Creative Imagination

creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic Imagination. The Active Imagination in the gnostic is likewise a theophanic Imagination; the beings it ‘creates’ subsist with an independent existence sui generis in the intermediate world

Corbin argues that creative imagination is ontologically grounded in the divine theophanic act, such that human Active Imagination participates in cosmic creation rather than producing mere subjective fantasy.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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the Creation is essentially a theophany (tajalli). As such, creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagina-tion is essentially a theophanic Imagination. The Active Imagi-nation in the gnostic is likewise a theophanic Imagination

This passage establishes the foundational Corbinian thesis that Creative Imagination is identical with the divine theophanic power, with human imagination serving as the organ of absolute theophanic imagination.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image, the very type and model of magical action, or of all action as such, but especially of creative action … this Imaginatio must not be confused with fantasy. As Paracelsus already observed, fantasy, unlike Imagination, is an exercise of thought without foundation in nature

Corbin, drawing on Paracelsus, articulates the essential distinction between ontologically grounded Creative Imagination and mere fantasy, establishing the former as the model of all genuine creative action.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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The Imagination as a creative magical potency which, giving birth to the sensible world, produces the Spirit in forms and colors; the world as Magia divina ‘imagined’ by the Godhead … this Imaginatio must not be confused with fantasy

Corbin frames Creative Imagination as a world-generating magical potency — the divine Magia divina — radically distinguished from the illusory productions of mere fantasy.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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It is our Active Imagination (and, it goes without saying, not the ‘fantasy’) that does this imagining, and then again it is not; our Active Imagination is a moment, an instant, of the Divine Imagination that is the universe, which is itself total theophany. Each of our imaginations is an instant among theophanic instants

Corbin articulates the paradox at the heart of Creative Imagination: it is simultaneously the individual’s act and an instantiation of total divine theophany, resolving the apparent contradiction through the coincidentia oppositorum.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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Creative imagination is a very real energy of the body and spirit, passing from one place to another via inspiration; it can sweep through a group like a pulsating musical rhythm. The transmission of imagination cannot be encapsulated in the planned outcomes of linear causes and effects.

McNiff positions creative imagination as a somatic-spiritual energy that circulates contagiously between persons and contexts, exceeding linear causal models and grounding his arts-therapy practice.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

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I take dreaming, not waking, as my paradigm for creative imagination. From the point of view of dreaming perception, an image is a place, an environment in which we find ourselves … In the world of creative imagination we encounter quasi-physical presences

Bosnak proposes dreaming as the epistemological paradigm for creative imagination, arguing that imaginal images are quasi-physical environments with autonomous presences rather than mental representations.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis

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the intermediary character of the Imagination, which places it at once in the sensible and the intelligible, in the senses and in the intellect, in the possible, the necessary and the impossible, so that it is a ‘pillar’ (rukn) of true knowledge, the knowledge that is gnosis (ma’rifa)

Drawing on Ibn ‘Arabi, Corbin establishes imagination’s intermediary ontological position — between sense and intellect, possible and impossible — as constitutive of genuine gnostic knowledge.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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Always open and receptive to new possibilities, imagination is the conductor of creative action, forging fresh links between previously separate entities. Imagination encourages the creative interplay of diverse forces both within the individual psyche and among people in groups.

McNiff, invoking Jean Paul Richter’s notion of imagination as ‘faculty of faculties,’ positions creative imagination as the integrating intelligence that orchestrates diverse psychic and social forces.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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we are in a position to appreciate the noetic validity of the visions of the Active Imagination and its indispensable function, since it is absent from no mystic station

Corbin argues that Active Imagination holds a universal and indispensable noetic function across all levels of mystical experience, anchoring its cognitive legitimacy within Ibn ‘Arabi’s hierarchy of being.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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Coleridge’s idea of the Primary Imagination may be helpful. His conception, you remember, is that Imagination is the faculty by which we nurture reality into being

McGilchrist recuperates Coleridge’s Primary Imagination as the faculty through which reality is co-created, aligning a Romantic epistemology with his neurobiological argument for imagination’s world-constituting role.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Coleridge’s idea of the Primary Imagination may be helpful. His conception, you remember, is that Imagination is the faculty by which we nurture reality into being

