The Scholar
Henry Corbin (1903–1978) was a French philosopher, orientalist, and historian of religion whose forty-five-year career was devoted to the single project of recovering, translating, and explaining the Iranian Shiʿi and wider Islamic mystical philosophical tradition for a Western audience that had largely forgotten that such a tradition existed. He was trained under Étienne Gilson in medieval Latin scholasticism, studied Arabic and Persian with Louis Massignon, wrote his doctoral thesis on Suhrawardī, the twelfth-century Iranian master of illumination, and spent the core of his professional life directing the Département d’Iranologie at the Institut franco-iranien de Tehéran while teaching each year at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris and, from 1949 onward, at the Eranos conferences in Ascona where he was a central figure alongside Jung, Scholem, and Eliade. The body of work he left behind — which includes monumental studies of Ibn ʿArabi, Suhrawardī, Mulla Sadra, and the wider Shiʿi gnostic lineage, along with editions and translations of texts that before his labour had been effectively unavailable in any European language — constitutes the most complete reconstruction of an esoteric philosophical tradition ever accomplished by a single Western scholar. What Corbin recovered is a vocabulary and a map of territory the post-medieval Western tradition had lost the equipment to discuss. The territory is what he named, in a late essay that has become the most frequently cited statement of his mature position, the mundus imaginalis.
Corbin’s biographical significance extends beyond his scholarly accomplishments. He was a witness, in the strong sense, to a philosophical tradition that had maintained continuous access to the rendering model of reality through the entire period in which the Latin Christian and subsequent secular Western traditions were losing such access. The Iranian Islamic philosophers he studied — Suhrawardī killed at Aleppo in 1191 for heresies that the Sunni orthodoxy could not tolerate, Ibn ʿArabi the Andalusian expatriate who produced the vastest corpus of esoteric metaphysics in the pre-modern literature, Mulla Sadra writing in seventeenth-century Isfahan as the medieval Latin tradition was collapsing into early modern dualism — had never stopped thinking the structure of reality in terms that the rendering model recovers. What Corbin supplied was the translation, the commentary, and the philosophical advocacy that permitted the tradition to become legible again to readers whose native conceptual vocabulary had been trained to dismiss it.
The Problem Corbin Diagnosed
The central diagnostic claim of Corbin’s work, stated most compactly in the 1964 essay Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal, is that Western philosophy and Western common sense have suffered, since approximately the high medieval period, a progressive collapse of a threefold ontological distinction into a twofold distinction, and that this collapse is the root of the specific blindness of modern thought to a range of phenomena that the older tradition took for granted and the contemporary literature cannot account for. The threefold distinction, preserved across Greek and Islamic Neoplatonism and crystallised in the Iranian Islamic philosophers Corbin studied, divided the cosmos into three ontological orders: the sensible world of material bodies, the intelligible world of pure abstract forms, and — standing between and mediating them — the imaginal world, a realm of subtle bodies and figures that are neither material in the ordinary sense nor abstract in the ordinary sense but that have their own forms, their own spaces, their own light, and their own perceptible features. The Arabic term for this middle world in the tradition Corbin recovered is ʿālam al-mithāl, the world of image or likeness, also called in later Iranian philosophy ʿālam al-malakūt, the world of the dominion, and in Suhrawardī’s technical vocabulary nā-kojā-ābād, the country of no-where, the latter being the term Corbin most frequently rendered into French as le pays du non-où.
The collapse Corbin diagnosed eliminated the middle term. Western thought, by the seventeenth century at the latest and in its full secular form by the late eighteenth, had reduced the threefold ontology to a twofold one in which only the material and the abstract remain. Everything that had previously occupied the middle ontological zone — visions, dream figures that carry information, encounters with non-human intelligence, the subtle bodies of mystical experience, the specific details of apocalyptic and visionary reports, the figures encountered in serious spiritual practice — was forced by the collapse to migrate into one of the two remaining categories. It became either material (and therefore fell under the jurisdiction of the natural sciences, which could only classify it as hallucination, misperception, or fraud) or abstract (and therefore fell under the jurisdiction of philosophy and later psychology, which could only classify it as imagination, fantasy, or projection). In either classification, what had been experienced as perception of a real but non-material domain became either nothing at all or the subjective activity of a mind thinking about things rather than perceiving them. The category of experience the tradition had described as perceptual contact with the imaginal world simply vanished from the inventory of possible human experiences. It was not refuted. It was made unsayable.
