Imagination and Contemporary Theory

A blog post not to be missed from Adrian J.Ivakhiv, Ph.D., York University, 1997

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont. His post on imagination and contemporary theory will be useful to many readers. I found it because in the post he links to this blog. As a biologist & former Associate Professor of Environmental Studies myself, I have much in common with Dr. Ivakhiv.  -

Imagination & Contemporary Theory 

This reminds me too that Gaston Bachlard's Earth & Reveries of Will is due out in English translation soon. See the Bachelard facebook page!

Corbin & Olson Continued...

As part of my continuing series on Corbin & poetry in America, here are a few paragraphs from Poetry & Truth: The Beloit Lectures and Poems, by Charles Olson, Transcribed & Edited by George F. Butterick, Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, Ca, 1971. It is hardly possible to convey the full impact of these rambling and chaotic but always astonishing "lectures." I have here selected a few pages near the end of the text which refer to Henry Corbin's Avicenna and the Visionary Recital and to ta'wil. It is impossible I think to find a "good" place to pick up Olson's "thread"  so I simply begin & hope that the interested reader will acquire the book:

Yeah, I mean the first sentence is the whole shot, shoot. I used it only once before and I didn't do this to it. I simply walked out at Berkeley—I would like very much to talk how—this was a lecture at Berkeley, in front of my peers, called "Causal Mythology," and I had just flown in from Rome and hadn't done my work, and had to get up in front of, oh I think the body of poets that you could say are in this world, or most in this world—at 10:30 in the morning. And luckily I remembered a Visionary Recital—the one I mentioned to you—of the angel of the right and the angel of the left—which I also have with me tonight, and as a text. That's the one I mentioned earlier in the week—Avicenna's queer, short whatever it is. Again, Avicenna in this same period. And I said I wanted to talk about the orb, the urb, the image, and the anima mundi, and that it was all to be done under this apothegm or epigram, epigraph. And now here I am again, for the second time, in such a situation—and with the bell tolling! [over the campus, heard in the background] "That which exists through itself . . . That which exists through itself, is what is called meaning." Too much! I mean it's too much for me to stand here and just have that. And that is what I have to offer. And that's what I think there is to offer, and I don't think anything in this world moves it a jot, except as we do, or become such. "That which exists through itself is what is called meaning." And even that word meaning is, I think, very—I'm reading from a translation of the Chinese, and as you prob—many of you, many of you, especially, may know—the word, of course, in Chinese is that word which I would like to avoid mentioning, but it rhymes with the man who also, to whom that is attributed. And we have that word in our language as 'how,' if you get my string of rhymes. A Chinese man's name; his, like they say—or one did say, concept; and our word 'how.' I mean, like, the trouble, at least—if I may jump on him—Bob had, the first night I was here, with what was the first of three poems that for me belonged to you . . . And in my stubborn ruse way, I would like to read it again, so that we can summarize, hopefully, the week. It has the title, "*Added to making a Republic in gloom on Watchhouse Point"—which is simply where I live, it's called such, it's part of Fort Point, Fort Square, Gloucester, Massachusetts:

an actual earth of value to
construct one, from rhythm to
image, and image is knowing, and
knowing, Confucius says, brings one
to the goal: nothing is possible without
doing it. It is where the test lies, malgre
all the thought and all the pell-mell of
proposing it. Or thinking it out or living it
ahead of time.

—and it has that margin, "Reading about my world, March 6th, 1968."

Now, it wasn't Confucius, of course, that—right? It wasn't, as you, if you—I mean 'how' does not rhyme with 'Confucius.' I mean, there's—I didn't even figure this out that night. I thought I'd read this whole damn thing to you and come up like a living exegesis and make it work so that you understood every word. It's only about 29 pages this, and it's really impeccable. It's more like immaculate. And completely penetrable. Completely penetrable to your mind, to your life, to your thought, to your feelings—and I think only those things will actually produce results, result. That's why I have pressed you, or harried you, harried you so hard, I think—is that there isn't any way out of that. I think that that statement, that almost, apparently, a truism—as much as Confucius says, "nothing is possible without doing it"—there isn't any way out of that, it's like a—no matter what we may think—a pliers of typology, or not of typology, but of what I'm saying is the blow upon the world. I'm sure we could talk tonight like Mrs. Walsh and I at dinner, of Mr. Williams. When I wrote that tonight, the blow upon the world, I was sure, I mean I suddenly thought, of course, that lovely other alternative, which I'm sure some of you know, of Williams' letter in middle life?—I don't know when he said it, wrote it—"Love is a stain upon the world." Or "is the stain," is it not?—"is the stain upon the world." Any of you correct me in that, or confirm me on that? William Carlos Williams, "Love is the stain upon the world"—I think he opens a poem or something with. I don't know how—I don't want that to seem the way I presented it, as though it's equal at all. I want to take on that burden, too, of not . . .

