This Imagination is subject to two possibilities, because it can only reveal the Hidden by continuing to veil it. It is a veil; this veil can become so opaque as to trap us and capture us in the trap of idolatry.

Henry Corbin

French philosopher. Professor and researcher at Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

Translation by Estevan de Negreiros Ketzer

Clinical psychologist. Doctor of Letters (PUCRS).

It is first necessary to recall the acts of the eternal cosmogony as conceived by the genius of Ibn Arabi[1]. To begin with: a Divine Being alone in His unconditioned essence, of which we know only one thing: precisely the sadness of primordial solitude that makes Him yearn to be revealed to beings who manifest Himself to the extent that He manifests Himself to them. This is the Revelation we have grasped. We must meditate on it in order to know who we are. O leitmotif is not the irruption of an autarchic Omnipotence, but a fundamental sadness: "I was a hidden Treasure, I longed to be known. That's why I produced creatures, to be known in them." This phase is represented as the sadness of the divine Names suffering anguish in ignorance because no one names them, and it is this sadness that descended in the divine Breath (tanafus) which is Compassion (Rahna) and existentiation (ijad), and which, in the world of Mystery, is the Compassion of the Divine Being with Himself and for Himself, that is, for His own Names. Or, in other words, the origin, the beginning is determined by love, which implies a movement of ardent desire (arakat shawqiya) on the part of the one who is in love. This burning desire is appeased by the divine Vision[2].

By means of an analysis in which he discovers the mystery of being in the experience of his own being, the theosophist avoids from the outset the theological opposition between Ens increatum and a ens creatum extracted from nothing, an opposition that makes it doubtful that the relationship between the Summum Ens and nothing from which He brings creatures into being has truly been defined. Sadness is not the "privilege" of the creature; it is in the Creator Himself; it is in fact the reason that, anticipating all our deductions, makes the primordial Being a creative Being; it is the secret of His creativity. And His creation springs, not from nothing, from something other than Himself, from a not-Him, but from His fundamental being, from the powers and virtualities latent in His own unrevealed being. Consequently, the word tanaffus also connotes "to shine", to appear in the manner of "during". Creation is essentially the revelation of the Divine Being, first to Himself, a luminescence taking place within Him; it is a theophany (tajallz ilahz). There is no notion of a creatio et nihilo opening a chasm that no rational thought will ever be able to cross, because it is this deeply divisive idea in itself that creates opposition and distance; here there is not even a fissure capable of turning into an area of uncertainty that no argument or proof can ever cross. The Divine Breath exhales what our shaikh designates as Nafas al-Rah-man or Nafas Rahmanzthe Sigh of existential Compassion; this Sigh gives rise to all primordial, subtle existence, called the Cloud ('nanny). Which explains the following hadith: "Someone asked the prophet: Where is the Lord before He created His (visible) Creation? There was no space above or below"[3].

This Cloud, in which the Divine Being exhaled and in which He originally was, receives in every way and at the same time, gives it is active and passive, receptive and existential (muhaqqiq); through it, differentiation takes place within the primordial reality of being (haqiqat al-wujud) who is the Divine Being (Haqq fi dhatihi). As such, it is the absolute and unconditioned Imagination (khayal mutlaq). The initial theophanic operation by which the Divine Being reveals Himself, "shows" Himself, differentiating Himself in His hidden being, that is, manifesting to Himself the virtualities of His Names with their correlates, the eternal existences of beings, their prototypes latent in His essence (a'yan thabita)[4] - this operation is conceived as the creative Active Imagination, the theophanic Imagination. Primordial Cloud, Absolute or Theophanic Imagination, Existential Compassion are equivalent notions, expressing the same original reality: the Divine Being from whom all things are created (al-Haqq al-makhluq bihi kull shay) - which is to say the "Creator-Creature". For the Cloud is the Creator, because it is the Breath that He exhales and is hidden in Him; as such, the Cloud is the invisible, the "esoteric" (batin). And it is the manifested creature (zahir). Creature-Creator (khaliq-makhluq): this means that the Divine Being is the Hidden and the Revealed, or also that He is the First (al-Awwal) and the Last (al-Akhir)[5].

