divine names
The term ‘Divine Name’ occupies a strikingly varied terrain across the depth-psychology and mystical-philosophical corpus housed in this library. In the Sufi metaphysics of Ibn ʿArabī as interpreted by Henry Corbin, the Divine Name is not a mere linguistic label but an ontological principle: each Name is a theophanic event, a mode by which the hidden Godhead externalizes itself into created individuality, so that the being who bears or is governed by a given Name is simultaneously that Name’s passive realization and active confirmation. This reciprocal constitution of divine lord and human vassal through the Name’s significatio passiva is one of the most penetrating ideas in the corpus. Jung’s engagement with the motif, briefer but pointed, treats the ‘true name’ in the Egyptian Ra-Isis myth as a psychic quantity equivalent to soul-substance and libido — to utter it is to transfer power. John of Damascus approaches the Divine Name from orthodox Trinitarian theology, insisting that names indicate natures and that the Son’s title ‘God’ is not honorary but substantial. Across these positions a central tension obtains: is the Divine Name a vessel of unknowable essence, a relational event between worshiper and worshiped, or a magical-psychic token of power? The stakes — cosmological, psychological, and soteriological — differ with each tradition, making this term a revealing crossroads in comparative depth-hermeneutics.
The lāhūt, the divine Name, creates my being, and reciprocally my being posits it in the same act in which it posits me; that is our common and reciprocal passio, our com-passio
Corbin articulates Ibn ʿArabī’s central thesis that the Divine Name and human being are mutually constitutive in a single act of ontological compassion, making the Name an existential rather than merely linguistic category.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
The ‘true name’ is Ra’s soul and magic power (his libido). What Isis demands is the transference of libido to the mother.
Jung reads the Divine Name in the Ra-Isis myth as a psychic quantity — the god’s libido-soul — whose utterance constitutes a transfer of power, translating an archaic magical formula into depth-psychological currency.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
Each manifest being is the form (sérat) of a ‘lordly name’ (ism rabbani), the name of the particular God who governs him, by whom he acts, to whom he appeals.
Corbin presents the Divine Name as the governing ontological form of every individual being, so that each creature is the visible expression of the divine Name that rules and constitutes it.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
it is because that man is the Name’s action, the executant of its intention and will. In us this action fulfils its significatio passiva: it is the marbūbiya of the Name’s servant
Corbin expounds the doctrine that the human being, as passive recipient of a Divine Name, is the Name’s own self-realization in the created world, a relationship traceable to pre-eternal covenant.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
invested with the divine Name par excellence, al Raḥmān, the Compassionate… the supreme figure of the pleroma, of the figure whose Name encompasses the entire secret of divine Compassion
Corbin identifies the investiture of the Muḥammadic Spirit with the supreme Divine Name al-Raḥmān as the cosmogonic act that unfolds all subsequent theophanic Names, linking Divine Name to demiurgic Sophia.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
the Divine Being is not fragmented, but wholly present in each instance, individualized in each theophany of His Names, and it is invested in each instance with one of these Names that He appears as Lord
Corbin describes a mystical kathenotheism in which the undivided Godhead is fully present in every theophany of each Divine Name, making each Name an integral manifestation rather than a partial attribute.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
inasmuch as He is incomprehensible, He is also unnameable. But inasmuch as He is the cause of all… He receives names drawn from all that is, even from opposites
John of Damascus grounds Divine naming in apophatic theology: God in His essence is strictly unnameable, yet receives names from His causal relations to created effects, including contrary ones.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting
the Breath of the Divine Compassion (Nafas Raḥmānī), which liberates the divine Names still confined in the occultation of their latent existence… suggests a twofold, active and passive dimension in the being of the Godhead
Corbin expounds the cosmogonic function of divine Compassion as the breath that releases latent Divine Names into manifested existence, endowing them with both active and passive ontological aspects.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
the divine Compassion also embraces the God created in the faiths… to embrace, in a total religious sympathy, the theophanies of these divine Names in all faiths
Corbin argues that divine Compassion encompasses every theophany produced under every Divine Name in every faith tradition, universalizing the doctrine of Divine Names across religious difference.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
the name which expresses His nature proves the truth of our confession of the faith. For the name, which indicates any single substance, points out also any other substance of the same kind
John of Damascus argues that the Divine Name ‘God’ applied to Christ is not honorific but substantial, indicating genuine consubstantiality with the Father, and thus that names carry ontological weight.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
On this twofold, active and passive, aspect of the Divine Names, cf. Affifi, Mystical Philosophy, pp. 46 and 53.
Corbin notes the dual active-passive structure of the Divine Names in Ibn ʿArabī’s system, analogous to a cosmogonic Eros, directing the reader to comparative scholarship on this ontological polarity.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
God epiphanizes Himself to each of us in the form of what we love; the form of your love is the form of the faith you profess… Ibn ʿArabī said: ‘To one who understands the allusion, God is a meaningful designation.’
Corbin shows that for Ibn ʿArabī the Divine Name functions as an individualized theophanic designation shaped by each worshiper’s love, so that ‘God’ is not a universal abstraction but a relational event.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
The confession of that name gives salvation, when faith is demanded… You empty language of its meaning, and distort the words of God into a sense they cannot bear.
John of Damascus insists on the salvific and ontologically literal force of Trinitarian Divine Names against those who would reduce ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ to honorary or metaphorical titles.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside
‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come’… it is appropriate that at the outset the Lord should teach those who pray to start with theology
The Philokalia passage treats the hallowing of the Divine Name in the Lord’s Prayer as a theological initiation into the mode of divine existence, linking liturgical invocation to contemplative knowledge.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside