Alone with the Alone – Creative Imagination in the S′fism of Ibn `Arab′: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn 'Arabī (Mythos: The Princeton/Bollingen Series in World Mythology)

Sophionic knowledge and love is explained here , with its roots in Avesta .

Second copy....brilliant read if it's your thing!!

This is a beautiful book, very deep.

The year 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary not just of the moon landing, but of the publication of a book whose arrival in the English-speaking world could be described as a visitation from another planet – or, to use its author’s own phrase, from a lost continent. Henry Corbin (1903–1978) was a French philosopher and mystical theologian (or, to use another of his favourite terms, a ‘theosopher,’ a seeker of divine wisdom) who devoted much of his scholarly life to the exegesis of esoteric Islamic texts. But his impact outside of that somewhat rarefied field spread when he started lecturing at Eranos, an annual symposium held in Switzerland from the Thirties onwards to continue the work of the psychotherapist C.G. Jung in studying the relationship of spirituality to the soul. There he met and engaged with other like-minded scholars such as the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, the scholar of Kabbalism Gershom Scholem and the post-Jungian archetypal psychologist James Hillman, among others. In 1958 Corbin published L’Imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn ’Arabī, a study of the thirteenth century Andalusian mystic, based on lectures he had given earlier at Eranos. The English translation appeared eleven years later; and constitutes a giant leap for (western) mankind’s understanding of the relationship between mind, matter and the imagination. Corbin argues that, whereas in the West the predominant religious orthodoxy is that God created the world out of nothing, there is an alternative esoteric tradition that God imagined the world into being “from within Himself, from the eternal virtualities and potencies of His own being”; so that creation is a ‘theophany,’ a revelation of the divine: “As such, creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic Imagination.” The theophanic creation is also threefold: between the spiritual and material worlds there is an intermediate world of archetypal images, which can be perceived by those who seek to know other worlds (‘gnostics’) with the faculty that Corbin, following Jung, calls Active Imagination, a reflection in the human being of the divine imaginative power: “The Active Imagination in the gnostic is likewise a theophanic Imagination”; but in our ‘laicised’ world its power has become so degraded that the term ‘imaginary’ has come to mean an unreal fantasy. For this reason Corbin would eventually coin a new word – ‘imaginal’ – to describe those forms which subsist in the intermediate world; and that world itself he would call in Latin the mundus imaginalis, translating directly the Arabic term ’ālam al-mithāl. In his book on Ibn ’Arabī, however, he use the neologism Imaginatrix to designate the imaginative Dignity or Presence with which a human being can be transmuted into “a theophanic figure” in the eyes of the lover; so that the beloved becomes the means by which we can see God, the ‘real’ Beloved. It is also the means for God to manifest Himself: “He can do so only in the figure which at once reveals Him and veils Him, but without which He would be deprived of all concrete existence, of all relatedness.” The Imaginatrix thus “opens the way to the transcendent dimension”. It is the faculty “which at once produces symbols and apprehends them” – and here Corbin makes a crucial distinction between allegory and symbolism: “allegory is a rational operation, implying no transition either to a new plane of being or to a new depth of consciousness; it is a figuration, at an identical level of consciousness, of what might very well be known in a different way. The symbol announces a plane of consciousness distinct from that of rational evidence; it is the ‘cipher’ of a mystery, the only means of saying something that cannot be apprehended in any other way; a symbol is never ‘explained’ once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again”. Corbin’s ‘theophanism’ is as far removed from the allegorical approach to images and figures (explaining them away) as it is to literalism (“the anthropomorphism that attributes human predicates to the Godhead”): Theophanic visions have their place in an intermediate world, which can only be perceived by the Imaginatrix: one “in which occur visions, apparitions, and in general all the symbolic histories which reveal only their material aspect to perception or sensory representation”. These symbolic histories include the sacred stories of the prophets, “which have meaning because they are theophanies; whereas on the plane of sensory evidence on which is enacted what we call History, the meaning, that is, the true nature of those stories, which are essentially ‘symbolic stories,’ cannot be apprehended.” For Sufis such as Ibn ’Arabī, as for Islam in general, Jesus is the penultimate prophet; but Corbin, though a Protestant Christian, always seeks within the Abrahamic faiths those mystical or esoteric traditions which enable him to find an inner harmony within what are otherwise irreconcilable differences of dogma (“To the gnostic all faiths are theophanic visions in which he contemplates the Divine Being”). This leads Corbin to one of his most important insights, contrasting the mainstream interpretation of the Incarnation (“a unique material fact situated among the chronological facts of history”) with the mystical conception of God appearing to us in the only form that we can recognise, “an Apparition which is a shining of the Godhead through the mirror of humanity, after the manner of the light which becomes visible only as it takes form and shines through the figure of a stained-glass window.” We see this divine apparition with “the theophanic Imagination” which is invested in “the consciousness of the individual believer”; and it leads us each to our own “celestial assumption.” For the divine is always descending to Earth; and we are always yearning to ascend to Heaven: “That is why the other world already exists in this world; it exists in every moment, in relation to every being.” The theophanic Imagination or Imaginatrix also sees God in the beauty of the Beloved, who is no less a “concrete person,” but one transfigured by “the light of another world” – an angelic world: “Beauty is the supreme theophany, but it reveals itself as such only to a love which it transfigures. Mystic love is the religion of Beauty, because Beauty is the secret of theophanies and because as such it is the power which transfigures. Mystic love is as far from negative asceticism as it is from the aestheticism or libertinism of the possessive instinct.” This mystic love also extends to the beauty of the natural world which is far from being merely a ‘material world,’ with its implication of consumerism destroying the environment:“Salvation does not consist in denying and doing away with the manifest world, but in recognizing it for what it is and esteeming it as such: not a reality beside and in addition to essential divine reality, but precisely a theophany, and the world would not be theophany if it were not Imagination.” If it enables us to love the manifest world and the manifest beings in it, the Imaginatrix also “enables us to understand the meaning of death, in the esoteric as well as the physical sense: an awakening, before which you are like someone who merely dreams that he wakes up.” For dreaming, like dying, is also an imaginative, intermediate state between our everyday waking consciousness and the true, mystical awakening: “It would be difficult to situate the science of the Imagination any higher.” It would be equally difficult, therefore, to over-estimate the devastating consequences of the gradual loss in the West of this intermediate realm and the degradation of its organ of knowledge, the Imaginatrix. Corbin has shown elsewhere in his writings how it corresponds to the loss of the threefold model of the human being – as made of body, soul and spirit – and its replacement by a dualistic model of body and soul, or mind and matter. We know that we perceive material things with our physical senses and abstract ideas with our intellect; but we no longer recognise the creative power of prayer as “the highest form, the supreme act” of the Imagination. The degradation of the Imaginatrix means that we lose sight of the realm that bridges Heaven and Earth, which becomes a lost continent: “The magnitude of the loss becomes apparent when we consider that this intermediate world is the realm where the conflict which split the Occident, the conflict between theology and philosophy, between faith and knowledge, between symbol and history, is resolved.” The consequences of this “metaphysical tragedy” are the profanation of human love (dramatised in that great medieval story of Tristan and Isolde) and the desecration (because of its de-sacralisation) of the natural environment: when the soul becomes a Waste Land, its effects spread into the material world; but we see only the physical symptoms, not the metaphysical cause.

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