The ‘Ālam al-Mithāl

Henry Corbin & the Ṣūfī Ibn ‘Arabī

This essay serves as a first step in a longer survey on archetypal cosmology

and the archetypal field, one drawn from both contemporary thought and
precursors from many mystical traditions. While the language may appear
academic at times, this is far from my intent and owes itself only to the
overwhelming nature of the subject at hand. If anything, the focus of the
subject is personal revelation. My hope is that through the limits of such
language I might accidentally draw, however humbly, from a hidden lineage
of precursors: I think here of Walter Benjamin, Bishop Berkeley, Jorge Luis
Borges and, most directly, Henry Corbin; the French orientalist and
phenomenologist whose work is central to our brief article today. Whatever
their differences, a singular eccentric and original imagination is the
foundation to each, an ecstatic leaning disguised in scholarship and
intellectual discipline. My own introduction to Henry Corbin is quite recent.
Nonetheless, his writing introduced itself with such a rare surge of familiarity
and feeling that I am struck thinking of these others as some long lost guild.
One of the many directions of Corbin’s work is the reintegration of the
contemplative intellect into the mystic and prophetic traditions. Corbin might
even trace this lineage further back, following the principle of isnād, the
naming of “transhistorical” contemporaries, to the Iranian master Suhrawardī
and his theosophy of Light (ḥikmat al-Ishrāq). As Corbin explains: “the effects
of Suhrawardī’s theosophy of Light have been felt in Iran down to our own
time. One of its essential features is that it makes philosophy and mystical
experience inseparable: a philosophy that does not culminate in a
metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation.” In the Iranian mysticism of
Suhrawardī and in that the great mystic Ibn ‘Arabī, this idea of a
contemplative intellect is invoked as one of the many Figures in a complex
Angelology of subsistent images. This Angelology, central to Corbin’s work
and to our discussion today, can be described in his language as the
intermediate state of the “creative Imagination,” of which the contemplative
intellect is but a manifestation. It can also be described as the archetypal
field, through which both the artistic process and the mystic tradition so
arises. Throughout his writing, it is this principle of creative Imagination
which Corbin holds as the singular conduit of all spiritual experience and
phenomena.

“Here we shall not be dealing with imagination in the usual sense of the
world: neither with fantasy, profane or otherwise, nor with the organ which
produces imaginings identified with the unreal,” writes Corbin. Rather, we
speak of “a universe endowed with a perfectly ‘objective’ existence and
perceived precisely through the Imagination.” As in certain aspects of
Tibetan Buddhism such as Dzogchen, this organ of Imagination is the direct
doorway into, and state of, the archetypal experience.

Without question, Henry Corbin’s work is essential to discussing a

contemporary frame for an archetypal cosmology. The key essential ideas of
his thought that fit our discussion are many: his understanding of the Arabic
term ta’wīl as a means to invoke archetypal experience, his explanation of
Ṣūfī Angelology as correspondent to archetypal beings, and, lastly, his
knowledge and interpretation of Khiḍr, the invisible master of the mystic Ibn
‘Arabī and of all those who have no earthly master.

The Ta’wīl and Esoteric Meaning

“The ta’wīl is essential symbolic understanding,” writes Corbin in his essay

Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī, “the transmutation of
everything visible into symbols, the intuition of an essence or person in an
Image which partakes neither of universal logic nor of sense perception, and
which is the only means of signifying what is to be signified.”
The ta’wīl is essential to comprehending a break from rationalist empirical
understanding to that of the mystic experience. Entering the ta’wīl is to exit
the sharī’a- the law, the literalist religion. That is, to enter into myth and
symbol is to experience a language distinct from rational evidence. It is
important to note the palpable anticlerical nature throughout Corbin’s
writing: he interprets the mystic Ibn ‘Arabī as the great opponent of the
literalist Islam and almost purposefully neglects any writings that might
contradict such a reading. It is an interpretation, according to his biographer
Tom Cheetham, which created much animosity for Corbin in scholarly circles.
In my own reading of Corbin and, in what I believe would agree with Tom
Cheetham, it is essential to everything that follows that Corbin’s interest
simply does not lie in the historical Ibn ‘Arabī but, rather, in another more
essential, “Transhistorical” manifestation who he experiences in dialogue
with his own esoteric vision. Corbin’s writing is radically dismissive of any
rational historicist investigations. Such a dismissal is fundamental to his
philosophy as is his deep seated anticlerical theology, for both are at the
very heart of mystic process and at the heart of his understanding of
phenomenology.

