"...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.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

from Jacob Frank’s The Words of the Lord

The following is from Jerome Rothenberg's Poems & Poetics blog. - This material is particularly relevant to Corbin's project to envision the prophetic tradition from the widest and most inclusive possible perspective. -

Reconfiguring Romanticism (42): from Jacob Frank’s The Words of the Lord

Translation from the Polish Manuscripts by Harris Lenowitz

INTRODUCTION

[Originally written for Rothenberg & Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volume 3, with passages adapted from A Big Jewish Book (a.k.a. Exiled in the Word), but never published as such. Jacob Frank, the eighteenth-century Jewish messiah, was one of a long chain of Messiahs from the time of Jesus and before. See also H. Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights, Oxford University Press, 1998.]


As a time of growing dislocations & deconstructions, the eighteenth-century saw changes of mind that reached into isolated corners of Europe, far removed from the strongholds of both the Enlightenment & the “natural supernaturalism” & radical mysticisms that were among the marks of an emerging Romanticism. The messianic Frankist movement as it affected eastern European Jews involved, like its literary & western counterparts, a shift in language & its attendant symbols that resembled the shifts emerging as well in the dominant cultures.

Of the work presented below, Harris Lenowitz writes as translator: “These are some of the sayings of Yankiev Leivich, Yakov ben Lev, who called himself Yakov Frank and whom some called Wise Jacob. Jacob Frank was a creature of Podolia, Turkey, Poland-in-its-disintegration. He traveled. His father was a traveling preacher. Frank was a peddler too and spoke everybody’s language: Balkan, Turkish, Yiddish, Polish, Ladino, with quotations, citations, and language play from Hebrew and Aramaic. He joined up with Sabbateans, followers of the messianic movement begun by Shabtai Zvi and Nathan of Gaza [in the seventeenth century], continued through Barukhya Russo [d. 1721], and temporarily short one messiah. With them he turned against the Talmud, into the Zohar, and out through the Sabbatean pore. He added some things to the movement: a new emphasis on the Virgin, a passage through Christianity, after the passage through Islam which Shabtai/Nathan originated, on the way to Esau. Perhaps more sex. He became a messiah to thousands of Jews.”

In the “words” written down by his followers, the mini-narratives show a range of transformative experiences that came to him, like vatic prose poems, in the form of dreams & visions or by observations, simple or not, of the people & events to which his way of life had brought him.

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