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