The Metaphysics of The Healing by Avicenna (review)

REVIEWS 213 (87). Arnaldi complicates the idea of national identity by distinguishing between its use in writing and its existence in action. His strategy of examining the evolution of Italian national identity by considering the invasions of the Apennine Penninsula and those who eventually voice and act upon their collective experience of being invaded, sheds much light on this complicated issue. Arnaldi considers other far reaching motifs, such as the influence of Christianity on Italy, the wax and wane of papal power, and the enduring and not-so-enduring legacies of various invaders, from the Ostrogoths to the Muslims to Napoleon. Arnaldi is professor emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Bologna and the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and, as one would expect, the most fascinating chapters of the book—those discussing invaders such as the Longobards, the Carolingians, and Frederick II— coincide with the author’s area of expertise. However, despite the author’s professed attempt to write what he refers to in the introduction as a “readable” book, the convolutions of the text, perhaps in part owing to its English translation, makes for dry, academic reading. Take for instance the following sentence: “The correspondence between the creation of the ‘temporal dominion’ of the Church of Rome and the transformation of the primacy of morality and reputation, which the Church had attained by the second and third centuries, into a practical primacy of a jurisdictional nature—at least over the churches of the West (for Eastern churches, of course, the question is quite different)—changed over time from something informal, because chronological, as it actually was, into the foundation for the thesis that justified the existence of the church state, a thesis that was propounded as late as 1929 in a speech to the parish priests of Rome by Pope Pius XI” (5). Such sentences require slow, considered re-readings , and are not apt to attract the sort of general readership that would rush this book onto a best seller list. Furthermore, the reader who does take the time to slog through quite a few tortuous sentences is greeted at the end of the book not by an elegant summation of the important themes revealed in the prior 200 pages, but by no conclusion whatsoever; the faithful reader is left with an empty, abandoned feeling, as if the date with whom things were going well just excused herself to go to the bathroom and never came back. DANIEL WALLACE MAZE, Art History, UCLA Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, ed. and trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press 2005) xxvii + 820 pp. Avicenna’s Metaphysics is among the very most significant works of philosophy . It is an ingenious synthesis and reformation of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic strains of late ancient philosophy; it is the classic expression of the fundamentals of Islamic rationalistic theology; it is a fount of medieval Latin metaphysics. Together with its parent-compendium, al-Shifâ’ (The Healing), it has exerted a singular influence upon the Latin, Arabic, and Persian traditions. This publication, the latest installment of Brigham Young University’s Islamic Texts Series, consists of the Arabic text and Michael Marmura’s English translation. The handful of parallel-text volumes in this series are admirably constructed and accessible to the student of philosophy with limited (or no) familiarity with the Arabic language. As such, they herald the increasing importance of medieval Muslim philosophers to the English-language history REVIEWS 214 of philosophy curriculum. Marmura presents the Arabic text from the critical edition of al-Shifâ’ (21 vols., ed. I. Madkûr et al, Cairo 1952–1983; the section on Metaphysics: alIl âhîyât, 2 vols., ed. Anawati 1960); variants in the manuscripts have not been noted, and specialists are referred to the critical apparatus in the Cairo edition. Until now, non-Arabists have had to rely upon Anawati’s French translation of the text (2 vols., Paris 1978, 1985; there is an older German and a very recent— 2002—Italian translation); study of the reception of Avicenna in the Latin West has been facilitated by the excellent edition of the Latin translation of the text prepared by S. van Riet...