“Christian ‘faith’ is pistis, a believing that something was, is, and will be so.
Judaic ‘faith’ is emunah, a trusting in the Covenant. Islam means
‘submission’ to the will of Allah, as expressed through his messenger
Mohammad, ‘the seal of the prophets.’ But Gnosis is not a believing that, a
trusting in, or a submission. Rather, it is a mutual knowing, and a
simultaneous being known, of and by God,” writes the American scholar
Harold Bloom.

Corbin’s interpretation of the ta’wīl, etymologically the carrying back of a

thing to its principle, is that of a Gnostic break from the literalist faith, a
fundamental “symbolic exegesis” that transcends and contradicts the
rational historical meanings through a mutual knowing. Writes Corbin: “All
minds have not the same degree of discernment: to some men the literal
aspect, the zāhir, is addressed, while others are capable of understanding
the hidden meaning, the bāṭin.” The basic understanding is
phenomenological and naturalist and most importantly, inherently not
supernatural. Corbin writes of “the reality of power to which priesthood lays
claim but ultimately fails to obtain, whereupon it projects a fiction of that
same power into the realm of the supernatural (the abstract monotheist
god).” Religion gives subjectivity to otherness, to a supernatural God of
superstition through faith and submission. The mysticism of Ibn ‘Arabī gives
subjectivity to world itself through the creative imagination, through mutual
knowing, through what Corbin calls Ibn ‘Arabī’s “theophanic prayer.”

It is a multidimensional structure of existence not unlike the Dzogchen

interpretation of the kayas in Tibetan Buddhism: a concurrent
multidimensionality, dependent on the cultivation on one’s own awareness to
perceive these interwoven realms. One does not enter the archetypal realm
in the sense that they leave somewhere else behind. Rather, one enters the
archetypal realm through the doorway of one’s own perception. One
integrates the intermediate space of the archetypal field (the Sambogakaya)
into their intrinsic awareness. Existence in the world of everyday
appearances (Nirmanakaya) never ceases. The nihilistic Eastern
philosophical frame of appearances as illusion does not carry over here.
Further more, the experience of the archetypal field is itself a doorway into
the Dharmakaya, the realm of pure unmitigated awareness, emptiness itself,
openness and space. One does not leave to go to the Dharmakaya. Rather
the dharmakaya exists concurrently and through the Sambogakaya and the
Nirmanakaya. All manifestation in the Sambogakaya and Nirmanakaya arises
from the un-manifested emptiness of the Dharmakaya. The ongoing process
of holding this state of multidimensionality is seen as liberatory in the
Dzogchen perspective. There are correspondences in the work of Heidegger,
Corbin’s contemporary and influence, as well as those that followed in
existential phenomenology. Most importantly to our present discussion, we
see this same process of Gnosis and multidimensional integration in the
“theophanic” prayer of Ibn ‘Arabī.

Corbin writes:

“The ‘Self’ is a characteristic term by which a mystic spirituality underlines

its dissociation from the aims and implications of denominational
dogmatisms. But it enables these dogmatisms to argue in return that this
Self, experienced as the pure act of existing, is only a natural phenomenon
and consequently has nothing in common with a supernatural encounter with
the revealed God, attainable only within the reality of the Church. The term
‘Self,’ as we shall employ it here, implies neither the one nor the other
acceptance. It refers neither to the impersonal Self, to the pure act of
existing attainable through efforts comparable to the techniques of yoga, nor
to the Self of the psychologists. The word will be employed here solely in the
sense given it by Ibn ‘Arabī and numerous other Ṣūfī theosophists when they
repeated the famous sentence: He who knows himself knows his Lord.
Knowing one’s self, to know one’s God; knowing one’s Lord, to know one’s
self. This Lord is not the impersonal self, nor is it the God of dogmatic
definitions, self-subsisting without relation to me, without being experienced
by me. He is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the
knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me;
it is alone with him alone, in this syzygic unity, that it is possible to say thou.
And such is the reciprocity in which flowers the creative Prayer which Ibn
‘Arabī teaches us to experience simultaneously as the Prayer of God and the
Prayer of man.”

