Insight Editions · No. 115
Face de Dieu, face de l'homme
Herméneutique et soufisme
Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin examines the imaginal world, spiritual hermeneutics, Iranian and Ismaili thought, and the Imam as the meeting point between divine and human.
A study guide to Face de Dieu, face de l'homme by Henry Corbin. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
The book gathers five Eranos lectures, preceded by an editors' foreword: on the mundus imaginalis, on Swedenborg and Ismaili hermeneutics, on the heroic and mystical epic, on the Imam as Face of God and Face of man, and on the Paraclete in Iranian philosophy. Quotations keep Corbin's French as printed, each followed by the editor's English translation; page references [p n] are to the printed edition. The notes are used only for context.
Argument Map
Figure 0. How the five essays build one argument (editor's reconstruction).
Chapter Map
| Part | Essay (printed pages) | Core question | Key figures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essay 1 | Mundus imaginalis, or the imaginary and the imaginal (7 to 40) | Is there a real world of images? | Sohravardi, Molla Sadra, the Green Island |
| Essay 2a | Comparative spiritual hermeneutics: Swedenborg (41 to 107) | How does the Word have an inner sense? | Swedenborg |
| Essay 2b | Comparative spiritual hermeneutics: Ismaili gnosis (108 to 162) | Adam, Eve, Noah read as dramas of knowledge | Qazi No'man, Nasir-e Khosraw |
| Essay 3 | From the heroic epic to the mystical epic (163 to 236) | How can a recital break history? | Sohravardi, Ahsa'i, Kay Khosraw |
| Essay 4 | Face of God and face of man (237 to 310) | At what level do God and man meet? | Qazi Sa'id Qommi, Ahsa'i, Berdyaev |
| Essay 5 | The idea of the Paraclete in Iranian philosophy (311 to 358) | Who reveals the hidden sense, and when? | Haydar Amoli, Ja'far Kashfi, Joachim |
Table 0. The five essays at a glance.
Essay 1. Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal
The opening essay, a talk dated March 1964, sets the vocabulary for the whole book. Corbin argues that Islamic theosophers describe a third world between the senses and the intellect, fully real and perceived by a cognitive Imagination, and that French and English lack a word for it because modern thought has reduced imagination to fantasy. His answer is a coined term: the imaginal [p 7 to 8, 26].
Why a Latin Name
Corbin chose the two Latin words mundus imaginalis because Latin gives a fixed technical marker against which the "floating" modern equivalents can be measured. He confesses that he could not translate his Arabic and Persian texts with the word imaginaire, since in ordinary usage it means the unreal, the utopian, something outside being. To use it would mislead the Western reader whom the texts are trying to wake [p 7 to 8]. That French speaks of the imaginary as the unreal is, for him, a symptom of something, and the essay proceeds in three steps: the order of reality called the "eighth climate," the organ that perceives it, and the topography of these interworlds as described by those who went there [p 8].
Figure 1. Why Corbin coined a Latin term rather than use imaginaire [p 7 to 8].
The Country of No-Where
The guiding image comes from Sohravardi's visionary recitals. In The Crimson Archangel the captive who slips his jailers meets a being with the graces of youth and asks where he comes from. The answer is that he is the eldest of the Creator's children and comes from beyond the mountain of Qaf, where the captive himself began and to which he will return [p 9]. Qaf is the cosmic mountain formed by the nested celestial spheres. However far one walks, one arrives back at the starting point, like the point of a compass; yet the self found "there" is a higher self, a self in the second person, reached only by bathing, like Khezr, in the Spring of Life [p 9 to 10].
Figure 2. The meeting in The Crimson Archangel [p 9 to 10].
Two other recitals name this beyond. In The Rustling of Gabriel's Wings and in the Vade-mecum of the Fedeli d'amore the answer is the same: I come from Na-koja-Abad [p 10]. Corbin notes the term is in no Persian dictionary and was probably coined by Sohravardi: literally the city or country (abad) of No-where (na-koja). Etymologically it could be rendered ou-topia, Thomas More's coinage, but in concept and lived meaning that rendering would be a misreading [p 10 to 11].
Figure 3. Na-koja-Abad is not utopia [p 10 to 11].
Leaving the "Where"
The region beyond Qaf contains the mystic cities of Jabalqa, Jabarsa and Hurqalya and begins at the convex surface of the Ninth Sphere, the Sphere of Spheres that encloses the cosmos and fixes every orientation. Past that limit the question "where?" (ubi, koja) loses its sense [p 12]. Leaving the "where" is not a change of place. Sohravardi's closing symbol, the drop of balm held in the palm toward the sun that passes through to the back of the hand, says that one goes inward, and by going inward finds oneself outside. The relation in play is that of the exoteric (zahir) to the esoteric (batin), the bark to the almond [p 12].
Figure 4. Leaving the "where": going inward, one finds oneself outside [p 12 to 13].
Once the passage is made, the inner reality turns out to envelop what was outer. Spiritual reality is not "in the where"; the "where" is in it. Its place relative to sensible space is No-where because its ubi is an ubique, everywhere [p 13]. Grasping this, Corbin says, is the key to reading visionary topographies and to distinguishing them from what modern vocabulary calls inventions or utopian deliriums.
The obstacle is the Western "agnostic reflex," born of consenting to the divorce between thought and being. Many recent theories offer every clever explanation of visionary testimony except the one that would let it signify what it is [p 13]. What is needed is a cosmology that places worlds and interworlds "beyond Qaf," intelligible only to an existence whose act of being is a function of its presence to those worlds [p 14].
Figure 5. The obstacle and the remedy [p 13 to 14].
Three Worlds, Three Organs
Corbin quotes Sohravardi's Book of Conversations: when the ancient sages speak of a world with dimension and extension other than the pleroma of Intelligences and other than the world ruled by the Souls of the Spheres, with countless cities including Jabalqa and Jabarsa, do not hasten to cry lie, for pilgrims of the spirit contemplate it [p 14 to 15]. The theosophers agree on a threefold scheme.
| World | Arabic term | Organ of knowledge | Part of the human being |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical, sensible world, terrestrial and sidereal | molk (phenomenon) | The senses | Body |
| World of the Soul or Angel-Souls, with the mystic cities; begins at the convex surface of the Ninth Sphere | Malakut; its threshold is 'alam al-mithal | Imagination | Soul |
| World of pure archangelic Intelligences | (Jabarut) | Intellect | Spirit |
Table 1. The three universes and their matching organs and anthropology, which «règle la triple croissance de l’homme» (editor's translation: "regulates the triple growth of man") from this world to resurrections in the others [p 15].
This removes the old dilemma of thought versus extension. Between the empirical and the abstract stands 'alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, «un monde aussi réel ontologiquement que le monde des sens et le monde de l’intellect» (editor's translation: "as real ontologically as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect") with its own perceptive faculty of full cognitive value [p 15]. It is the "eighth climate": beyond the seven climates of traditional geography lies a world with extension, figures and colours not perceptible to the senses but to imaginative perception, "psycho-spiritual senses," in which everything in the sensible world has its analogue [p 16].
Figure 6. The intermediate world in Corbin's reconstruction: ontologically above the senses, below pure intellect, entered at the boundary of the cosmos [p 15 to 19].
Archetype, Suspended Image, Mirror
'Alam al-mithal may be rendered mundus archetypus with care, since the same Arabic word names Platonic Ideas; but those are qualified as Platonic archetypes of light. For the eighth climate the term denotes, on one side, the archetypal Images of singular things, pre-existing in the eastern city of Jabalqa; on the other, the western city of Jabarsa, where spirits dwell after earthly life and where the forms of all our deeds, thoughts, desires and behaviour subsist [p 16 to 17].
Figure 7. The two cities of the eighth climate [p 16 to 17].
Sohravardi's school calls these realities "suspended Images" (mothol mo'allaqa), which Corbin names Imaginalia. Their status rests on visionary experience, to be accepted as one accepts the observations of Hipparchus or Ptolemy. They cannot exist like empirical things, or anyone could perceive them; nor in the pure intelligible world, because they have extension; nor in our thought alone; nor can they be nothing, or we could not rank or judge them [p 17]. Hence the intermediate world is metaphysically necessary, and on it depend the validity of visionary recitals, dreams, symbolic rites, places composed in meditation, cosmogonies and above all the spiritual sense of prophetic revelation [p 18].
The model is the mirror. The metal of a mirror is not the substance of the image but the place of its appearance. This led to a theory of epiphanic forms (mazhar, plural mazahir), and active Imagination is the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place of the archetypal Images [p 18]. Corbin aligns Henry More's spissitudo spiritualis with Sadra Shirazi's equivalent [p 17].
Corbin finds the most exact Western formulation in Swedenborg: in heaven everything appears in place and space, yet angels have no idea of space, because all progress there is change of inner state; those in like states are near, and «le chemin lui-même s’allonge et se raccourcit selon le désir» (editor's translation: "the way itself lengthens and shortens according to desire") [p 20]. The consequence: there is a spiritual place and a bodily place, and the passage from one to the other always involves a rupture. The traveller notices only afterwards that he has left the map, and so can describe where he was but can show no one the road [p 21]. Confusing this with science fiction leaves "an abyss" uncrossed [p 21].
Figure 8. Swedenborg: passing from one to the other always involves a rupture [p 20 to 21].
The Organ: Active Imagination
The organ of entry is neither the senses nor pure intellect but the intermediate power, active Imagination, which transmutes inner spiritual states into outer vision-events that symbolise with them. That transmutation is what spatialises spiritual space, making nearness and distance [p 22].
| Postulate | Content | Source cited |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Independence | Imagination is a purely spiritual faculty, independent of the body and able to survive it; after death the soul perceives concrete things by it, and their known existence is their concrete existence | Sadra Shirazi [p 22 to 23] |
| 2. Cognition | Imaginative perception has its own noetic value in relation to its world, where time becomes reversible and space is a function of desire | [p 24] |
| 3. Control | Placed between sense and intellect, Imagination symbolises with both, which guards it from straying | [p 24] |
Table 2. The postulates of the cognitive Imagination as Corbin states them [p 22 to 24].
Symbol Is Not Allegory
The ordinary attitude opposes the real to the imaginary and confuses symbol with allegory. Allegory is harmless: a disguise of something already known otherwise. The appearance of an Image with the force of a symbol is an Urphaenomen, unconditioned and irreducible, something that cannot manifest in any other way in our world [p 25]. Neither Sohravardi's recitals nor Shi'i accounts of reaching the land of the Hidden Imam are imaginary, unreal or allegorical. The world they describe escapes empirical control, otherwise anyone could reach it, and it is perceived only by an imaginative consciousness which is Imaginatio vera [p 25 to 26]. Its witnesses knew afterward that they had been "elsewhere"; ce ne sont pas des schizophrènes (they are not schizophrenics, editor's translation) [p 26].
Figure 9. Symbol is not allegory [p 25].
Topographies: The Green Island
The main story is the Account of strange and marvellous things seen in «l'Île Verte située dans la Mer Blanche» (editor's translation: "the Green Island in the White Sea") by a young Iranian shaykh, 'Ali ibn Fazel Mazandarani, toward the end of the thirteenth century [p 31]. A grounded scholar, he follows an Andalusian master from Damascus to Cairo to Andalusia, falls ill, then joins travellers bound for the peninsula of the Shi'is, twenty-five days across a desert. There, hearing from the minaret the Shi'i invocation that the Joy be hastened, he weeps, recalling centuries of clandestine persecution [p 31 to 32]. No fields are sown; food comes twice a year by seven ships from the Green Island, one of the islands of the Hidden Imam's sons. Other traditions place the island in the Caspian, as if to say it has no coordinates in this world [p 32].
The ships arrive early, as if desire had shortened space. A noble shaykh already knows his name and has come to fetch him; the pilgrim cries out (editor's translation from the French) that he was remembered, that he had a name for them, a gnostic motif Corbin links to the Hymn of the Pearl and Sohravardi's Recital of Occidental Exile [p 33]. After sixteen days the sea turns white, a protective zone that swallows hostile ships; the island has a city with seven walls, rivers, diaphanous marble and young, beautiful inhabitants [p 33].
Figure 10. The Green Island journey as a passage from mapped space to the eighth climate [p 31 to 34].
The second half becomes an initiation in three phases: conversations with Sayyed Shamsoddin, grandson of the Twelfth Imam and governor of the island; a visit to a sanctuary in the central mountain; and final talks on whether one may see the Imam [p 34]. On the summit stands a small domed temple where the Imam sometimes leaves a personal message, which only the Sayyed and those like him may climb to. It stands in the shade of the tree Tuba, the Tree of Being, beside a spring that can only be the Spring of Life, served by Khezr [p 34]. Access requires an inner conformation, a state "like" that of the Imam's descendant [p 35]. On a Friday that falls mid-month the pilgrim sees 313 horsemen, the chiefs of the hidden chivalry, gathered in expectation of the Joy [p 35]. He learns he twice met the Imam unknowingly when lost in the desert. He must leave; he keeps only his notes and the Sayyed's parting provision [p 35 to 36].
| No. | Symbol of the Green Island |
|---|---|
| 1 | One of the islands of the Twelfth Imam's sons |
| 2 | Source of Life under the Tree of paradise; feeds distant followers with "suprasubstantial" food |
| 3 | Lies west, like Jabarsa; compared with Amitabha's western paradise, Maitreya, and the Celtic Tir-nan-Og |
| 4 to 6 | Self-sufficient like the Grail domain; immune to outside attack; found only by those called |
| 7 to 8 | A central mountain; like Montsalvat, where the faithful approach the hidden pole of the world |
Table 3. Corbin's eight-point "harvest of symbols" from the Green Island [p 36].
Conclusion: The Angel Is the Ecstasy
Corbin closes with questions, the last asking whether hermetic, kabbalistic figures and mandalas impose the postulate of the imaginal world's objectivity [p 39]. He answers through Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, for whom angels exist in substance only in the absolute heavens and
These words break the mutual isolation of consciousness and object: la phénoménologie est d'ores et déjà une ontologie (phenomenology is already an ontology, editor's translation). There is no criterion of the Angel's manifestation outside the manifestation itself; the Angel is the ekstasis, the change of our state. So too the Imam is the ekstasis of Shi'i consciousness, invisible to anyone not in the same spiritual state, which is what Sohravardi meant: «Si tu es Khezr, à travers la montagne de Qâf, sans peine, toi aussi, tu peux passer.» (editor's translation: "If you are Khezr, you too can pass through the mountain of Qaf without difficulty") [p 39 to 40].
