Icon by Chantal Heinegg

 

Swedenborg and Ibn al Arabi on man as a perfect embodiment of God's essential nature

 

 Swedenborg excerpts are from Divine Love and Wisdom, chapter 1.

Ibn Arabi excerpts are from The Bezels of Wisdom, chapter 1.

 

Ibn al Arabi:

God only taught the Perfect Man His Most Beautiful Names and placed them within him, because the Perfect Man is the spirit of the world and the world is his body – as was mentioned – and because the spirit governs the body and exercises free disposal (tasarruf) within it through its spiritual and corporeal faculties, just as the Names are like spiritual and corporeal faculties for the Perfect Man. Just as the spirit governs the body and controls it through faculties, in the same way the Perfect Man governs the affairs of the world and controls them by means of the divine
Names.

Know that every one of the realities of the essence of the Perfect Man and of his ontological level is an isthmus (barzakh) in terms of its comprehensive unity (ahadiyyat al-jam' ), standing between one of the realities of the Sea of Necessity (wujûb) and a reality which is its locus of manifestation within the sea of possibility (imkân) and which is its "throne", upon which that Necessary reality is seated.14 So when the perfect comprehensive theophany (tajallî) descends upon its locus of manifestation, the Perfect Man, he receives it through his perfect, comprehensive and unified reality, and that theophany courses through all of the realities within his nature.

Then the light of theophany flows out from him onto that which is in conformity with it within the world. Therefore the bounties and blessings which descend upon the realities of the world through the theophany of the All-merciful only reach these realities after having become determined within the Perfect Man and colored by an added hue which did not exist before the determination of the theophany within him. Therefore the realities and archetypes of the world are his subjects, and he is the vicegerent (khalîfah) over them. And the vicegerent must look after his subjects in the most fitting and best manner. It is here that some of the Perfect Men are superior to others.

God manifests Himself to the heart of the Perfect Man, who is His vicegerent. And the reflection of the lights of His self-manifestation overflows into the world, which remains in existence by receiving this effusion (fayd). As long as this Man is in the world, he seeks from God the aid of the theophanies of the Essence and of the "Merciful" and "Compassionate" Mercy15 by means of the Names and Qualities of which the beings are the manifestations and the loci upon which they are "seated".16 So the world is preserved by this seeking of aid and by the effusion of theophanies as long as the Perfect Man remains within it. Therefore no meaning passes from the Inward (bâtin) to the Outward (zâhir) except by his command. Therefore even if he does not know it because of the domination of his human qualities, he is the isthmus between the two seas – i.e. the two seas of the Outward and the Inward – and the partition between the two worlds. And to him is the reference in His words, "He let forth the two seas that meet together, between them an isthmus they do not overpass" (Quran LV, 19).

Therefore, or because the world is like the body and the Perfect Man is like the spirit, it is said that the world is a "great man", for just as man consists of a body and a spirit which governs it, the world is made up of these two, although it is larger than man in form; but this statement is only true on condition of the Perfect Man's existence within it, or the world, for if he did not exist within it, it would be like a discarded body without a spirit.

And the Perfect Man is a book, the epitome and summary of the Mother of the Book, which consists of the ontological plane of the comprehensive Unity of the Name "Allah", which comprises the Necessary and active realities pertaining to the Names and the subtle essences of the Qualities pertaining to the level of Lordship,
such that nothing escapes them, save inherent Necessity (al-wujûb al-dhâtî), for the contingent and possible being has no share in that, or else the realities of things would
be reversed.

And therefore, i.e. because man is the epitome of the ontological plane of "Allah" and comprises what it contains of the realities of the Names and Qualities in a comprehensive unity, He singled him out for the divine Form, even if the world also is in accordance with the Form, for whatever is nearer to oneness is more deserving of being attributed to God and the form of man is the form of His comprehensive Unity, while the form of the world is His particularized form. For He said through the mouth of the Holy Prophet, "Verily God created Adam in His" divine and perfect "form" and according to His own all-comprehensive qualities of Lordship. And since it is possible that the pronoun in "His form" refers to Adam, as some people have claimed, he followed this with his words, and in another version, "in the form of the All-Merciful".

It has been said that "form" means appearance, and so it can only apply to bodies. So what is meant by "form" in this hadîth is "attribute", i.e., "Adam was created according to the Attributes of God", or, living, knowing, willing, powerful, hearing, seeing and speaking. Since Reality appears outwardly through form, the term has been applied figuratively to the Names and Qualities; for through them God appears in external reality. This is the point of view of the exoteric authorities.

But in the view of those who have attained the Truth, form is that without which the unseen and disengaged (mujarrad) realities cannot be conceived or manifested. And the form of God is Being determined by the other determinations through which It is the source of all acts relating to perfection and all active properties.

