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Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi
Alone with the Alone
Corbin’s book-length study of ibn-arabi and the theophanic imagination. Originally L’Imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn ʿArabī (1958); translated into English by Ralph Manheim for the Bollingen series in 1969. The edition held carries Harold Bloom’s preface, which frames Corbin as an esotericist of comparable stature to Jonas, Scholem, and Idel, distinguished by his “marvelous universalism” in surveying “the situation of esoterism” across traditions.
The book’s central claim is that the imagination, in Ibn ʿArabī’s Sufism, is not a faculty of mental fabrication but the creative power through which the Absolute manifests in form — the “Imaginative Presence” in which “the Necessary Being, whose pure Essence is incompatible with all form, is nevertheless manifested in a form belonging to the Imaginative Presence” (Corbin 1969). The fourth section, “Creativity of the Heart,” develops the heart as the organ of theophanic vision: “the science of the Imagination is also the science of mirrors, of all mirroring ‘surfaces’ and of the forms that appear in them.”
The book introduces to English-speaking readers the imaginal geography of hurqalya — the alternate earth where theophanies occur — and the Ismailian dialectic of the active Intelligence. It is the single text through which Corbin’s ontology of the image entered archetypal-psychology-charter.