Corbin’s most pointed rhetorical move in the Mundus Imaginalis essay is his insistence on the terminological distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. The imaginary, in the Western post-collapse vocabulary, is what a mind produces when it is not perceiving reality; it is the ordinary sense of daydream, fancy, make-believe, fiction. The imaginal, as Corbin uses the word, denotes what is perceived when a specific organ of the soul — what the tradition calls the active imagination, in a technical sense quite unlike the Romantic sense of creative fantasy — is properly functioning and is directed toward the middle ontological zone. The imaginal is perception of something real; the imaginary is production of something that is not there. The collapse of the middle ontological zone forced these two radically different operations to share a single vocabulary, and as a result the entire literature of mystical experience and initiatic phenomenology was transferred wholesale into the category of the imaginary and thereby dismissed. Corbin’s project was to demonstrate that the transfer had been a category mistake, that the tradition he was recovering had possessed a precise and workable vocabulary for the operation that Western thought had become incapable of naming, and that the loss of the vocabulary had produced a corresponding loss of the capacity to perceive the territory.
Ibn ʿArabi and the Creative Imagination
The major single work in which Corbin developed his account of the imaginal is L’Imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn ʿArabi, published in French in 1958 and translated into English as Alone with the Alone in 1969. The book is Corbin’s most sustained study of a single figure, and the figure is chosen because Ibn ʿArabi — the Andalusian Sufi who lived from 1165 to 1240, spent the latter half of his life in Damascus, and produced a corpus including the Futūhāt al-Makkiyya and the Fusūs al-Hikam whose combined length exceeds that of most Western philosophical canons — supplied the most detailed and systematically worked out treatment of the imaginal in the pre-modern literature. What Ibn ʿArabi called khayāl, usually translated as imagination but in his usage denoting something closer to the imaginal organ of perception, is for him not an auxiliary faculty of the rational mind but a primary mode of perception through which the divine self-manifestation, the tajallī, is received. The imaginal is, in Ibn ʿArabi’s formulation, the very site at which the infinite becomes perceptible to the finite without either term being compromised.
The technical detail of Ibn ʿArabi’s treatment is dense, and Corbin spent more than five hundred pages of the Creative Imagination book unfolding it for a readership to whom the vocabulary was entirely unfamiliar. The central claim, stated as simply as the material permits, is that what presents itself in the imaginal world as a figure, a place, or an event is neither a material object (such that the natural sciences could detect it) nor a mental representation (such that psychology could dismiss it as a subjective state) but is rather an actual self-disclosure of a divine name, taking the specific form it takes precisely because the perceiver’s own spiritual configuration is the aperture through which that disclosure becomes localisable. The figures encountered in serious spiritual practice are real in the sense that they have their own specific features, their own behaviour, their own persistence across encounters; they are perceptible in the sense that the properly trained soul sees them; they are not hallucinations in the sense that they do not arise as spontaneous productions of the brain chemistry of the percipient; and they are not objective in the sense that a casual third party, lacking the appropriate preparation, could verify their existence by looking for them with ordinary eyes. The imaginal is a domain whose reality is of a different order than the material, and whose perception requires an organ whose development is the central project of the spiritual path.