Key takeaways
- Imaginal is not imaginary: the word protects a real, intermediate order of being from being dismissed as fantasy [p 26].
- Spiritual place situates rather than being situated; leaving the "where" means interiorisation, which reverses inside and outside [p 13, 21].
- Imagination is a cognitive organ whose validity depends on a cosmology with an intermediate world; lose the world and imagination loses its axis [p 24, 27].
- Symbol differs from allegory: allegory translates the known; symbol is the only possible appearance of the unknown [p 25].
- The Hidden Imam's appearances resist socialisation because they are incognito, initiated by him, and recognised only afterwards [p 30].
Essay 2, Part I. Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics: Swedenborg
The longest essay in the book, an Eranos lecture, sets the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 to 1772) beside Ismaili gnosis to show that spiritual readers of the Bible and of the Qur'an, working independently, read Adam, Noah, the Flood and the Ark the same way: not as a closed past but as present events of the soul [p 44 to 46]. This first part covers the prologue and Swedenborg.
Prologue: Hikayat, History as Mime
Corbin opens with an Arabic word, hikayat, which means at once narrative, history and imitation (mimesis), as if the narrator's art were at bottom a mime's. Its grammatical use makes the point with humour: when replying, one repeats the other speaker's word in the same case even at the price of a solecism, as if answering Puto eos esse Romanos with Non sunt Romanos [p 41]. The pilgrims' procession around the Ka'ba is a hikayat of the angels' procession around the heavenly Temple [p 41 to 42]. History so understood is image or symbol, and its symbolic quality bends the banal sequence of outer events to a higher demand, just as hikayat suspends grammar [p 42].
Figure 11. The three meanings held in the one word hikayat [p 41].
Since Hegel we oppose Nature and History, with History as man's own world. For the Neoplatonic family of thought, History belongs to physis as much as Nature does: both are subject to irreversible, homogeneous time and to a space that disperses events. The true opposite of both lies on the vertical, in the spiritual world [p 42 to 43]. Nature and History are the hikayat, the outer (zahir) of a hidden true reality (haqiqat, batin), and the true history is found by ta'wil, spiritual hermeneutics, which etymologically means "leading back" each thing to its archetype (asl), unveiling the hidden and veiling the apparent [p 43]. Nature then is a Liber mundi to decipher, as the revealed Book is; together they yield "hierohistory" [p 43].
Figure 12. Where history is placed [p 42 to 43].
Two summits are chosen: Swedenborg, «le prophète du sens intérieur de la Bible» (editor's translation: "the prophet of the inner sense of the Bible") and Shi'ism, both Twelver and Ismaili, which rests on the esoteric sense of the Qur'an [p 44 to 45]. The method must itself be phenomenological, that is hermeneutic: modes of being (modi essendi) express themselves in modes of understanding (modi intelligendi). Applying historical criticism to the Qur'an would at best yield a Qur'an never read by any believer. The starting point is a spiritual fact, how believing readers understood the shared data [p 46 to 47].
1. The Theory of Correspondences
Swedenborg's hermeneutics rests on a general doctrine of correspondences tied to a theory of knowledge whose highest degree is immediate spiritual perception. This was the privilege of a very ancient, "celestial" humanity: looking at earthly objects, they thought through them the divine things they represented, as we hear an orator's meanings rather than his words [p 47 to 48]. Decline began when the sensible object became the main thing instead of the instrument; reasoning about spiritual things like sensible ones makes one spiritually blind [p 48].
Figure 13. The loss of immediate spiritual perception [p 47 to 48].
To know what "representations" and "correspondences" are, one must know that there is a spiritual world distinct from the natural, and that what flows from it into nature represents spiritual things because it corresponds to them. A rough idea: inner affections show in the face; the features are correspondences, the glances representations. Things of the inner man are "imaginalised" in the outer man [p 48 to 49]. The bipartition of the world runs through each person, whose inner man is a spiritual world and outer being a natural one; natural forms are effects, never causes of causes [p 49]. Swedenborg saw this directly; his anatomical studies let him read through an anatomical plate, with angelic help, to the invisible spiritual organism [p 50]. "Blessed," he writes, is he who is in a state of correspondence, whose outer man corresponds to the inner [p 50]. Nature is a "representative theatre" of the spiritual world, which matches, down to its vocabulary, the Islamic theosophers of Light, for whom sensible things are epiphanic forms (mazahir) [p 51].
Figure 14. A rough idea of correspondence: the face [p 48 to 49].
| Level | Inhabitants | Sense of the Word | Swedenborg's metal age |
|---|---|---|---|
| Third, inmost heaven | "Celestial" angels | Celestial sense | Gold: celestial love |
| Second, middle heaven | Spiritual angels | Spiritual sense | Silver: spiritual truth |
| First, lower heaven | Good spirits | Natural (literal) sense | Bronze: natural good |
Table 4. Swedenborg's threefold structure of heavens, senses of Scripture and goods. Corbin writes "célestiel" to avoid confusion with astronomy and with Avicenna's Angeli caelestes [p 52, 75 to 76].
Each heaven contains countless societies formed spontaneously by affinities of love and intelligence; together they form one Man, and each angel and society is a "little heaven" [p 52 to 53]. The "dwelling" in heaven is a state of the inner man; hell's dwellings mirror heaven's, since every person carries his heaven and his hell within him, and times and places are inner states [p 53]. From this follow a double light, a double heat, a double Imagination, and the theme of the Homo maximus [p 53].
Figure 15. Every person carries his heaven and his hell within him [p 52 to 53].
The first humans spoke silently, by an inner respiration, the way spirits and angels speak by representations, through living variations of light and shade; in the higher heavens even this cannot be put into words. In his essential being, man is as his love is [p 56 to 57].
Homo Maximus and the Hidden God
The doctrine of correspondences culminates in the Homo maximus, which Corbin had earlier compared at Eranos with the Ismaili "Temple of Light" (Haykal nurani) of the Imam [p 57 to 58]. Swedenborg writes that every part of the human body corresponds to heavenly societies so that together they represent a Man, whence the universal Heaven is also called Homo maximus, because «le Seigneur est le seul Homme, et que le Ciel le représente» (editor's translation: "the Lord is the only Man, and Heaven represents him") [p 58].
Figure 16. Swedenborg's theophanic structure as Corbin presents it: the hidden God known only through the divine Human, whose image repeats in every heaven and every being [p 58 to 61].
The Kyrios Anthropos is Heaven itself, as the sun relates to our world; and he alone is properly Man, all humans being named men after him as his images, insofar as they are in love [p 60 to 61]. Hence the monadology in which each spirit is a "little heaven": in heaven each is «comme s’il était le centre du Tout» (editor's translation: "as if he were the centre of the All") receiving influx through the form of the whole [p 61]. In the earliest humanity this science of correspondences was the science of sciences; books, rites and worship were written in it, so people communed with angels [p 61]. An Ancient Word preceded the Bible, now lost on earth but kept in heaven and still found among certain peoples of Great Tartary; Corbin asks whether this can mean anything but the Mahayana Buddhist scriptures, since Swedenborg's heaven is large enough for all religions [p 61 to 62].
2. Principles of Spiritual Hermeneutics
Correspondences are not applied to the Bible "from outside" and after the fact; they are what the text means when understood in its true, spiritual sense [p 63]. Swedenborg's Ecclesia (assembly) is so broad, covering angelic worlds, spirits, all ages of humanity and humanities of other worlds perceived "in the Spirit," that Corbin keeps the Latin word [p 63 to 64].
| Style of the Word | Where | Nature |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Symbolic history | Genesis 1 to 11 | Historical in form, but the expression of the earliest humanity's direct spiritual perception; neither history nor what we call myth |
| 2. Historical proper | Moses from Abraham on, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings | Facts are as the letter says, yet all are representative and contain arcana caelestia |
| 3. Prophetic | Prophets | Not treated here |
| 4. Psalms | Psalms | Between prophetic style and ordinary speech |
Table 5. The four styles of the Bible in Swedenborg's hermeneutics [p 64 to 66].
The Word is like a body holding a living soul, invisible until the letter is "as if dead"; this requires a new birth, a regeneration [p 66 to 68]. Swedenborg tracks a descent: the Antiquissima perceived celestial ideas directly; the Antiqua (Noah) collected them as doctrinalia, things "significative"; when even that faded and earthly things themselves were held holy, they became pure "representatives" and the Ecclesia repraesentativa began with Abraham [p 67]. A new modus intelligendi is impossible without a new modus essendi, the same idea as Shi'i esoteric hermeneutics as "spiritual birth" (wiladat ruhaniya) [p 68]. One must read the Word as angels perceive it while a man on earth reads it: they know nothing of the letter, not even place names; by Adam they perceive the faith of the most ancient Church, by Abraham not a person but a saving way [p 68]. Why else would Scripture record Noah's age and the day the Flood began? The fountains of the great deep were broken up are prophetic words [p 69].
Figure 17. Swedenborg's descent of the Churches [p 67].
Every divine thing has three parts, originating, intermediate and last, like end, cause and effect; the last contains the others and is their base [p 69 to 70]. Swedenborg's image is a temple column that collapses on itself into a plane: what was top in successive order becomes centre in simultaneous order. So the celestial and spiritual senses dwell together hidden in the literal, which is their envelope and protection; without it they would be a temple with sanctuaries and a Holy of Holies but no roof or walls [p 70 to 71].
Figure 18. Swedenborg's collapsing column: the senses that descend in sequence coexist concentrically in the one text we read [p 70 to 71].
This resolves the apparent paradox that the letter must "die" yet is indispensable. The same demand governs Shi'i esotericism: keep zahir and batin simultaneous. For the profane the letter is the protective wall; for the adept it becomes transparent, tending to Geistleiblichkeit, Oetinger's "spiritual corporeity" [p 71 to 72]. Hence two profanations: treating the letter as self-sufficient, and seizing the spiritual sense by a few theoretically known correspondences, which closes heaven and risks spiritual madness. That is why Cherubim guard the sanctuary [p 72 to 73].
Figure 19. The two profanations [p 71 to 72].
3. The Ages of Humanity
Spiritual history would be continuous decline but for periodic "Judgments in Heaven" that restore it [p 73].
| Ecclesia | Age | Mode of knowing | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antiquissima (Adam) | Gold | Direct perception; heaven flows through the inner man; man is himself tree, garden, paradise; inner respiration | Its posterity perished: the Flood [p 74 to 75, 78] |
| Antiqua (Noah) | Silver | Knowledge through correspondences and symbols, not perception; knows what dawn signifies but no longer sees the Lord in it | Correspondences degenerated into magic and idolatry [p 75 to 76, 78 to 79] |
| Israelite (repraesentativa) | Bronze | Rites without explicit meaning; angels speak with an elite who teach outer things | Captivity of the ten tribes, dispersion [p 76, 79] |
| Christiana | Iron | Knowledge only from the Word; influx yields partial, abstract truths cut off from love | Judgment already pronounced in the spiritual world: New Jerusalem [p 77 to 79] |
Table 6. Swedenborg's four Churches and their metal ages [p 73 to 79].
Setting Paulinism aside, Swedenborg reads the Incarnation not as ransom or "satisfaction" but as the continuation of a combat begun at the origin of the Ages; the Lord "comes" each time an Ecclesia is devastated [p 77]. "Last Judgment" means the last time of an Ecclesia and the last state of each life, since each person's resurrection follows death. Corbin notes a remarkable convergence with the Ismaili Qiyamat that closes each prophetic period [p 78]. Heaven and Earth in Revelation do not mean the sky and the planet but the spiritual Church, so the Judgment on our iron age is "already pronounced" there [p 79]. Since spiritual time is change of state, this history can always be put in the present tense; it is "always imminent," quite unlike the modern "meaning of history" [p 80].
4. The Six Days: Creation of the Spiritual Man
The first chapter of Genesis, in its inner sense, treats not cosmogony but the new creation of man, his regeneration [p 81].
The celestial man is himself the garden, but it is not his: his perceptions are acted in him by the Lord. Corbin calls this the substitution of cogitor for the Cartesian cogito. Those who must believe they are the agents of their own knowing cling to an illusory self, become opaque, and are expelled from the garden that they were, which is to be expelled from oneself [p 85 to 88].
5. The Spiritual Sense of the Story of Adam
The forbidden tree is not knowledge as such, and certainly not the analogical "science of correspondences" which Swedenborg himself practised, reading the anatomy of the brain as the topography of heaven. The fault is to demand logical or empirical demonstration for suprasensible things and to refuse assent otherwise, reducing the analogue to the identical [p 88 to 89]. Swedenborg: the desire to scrutinise the mysteries of faith by empirical and "scientific" things caused the fall of every Church [p 88 to 89]. Corbin adds that modern "scientific" forecasts of man's future ignore the Threshold they would have to cross [p 90].
That exteriorisation held the germ of the will to power and possession. The successive posterities: doubt (believing only what is seen), represented by the serpent, whose cunning is now armed with "scientific" knowledge, with Cartesianism particularly targeted for denying spirit any substance [p 95 to 96]; then the fall, when the Tree of Knowledge replaces the Tree of Life at the garden's centre, the order of powers inverted [p 96 to 97]; nakedness as abandonment to one's own selfhood; the divine voice as the last trace of inner perception [p 97 to 98]; expulsion, with the flaming sword as self-love [p 98].
| Stage | Inner meaning |
|---|---|
| 1 | Homo in unity, masculine-feminine |
| 2 | Exteriorisation of the proprium: Eve formed |
| 3 | Doubt: the serpent |
| 4 | The fall: knowledge displaces life |
| 5 | Expulsion: Cherubim and the flaming sword |
| 6 to 7 | Fall below the human level: the people of the Flood; the names of Genesis 5 are doctrines and schools, not individuals |
Table 7. The states of the most ancient Church as Swedenborg reads Genesis 1 to 5 [p 98 to 99].
