Subsistence of the Soul in School of Khorasan: Self-Knowledge in Mīrzā Mahdī Isfahānī, Shaykh Mujtabā Qazvīnī, and Ayatullah Murvārīd

The School of Khorasan follows an anti-philosophy approach and believes in the separation of the fields of revelation, intellect, and gnosis from each other. It also attends to the surface meaning of religious texts and has a different view of the soul and its subsistence. The advocates of this School believe that the soul is a delicate body which is different from the soul only in terms of its accidents. They also maintain that it receives certain perfections such as knowledge and intellect, which are luminar (nūrī), immaterial, single, and external realities, merely through Almighty’s blessing. Man will always remain a corporeal being not only at the moment of creation but also to the end of what they unite with. In the School of Khorasan, self-knowledge is a necessary introduction to demonstrating the subsistence of the soul so that immortality is considered to be secondary to the knowledge of the truth. The soul, which lives with the body in worldly life, continues its life in the intermediate world needless of the body and independently in a body-like form. However, it is returned to the worldly body in the Hereafter and is rewarded or punished alongside it. This view suffers from some problems as follows: 1) equating the soul with body requires spiritual and corporeal resurrections to refer to the same process; 2) the approach of this school lacks internal consistency at times, and some diversity and conflict of ideas can be observed there, and 3) some of the concepts and related problems have not been explained correctly. Following an analytic library method, the present study explains and evaluates the views of three prominent figures of this school regarding the truth of the soul and its subsistence.