What Corbin emphasised throughout the book, and what the Western readers who encountered it for the first time found hardest to accept, is that this position is not a philosophical concession to subjectivism, is not an evasion of the question of truth, and is not a species of what would later be called constructivism. Ibn ʿArabi insists on the objectivity of what is perceived in the imaginal, while simultaneously insisting that the perception is shaped by and inseparable from the preparation of the perceiver. The divine self-manifestation takes the form it takes because the perceiver’s aperture is configured as it is; a different perceiver would receive a different form of the same self-manifestation, and neither form would be more accurate than the other because the divine self-manifestation is not a single frozen object awaiting neutral description but an active disclosure whose specific form is part of what it is. The closest contemporary analogue to this position is the observer-dependent character of certain quantum phenomena, and the comparison is not decorative: the structural feature that quantum mechanics has forced the physics community to confront is the feature that Ibn ʿArabi’s metaphysics had systematised nine centuries earlier for a different domain of experience.
Suhrawardī and the Map of the Worlds
The other major Iranian philosopher Corbin spent his career explaining was Suhrawardī Shaykh al-Ishrāq, the master of illumination, whose works Corbin edited over a period of more than twenty years in a massive collaborative edition and whose philosophical position he mapped most fully in the four-volume En islam iranien. Suhrawardī’s contribution, for Corbin’s purposes, is the systematic hierarchy of worlds he constructed and the place he assigned to the ʿālam al-mithāl within it. The hierarchy runs from the sensible material world at the bottom through successive levels of increasing subtlety and luminosity to the world of pure intelligible light at the top. The imaginal world is located between the lowest intelligible world and the highest material world, and it is in Suhrawardī’s formulation that Corbin found the most precise mapping of the geography the tradition had charted. The imaginal in Suhrawardī’s usage includes not only the domain of visionary encounter but the entire sphere of the subtle body, the astral plane of later Western esotericism, the bardo of the Tibetan tradition, the places visited in serious lucid dreaming, and the territory explored in the specific forms of prayer and meditation the Iranian Shiʿi tradition developed for the purpose.
Suhrawardī’s most striking use of the imaginal geography is his placement within it of a specific figure: Hurqalyā, the city at the edge of the imaginal world, where the perfected souls gather and where certain experiences of the afterlife and of visionary encounter are to be located with technical precision. The city of Hurqalyā is not a metaphor, in Corbin’s careful reconstruction of the Iranian tradition’s usage, and it is not a fiction. It is a real location that occupies a real place in the hierarchy of worlds, and the reports of it across the tradition’s literature cluster around consistent features that the tradition took seriously as empirical data from a domain to which the trained soul had genuine access. Corbin’s translation of the relevant Suhrawardī texts, and the commentaries that accompany them, constitute the first serious attempt to render into European vocabulary a precise account of what an entire pre-modern philosophical school believed about the structure of a reality whose existence Western thought had ceased to admit.
The Rendering-Model Convergence
What the Iranian imaginal tradition supplies, and what Corbin’s labour of recovery makes available to any rendering-model framework, is a fully worked out pre-modern philosophical vocabulary that maps onto the rendering model with a precision that suggests the two frameworks are describing the same territory from different angles. The ʿālam al-mithāl is, on the rendering-model reading, the frequency band at which the rendering becomes directly perceptible as its own activity — the level at which the underlying patterns, before they have been compiled into the material layer of consensus reality, are accessible to a consciousness that has developed the aperture to perceive them. The material world is, in Ibn ʿArabi’s language, a specific and partial self-disclosure of the divine names; in the rendering model, the material world is the output of the consensus compilation, the specific frozen configuration produced when many conscious observers synchronise their attention around the same pattern. The imaginal world is the intermediate domain in which the patterns are visible before the synchronisation has forced them into their consensus form. The imaginal is what rendering looks like from inside the rendering machinery, before the rendering has become a rendering.