6. The Spiritual Sense of the Story of Noah
"Earth" in Genesis 6:5 means the will, since man is as his love [p 99]. Noah signifies a new Ecclesia, the remnant saved, which has conscience and knowledge but no longer direct perception [p 99 to 100]. The Ark is the formation of that Church, and its floating and long voyage are the trials of an initiation that ends in Go out of the Ark [p 100 to 101]. Man-Noah must be taught outwardly through the senses, learning to turn sensible things into symbols, thanks to the doctrinalia preserved by Enoch, whom "God took" [p 101 to 102].
Corbin ends this half with the Fifth Imam, Muhammad al-Baqir (57/676 to 115/733): if a Qur'anic verse had meaning only for the people on whose occasion it came down, the whole Qur'an would be dead today. No! The holy Book is alive, it never dies [p 107].
Key takeaways
- Ta'wil leads things back to their archetype; Nature and History alike are outward mime (hikayat) of the spiritual world [p 43].
- Understanding depends on being: no new reading of Scripture without a new mode of existence, a spiritual birth [p 46, 68].
- The literal sense must be both kept and seen through; its loss or its absolutism are twin profanations [p 72].
- Adam's fall is a drama of knowledge: demanding empirical proof for the suprasensible, and a selfhood that takes itself as its own source [p 89 to 91].
- The Flood and the Ark are inner initiations, always present, not geological events [p 105 to 106].
Essay 2, Part II. Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics: Ismaili Gnosis
The second half of the Eranos lecture (dated 4 July 1964) reads the same stories through the tenth-century Ismaili jurist and theosopher Qazi No'man and his Asas al-Ta'wil, the foundation of esoteric exegesis. The verdict: on Adam, Noah, the Flood and the Ark, Ismaili gnosis converges with Swedenborg, and both point to an eschatology of the Paraclet as the only frame for a general theology of religions [p 108, 116 to 117, 159].
Against Historicism
Al-Baqir's saying that the Qur'an "never dies" anticipates and defeats historicism, the method that makes a holy Book captive to the date of its composition and smothers any meaning beyond that "past." Both Swedenborg and the Shi'is escape it through worlds that symbolise with one another, relative to which what we call history is a hikayat [p 108].
1. Shi'i and Ismaili Hermeneutics
Shi'ism differs from Sunni Islam by making spiritual hermeneutics of the Qur'an its foundation; the Sunni debate over whether the Qur'an is created looks "badly posed" without that horizon. Islamic thought owes to Shi'ism its prophetic philosophy, in which the prophet's mission is inseparable from the walayat of the Imams, the "Friends of God" charged with initiating people into the Book's true sense [p 109].
| Movement | Act | Bearer | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Descent, genesis (mabda') | Tanzil: sending down the Book | Prophet | The letter, shari'at, positive religion |
| Return to origin (ma'ad) | Ta'wil: leading the letter back to its true sense | Imam | The haqiqat, the spiritual Idea |
Table 8. The double movement of prophecy and Imamate [p 109].
Twelver Shi'ism, the official religion of Iran for five centuries, limits the Imams to twelve; with the Prophet and Fatima they form the Fourteen Most Pure, the earthly manifestation of the Eternal Muhammadan Reality in its double aspect, Logos (exoteric prophecy) and Sophia (esoteric Imamate). With the Twelfth the Imamate enters occultation; the hierarchy stays incognito [p 110]. Its hermeneutics follows four worlds, the four Lights of the Throne: pure Lights (white), Spirits (yellow), Souls including the mundus imaginalis (green), bodies (red). The first three match Swedenborg's three heavens. Each world is esoteric to those below it and exoteric to those above, giving an esoteric to the fourth power, each with sevenfold resonance [p 110 to 111]. A full commentary would need a library; only the Hidden Imam at his parousia will reveal the esoteric of all revelations, and that is the Qiyamat [p 111 to 112].
Figure 20. The first three of the four Lights of the Throne that order Twelver hermeneutics [p 110].
The Ismaili Principle (Mobdi'), divine Silence and Abyss, stays inaccessible, beyond being and non-being. From it emerges the First Intelligence as Deus revelatus, then the archangelic pleroma; a "speculative and dramatic" cosmogony derives our macrocosm from one of them, plus the homologous microcosm (man) and a mesocosm, the esoteric sodality on earth [p 114]. The macrocosm as cosmic Man echoes Homo maximus, and above all the future Imam of the Resurrection (Qa'im al-Qiyamat), the Anthropos in the absolute sense. His "divinity" (lahut) is the human Form in its integrity, the "Temple of Light" made of the light-forms of all adepts, each holding a rank like an organ in a body [p 114 to 115]. Entering the sodality is entering the "virtual paradise," letting the human being's latent angelicity become actual after death [p 115].
Figure 21. The Ismaili descent from the Principle [p 114].
The Da'wat and the Hidden Shahadat
Where Swedenborg speaks of Ecclesia, the Ismailis speak of da'wat, the "Convocation" or "Call," which began "in heaven" with the First Intelligence's call to the pleroma and continues on earth cycle by cycle [p 117]. Its object is tawhid, but that is still the exoteric sense, since the Principle is beyond our affirmations and negations. The esoteric shahadat names the ranks of the double hierarchy; to avoid both agnosticism (ta'til) and anthropomorphism (tashbih) is to recognise the mystery of the One in each of the "Ones," each determined by the rank before it. These dignitaries (hodud) are the hidden actors of sacred history [p 117 to 118].
Figure 22. The esoteric shahadat avoids both by recognising the One in each of the "Ones" [p 117 to 118].
| Element of the shahadat | Count | Esoteric reference |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 4 | First Intelligence and First Soul (Sabiq, Tali); Prophet and Imam. Also the four arms of the Christian cross |
| Syllables | 7 | The seven Imams of each prophetic period |
| Letters | 12 | The twelve Hojjat or Lawahiq around the Imam, doubled by twelve "Wings," the da'is of the twelve regions |
Table 9. Qazi No'man's reading of the profession of faith as a map of the hierarchy [p 118 to 119].
2. The Esoteric Story of Adam
Our Adam is distinct from the universal First Adam (Adam al-awwal al-kolli), and from the spiritual Adam, the heavenly Anthropos, protagonist of a drama in the pleroma. That Anthropos was immobilised in doubt, the vertigo of his own person, and this "delay of eternity" is the origin of time; his rank fell from third to tenth. Terrestrial cycles exist to make up the delay, and alternate between cycles of epiphany (dawr al-kashf) and occultation (dawr al-satr); ours is one of occultation [p 119 to 120].
Figure 23. Three Adams; the Anthropos's "delay of eternity" begins time [p 119].
For the Ismailis, the earthly paradise is man's descent from the angelic state of the previous cycle; its norm of knowledge is the concomitance of zahir and batin, the perception of symbols. Iblis breaks it. The fault is less a preference for the sensible than a claim to reach the suprasensible directly; both errors leave the sensible signifying nothing but itself, and heaven is closed [p 121 to 122].
Figure 24. The earthly paradise and its breach [p 121 to 122].
The "prologue in heaven" is read in Qur'an 2:28 and 38:71 to 74. The speaker is the last Imam of the prior cycle of epiphany, Honayd, father of "our" Adam, who foresaw the end of that blessed state and the need for a new cycle under the discipline of the arcane: this is what the angels did not know. The "angels" addressed are the twelve Lawahiq, chosen as Adam's companions. "On earth" and "of clay" mark the change of condition: clay means exoteric, opaque knowledge; the angels had known inwardly, without initiatory teaching or ritual law. Henceforth humans reach the esoteric only through the exoteric [p 122 to 123]. Adam lay inert until the Spirit was breathed in, the science of the Names. Iblis, one of the twelve from the prior cycle, said it is only emptiness and refused, saying you created me of fire, him of clay, meaning: I was created in knowledge that flashes by immediate divine influx, which cannot coexist with an outer object; he in discursive knowledge [p 123 to 124].
Hence for Ismailism the esoteric is essentially feminine. In the prophet-Imam dyad, the prophet who states the Law is masculine; the Imam, holder of the spiritual sense, is feminine, called the "spiritual mother" of the adepts. The "Eternal Feminine" here denotes a metaphysical status, not a civil one [p 127].
Figure 25. A metaphysical, not a civil, status [p 127].
Practising ta'wil does not destroy the outward appearance; one cannot see a spirit here without a body, nor an esoteric without its exoteric, or it would no longer be esoteric [p 128]. Qazi No'man warns that most who go astray in this science perish this way: «si l’exotérique d’une chose interdite est chose interdite, son ésotérique également correspond à une chose interdite; l’ésotérique ne transforme pas l’illicite en licite» (editor's translation: "if the exoteric of a forbidden thing is forbidden, its esoteric too corresponds to something forbidden; the esoteric does not turn the illicit into the licit") [p 128 to 129].
The garden's esoteric is divine inspiration (ta'yid) flowing directly into the human being, pure spiritual knowledge [p 130]. In our cycle of occultation, all esoteric ranks of the da'wat are open to man, but only through the zahir, with symbolic ritual duties. One thing stayed inaccessible: the Tree is the Imam of the Resurrection, who alone will reveal the hidden sense of all revelations and release people from ritual, when the apparent becomes hidden and the hidden apparent. Touching the Tree meant usurping the Resurrector's prerogative, and to do that one had to break the present union of zahir and batin; the breaking was itself the violence [p 130 to 131]. Iblis, remembering the prior cycle in which humans were exempt from symbols and Law, awakened that nostalgia in Adam: God forbade the Tree «afin que vous ne deveniez pas deux Anges ou que vous ne soyez pas des éternels» (editor's translation: "lest you become two angels or immortals") (7:20) [p 131 to 132].
«Lorsqu'ils eurent goûté de l’Arbre, leur nudité leur apparut» (editor's translation: "When they tasted of the Tree, their nakedness appeared to them"): trying to abolish the exoteric stripped the esoteric of its garment, and since Adam lacked the power to bear pure esoteric knowledge, what was laid bare was his own impotence and inner darkness, Swedenborg's darkness of the proprium cut off from its Principle [p 132]. The drama devastates both esoteric (Eve) and exoteric (Adam): premature unveiling of the inner reduces the outer to dead nature, "a corpse." If that is Nature for a certain modern science, all esotericisms have tried to redeem this fault, and until the Imam-Paraclet comes each can only be a witness, advancing in the night of symbols [p 132 to 133].
The episode does not end darkly. God "turned back" to Adam, He being al-Tawwab. Adam lost the "celestial" state, unveiled ta'wil, but kept his caliphate, his Imamate and the divine sap (maddat); he "descended to earth," and earth is the da'wat, where the sap reaches adepts only through the hierarchies. Answering the Call is already a virtual return to paradise, which the Ark will symbolise; the "party of Iblis" are those made to forget the remembrance (dhikr) of God, a "delay" (ta'khir) that echoes the delay of eternity [p 134 to 136]. Adam's period continues through Seth and his successors, whose names match Genesis 5, until Noah [p 136].
Figure 26. What Adam lost and kept when God turned back to him [p 134 to 136].
3. The Esoteric Story of Noah
The 950 years of Noah, in Qur'an and Bible, measure his period, not his life, as Swedenborg also saw. The Flood is a suffocation of souls from the same drama of knowledge, and its actors are defined by their attitude to exoteric and esoteric [p 137 to 138].
Figure 27. The Flood in Qazi No'man's esoteric reading: two complementary refusals and one refuge [p 138 to 145].
As a law-giving prophet (Natiq), Noah calls to the zahir and ritual; only a modest minority answers. Against him rises a double opposition: those who think they can reach the batin at once, and those held by the exoteric left to itself. The Notables say «tu n'es qu’un homme comme nous» (editor's translation: "you are only a man like us") (11:29): the exoteric brings nothing new and serves only their will to power; do not abandon your old gods (71:22) means the doctors of the Law who misled them [p 138 to 139]. Building the Ark is erecting the da'wat, the esoteric sodality with its grades, so that adepts may be saved from drowning in unconsciousness by the life of spiritual knowledge which has the nature of light. The mockers behave as their like always do toward gnostics [p 139]. The Ark's structure encodes the four, seven and twelve, as do the cross and the shahadat: exoterically the symbols differ, esoterically the archetype (asl) is the same [p 140].
| Aspect of the Flood | Swedenborg | Ismaili gnosis |
|---|---|---|
| Suffocation by the spiritual | Without inner respiration, people choke on what they can no longer breathe | Notables and Noah's son, like Adam, choke trying to reach a naked esoteric |
| Suffocation by absence of the spiritual | Losing the "breath of life" kills the spiritual organism | Pure exoterists, who know only the letter, suffocate souls |
| Water | Knowledge and its contrary | Knowledge that gives life or drowns |
| Go out of the Ark | End of trial; spiritually free men | Believers in the unseen; the Ark rests on al-Judi, the novices' grade |
Table 10. The convergence Corbin establishes on the Flood [p 145 to 147].
O Earth, swallow your waters. O Heaven, cease (11:46): henceforth each prophet will call only to the Law, and spiritual knowledge, the water from the esoteric Earth of the Imamate, withdraws into the person of the Imam. The Ark stops not on Ararat but on al-Judi, the initial grade of novices, beyond which lies only the profane world [p 146]. Those who passed the trial are true believers in the unseen; the rest are those who lag behind and who set up the exoteric without the esoteric. The survivors move incognito among people under the discipline of the arcane until the Imam of the Resurrection [p 147 to 148].
Prophetic Succession and Ismaili Christology
The law of succession: the prophet (Natiq, speaker) has an Imam who is silent (samit) during his life, his Hojjat, "feminine" to his "masculine"; at his death the Imam succeeds, choosing a Hojjat from the twelve, and so on. A new Imam is born spiritually of the union of masculine-prophetic and feminine-esoteric [p 152 to 153].