Thus, in this Cloud all forms of being are manifested, from the highest Archangels, the "Spirits ecstatic with love" (al-muhayyamun), even the minerals of inorganic nature; everything that differs from the pure essence of the Divine Being as such (dhat al-Haqq), genera, species and individuals are all created in the Cloud. "Created", but not produced ex nihiloSince the only conceivable non-being is the latent state of beings, and since even in their state of pure potentiality, hidden within the unrevealed essence, beings have a positive status (thubat) since pre-eternity. And, in fact, "creation" has a negative aspect, since it puts an end to the privation of being that keeps things in their concealment; this double negativity, the non-being of a non-being, constitutes the positive act. In this sense, it is permissible to say that the universe originates at the same time in being and non-being[6].

Thus, Creation is Epiphany (tajallz), that is, a passage from the state of concealment or potency to the luminous, manifest, revealed state; as such, it is an act of the divine, primordial Imagination. Correlatively, if we didn't have this same power of Imagination within us, which is not imagination in the profane sense of "fantasy", but Active Imagination (quwwat al-khayal) or ImaginatrixIn other words, nothing that we show ourselves would manifest itself. Here we find the link between a recurring creation, renewed from moment to moment, and an incessant theophanic Imagination, in other words, the idea of a succession of theophanies (tajalliyat) which causes the continuous succession of beings. This Imagination is subject to two possibilities, because it can only reveal the Hidden by continuing to veil it. It is a veil; this veil can become so opaque as to trap us and capture us in the trap of idolatry. But it can also become increasingly transparent, because its sole purpose is to allow the mystic to obtain knowledge of being as it is, that is, the knowledge that liberates, because it is the gnosis of salvation. This occurs when the gnostic understands that the multi-successive forms, their movements and actions, appear to be separate from the One only when they are veiled by a veil without transparency. Once transparency is achieved, he knows what they are and why they are; why there is union and discrimination between the Occult and the Manifest; why there is the Lord e his vassal, the Adorer e the Adored, the Beloved e the Lover; because any unilateral affirmation of a unity that confuses them, or of a discrimination that opposes their two existences as if they were not of the same essence, is a betrayal of the divine intention and, therefore, of the Sadness that in every being yearns for appeasement in the manifestation of His secret.

The Creator-Creature, the Creator who does not produce His creation outside of Himself, but, as it were, clothes Himself in it as the Appearance (and transparency) under which He manifests and reveals Himself first and foremost, is referred to by various other names, such as the "imagined God", i.e. the God "manifested" by the theophanic Imagination (al-Haqq al-mutakhayyal), the "God created in faiths" (al-Haqq al-makhaluq fi'l-i'tiqdhat). The initial act of the Creator imagining the world is matched by the creature imagining its world, imagining worlds, its God, its symbols. Or rather, these are the phases, the recurrences of a single, eternal process: Imagination carried out in an Imagination (takhayyul fz takhayyul), an Imagination that recurs just as - and because - Creation itself recurs. The same theophanic Imagination of the Creator who revealed the worlds, renews Creation at every moment in the human being whom He revealed as His perfect image and who, in the mirror that this Image is, shows Himself to be the image of. This is why man's Active Imagination cannot be a vain fiction, since it is this same theophanic Imagination that, in and through the human being, continues to reveal what was shown when he was first imagined.

This imagination can only be called "illusory" when it becomes opaque and loses its transparency. But when it turns to the divine reality that it reveals, it liberates, provided that we recognize the function with which Ibn 'Arabi endowed it and which only it can perform; namely, the function of coincidentia oppositorum (jam' bayna'l naqzdayn). This term is an allusion to the words of Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz, a famous Sufi master. "By what do you know God?" he was asked. And he replied: "By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum"[7]. For the whole universe of worlds is both He and not-He (huwa la huwa). The God manifested in forms is both Himself and different from Himself, because once He manifests Himself, He is the limited that has no limit, the visible that cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It can only be perceived by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayalthe imaginative "Presence" or "Dignity", the Imaginatrix) at times when it dominates man's sensory perceptions, in dreams or, better still, in the waking state (the state characteristic of the Gnostic, when he distances himself from awareness of sensory things). In short, a mystical perception (dhawq) is necessary. Understand all the forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures they manifest, which are the ethereal hecceities, that they are other than the Creator and yet that they are Him, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence between the descent of God towards the creature and the ascent of the creature towards the Creator. The "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it that corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river[8]. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols (ta'wzl, ta'bzr), a method of understanding that transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir), making them make this crossing.