I would like, actually, if I can, just to leave you with that sentence. I think it's, like they say, glass [?] enough. I mean I suppose I speak ... I have the superstition that human beings have, that when they hear something that matters to them, it's true. I—and again, if you'll excuse me—I will keep my noun. I once was told this, by myself, to myself, by no body or thing that I could identify. I think I was asleep, and it was a dream. But what got said was, "Everything issues from—Everything issues from . . . , and nothing is anything but itself, measured so." Which I'm sure led me on the path to the door of this sentence, quite simply. Can you hear? May I, would you like me to just repeat that? It's easy. I mean, it's like a prayer. Not really—a bead, something I carry in my pocket. I've never said this out loud, that's how much I know [?] use, hears, loves [?]. Nobody ever heard me say this before. And still I have something for myself—by even telling you that much. "Everything issues from . . . , and noth¬ing is anything but itself, measured so." I mean that's what of course got me. Those things always read ... I mean, that's why I do believe in the reversable, because actually the thing cocks back. That's why I'm talking . . . Earlier in the week I stressed the whole Arabic or Ismaili Muslim concept of ta'wil—which I think is almost singularly the only place I know, actually, in the body of man's accumulation, that you have this little—or you have, what we seem to me to be practically preparing from scratch, the acts of the future. "Measured so." I mean, what a trick to pull on you, to give you the whole thing and then say, "measured so." I mean, that's a voice talking, literally. I mean, if you take thought, it's simply seeking to be correct in the meter. It's perfectly obvious that that statement is not indulging me; it's supplying me with, like, the afterthought. I say that as of some conversation I had at the end of one session with someone from Madison who was saying that there is no metric left in poetry, because time now is now. I said, yeah, that's it, hey—he's one of Creeley's men, so he's very quick and bright, and knows what, knows something, really—you know, like, the meter is sort of gone and come and done in front of ourselves, and how do you therefore have meter? Well, I think it's simply measure, and I think it is what I'm unfortunately, probably—sort of engaged to do. And here I do it now publicly for the first time—which is to see if you can be so careful as to do this in public—to suggest measure as well. If you will note the first poem, carefully, that I wrote for you, carefully, does not involve itself except in itself with that question. The state¬ments are on the other matter entirely—of rhythm, image, knowing, and one I also added but I slipped out of the synod or quartorum —construct. I equally received that as a gift, maybe ten years earlier. The leading poet alive in the world, in a dream, told me when I was very young or much younger—I can read you the poem, I published it some years ago, in a series of poems in which I sought at that date—and this is prior to I think what all of you must best know of my own, that piece of writing that is called "Projective Verse." This is written some two years, I think, earlier—"The ABCs." And hidden amongst them, in "ABCs—2," is the actual words that I then wrote, that were spoken, again inside my head by another person entirely:

of rhythm is image
of image is knowing
of knowing there is
a construct
 

(pp. 61-64).

Editor's Notes on these pages:

p. 61:    a lecture at Berkeley, in front of my peers, called "Causal Mythology." Causal Mythology, transcribed and edited by Donald Alien (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1969), a lecture at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 20 July 1965.
p. 61:    a Visionary Recital. Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1960). The passage on the two angels is quoted on p. 13 of Causal Mythology.
p. 61:    "That which exists through itself, is what is called meaning." See The Secret oj the Golden Flower, A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard Wilhelm, commentary by C. G. Jung, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962), p. 21: "Master Lii-tsu said, That which exists through itself is called the Way (Tao)." While on p. 97 it is pointed out: "Wilhelm translates Tao by Sinn (Meaning)." See also Causal Mythology, p. 11.
p. 62:    William Carlos Williams, "Love is the stain upon the world"

The stain of love
Is upon the world.