The Angel's appearance is the direct conjunction of ta'yid, divine sap, "column of light," with Maryam. The regular earthly line of initiatory filiation is broken by heaven's intervention. The virginal conception is Christ's spiritual birth from pure esoteric, without the masculine principle of Law; and Corbin insists this is not allegory: on its own plane the spiritual truth is the literal truth [p 156 to 157]. John the Baptist, the Imam of the time, is first to bow before the new prophet. The Qur'an (4:156) is "resolutely docetist": Christ was not killed but raised; people had the illusion of killing him and got what they wanted, doubt and perplexity, that is, agnosticism. The mysterious meal (5:112 to 114) is read as a mystical Supper after his disappearance, told of no other prophet. Christ will reappear only after the Imam of the Resurrection [p 157 to 158]. Take up your cross means the cross has the same esoteric meanings as the Ark and the four words of the shahadat: esotericism everywhere tends to the same end [p 158].
Conclusion: A Theology of the Paraclet
The most dramatic problem in spiritual history comes when theologies try to stop history at themselves. Shi'ism defies past and present by teaching that after legislative prophecy closed, humanity's religious future is not closed: what is awaited is an irruption of metahistory that bursts «l’unidimensionnalité de notre «conscience historique»» (editor's translation: "the one-dimensionality of our historical consciousness") the Imam of the Resurrection, whom many Shi'i authors identify with the Paraclet of John 15:26 and 16:13 to 14 [p 158 to 159].
Key takeaways
- Each spiritual world is esoteric to the one below and exoteric to the one above; meaning is layered, not binary [p 111].
- The Ismaili fall is the claim to reach the hidden directly, breaking the bond of letter and spirit [p 121 to 122, 131].
- The esoteric is the Feminine: Eve, the Imam as "spiritual mother," Maryam as Hojjat [p 125 to 127, 154].
- The esoteric never licenses the forbidden; esotericism without the letter collapses into libertinism or abstraction [p 128 to 129].
- The Ark is the initiatory community that keeps knowledge alive between the drowning of literalism and the drowning of presumption [p 139 to 145].
Essay 3. From the Heroic Epic to the Mystical Epic
An Eranos lecture dated July 1966 [p 235]. Corbin asks how Sohravardi (d. 587/1191) could "complete" the deeds of the heroes of Ferdawsi's Shah-Nameh by giving them a mystical outcome. His answer runs through three steps: a principle of wrenching free (principe d'arrachement) that replaces historical causality; a metaphysics of the creative Act taken from Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i, where the absolute is "absolved" being; and two worked cases, the Grail of Kay Khosraw and the death of Esfandyar, in which the reciter becomes the story he recites [p 163 to 235].
I. Wrenching Free Versus Causality
A film at the Musée Guimet
Corbin opens with a film by a young Iranian director on the tragic prince Siyavakhsh, father of Kay Khosraw. The film refused spectacle. It ran on two planes: actors processing through the ruins of Persepolis, speaking in everyday language and calling the heroes' decisions into question, and the same figures in action, speaking Ferdawsi's archaic Persian. The finished work of art and something still taking shape alternated, so that the past was torn out of the past and time became reversible [p 163 to 164]. Most of the audience was lost; Corbin saw in it an intuition of the whole problem [p 166].
Figure 28. The Siyavakhsh film: the past torn out of the past [p 163 to 164].
That tearing loose is what the Arabic hikayat contains. Taken strictly, the word means a story that is at once an imitative action (compare Greek mimesis): a repetition, a re-creation, a recital whose reciter is the "mime," the actor. The event is never closed; it becomes history only as an event understood, and understanding, which is what hermeneutics means, is everyone's task in every generation, with "no alibi possible" [p 164 to 165]. Whoever cannot do this is at most a "tourist of history," turning like a weathervane in the "wind of history." Even standing in Persepolis such a person misses the appointment, because the rendezvous takes place not in the geographical site but in its subtle double, the malakut, the "eighth climate," Hurqalya [p 165 to 166].
Iran, the Book, and the "Orient"
This Iranism is not racial. It has nothing to do with the Romantic Volksgeist. Sohravardi's "Orient" is not on our maps: it is the origin (oriens, origo) of being as light, with its successive Orients (major Orient of the cherubic Intelligences, Jabarut; minor Orient of the Angels or celestial Souls, malakut; middle Orient of the imaginal world, Hurqalya). "Oriental" knowledge is presence, unveiling, the dawn rising in the soul, ishraq, rather than representation obtained by discursive steps. The ancient Sages are "Orientals" because this knowledge was given to them, not because they lived in the East; by the same move Islamic gnosis frees spiritual Islam from every ethnic tie, "including the tie with the Arab ethnos" [p 167 to 168].
Figure 29. Sohravardi's successive Orients, none on our maps [p 167 to 168].
| Orient | Level of being | Inhabitants |
|---|---|---|
| Major Orient | Jabarut | Cherubic Intelligences |
| Minor Orient | Malakut | Angels, celestial Souls |
| Middle Orient | Imaginal world, "eighth climate" | Hurqalya, its cities and heroes |
Table 11. Sohravardi's successive "Orients," none of them geographical [p 168].
For ordinary history, Islam and ancient Persia would have stayed in dialectical opposition. Hermeneutics turns them into a fulfilment, a "leading back to the Orient," like Maryam who "withdrew from her family to a place in the East" (Qur'an 19:16), the verse in which all the gnostics of Islam meditated this theme [p 169]. Corbin suggests Western parallels: the meeting of Celtic material with the Gospel of Nicodemus in Joseph of Arimathea, source of the Grail cycle of Robert de Boron; the meeting of the Corpus hermeticum with Wolfram's Parzival; and analogies between Kay Khosraw and Parsifal. Sohravardi himself has "an extraordinary 'Grail narrative'" [p 169].
Figure 30. Islam and Persia read two ways [p 169].
Three books: Rhapsodies, Heroes, Orient
To sharpen the idea, Corbin borrows from Joseph Baruzi's study of Liszt's book on Les Bohémiens et leur musique. Even if the technical and historical objections to Liszt were decisive, his overall vision would keep its validity, because his reading of Gypsy music is shaped by "dominating presences" that substitute for causality a principle of wrenching free from historical causality itself [p 170 to 171]. The Gypsies, as Liszt saw them, are a people "without memory," afraid of memory "as it would fear ghosts." When such a people wanted "to have their book too," they had "to sing in order to say" [p 172]. The marks of epic, for Liszt, are passions "spontaneous, absolute, imperious" [p 173].
Here Corbin splits the Latin absolutum into the French pair absous and absolu. There is no absolute without an absolvens that absolves it of every condition other than itself. "The absolute is such only because it absolves itself" [p 173 to 174]. The first effect of these absolving presences is an inversion of time: a memory torn from its moment transmutes everything before it, so that "all this anterior now succeeds" the privileged hours. The past was not finished; now it will be accomplished, become Event [p 174 to 175]. Sohravardi knew such presences too: the "marvellous day" when the inspiration of the Theosophy of the Orient came to him at once, followed by long months of writing. The objections of "a few obstinate Arabists" to his claimed descent from the Persian Sages break, Corbin says, on the same rampart as the objections to Liszt. Before Sohravardi nobody had seen the Khosrawaniyun, the Sages named after Kay Khosraw, as forerunners of the Ishraqiyun; from him on they were. "Sohravardi does not merely tell the history of the philosophy of ancient Persia; he is himself that history" [p 175 to 176].
Figure 31. Corbin splits absolutum in two [p 173 to 174].
Figure 32. Corbin's "triple phase" of epic, from Baruzi's Liszt to Sohravardi [p 170 to 179].
The "oriental finality" is therefore a principle of wrenching free from all the causalities of this world: the hero reaches the absolute state that absolves him of history in becoming. This is the summit of ta'wil: no longer only a hermeneutic of a text, leading it back to its inner sense, but a hermeneutic of the human being, leading the person back to his true being, his origin, his "Orient" [p 179 to 180]. Literary history cannot handle the question; it needs a metaphysics of the creative Act. Corbin finds it in Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (d. 1241/1826) and the Shaykhi school, "an integral Shi'i theosophy" not perfectly understood even in Iran [p 180].
Figure 33. The summit of ta'wil [p 179 to 180].
II. The Creative Act as Absolution of Being
Apophasis and the equivocity of being
Tradition has some twenty names for this level of absolute being (wojud motlaq): primordial Will (Mashi'at), eternal Muhammadan Reality, universal Mercy, absolute walayat, the universal Tree, the Morning of pre-eternity, the world of the Imperative, essential Love answering the hadith of the hidden Treasure [p 184]:
The same structure in the Recital
This is exactly how Ahsa'i describes the hikayat:
The same holds for the witness, what he contemplates, and what he testifies to. Plurality appears only from a point of view, because the Recital becomes real only "once the mountain of one's own egoity is abolished," and this happens in each being according to its measure. "Meditate, and meditate again!" [p 186 to 187]. The situation matches Sohravardi's injunction and the Fifth Imam's teaching that through ta'wil the Book is forever alive, its hidden sense fulfilled in each believer who recites it [p 187]:
For this reciter the haunting fear of the "outdated past" is exorcised. How could the past be outdated when it is happening in him, when by absolving himself of closed egoity he absolves the past of its fixity, so that it now follows him? "Tradition is transmitted only through this creation." Why contest the Shi'i conscience's testimony to its Imams, or Sohravardi's testimony to the Khosrawaniyun? Here, again, phenomenologist and positivist historian fail to understand each other [p 187 to 188].
An adamology of the creative Act
The mystical reciter stands where Adam stood: his own father and mother, his own matter and form, absolved of all external lineage [p 188]. Ahsa'i distinguishes Adam the Major (Adam al-Akbar), primordial Adam, zenith, from Adam the minor, "our father," the earthly Adam, nadir [p 188]. (al-'omq al-akbar). Will and Potentiality circumscribe each other exactly: if Potentiality exceeded the Will something would escape it; if the reverse, the Will would meet the Impossible [p 188 to 189]. The Will is primordial ADAM; the Potentiality is his EVE, his perfect equal. Eve is the setting free (itlaq), the licence to be (jawaz), the absolution that absolves this absolute. Their bi-unity, the metaphysical androgyne, is the absolutum, being pre-eternally absolved of nothingness [p 189 to 190].
Figure 34. Ahsa'i's two Adams [p 188].
| Term | Latin | Arabic | Figure | Grammar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Absolving agent | absolvens | motliq | Adam, the Will, the masculine | nomen agentis |
| Act of absolving | absolutio | itlaq, jawaz | Eve, Potentiality, the feminine | nomen actionis |
| Absolved being | absolutum | motlaq | Adam-Eve, the androgyne | nomen patientis |
Table 12. The triad of the absolute in Ahsa'i, as Corbin lays it out [p 182, 189 to 190, 193].
Zayd is standing; the iron in the fire
Figure 35. The tri-unity scheme and its homologues [p 193 to 196, 204].
From the iron to the Imam: the Face
Corbin notes that this hadith, in a theology where imamology is the homologue of Christology, marks the whole difference between the two, unless one goes back to an early angel Christology (Engelchristologie) [p 198]. The Muhammadan Reality is the "supreme symbol" (al-mathal al-a'la) of the One to whom nothing is like (42:9); far from weakening pure tawhid, this symbol guarantees it. The Imams do not reveal the divine Essence: they are the revealed divine Face [p 198 to 199].
The theophanic stations are "the letters composing the person of man," because his inmost self is a word (kalimat), a logos; their whole is his imperishable Face. God is veiled from you by you as long as the "mountain" of carnal egoity, closed and opaque, still stands; when it falls you become "His epiphany to yourself through yourself" [p 202]. Then the object to be known becomes the knowing Subject: this is the Imam's precept "know God through God," and this is "oriental" knowledge, the soul rising to its own dawn [p 203].
Figure 36. "know God through God" [p 202].
III. Return to the "Orient" as the Goal of the Recital
1. The Grail of Kay Khosraw
The xvarnah (Persian khorrah), the Light of Glory, is both the "glory" and the "destiny" of a being of light; its iconography spread as far as Buddhas and early Christian figures. One of its forms is a marvellous cup, the Grail, held by the primordial king Jamshid and by the Kayanid kings, notably Kay Khosraw, who left this world without crossing death [p 205 to 206]. Kay Khosraw is one of eight Kayanid sovereigns before Zoroaster. Their history is real but exceeds our chronology; no date can be assigned to them, and attempts to identify them with the Achaemenids have failed [p 206].
Figure 37. The Light of Glory and its cup [p 205 to 206].
Two parallels with Parsifal stand out. First the fortress Kang-Dez, built by Siyavakhsh, compared with the Grail castle: to withdraw into it is to be hidden from this world, and what happens there can be perceived only in vision [p 207]. It lies in the "extreme north," which is the celestial pole, the "emerald rock" where the eighth climate begins, at the summit of Alborz, the cosmic mountain of Qaf; one reaches it through Eran-Vej, in medio mundi. It has seven walls of different metals, fourteen mountains, seven rivers, fifteen gates; there live a son of Zoroaster and the eschatological companions of the future Saoshyant, among them Kay Khosraw. Shi'i images of the Green Island where the hidden Imam lives, and of the city of Hurqalya, match it closely [p 207 to 208]. Second, the "childhoods": both heroes survive through a dream, a mother's courage and questing knights, both grow up in solitary mountains and forests [p 208].
| Motif | Kay Khosraw (Iran) | Grail cycle (West) |
|---|---|---|
| Hidden castle | Kang-Dez, at Qaf, eighth climate | Grail castle; Sarras, "Palais espiriteus" |
| Childhood | Raised by his mother in mountains and forests | "Enfances Parsifal" |
| Quest | Seven years against Afrasyab, usurper of the xvarnah; destroys his inverted castle | Quest of the Grail, the Waste Land |
| Vessel | Grail of Jam, mirror of the universe | Holy Grail |
| Withdrawal | Bathes in the Spring of Life and vanishes | Galahad's ecstatic death; Grail taken "to Heaven"; Arthur to Avalon |
| Return to the "Orient" | Hidden among the Saoshyant's companions | Grail carried "to India" (Titurel); Prester John |
Table 13. Kay Khosraw and the Grail cycle, motif by motif [p 206 to 213].
