Gnosis as Weltreligion

henry-corbin‘s 1956 Rome lecture, published as Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (1983), advances a claim that shapes the whole of his philosophical project: gnosis is not a local Christian heresy of the first centuries nor a medieval Islamic deviation but a world religion — a Weltreligion — prior to and running across the dogmatic formations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. “Gnosis was not born in Islam in the Middle Ages, any more than it is a simple Christian heresy of the first centuries of our era; rather, it is something that existed long before Christianity” (Corbin 1983, p. 192, cited in Bloom, introduction to Corbin 1969).

The sources Corbin assembles for this claim are deliberately catholic. Ismā‘īlī Shī‘ism, Iranian Sufism, Christian Gnosticism, Kabbalah, the corpus-hermeticum, Böhme, Blake, and Emersonian Self-Reliance are read as isomorphic expressions of the same intelligentia spiritualis. Corbin’s own formulation: “There is no syncretism to be constructed, but only isomorphisms to be noted when the axis of symmetry is governed by one and the same intelligentia spiritualis, when, unbeknownst to them, a pre-established harmony gathers all these ‘esoterics’ fraternally in the same temple of Light, the same kingdom of spiritual man” (Corbin 1969, p. 92).

The thread is load-bearing for the Seba graph because it names the unity the graph itself is attempting to articulate. The hermetic-transmission is not a curiosity of Renaissance specialists; it is the connective tissue of the Lineage. The mundus-imaginalis, the theophanic heart, the doctrine of correspondences, the alchemical opus, the Platonic anamnesis — these are not separate topics but variants of a single pattern. Corbin’s thesis licenses the lateral traversals that the graph depends on.

Sources

• henry-corbin: gnosis is a world religion prior to and across dogmatic formations.
• gnosis-hermetic: the Hermetic transmission as one of its continuous stems.
• ibn-arabi: the Andalusian-Sufi variant.