The place of the human being in the divine Project

” Reason cannot see the real state of the world,
just as he who is born blind cannot see the things of this world;
but, besides reason, Man possesses a certain faculty
through which he perceives hidden mysteries.
Like fire in flint or iron,
God placed this faculty in the body and soul of Man. “.
The Persian poet and mystic Shabestarî (1287-1320)

The great question throughout human history, the one that has advanced science, launched adventurers across the seas, and plunged many who have tried to answer it into dizzying perplexity, is that of the meaning of our existence on earth.

The West has adopted an analytical approach that separates the body, which is more accessible in its materiality, from the soul and the spirit. Medicine has developed a psychiatric specialty to treat this elusive part of the human being, his psyche. However, we all feel that this break is artificial, because Man is one. Body, soul, spirit are three aspects of his unique essence, and he is linked through it to the whole of creation.

In a hadith qudsi(1), God says:

“I was a hidden Treasure, I loved to be known and I created the creatures.”.

The whole of creation therefore has no other purpose and no other meaning than the knowledge of the divine. Of course, this is not a question of theoretical knowledge, but of being (re)born with God, in accordance with the etymology of the word “knowledge”. Religion itself has no other purpose than to allow Man to find the path that will lead him back to his Creator, to his origin, and therefore to the center of himself. This new birth is the return to the preeminence of the spirit.

The place of the human being is central in this divine Project. The three dimensions of the body, mind and spirit that compose it, each play a fundamental role in this story. Thus, the Koran mentions the creation of Adam:

“When your Lord said to the angels: ‘I am going to appoint a lieutenant on earth,’ they said: ‘Will You appoint one who will do evil and shed blood, while we celebrate Your praise and glorify You and proclaim Your sanctity?’ The Lord said: ‘I know what you do not know.’ He taught Adam the names of all creatures, then He presented them to the angels, saying: ‘Make known to Me their names, if you are truthful.’ They said: ‘Glory be to You! We know nothing except what You have taught us. You are indeed the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.’ He said: ‘O Adam! Make known to them the names of these creatures.’ When Adam informed the angels, the Lord said: ‘Have I not warned you? I know the secret of the heavens and the earth, I know what you reveal and what you conceal.’ When We said to the angels: “Prostrate yourselves before Adam!” they prostrated themselves, except Iblis, who refused and became arrogant: he was of the disbelievers.”(Quran 2, 30-34).

The Luminous Nature of Man

Thus, the angels saw at first only the external nature of Adam and his inherent tendency to commit evil. Yet, despite its apparent imperfections, human nature is the fruit of the divine Breath. It has an innate predisposition to receive knowledge because it carries within it all of Creation, hence the teaching of the names.

The name in fact designates the essential nature of a thing or a being. It is contained in the divine Breath. The Spirit of God gives birth to the Word. Adam can name the angels, but the angels ignore the name of Adam. The human being endowed with freedom, conscious of himself, can have an autonomous representation of nature and beings, while the angels have no other choice than to glorify God. Pure singers of God, their melody cannot refuse his Glory. It is therefore before the spiritual and interior nature of Adam that God asks the angels to prostrate themselves.

Another Quranic passage clarifies this when God says to the angels:

“Yes, I will create a human being from clay. When I have formed him harmoniously, and breathed into him of My Spirit, fall prostrate before him!” Only the devil (Iblis) refuses to prostrate himself, arguing that God created him from clay, while he himself was created from fire. (Quran 38, 76).

The angels, created of light, marked with the sign of spiritual nobility, must prostrate themselves before Man, fashioned of clay, imprisoned in matter. Why? Because God breathed into him “of His Spirit”. It is this light that God puts in Adam, the fundamental reality of the human being, which gives him all his nobility.

But then, what about the soul? Ibn ‘Ajiba answers: “The spirit is that through which the insufflation has taken place. The soul, for its part, is created in the fetus, before the spirit is insufflated. It is through it that movement occurs, and it necessarily accompanies the physical body, separating from it only at death. Then, the spirit goes out first and the soul ceases to be: this is how life ends.”.

We will see later that there also exists, beyond this animal part of the soul, attached to the body, another part which will be, it, susceptible to transform itself under the influence of the spirit. The Koranic stories show how the bodily dimension of the human can be misleading, a trap for the angels but also for the soul if it is confused with it, forgetting its primordial nature, its luminous, spiritual essence.

The Quran speaks of the human body created from mud and describes it as a lump of coagulated blood. Nothing very noble in appearance. It is moreover this apparent mediocrity which causes the revolt of Iblis. And he shows by this attitude one of his essential characteristics, which is to deny the spiritual reality of the human being in order to retain of him only his external aspect.

By this act of individual affirmation, Satan is fallen from the spiritual degree which was his as an angel, to become a psychic force tending towards a continuous affirmation of itself. His fall symbolizes this ever greater manifestation of the ego, which is necessarily accompanied by a restriction of the field of consciousness to the sole modality of the sensible. Here we find the separation between the shell of things, and their profound nature.

Another account gives us the details of this breathing of the Spirit of God into the body of man in the following manner:

“When He breathed the Spirit into it (2)and when it reached Adam’s head, he sneezed; then the angels said: “Say: Praise be to God!”, and Adam repeated: “Praise be to God!” Then God said to him: “May God have mercy on you!” When then the Spirit entered his eyes, he looked at the fruits of Paradise, and when it reached his stomach, he felt the desire to eat and leapt before the Spirit even reached his feet, in its rush towards the fruits of Paradise. God says about this: “Man is impatient by nature.”(Quran 21:37).

It is also “created from forgetfulness” adds the Holy Book, which is why the path of spirituality is first of all a reminder, an awakening so that the memory of our triple dimension, of the knowledge poured into us and of our first destiny, returns to us.