Sophianic Theophany

In Henry Corbin’s reading of Ibn ʿArabī’s Fusūs al-Hikam and Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, Sophia appears not as the fallen wisdom of the Gnostics but as the theophanic Eternal Feminine, the Image in which the Godhead is most fully contemplated. Corbin’s formulation: “the mystic obtains the highest theophanic vision in contemplating the Image of feminine being, because it is in the Image of the Creative Feminine that contemplation can apprehend the highest manifestation of God, namely, creative divinity” (Corbin 1969).

The argument is structural. Divine Being, as the Sufic mystics read it, is twofold — at once poietic and pathetic, active and passive. The being who reveals the Image of God must therefore present this same structure: “He will have to be at once passion and action, that is, according to the Greek etymology of these words, pathetic and poietic (munfaʿil-faʿil), receptive and creative” (Corbin 1969). The Eternal Womanly, in whom both are present, is therefore the theophanic image par excellence. “Eve” — the feminine being created from Adam who in turn is the matrix of his being — is the figure in whom this twofold structure is read.

Corbin marks the divergence from Gnosticism explicitly: “Beauty, in this context, is by no means an instrument of ‘temptation’; it is the manifestation of the Creative Feminine, which is not a fallen Sophia. The appeal addressed to her is rather an appeal to the transfiguration of all things, for Beauty is the redeemer” (Corbin 1969). Where Valentinian Sophia falls, Sufic Sophia descends without falling — she is the angel of theophanic-imagination, the term toward which the Fedeli d’amore direct their love. Suhrawardī’s “Greek princess” of the Persian visionary tale is “this Wisdom or Sophia of the race of Jesus, because she too is at once of a human and of an angelic nature” (Corbin 1969, n. 9).

Sophianic theophany is the Lineage’s principal counterweight to the Gnostic catastrophe reading: wisdom as descending presence rather than fallen substance.

Relationships

• sophia
• theophanic-imagination
• celestial-earth
• mundus-imaginalis
• creative-imagination
• man-of-light
• anima-as-mediatrix

Primary sources

• corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)