The Dialectic of Love
Henry Corbin Excerpts
From Alone With the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi.
[145] Of all the masters of Sufism it is Ibn ‘Arabi (except perhaps for Ruzbehan of Shiraz) who carried
furthest the analysis of the [146] phenomena of love; in so doing he employed a very personal dialectic,
eminently suited to revealing the source of the total devotion professed by the Fedeli d’amore. From the
context thus far outlined the question rises: What does it mean to love God? And how is it possible to love
God? Ordinarily the religious language employs such formulas as though they were self-explanatory. But
the matter is not so simple. Ibn ‘Arabi carries us forward by means of two observations: “I call God to
witness that if we confined ourselves to the rational arguments of philosophy, which, though they enable us
to know the divine Essence, do so in a negative way, no creature would ever have experienced the love of
God. . . . Positive religion teaches us that He is this and that; the exoteric appearances of these attributes are
absurd to philosophical reason, and yet it is because of those positive attributes that we love Him.” But then
it becomes incumbent upon religion to say that nothing resembles Him.17 On the other hand God can be
known to us only in what we experience of Him, so that “We can typify Him and take Him as an object of
our contemplation, not only in our innermost hearts but also before our eyes and in our imagination, as
though we saw Him, or better still, so that we really see Him. . . . It is He who in every beloved being is
manifested to the gaze of each lover . . . and none other than He is adored, for it is impossible to adore a
being without conceiving the Godhead in that being. . . . So it is with love: a being does not truly love
anyone other than his Creator.”18 Ibn ‘Arabi’s whole life provides a pledge of personal experience on all
these points.19
But if the one Beloved is never visible except in a Form which is His epiphany (mazhar), if He is
indeed unique in each instance for each unique individual, it is because this Form, though revealing Him,
also conceals Him, because He always transcends it. How then can He show Himself in that Form if it is
true that the Form hides Him and yet that without that Form he would be unable to disclose Himself? What
relation is there between the real Beloved and the concrete form that makes Him visible? [147] Between the
two there must necessarily be a con-spiration (Persian ham-dami) a sym-pathy. And further, what sort of
love is really addressed to this form that manifests Him? When is it true love, and when does it err by
becoming engrossed in the Form? And finally, who is the real Beloved, but also who in reality is the
Lover?
The entire work of Ibn ‘Arabi is an experiential answer to these questions. In specifying their
content, we may be guided by what we have meditated upon thus far, which may be summed up as follows.
What we call “divine love” (hibb iliihi) has two aspects: in one aspect it is the Desire (shawq) of God for
the creature, the passionate Sigh (hanin) of God in His essence (the “hidden Treasure”), yearning to
manifest Himself in beings, in order to be revealed for them and by them; in its other aspect, divine love is
the Desire of the creature for God, or in actual fact the Sigh of God Himself epiphanized in beings and
yearning to return to himself. In reality the being who sighs with nostalgia (al-mushtaq) is at the same time
the being toward whom His nostalgia sighs (al-mushtaq ilayhi), although in his concrete determination (ta
‘ayyun) he differs from Him. They are not two heterogeneous beings, but one being encountering himself
(at once one and two, a bi-unity, something that people tend to forget). One and the same ardent Desire is
the cause of the Manifestation (zuhur) and the cause of the Return (‘awda). If God’s Desire is more intense,
it is because God experiences this desire in its two aspects, whereas to be a creature is to experience it only
in its second aspect. For it is God who, determined in the form of the fedele, sighs toward Himself, since
He is the Source and Origin which yearned precisely for this determinate Form, for His own
anthropomorphosis. Thus love exists eternally as an exchange, a permutation between God and creature:
ardent Desire, compassionate nostalgia, and encounter exist eternally, and delimit the area of being. Each
of us understands this according to his own degree of being and his spiritual aptitude. A few men, such as
Ibn ‘Arabi, have [148] experienced this encounter visually for prolonged periods of time. For all those who
have experienced it and understood it, it is a yearning for the vision of divine Beauty which appears at
every moment in a new form (the “divine days” of which the “interpreter of ardent desires” speaks), and it
is the infinite desire to which Abo Yazid Bastami alludes: “I have drunk the potion of love, goblet after
goblet. It is not exhausted and my thirst has not been slaked.”20
This relationship inherent in divine love is exemplified by the relationship, analyzed above, of
every human being with his own Lord. With this as our starting point we shall be able, by following Ibn
‘Arabi’s own developments and the questions he puts to himself to advance our design, which is to show
how, since unio mystica is in itself unio sympathetica (that is to say, a sharing in that com-passion which
joins the being of the lord and the being of his vassal of love into a unity which an essential passion splits
into two terms, each yearning for the other, the Creator and the creature in their bipolarity) the fidelity in
love which nourishes and guarantees this “suzerainty” by attaching the two terms that are essential to it,
assumes for us the aspect of the devotio sympathetica. What do we learn from the dialectic of love
underlying the situation we have outlined? And what mode of being fulfils and exemplifies this
“devotion”?