Sohravardi first presents Kay Khosraw as the ecstatic of pre-Zoroastrian Persia: absorbed in prayer and contemplation, the Sophia of the Father came to him, he was carried up to the supreme world, the archangelic Lights showed themselves face to face, and he understood what the royal Light of Glory (Kayan khorrah) is: «cette projection dans l’âme d’une force victoriale devant laquelle les têtes s’inclinent» (editor's translation: "that projection into the soul of a victorial force before which heads bow") [p 214]. Whatever the book, this lets Sohravardi claim the Khosrawaniyun as his spiritual ancestors. The ecstasy may also be the occultation itself, like Galahad's: the initiate entering the other world enters only the world his soul already inhabits [p 214 to 215].
The "Grail narrative" proper is the fourth of twelve apologues in Sohravardi's Persian treatise The Language of the Ants. A prelude names the Cup of Jam; then the mysteries: the Grail is the inner man of light, the Espahbad Light, enclosed in a leather sheath "turned on the lathe" with ten joints (the body). When the bonds are untied, the Grail is invisible: the soul is in contemplation. When all the ties are tied, it appears. At the spring equinox Kay Khosraw held it to the Sun, and all the lines and imprints of the worlds appeared in it. Three eschatological verses follow (84:3-5, 69:18, 82:5), which ta'wil demands we read in the present tense [p 215 to 217]. Then the disclosure:
Here the hikayat is exemplary. Sohravardi is the iron, the Grail the fire. Kay Khosraw's deed is not a past fact to which the mystic is "behind the times"; the Grail is his imperishable Face, the Imam of his being, and Kay Khosraw in turn is absolved of every tie "in the past" because he is real and present in the Recital. The mystic does not tell a story; he is that story, the patient in whom it happens and therefore also its agent [p 217 to 218].
2. The death of Esfandyar
The second case comes from Sohravardi's The Crimson Archangel and involves three heroes: Zal and his son Rostam, two of the knights who turned back from Kay Khosraw's last journey, and Esfandyar, knight of the Zoroastrian faith, son of Vishtaspa [p 219]. The key is the bird Simorgh (Avestan Saena meregha), present in both heroic and mystical literature. Sohravardi's prelude to On the Modulation of Simorgh places its nest in the tree Tuba atop Qaf, at the threshold of the eighth climate. Tuba symbolises absolute being, hence also the Imam; its branch hangs before each elect's oratory, identity of the Face under which God is known and the Face under which man is known. Every hoopoe (soul of light) that in spring leaves its nest, strips its own plumage with its own beak, and flies to Qaf becomes a Simorgh whose song wakes the sleepers [p 219 to 220].
Its food is fire; whoever ties one of its feathers to the right arm passes through fire unburned [p 221]. Bar Hebraeus (d. 1284) transferred several of these attributes to the dove of the Holy Spirit [p 221]. 'Attar's Language of the Birds completes the image: reading Simorgh as si morgh, "thirty birds," he has thousands set out and thirty arrive, to discover that Simorgh is themselves. An Iranian Shi'i shaykh, commenting on it in Corbin's hearing, concluded: "that is the mystery of the divine Face, and that is the Imam" [p 221 to 222].
In The Crimson Archangel, the Angel (Gabriel, Angel of humanity, and the initiate's personal daimon, the hermetic Poimandres) teaches the way to Qaf, the soul's descent from and return to the Orient, divided between Zal and Esfandyar. Zal is born white-haired, the whiteness of the world of light; his horrified father Sam exposes him in the winter desert; his mother finds him alive, sheltered by Simorgh by day and suckled by a gazelle by night. Simorgh tells the Angel: Zal was born under the gaze of the tree Tuba, "we did not let him perish." Day is the soul's homeland of light; night is sense perception; the gazelle is the anima sensitiva [p 222 to 223]. Corbin cites Merkelbach on the mystery meaning of the Greek novel: Daphnis nursed by a goat; Heliodorus' Chariclea born white because her mother gazed on Andromeda, exposed, and destined to seek her true homeland in the "Orient"; and the Song of the Pearl in the Acts of Thomas, close to Sohravardi's Tale of the Occidental Exile [p 223 to 224].
Defeat in appearance, ecstatic death in truth. Sohravardi says at the end of his Occidental Exile: «C’est moi qui suis dans ce récit» (editor's translation: "It is I who am in this story") [p 226]. Simorgh is multitude and each time unique; Esfandyar's death means the same as Kay Khosraw's withdrawal into Kang-Dez. Simorgh is the divine Face as shown to man and at the same time his own imperishable Face, the Imam or Angel of his being; in this face to face the two Faces reflect each other, and a human being can anticipate the vision but not go beyond it [p 226]. The moth of the famous apologue threw itself into the flame and, becoming the flame, was for an instant in love with itself; here a last limit is crossed, and the initiate passes through fire unconsumed. The birds at the "rising dawn," aurora consurgens, become forever the Fire that feeds the blaze of the divine Face without being consumed [p 226 to 227]. For Zoroastrian tradition Esfandyar's death was Ahriman's work through the rebels against the faith; Sohravardi's ta'wil exorcises Ahriman and tears the heroes from his power [p 227].
IV. Iranism and the Hieratic World
Corbin closes with a comparison he hopes might bring the unknown Iranian philosophers into Western debate: Sohravardi's Iranism and the "Iranism" of Alexis Khomiakov and the Slavophiles in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century [p 227 to 228]. Khomiakov built a non-Hegelian philosophy of history in which religions are defined by categories of the will: "freedom or necessity." Iranism is the creative spiritual principle, religion of moral freedom; Kushitism (Kush, the Bible's Ethiopia) is the religion of physical and logical necessity, the latter perfected in Hegel. Iranian thought "is grounded in tradition" and is grasped only by higher intuition, not deduced [p 228 to 229].
| Khomiakov (Slavophile) | Leontiev | Sohravardi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Key principle | Iranism = creative freedom, against Kushite necessity | Byzantine sacral idea | "Oriental" knowledge, the Light of Glory |
| Bearer | The Russian people, universalised | Not the people: elect personalities, beauty, the Church | A hieratic lineage, not a race |
| Risk or stance | Populism, temporal ideal | Spiritual, ascetic, hieratic | Lineage like the Grail keepers' |
Table 14. Corbin's closing comparison: Sohravardi stands nearer to Leontiev's Byzantium than to Khomiakov's people [p 228 to 231].
The contrast appears quickly. Khomiakov's Iranism raises a people's hidden type to universal value, with a basic "populism." Constantin Leontiev put his faith neither in Russia nor in its people but in the sacral, hieratic idea of Byzantium; without it the Russian people was, in his view, insignificant. He believed in the Church, the idea, beauty, certain elect creative personalities, not in the mass; he remains a witness of a hieratic world in Iamblichus' sense [p 229 to 231]. So what the ancient Sages were for Sohravardi corresponds rather to what Byzantium was for Leontiev. It was not the Iranians who made their knowledge "oriental"; "oriental" knowledge made them "Orientals", the xvarnah that may invest a being or withdraw from it. The descent Sohravardi claims is hieratic, not ethnic [p 231].
At the peril of history
No one was more traditional than Sohravardi, who tied the "oriental" tradition of Islamic Persia to that of Zoroastrian Persia; no one more creative, since without him that tradition would not exist. The opposition between tradition and new creation is vain: in the new creation the tradition re-creates itself in the person of the reciter [p 234]. Corbin ends with the Vulgate's Quae est ista quae progreditur quasi aurora consurgens (Song of Songs 6:10): the "army set in battle array" that reconquers lost ground; those who hold fast on the shore "at the peril of history" are, he says, "in truth the strongest of the strong" [p 235].
Essay 4. Face of God and Face of Man
An Eranos lecture dated July 1967, given the year the Eranos theme was "polarity" [p 237, 310]. Corbin reads a chapter of Ibn Babuyeh's Kitab al-Tawhid on the "divine Face," with the unpublished Safavid commentary of Qazi Sa'id Qommi (d. 1103/1691), and draws a single claim from it: the Imam is at once the Face God shows to man and the Face man shows to God. He then asks at what level of the human being this meeting happens, answers with Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i's adamology, follows the Imam as "pole of the soul" into Sohravardi's angelology, and ends by setting the result beside Rozanov, Berdyaev and Nietzsche [p 237 to 310].
I. The Imam as Face of God and Face of Man
Why polarity, and why Shi'ism
The Arabic word for pole, qotb, is often used loosely for the head of a Sufi order. Strictly, Corbin says, the polar function (qotbiya) belongs only to the figure who polarizes both the devotion and the speculative theosophy of Shi'ism: the Imam, the "Guide" [p 237]. Western readers attend at once when a philosopher shows that some modern anthropology is a secularized christology, yet they assume Islam, knowing only the transcendent One, has nothing to say about theandria, the divine-human unity. That holds for majority Sunni theology. It holds less for Sufism with its Perfect Man, and not at all for Shi'ism, where imamology does the work christology does in Christian theology, precisely in order to guarantee the transcendence of tawhid [p 238]. It met the same problems as christology but solved them in a sense official Christian history pushed to the margin. What looks "left behind" by History is offered "in the present": the issue is neither "our time" nor another, but a polar dimension that man lost "dès qu'il s'est acharné pour «faire de l'histoire» à être «de son temps»" (editor's translation: "as soon as he grew set, in order to 'make history,' on being 'of his time'") [p 238].
The Shi'ite treatise on God is apophatic: every attribute must be kept apart (tanzih) from the divine Essence. The Qur'an's "anthropomorphisms" (God's Face, hand, side) are then neither naive literalism nor rationalist allegory. They refer to the primordial theophany, the pleroma of the Fourteen Immaculate Ones (the Prophet, Fatima, the Twelve Imams), considered not in their brief historical appearance but as pre-eternal "persons of light" (ashkhas nuraniya), the "primordial Muhammadan Reality" [p 239 to 240]. Their light descends through the levels of Lahut, Jabarut, Malakut and Molk. Corbin compares them to the Aeons of Valentinian gnosis, and recalls the hadith of the Twelve Veils of light, twelve millennia through which the Muhammadan Light descends: the "metahistorical prehistory" of prophecy [p 240].
Prophecy and walayat, exoteric and esoteric, are the two poles of revelation. Walayat is the quality of the Friend or Beloved of God. In the Prophet it is the hidden source of his mission; its manifestation is the charisma of the Imam. As the Prophet is "Seal of the prophets," the First Imam is "Seal of absolute walayat" and the hidden Twelfth Imam the "Seal of walayat" for the Muhammadan period. The supreme polar function, "pole of poles," belongs to the First Imam and through him to all Twelve, who are "one and the same Light" [p 240 to 241].
Figure 38. The two poles of revelation [p 240 to 241].
The text: eleven hadith on Qur'an 28:88
Chapter XII of the Kitab al-Tawhid of Shaykh Saduq Ibn Babuyeh (d. 381/992) gathers eleven hadith, mostly from the Fifth and Sixth Imams, in which disciples ask about one verse: «Toute chose est périssable hormis sa Face» (28: 88) (editor's translation: "Everything perishes except his Face") [p 242]. The question is grammatical. To whom does the pronoun in illa wajha-hu refer? The ordinary reading says God's Face. Some mystics read, as the grammar allows, "except the face of that thing," the imperishable face within it, and caused scandal. The Imams' hermeneutic leans to the second reading, or rather holds both at once [p 242].
Two sets of answers emerge. In the first three hadith, the imperishable Face of a being is its din, its religion, which Qommi glosses as inner faith, "les expériences intérieures, secrètement vécues en compagnie de Dieu" (editor's translation: "inner experiences, lived in secret in God's company"), of which the outward shari'at is only the vehicle [p 242]. In the following hadith the Fifth and Sixth Imams declare: «C'est Nous (les Imâms) qui sommes la Face de Dieu impérissable» (editor's translation: "It is We, the Imams, who are the imperishable Face of God") [p 243]. How do the two connect?
Figure 39. Two readings of "except his Face" (28:88) [p 242].
In the first hadith, when a disciple cites the verse, Imam Muhammad al-Baqir answers with irony that God is too sublime to be given a face: «Le sens du verset est que tout être périt, disparaît, hormis sa religion, car la face est ce que l'on tourne vers la chose vers laquelle on va.» (editor's translation: "The meaning of the verse is that every being perishes and disappears except its religion, for the face is what one turns toward the thing one is going to.") [p 243]. Qommi notes what the Imam rejects: that God has a face among others, like Zayd's or 'Amr's. He does not reject that God may present a Face, the Face under which he shows himself to his believer, "wherever you turn, there is the Face of God" (2:109). What must be grasped is the theophanic relation between the one who shows himself (motajalli) and the one to whom he shows himself (motajalla la-hu): God appears to each according to each one's capacity [p 243 to 244].
Here the link is made. Wajh Allah means what orients, that by which one turns toward God, so that turning toward God implies that God faces the pilgrim at that very moment. For a Shi'ite that Face is the one shown by the Prophet and the Imams in the religion that shapes their inner life. Faith is therefore at once the Face a being presents to God and the divine Face God shows it through his prophets and Friends. Then comes Ja'far al-Sadiq's reply: «C'est Nous, répond-il, qui sommes la Face de Dieu qui ne périt pas.» (editor's translation: "'It is We,' he answers, 'who are the Face of God that does not perish.'") [p 244]. Shi'ite authors add that the letters of wajh (w = 6, j = 3, h = 5) total fourteen, the number of the Immaculate Ones [p 244 to 245].
The equation of Imam and religion through the middle term "Face" makes the Imam homologous with the Mazdean and Manichaean Daena, the figure of splendid beauty who meets the believer at death and says she is his religion and his self. For the Shi'ite, knowledge of the Imam and knowledge of oneself are bound together [p 245].
Figure 40. The equation that makes the Imam homologous with the Daena [p 245].
