Himma as Creative Imagination

In Ibn ʿArabī, himma is the spiritual-cognitive power of the heart by which the gnostic creates — not ex nihilo, but by causing what already exists in actu in a higher Hadra (Presence) to appear in the sensible world. Corbin: “By concentrating the spiritual energy of himma on the form of a thing existing in one or more of the ‘Presences,’ the mystic obtains perfect control over that thing, and this control preserves the thing in one or another of the ‘Presences’ as long as the concentration of himma lasts” (Corbin 1969, p. 226).

Himma is the operative power of creative imagination — the Imagination Créatrice of Corbin’s title — and Corbin glosses it through its Greek cognate: enthymesis, “the act of meditating, conceiving, imagining, projecting, ardently desiring — in other words, of having (something) present in the thumos, which is vital force, soul, heart, intention, thought, desire” (Corbin 1969, p. 224, quoted in Hillman 1992). The Sufi himma and the Homeric thumos are the same organ named twice: the heart’s chamber where the imaginal becomes actual.

Hillman builds the thought-of-the-heart on this passage. The himma is the antidote to the modern psychological illusions that confuse imaginal with subjective, essential with external. Through himma the figures of the imagination “are actually presented to us as not of our making, as genuinely created, as authentic creatures” (Hillman 1992) — the mundus-imaginalis revealed as a real order of being to which the heart is the only adequate organ.

Relationships

• creative-imagination
• mundus-imaginalis
• thought-of-the-heart
• thumos
• theophanic-imagination

Primary sources

• corbin-alone-with-alone (Corbin 1969, pp. 220–227)
• hillman-thought-heart (Hillman 1992)