Ibn Arabi

In the immense “Meccan Openings” and the compact “Bezels of Wisdom,” which he said the Prophet handed him in a dream, Ibn Arabi taught that there is only one Being, God's, and that the world is His self-disclosure (tajalli) through the divine names, so that God is at once beyond all likeness (tanzih) and like all things (tashbih), “He and not He.” Each creature is the manifestation of a “fixed entity” known eternally in God's knowledge, so that God's will follows what each thing eternally is; the Perfect Man, realized in the prophets and saints, is the mirror in which God sees Himself, and the heart of the knower becomes “capable of every form.” He held that the people of the Fire would in the end find their torment turned to a kind of bliss by the mercy that precedes God's wrath, followed the Zahiri school in law and kept its letter strictly, and wrote to the Seljuk sultan urging him to enforce the restrictions of the Pact of Umar on Christians. Ibn Taymiyya made him the chief target of his polemic against monism.

Why he matters: Asín Palacios, a Spanish priest, built a career on him and on the thesis that Islamic eschatology shaped the Divine Comedy; the Classics of Western Spirituality published the “Bezels” for Catholic readers, and his doctrine of names as the mode of God's self-communication is the Islamic analogue to the Palamite energies and the Dionysian names that Catholic theology must weigh. He is where Islam comes closest to, and furthest from, the Christian doctrine of participation.