One of the Sufis has said, "If a questioner asks how 'form' can be attributed to God, we will answer that according to the exoteric authorities it as a figurative attribution, not a real one, because for them to apply the word 'form' to sensory beings is true and correct, and to intelligible beings is figurative. But for us, since the world
in all of its spiritual, corporeal, substantial and accidental parts is the particularized form of the ontological plane of 'Allah', and the Perfect Man is His summary form, the attribution of form to God is true and correct, and to what is other than He is figurative; for in our eyes nothing other than He possesses existence."

And He made him, or the Perfect Man, the sought-after goal and the desired end in the creation and maintenance of the world, like the rational soul, which is the goal in making perfect the body and harmonizing the natural and bodily constitution of the human individual.

 

Swedenborg:

God is the essential person. Throughout all the heavens, the only concept of God is a concept of a person. The reason is that heaven, overall and regionally, is in a kind of human form, and Divinity among the angels is what makes heaven...

It is because God is a person that all angels and spirits are perfectly formed people. This is because of heaven’s form, which is the same in its largest and its smallest manifestations...

It is common knowledge that we were created in the image and likeness of God because of Genesis 1:26, 27 and from the fact that Abraham and others saw God as a person.

...We may gather how important it is to have a right concept of God from the fact that this concept is the very core of the thinking of anyone who has a religion. All the elements of religion and of worship focus on God; and since God is involved in every element of religion and worship, whether general or particular, unless there is a right concept of God there can be no communication with heaven. This is why every nation is allotted its place in the spiritual world according to its concept of a human God. This [understanding of God as human] is where the concept of the Lord is to be found, and nowhere else...

In the Divine-Human One, reality and its manifestation are both distinguishable and united. Wherever there is reality, there is its manifestation: the one does not occur without the other. In fact, reality exists through its manifestation, and not apart from it. Our rational capacity grasps this when we ponder whether there can be any reality that does not manifest itself, and whether there can be any manifestation except from some reality. Since each occurs with the other and not apart from it, it follows that they are one entity, but “distinguishably one.”

They are distinguishably one like love and wisdom. Further, love is reality and wisdom is its manifestation. Love occurs only in wisdom, and wisdom only from love. So love becomes manifest when it is in wisdom. These two are one entity in such a way that although they can be distinguished in thought they cannot be distinguished in fact; and since they can be distinguished in thought and not in fact, we refer to them as “distinguishably one.”

Reality and its manifestation are also distinguishably one in the Divine-Human One the way soul and body are. A soul does not occur without its body, nor a body without its soul. The divine soul of the Divine-Human One is what we mean by the divine reality, and the divine body of the Divine-Human One is what we mean by the divine manifestation.

The reason reality is not reality unless it is manifested is that before that happens it has no form, and if it has no form it has no attributes. Anything that has no attributes is not really anything. Whatever is manifest on the basis of its reality is one with that reality because it stems from that reality. This is the basis of their being united into a single entity, and this is why each belongs to the other reciprocally, with each being wholly present in every detail of the other, as it is in itself.

It therefore stands to reason that God is a person and in this way is God manifest—not manifest from himself, but manifest in himself. The one who is manifest in himself is the God who is the source of all.

In the Divine-Human One, infinite things are distinguishably one. It is recognized that God is infinite: he is in fact called the Infinite One. But he is called infinite because he is infinite. He is not infinite simply because he is intrinsically essential reality and manifestation, but because there are infinite things in him. An infinite being without infinite things within it would be infinite in name only.

The infinite things in him should not be called “infinitely many” or “infinitely all,” because of our earthly concepts of “many” and “all.” Our earthly concept of “infinitely many” is limited, and while there is some- thing limitless about our concept of “infinitely all,” it still rests on lim- ited things in our universe. This means that since our concept is earthly, we cannot arrive at a sense of the infinite things in God by some process of shifting it to a higher level or by comparison. However, since angels enjoy spiritual concepts they can surpass us by changing to a higher level and by comparison, though they cannot reach infinity itself.

Anyone can come to an inner assurance about the presence of infinite things in God—anyone, that is, who believes that God is a person; because if God is a person, he has a body and everything that having a body entails. So he has a face, torso, abdomen, upper legs, and lower legs, since without these he would not be a person. Since he has these compo- nents, he also has eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and tongue. He also has what we find within a person, such as a heart and lungs and the things that de- pend on them, all of which, taken together, make us human. We are cre- ated with these many components, and if we consider them in their in- terconnections, they are beyond counting. In the Divine-Human One, though, they are infinite. Nothing is lacking, so he has an infinite completeness.

We can make this comparison of the uncreated Person, who is God, with us who are created, because that God is a person. It is because of [his being a person] that we earthly beings are said to have been created in his image and in his likeness (Genesis 1:26, 27).

 

Portrait of Swedenborg by Carl Frederick von Breda