Humans > Angels

In class, we spoke a lot about what being the complete human really means and how a human actually becomes complete. A complete human is the idea that, in unity with God, the limited capacities for knowledge and action become one with Allah’s own self-knowledge and with the universal nature of the real. In order for a human to become complete, one must fully embrace all of the aspects of the transcendence and immanence because the human being has the ability to recognize everything. A human has to recognize that the real exists in everything in order to realize this falling away of the limited ego. I became even more interested when we began speaking about the human vs. the angel. The complete human is different than the angels, who can only somewhat see God and stick to their own perspective. They carry out this “error of binding,” because they see the real only in one form and deny its true nature. Humans, on the other hand, are the dividing line between transcendence and immanence and do not fix the real into only one form. Instead, the complete human can recognize all the aspects of both the creation and the real, because the complete human knowledge is the divine self-knowledge. I found the example of angelic boast to be very interesting when thinking about these differences between the complete human and angels. Sells refers to the myth about how angels claimed to praise God the best since they know the divine names, however each angel only knows a single name. The angels cannot completely praise God because they do not realize each aspect. Only humans can realize all of the aspects. Sells says, “The angels, regardless of the intensity of their powers, are not universal. Only human nature can achieve universality or completeness”(Sells 78). To me, I found this idea really interesting, because when I first came upon the part about humans vs. angels, I automatically thought the angel would exceed the human. However, after reading, it is clear that the angel has only one perspective whereas the human recognizes all aspects. Please feel free to comment if you have anything else to add about these topics!