Theophanic Prayer

For Ibn ʿArabī, as Corbin reads him, prayer is not petition. It is cosmogony — the act by which the worshiper participates in the theophanic event through which God becomes manifest. “Prayer is not a request for something: it is the expression of a mode of being, a means of existing and of causing to exist, that is, a means of causing the God who reveals Himself to appear” (Corbin 1969, p. 247). The worshiper does not address a God standing outside the world; he helps manifest a God whose manifestation depends on the vessel that receives Him.

The theological engine beneath this claim is the pathetic God: the Hidden Treasure whose divine Names suffer an eternal distress to be known, a longing that only the theophanic act relieves. “The Active Imagination carries out the divine intention, the intention of the ‘Hidden Treasure’ yearning to be known, to appease the distress of His Names. Any purely negative critique of the Imagination would be untenable, for it would tend to negate this revelation of God to Himself and to drive Him back into the solitude of nonknowledge” (Corbin 1969, p. 193). Every prayer, when it succeeds, is simultaneously prayer of man and prayer of God — the reciprocal act that constitutes the Creator-Creature as a bi-unity.

The contrast with petitionary prayer is total. Petition assumes a God who may or may not grant; theophanic prayer assumes a God who becomes through the act. The metaphysical stakes are correspondingly different. Corbin sees in this teaching the rebuke to any monotheism that severs the Creator from the creature and leaves prayer as the creature’s attempt to reach across the void. In Ibn ʿArabī’s cosmology, the void does not exist, because creature and Creator are the two faces of a single theophanic act.

Relationships

Primary sources

corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)