"...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

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Zoroastrians in New York


A Rare Glimpse Inside A Zoroastrian Temple In New York
Take a look inside Pomona, New York’s new Dar-e-Mehr temple.

Full article in The Huffington Post




Posted by Tom Cheetham at 11:15 AM 0 comments

Recent Citations


Disorientation and Inferred Autonomy: Kant and Schelling on Torture, Global Contest, and Practical Messianism

FS Scribner - Rethinking German Idealism, 2016
... As the great French Sufi scholar Henry Corbin notes, the polestar is the axis of metaphysical
geography; the quest for the mystical Orient is not achieved by traveling east: 'This mystic Orient,
the Orient-origin, is the heavenly pole, the point of orientation of the spiritual ascent. ...

[PDF] Asceticism, Mysticism, and Messianism: A Reappraisal of Schechter's Portrait of Sixteenth-Century Safed

ER Wolfson - Jewish Quarterly Review, 2016
... In my scholarship, I have employed the locution imaginal body, borrowed from the work of Henry
Corbin on Islamic esotericism, in order to convey this sense of embodiment that is not material
flesh but which is nevertheless a concrete phenomenon and not merely a figure of ...

[HTML] Ontology and the Aesthetics of Cinematographic Bodies

JY Heurtebise
... in the ontological reality of the body. This ontological reality is essentially, as Henry
Corbin says, “imaginal.”[9]. 4. Plato and Bresson: the refusal of sensibility and the
hand of the devil. The question of the representation of the ...

[PDF] Fernando Pessoa and Islam

F Boscaglia - Oriente e Orientalismo
... In fact, these references to the Arab and Persian imaginary and cultures are particularly related
to a line of thought about the ontology of imagination, which I have read in comparison with Henry
Corbin's studies about the Creative Imagination [Imagination Créatrice] (1958) in ...
Posted by Tom Cheetham at 11:09 AM 0 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)