Henry Corbin Quotes

Henry Corbin

Prayer is the highest form, the supreme act of the Creative Imagination.

Henry Corbin
(Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi)

The individual is identified with the perishable; what can become eternal in the individual pertains exclusively to the separate and unique active Intelligence.

Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi)

To be acquainted with what is best and oldest in yourself, is to know yourself as you were, before the world was made, before you emerged into time.

Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi)

For the thinkers that are closest to Corbin's heart, there is no point to a philosophy that is not also a spirituality, which does not lead to a mystical vision. For Suhrawardi: "There is no true philosophy which does not reach completion in a metaphysic of ecstasy, nor mystical experience which does not demand a serious philosophical preparation.

Henry Corbin (The World Turned Inside Out)

The Image in question is not one that results from some previous external perception; it is an Image that precedes all perception, an a priori expressing the deepest being of the person... Each of us carries within himself an Image of his own world, his Imago mundi, and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out.

Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi)

That is why the theopathic maxim of the disciples of Ibn Arabi was not Ana'l Haqq "I am God " (Hallaj) , but Ana sirr al-l Haqq, "I am the secret of God," that is to say, the secret of love that makes His divinity dependent on me, because the hidden Treasure "yearned to be known" and it was necessary that beings exist in order that He might be known and know Himself.

Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi)

Ibn Arabi observes that the most perfect of mystic lovers are those who love God simultaneously for himself and for them- selves, because this capacity reveals in them the unification of their twofold nature (a resolution of the torn "conscience malheureuse" ). He who has made himself capable of such love is able to do so because he combines mystic knowledge ( ma rrifa ) with vision (shuhud)

Henry Corbin (Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi)

Consider the idea of a God who is essentially sadness and longing, yearning to reveal himself, to know himself through a being who knows him, thereby depending on that being who is still himself - yet who in this sense creates Him. Here we have a vision which has never been professed outside of a few errant knights of mysticism. To profess this essential bipolarity of the divine essence is not to confuse creator and created, creature and creation. It is to experience the irrevocable solidarity between the Fravarti and its Soul, in the battle they undertake for each other`s sake.

Henry Corbin (The Voyage and the Messenger, 1998)

Qadi Sa'id develops a concept of time which is allied to the ontology of the mundus imaginalis and of the subtle body. Each being has a quantum (miqdar) of its own time, a personal time, which behaves like a piece of wax when it is compressed or else stretched. The quantum is constant, but there is a time which is compact and dense, which is the time of the sensible world; a subtle time, which is the time of the 'imaginal world'; and a supra-subtle time, which is the time of the world of pure Intelligences. The dimensions of contemporaneity increase in relation to the 'subtlety' of the mode of existence: the quantum of time which is given to a spiritual individual can thus encompass the immensity of being, and hold both past and future in the present.

Henry Corbin (Cyclical Time and the Ismaili Gnosis)

Relevant Pages

Sufism
Ibn-Arabi
Western Esotericism

Henry Corbin Biography

Henry Corbin portrait

Born: 1903
Died: 1978

Henry Corbin was a Iranologist, theologian and philosoper. He is best known for his influential role in the study of Islamic philosophy and mysticism.

Notable Works

Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (1960)
Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi. (1969)