Henry Corbin

French Islamicist, philosopher, and phenomenologist of Iranian Sufism. Professor of Islam and Islamic Philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the University of Tehran, director of the Department of Iranology at the Institut Franco-Iranien, and annual lecturer at the Eranos conferences at Ascona for twenty-nine years between 1949 and 1978. Through Eranos, Corbin became — in james-hillman‘s own account — one of the three immediate fathers of archetypal-psychology-charter, alongside carl-jung and the Renaissance Platonic tradition (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account).

Corbin’s governing contribution is the recovery of the mundus-imaginalis — the imaginal world — as an ontologically real intermediate realm, neither sensory nor purely intelligible, in which theophanies and visionary experience take place. He drew this from the Iranian Sufi tradition of ibn-arabi, suhrawardi, Najm al-Dīn Kubrā, and Shaikh Ahmad Ahsā’ī, and traced its genealogy back through the corpus-hermeticum, Zoroastrian angelology, and the Neoplatonism of plotinus. Corbin’s coinage of imaginal as strictly distinct from imaginary is itself a philosophical act: it names an ontological tertium that post-Cartesian European vocabulary had lost. Harold Bloom records that Corbin “laments our degradation of the Imagination into fantasy” and blames it on “all the normative theological accounts of a creatio ex nihilo” (Bloom, in Corbin 1969, p. xii).

The technical corollaries of Corbin’s recovery are: creative-imagination as the theophanic organ of the heart (the himma of ibn-arabi); tawil as the spiritual hermeneutic that carries the form back to its origin; hurqalya and celestial-earth as the topographical name of the imaginal world in Shaikhī Shī‘ite theosophy; and man-of-light as the luminous subtle body whose phenomenology Najm Kubrā recorded in his Diarium.

Corbin and james-hillman share the word imaginal but diverge on its content — the divergence is documented at corbin-hillman-divergence. Corbin reads the imaginal as theophanic and angelic; Hillman reads it as polytheistic and pathologising. The productive fork is load-bearing for the post-Jungian Lineage.

Henry Corbin

Henry Corbin

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Major works