Corbin–Hillman Divergence on the Imaginal

james-hillman is explicit that he inherits the term imaginal from henry-corbin and that his debt is permanent: “my work is, and will forever remain, profoundly indebted” to Corbin (Hillman, Mythic Figures, Eranos 1974). Yet at the same lecture Hillman marks the divergence. For Corbin the imaginal is hieratic and theophanic — its proper figures are the Angel, the Face of God, the Perfect Man, the Man of Light; its register is sacred and its phenomena are forms of revelation. For Hillman the imaginal is polytheistic and pathologising — its proper figures are the gods in their fullness, which includes the monstrous, the absurd, and the macabre, and its register is the psychopathology of everyday life. The axis of disagreement is whether the imaginal’s content is properly sacred (Corbin) or properly plural and pathologised (Hillman).

Corbin regarded precisely the pathologised imaginal as a symptom of secularization — a “secularization of the imaginal” in which “the fantastic, the horrible, the monstrous, the macabre, the miserable, and the absurd” displace the hieratic theophany that the imaginal is properly for (Corbin, quoted in Hillman, Mythic Figures 1974). Hillman, writing within Corbin’s own framework, turns this symptom into method: the monstrous and the absurd are precisely what soul-making requires, because the gods present themselves pathologised exactly where they are not recognized.

The Lineage holds both positions. Corbin supplies the metaphysical warrant — the imaginal as ontologically real — without which Hillman’s pathologising move is unintelligible. Hillman supplies the therapeutic consequence — the imaginal as the site of soul-making — without which Corbin’s theophany remains an historical-philological reconstruction. Each needs the other. The graph records the disagreement rather than resolving it: this is the Phase-8 contradiction marker the ARCHE synthesis primer asks for.

Sources

• henry-corbin: imaginal is theophanic; its content is hieratic and angelic.
• james-hillman: imaginal is polytheistic; its content includes the pathologised, the monstrous, the absurd.