Since in both its aspects, whether consciously or not, the love whose mover is Beauty has God
alone as its object—since “God is a beautiful Being who loves beauty”21 and who in revealing Himself to
Himself has produced the world as a mirror in which to contemplate His own Image, His own beauty—and
since if it is written that “God will love you” (Koran III:29), it is because He loves Himself in you22—all
love would seem eo ipso to warrant the epithet “divine.” Virtually, no doubt; but to suppose this to be the
actual reality would be to suppose the existence of an ideal humanity, made up entirely of Fedeli d’amore,
that is, of Sufis.
Thus it is fitting to distinguish with Ibn ‘Arabi three kinds [149] of love which are three modes of
being: (a) a divine love (hibb ilahi) , which is on the one hand the love of the Creator for the creature in
which He creates Himself, that is, which arouses the form in which He reveals Himself, and on the other
hand the love of that creature for his Creator, which is nothing other than the desire of the revealed God
within the creature, yearning to return to Himself, after having yearned, as the hidden God, to be known in
the creature; this is the eternal dialogue of the divine-human syzygia; (b) a spiritual love (hibb ruhani),
situated in the creature who is always in quest of the being whose Image he discovers in himself, or of
which he discovers that he himself is the Image; it is, in the creature, a love which has no other concern,
aim, or will than to be adequate to the Beloved, to comply with what He wishes to do with and by His
fedele; (c) the natural love (hibb tabi’i) which desires to possess and seeks the satisfaction of its own
desires without concern for the satisfaction of the Beloved. “And that, alas,” says Ibn ‘Arabi “is how most
people understand love today.”23
This classification contains its own motivation. Love considered in relation to the creature differs
from love considered in relation to God, to the Being who is at once subject and object, Lover and Beloved.
Considered in relation to us, according to the demands of our essence, which is at once spiritual and
corporeal, love is twofold: spiritual and natural or physical, which are so different as to pursue opposing
ends. The first problem is to find a way to reconcile spiritual love with physical love; only when the two
aspects of creatural love have been reconciled can we ask whether a conjunction is possible between it and
the divine love which is love in its true essence; only then can we ask whether it is possible for us to love
God with this twofold, spiritual and physical love, since God Himself is never visible except in a concrete
form (imagined or sensible) that epiphanizes Him. A sympathy must be restored between the spiritual and
the physical if love is to flower in the creature as a theopathy corresponding to the divine yearning to be
known, in [150] other words, if the bi-unity, the unio sympathetica, of the lord of love (rabb) and of his
vassal of love (marbub) is to be realized.24
The first step will have been taken when we are able to answer the question: Must we suppose that
we love Him for Himself or for ourselves? or for Him and ourselves at once, or neither for Him nor for
ourselves? For this question will prove to be appropriate and answerable only on condition that we ask this
second question: through whom do we love Him? In other words, who is the real subject of Love? But this
second question is tantamount to inquiring into the origin and end of love, a question which, says Ibn
‘Arabi, was never asked him except by a woman of subtle mind, who was a great mystic, but whose name
he passes over in silence.25
The answer to the first question will automatically postulate a reconciliation of the two, spiritual
and natural, aspects of love. Ibn ‘Arabi observes that the most perfect of mystic lovers are those who love
God simultaneously for himself and for themselves, because this capacity reveals in them the unification of
their twofold nature (a resolution of the torn “conscience malheureuse”).26 He who has made himself
capable of such love is able to do so because he combines mystic knowledge (ma ‘rifa) with vision
(shuhud). But in mystic experience all vision is a mode of knowledge presupposing a Form of the object
experienced; this Form, which is itself “composite,” corresponds to the lover’s being. For since the soul is
dual in structure, its love for God or for any other being proceeds from its physical nature in so far as it is
inspired by the hope of finding itself (or by the fear of losing itself); a love whose only aim is to satisfy the
Beloved, proceeds from the spiritual nature of the soul.