McGilchrist recuperates Coleridge’s Primary Imagination as the faculty through which reality is co-created, aligning a Romantic epistemology with his neurobiological argument for imagination’s world-constituting role.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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people feel much happier nowadays talking about creativity than they do talking about the I-word, imagination … creativity is thought to be dealing with possible realities in a way that imagination is not

McGilchrist diagnoses a contemporary cultural resistance to the term ‘imagination’ in favor of the safer ‘creativity,’ arguing that this evasion reflects a diminished ontological confidence in imagination’s world-disclosing power.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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people feel much happier nowadays talking about creativity than they do talking about the I-word, imagination … creativity is thought to be dealing with possible realities in a way that imagination is not

McGilchrist diagnoses a contemporary cultural resistance to the term ‘imagination’ in favor of the safer ‘creativity,’ arguing that this evasion reflects a diminished ontological confidence in imagination’s world-disclosing power.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Imagination’s middle realm is thoroughly immersed in the experience of the world but open to new perspectives, unfettered by fixed ideas, and always longing to create anew … a kinetic and dynamic area corresponding to the ancient Celtic conception of ‘thin places,’ where movements between matter and spirit occur with relative ease.

McNiff develops imagination’s intermediary status through the concept of the ‘middle realm,’ a dynamic threshold zone between matter and spirit comparable to both Celtic sacred geography and athletic peak experience.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagina-tion is essentially a theophanic Imagination … Prayer is a theophany par excellence; as such, it is ‘cr

Corbin extends the theophanic function of creative imagination to the practice of prayer, which itself becomes a creative act that recapitulates cosmic creation.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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it is by means of active imagination that Jung joins together again the Hellenistic, Neoplatonic tradition of image-work and the analytical mode of self-knowledge of Sigmund Freud

Hillman positions active imagination — the clinical form of creative imagination — as the hinge concept joining the Neoplatonic imaginal tradition with Freudian self-inquiry within depth psychology.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting

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Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed … as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries

Hillman situates the mundus imaginalis — Corbin’s domain of creative imagination — as the soul’s tertium position between body and spirit, establishing its centrality to archetypal psychology’s ontology.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting

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Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed … as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries

Hillman situates the mundus imaginalis — Corbin’s domain of creative imagination — as the soul’s tertium position between body and spirit, establishing its centrality to archetypal psychology’s ontology.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting

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Jung was far ahead of his time. His early recognition of the creative, integrative, healing function of play and fantasy anticipated future developments in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

Papadopoulos traces Jung’s recognition of imagination’s creative and integrative healing function as anticipating both later psychoanalytic developments and contemporary neuroscientific affirmations of the image-body relationship.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting

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Jung gave ‘the leadership to the unconscious’ and formulated what he called the ‘transcendent function,’ which integrates conscious and unconscious experience into a third state of adaptation and change

McNiff situates Jung’s active imagination — the clinical operationalization of creative imagination — within the development of the transcendent function as the integrating third term between consciousness and unconscious.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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I do not consider imagination to be a mental faculty only. Here, I follow the Romantics, who took the power of imagination right out of the head and into the cosmos.

Hillman insists that imagination is a cosmic rather than merely psychological capacity, aligning himself with Romantic cosmology and Corbin’s theophanic imagination against purely intrapsychic accounts.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting

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What is psychological genius, the genius of psychology which engenders the sense of soul and generates psychological reality? … why does this engendering of soul, or psychological creativity, depend so upon the human connection?

Hillman raises the question of psychological creativity as soul-generation, gesturing toward the relational and imaginal conditions that make creative psychological work possible.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside

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the power of the heart is a secret force or energy (quwwat khafiya), which perceives divine realities by a pure hierophanic knowledge … the heart of the gnostic is like a mirror in which the microcosmic form of the Divine Being is reflected

Corbin elaborates the cardiac organ of creative imagination in Sufi physiology, where the heart as mirror-organ mediates the theophanic self-disclosure that constitutes creative imaginal perception.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside

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Active Imagination is a method developed by C. G. Jung which allowed him to access and delve into the images of his inner world and of the unconscious in order to more clearly understand their meaning and significance

Tozzi frames active imagination as the primary Jungian method for accessing unconscious images, positioning it as the clinical application through which creative imagination becomes therapeutic practice.

Tozzi, Chiara, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017aside

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