---
slug: corbin-active-imagination-4fc893e0
title: "Corbin on Active Imagination"
author: "Henry Corbin"
work: "Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi"
section: ""
year: "1969"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - active-imagination
fragment: |
  That is why man's Active Imagination cannot be a vain fiction, since it is 222 this same theophanic Imagination which, in and by the human being, continues to reveal what it showed itself by first imagining it. This imagination can be termed "illusory" only when it becomes opaque and loses its transparency. But when it is true to the divine reality it reveals, it liberates, provided that we recognize the function with which Ibn ‛Arabī endowed it and which it alone can perform; namely, the function of effecting a coincidentia oppositorum (jam‛ bayna'l-naqīḍayn). This term is an allusion to the words of Abū Sa‛īd al-Kharrāz, a celebrated Ṣūfī master. "Whereby do you know God?" he was asked. And he replied: "By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum."7For the entire universe of worlds is at once He and not-He (huwa lā huwa). The God manifested in forms is at once Himself and other than Himself, for since He is manifested, He is the limited which has no limit, the visible which cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Ḥaḍrat al-Khayāl, the imaginative "Presence" or "Dignity," the Imaginatrix) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (maẓāhir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The 223 "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river.8 The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols (ta'wīl, ta‛bīr), a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (maẓāhir) by making them effect this crossing. An intermediary, a mediatrix: such is the essential function of the Active Imagination.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Corbin's Ibn Arabi will not let you rest on either bank. The Active Imagination, as he reads it, is not a faculty for generating private imagery — it is the site where the universe's own self-disclosure continues through the human being who receives it. That framing matters precisely because it cuts against the most available spiritual use of imagination: the one that says, if I cultivate inner vision carefully enough, the opposites will resolve and I will be done with the tension. But the coincidentia oppositorum is not a resolution. Al-Kharrāz names God by it — not as a final synthesis but as the permanent structure of how anything divine appears at all. The limited that has no limit. The visible that cannot be seen. Hold those phrases and notice they are not paradoxes waiting to be dissolved; they are descriptions of what manifestation actually is when imagination has not gone opaque.
  
  What makes imagination "opaque" in Corbin's sense is precisely the pneumatic ambition — the soul's desire to use vision as the escalator out of creaturely limitation. When imagination loses its transparency, it stops being a bridge and becomes a destination. The ta'wīl, the hermeneutics of crossing, cannot begin there. Crossing requires two banks, and one of them is always the creature that has not yet arrived.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The sentence worth pressing is the one about opacity: imagination becomes "illusory" only when it loses its transparency. Corbin is inverting the standard charge against mystical vision — that it is fantasy, projection, subjective noise — by locating the pathology not in imagination's activity but in its failure to remain a medium. Glass that clouds is not more glass; it is less. When the Active Imagination is fully itself, it does not add a layer between the perceiver and the real; it removes one. What follows from this inversion is vertiginous: the coincidentia oppositorum is not a logical paradox to be resolved but a perceptual event to be undergone — the moment the soul discovers that the limited thing in front of it is simultaneously the unlimited that has no outside. Edinger would call this the ego's encounter with the Self; Corbin would say that framing is still too interior, still too psychological, because for Ibn Arabi the crossing happens between worlds, not merely within a psyche. The bridge does not span two regions of mind — it spans creature and Creator, and you are always already standing on it.
parent_id: Corbin_1969_Creative_Imagination_in_the_Sufism__par0051
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Corbin writes:

> That is why man's Active Imagination cannot be a vain fiction, since it is 222 this same theophanic Imagination which, in and by the human being, continues to reveal what it showed itself by first imagining it. This imagination can be termed "illusory" only when it becomes opaque and loses its transparency. But when it is true to the divine reality it reveals, it liberates, provided that we recognize the function with which Ibn ‛Arabī endowed it and which it alone can perform; namely, the function of effecting a coincidentia oppositorum (jam‛ bayna'l-naqīḍayn). This term is an allusion to the words of Abū Sa‛īd al-Kharrāz, a celebrated Ṣūfī master. "Whereby do you know God?" he was asked. And he replied: "By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum."7For the entire universe of worlds is at once He and not-He (huwa lā huwa). The God manifested in forms is at once Himself and other than Himself, for since He is manifested, He is the limited which has no limit, the visible which cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Ḥaḍrat al-Khayāl, the imaginative "Presence" or "Dignity," the Imaginatrix) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (maẓāhir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The 223 "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river.8 The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols (ta'wīl, ta‛bīr), a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (maẓāhir) by making them effect this crossing. An intermediary, a mediatrix: such is the essential function of the Active Imagination.

— Henry Corbin

Corbin's Ibn Arabi will not let you rest on either bank. The Active Imagination, as he reads it, is not a faculty for generating private imagery — it is the site where the universe's own self-disclosure continues through the human being who receives it. That framing matters precisely because it cuts against the most available spiritual use of imagination: the one that says, if I cultivate inner vision carefully enough, the opposites will resolve and I will be done with the tension. But the coincidentia oppositorum is not a resolution. Al-Kharrāz names God by it — not as a final synthesis but as the permanent structure of how anything divine appears at all. The limited that has no limit. The visible that cannot be seen. Hold those phrases and notice they are not paradoxes waiting to be dissolved; they are descriptions of what manifestation actually is when imagination has not gone opaque.

What makes imagination "opaque" in Corbin's sense is precisely the pneumatic ambition — the soul's desire to use vision as the escalator out of creaturely limitation. When imagination loses its transparency, it stops being a bridge and becomes a destination. The ta'wīl, the hermeneutics of crossing, cannot begin there. Crossing requires two banks, and one of them is always the creature that has not yet arrived.

---

Henry Corbin · *Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi* · 1969