--- slug: corbin-imaginal-afad264e title: "Corbin on Imaginal" author: "Henry Corbin" work: "Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi" section: "" year: "1969" tradition: post-jungian themes: - imaginal fragment: | In short, there has ceased to be an intermediate level between empirically verifiable reality and unreality pure and simple. All indemon-strable, invisible, inaudible things are classified as creations of the Imagination, that is, of the faculty whose function it is to secrete the imaginary, the unreal. In this context of agnosticism the Godhead and all forms of divinity are said to be creations of the imagination, hence unreal. What can prayer to such a God-head be but a despairing delusion? I believe that we can measure at a glance the enormity of the gulf between this purely negative notion of the Imagination and the notion of which we shall be speaking if, anticipating our analyses of the ensuing texts, we answer as though taking up the challenge: well, precisely be-cause this Godhead is a Godhead, it is real and exists, and that is why the Prayer addressed to it has meaning. lead_in: "" reflection: | Corbin is diagnosing a wound in Western epistemology before he is praising Sufi imagination. The wound is specific: once you accept that only the empirically verifiable is real, you have not cleared the air of metaphysical delusion — you have simply reclassified an entire region of human experience as delusion. The imaginal becomes the imaginary, and prayer becomes what a man does when he has deceived himself about the nature of things. What Corbin notices, and what is easy to miss, is that this epistemological move does not liberate the person who makes it. It strands them. The intermediate realm — what the Sufis call the *barzakh*, what Corbin translates as the *mundus imaginalis* — is precisely the site where soul is neither dissolved into pure spirit nor collapsed into biology. Remove it, and you are left with a choice between two forms of impoverishment: transcendence without grounding, or matter without depth. The secular West chose the second and called it maturity. The challenge Corbin takes up — that a Godhead born of imagination is *therefore* real, not therefore fraudulent — is not mystical special pleading. It is a claim about the ontological status of image itself. The soul makes things that are not sensory and not nothing. That the culture has no category for such things does not make them evaporate. It makes them symptoms. reflection_v0_3: | The turn happens at the word "precisely" — and what pivots with it is the entire modern valuation of imagination. Corbin has just described the agnostic reduction: imagination as the faculty that generates fictions, the unreal, the merely subjective. He has let that case breathe. Then he inverts it in a single clause. Not by arguing that the Godhead survives imagination's reach, but by claiming that to exist *in* imagination — in the sense the Sufis mean — is to exist in the only register where such realities can be real at all. This is the mundus imaginalis, the intermediate world whose disappearance from Western metaphysics Corbin reads as the root wound of modernity. What makes the prayer meaningful, on this account, is not that its object exists "out there," independently verifiable — but that the imaginal is itself an ontological domain, not a lesser cousin of matter. The soul that prays is not addressing a fiction; it is meeting a reality whose mode of being simply cannot be measured by the instruments built for a different world. parent_id: Corbin_1969_Alone_with_the_Alone__par0055 source: oracle-v3-retrieve generated: 2026-04-17 regenerated: 2026-04-18 prompt_version: v2.7 status: draft --- Corbin writes: > In short, there has ceased to be an intermediate level between empirically verifiable reality and unreality pure and simple. All indemon-strable, invisible, inaudible things are classified as creations of the Imagination, that is, of the faculty whose function it is to secrete the imaginary, the unreal. In this context of agnosticism the Godhead and all forms of divinity are said to be creations of the imagination, hence unreal. What can prayer to such a God-head be but a despairing delusion? I believe that we can measure at a glance the enormity of the gulf between this purely negative notion of the Imagination and the notion of which we shall be speaking if, anticipating our analyses of the ensuing texts, we answer as though taking up the challenge: well, precisely be-cause this Godhead is a Godhead, it is real and exists, and that is why the Prayer addressed to it has meaning. — Henry Corbin Corbin is diagnosing a wound in Western epistemology before he is praising Sufi imagination. The wound is specific: once you accept that only the empirically verifiable is real, you have not cleared the air of metaphysical delusion — you have simply reclassified an entire region of human experience as delusion. The imaginal becomes the imaginary, and prayer becomes what a man does when he has deceived himself about the nature of things. What Corbin notices, and what is easy to miss, is that this epistemological move does not liberate the person who makes it. It strands them. The intermediate realm — what the Sufis call the *barzakh*, what Corbin translates as the *mundus imaginalis* — is precisely the site where soul is neither dissolved into pure spirit nor collapsed into biology. Remove it, and you are left with a choice between two forms of impoverishment: transcendence without grounding, or matter without depth. The secular West chose the second and called it maturity. The challenge Corbin takes up — that a Godhead born of imagination is *therefore* real, not therefore fraudulent — is not mystical special pleading. It is a claim about the ontological status of image itself. The soul makes things that are not sensory and not nothing. That the culture has no category for such things does not make them evaporate. It makes them symptoms. --- Henry Corbin · *Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi* · 1969