Which case, and why?

When the Real (glory be to Him) willed, with respect to His Most Beautiful Names, which no enumeration can reach, to see their entities (or, if you wish, you may say: to see His own entity) in an all-comprehensive [engendered] being that encompasses the whole affair, by virtue of its being qualified by existence, and through which His secret would become manifest to Him: for a thing's seeing itself by means of itself is not like its seeing itself in some other thing that serves for it as a mirror. For [in the latter case] its self appears to it in a form that is given by the locus looked into, [a form] which would not appear to it without the existence of this locus and its self-disclosure to it.