6.8 Trinitarian World
Based on the Hadith which declares that “Allah has created the (Perfect) Human Being upon His own Image” [I.163.20, II.395.25], Ibn al-Arabi asserts that the cosmos, or the physical world, in turn, is created upon the human image [II.652.25]. For this reason, the Macrocosm is often called as the Great Human and the Human is called a Microcosm [II.150.25, III.11.18]. This same analogy between the human and the cosmos led the Sufis to use the terms such as the Universal Spirit, the First Intellect, the Universal Soul and the Initial Body, in connection with their theories of creation and ontology, as we have seen at the beginning of chapter IV. The “Universal Heart”, however, is not normally used in this regard, and is not found in Sufi literature, although similar terms were sometimes used in other traditions. Nevertheless, in his mystical view of creation, Ibn al-Arabi uses other terms that may refer to the concept of the heart of the cosmos, for example as the high state or place to which Prophet Idris, who is Enoch or Hermes Trismegistus, was elevated, as we will see further in the chapter VII.
In their continuous endeavor for the realization of divine reality, many Sufis have dealt with these terms in both domains, following the verse from Quran where Allah says: “We shall show them our signs in the horizons (i.e. the physical world) and in their souls (i.e. the psychical world), until it may become clear to them that He is the Real (i.e. the spiritual or divine world)” [41:53]. In the same way Ibn al-Arabi also explains in his introduction to the long chapter 371 in which he explores the system of creation, with the various depictions that were reproduced at the beginning of chapter IV: “Allah has created the outside world only as an example for the human to know that everything that appears in the cosmos is in himself and that he is the intended essence (out of all this creation)” [III.417.19], and then after two pages he adds that Allah made the human’s knowledge of himself as an example for knowing his Lord, because if he does not know himself he would not know his Lord [III.419.12]. This was also declared in some prophetic narrations often quoted by Ibn al-Arabi: “whoever knows himself knows his Lord”, “those who know themselves best know their Lord best” [I.328.31, II.298.30]. Therefore, the physical world is a mirror of the psychical world, and both together are a mirror of the spiritual world. Therefore, this trinitarian world can be represented as a cube as in Figure 6.2. It should be noted, however, that the world is a complex combination of these three levels, and not as it may be understood that they are separate perpendicular dimensions.