The ‘Ālam al-Mithāl

The mysticism of Ibn ‘Arabī draws from the Neoplatonism of Avicenna,
defeated in the West but carried forth in Iran in the work of Suhrawardī and
his theosophy of Light (ḥikmat al-Ishrāq), and further on into the Ṣūfīsm of
the present. According to Corbin: “Iran moreover, knows no development
corresponding to the disappearance, with all it implied, of the Animae
coelestes, the hierarchy of the Angelic Souls rejected by Averroism. Along
with Animae coelestes Iranian Islam preserved the objective existence of the
intermediate world, the world of subsistent Images (’ālam al-mithāl) or
immaterial bodies.” Suhrawardī, contemporary of Ibn ‘Arabī, called this the
cosmic Intermediate Orient.

Thus we might see our discussion turn back directly to the archetypal realm
of experience.
In contemporary thought, the notion of an archetypal realm relates most
directly to Jung’s hypothesis of a collective unconscious. In the earlier
Platonic-Pythagorean tradition, the archetypes were seen as essential
metaphysical structures of the world. Those of the 20th century,
corresponding to mainstream Jungian ideas, are most often seen as only
essential psychological forms. While it is well worth noting CG Jung’s own
shift back toward the Platonic vision late in his own life, this general shift in
perspective embodies much of what might be said about the trajectory of
human consciousness. In both the modern scientific world view and in that of
the rational organized religion, subjectivity resides in the human being. The
world itself, once rife with spiritual and symbolic meaning, becomes
objectified, spiritually inactive. Only man has consciousness, the world itself
is disenchanted. Concerning the world’s major religious traditions, it is only
in the outliers and, often, the heretics, those that fall under the category of a
truly Gnostic or mystic tradition, that we might again find the appearance of
this embodied and conscious world view. In Suhrawardī’s theosophy of Light
and, with that, Ibn ‘Arabī’s mystic experience, we see an unbroken
understanding of the Platonic conception of the archetype continuing on to
the present day with our reading of Henry Corbin. In the Ṣūfī understanding,
it is languaged as the ‘ālam al-mithāl: the world of real and subsistent
images. As such, it should be noted that in Corbin’s view, by the 20th
Century, the true expression of the archetypal experience had fallen “only to
the poets.”

Corbin writes: “In the Suhrawardīan theosophy of Light, the entire Platonic
theory of Ideas is interpreted in terms of Zoroastrian angelology. Expressing
itself as a metaphysic of essences, the Suhrawardīan dualism of Light and
Darkness precludes the possibility of a physics in the Aristotelian sense of
the word. A physics of Light can only be an angelology, because Light is life,
and Life is essentially Light.” Over the course of his writing, we are
introduced to the many hierarchies of angels, the “intermediate supra
sensory world where the Active Imagination perceives events, Figures,
presences directly, unaided by the senses.” Of these Animae coelestes,
Corbin writes chiefly of their relationship to the direct Imagination, the active
Intelligence (of which the contemplative intellect is qualified as prophetic
spirit) and, further on, to the dialectic of love and the divine feminine.

Writes Corbin:

“Since these Angel-Souls (Animae coelestes) communicate to the Heavens

the movement of their desire, the orbits of the heavenly bodies are
characterized by an aspiration of love forever renewed and forever unstilled.
They are indeed Imagination in its pure state since they are freed from the
infirmities of sense perception. They are par excellence the Angels of this
intermediate world where prophetic inspiration and theophanic visions have
their place; their world is the world of symbols and of symbolic knowledge,
the world to which Ibn ‘Arabī penetrated with ease from his earliest years.”

The Disciple of Khiḍr

So we might ask, what is the means of experience then of these archetypal
structures?
Ibn ‘Arabī himself answers that first we cast off the gatekeepers of
knowledge, whether they be personified or simply the concrete frame of our
own limited experience. Like so many secret traditions and teachings, the
ta’wīl of Ibn ‘Arabī is an initiation into self-mastery and self awareness. Of
one his own books, Mawāqi’ al-nujūm (the orbits of the stars), he writes: “It is
a book which enables a beginner to dispense with a master, or rather: it is
indispensable to the master.”

