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Title: Alone with the Alone by Henry Corbin, Ralph Manheim ISBN: 0-691-05834-2 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 02 March, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.06 (17 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Rethinking Imagination
Comment: This is an important study of imagination in Ibn Arabi by a significant philosopher-Orientalist. Corbin differentiates imagination from mere "fantasy," an "exercise of thought without foundation in nature." Thus what he has in mind when speaking of imagination is quite different from what we usually associate with the term. Cosmic Imagination is the creative power that gives birth to the sensory world: God imagines the cosmos and brings it into being. Imagining is a creative act which at the Divine level is a form of genesis where God draws out existence from Himself. This view stands in contrast to creation ex nihilo, a theological view partly responsible, in Corbin's view, for the degeneration of imagination into fantasy. But it is not only God who creates through Imagination, but man as well. The God that man creates is a theophony of man's active imagination, which is merely an organ of "absolute theopanic Imagination" (takhayyl mutlaq). This is another way of saying that God imagines Himself or rather creates an image of Himself through man, and that this imagining is a part of a larger Divine Imagination. No two images of God created by mortal imagination are exactly alike.
Most of the work is based on Ibn Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam, but as Chittick has noted, determining where Ibn Arabi ends and Corbin begins is not a simple task.
Rating: 5
Summary: Remarkable insight to understand Ibn Arabi
Comment: Ibn Arabi is very difficult and one requires lot of attention and background in sufi reading to grasp and untie the knots of his mystic thoughts. This book has done a good job in this direction.
Rating: 5
Summary: breathtaking
Comment: One of the best books on esoteric Persian thought I've ever read; immensely scholarly and yet largely readable, though very rich and thick with insight in places you'll want to slow down and really absorb. (A newcomer to Ibn 'Arabi's writings, I'm reviewing this book from a depth-psychological point of view.)
If you've read my other reviews you know I'm a relentless critic of unreadable writing, much of which is symptomatic of a narcissistic unavailability better dealt with in therapy than through a publisher or fan club. Corbin is not easy to follow in places, but it's the concentration of the material that makes for more careful study--and makes more careful study worthwhile.
I was particularly moved by the image of the saddened God breathing out a sigh at being unknown, a sigh that made space for humans to reflect God back to God and thereby become the "secret treasure." Corbin's criticism of "becoming one with God" mirrors Buber's of "doctrines of absorption": both praise a dialog between person and the Divine rather than a reduction of one to the other.
Note to students of James Hillman: while many of Hillman's ideas can be found here (the heart as an organ of soulful perception, for instance), Ibn 'Arabi makes a clear, non-Hillmanic distinction between Forms (Images) of God and the ineffable true God that shines through the Forms like light through stained glass. This distinction does not exist for archetypal psychology, which collapses the archetypal image into the archetype itself and regards extra-psychic activities as outside its purview.
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Title: Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth by Henry Corbin, Nancy Pearson ISBN: 0691018839 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 August, 1989 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy by Henry Corbin, Joseph H. Rowe, Jacob Needleman ISBN: 1556432690 Publisher: North Atlantic Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin, Nancy Pearson, Zia I. Khan ISBN: 0930872487 Publisher: Omega Publications Pub. Date: May, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Ibn-Al-Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom (Classics of Western Spirituality Series) by R. W. Austin ISBN: 0809123312 Publisher: Paulist Press Pub. Date: November, 1980 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Journey to the Lord of Power: A Sufi Manual on Retreat by Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, Ian Arabi, Ibn Arabi, Rabia T. Harris ISBN: 0892810181 Publisher: Inner Traditions Intl Ltd Pub. Date: March, 1990 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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