In order to “synchronize” this dual nature by joining the two forms of love springing from the two
facets of the soul, the divine Beloved, who defines Himself as admitting of no division, as desiring that the
soul should love no one but Him and should love Him for Himself, manifests Himself to the soul, that is,
[151] produces Himself for the soul in the physical form of a theophany.27 And He grants him a sign
(‘alama) , which makes it so plain that it is He who is manifesting Himself to the soul in this Form, that the
soul cannot possibly deny it. Of course it is the kind of sign that is identified not by the senses but by
another organ; it is an immediate, a priori evidence (‘i’lm daruri). The soul apprehends the theophany; it
recognizes that the Beloved is this physical Form (sensible or mental, identified by the Active
Imagination); at once in its spiritual and its physical nature, it is drawn toward that Form.28 It “sees” its
Lord; it is aware of seeing Him in this ecstatic vision that has been bestowed upon its inner faculties, and it
can only love Him for Himself: this love is “physical” since it apprehends and contemplates a con- crete
Image, and at the same time a spiritual love, for it is not concerned with taking possession of the Image, but
is itself wholly invested with that Image. This conjunction of spiritual love and the natural love it
transmutes, is the very definition of mystic love.
Nevertheless this magnificent impulse might prove to exceed the mystic’s capacity and therefore
come to nothing if the mystic did not at the same time know who the real Subject is that moves this love
within him, that is, who the real lover is, a knowledge which anticipates and resolves the question: who is
the real Beloved? The answer is quite precise: the soul gains awareness that it “sees” God not through
itself, but through Him; it loves only through Him, not by itself; it contemplates God in all other beings not
through its own gaze, but because it is the same gaze by which God sees them; the soul’s “Lord of love” is
the image acting within it, the organ of its perception, whereas the soul itself is His organ of perception.
The soul’s vision of its divine Lord is the vision which He has of the soul. Its sympathy with being is the
theopathy it experiences in itself, the passion which this Presence arouses in the soul and which to the soul
is its own proof. Accordingly it is not by itself or even in conjunction with Him that the soul contemplates
and loves, but through Him [152] alone. Thus since the soul is His organ, the organ of Him who demands a
total devotion in sym-pathy with Him, how could the soul love anyone but Him? It is He who seeks and is
sought for, He is the Lover and He is the Beloved.29
To state this identity is simply to recall the nostalgia of the “Hidden Treasure” yearning to be
known, the nostalgia which is the secret of the Creation.30 It is with Himself that the Divine Being
sympathized in sympathizing with the sadness of His Names, with the sadness of our own latent existences
yearning to manifest those Names, and that is the first source of His love for us who are “His own beings.”
Conversely, the love that these beings experience for Him without even knowing it, is nothing other than a
vibration of His being in their being, set in motion by His love when he freed them from their expectancy
by putting their being into the imperative (KuN, Esto!). It is precisely therein that Ibn ‘Arabi discerns the
cause of the emotion we experience when we listen to music, for there is sympathy between on the one
hand the response of our eternal virtuality to the Imperative that has awakened it to being and on the other
hand our presentiment of the virtualities which the musical incantation seems to evoke and release.31 Still,
we must never forget that if He is the Lover and the Beloved, it is because it is in His essence to be both
one and the other, just as He is the Worshiped, the Worshiper, and the eternal dialogue between the two.