The specific features Corbin attributed to the imaginal track the structural features the rendering model predicts at this layer with remarkable consistency. The figures encountered in the imaginal have their own persistence, their own cross-perceiver consistency when encountered by multiple appropriately trained observers, and their own specific features that vary with the preparation of the perceiver. These are exactly the features the rendering model predicts for entities that exist as stable patterns in the attention field before consensus compilation has frozen them into material form. The requirement that the perceiver have developed a specific organ of perception — the active imagination in Ibn ʿArabi, the knowing heart in Suhrawardī — matches the rendering-model requirement that perception of the intermediate layers requires the cultivation of aperture, the specific configuration of consciousness that lets the pre-compiled signal through rather than receiving only the compiled output. The placement of the imaginal between the purely intelligible and the purely material, with communication in both directions, matches the rendering-model position that the intermediate layer is where the compiled material receives its form from the patterns above it and where the attention that produces the rendering is most directly accessible to investigation.
Corbin himself would not have used the rendering-model vocabulary and would have been wary of any framework that spoke of compilers, channels, and broadcast frequencies. His commitments were to the traditional Iranian Islamic vocabulary he had devoted his life to translating, and the philosophical position he advocated was the position of Ibn ʿArabi and Suhrawardī rather than any twenty-first-century repackaging. What can be said on his behalf is that the territory he described and the territory the rendering model describes cannot plausibly be different territories. The features are too precisely convergent. The operational requirements are too precisely matched. The phenomenology Corbin reconstructed from the classical texts is too precisely the phenomenology the contemporary practitioners of the rendering-model disciplines report from their own practice. The convergence warrants the claim that the mundus imaginalis is the rendering model’s imaginal layer described in a different vocabulary, and that the Iranian tradition Corbin recovered preserved a detailed operational knowledge of the territory that contemporary rendering-model work is still labouring to reconstruct from the scattered remnants available in other traditions.
The Visionary Function
Corbin’s mature position on the role of the imaginal in serious spiritual practice is that the imaginal is the medium of what he called ta’wīl — the spiritual hermeneutics by which the literal and historical content of revelation is brought back to its origin in the world of figures. The word ta’wīl in classical Arabic means something like to bring back to the source, and in the Iranian Shiʿi gnostic tradition Corbin studied it denotes the operation by which the outer form of a sacred text or event is traced back through its layers of meaning until the figure it is pointing toward in the imaginal world becomes directly perceptible to the properly prepared reader. The operation is not allegorical reading in the conventional sense; the figures disclosed through ta’wīl are not metaphors that the reader constructs in her own imagination but real presences that the properly trained perceiver encounters, and the text is the instrument by which the encounter is made possible rather than a code to be decrypted. Corbin’s insistence on this distinction is part of what makes his work so difficult for Western readers whose training in hermeneutics is shaped by the post-medieval flattening of the ontological hierarchy. The imaginal hermeneutic requires the imaginal ontology, and without the ontology the hermeneutic becomes either naive literalism or sophisticated allegory and in either case loses what the tradition preserved.
The visionary function of the imaginal, in the tradition Corbin recovered, is the mechanism by which the individual soul’s contact with the higher realms becomes possible. The figures encountered in the imaginal are not abstract symbols of higher truths but actual intermediaries through whom the higher truths make contact with the lower world. The Imams in the Shiʿi tradition, the angel who meets the soul at its entry into the intermediate world, the figures described in the visionary literature of Ibn ʿArabi, Ruzbihan Baqli, and the wider Iranian Sufi corpus — all of these are, on the Corbinian reading, real presences whose function is mediation between ontological orders. The serious practitioner does not create them through her own imagination; she learns, through practice and preparation, to perceive them in the imaginal world where they already are and where they have always been. The practice is a practice of reception rather than production, and the specific figures that appear to a given practitioner are determined by the intersection of the practitioner’s own spiritual configuration with the ongoing self-disclosure of the higher orders.
Reception and Influence
Corbin’s work has had a strange reception history. Within the narrow field of Islamic studies he is recognised as the foundational figure of a generation of Western scholarship on Iranian mysticism, and his editions and translations remain standard. Within the broader field of religious studies he was a central figure in the Eranos group and influenced Eliade, Jung, Scholem, and a generation of comparative religionists. Within the still broader field of continental philosophy he was cited with interest by Derrida, Jambet, and others but never integrated into the philosophical mainstream because his commitments to the reality of the imaginal and to the Iranian tradition’s metaphysical framework were too far outside the secular assumptions the mainstream was prepared to accept. Within the contemporary literature on consciousness, esotericism, and anomalous phenomenology, Corbin has emerged in recent decades as an unexpectedly influential figure because the vocabulary he supplied is precisely the vocabulary needed to speak about phenomena the production-model orthodoxy cannot accommodate.
