"...the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an 'object' which is proper to it..."
Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a scholar, philosopher and theologian. He was a champion of the transformative power of the Imagination and of the transcendent reality of the individual in a world threatened by totalitarianisms of all kinds. One of the 20th century’s most prolific scholars of Islamic mysticism, Corbin was Professor of Islam & Islamic Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Teheran. He was a major figure at the Eranos Conferences in Switzerland. He introduced the concept of the mundus imaginalis into contemporary thought. His work has provided a foundation for archetypal psychology as developed by James Hillman and influenced countless poets and artists worldwide. But Corbin’s central project was to provide a framework for understanding the unity of the religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His great work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind. His work marks a watershed in our understanding of the religions of the West and makes a profound contribution to the study of the place of the imagination in human life.

Search The Legacy of Henry Corbin: Over 800 Posts

Friday, June 5, 2009

Briefly Noted

This is especially worthy of note & is a measure of how far Corbin's influence has penetrated popular culture:
Dream Sequence - Like his indie debut, Slacker, Richard Linklater's new movie explores the correspondence between film viewing and dreaming. "In the few decades since Corbin coined the word "imaginal," it has, with an alacrity that would have amused Borges and Calvino, infiltrated a host of disciplines including art, psychology, and, most intriguingly of all, quantum physics."

Imaginal Studies (England) "We find our Sources in the visionary work of Henry Corbin, James Hillman, and the adepts who inspired them - supported by recent imaginative approaches to participative and transformative research that realise the vision in embodied practice."

Philosophy in Iran: Between Critical Rationalism and Eastern Wisdom "Corbin is one of the few western names still found on a Teheran street sign since the Islamic Revolution. It leads straight to the entrance to the Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP), where the great French philosopher Henry Corbin (1903–1978) taught."

The James Hillman Collection at Opus Archives - At Pacifica Graduate Institute.

The New Eye: Visionary Art and Tradition - " The mundus imaginalis is a place of encounter and transformation. “Is it possible to see without being in the place where one sees?” asks Corbin, throwing down the gambit of visionary experience. “Theophanic visions, mental visions, ecstatic visions in a state or dream or of waking are in themselves penetrations into the world they see.” "

Corbiniana: Henry Corbin

The Ideology of Carnival "All of these again relate to Henry Corbin’s analysis of Avicenna’s visionary recitals."

'Irfan - What is It? "The renowned academic Henry Corbin has had a great deal to say about `irfan and what it means. Henry Corbin was an expert on Iranian mysticism and wrote a lot of books about it. A central theme of his writings and, indeed, of mysticism is the process of going from understanding God intellectually to experiencing God in one's soul."

The Imagination (pdf) - Jeff Munnis - The Swedenborgian Church - "I have been doing a lot of reading of Henry Corbin the last few years."

Development of the Resurrection Body: A multi-part electronic class by Ravani Rah Weiner. "Part of the miracle here is that the answer for me came from a very esoteric realm of Islam. It is part of the body of wisdom which Suhrawardi and others brought from the Zoroastrian tradition to rejuvenate Islam in the thirteenth century. The source of this was the book Spiritual Body and the Celestial Earth by Henry Corbin, which was a book in my husband's library that almost flew off the shelf as an answer to my prayers. I have since found Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam and Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, both by Corbin, to be equally helpful."

The Philosophical Significance of the Imam in Isma'ilism - "With this Intellect started what Professor Henry Corbin calls 'le drame dans le ciel'. "

Schiehallion - Mount Zion in the far north, by Barry Dunford "...the French oriental scholar, Henry Corbin, in a profound and illuminating address delivered to the Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1974, entitled The Imago Templi in Confrontation [sic] after commenting on the "Sons of the Valley" which he identifies as "an exalted company of initiate Brothers, who constitute ab origine the secret Church of Christ", goes on to state: "Robert of Heredom is thus initiated by the Sons of the Valley and created Grand Master of the new Temple, which will be born again from the ashes of the old….Robert’s name in chivalry refers us to the mystical mountain of Heredom in the north of Scotland…." "

Review: The Wandering Sufi: Into the Mystic with Peter Lamborn Wilson by Erik Davis "In 1974, a number of great Sufi scholars like Toshihiko Izutsu, Henry Corbin, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, backed with money from the Shah's wife, founded the Iranian Academy of Philosophy, an institute devoted to Sufi research."

Is Reverie to be Trusted: The Imaginal and the Work of Maria Gimbutas, Norvene West. Feminist Theology 13/2 (2005)

Review of Swedenborg & Esoteric Islam, in The Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 2005.

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