Hidden treasure Quote by Henry Corbin

““To begin with, let us recall the /J,adltlt which all our mysticr of Islam untiringly meditate, the �adltlt in which the Godhead reveals the secret of His passion ( his pathos): "I was a hidden Treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them." With still greater fidelity to Ibn rArabi's thought, let us translate: "in order to become in them the object of my knowledge." This divine passion, this desire to reveal Himself and to know Himself in beings through being known by them, is the motive underlying an entire divine dramaturgy, an eternal cosmogony. This cosmogony is neither an Emanation in the Neoplatonic sense of the word nor, still less, a creatio ex niltilo. It is rather a succession of manifestations of being, brought about by an increasing light, within the originally undifferentiated God ; it is a succession of tajalliylit, of theophanies.15 This is the context of one of the most charac- teristic themes of Ibn rArabi's thinking, the doctrine of divine Names ( which has sometimes been termed, rather inexactly, his "mythology" of the divine Names).””

— Henry Corbin