The Perfect Human Being: Mirror of God

The divine looks into the mirror.

This is Ibn ʿArabī’s opening image for the doctrine of al-insān al-kāmil, the Perfect Human Being. He works from a hadith in which God says: I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known, so I created the world. The creation is God’s act of self-disclosure — the divine wanting to be known, which requires a knower, which requires a creation capable of knowing.

But an imperfect knower produces an imperfect knowing. The world in its ordinary state — humans preoccupied with their appetites, their fears, their social arrangements — reflects the divine in a fragmented, partial, distorted way. The divine image in these mirrors is broken.

The Perfect Human Being is the unbroken mirror. The one who has fulfilled the purpose of human creation — who has become fully transparent to the divine, whose ego-self is sufficiently dissolved that no distortion interposes between the divine and its reflection — serves the cosmic function the creation was made for. God sees Himself clearly, for the first time, in this mirror.

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The structure of the doctrine has three elements.

First: the Perfect Human Being is the barzakh — the isthmus, the middle term — between the Absolute and the created world. The Absolute, as pure undifferentiated Being, cannot be in direct contact with relative existence. The Perfect Human Being stands between them as the meeting point: fully human (relative, particular, embodied) and fully divine (transparent to the Absolute, carrying the totality of the divine names). They are the hinge.

Second: the Prophet Muhammad is the Perfect Human Being in its fullest historical manifestation. The prophetic function — carrying the divine revelation into human language, embodying divine ethics in a human life — is the clearest expression of what al-insān al-kāmil is. But the doctrine does not confine it to the Prophet. The Sufi path is precisely the path toward this condition, which all human beings are, in principle, capable of approaching.

Third: the realization is not individual. When the Perfect Human Being fulfills the divine self-knowledge, this is not a private achievement. The cosmos participates. Something changes at the level of reality, not just the level of individual spiritual experience.

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The implications disturbed the orthodox immediately.

If every human being, through the Sufi path, can approach the condition of al-insān al-kāmil, then the distinction between prophet and mystic is one of degree, not kind. Ibn ʿArabī is careful to maintain the Prophet’s unique status — the prophetic function is closed with Muhammad, the khatm al-nabiyyin (seal of the prophets). But the mystical function — the saint’s realization of divine unity — continues after the prophets, carried by the friends of God (awliya).

The Sufi tradition’s claim that the saint is the heir of the prophet, carrying on in the interior realm what the prophet carried in the legislative realm, is the socially dangerous form of the doctrine. It implies that spiritual authority — the authority of direct realization — may be independent of and superior to legal authority in certain contexts. The legal scholars, who hold the legal authority, have obvious objections.

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Ibn ʿArabī’s student al-Jili elaborated the doctrine into its most systematic form in the fourteenth century.

His Al-Insān al-Kāmil (The Perfect Human Being) maps the doctrine cosmologically: the Perfect Human Being is the archetype through which the divine names are manifested most completely, the lens through which the divine light is focused into the world. The relationship between the Perfect Human Being and God is that of a lamp to its light: the lamp is distinct from the light but the light requires the lamp to be visible.

The doctrine entered Lurianic kabbalah in the sixteenth century through the Safed mystics, became the Adam Kadmon of kabbalistic cosmology, influenced esoteric Christian thought through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and resurfaces in every tradition that takes seriously the claim that human realization is the universe’s self-completion.

The mirror is the human heart. The Perfect Human Being is the polished mirror.

God looking at God, seeing God, knowing God — through a face that has learned to be nothing but that seeing.