Theology
1165 to 1240, al-Andalus and Damascus
The unity of being, the perfect human, and God’s self-disclosure.
Start learning Ibn →Ibn al-‘Arabi’s vast metaphysics turns on a single, dizzying idea: there is, in the strictest sense, only one Being - God - and everything we call ‘the world’ is the radiance of that one Being appearing to i…
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 creatio…
If the cosmos is a mirror in which God beholds His names, the ‘perfect human’ (al-insan al-kamil) is the place where the mirror becomes perfectly clear - the one being in whom all the divine names are gather…
Ibn al-‘Arabi’s most famous and most radical verses declare a heart ‘capable of every form’ - a temple for idols, a Christian convent, the Kaaba, the Torah, the Qur’an - following only ‘the religion of…
Between the world of pure spirit and the world of dense matter lies, for Ibn al-‘Arabi, a third realm - the world of imagination (khayal), the barzakh - where meanings take on form, where visions and dreams are real, an…
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