Cosmology of Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi

In his search for the essence of being, following an aprioristic approach, Razi believed in the five-fold substances of Necessary Being (Creator), rational soul, hyle (matter), absolute time (perpetual duration), and absolute place (vacuum). When explaining the process of creation through the four pre-eternal things alongside God, he justified the role of God’s Will in the process of creation by highlighting the role of the soul’s ignorance in its tendency for matter. He also demonstrated that the world was created at God’s will and not by nature. In his view, it is only Man who can liberate the soul from the pains and calamities of matter through the mediation of the intellect and lead it towards happiness and salvation. However, the difference is that the soul will not have any desire for matter. Razi believed in the possibility of corruption and change in bodies and, as a result, in the world of creation, even if the bodies are of an earthly or heavenly nature. He maintained that bodies consist of hyle and vacuum and emphasized that substances enjoy volume and are pre-eternal. Accordingly, he agreed that particles are infinite in number and composite in nature and disagreed with creation out of nothing. In his view, the qualities of four-fold elements and heavenly spheres, such as lightness and heaviness, brightness and darkness, and softness and hardness, depend on the mass and number of the vacuum-like components that penetrated the substances of hyle. At the same time, Razi acknowledged the centrality and immobility of the Earth and believed that heaven and, following it, the Sun, and other stars have a spinning motion through the balance of the components of the hyle and the vacuum within them. He considered the world to have been originated and agreed with the possibility of existence of other worlds. Finally, Razi explained vacuum and plenum in the mould of the concept of an infinite universal place which is independent of the world and also introduced beyond this place as space.