It appears in two poems in Williams' Collected Earlier Poems (New York: New Directions, 1951), "First Version: 1911" (pp. 173-174) and "Love Song" (p. 174).
p. 63:    "Everything issues from . . ." In a notepad of dreams from 1958 among the poet's papers occurs:

                                 issues
Everything comes fr the
Black Chrysanthemum
& nothing is anything but itself
measured so ...

p. 63:    ta'wil. The "exegesis that leads the soul back to truth." See Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, esp. pp. 28-35.
p. 64:    The leading poet alive in the world . . . Ezra Pound.

Jung's Red Book - More News

The mainstream media seem to be interested in Jung's Red Book. National Public Radio did a piece this week. The New Yorker also took note. And there are odd goings on at the Rubin Museum which is having a series of programs to coincide with the Red Book on display.

Corbin & Poetry - #6 in a series - Updated Version

Pierre Joris, prolific poet, essayist, translator and anthologist (here on wikipedia) has this to say on ta'wil & Henry Corbin:

"I believe I first heard the word in the late sixties, reading a Charles Olson essay (&/or Robert Duncan material — can't remember what came first). Then a fine use of the concept in terms of poetics was made in the early 70's by Robert Kelly in a dialogue with George Quasha & Chuck Stein for the "Vort" magazine Kelly issue [Vol 2, #2, 1974]. At which moment I was able to get my hands on the Corbin book (in London) & then several of his volumes in French which I took with me when I moved to Algeria in 1976. Kelly's notion of the (process of the) poem as a "ta'wil of the first line" has been important for me. I have used / cited the term & its poetological implications on a number of occasions — inside of poems but also when using it as the name of my off&on small press venture)."

A ready example can be found in a recent post by Jerome Rothenberg of an excerpt from Notes Towards a Nomadics Manifesto. Joris writes:

"We will keep Robert Kelly's notion of "ta'wil of the first line," the poem as nomadic/ rhizomatic extension of some given or found beginning, but a ta'wil reduced to immanence, to a "writing through." As he tells it otherwise in A MY NAME [in The Convections, 1978]: "This chant was my first news of the Great Trade Route along which scarce and isolate merchant-poet-nomads carried goods from tribe to tribe, over the mountains and under the sun, bringing the only news."

I asked Joris about his idea of a ta'wil reduced to immanence, and he replied with this:

"Yes, I know that Corbin would frown as transcendence is core to his thinking. My sense of "immanence" (& my insistence on it, rather than on a vertical theophany & the baggage such verticalities & hierarchies carry with them in religio-political terms throughout the history of our monotheisms) comes in good part via an early reading of Spinoza — prolonged later on by deep involvement in Gilles Deleuze's thinking about Spinoza, but any number of other matters too. If I were to put it in relation to Islamic mysticism, I would probably go to the term BARZAKH, as that "inbetween" place, — the original meaning of which is "curtain, barrier," but thus also "connecting link," "isthmus" between two spheres of existence,  as in its Koranic sense as "Bardo" realm between life and death etc — and of which Ibn Arabi, who speaks of it often and deeply, says somewhere that finally it is the only place there is, i.e. that there is nothing that is not in the barzakh."

And I am very grateful to Joris for sending along a scan of portions of the extremely important and fascinating VORT issue which I make available here:
VORT 5 (Vol2, No2) Robert Kelly Issue - Excerpts

 

Michael Maier - Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem XXXVI

UPDATE:

In the first versions of this post I referred to the "VORT Interview" with Kelly. As any reader will see, the piece is hardly an interview, but something rather more interesting. Upon seeing the piece posted here, George Quasha wrote that both he and Charles Stein would prefer that

"it would be referred to not as an interview, which it really was not (as it says itself), but as a dialogue or more particularly as an act of dialogical criticism in alignment with the ta'wil project itself. It was laboriously edited and shaped as a particular critical act that was an embodiment of its own principle -- and in that respect it is a work that we created together, with its foundations in Olson and Duncan as well as Corbin, and moving to a new approach to engaging these issues; therefore an act of poetics. It's obviously indebted to RK but not in the sense that an "interview" implies. I don't know other things that have this co-performative poetics so much in evidence. In fact, it's the real beginning (and we did a number of these dialogues with poets, called DiaLogos at the time, including Ted Enslin and Jonathan Williams) of the long process of co-performative and dialogical work that Chuck and I have continued and which is expressed in An Art of Limina. In making this distinction I'm not carping but speaking to the heart of a long-developing and intricate project. In the present context of poetics the special qualities of our approach to the co-performative are easily missed and obscured or simply not noticed. That's why we hope to preserve certain distinctions when the opportunity arises."

