational animals, culminating in humanity .
Al-Batalyawsi presents the human being as a microcosm (al-alam al-asghar) standing at the end of the descending arc of existence . Through intellectual perception and the acquisition of abstract knowledge, the rational soul ascends back through these stages toward the Active Intellect, thereby completing the imaginary circle of existence and cognition .
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