Corbin and Hillman on the Imaginal — Sacral vs Pathologized

The transmission of the mundus imaginalis from Corbin to Hillman is the single most consequential post-Jungian graft, and also the site of a disagreement the graph must record. Corbin coined the term and treated the imaginal as ontologically sacral: the theophanic Imagination is the organ of God’s self-disclosure, and its products — the Angel, the Temple, the Form — subsist on a plane whose reality is secured by its theophanic function. Hillman accepted the ontological claim against any reduction of image to fantasy, but he refused the sacral register. In a 1974 Eranos lecture he noted the divergence explicitly: “In stressing the pathologized aspect of the imaginal, I am aware of diverging here from the view of Henry Corbin who is the founder of the term ‘imaginal’ and to whom my work is, and will forever remain, profoundly indebted” (Mythic Figures 2007, p. 78 n. 5).

The divergence is not cosmetic. For Corbin, the mundus imaginalis is the place where theophany occurs; its image-beings are angels, lords, beloveds, Sophianic figures — images that carry the divine face. For Hillman, the imaginal includes the symptom, the pathology, the ugly and twisted image, the underworld itself. Where Corbin’s soul meets its Angel, Hillman’s soul meets Dionysus dismembered, Hades lord of the dead, the abnormal as archetypal necessity.

The biographical record supports the intellectual record. Hillman “revered Corbin’s ‘great cosmology of the imagination’” and Corbin called Re-Visioning “the psychology of the resurgence of the Gods” (Russell 2023). The affection was real; so was the divergence. Corbin gave Hillman the imaginal as cosmology. Hillman returned it as psychology — and in the translation, the theophanic ground was left behind. See also corbin-hillman-divergence, hillman-vs-jung-on-imagination, and plotinus-corbin-hillman-line.

Sources

• henry-corbin: the imaginal is theophanic, its object the personal Lord in whose Name each soul’s hexeity is constituted
• james-hillman: the imaginal is psychological, its object the full range of archetypal images including the pathologized
• corbin-alone-with-alone: “this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic Imagination”
• hillman-mythic-figures: “I am aware of diverging here from the view of Henry Corbin”