The Legacy of Henry Corbin: The ‘Dialogue’ between Odysseus Elytis and Henry Corbin

"...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.

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

The ‘Dialogue’ between Odysseus Elytis and Henry Corbin

Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 39, 2018

Philosophy and Literature

Nikoleta Zampaki

Pages 121-124

DOI: 10.5840/wcp23201839850

This paper aims at presenting the relationship of the poet Odysseus Elytis with the French philosopher Henry Corbin as it is displayed through the poetic work of Elytis The light-tree and the fourteenth beauty. We study the notion of imagination in this poetic synthesis through the philosophical perspective of Corbin. Emphasis is given on the solar metaphysics and the element of transparency. We focus on a parallel reading of Elytis and Corbin in order to show in what ways poetry and philosophy can be related. Elytis (as Corbin’s theory goes) aims at passing on a third dimension of things or a third level of reality.