Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi
A SHORT COURSE IN JUNE ON HENRY CORBIN’S GREAT BOOK
Celebrating a Master
Join us for a four-week study of what I think is Corbin’s finest and most accessible single volume. Comprised of revised versions of two lectures delivered at the Eranos Conference in 1955 and 1956, the text was published in French in 1958 and in English in 1969. A second English edition was published in 1998 under the title Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi.
This extraordinary book has influenced all manner of scholars, psychologists, poets, artists, musicians and spiritual seekers for six decades. Among those outside the world of Islamic studies and scholarship who have found his writings a source of inspiration we can note the following wildly diverse figures: Kathleen Raine, James Hillman, Charles Olson, Gloria Anzaldua, Trey Spruance, Diane di Prima, Elliot Wolfson, Chiara Bottici, George Quasha, Federico Campagna, and Jeffrey Kripal. I feel confident that Corbin would have been surprised, if indeed not always pleased, at the nature, the breadth and depth of his influence.
Hadi Fakhoury, whose own work on Corbin has been foundational, has noted that Corbin is not merely a commentator and scholar, but a primary and brilliantly original thinker. Much as you don’t read Heidegger to learn about the Presocratics, you don’t read Corbin to learn about Ibn ‘Arabi. Not because he’s wrong, but because he has his own project, worthy of study on its own terms. Corbin was a mystic, an ecumenical theologian and a philosopher. His overarching project as he saw it was two-fold: first, to resuscitate in the modern West the idea of theophanic Imagination as an organ of perception and a source of knowledge; and second, to thereby make evident the fundamental unity of the Religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Corbin’s grand psycho-cosmological vision at the very least provides a starting point outside of the now-outdated metaphysics that characterized several centuries of very problematic Western intellectual, economic and technological development. In my reading of his work Corbin’s notion of creative imagination and the cosmology it entails often anticipated, and is at least compatible with much that is best in 21st century thought. His vision is ecumenical, pluralist, feminist, open-ended, deeply ecological, and profoundly antithetical to fundamentalisms and authoritarianisms of every kind. My long engagement with his work has been transformative for me, and I know it can be for others.
The book is not easy to read. It is an initiatory text. In places it is very beautiful, even thrilling, for those who let it work on them. Corbin writes out of such a broad range of knowledge and associations that his references and allusions can be a bit much for the average reader, even someone with a broad education. And some of the best parts of this marvelous literary and spiritual experience are to be found in the footnotes. It requires a search for the golden nuggets. I know from experience that it can be read with profit by everyone willing to try. Simply keep reading until you find something that makes your heart leap.
Another thing I know for certain is that every time I read this book I find new connections, new analogies and new visions of human possibility. So even if you’ve read it already, I invite you to come along with us for what is always an adventure.
JUNE SHORT COURSE - FOUR WEEKS
CREATIVE IMAGINATION IN THE SUFISM OF IBN ‘ARABI
CLASS MEETS TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS 4-5:30pm NEW YORK TIME
JUNE 4 THROUGH JUNE 27
FULL TUITION $40 PER WEEK - $160 FOR THE COURSE
ONE HOUR LECTURE; 30 MINUTES Q&A
RECORDINGS INCLUDED - YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ATTEND LIVE
TO REGISTER CONTACT ME VIA EMAIL:
tcheetham@gmail.com
I ran across this paragraph from Daniela Cascella's book Chimeras in my nobebook just now:
"The fire of the encounter, sparked by a secret perception, moves a desire to write. Echoes of it may be heard in himma, a complex Arabic term translated by Henry Corbin in his stuty of Ibn ‘Arabî as the creative power of the heart. Creative, in the sense that it causes something that is already there to appear. So desire is not in lack, but in attention. It burns, has the ardour which finds knowledge in stillness though unheard and present correspondences, as Roberto Calasso articulates in Ka when he writes of the Vedic bandhu—the nexus, the bond: to know is to connect, and what is known as connection is known forever. Forever heard. In a bell, a voice, a stone, a loss, a chord, a composite, in wild kinship, yearning for the unheard and the implausible, here writing begins, my chimera.
This is very exciting news and after all the travels in high weirdness, there should be much refreshed insight to hand.