Body Resuration in the Hereafter

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Bodily Resurrection: Between Avicenna’s Peripatetic Position and Mullā Ṣadrā’s Demonstration

The problem of “bodily resurrection” (how bodies are resurrected on the Day of Judgment) represents one of the most complex issues faced by Islamic philosophy in its attempt to reconcile reason with religious revelation. This challenge became especially evident in the contrast between Avicenna’s position and the philosophical foundation later developed by Mullā Ṣadrā.

Avicenna, as one of the foremost figures of the Peripatetic (Aristotelian) school, encountered an obstacle that Aristotelian logic could not overcome. He was able to demonstrate, through rational arguments, the survival and immortality of the soul (spiritual resurrection). However, he struggled to explain the mechanism by which the body's scattered material particles could be reassembled to reconstruct the very same body. As a result, Avicenna explicitly stated that bodily resurrection rests upon faith in and acceptance of the teachings of revelation, considering it something whose mechanism philosophical reason is incapable of proving.

In contrast, Mullā Ṣadrā did not stop at these perceived boundaries between reason and religion. Instead, he sought to establish a theory that could rationally demonstrate bodily resurrection on the basis of the principles of his Transcendent Philosophy (al-Ḥikmah al-Mutaʿāliyyah). Ṣadrā rejected the notion that resurrection entails the reassembly of the body's former earthly particles. Rather, he proposed that the human soul, by virtue of its immateriality and attained perfection, becomes in the afterlife the active creator of its own body. According to this view, on the Day of Judgment the soul generates from within itself an “imaginal” (mithālī) body that corresponds in form and function to the earthly body, yet is free from material density and the susceptibility to decay.

Mullā Ṣadrā illustrates this mechanism through a vivid dream. In a dream, a person undergoes a complete sensory experience: they see their body, walk, suffer pain, experience pleasure, and perceive dimensions, textures, and even temperature with remarkable accuracy. Yet this dream body is not composed of the dense material particles of clay present in the sleeper’s room. Rather, it is a body created by the soul through its imaginative faculty within the imaginal realm (ʿālam al-mithāl). Mullā Ṣadrā extends this power from the temporary condition of dreaming to the reality of existence in the hereafter.

Thus, Mullā Ṣadrā advances the position that resurrection is indeed bodily because the soul is resurrected together with a body that is connected to it and bears its identity. However, this is not the same material earthly body that is subject to decomposition and annihilation.