But, as we have already pointed out, we should lose sight of this essential bi-unity by reducing the doctrine
of Ibn ‘Arabi purely and simply to what is known to us elsewhere as philosophical monism, or by
confusing it with an existential monism of mystic experience.32
Indeed, our usual philosophical categories as well as our official theological categories fail us in
the presence of a theosophy such as that of Ibn ‘Arabi and his disciples. It is no more possible to perceive
the specific dialogue that this theosophy establishes if we persist in reducing it to what is commonly called
“monism” in the West, than to understand the consocia-[153]tion of the physical and the spiritual on the
theophanic plane or, a fortiori, to understand how Maryam can be a substitute for the mystic, if we think in
terms of Incarnation ( in the sense which official Christian dogma has given to this word). There is an
essential structural connection between the theological docetism of Islamic esoterism (in its Christology
transposed into prophetology and Immology) and the theophanic idea professed by our mystics. The
subjectum Incarnationis, if it is necessary to speak of it, will never be found on the plane of materially
realized existences, of events accomplished and known once and for all, but always in the transcendent
dimension announced by theophanies—because “true reality” is the internal event produced in each soul by
the Apparition that impresses it. In this domain we require a faculty of perception and mediation very
different from the demonstrative or historical reasoning which judges the sensible and finite data relating to
rationally defined dogmas or to the irreversible events of material history. It is not in the realm of an
already given and fixated reality that this mediating faculty brings about the theophanic union of the divine
and the human and the reconciliation between the spiritual and the physical which, as we have seen, is the
condition of perfect, that is to say, mystic love. This mediating faculty is the active or creative Imagination
which Ibn ‘Arabi designates as “Presence” or “imaginative Dignity” (Hadrat khayaliya) . Perhaps we are in
need of a neologism to safeguard the meaning of this “Dignity” and to avoid confusion with the current
acceptance of the word “imaginative. “ We might speak of an Imaginatrix.33
It is through this Imaginatrix that the dialectic of love attains its culminating phase when, after
finding out who the real Lover is, it opens the way to the transcendent dimension in order to discover who
the real Beloved is.
Here the spiritual aspect, the Spirit, must manifest itself in a physical form; this Form may be a
sensible figure which the Imagination transmutes into a theophanic figure, or else it may [154] be an
“apparitional figure” perceptible to the unaided imagination without the mediation of a sensible form in the
instant of contemplation. In this theophanic figure it is the real Beloved who manifests Himself; He can do
so only in the figure which at once reveals Him and veils Him, but without which He would be deprived of
all concrete existence, of all relatedness. Thus the real and invisible Beloved has to be typified
(mumaththal) in a concrete figure by the Active Imagination; through it He attains a mode of existence
perceptible to the vision of that privileged faculty.34 It is in this sense that the concrete figure toward
which the volitional act of love is directed is called the Beloved; but it is also called the Beloved in the
sense that what is really loved in the figure is something which it discloses as being the Image of the
Beloved, but which is not a datum existing in actu, despite the illusion to the contrary held by simple
natural love which, since it is interested only in itself, strives only for the possession of what it looks upon a
given object.
But of course this nonexistent (ma‘dam) is not a mere nothing; it is hardly conceivable that a
nothing should exert an influence and certainly not that it should be invested with a theophanic function. It
is something not yet existent in the concrete form of the Beloved, something which has not yet happened,
but which the lover desires with all his strength to make exist or cause to happen. It is here precisely that
originates the highest function of human love, that function which brings about the coalescence of the two
forms of love that have been designated historically as chivalric love and mystic love. For love tends to
transfigure the beloved earthly figure by setting it against a light which brings out all its superhuman
virtualities, to the point of investing it with the theophanic function of the Angel (so it was with the
feminine Figures celebrated by Dante’s companions, the Fedeli d’amore; and so it was with her who
appeared to Ibn ‘Arabi in Mecca as the figure of the divine Sophia). Ibn ‘Arabi’s analysis goes ever deeper:
whether the Lover tends to contemplate the beloved being, to unite with [155] that being, or to perpetuate
its presence, his love strives always to bring into existence something which does not yet exist in the
Beloved.36 The real object is not what he has obtained, but duration, persistence or perpetuation (dawam
wa’stimrar) ; duration, persistence, perpetuation, however, are something nonexistent, they are a not yet;
they have not yet entered into being, into the category of the real. The object of loving adhesion in the
moment when the lover has achieved union (hal al-wasla) is again something nonexistent, namely, the
con-tinuation and perpetuation of that union. As the Koran verse—“He will love them and they will love
him” (v:59)—suggests to our shaikh, the word love never ceases to anticipate something that is still absent,
something deprived of being.38 Just as we speak of a Futurum resurrectionis, we must speak of a Futurum
amoris.
