Theophanic Imagination

The theophanic Imagination, in Corbin’s reconstruction of Ibn ʿArabī, is not a subjective faculty but the cosmological organ by which God discloses Himself. “The initial idea of Ibn ʿArabī’s mystic theosophy and of all related theosophies is that the Creation is essentially a theophany (tajallī). As such, creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic Imagination” (Corbin 1969, p. 182). Imagination is therefore first predicated of God and only secondarily of the mystic; the active Imagination in the gnostic is the human participation in a cosmic operation whose origin and end are in the divine self-disclosure. The beings which the theophanic Imagination produces “subsist with an independent existence sui generis in the intermediate world” — the mundus-imaginalis, the ʿālam al-mithāl — which is neither sensory nor intelligible but genuinely ontological.

The organ of the theophanic imagination is the heart. Corbin titles the long fourth section of Alone with the Alone “Creativity of the Heart,” and the heart there is not metaphor but organ: the mirror in which the divine Face becomes visible. “The science of the Imagination is also the science of mirrors, of all mirroring ‘surfaces’ and of the forms that appear in them” (Corbin 1969). The power is activated by prayer.

Two consequences follow. First, the products of imagination are not “mere” images and cannot be deflated into fantasy without a metaphysical loss that Corbin calls “the degradation of the ontologically creative Imagination into a fantasy productive only of the imaginary and the unreal” — the hallmark of the laicized modern world. Second, because the Creator-Creature is a bi-unity, the mystic’s creative act is continuous with God’s: “It is one and the same divine operation, but through the intermediary” (Corbin 1969, p. 224). This is not pantheism. It is the theophanic principle that every manifestation is a face, and every face belongs irreducibly to its own Lord.

This is the concept james-hillman cited when he called Corbin’s Eranos lectures the demonstration of “the theophanic power of bringing the divine face into visibility” (Russell 2023). It grounds the post-Jungian insistence that the archetypal image is not a representation of something prior but is itself the primary reality of the psyche. Hillman inherited the term but diverged on its register — where Corbin held the imaginal sacral, Hillman stressed “the pathologized aspect of the imaginal” (Mythic Figures 2007, p. 78 n. 5), a move Corbin would have read as a falling-away from the theophanic ground.

Relationships

Primary sources

corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)
corbin-man-light-iranian (Corbin 1971)