The Spiritual Physick

A short ethical treatise by the physician and philosopher Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, known in Latin as Rhazes, written for the governor of Rayy as a companion to a medical book he had dedicated to him. Just as medicine treats the body, this spiritual medicine treats the soul by correcting bad character. Al-Rāzī begins by praising reason as God's greatest gift and the judge that should govern all else, then argues that the chief task is to restrain passion, which constantly pushes toward immediate pleasure. Drawing on Plato's division of the soul into rational, spirited and appetitive parts, he works through particular faults in turn, including passionate love, vanity, envy, anger, lying, miserliness, anxiety, grief, gluttony, drunkenness and the pursuit of rank. Pleasure, he argues, is only a return to the natural state after some harm, so chasing it brings little. The final chapter argues that fear of death is unreasonable, since either nothing follows death or a good soul has nothing to fear.

It is a lively early work of practical ethics that treats bad habits like illnesses, and its reasoning about anger, envy, grief and the fear of death still offers usable advice.