Creative Imagination (himma)

Himma — the creative power of the heart — is ibn-arabi‘s name for the organ by which the mundus-imaginalis is perceived and, reciprocally, by which the divine comes to visibility. henry-corbin translates the technical Arabic as creative imagination and places it at the centre of Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī. The concept is distinct from the psychological faculty of fantasy as Western philosophy has come to understand it: himma is an ontological organ, not a subjective power, and its operation is theophanic rather than representational.

Corbin writes: “any purely negative critique of the Imagination would be untenable, for it would tend to negate this revelation of God to Himself and to drive Him back into the solitude of nonknowledge, to refuse His Names the assistance they have expected of us since pre-eternity” (Corbin 1969, p. 193). The imagination is thus not a private faculty of the psychological subject but the medium through which the divine Names unfold themselves into manifestation. The heart is “the focus in which creative spiritual energy, that is, theophanic energy, is concentrated, whereas the Imagination is its organ” (Corbin 1969, Alone with the Alone).

Himma is the Islamic analogue of the alchemical imaginatio-vera (“true imagination,” distinguished from imaginatio fantastica) and of active-imagination in the Jungian technique. It is not the same as either. Corbin’s imagination is always theophanic — its proper phenomena are the Face of God, the Angel, the Perfect Man — while Jungian active imagination is typically egoically facilitated and therapeutically framed. The Corbinian heart sees the Angel; the Jungian ego converses with the figures of the unconscious. Both presuppose the real autonomy of the imaginal; they differ on the teleology of the encounter.

This is the load Corbin carries for post-Jungian psychology: he supplies the metaphysical warrant for james-hillman‘s soul-making. Without himma or its equivalent, the imaginal collapses into either private fantasy or abstract intellectual object.

Relationships

Primary sources

corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)