An Introduction to the thought of Henry Corbin
~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.”
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.” It has been claimed that he was the greatest esoterist of the 20th century. 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.”
Underlying this passage is a journey from one world to another, from “our contemporary, post-Nietzschean world to the ‘perennial’ worlds of Iranian Theosophy.” “Persia was right there in the centre, as median and mediating world,” Corbin said. It was in the spiritual world of Iran that Corbin found his home in the companion of Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi the Iranian born theosopher of Illumination, “The Imam of the Persian Platonists” or the Oriental Theosopher as Corbin would call him. Suhrawardi would be Corbin’s closest companion for the rest of his life. With Suhrawardi’s Hikmat al-Ishraq, a book Corbin translated as The Oriental Theosophy, “a Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia,” Corbin’s “spiritual destiny” was “sealed.” Suhrawardi was the self-proclaimed “resurrector of the Illuminationist Theosophy of the ancient Persian sages.” The combination of a Platonism of the Greeks with the Zoroastrian angelology and philosophy of Light and Darkness of Ancient Persia left a lasting impression on the young Corbin who had by then already considered himself part of a spiritual fellowship, “a new spiritual chivalry that unites Hermetic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Jewish, and Gnostic theosophers of the West with the Oriental theosophers of Iranian Islam. Luther, Swedenborg, Hamann, Barth, and Heidegger were suddenly in the company of each other and in the company of an Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra.
However, despite Corbin’s love for Iran, which he described as the “homeland to philosophers and poets,” he would forever carry with him another integral encounter, this one with the “old Germany” that was also a “homeland to philosophers and poets.” Behind the towering figure of Heidegger, who was extremely influential on Corbin’s thought, stand the no less important figures of Luther, Hamann, Swedenborg, and Barth. One may conclude that by the time Corbin’s journey took him to the Orient, his theosophical vision was “German in provenance;” this was the period of Corbin the “Protestant theologian.” Indeed the sense of urgency and the apocalyptic vision one finds in all of Corbin’s work owes much to Schleiermacher and Barth, Otto and Heidegger, Jung and Swedenborg. One finds the seeds of Corbin’s philosophy in his early transition “from fin-de-siècle French Catholicism to an idiosyncratic, Weimar-era, radicalized German Lutheranism.” The key influences of Hamann, Luther, and Heidegger stand out.
If we consider Corbin’s contributions to Hic et Nunc (1932-1934), it reveals strong Barthian influences (early Barth). The general tenor of a contribution made by Corbin reveals a rejection of traditional “religious thought” in favor of a notion of “witness.” The editorial urged substituting Franz von Baader’s cogitor, “I am thought,” for the Cartesian cogito. In a similar vain, Corbin called for a philosophy-theology of response to the Divine call. “Spirit can only reveal; I can only listen.” Corbin invokes a non-historical notion of resurrection as the affirmation of the ever present “New Human.” Finally, Corbin’s final article in this journal called for a Christian philosophy as an encounter with the Word.
The encounter with the Word was clearly a Lutheran theme; the engagement as a listener with the spoken Word is the only true historical reality. The influence of Luther was pivotal for Corbin’s philosophical preparation; for it was Luther who taught Corbin the crucial fact of Verbum solum habemus (we have only the Word). Corbin writes,
Comprehension is faith: the “comprehending” of faith, the “hermeneia” that makes true exegesis possible, is truth; and as truth it is the topology of the letter, a modification realized through each one of the faithful, by and for faith. The letter spiritually understood realizes itself, gains its actual reality, in faith, and is fides Christi, that is to say, the reality of the justification, which is realized in the theologia crucis, itself the negation of man. Hermeneutics is thus the actual reality of anthropology. A text is not given, an In-Itself, but a For-Us. And it is by faith that it is for-us and really exists.
Luther had also taught Corbin the “revelatory function” of the significatio passiva-the role of passive meaning in the understanding and interpretation of the Word. This term figures prominently in Corbin’s study of medieval philosophy and represents a fundamental turning point in his understanding of ‘being’ and ‘knowing.’ In response to the dilemma posed by the Psalm verse “In justitia tua libera me,” Luther underwent a moment of revolt and despair. What relation was there between justice in this verse and his deliverance? In a sudden flash, he understood that this attribute of God, this quality of justice, cannot be understood as a quality we confer upon God, but it must be understood in its significatio passiva. That is to say that God’s justice is to be understood in as much it occurs within me. Corbin,
The Divine names are not the attributes conferred by the theoretical intellect upon the divine Essence as such; they are essentially the vestiges of their action in us, of the action by which they fulfill their being through our being…In other words, we discover them only insofar as they occur and are made within us, according to what they make of us, insofar as they are our passion.
Luther had also taught Corbin the “revelatory function” of the significatio passiva-the role of passive meaning in the understanding and interpretation of the Word. This term figures prominently in Corbin’s study of medieval philosophy and represents a fundamental turning point in his understanding of ‘being’ and ‘knowing.’ In response to the dilemma posed by the Psalm verse “In justitia tua libera me,” Luther underwent a moment of revolt and despair. What relation was there between justice in this verse and his deliverance? In a sudden flash, he understood that this attribute of God, this quality of justice, cannot be understood as a quality we confer upon God, but it must be understood in its significatio passiva. That is to say that God’s justice is to be understood in as much it occurs within me. Corbin,
The Divine names are not the attributes conferred by the theoretical intellect upon the divine Essence as such; they are essentially the vestiges of their action in us, of the action by which they fulfill their being through our being… In other words, we discover them only insofar as they occur and are made within us, according to what they make of us, insofar as they are our passion.
Therefore, the divine attributes cannot be understood (modus intelligendi) except in relation to us, our mode of being, (modus essendi.) This relationship is what makes possible “an Understanding that is not a theoretical inspection but a passion lived and shared with the understood object, a com-passion, a sympathy.”
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