Rabb and the Personal Lord

Corbin draws from Ibn ʿArabī the distinction between Allāh, the universal Godhead, and Rabb, the personal Lord — the specific divine Name in which each soul’s eternal hexeity is constituted. Every mystic stands in a syzygic bond with his own Rabb; this bond is not a share of a collective archetype but the irreducibly individual theophany that makes him who he is. “Having lost his bond with his specific Lord-archetype (that is, having lost his knowledge of himself), each ego is exposed to a hypertrophy that can easily degenerate into a spiritual imperialism; this kind of religion no longer aims to unite each man with his own Lord, but solely to impose the ‘same Lord’ upon all” (Corbin 1969).

The bond is reciprocal. Ibn ʿArabī’s coincidentia oppositorum preserves “simultaneously the unity and plurality without which the twofold dimension of each being, that is to say, his theophanic function, is inconceivable” (Corbin 1969). The vassal constitutes his Lord by being his theophany; the Lord constitutes the vassal by being the Name to which his hexeity eternally responds. Corbin names this category “mystic kathenotheism” — one god at a time, each soul to its own face.

The figure cuts against both orthodox monotheism and collective-archetype psychology. The fedeli d’amore — the faithful of love, traced by Corbin from Ibn ʿArabī through Suhrawardī to Dante — are the initiates of this radical singularism. Against Jung’s transpersonal self, Corbin holds the Rabb irreducibly individual; against doctrinal universals, he holds every theophany an angelophany, every soul’s salvation mediated by its own Angel.

Relationships

Primary sources

corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)