In keeping with these concerns and this request I will post the dialogue in its entirety in this space when I have access to the full text. - TC

Henry Corbin & Suhrawardi's Angelology by Roberts Avens

Being the third in a series of papers by Avens: "Henry Corbin & Suhrawardi's Angelology" by Roberts Avens, Hamdard Islamicus Vol XI, No. 1, Spring, 1988, 3-20.

Corbin & Suhrawardi's Angelology by Roberts Avens

Muhammad on Buraq sees the angel with seventy heads. From Mir Haydar’s Mirajnameh. Herat or Samarkand c. 1420-40. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. In Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources. Eleanor Sims with Boris Marshak and Ernest Grube. Yale University Press, 2002. 

The Persian Blogosphere

A Glimpse into the Persian Blogosphere
BBC World Service Trust Iran Project
Balatarin
Zigzag

Mapping Iran's Online Public

The Act of Being by Christian Jambet

I'd like to call attention to the English translation of a work from one of Corbin's most illustrious students, Christian Jambet.


David Burrell begins his lengthy review (in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews here) as follows:

"A superb translation of L'acte de l'etre (Paris: Fayard 2002), this comprehensive presentation of Muhammad Ibn Ibrahim Sadr al-Din Shirazi [Mulla Sadra] will help western philosophers and theologians to come to appreciate the trajectory of Islamic thought which extends beyond the stereotype prevailing in the west: that Islamic philosophy all but evaporated after al-Ghazali's trenchant attack on Ibn Rushd [Averroes]. It rather moved back to the heartland from Andalusia, in the personages of Suhrwaradi, Ibn al-Arabi, and later, Mulla Sadra, as well as countless lesser luminaries, as Sayyed Hossain Nasr has been reminding us for some time. I came to realize the truth of Nasr's contention in the first Mulla Sadra conference in Teheran in 1999, where the participants were overwhelmingly impressed with the contemporary vigor of philosophy (and poetry) in Iran. That event gave me the opportunity to compare Mulla Sadra's attitude towards existence with that of Thomas Aquinas, using Henry Corbin's edition and translation of Mulla Sadra's Masha'ir [Les Penetrations Metaphysiques]."

Burrell's comparative essay can be read here as a pdf: "Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Mulla Sadra Shirazi (980/1572 – 1050/1640) and the Primacy of esse/wujûd in Philosophical Theology," David B. Burrell, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, Volume 8, 2 (September 1999), 207-219.

The book has also been reviewed in the Journal of Islamic Studies: here (1st page only; subscription required).

I make Jambet's Preface to the English Edition available here  in the hope that it will entice readers to embark on this journey.

The Act of Being - Christian Jambet - Preface to the English Edition


And those who can read the French should see this review / article in Le Monde from January 2003:

Christian Jambet, l'islam dans le désert Contre les extrémistes de la charia et contre le discours simpliste qui assimile l'islam au terrorisme, le philosophe tente, en explorant les textes, de faire entendre une voix dissidente.

Who was Sunsiaré?

Anyone who has seen the Cahier de l'Herne volume devoted to Henry Corbin will have doubtless wondered about the woman in this striking photo. We have the answer to the puzzle of her identity thanks to the excellent Jean Moncelon here (in French) who brings the work of d'Azay to our attention. I paraphrase from portions of Moncelon's account:

Sunsiaré de Larcône

For years, this singular photo of the author of The Messenger, published in the Cahier de l'Herne volume devoted to Henry Corbin in 1981, posed an enigma, the caption giving only a first name and a date: "1961, Sunsiaré in conversation about the title of her novel, The Messenger."

What face was concealed behind the blonde hair of this remarkably attractive young woman who seemed to captivate Henry Corbin? And who was this mysterious Sunsiaré, author of a single novel, whose title had provoked the curiosity of the Orientalist? The novel itself could easily enough be read, but the biography of its author remained unknown, except that Sunsiaré died in a car accident, along with Roger Nimier, at the age of 27.