Iron in the fire, and the eye of Eckhart
The reasoning runs as follows. In its depths God is unknowable, unpredicable, incommunicable. The Face the Absconditum turns to man, the Deus revelatus, must be a theophanic Figure, which carries all the "anthropomorphic" attributes; Shi'ite gnosis recognizes it as the Imam [p 245]. Without it man would have no qibla for thought or prayer. The Imam stands to the deity as red-hot iron to fire: the iron is not fire, and the Imam is not God, but without the iron the fire would not appear [p 246]. Conversely, since the believer's Face is his faith in the divine Face that appears in the Imam, the Imam is the form of that faith. So the Face under which man knows God is the Face under which God knows man. Corbin recalls Meister Eckhart, quoting from memory: «L'œil par lequel je connais Dieu, est l'œil même par lequel il me connaît» (editor's translation: "The eye by which I know God is the very eye by which he knows me") [p 246]. Shi'ite spirituality is "imamocentric" as Christian spirituality is christocentric, and its authors repeat that without the Imam tawhid is impossible: one falls into the abyss of tashbih (anthropomorphism) or of ta'til (emptying God of attributes, agnosticism) [p 246 to 247].
Figure 41. The image of iron in fire [p 245 to 246].
Figure 42. Corbin's two intersecting ellipses with a shared focus, the Imam [p 247, 257].
Corbin proposes the diagram himself: two ellipses overlapping so that one focus is common to both. There is polarity between the hidden God and his Face, and between that Face and man; "mais il n'y a pas de polarité entre l'Absconditum et l'homme" (editor's translation: "but there is no polarity between the Absconditum and man") [p 247]. All this presupposes an interiorized imamology. The historical persons of the Imams were the epiphanic form (mazhar) of their persons of light, and the meeting of the two Faces happens in the malakut, neither rational abstraction nor sensible concreteness but "spiritual concrete." Shi'ite mysticism does not plunge the soul into the undifferentiated night of being; it is the meeting with a Face, Greek prosopon, of which wajh is the exact equivalent. Its fana' is not annihilation of the person but the raising of the creaturely dimension to the divine in one who becomes, through the Imam, a Friend of God [p 248].
Two faces of every being
Qommi frames this through an old scheme: Plotinus's "two faces" of the soul, Avicenna's Intelligences with a dimension of light (their act of being) and a dimension of shadow (their quiddity, not Ahrimanian but contingent), and Sohravardi's two wings of Gabriel, one of pure light, one darkened to the red of dusk [p 248 to 249]. Every being has a face toward itself (its quiddity, poverty, darkness) and a face toward its Principle (its light, act of being, perfection) [p 249].
Figure 43. The two faces of every being [p 248 to 249].
He applies it to Qur'an 10:105, Aqim wajha-ka li'l-Din, which grammar lets us read two ways, forming a hermeneutic circle. (a) "Raise the Face in you that is religion," your dimension of light, because at that instant God faces you, as in the inspired hadith of the hidden Treasure who longed to be known. (b) "Raise your face toward religion": lift the face turned toward yourself, your quiddity, your shadow, up to the Face on your Principle's side, your "true Face" [p 249 to 250]. The two Faces relate as the knowing "I" relates to the "self" it knows in "he who knows himself knows his Lord." In gnosis this is the relation of the soul to its celestial Double, its "Angel," "simultanément toi-même et autre que toi, tout en étant toi" (editor's translation: "at once yourself and other than you, while being you") [p 250 to 251]. Qommi concludes that once this is understood, it no longer matters whether the pronoun in 28:88 goes back to the thing or to God, since the thing's imperishable Face is the Face it has toward God, which is God's Face toward it [p 251]. Each Face is the mirror of the other: one cannot cease to appear to the other without the other ceasing to appear to it [p 251].
Figure 44. Aqim wajha-ka li'l-Din read two ways, a hermeneutic circle [p 249 to 251].
| Reading | Text | Face meant | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|
| 28:88, common | "except His Face" | God's Face | God alone endures |
| 28:88, mystical | "except its face" | The thing's imperishable face | The face a being turns to God endures |
| 10:105 (a) | "Raise the Face that is religion" | Face of light, where God faces you | Let it appear in act |
| 10:105 (b) | "Raise your face toward religion" | Face of shadow, your quiddity | Lift it to your true Face |
| Qommi's synthesis | Both at once | The Imam | Face of creature to God = Face of God to creature |
Table 15. The double readings Qommi holds together [p 242 to 251].
The inner Ka'ba and the occultation
"Religion" means Islam (3:17), and Islam before any confessional sense is a divine service of turning wholly toward the Most High, of "facing." The Imams are the Face each believer has toward God because they are the Threshold of God (Bab Allah). As the one praying turns outwardly to the Ka'ba, so in all his knowing and service he must turn "la face de son cœur vers le Seuil intérieur ou ésotérique (bâb bâṭin) et la Face vraie, vers la Ka'ba de pure lumière" (editor's translation: "the face of his heart toward the inner or esoteric Threshold and the true Face, toward the Ka'ba of pure light") [p 252]. Any worship that does not take them inwardly as its pole is no worship, "même si l'orant était un prophète ou un ange d'entre les anges" (editor's translation: "even if the worshipper were a prophet or an angel among angels") [p 252]. Qommi adds that these are extraordinary secrets not to be divulged, and Corbin recalls an Iranian master's phrase: «Le temps n'est pas encore venu.» (editor's translation: "The time has not yet come.") [p 253].
Figure 45. The Imams as Threshold of God (Bab Allah) [p 252 to 253].
The variant follows: "He who knows his Imam knows his Lord" [p 253]. Ja'far adds: «Cette Face de Dieu, nous ne cessons de l'être chez les hommes aussi longtemps qu'il y a en eux une vision (ru'ya) de Dieu.» Asked what vision is, he says: «Le besoin. Lorsqu'il n'y a plus ce besoin de Dieu en eux, Dieu nous enlève vers lui.» (editor's translation: "We do not cease to be this Face of God among men as long as there is in them a vision of God." "Need. When there is no longer this need of God in them, God takes us up to himself.") [p 253 to 254]. That is the ghaybat, the occultation of the Imam, and it is the present age. Visible or hidden, the Imam remains the mystical pole without which the human world, which includes the malakut, would collapse [p 254].
Corbin plays on French regarder, "to look at" and "to concern." A thing "concerns" us only because we look at it. Many now hold that the question of God "no longer concerns us"; taken literally the phrase becomes terrible: «Dieu ne nous regarde plus», ce qui veut dire que nous, nous ne le regardons plus (editor's translation: "'God no longer looks at us,' which means that we no longer look at him") [p 255]. The occultation is reciprocal. The look that is at once God looking at man and man looking at God is the Imam, and man cannot survive, as man, the loss of his polar dimension [p 255]. This keeps the Shi'ite mystic from the hubris of Hallaj's Ana'l-Haqq, "I am God" [p 255].
If the First Imam could say at Kufa «Je suis le second Christ; je suis lui et il est moi» (editor's translation: "I am the second Christ; I am he and he is I") [p 259], then to which of the many christologies does imamology correspond?
II. Imamology and Adamology
The triad of Adams
The answer comes from Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (d. 1241/1826), founder of the Shaykhi school, whose metaphysics of being is put in terms of adamology [p 259 to 260]. As in Essay 3, absolute being (wojud motlaq) presupposes an absolvens that frees it from the Great Abyss. The being so absolved, mashi'at, the self-creating primordial Will, is the Greater Adam (Adam al-akbar, Homo maximus), zenith whose nadir is "our father" Adam; its Eve is the setting free (itlaq) that is its form. Corbin sums up: Molla Sadra's primacy of existence is an ontology "of Adam alone," the old metaphysics of essence one "of Eve alone," and Ahsa'i's an ontology of the metaphysical Adam-Eve, keeping the polarity of being and essence [p 260 to 261]. The Fifth Imam's saying that God created "millions of worlds and millions of Adams," and that you are the last of them, names the descents from world to world [p 261].
Figure 46. The adamology behind imamology [p 259 to 262].
| Adam | What it is | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Greater Adam | Divine creative Will, mashi'at; the Act of being | Absolute being in act |
| 2. Second Adam | Primordial Muhammadan Reality; heaven of absolute walayat; the fourteen persons of light | Barzakh: upper face on the absolute, lower face on determinate being |
| 3. Third Adam | Universal Intelligence, 'aql al-koll, Nous | First of the "bound" (moqayyad) beings |
| Each lower Adam, down to "our father" | Like Melchizedek, without father or mother save spiritual ones: act of being (father) and quiddity (mother) | Adam of each universe |
Table 16. Ahsa'i's adamological triad [p 261 to 263].
Because shay' (thing) and mashi'at (will) share a root, things appear to these thinkers less as German Realität than as Wirklichkeit, from wirken: existing things are "wills" of the primordial Will [p 261 to 262]. The relation of first to second Adam is the iron and the fire again, or the act of standing and the one who stands; the Imams are God's "stations" (maqamat), differing from him only in being his creatures and servants [p 263].
Matter as father, Form as mother
Every being, from Intelligence to mineral, has Matter and Form; the matter of Intelligence is "molten light," that of the mineral "congealed light." This is "spiritual realism" rather than materialism [p 263]. Then Ahsa'i makes a radical reversal: Matter is the father, Form the mother, so that Form, not Matter, individuates [p 264]. He cites Ja'far: God created the believers from his Light and dyed them in his Mercy, «Son père est la Lumière et sa mère est la Miséricorde» (editor's translation: "His father is Light and his mother is Mercy") [p 264]. In man, living nature is the father, thinking nature the mother. Consequence: if Matter were mother it would bear endless forms, the subjectum evolutionis; with Form as mother there is no evolutive generation, only an ascent of forms receiving successively subtler matter. Corbin hears in this "l'irrémissible individualité des êtres" (editor's translation: "the irremissible individuality of beings") against all levelling by logical concepts [p 265].
Figure 47. Ahsa'i's reversal [p 263 to 264].
First creation (Will and resolve: being and first quiddity) is distinguished from second creation (qadar, measure, and qada', decree). Wood is first quiddity relative to the throne or the idol carved from it [p 265 to 266]. For man, between the two creations comes the Covenant of Qur'an 7:172, "Am I not your Lord?" (a-lasto bi-rabbikom), a metahistorical drama which Corbin likens to souls choosing their lot in Plato. Those who truly assented received the "tincture of Mercy," the true human Form; those whose assent hid a refusal received a "tincture of Wrath," a satanic form under human appearance. Hence the saying that the blessed is blessed from his mother's womb: unintelligible within one lifetime, it states a responsibility engaged before this world [p 266 to 267]. The wood becomes a throne or an idol.
Figure 48. The two creations and the Covenant between them [p 265 to 266].
So Ahsa'i rejects the philosophers' "rational animal." Their "living" is a logical genre shared by man, dog and horse; but «La nature vivante (ḥayawâniya) qui dans l'homme se trouve réunie à la nature pensante [...] n'est point une nature vivante qui serait un genre commun à l'espèce pensante, à l'espèce aboyante, à l'espèce hennissante» (editor's translation: "The living nature joined in man to thinking nature is not a living nature that would be a genus common to the thinking species, the barking species, the neighing species") [p 268]. The matter itself is differentiated by the pre-existential choice, as receptacles round a light shine according to their capacity, not their distance [p 268 to 269].
Three living natures
| Living nature | Source | Essential for | Accidental for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Animal, sensory | Souls of the celestial Spheres | Animals | Man (a "vehicle," a bark) |
| 2. Celestial, hieratic (malakutiya qodsiya) | Malakut | Man | The Imam |
| 3. Celestial divine (malakutiya ilahiya) | The Second Adam, Muhammadan Reality | The Immaculate Imam | (none; its Form is supreme tawhid) |
Table 17. The triple differentiation of living nature in Ahsa'i [p 270 to 273].
Man descended into this world to actualize, through sensible things, the knowledge that perfects him, the "quest for the Pearl." Animal nature is lent to him as a means. Until it is subdued by his malakuti nature it can take only animal forms (the wild beast in anger, the scorpion in slander), which will appear only at the Resurrection: "hence so many demons with human faces." Through the alchemy of gnosis the soul must reach the "pacified" state so that from father and mother "naisse l'enfant qui est l'homme vrai" (editor's translation: "the child who is the true man may be born") [p 271 to 272]. In the Imam both lower natures are perfectly pacified under his nature of divine light; the Form of that highest nature is supreme tawhid, the Imams' 'ismat, immunity, and its pole is "le support (ou réceptacle) du regard par lequel Dieu regarde le monde" (editor's translation: "the support or receptacle of the look by which God looks at the world") [p 273]. The circle closes.
Christos-Angelos, not social incarnation
The man of this anthropology is neither the rational animal, nor homo oeconomicus, nor the social or evolutionary man. He has a spiritual body. He is "un pas-encore," a not-yet: «L'être humain est un ange en puissance ou un démon en puissance» (editor's translation: "The human being is an angel in potency or a demon in potency") [p 274]. Imamology therefore corresponds to a very old christology, that of Christos-Angelos, the Angel or celestial Man of late Jewish apocalyptic (Enoch, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Shepherd of Hermas) [p 274 to 275]. Those who now say "incarnation" have often swapped divine incarnation for a social one; imamology remains a theology of transfiguration, translatable only into a christology of caro spiritualis Christi. The human pole is not the carnal or social man, where confusion with mass consciousness threatens; the polarity saves the spiritual individual from depersonalization, a fascination so strong that complaisant theologies can become "a theology of atheism" without noticing [p 275]. With Schelling, mutatis mutandis, the subjectum incarnationis is neither God nor man but a "divine extra-divine person," and equally a human extra-human one. Since the three natures map onto molk, malakut and jabarut (body, soul, spirit), the divine-human polarity lies between the second and third degrees; the Imam's human nature is that of man as angel in potency [p 276].
III. The Imam as Pole of the Soul
Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui
The Imam converges with the Angel of the Ishraqiyun, guide and celestial counterpart, the self each "I" discovers in knowing itself and addresses as "you" [p 277]. The first condition is to grasp that events happen in the malakut, relative to each soul, perceived by active Imagination, not by sense or reason. Some families of minds take this for granted; others cannot conceive it and relegate such events to legend [p 277 to 278].