An intermediary, a mediator: this is the essential function of Active Imagination. We'll talk more about it later. The intellect ('aql) cannot replace it. The First Intelligence ('Aql awwal) is the first determination (ta'ayyun awwal) that opens up inside the Cloud, which is itself the absolute theophanic Imagination. The intermediary between the world of Mystery ('alam al-ghayb) and the world of visibility ('alam al-shahadat) can only be the Imagination, since the plane of being and the plane of consciousness that it designates is the one in which the Incorporeal Beings of the world of Mystery "take on a body" (which does not yet mean a material, physical body)[9]and in which, reciprocally, natural and sensual things are spiritualized or "immaterialized". We will cite examples to illustrate this doctrine. The Imagination is the "place of appearance" of spiritual beings, Angels and Spirits, who take on the figures and forms of their "apparitional forms" and because pure concepts (ma'anz) and sensory data (masusat) are found and flourish in personal figures prepared for the events of the spiritual drama, it is the place where all "divine history" takes place, the stories of the prophets, for example, which have meaning because they are theophanies; while on the plane of sensory evidence on which what we call HistoryThe meaning, that is, the true nature of these stories, which are essentially "symbolic stories", cannot be grasped.

Translation of the English version: CORBIN, Henry. The Creative Imagination as Theophany or the "God from Whom All Being Is Created". In: Alone with the Alonecreative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

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[1] Cf. the aspects already outlined above, Chap. I, §§ 2 and 3. In order to establish the equivalence of the terminology used in the following paragraphs, let's note the following: al-Haqq al Makhluq bihi: the God by whom and in whom every being is created (the Creator-Creature). Al-Haqq al-mutakhayyalThe God manifested by the Theophanic Imagination. Al-Haqq Makhluq fi'l-i'tiqadatthe God created in faiths. Tajdid al-khalq recurrence of creation.

[2] Cf. Ibn 'Arabi, Fatuhat, II, 310.

[3] Ibid., on essence (haqiqa) of Absolute Imagination (khayal mutlaq), of the Imagination that essentializes (khayal muhaqiqi), configures (mussawir) all the forms or receptacles that constitute the exoteric, manifest and epiphanic aspect of the Divine Being (Zahir Allah).

[4] Finally, as we have already noted and for reasons that need not be explained here, the term eternal hecceity [the unique character of being according to Duns Scotus] seems to us the most direct translation of the term a'yan thabitaIn Ibn Arabi's work, it is used with such complex connotations. Hecceity is a term characteristic of Duns Scotus' technical vocabulary. In using it here, we do not intend to suggest affinity or homology. Such a question could only be raised in connection with an in-depth study of the later Avicermans of Irar, who were themselves permeated by Ibn 'Arabi's theosophy.

[5] Fatuhaz II, 313. Like the Divine Sigh, the Cloud is a breath inhaled and exhaled by the Divine Being (in the haqiqa of Haqq); it is the configuration (and configurability) of the creature in the Creator. It is the Creator-Creature, that is, the One in whom all the forms of the universe are manifested, the One in whom the infinite diversity of theophanies unfolds successively (fa-kana al-Haqq al makhluq bihi ma xahara min suwar al-'alam fihi ma xahara min ikhtilaf al-tajalli al-ilahi fihi).

[6] Fatuhaz II, 311.

[7] Cited in Futuhaz II, 379.

[8] Ibid., 379.

[9] Cf. the five "descending" meanings denoted by the term "matter" in Ibn 'Arabi's theosophy and related theosophies; Chap. I, n. 99.