The answer comes from the investigative work of Lucien d'Azay in his book Seeking Sunsiaré, Gallimard, 2005. According to Gilbert Durand in a letter sent to the author, the meeting with Corbin was in 1962, the year of her death:

"In the spring of 1962 in Paris (in a UNESCO hall that [Roger] Caillois lent us, I think) during my lecture to the « Société du Symbolisme » I saw a beautiful couple in the front of the audience smiling at me... At the intermission they came up and Sunsiaré said: "Sir, you'll hear a lecture - that of Abellio [presumably Raymond Abellio - TC] - the most intelligent man I know." I was the one who, despite many inner reservations, had invited the mage of Gallimard ... We chatted a bit, and since she presented herself as an "orientalist" taking a course from Henry Corbin at the EPHE, I asked them for some information on the "Muslim rosary." She told me to contact Corbin who was to become my "master" for the next fifteen years. She was indeed the "Messenger." Two years later Corbin led me into the prestigious Eranos circle that I attended religiously for a quarter of a century."

In connection with Corbin, and because the reference to Swedenborg seems particularly appropriate [Balzac was influenced by Swedenborg; see the link below - TC] , among the many stories of Sunsiaré recounted by d'Azay, we note that of Laszlo Szabo: "She always seemed happy, but this was only an appearance. A journey, not an apparition ... An angel, blazing like a phoenix. One would say a Seraphitus Seraphita from Balzac. She falls upward - towards the heavens," he concluded with a rising gesture.

[It is worth mentioning that Corbin closes "Cyclical Time in Mazaism and Ismaili Gnosis" (Eranos, 1951) with lines from another early work by Balzac heavily influenced by Swedenborg, Louis Lambert : "Resurrection is accomplished by the wind of heaven that sweeps the worlds. The Angel carried by the wind does not say: Arise ye Dead! He says: Let the living arise!" (p. 145 of the 1889 Englsih edition, here).]

- Our thanks to Jean Moncelon

Things and Angels, Death & Immortality

This is the second installment in my series of posts making the more inaccessible works of Roberts Avens available.

"Things and Angels, Death and Immortality in Heidegger and in Islamic Gnosis," Hamdard Islamicus Vol. VII/Number 2, Summer 1984. As with most of Avens' work, there are many references to Henry Corbin.

Things and Angels - Avens


Adam honoured by angels; British Library, London; from "Majalis al-'Ushshaq", Kamal al-Din Husayn Gazurgahi (author), Iran (Shiraz), c. 1560, shelfmark: Or. 11837

« La Sophia éternelle »

As promised, here is the French version, entire, of Henry Corbin's « La Sophia éternelle » (à propos du livre de C.G. Jung : Antwort auf Hiob), Revue de culture européenne 5, 1953, 44 pp. This piece has been discussed in several earlier posts.


(Icon of the Holy Wisdom, Novgorod School, 14th c. )

La Sophia Eternelle - Henry Corbin

Roberts Avens on Henry Corbin

The late Roberts Avens (1923-2006) was among the first in the English-speaking world to attempt to show how Corbin's work relates to contemporary western theology and philosophy. His writings are an important resource for those interested in the implications of Corbin's thought. Avens was Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. Born in Dricani in southeastern Latvia (see map below), he received a BA and MA in the humanities from the University of Brussels, and an MA and PhD in theology and the phenomenology of religion from Fordham University (1976). In addition to his philosophical work, he devoted much time to writing poetry, mostly in Latvian, under the name of Roberts Mūks. Some of his poems (in Latvian) can be found in Jaunā Gaita nr. 187, jūnijs 1992 and others of his and some honoring him on his 70th birthday, along with more photos, can be found in Jaunā Gaita nr. 191, marts 1993. A short obituary in the Latvian press can be found here.

I here begin a project to make some of his hard-to-find essays available in these posts from time to time, and begin with "Corbin's Interpretation of Imamology and Sufism" below. A partial bibliography follows.

Avens, Roberts, Imagination as Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield & Cassirer, Spring Publications, 1980. A selection from this book is available online: "Western Romanticism and the East"
____ The New Gnosis, Spring Publications, 1984.

____ "Things and Angels, Death and Immortality in Heidegger and in Islamic Gnosis," Hamdard Islamicus VII(2): 3-32, Summer, 1984
____ "Theosophy of Mulla Sadra," Hamdard Islamicus IX(3): 3-30, Autumn, 1986
____ "Henry Corbin and Suhrawardi's Angelology," Hamdard Islamicus XI(1): 3-20, Spring 1988
____ "Corbin's Interpretation of Imamology and Sufism," Hamdard Islamicus XI(2): 67-79, Summer, 1988
____ "The Subtle Realm: Corbin, Sufism and Swedenborg," in Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision, ed. Robin Larson, Swedenborg Foundation, New York, 1988.
____ "Henry Corbin's Teaching on Angels," translated from the German by Hugo M. Van Woerkom; Gorgo 18 (1988).


