Beauty is the Supreme Theophany

"As for the theophanic function invested in men, it is the secret of the dialectic of love. In the nature of mystic love this dialectic discovers the encounter (con-spiration) between sensory, physical love and spiritual love. Beauty is the supreme theophany, but it reveals itself as such only to a love which it transfigures. Mystic love is the religion of Beauty, because Beauty is the secret of theophanies and because as such it is the power which transfigures. Mystic love is as far from negative asceticism as it is from the estheticism or libertinism of the possessive instinct. But the organ of theophanic perception, that is, of the perception through which the encounter between Heaven and Earth in the mid-zone, the 'alam-al-mithal takes place, is the Active Imagination. It is the active Imagination which invests the earthly Beloved with his "theophanic function"; it is essentially a theophanic Imagination and, as such, a creative Imagination, because creation itself is theophany and theophanic Imagination. From this idea of Creation as theophany … arises the idea of a sophiology, the figure of Sophia aeterna … as she appears in the theosophy of Ibn 'Arabi."

"In place of the negative connection that we habitually understand between Christian asceticism and the Greek consciousness of beauty, it is necessary to speak here of a valorization that confers a prophetic function on beauty."

Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi, 98 and En Islam Iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, Tome III: Les fideles d'amour - Shi'isme et sufisme. Paris: Gallimard, Bib. des Idees, 1972, 16.

Sculpture of Sophia, Ephesus Library, Anatolia (Turkey) 135 C.E. from wikimedia.