Heart as Subtle Organ

Ibn ʿArabī’s qalb — the heart as the subtle organ of theophanic perception — is the center from which the mystic exercises himma-as-creative-imagination and upon which the divine Names concentrate their influx. Corbin places the doctrine in the lineage of a “subtle physiology” shared with Oriental Christianity (the Prayer of the Heart, the charisma of cardiognosis) and with the Indic chakra tradition: “This ‘mystic physiology’ operates with a ‘subtile body’ composed of psycho-spiritual organs… For Sufism the heart is one of the centers of mystic physiology. Here we might also speak of its ‘theandric’ function, since its supreme vision is of the divine Being” (Corbin 1969). The citation of Eliade — “such experiences were not real; they were perfectly real, but not in the sense in which a physical phenomenon is real” — frames the ontological claim: the heart is real, but on the plane of the mundus-imaginalis, not on the plane of cardiology.

The heart is the focus “in which creative spiritual energy, that is, theophanic energy, is concentrated, whereas the Imagination is its organ” (Corbin 1969). The pairing is structural. The heart receives; the Imagination exteriorizes. What the heart knows by himma, the Imagination manifests as subsisting image. The supreme vision of the heart is the direct apparition of the divine Form in a figure corresponding to the mystic’s theophanic capacity — a Temple, a Light, an Angel.

The concept rhymes with Hillman’s thought-of-the-heart and with the longer Western tradition of reason of the heart (Pascal, the contemplative mystics), but Corbin’s distinctive contribution is to locate the heart not as a faculty parallel to reason but as the organ whose object is irreducibly theophanic.

Relationships

• himma-as-creative-imagination
• reason-of-the-heart
• thought-of-the-heart
• aisthesis-as-organ-of-the-heart
• theophanic-imagination

Primary sources

• corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969)