Ibn ‘Arabī

Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn al-‘Arabī (1165–1240), called al-Shaykh al-Akbar (“the Greatest Master”), is the Andalusian-born Sufi theosopher whose corpus — chief among it the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (“Bezels of Wisdom”) and the vast Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (“Meccan Revelations”) — supplies henry-corbin with the technical vocabulary of theophanic metaphysics. Born in Murcia, formed between Seville and North Africa, journeyed east through Egypt and Arabia, and died in Damascus “surrounded by his family, his friends, and his Ṣūfīs” on the 28th of Rabī‘ II, A.H. 688 (Corbin, Alone with the Alone 1969, p. 76), Ibn ‘Arabī stands at the centre of the Andalusia-to-Iran transmission that Corbin spent his life mapping.

Ibn ‘Arabī’s doctrine is theophanic throughout: the manifest world is the unfolding of the divine Names and Attributes, each creature an epiphanic form of a specific Name, the divine Being “the Creator-Creature, that is to say, He in whom are manifested all the forms of the universe, He in whom the infinite diversity of the theophanies successively unfolds” (Ibn ‘Arabī, Futūḥāt II, §11, cited in Corbin 1969). This is the ontological ground of Corbin’s theophanic-imagination and of the doctrine that every manifestation is, as such, an angelophany.

Two of Ibn ‘Arabī’s technical contributions become load-bearing in post-Jungian psychology through Corbin. The first is himma — the creative power of the heart — which Corbin translates as creative-imagination. The second is the doctrine of the “eternal hexeity,” the absolute individuality of each being as a specific theophanic form of a divine Name. The phrase “He who knows himself knows his Lord” — which Ibn ‘Arabī places at the centre of his anthropology — is in Corbin’s reading the Sufi formulation of exactly what Jung will later call the Self.

Ibn ‘Arabī’s parallel with the Shī‘ite tradition was made explicit by his commentator Haydar Āmulī (fourteenth century), “who proclaimed that the true Shī‘ism was Sufism and that reciprocally the true Sufism was Shī‘ism” (Corbin 1969, p. 26). Through this merger — and through Corbin’s editorial recovery of it — Ibn ‘Arabī’s theophanic metaphysics enters the stream that flows into Eranos and into archetypal psychology.

Key concepts

Major works

corbin-alone-with-alone (the text through which the Seba graph touches Ibn ‘Arabī)