Ens Supremum

The Seba library treats Ens Supremum in 4 passages, across 3 authors (including Miller, David L., Corbin, Henry, Heidegger, Martin).

In the library 4 passages

By confusing Being with a supreme being (ens supremum), that is, by making of Esse an ens supremum, monotheism perishes in its triumph. It elevates an idol just at the point where it denounces such in a polytheism it poorly understands.

Miller, transmitting Corbin, argues that the identification of Esse with ens supremum is the defining metaphysical catastrophe of monotheism, constituting idolatry precisely where idolatry is most condemned.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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this reciprocity becomes incomprehensible if we isolate the ens creatum outside the Ens increatum.

Corbin establishes the ontological polarity between ens creatum and Ens increatum as the structural condition for theophanic reciprocity, showing that isolating the created from the uncreated being dissolves the possibility of prayer and divine-human encounter.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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the entity is the ens perfectissimum. ‘. . . substantia quae nullaplane re indigeat, unica tantum potest intelligi, nempe Deus.’ Here ‘God’ is a purely ontological term, if it is to be understood as ens perfectissimum.

Heidegger demonstrates how scholastic-Cartesian ontology identifies God with the ens perfectissimum — a supreme being requiring no other entity — thereby instantiating the very confusion between Being and a being that Corbin and Miller diagnose as catastrophic.

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 1962supporting

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The New Polytheism. Copyright C 1974, 1981 David L. Miller. ‘Prefatory Letter’ by Henry Corbin and ‘Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic’ by James Hillman

The editorial apparatus of Miller’s text records the collaborative intellectual triangle — Miller, Corbin, and Hillman — within which the critique of ens supremum was developed and disseminated.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside

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