Corbin's examples come from gnostic sources. In the Acts of Peter, Peter can say of the Transfiguration only «Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui» (editor's translation, following Corbin's French: "As I saw him, so I had the capacity to grasp him"). Blind widows are told to perceive in spirit what eyes cannot see; an ineffable light enters their eyes, and some see an old man, some a youth, some a child [p 278 to 279]. In the Acts of John, James and John see the same figure on the shore as a child and as a handsome man; there is the Cross of Light separating what is from what becomes [p 279]. Origen says the Saviour appeared to each according as each was worthy [p 280]. This is docetism properly understood: dokesis not as phantasm but as "real apparition" corresponding to the subjective a priori of the seer, the first theological critique of knowledge. The soul is not witness of an outer event others could equally witness; the event takes place in it, and every theophany is an angelophany [p 280 to 281].
Two symptoms show the modern loss of this sense: theologians opposing "Platonic spiritualism" to the "realism" of the Incarnation, even about Palamas and the Light of Tabor, without saying at what level the subjectum incarnationis lies; and scholars' scorn for Marco Polo's tradition that each of the three Magi saw Jesus alone, at his own age [p 281 to 282].
Three declarations of the Khotbat al-Bayan
The "Sermon of the Great Declaration," whose authenticity Qommi defends, hammers some seventy affirmations by the eternal Imam: «Je suis le Guide et je suis celui vers qui les créatures sont guidées. [...] Je suis l'œil de Dieu, sa Langue véridique, sa Main... Celui qui me connaît tel que je dois être connu, celui-là connaît son Dieu.» (editor's translation: "I am the Guide and the one to whom creatures are guided. ... I am the eye of God, his truthful Tongue, his Hand ... Whoever knows me as I must be known knows his God.") [p 285]. Corbin takes three.
"I am the father of orphans, the husband of widows": orphans and widows are the same souls, orphaned of knowledge and widowed of their spiritual homeland. The Imam is their invisible master (ostad-e ghaybi), and each soul stands to him as Maryam to Gabriel. Corbin cites Silesius: what use is it, Gabriel, to greet Mary if you have not the same message for me? A mystical hierogamy appears where the Imam is identified with the Angel [p 288 to 289].
"I am the Kalimat al-taqwa," which Corbin renders "Logos of vigilance": taqwa comes from w-q-y, to guard, not "fear of God" [p 289 to 290]. Using Sohravardi and the Arabic Theology of Aristotle, Qommi argues that every reality has a Logos, a lord of its species (rabb al-naw'), its "Perfect Nature"; moral and religious realities too. Vigilance is a reality of pure light, and the Imam is its archetype and the angel of the species of the Vigilant, "à la fois comme un père et une mère compatissante" (editor's translation: "at once like a father and a compassionate mother") to them [p 291 to 293]. The Imam now wears the features of the Angel: the Perfect Nature, "key of wisdom," the angel of the philosopher to whom Sohravardi addressed a psalm; the Angel on the mystical Sinai of the Occidental Exile. The Shi'ite meeting his Imam is in the same position as the Valentinian gnostic meeting his Angel: a self that is truly oneself yet distinct from the knowing "I," a Face one can call "you" [p 293 to 295].
IV. Aspects of Theandry
Shi'ite theosophy has grown "in a closed vessel," held behind the frontier of technical vocabularies, absent from the West's great metaphysical debates; yet since truth is measured against metahistory, "it is never too late" for a deferred meeting [p 295].
Rozanov. While studying these texts Corbin read Vasily Rozanov (1856-1919), The Dark Face of Christ, a negative counterpart. Torn between the ancient religions and Christianity, Rozanov held that if Christ is God as the dogma says, the world must belong to the devil: the Sun only "attracts" the Earth by Newton's law, "a perfectly Christian answer" [p 296]. Black is the tomb on which Christianity stands; white is the resurrected Hellene, Jew and Egypt. Before Christ's beauty the world becomes "bitter, flat and boring" [p 297]. Yet in Solitaria he writes: «Mon Dieu c'est Quelqu'un, c'est un Visage» (editor's translation: "My God is Someone, is a Face"), and draws two cones touching at their apex: the social self narrows to a point through which a single ray from God passes, and from it a second cone widens to infinity [p 298 to 299]. This matches Corbin's two ellipses. The "dark face" may simply be the social self, where religion speaks in terms of power, constraint and authority, what Berdyaev calls objectivation [p 299].
Berdyaev. Berdyaev's theandrism, inherited from Soloviev, rethinks theandria toward the religion of the Spirit, the "third" revelation of the Paraclete since Joachim of Fiore, which will not be a new religion but the fulfilment of Christianity, as the hidden Twelfth Imam, identified by several Shi'ite thinkers with the Paraclete, will bring no new religion but unveil the spiritual sense of all revelations [p 300 to 301]. It is a revelation "of man to God," which matches the Imam as man's Face toward God [p 301]. Berdyaev's critique of revelation is bipolar: there is one who reveals and one to whom revelation is made, the Ibn 'Arabi pair motajalli and motajalla la-hu. The religious phenomenon «nous révèle à la fois Dieu dans l'homme et l'homme en Dieu» (editor's translation: "reveals to us at once God in man and man in God") [p 303]. He holds that "historical revelation" is a contradictory notion, the symbolization of spiritual revelation in history, close to the Shi'ite malakut [p 304 to 305], and that revelation has an exoteric and an esoteric side [p 306]. A note rejects opposing messianic hope to cyclical history: Iranian and Shi'ite eschatologies are both strictly cyclical, and linear time may be a secularized eschatology [p 306].
Berdyaev's leitmotiv from Baader, "man wanted to be man without God, but God did not want to be God without man," is theandry itself; but adamology asks which Man is meant. Gnostics placed the anthropomorphosis at the level of the celestial Anthropos, Ahsa'i's Second Adam [p 306 to 307]. European metaphysics, Berdyaev shows, unfolded from christology: now the divine absorbing the human, now the reverse. Boehme sets the birth of God in eternity, Hegel in historical time; at the end the divine appears as man's servitude, and man, stripped of his polar dimension, hears Nietzsche's question and his "God is dead," after which man is a sickness to be surpassed [p 307 to 309].
Essay 5. The Idea of the Paraclete in Iranian Philosophy
The last essay is offered as a series of "soundings" [p 314]. Corbin follows one exegesis through Iranian thought: the Paraclete promised in the Gospel of John, first identified with the Prophet Muhammad, is moved by Shi'ite thinkers onto the hidden Twelfth Imam, and the Zoroastrian Saoshyant joins them. The result is a "paracletic philosophy" in which the age of the letter gives way to the age of spiritual meaning. It runs parallel to Joachim of Fiore and Schelling, and Corbin argues it belongs "to the philosophy to come" [p 311 to 358].
I. The Question and the Two Faces of the Paraclete
Recent work on the Paraclete (Otto Betz, with Coptic Manichaean texts, Qumran and Nag Hammadi) left Iran out, and Corbin admits the fault lies partly with iranologists [p 311]. He takes "Iranian philosophy" broadly: falsafa, hikmat, 'irfan, theologians and gnostics alike. The Johannine Paraclete has two aspects. He is the Spirit of truth sent from above, who reveals the hidden sense of the prophetic teaching and leads into all truth, the "Comforter." By etymology he is also the advocate, an intercessor whose role is that of accuser, arraigning the world of Darkness before the divine Light [p 312]. Sohravardi's school stresses the first aspect. When Haydar Amoli (14th century) and Ibn Abi Jomhur (15th century) identify the Paraclete with the Twelfth Imam, the whole "prophetic philosophy" deepens along its axes: tanzil and ta'wil, exoteric and esoteric, Prophet and Imam, cycle of prophecy and cycle of walayat [p 312].
Figure 49. The two aspects of the Johannine Paraclete [p 312].
II. The Shi'ite Traditionists
Majlisi and his source. Majlisi, drawing on Qotboddin Ravandi (6th/12th century), cites John 16 and 14:26 in Arabic and a hikayat that bends the verses toward ta'wil: «il vous communiquera les secrets et vous enseignera toutes choses. Il témoignera de moi, de même que je témoigne de lui, car je vous apporte les paraboles, tandis qu'il vous apportera le ta'wil» (editor's translation: "he will communicate the secrets to you and teach you all things. He will bear witness to me as I bear witness to him, for I bring you the parables, while he will bring you the ta'wil") [p 315]. The setting is a prophetology close to the Jewish-Christian Verus Propheta, who hastens from prophet to prophet toward his "place of rest," here Muhammad. So the Paraclete sent after Jesus must be the Seal of the prophets; the tradition even holds that the name of Elijah in Matthew 11 replaced that of Ahmad (Qur'an 61:6). Since Elijah is also identified with 'Ali, the First Imam, a slide toward the Imam is already under way [p 315 to 316].
Nahavandi's double Epiphany. Shaykh 'Ali Akbar Nahavandi Mashhadi, in a vast Persian compendium on the Twelfth Imam, joins John's Gospel to Revelation 12 and finds a double Manifestation (zohur), an echo of Christ's "double advent" [p 317]. The first is the Prophet. Nahavandi knows the Christian sense of the word (Persian "Comforter"), reads the "Syriac" Fariqlit as "praiseworthy" (Ahmad) against Greek Paraklet, "mediator," but grants that words matter less than Signs. The Paraclete can come only after Jesus because successive law-giving prophets cannot coexist; his law lasts to the end of time; and Qur'an 3:48 and 4:156 express the Qur'an's "docetic" christology [p 318 to 319]. He therefore doubts Ibn Abi Jomhur's reading. Corbin notes the difficulty: no single figure can be both the last law-giving prophet and the one who unveils the hidden sense, since all Shi'ite prophetology holds that the Qa'im brings no new law but the truth of all laws [p 320].
Figure 50. Nahavandi's double Epiphany [p 317 to 321].
Recent Christian scholarship found a parallel doubling: Christ as "first Paraclete," interceding in heaven, and the archangel Michael as "great Paraclete," Spirit of truth fighting evil. Shi'ite prophetology always split tanzil (the Prophet, with Gabriel) from ta'wil (the Imam, whose last combat resembles Michael's, Revelation 12:7-10) [p 321]. Nahavandi's second Epiphany is the Imam's parousia: the cosmic signs of Matthew 24 and Luke 21 match the akhbar on the Qa'im's emergence from the occultation he entered at five; the period Jesus announced as the lifting of the veil ends in that parousia, «Alors il ressort que l'intention de Jésus vise aussi la manifestation de cette même Lumière» (editor's translation: "It follows that Jesus' intention also aims at the manifestation of this same Light") [p 322].
Figure 51. The split Shi'ite prophetology always kept [p 321].
| Figure in Revelation 12 | First reading (Nahavandi) | Second reading (Nahavandi) | Yazdi Ha'eri |
|---|---|---|---|
| Woman clothed with the sun | Fatima | Narkes, Byzantine princess, mother of the Twelfth Imam | Fatima |
| Sun | Absolute prophecy | Her husband, the Eleventh Imam | A small part of her own light |
| Moon under her feet | Absolute walayat | Hakima Khatun, the midwife aunt | Likewise borrowed from her light |
| Twelve stars | The Twelve Imams | Muhammad and the first eleven Imams | |
| Child | Imam Hosayn (Karbala) | The Twelfth Imam | The hidden Qa'im |
| Dragon | His murderers | All demonic forms, the Abbasids first | The Abbasids, the "accursed tree" |
Table 18. Shi'ite readings of the vision of Revelation 12 [p 323 to 326].
In Yazdi Ha'eri the "rod of iron" is the sword of the last combat, and the child cannot be Jesus, who never fought: «Christ fut une épiphanie (mazhar) de la Miséricorde» (editor's translation: "Christ was an epiphany of Mercy") [p 325 to 326]. The occultation is thus lit by Revelation 12:5-6, the child caught up to God and the Woman fleeing into the desert, "an extraordinary meeting between hermeneutists of the religions of the Book." Who first moved the Paraclete onto the Imam remains an open question [p 326 to 327].
III. Sohravardi (d. 587/1191)
In the Arabic Temples of Light (Hayakil al-Nur), Seventh Temple, Sohravardi writes that revelation of the letter is entrusted to the prophets, while spiritual hermeneutic and explanation belong to "the Supreme Epiphany," all Light and Spirit, the Paraclete whom Christ announced; the passage is absent from the single Persian manuscript [p 328 to 329]. Reading John's bismi as "with my name," he says the Paraclete will be called Christ, "because he will be anointed with Light": a second Christ, matching both the Christ-Michael doubling and the First Imam's sermon "I am the second Christ" [p 329 to 330]. Dawwani (d. 907/1501-02) reads the word as fariq, "the one who separates" true from false, and makes the Paraclete the Seal of Muhammadan walayat: the Prophet saw all realities but had to speak them in exoteric form; "lifting the veils" belongs to the Twelfth Imam [p 330 to 331]. Ghiyathoddin Shirazi, though Dawwani's opponent, calls the Paraclete "the one in whom is the science of the Book." With Sohravardi, "the elements of paracletic philosophy are already in place" [p 331 to 332].
IV. Haydar Amoli and V. Ibn Abi Jomhur
Haydar Amoli (born at Amol 720/1320, last known work 787/1385) was a young minister in Tabarestan, left everything after a crisis at thirty, and spent the rest of his life at the Shi'ite shrines of Iraq. His thesis: the true Sufi is the true Shi'ite, and the integral Shi'ite is the true Sufi. Against his revered Ibn 'Arabi, who made Jesus Seal of universal walayat, he holds that the First Imam seals universal walayat and the Twelfth seals Muhammadan walayat [p 332 to 334]. After the Prophet's saying that if one day remained God would lengthen it until a man of his line appears to fill the earth with justice, Amoli adds a Johannine-sounding sentence: «Nous vous apportons le tanzil. Quant au ta'wil, c'est le Paraclet qui vous l'apportera à la fin de ce temps.» (editor's translation: "We bring you the tanzil. As for the ta'wil, the Paraclete will bring it to you at the end of this time.") He adds that "in their language" the Paraclete is the Mahdi, and recalls the hadith of seven inner senses of the Qur'an [p 334 to 335]. The Imam-Paraclete's coming reveals ontological tawhid, as the prophets brought theological tawhid [p 335].