Mūks, Roberts. Krokodīls un es. Ojāra Jēgena vāks. Annarborā Mišigenā: Ceļinieks, 1984.
_____ Apaļais cilvēks – Dieva kopija. 2007.
DIEVS,DIEVI UN VELNIŅI, Apgāds Mantojums, 2005. A book of essays, reviewed in Latvian here.

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Avens - Corbin on Imamology & Sufism

The Anecdote of the Spoon

On pages 206-7 of Corbin's Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi we read:

This ascending movement involves not only man; every being is in a state of perpetual ascension, since its creation is in a state of perpetual recurrence from instant to instant. This renewed, recurrent creation is in every case a Manifestation (izhar} of the Divine Being manifesting ad infinitum the possible hexeities in which He essentializes His being. If we consider the creature in relation to the Creator, we shall say that the Divine Being descends toward concrete individualizations and is epiphanized in them; inversely, if we consider these individualizations in their epiphanic function, we shall say that they rise, that they ascend toward Him. And their ascending movement never ceases because the divine descent into the various forms never ceases. The ascent is then the Divine Epiphany in these forms, a perpetually recurrent Effusion, a twofold intradivine movement. That is why the other world already exists in this world; it exists in every moment, in relation to every being. [Note 41.]

[Note 41, pp. 354-5]: Fusus II, 151. Here I should like to mention a conversation, which strikes me as memorable, with D. T. Suzuki, the master of Zen Buddhism (Casa Gabriella, Ascona, August 18, 1954, in the presence of Mrs. Frobe-Kapteyn and Mircea Eliade). We asked him what his first encounter with Occidental spirituality had been and learned that some fifty years before Suzuki had translated four of Swedenborg's works into Japanese; this had been his first contact with the West. Later on in the conversation we asked him what homologies in structure he found between Mahayana Buddhism and the cosmology of Swedenborg in respect of the symbolism and correspondences of the worlds ( cf. his Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, p. 54, n. ). Of course we expected not a theoretical answer, but a sign attesting the encounter in a concrete person of an experience common to Buddhism and to Swedenborgian spirituality. And I can still see Suzuki suddenly brandishing a spoon and saying with a smile: "This spoon now exists in Paradise. . . ." "We are now in Heaven," he explained. This was an authentically Zen way of answering the question; Ibn 'Arabi would have relished it. In reference to the establishment of the transfigured world to which we have alluded above (n. 10), it may not be irrelevant to mention the importance which, in the ensuing conversation, Suzuki attached to the Spirituality of Swedenborg, "your Buddha of the North."

[At Eranos in 1954 Corbin presented "Épiphanie Divine et Naissance Spirituelle dans la Gnose Ismaliénne," and Suzuki's contribution was "The Awakening of a new Consciousness in Zen." See the Eranos Jahrbuch 1954, Band 23. For more on Corbin & Swedenborg see Roberts Avens' article "The Subtle Realm: Corbin, Sufism and Swedenborg," in Swedenborg a Continuing Vision.]

Corbin in the Music of Sir John Tavener

Sir John Tavener's (b. 1944) piece The Veil of the Temple (also here) makes use of some lines from Corbin's Temple and Contemplation. Tavener has written a short essay on the composition available here as a pdf. The premiere of this immense overnight work was in 2003 at the Temple Church in London. Of Cycle 8 Tavener writes,

"My references to the Knights Templar that follow are symbolic. There is a rather wonderful legend concerning them, recalled by the eminent French Islamisist Henry Corbin. He tells that on March 18th, a knight of the Temple is seen to appear uttering the cry “Who will defend the Holy Temple? Who will defend the Tomb of Christ?”. At this call, the enthroned Templars come alive and stand up to answer “No one! No one! The Temple is destroyed forever”."

