Ibn al-‘Arabi · Theology
For Ibn al-‘Arabi, the unknowable God becomes knowable through the divine names - Merciful, Avenger, Living, Hidden - and the whole cosmos is the endless self-disclosure (tajalli) of those names in the mirror of creation.
Ibn al-‘Arabi’s metaphysics begins in a problem that all mystical theology faces. The divine Essence (al-Dhat) - God as God is in Himself - is utterly beyond knowledge. It has no name, no quality, no relation; it is the ‘Treasure’ locked in absolute hiddenness, of which nothing positive can be said, for any name would limit the limitless. The Sufis call this the ‘Blindness’ or the ‘Cloud,’ the sheer unknowable depth of the Real. But if God in His Essence is forever unknowable, how is God known at all? How can there be religion, revelation, prayer, a relationship between the creature and its Lord?
Ibn al-‘Arabi’s answer is the doctrine of the divine names (al-asma al-husna, ‘the most beautiful names’). The Qur’an gives God ninety-nine names - the Merciful, the Compassionate, the King, the Holy, the Living, the Knowing, the Forgiving, the Avenger, the First, the Last, the Manifest, the Hidden, and many more. These names, Ibn al-‘Arabi teaches, are how the unknowable Essence makes itself knowable. A name is not the bare Essence; it is the Essence considered in a particular relation to the cosmos. ‘The Merciful’ is God as the source of mercy to creatures; ‘the Creator’ is God as related to a creation; ‘the Forgiving’ is God as related to those who sin and turn back. Each name is a window cut into the unknowable, a particular face the hidden God turns toward the world. Through the names - and only through the names - the Treasure becomes known.
The key word for how the names enter the world is tajalli - ‘self-disclosure’ or ‘self-manifestation,’ sometimes translated ‘theophany.’ The cosmos, for Ibn al-‘Arabi, is nothing other than the tajalli of the divine names: each creature manifests one or more of the names, gives them an outward face, lets them be seen. A merciful act discloses the Merciful; a living creature discloses the Living; the order and proportion of the world disclose the Wise; the sheer existence of anything discloses the Real. The world is not a collection of neutral objects that happen to exist; it is a tapestry woven entirely of divine self-disclosures, a single vast theophany in which, to the seeing eye, every thing is a name of God taking visible shape.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Ibn al-‘Arabi the unknowable Essence discloses itself through the divine names, each name a relation between God and the cosmos; that creation is tajalli, the endless self-disclosure of the names in the mirror of the immutable entities; and that the cosmos exists to let God contemplate His own nam…
Leads to Plotinus.
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