Henry Corbin:
It goes without saying that the form in which each of us receives the master’s thought conforms to his “inner heaven”; that is the very principle of the theophanism of Ibn ‘Arabi, who for that reason can only guide each man individually to what he alone is capable of seeing, and not bring him to any collective pre-established dogma: Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui. The truth of the individual’s vision is proportional to his fidelity to himself, his fidelity to the one man who is able to bear witness to his individual vision and do homage to the guide who leads him to it. This is no nominalism or realism, but a decisive contemplation, far anterior to any such philosophical choice, a distant point to which we must also return if we wish to account for the deformations and rejections which the spirituality of Ibn ‘Arabi has so often incurred, sometimes for diametrically opposed reasons, but always because men have sidestepped the self-knowledge and self-judgment that this spirituality implies.