The passage in question is from the opening paragraph of Corbin's "The Imago Templi in Confrontation with Secular Norms" (p. 263). In this first section, The Imago Templi at "the meeting-place of the two seas", Corbin writes as follows:

"A great Jewish writer of our time, Elie Wiesel, has chosen as the epigraph to one of the most poignant of his books, Le serment de Kolvillag [in English as The Oath - TC], the following quotation from the Talmud: "If peoples and nations had known the evil they were inflicting on themselves by destroying the Temple of Jerusalem, they would have wept more than the children of Israel." I was still pondering the far-reaching implications of these lines when, in a recent work, I came across another epigraph, taken this time from the historian Ignaz von Dollinger: "If I were asked to name the dies nefastus in the history of the world, the day that would come to my mind would be none other than October 13, 1307" (the day when Philip the Fair ordered the mass arrest of the French Templars). A few pages further on, the same work makes mention of "a legend whose setting is the amphitheatre of Gavarnie in the Pyrenees, where six knights of the Temple lie at rest in a chapel. Every year, on March 18—the birthday of the last Grand Master of the Order— a knight of the Temple is seen to appear, whose shroud is replaced by the famous white cloak with the four-triangled red cross. He is in battle apparel and holds his lance in rest. He walks slowly towards the centre of the chapel and utters a piercing call, which re-echoes around the amphitheatre of mountains: 'Who will defend the holy Temple? Who will deliver the tomb of Christ?' At his call, the six entombed Templars come alive and stand up, to answer three times: 'No one! No one! No one! The Temple is destroyed.'"

"The lamentations of the Talmudist sages and the doleful cry resounding through a Pyrenean amphitheatre echo each other, in that each of them sets the same catastrophe at the centre of world history: the destruction of the Temple, of the same Temple. Nevertheless, over the centuries a triumphal Image occurs and recurs, opposing this despair with the tenacity of permanent defiance: the Image of the rebuilding of the Temple, the coming of the New Temple, which assumes the dimensions of a cosmic restoration. The two images, of the destruction and of the rebuilding of the Temple, are inseparable one from the other. They draw on the same source, and they configurate a vision of the world which in both its horizontal and vertical dimension is dominated by the Image of the Temple, Imago Templi, and which conjoins the destiny of the city-temple and the destiny of the community-temple in the body of the Knights Templar." (263-4) - H. Corbin.

Notes on Corbin & Hamann

In 1937 the young Henry Corbin taught a course at the l'Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes on the influence of Luther on Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788). (I have discussed Hamann & Corbin in this earlier post).

He followed with the publication of a short piece in the Annuaire de l’ Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences Religieuses 1938-1939, pp. 77-81, Conférence temporaire : « L’Inspiration luthérienne chez Hamann ».

In 1935 he had written a substantial essay and had planned a book which would include this, plus his translations of a few short pieces by Hamann. One of these translations was published as J.G. HAMANN, « Aesthetica in nuce. Rhapsodie en prose kabbalistique », trad. de l’allemand par H. Corbin, Mesures, janv. 1939, 27 p.
This translation appeared also in Henry Corbin, edited by Christian Jambet, Cahier de l'Herne, no. 39. Consacré à Henry Corbin, 1981.

In 1985 Corbin's larger essay and three translations of pieces by Hamann were at long last published as Hamann, philosophe du luthérianisme, introduction by Jean Brun. Paris, Berg International, 1985, reissued in 2005.

Hamann's essay "Aesthetica in nuce, " "Aesthetics in a Nutshell," is a remarkable piece of Romantic literature in itself and is not readily available in English. I make it available here (in printable, if not screen-readable form & as yet at least, without the extensive notes provided by the translator) in a translation by Joyce P. Crick from Nisbet, Hugh Barr, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Aesthetica in Nuce Complete - Hamann

Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal

It is perhaps worth making this essay available here in spite of the fact that it can also be found online here in a different translation. This pdf version may be more readable and more easily printed. This is the essay as it first appeared in Spring 1972 (Zurich), in a translation by Ruth Horine.

Mundus Imaginalis
or
The Imaginary and the Imaginal

by

Henry Corbin
(Paris/Teheran)

Spring 1972 - Zürich

[This paper, delivered at the Colloquium on Symbolism in Paris in June 1964, appeared in the Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme 6, Brussels 1964, pp. 3—26. The version printed here has been condensed (with the permission of the author) by omitting paragraphs of a technical nature on pages 5 and 8 of the original, as well as an account (pp. 17—23) of the topography of the Eighth Clime. The complete text of this account has been published in H. Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, tome IV, livre 7, Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Other writings of Prof. Corbin have been published regularly in French in the Eranos Jahrbucher. His major works in English translation are: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Bollingen Series LXVI) N. Y. and London, 1960 and Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn'Arabi, Princeton and London, 1969. – Eds.]

MUNDUS IMAGINALIS

Blue Animal Skin Carpet - Konya; from Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of very Early Turkish Carpets. Oxford University Press, 1993.