Creativity of the Heart

The creativity of the heart is the phrase by which Henry Corbin renders into French the Sufi doctrine — developed most fully by Ibn ʿArabī — that the heart (qalb) is the organ of a creative power (himma) by which the spiritual imagination brings into being the object of its contemplation. The heart is not the seat of sentiment here but the instrument of a mode of knowing and making that is neither rational abstraction nor sensible perception.

The doctrine matters to the Seba lineage because it articulates, from within the Sufi tradition, what Jung called active-imagination and what Hillman later called the imaginal ego’s work with the image: the heart, attending to an image with sustained devotion, does not merely perceive it but participates in its coming-to-be, confers on it a mode of being intermediate between the purely subjective and the purely objective — the [[mundus-imaginalis|mundus imaginalis]]. See himma-as-creative-imagination and heart-as-organ-corbin.

Relationships

• himma-as-creative-imagination
• heart-as-organ-corbin
• creative-imagination