The central gesture
Al-Insān al-Kāmil fī maʿrifat al-awākhir wa-l-awāʾil — "The Universal Man, in the knowledge of the last and the first realities" — is al-Jīlī's masterpiece, and one of the great books of Sufi metaphysics. Its ambition is total: to set out, from the Absolute down to man, the whole architecture of the real — and to show that this architecture culminates in a single being, the Perfect Man.
The book prolongs the work of Ibn ʿArabī, but it does what Ibn ʿArabī had not done: it orders. Where the Futūḥāt overflow into thousands of pages, al-Jīlī builds a clear path, chapter after chapter. It is through this book that the Akbarian doctrine became teachable.
The key concepts (made plain)
- The Perfect Man — Not the man "without flaw," but the complete man (kāmil): the one in whom human nature reaches its fullness. He is the mirror in which God contemplates Himself — the point where the reflection becomes distinct.
- The degrees of the descent — Al-Jīlī describes the real as a tanazzul, a descent: from the pure Essence down to the sensible world, Being passes through degrees — Oneness, the Names and Attributes, the archetypes, then spirits, souls, bodies.
- The Essence and the Names — At the highest, the Essence (al-Dhāt), of which nothing can be said. Then the Essence knowing Itself, then unfolding into divine Names — each Name a facet by which the Absolute can be named and worshipped.
- The Muhammadan Reality — The Perfect Man, in his principle, is a single reality: the ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya, source of all prophethood and all sainthood, manifested age after age in the prophets and the saints.
- One single existence — The ground of the doctrine: there is, in all of reality, only one Being — that of God — which veils itself in degrees. The world is neither other than God, nor God: it is His manifestation.
The architecture of the work
The book has some sixty chapters, which descend from the Essence towards the world, then rise again towards the Perfect Man. Al-Jīlī traverses everything: the degrees of Being, the divine Names and Attributes, the worlds (the Spirit, the soul, nature, the Throne, the Footstool), the nature of man, the hidden meaning of the Law and the rites, eschatology — Paradise, Hell, the vision of God. The doctrine of the Perfect Man, which crowns the whole, occupies the final chapters.
To read it
It is a book of pure metaphysics, demanding — but of great clarity of plan. In the 20th century, Titus Burckhardt gave a partial French translation of it, De l'Homme universel, which made its essentials known to the French-speaking reader. Best approached after a first initiation into the thought of Ibn ʿArabī.
Resonances
- The author: Al-Jīlī
- The source doctrine: Ibn ʿArabī
- The translator into French: Titus Burckhardt
- The theme: The Perfect Man