The Seba library treats Kathenotheism in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Corbin, Henry, Campbell, Joseph, Miller, David L.).
Here we have a kind of kathenotheism verified in the context of a mystic experience; the Divine Being is not fragmented, but wholly present in each instance, individualized in each theophany of His Names
Corbin defines kathenotheism as the mystical structure in which the Divine is wholly present and individualized in each theophany of its Names, distinguishing it from both fragmentation and abstraction.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
In connection with the end of the preceding note we recall this category which we propose, here and elsewhere, to call ‘mystic kathenotheism’ and which we should like to add, because it does not seem to be considered there, to the fine analyses provided by Gerda Walther
Corbin formally proposes ‘mystic kathenotheism’ as an original phenomenological category to be added to the typology of mystical experience, noting its absence from existing scholarship.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
the soul is not enjoined to return to God in general, to Al-Lah, who is the All, but to its own Lord, manifested in it, the Lord to whom it replied: Labbayka, Here I am!
Corbin articulates the eschatological singularity underpinning kathenotheism: each soul returns to its particular Lord, not to an undifferentiated divine totality.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
Henotheism was a term invented by Max Müller with reference specifically to Vedic theology, where one god after another is celebrated as supreme.
Campbell clarifies the terminological origins of henotheism/kathenotheism in Müller’s Vedic scholarship, distinguishing it carefully from monolatry and monotheism within comparative religious typology.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
Each of us, as well, has to recognize ‘his’ God, the one to which he [is able to] respond… The Angel is the Face that our God takes for us, and each of us finds his God only when he recognizes that Face.
Miller, drawing on Corbin, frames the kathenotheistic principle in personal-angelological terms: each individual’s God is the particular divine Face disclosed to that person alone.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
A unique Theotēas… It is precisely this confusion that monotheism has committed, a confusion between the Theotēas (Divinity) and the theoi (gods).
Miller, via Corbin, locates the theological error of monotheism in conflating the unity of Divinity with a single supreme being, the same error kathenotheism structurally avoids.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
to recognize God in each form revealing Him (mazhar), to invest each being, each faith, with a theophanic function — that is an essentially personal experience, which cannot be regulated by the norms common to the collectivity.
Corbin describes the mystic’s capacity to encounter God in every theophanic form as an irreducibly personal experience, directly instantiating the kathenotheistic structure of singular divine disclosure.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
to be aware of the duality of the knower and the known is one thing, to affirm and justify their dualism would be another… the fundamentally dialogical situation.
Corbin frames the philosophical monism of Ibn ‘Arabi as a transcendental condition for dialogical mystical union, providing the ontological background against which kathenotheistic individuation operates.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside