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The World Turned Inside Out:
Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism, Tom Cheetham
Woodstock (Connecticut): Spring Journal Books, 2003
Pierre Lory
The
thought of Henry Corbin has already inspired several books focusing
on its general significance for philosophy and/or religious thought.
We remember of course La logique des Orientaux: Henry Corbin et la
science des formes (1983) by Christian Jambet, which compared the
“Oriental” positions
analyzed
by Corbin with those of various Western philosophers, such as Kant,
Hegel, and Marx. Daryush Shageyan highlighted its specific importance
for understanding Iranian thought in Henry Corbin: La topographie
spirituelle de l’Islam iranien (1990). Several articles, academic
papers and essays (thus G. Giuliano, Il
Pellegrinaggio in Oriente di Henry Corbin, 2003), have been written
on other aspects of Corbin’s work, references to which can be found
on the website <amiscorbin.com>.
As for the book by Tom Cheetham,
it springs from an original viewpoint. The author immediately declares
that he is not an Orientalist but was initially interested in philosophy
and depth psychology. He surveys Henry Corbin’s academic career, without
spending too much time on it, referring essentially to the data published
in the Cahiers de l’Herne volume, Henry Corbin (1984),
or explained by Daryush Shageyan (op. cit., pp. 13-35) and Seyyed Hossein
Nasr (in Traditional Islam in the Modern World, 1987, chap. 17).
Cheetham’s philosophical outline begins with the Heideggerian basis
of the question of Being: thinking represents an act of presence in
the world, an act of being. The outer world does not determine the nature
of human consciousness, but the degree of commitment of human consciousness
gives meaning to the world. What is primary is the nature of this act
and not the social or other outer conditions.
However, the position of
Corbin is by no means identical to that of Heidegger. The latter considered
the being of humanity as insuperably limited by death (the Zum-Tode-sein).
For Corbin, this position of principle is itself determined historically.
The act of consciousness, among the authors for whom Henry Corbin is
acting as the exegete, has a broader scope. It accounts for an experience
of being which manifests transcendence. Here, of course, opens a basic
divide that separates the “Oriental” authors studied by Henry Corbin
and so-called modern thought. It is in this sense – and only in this
sense – that Corbin challenges the predominance granted to historical
circumstances. The “Oriental” philosopher or theosopher is no longer
entirely determined by the flux of history, since a decision of consciousness
defines the boundaries of that which is called past or present, reality
or illusion, and life or death.
Cheetham
then develops the theme of ancient Iranian thought – Mazdaism, essentially
– and the “combat for the world” that it implies. He also provides a
short outline of the fundamental elements of esoteric thought in Islam,
notably Shi‘ism. The following chapters mainly analyze what could be called Corbin’s phenomenology.
This concerns how phenomena appear, never the phenomena as such. In
his research in Islamic philosophy, Henry Corbin notes a “gnostic” perception
of the universe. Gnostics discover a universe hidden to other people,
because gnostics make themselves present to it. This discovery takes
place by means of the “Return” (Arab. ta’wil) to a language which
itself is multiple. This language is that of philosophy, but also and
especially that of the text of Revelation, with respect to Muslim thinkers.
Meditation on the sacred text lets deeper meanings appear in function
of the intensity of the act of being of the meditator, and at the same
time, these new readings transform and
spiritualize
it. The same comment can be valid mutatis mutandis for reading
the Book of the Universe, the purpose of the archetypal Art that was
alchemy.
This
reference to alchemy opens the way to approaching the modalities of
the hermeneutics brought into play. This not only is conceptual, but
also involves the imagination, the creative faculty that Corbin has
made explicit in many passages of his writings. Muslim gnostics speak
of “hidden” worlds; this does not mean that they are all invisible.
The creative imagination allows one to gain access to them, because
it opens precisely in the ontologically determined place where Ideas
take form, where angelic spirits become perceptible by means of visions,
dreams and imaginative intuition (p. 66 ff.). The visionary images give
an understanding – by a symbolic route – of the events of life; through
this, they transform the person who is experiencing them. They are not
merely fleeting visual images. They are true “encounters with the angel”.
Here we touch upon one of
the themes that Corbin has most strongly emphasized. Monotheism offers
its adepts the vision of an immense and cosmic creative God, creating
simultaneously an immense distance between believers and their Lord.
This “paradox of monotheism” induces the necessity of conceiving intermediaries:
and it is indeed this necessity of angelology that Henry Corbin stresses
in several of his works (p. 162). The experience of the mystic is first
the juncture with the highest dimension, the most spiritual dimension
of the mystic’s own being, with the angel which is, in a manner of speaking,
his or her celestial counterpart. Moreover, precisely this encounter
with one’s own angel permits the establishment of a truly personal consciousness
(pp. 86, 95). Through this experience, the human person is capable of
knowing the personal Face of the cosmic God. However, this can only
take place at the end of a long pilgrimage, of a long transformation
permitting the manifestation of the Face of God, of his outer appearance
manifested in the form of an angel, which is found to coincide with
the innermost dimension of the human soul. This reversal of human consciousness,
expressed by Henry Corbin in several essential texts (pp. 59, 121),
is the very source of the title of Cheetham’s essay.
Tom
Cheetham’s book seems overall a very useful and salutary work. It enables
the reader to obtain a clear picture of the philosophical propositions
of Henry Corbin, and this without having to detour through the study
of medieval Islamic authors analyzed in the approximately twenty volumes of his works. Of
course, it bypasses the innumerable nuances to be made between the respective
and often-divergent positions of the “Oriental” thinkers discussed –
Avicenna and Suhrawardī, Ibn ‘Arabī and Mullā Sadrā
– but this is not the place to mention them all. Cheetham’s clear and
concise style, leaving to citations a useful but not invasive place,
gives an account of Corbin’s thought with an evident sympathy for its
principles and conclusions, while retaining the distance of an essayist
who does not identify himself with his subject.
Translated by Christine Rhone
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