From ‘Heidegger to Suhrawardi’ / Part 1

An Introduction to the thought of Henry Corbin [1]

~Samir Mahmoud 

One is overwhelmed when confronted by the sheer size of Corbin’s oeuvre and nothing less than a comprehensive survey of his work and biography can yield up the influences on his thought. Corbin referred to himself as a philosopher guided by the Spirit following it wherever it took him. Thus, his intellectual journey took him back and forth between different spiritual worlds. Perhaps his genius lies in his ability to “valorize,” as he describes it, the worlds of other cultures and previous eras over the “arc of a lifetime.”2

Corbin’s philosophy owes much to classical and medieval philosophy, occultism, the History of Religions (Religionswissenschaft), Lutheran theology, the Christian esoteric tradition (Jacob Boehme, Immanuel Swedenborg, etc…) and Islamic gnosis (Shi’ite, Ismaili, and Sufi), out of which Corbin produced a “brilliantly polished, absolutely authentic, and utterly irreproducible mixture.”3 It has been claimed that he was the greatest esoterist of the 20th century.4 Indeed, Corbin’s own life epitomizes the esoteric quest from the outer to the inner, from the literal to the symbolic, and from appearance to true Reality. It is the movement of the soul in its return to its original abode. Such is Corbin’s journey, “From Heidegger to Suhrawardi.”5 

The Function of the Dhikr

~Henry Corbin

Of all spiritual practices: meditation on the sayings of the Prophet and on the traditions of Sufism, meditated recitation of the Qoran, ritual Prayer, and so forth, the dhikr is the practice most apt to free spiritual energy, that is, to allow the particle of divine light which is in the mystic to rejoin its like.

The advantage of the dhikr is that it is not restricted to any ritual hour; its only limitation is the personal capacity of the mystic. It is impossible to study the question of colored aphorisms without knowing the spiritual exercise which is their source. Everything takes place, needless to say, in the ghayba, the suprasensory world; what is in question here is solely the physiology of the man of light. Najm Kobra set himself the task of describing the cases and circumstances in which the fire of the dhikr itself becomes the object of mystical apperception. As opposed to the fire of the Devil, which is a dark fire, the vision of which is accompanied by distress and a feeling of overwhelming oppression, the fire of the dhikr is visualized as a pure and ardent blaze, animated by a rapid upward movement. 

Knowledge and the Sacred [5]

~Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The divine man rides upon the glory of the sky where his form can no longer be discerned. This is called absorption into light. He fulfils his destiny. He acts in accordance with his nature. He is at one with God and man. For him all affairs cease to exist, and all things revert to their original state. This is called envelopment in darkness.

Turning to Western Asia, we discern the same concern for knowledge as the key to the attainment of the sacred and the doctrine that the substance of knowledge itself is sacred in Zoroastrianism and other Iranian religions such as Manichaeism which bases the whole of religion on the goal of freeing, through asceticism and knowledge, the particles of light scattered through the cosmos as a result of the sacrifice of the primordial man. Besides mystical tales of the quest of the gnostic after knowledge which abound in Mazdaean literature, the whole of Mazdaean angelology is based on the doctrine of illumination of the soul by various agencies of the Divine Intellect. 

UNDERSTANDING GOD

Ibn 'Arabi Heir to the Prophets

One of the major themes of Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings is the timehonored principle of the Judeo-Christian tradition that God created man in his own image.Muhammad’s version of this saying reads, “God created Adam in His own form.” 

I translate the Arabic word sura as “form”rather than “image” to retain its technical meaning. It is used in Islamic philosophy in the Aristotelian sense, in contradistinction to matter (the doctrine of hylomorphism,“matter-form-ism”). In Sufism, the same word is used to designate the appearance of things, in contrast to their “meaning” (ma‘na), which is their invisible reality, the spiritual substance that gives rise to their appearance in the outer world. Ibn ‘Arabi uses the word in both senses, though usually in the latter. 

As for the word “image,” it can serve well as a second translation for the word khayal,which we have already met as “imagination.” Khayal denotes not only our subjective power of imagining things, but also the objective reality of images in the world, such as reflections in a mirror.