Historical Development of the Problem of Vaporous Spirit in Sadrian Philosophy

The present paper is devoted to a historical study of some of the developments made by Mulla Sadra regarding the problem of vaporous spirit. Since this spirit is the mediator of the soul’s administration of the corporeal body, he assimilates it sometimes to cloud – which is a gnostic term, sometimes to a heavenly body, and sometimes to the “Throne” or the “Divine Seat”. This is because all of them share the quality of being the intermediary between their higher and lower levels and affect the process of transferring emanation and prudence from their higher worlds to their lower worlds. These similies of Mulla Sadra can be interpreted in line with the principle of the correspondence of the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. Some of these similies as well as his use of the above principle in discussing the vaporous spirit were unprecedented in the history of Islamic philosophy. Mulla Sadra’s other historical innovation was the idea of the gradedness of Man’s existence. In fact, based on his graded view of Man, he considers the vaporous spirit to be the intermediary between the imaginal level and the corporeal body. In this way, he explains the place of the vaporous spirit and its grades in the graded human existence. Accordingly, he solves the problem of establishing a relationship between the immaterial soul and the corporeal body by resorting to the vaporous spirit in a way to avoid the objection advanced against the Peripatetics in this regard. In the Sadrian view, the vaporous spirit is the main body of the soul, and the corporeal body is the sheath and cover of this spirit.