Thus the experience of mystic love, which is a conjunction (sympnoia, “conspiration” ) of the
spiritual and the physical, implies that imaginative Energy, or creative Imagination, the theory of which
plays so large a part in the visionary experience of I bn ‘Arabi. As organ of the transmutation of the
sensible, it has the power to manifest the “angelic function of beings.” In so doing, it effects a twofold
movement; on the one hand it causes invisible spiritual realities to descend to the reality of the Image (but
no further, for to our authors the Imaginalia are the maximum of “material” condensation compatible with
spiritual realities) ; and it also effects the only possible form of assimilation (tashbih) between Creator and
creature, so resolving the questions we asked at the outset: What does it mean to love God? How can one
love a God one does not see? For it is this Image that enables the mystic to comply with the Prophet’s
precept: “Love God as if you saw Him.” And on the other hand the image itself, though distinct from the
sensible world, is not alien to it, for the Imagination transmutes the sensible world by raising it up to its
own subtile and incorruptible modality. This twofold movement, which is at the same time a descent of the
[156] divine and an assumption of the sensible, corresponds to what Ibn ‘Arabi elsewhere designates
etymologically as a “condescendence” (munazala) . The Imagination is the scene of the encounter whereby
the supersensory-divine and the sensible “descend” at one and the same “abode.”37
Thus it is the Active Imagination which places the invisible and the visible, the spiritual and the
physical in sym-pathy. It is the Active Imagination that makes it possible, as our shaikh declares, “to love a
being of the sensible world, in whom we love the manifestation of the divine Beloved; for we spiritualize
this being by raising him (from sensible form) to incorruptible Image (that is, to the rank of a theophanic
Image), by investing him with a beauty higher than that which was his, and clothing him in a presence such
that he can neither lose it nor cast it off, so that the mystic never ceases to be united with the Beloved.”38
For this reason the degree of spiritual experience depends on the degree of reality invested in the Image,
and conversely. It is in this Image that the mystic contemplates in actu the full perfection of the Beloved
and that he experiences His presence within himself. Without this “imaginative union” (ittisal fi’l-khayal),
without the “transfiguration” it brings about, physical union is a mere delusion, a cause or symptom of
mental derangement.39 Pure “imaginative contemplation” (mushuhadat khayaliya), on the other hand, can
attain such intensity that any material and sensible presence would only draw it down. Such was the famous
case of Majnun, and this, says Ibn ‘Arabi, is the most subtile phenomenon of love.40
Indeed this phenomenon presupposes that the fedele d’amore has understood that the Image is not
outside him, but within his being; better still, it is his very being, the form of the divine Name which he
himself brought with him in coming into being. And the circle of the dialectic of love closes on this
fundamental experience: “Love is closer to the lover than is his jugular vein.”41 So excessive is this
nearness that it acts at first as a veil. That is why the inexperienced novice, though dominated by the [157]
Image which invests his whole inner being, goes looking for it outside of himself, in a desperate search
from form to form of the sensible world, until he returns to the sanctuary of his soul and perceives that the
real Beloved is deep within his own being; and, from that moment on, he seeks the Beloved only through
the Beloved. In this Quest as in this Return, the active subject within him remains the inner image of unreal
Beauty, a vestige of the transcendent or celestial counterpart of his being: it is that image which causes him
to recognize every concrete figure that resembles it, because even before he is aware of it, the Image has
invested him with its theophanic function. That is why, as Ibn ‘Arabi puts it, it is equally true to say that the
Beloved is in him and not in him; that his heart is in the beloved being or that the beloved being is in his
heart.42 This reversibility merely expresses the experience of the “secret of divine suzerainty” (sirr alrububiya), that secret which is “thou,”43 so that the divine service of the fedele d’amore consists in his
devotio sympathetica, which is to say, the “substantiation” by his whole being of the theophanic investiture
which he confers upon a visible form. That is why the quality and the fidelity of the mystic lover are
contingent on his “imaginative power,” for as Ibn ‘Arabi says: “The divine Lover is spirit without body; the
purely physical lover is body without spirit; the spiritual lover (that is, the mystic lover) possesses spirit and
body.”44