This paradoxical understanding in turn produces a very distinct concept of the image: the image is real. The religious symbol is not a symbol of something else—it is not a metaphor. It has no “intentional” object in the ordinary sense of that term. It is what it is. But it is also what it is not. It is true, and it is not true. But it is very real as an expression of the underlying or overlying Godhead or Infinite. To put the matter in the terms of Henry Corbin (with whom Wolfson sometimes thinks), this is a “conception of the image as a theophanic apparition that challenges the
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