Self awareness and mastery arises only through a direct participatory

process. There can be no authority, even if that authority is simply the fixed
authority of objectivity that inhibits such a mutual knowing. Corbin writes:
“Each human being is oriented toward a quest for his personal invisible
guide, or he entrusts himself to the collective, magisterial authority as the
intermediary between himself and Revelation.” In Ṣūfīsm, those who refuse
to follow any earthly master are called Uwaysīs and are said to follow an
invisible master. It is the “co- responsibility for personal destiny assumed by
the alone with the Alone,” in Corbin’s words.
In my own reading here, I would draw a direct correspondence to the
Kashmir Shaivite understanding of the “Guru Principle” in which the true
Guru is no longer the external master but, rather, the master personified
within the Self. It is necessary not to misinterpret such an idea of a
personified “invisible guide” or inner Guru as a dualistic act, such as the
Incarnation or the personification of the monotheistic God. Rather, it is
nothing if not Gnostic and participatory act of creative Imagination, that
integrates the mystic into a mutual knowing. The inner guide is the
archetypal manifestation of knowing.
Writes Corbin: “Ibn ‘Arabī was, and never ceased to be the disciple of an
invisible master, a mysterious prophet figure to whom a number of
traditions, both significant and obscure, lend features which relate him, or
tend to identify him, with Elijah, with St George, and still others. Ibn ‘Arabī
was above all the disciple of Khiḍr.”

The questions of “Who is Khiḍr? What does it mean to be a disciple of Khiḍr?”

are the central aspirations of Corbin’s meditation on Ibn ‘Arabī. These two
questions, in Corbin’s words, “illuminate each other existentially.” The
disciple of Khiḍr is he “who does not owe his knowledge of spiritual
experience to human teaching, who bears witness.”

The investigation begins with a Sūra XVIII of the Koran, in which the
mysterious Khiḍr appears alongside Moses as his guide and initiates Moses
into the science of predestination.
“Thus he reveals himself to be the repository of an inspired divine science,
superior to the law (sharī’a),” writes Corbin. “Thus Khiḍr is superior to Moses
in so far as Moses is a prophet invested with the mission of revealing a
sharī’a. He reveals Moses precisely the secret, mystic truth (haqīqa) that
transcends the law and this explains why the spirituality inaugurated by
Khiḍr is free from the servitude of the literal religion.”

Khiḍr’s relationship with the prophet Elijah is of much importance to this

passage, because it illuminates a break with rational linear time. In Corbin’s
view, “We shall never find a rational justification of the Koran episode in
which Khiḍr-Elijah meets Moses as if they were contemporaries. The event
partakes of a different synchronism.” It is a symbolic entry into the
“transhistorical” frame of the archetypal realm (’ālam al-mithāl). “Such a
relationship with a hidden spiritual master lends the disciple an essentially
‘transhistorical’ dimension,” he continues, “and presupposes an ability to
experience events which are enacted in a reality other than the physical
reality of daily life, events which spontaneously transmute themselves into
symbols.” He writes of a time “in which the past remains present to the
future, in which the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of
a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all
together in the present and thus form a phrase. Hence the recurrences, the
possible inversions, the synchronisms, incomprehensible in rational terms,
beyond the reach of historical realism, but accessible to another ‘realism,’
that of the subtile world, ‘ālam al-mithāl, which Suhrawardī called the ‘Middle
Orient’ of celestial Souls and whose organ is the theophanic Imagination.”

The prayer of Ibn ‘Arabī, the Disciple of Khiḍr, is prayer as a method of

Imagination that manifests mutual knowing or Gnosis. In Corbin’s words it is
“the creative prayer that becomes dialogue, creative because it is at once
God’s prayer and man’s prayer.”

Corbin writes of Suhrawardī’s mystic recital The Purple Archangel. The poem
is itself a participatory act. Only the literalist, the religionist, in Corbin’s view,
would see such things as meaningless allegory, as parable. In The Purple
Archangel, a mystic is initiated into a secret that allows him to climb the
cosmic mountain, Mount Qāf, and attain the Spring of Life.
Frightened at the difficulty of the task, he considers turning back. But the
Angel says to him:
“Put on the sandals of Khiḍr.” In so doing, the mystic becomes one with the
master through the realm of the archetypal Imagination. “If you are Khiḍr,”
writes Henry Corbin, “you too can ascend Mount Qāf without difficulty.” This
understanding of If you are Khiḍr effects a true identification with the
invisible master.

“Phenomenologically speaking,” he continues, “the real presence of Khiḍr is

experienced simultaneously as that of a person and as that of an archetype
in other words as a person-archetype.” The mystic is now Khiḍr. He has
attained “the Khiḍr of his being.”

Sources

Corbin, Henry
Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī
1969 Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

Cheetham, Tom
All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings
2012 North Atlantic Books Berkeley, California