Ibn Abi Jomhur Ahsa'i (d. after 901/1495) calls the Mahdi "Seal of the Seal." The cycle runs as a mystical hexaemeron: six law-giving prophets, from Adam's inaugural law to Muhammad's sealing law, after which time returns to its starting point and the cycle of walayat begins. "I and the Hour are like these two fingers": the end of the Prophet's time is the rising of the Hour [p 336 to 337]. The Verus Propheta "rises" again in the last Imam, who bears the Prophet's name. Through Kashani's gloss of the letters alif, lam, mim (the divine Self, Gabriel the Intelligence, Muhammad who closes the circle of being), the Mahdi-Paraclete alone can read the completed "great Book of being"; he is the pole on which all depends, as the millstone turns on its axis [p 338 to 340]. Corbin concludes that cyclical time makes the transfer from Prophet to Imam a structural necessity. Since the Imam has already broken briefly into our time and is now "Imam of this time," the two cycles are a symbolic projection, not a chronology [p 340].
VI. Ashkevari: the Saoshyant
Qotboddin Ashkevari (d. c. 1075/1664-65), a pupil of Mir Damad, ends a chapter on Zoroaster by quoting (through Shahrastani) a prophecy of a man at the end of time, Astvat-ereta, who will revive justice after the twenty-year reign of Patyara, and comments: "it is as if the sage Zoroaster were announcing our lord the Master of the Command," Patyara being the Dajjal [p 341 to 343].
| Saoshyant (Astvat-ereta) | Twelfth Imam |
|---|---|
| Brings salvation to embodied creation; renews bodily immortality | Qa'im of the Resurrection, changing the condition of bodies |
| Appears at the end of the twelfth millennium | The twelfth of the "Twelve Veils of light," each a millennium |
| Born of Zoroaster's seed kept in Lake Kansaoya | Born of the Muhammadan Light passed from prophet to prophet and Imam to Imam |
| Reappearance of Zoroaster | Muhammad al-Qa'im as reappearance of Muhammad al-Nabi, not reincarnation |
| Virgin mother Eredat-fedhri, "Omnivictrix" | Narkes, initiated by Fatima in a dream |
Table 19. Corbin's parallels between the Saoshyant and the hidden Imam [p 343 to 345].
"Two quantities equal to a third are equal to each other": Saoshyant, Twelfth Imam and Paraclete are one figure, uniting the Abrahamic and the Zoroastrian heritage around the eschatological hero [p 345].
Figure 52. Ashkevari: one eschatological figure [p 345].
VII. Ja'far Kashfi (d. 1267/1850-51) and Paracletic Philosophy
Kashfi's Persian summa orders a cosmogony on the Mazdean triad creation, mixture, separation (bundahishn, gumezishn, wizarishn), drawing on Kolayni's "Book of Intelligence" and the "Sermon between the two gulfs" [p 345 to 346]. The divine Essence, one and simple, has no contrary and so is unknowable. The first theophany, Intelligence (the Muhammadan Holy Spirit), has two Faces: exoteric, toward creatures (prophecy), and esoteric, toward the Principle (walayat). Its appearance forces its contrary, Ignorance, to appear, as sunrise makes a wall cast a shadow that is the wall's, not the sun's [p 347]. Light and Darkness are not born of the Imam, as from a new Zervan; they lie in human hearts and in each person's answer to the Imam's epiphany [p 348]. Kashfi draws diagrams with arcs: Intelligence's arc of prophecy turned downward, the black arc of Ignorance drawn upside down on the page, "a philosophy of the antipodes" [p 348 to 349].
Figure 53. Kashfi's two arcs "turning their backs": the parousia as separation, the Minor Resurrection [p 349 to 351].
To end the mixture the two arcs turn back: Light returns to light, Darkness to darkness, "neither integration nor sublimation." This separation is the Twelfth Imam's work, the "Minor Resurrection" [p 349 to 350]. Its human meaning: in the time of prophecy knowledge runs from the outward to the inward; in the time of walayat it runs from the heart outward, and one finds the exoteric through the esoteric [p 351]. But is this a chronology? The Imam's companions, who may be from Moses' people or Christians, appear with him "parce que depuis toujours ils appartiennent d'ores et déjà à son temps" (editor's translation: "because they have always already belonged to his time"). "Being of the Imam's time" is a mode of being and knowing, and to be chronologically contemporary and existentially contemporary "are two entirely different things" [p 352].
Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation ends with Peter (authority, Rome), Paul (freedom, the Reformation) and John (the spiritual Church), a typology drawn, like the Shi'ite readings, from Revelation 12, studied by Bengel and Oetinger before him [p 357 to 358]. By identifying the Twelfth Imam with the Paraclete, Iranian metaphysics joins "Johannism," a theme still traceable in secular variants. So this philosophy is not only a past fact in the history of ideas; it belongs "non moins essentiellement à la philosophie à venir" (editor's translation: "no less essentially to the philosophy to come") [p 358].
Synthesis
Key Takeaways
- The mundus imaginalis is a world as real as the sensible and the intelligible, perceived by active Imagination; calling it "imaginary" is the symptom of a lost cosmology.
- "Imaginal" is coined from imago the way "original" comes from origo, so that the subtle body can be an imaginal body, never an imaginary one.
- The imaginal world lies "beyond Qaf," at Na-koja-Abad, the "Land of No-where": not a utopia but a place outside the question "where."
- Spiritual bodies are not in their world as a body is in a place; their world is in them.
- Ta'wil leads the letter back to its archetype; it presupposes a new mode of being, not just a new method of reading.
- Swedenborg and the Ismailis, unknown to each other, both read Scripture as the history of inner states, keeping letter and spirit together.
- Every history presupposes a metahistory: the events of the Bible and the Qur'an "happen" in the soul before they are dated.
- In Ismaili exegesis the Fall is a drama of knowledge: the esoteric cannot be reached without the exoteric, and the esoteric never makes the forbidden licit.
- The mystical epic arises when doctrine becomes event and can only be told as narrative; the reciter becomes the hero he recites.
- Sohravardi's "Orient" is the origin of being as light, not a place on the map; his Iranism is not racial.
- Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i's "absolved" being needs an absolvens; his triad of Adams makes imamology a doctrine of man.
- Ahsa'i reverses hylomorphism: Matter is the father, Form the mother, so beings are irreducibly individual and do not evolve one into another.
- Imamology does the work of christology in order to protect tawhid: without the Imam one falls into anthropomorphism or into emptying God of attributes.
- The Imam is the Face God shows to man and the Face man shows to God; each Face is the mirror of the other.
- Corbin's two intersecting ellipses: polarity between the hidden God and his Face, and between that Face and man, but none between the hidden God and man.
- "God no longer looks at us" means we no longer look at him; the occultation is reciprocal.
- The divine-human meeting is set at the level of the spiritual body (caro spiritualis), as in the old Christos-Angelos christology, not at the level of flesh or society.
- Man is "a not-yet," an angel or a demon in potency.
- Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui: each sees the divine according to his capacity; docetism rightly understood is a theory of real apparition.
- The Imam converges with Sohravardi's Angel, the "Perfect Nature," the self one can address as "you."
- Shi'ite thinkers moved the Paraclete from Muhammad to the hidden Twelfth Imam, who brings no new law but the spiritual sense of all laws.
- Saoshyant, Twelfth Imam and Paraclete form one eschatological figure joining the Zoroastrian and Abrahamic heritages.
- Prophecy and walayat name two modes of being and knowing; to be "of the Imam's time" is existential, not chronological.
- Joachim of Fiore's reign of the Spirit, Schelling's Johannine Church and the Shi'ite reign of ta'wil run in parallel.
- Man cannot survive, as man, the loss of his polar dimension; that is Corbin's answer to "God is dead."
Frameworks and Mental Models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Three worlds, three organs | Sense, imagination and intellect each perceive their own real world | Sorting which faculty a claim depends on |
| Imaginal versus imaginary | Images can be cognitive, not merely invented | Taking visionary or symbolic material seriously without literalism |
| Exoteric and esoteric held together | Letter and sense need each other; either alone breaks | Reading any canonical text or rulebook |
| Wrenching free versus causality | A story can be re-enacted, not only explained by its antecedents | Asking what a past event means now |
| Absolutum and absolvens | The absolute presupposes an act that absolves it | Examining claims of "unconditioned" foundations |
| Two faces of every being | A face toward itself (shadow) and a face toward its source (light) | Thinking about identity and orientation |
| Intersecting ellipses | Relation runs only through a shared mediating focus | Mapping who can relate to whom, and through what |
| Talem eum vidi | Perception corresponds to the perceiver's capacity | Explaining why witnesses honestly disagree |
| Form as mother | Form individuates; matter differs by what it can receive | Resisting one-size-fits-all categories |
| Prophecy and walayat | Time of the letter and time of the sense coexist as modes | Distinguishing chronological from existential contemporaneity |
Table 20. Portable frameworks from the book.
Figure 54. Three worlds, three organs, the first framework in the table.
A closer look
- Corbin writes as a participant, not a neutral historian; he often adopts his authors' claims (for example, the authenticity of the Khotbat al-Bayan) on their own terms.
- His sweeping parallels (Grail and Kay Khosraw, Joachim and the Imam, Saoshyant and Mahdi) are typological; they show resonance, not historical influence, and he says so only intermittently.
- Polemic against "historicism," "socialization" and contemporary philosophy is frequent and sometimes unnamed; readers should identify the targets before accepting the verdicts.
- Shi'ite and Ismaili gnosis are presented from their most speculative authors; majority jurisprudential Shi'ism and Sunni positions appear mainly as foils.
- Several key texts were unpublished manuscripts when Corbin wrote (Qommi's commentary), so his summaries are hard to check.
- The essays overlap (Ahsa'i's absolute, the iron in the fire, Daena) because they were separate lectures; repetition is not added proof.
Who's Who
| Name | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Henry Corbin | Author; Eranos lecturer and translator of Iranian theosophy |
| Sohravardi, Shaykh al-Ishraq (d. 587/1191) | Theosophy of Light; visionary recitals, the "eighth climate," the Paraclete as "Supreme Epiphany" |
| Molla Sadra Shirazi | Primacy of existence; imaginal body and resurrection |
| Swedenborg | Correspondences and the inner sense of the Word |
| Qazi No'man | Ismaili jurist; Asas al-Ta'wil, read in Essay 2 |
| Nasir-e Khosraw (11th century) | Iranian Ismaili philosopher; the cycle of prophecy |
| Ja'far al-Sadiq, Sixth Imam (d. 148/765) | Source of many hadith on the Face, Mercy and the Covenant |
| Ibn Babuyeh, Shaykh Saduq (d. 381/992) | Kitab al-Tawhid, chapter XII on the divine Face |
| Qazi Sa'id Qommi (d. 1103/1691) | Commentator on Ibn Babuyeh; main guide of Essay 4 |
| Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (d. 1241/1826) | Founder of the Shaykhi school; absolved being, triad of Adams, Form as mother |
| Ibn 'Arabi | Theophanic correlation of lord and vassal; opposed by Amoli on the Seal of walayat |
| Haydar Amoli (b. 720/1320; last work 787/1385) | True Sufi is true Shi'ite; identifies the Paraclete with the Mahdi |
| Ibn Abi Jomhur Ahsa'i (d. after 901/1495) | Mahdi as "Seal of the Seal"; cyclical hexaemeron |
| Kamaloddin Kashani (d. 730 or 735/1334-35) | Gloss of alif, lam, mim; the Mahdi brings ta'wil |
| Jalaloddin Dawwani (d. 907/1501-02) | Commentator on Sohravardi; Paraclete as Seal of Muhammadan walayat |
| Mir Damad (d. 1041/1631-32) | Head of the "School of Isfahan" |
| Qotboddin Ashkevari (d. c. 1075/1664-65) | Mir Damad's pupil; Saoshyant as the hidden Imam |
| Ja'far Kashfi (d. 1267/1850-51) | Creation, mixture, separation; paracletic historiosophy |
| Joachim of Fiore | Three status; reign of the Spirit |
| Vasily Rozanov (1856-1919) | The Dark Face of Christ; two cones touching at a point |
| Nikolai Berdyaev | Theandrism, objectivation, religion of the Spirit |
| Schelling | "Divine extra-divine person"; Peter, Paul, John typology |
Table 21. People in the book. Dates appear only where the book prints them.
Glossary of Key Terms
Arabic, Persian and Latin terms as used in Corbin's book, with brief meanings.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 'alam al-mithal | World of the image, the mundus imaginalis |
| absolutum / absolvens | Absolved being and the act that absolves it (Ahsa'i) |
| barzakh | Interval or isthmus between two levels of being |
| batin / zahir | Inner, esoteric / outer, exoteric |
| caro spiritualis | Spiritual flesh, the spiritual body |
| da'wat | The Call; the esoteric community in Ismaili usage |
| Daena | Mazdean figure who meets the soul at death as its religion and self |
| ghaybat | Occultation of the Twelfth Imam |
| hikayat | Story that is also an imitative re-enactment |
| Hurqalya | Emerald city of the imaginal world, the "eighth climate" |
| Jabarut / Malakut / Molk | World of Intelligences / of Soul and image / of the senses |
| jism mithali | Imaginal (subtle) body |
| mashi'at | Divine Will; Ahsa'i's Greater Adam |
| mazhar | Epiphanic form, place of manifestation |
| Na-koja-Abad | "Land of No-where," beyond the mountain of Qaf |
| nobowwat | Prophecy, the bringing of a revealed law |
| Paraclete (Faraqlit) | Comforter and advocate; in Shi'ism the Prophet or the hidden Imam |
| Qa'im | The Imam of the Resurrection |
| qotb | Pole; strictly, the Imam |
| rabb al-naw' | Angel-lord of a species (Sohravardi) |
| Saoshyant | Zoroastrian eschatological saviour (Astvat-ereta) |
| tanzil / ta'wil | Sending down of the letter / leading back to the hidden sense |
| tashbih / ta'til | Anthropomorphism / emptying God of attributes |
| wajh | Face, Greek prosopon; letter value fourteen |
| walayat | Divine friendship, the esoteric of prophecy, the Imam's charisma |
About this book
Face de Dieu, face de l'homme: Herméneutique et soufisme by Henry Corbin, 1983. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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