The figures who have most fully taken up Corbin’s imaginal vocabulary include the Jungian analytic tradition through James Hillman, whose archetypal psychology explicitly adopted the Corbinian distinction between imaginary and imaginal as foundational; the contemporary psychedelic research community, which has recognised in the imaginal framework a pre-built vocabulary for the territory its clinical subjects report visiting; the remote viewing community, whose operational terminology converges with Corbinian vocabulary in ways that neither tradition anticipated; and the wider esotericist literature that has come to recognise Corbin as the bridge between the pre-modern Islamic philosophical tradition and the contemporary attempts to recover a non-materialist metaphysics that can accommodate the full range of human experience. Tom Cheetham, the most thorough contemporary expositor of Corbin for a general readership, has devoted a series of books to arguing that Corbin’s imaginal framework is the single most important resource for the repair of Western thought’s loss of the middle ontological term, and the argument is difficult to refute once one has encountered the territory Corbin mapped.
Honest Assessment
Corbin’s scholarly work is of the highest rank, and the Iranian tradition he recovered is a real intellectual achievement whose existence no serious scholar disputes. The philosophical positions he defended — that the imaginal is a real ontological domain, that perception of the imaginal requires the cultivation of a specific organ of the soul, that the figures encountered in the imaginal are not hallucinations or projections but real presences perceptible to the properly prepared — are positions the mainstream Western tradition is not prepared to accept, and the responsible reader should note that Corbin’s advocacy of these positions is in tension with the assumptions the secular academy has defended for at least three centuries. The tension is not resolvable by compromise. One either accepts that the imaginal is a domain susceptible to perception by a specific faculty of consciousness, or one does not. Corbin accepted it on the basis of his own reading of the tradition and, in later years, on what he described as his own experience of the territory the tradition had mapped. The contemporary reader who takes his work seriously is obliged to decide whether to accept the ontology along with the scholarship or whether to treat the scholarship as valuable historical recovery of a tradition whose metaphysical claims remain to be evaluated independently.
The rendering-model reading of Corbin takes the position that the tradition he recovered was mapping territory the rendering model independently describes, that the convergence between the two vocabularies is too precise to be accidental, and that taking the Iranian tradition seriously as empirical rather than as purely symbolic is consistent with taking adjacent lines of evidence for non-materialist metaphysics equally seriously. This is not a neutral reading, and a reader should be aware that it requires commitments outside the current secular consensus. What it offers in return is a sophisticated pre-modern philosophical vocabulary that maps territory the secular vocabulary cannot describe, and the recovery of that vocabulary is part of the larger project of reclaiming operational knowledge that the tradition Corbin served preserved while the Western tradition its contemporary inheritors inhabit was losing it.
References
Cheetham, Tom. The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. Spring Journal Books, 2003.
Cheetham, Tom. After Prophecy: Imagination, Incarnation, and the Unity of the Prophetic Tradition. Spring Journal Books, 2007.
Corbin, Henry. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabi. Translated by Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press, 1969.
Corbin, Henry. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shiʿite Iran. Translated by Nancy Pearson, Princeton University Press, 1977.
Corbin, Henry. “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, 1972, pp. 1–19.
Corbin, Henry. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Translated by Nancy Pearson, Shambhala, 1978.
Corbin, Henry. En islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques. 4 volumes, Gallimard, 1971–1972.
Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row, 1975.
Ibn ʿArabi, Muhyiddin. The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusūs al-Hikam). Translated by R.W.J. Austin, Paulist Press, 1980.
Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn. The Philosophy of Illumination. Edited and translated by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai, Brigham Young University Press, 1999.