Insight Editions · No. 138
L'homme et son ange
Initiation et chevalerie spirituelle
Henry Corbin · Foreword by Roger Munier
Henry Corbin examines Iranian Islamic initiation, Ismaili esotericism, the celestial double, and spiritual chivalry through Sohravardi, Hermetic traditions, and the Grail.
A study guide to L'homme et son ange by Henry Corbin, foreword by Roger Munier. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
The book gathers three lectures which the foreword says were given at the Eranos meetings in 1949, 1970 and 1976 [p I]: on the initiation recital and Hermeticism in Iran, on an Ismaili initiation novel of the tenth century, and on youth and chivalry in Iranian Islam. Quotations keep Corbin's French exactly as printed, each followed by the editor's English translation; page references [p n] are to the printed edition, with roman numerals for the foreword and "n" for a footnote.
Argument Map
Figure 0. How the three studies build one argument (editor's reconstruction).
Chapter Map
| Study | Printed pages | Sections | Core question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foreword (Roger Munier) | I to VI | The unity of the three lectures | Why the human being and his Angel? |
| 1. The initiation recital and Hermeticism in Iran | 7 to 80 | Recital of the Western Exile; the alchemical key; Hermes and the Perfect Nature; the celestial Double | Who is the Angel the soul meets? |
| 2. Ismaili initiation, or esotericism and the Word | 81 to 205 | The lost Word; the novel; initiation into the Word; the ritual and the Name; ethics of Quest and deposit; the time of prophets; epilogue | Is the Word lost, and is revelation closed? |
| 3. Youth and chivalry in Iranian Islam | 207 to 260 | The word fotowwat; three cycles; Zoroastrian roots; a dream and a prayer | What kind of person does walayat form? |
Table 0. The book at a glance. The general index (pp 261 onward) is not condensed.
Study 1. The Initiation Recital and Hermeticism in Iran
The first of the three Eranos lectures (1949) carries the subtitle Recherche angélologique, an inquiry into the Angel. Corbin warns in his opening note that these talks have the character of a search, a provisional marking of the route [p 7]. He takes one short Arabic text of Sohravardi, the Recital of the Western Exile, reads it against its scholastic commentary, and then sets it beside the alchemical tradition, to arrive at what he calls a "fundamental angelology": a picture of the human being as half of a pair whose other half is a being of light [p 7 to 40].
1. The Recital of the Western Exile
Sohravardi and the Oriental theosophy
Beside Avicenna, one figure dominates the spiritual thought of Islamic Iran: Shaykh Shihaboddin Yahya Sohravardi, put to death at Aleppo on Saladin's order when he was barely 38 (d. 587/1191). Avicenna became famous in the West through the Latin translators; Sohravardi stayed almost unknown there, yet his influence in Iran and India was lasting [p 7 to 8]. The two great speculative currents, the Peripatetics and the Ishraqiyun ("Illuminatives"), divide on these two names. Sohravardi's thought was amplified by the School of Isfahan (Mir Damad, Molla Sadra), joined with Ibn Arabi's theosophy to shape Twelver Shi'i gnosis, and was still at work in the Qajar thinkers and in Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i, founder of the Shaykhi school [p 8].
Three names guide that inspiration: Hermes, Zarathustra, Plato [p 9]. Corbin isolates three senses of ishraq:
| Sense of ishraq | What it names |
|---|---|
| Illumination | A philosophy of light, claiming descent from pre-Islamic Persian theology; hence the title Shaykh al-Ishraq |
| Dawn, the rising East | Ishraqi as "Oriental": not Easterners in general but the Sages of ancient Persia, the Khosrawaniyun |
| A mode of knowing | Knowledge that is "Oriental" because it is itself the Orient of knowledge, the cognitio matutina |
Table 1. The three senses of ishraq [p 9 to 10].
Figure 1. Three names that guide Sohravardi's inspiration [p 9].
Why a story, and not a treatise
The Theosophy of the Orient asks for another kind of understanding. In the Book of Conversations (§ 111) Sohravardi writes:
Gnosis is a Way, not a body of knowledge, and no didactic text, however clear, can provoke the Departure. What is needed is a form whose strangeness first strikes the understanding with violence, so that the shock shakes the whole soul [p 12 to 13]. The inner pilgrimage to the Orient escapes any exegesis: it can only be passed on under the veil of a dream, a figure, a myth or a parable, because that form keeps its power to deliver the shock [p 13]. Sohravardi's warning is blunt: woe to you if, when told "Return!", you think it means Damascus, Baghdad or some other city of this world [p 13].
Figure 2. Why gnosis needs a recital, not a treatise [p 12 to 13].
Figure 3. The movement of an initiation recital in Corbin's definition.
Every such recital has a double motif: meeting with a divine or angelic being who initiates the aspirant, and a series of visions marking the stages of the Quest [p 14 to 15]. Four of Sohravardi's tracts fit the type:
| Recital | Initiator and setting | Distinctive feature |
|---|---|---|
| Epistle on the State of Childhood | An ideal Sage, not further specified; solitary countryside | Ends by unveiling the meaning of ecstasy in musical audition (sama') |
| The Rustling of Gabriel's Wing | Ten Sages in a hierarchy; the nearest is Gabriel, the Holy Spirit, Tenth Intelligence | Journey through the celestial Spheres, then the three orders of Angels |
| The Crimson Archangel | A youth whose face is crimson, who says he is the Creator's First-Born | Crimson as the mixture of light and dark, like dawn and dusk |
| Recital of the Western Exile | The Sage on Sinai, the pilgrim's "father" | Written in Arabic; the full drama of exile and return |
Table 2. Sohravardi's four initiation recitals as Corbin sums them up [p 15 to 18].
Figure 4. The double motif of every initiation recital [p 14 to 15].
In Gabriel's Wing, at the hour of ishraq the visionary opens the door of the khanqah ("convent"), that is, the secret door at the threshold of his inmost consciousness that gives onto the unexplored desert [p 17]. Gabriel has two wings: the right is pure light; over the left lies a dark imprint like the reddish shadow on the Moon's face. The world of illusion is a shadow cast by the left wing; souls of light come from the right [p 17 to 18]. In the Crimson Archangel the pilgrim greets the radiant youth:
The three acts of the recital
Figure 5. The structure of the Recital of the Western Exile [p 22 to 32].
Act I. The narrator and his brother 'Asim travel from beyond the river to the land of the West to hunt birds from the shores of the Green Sea, and fall into the city whose people are oppressors (Qur'an 4:77), Qairawan. Recognised as sons of the Sage al-Hadi ibn al-Khair the Yemenite, they are chained and thrown into a bottomless well [p 23]. The commentator decodes: 'Asim ("the Preserved") is the contemplative faculty; beyond the river is the celestial world; the birds are sensible things that the gnostic must raise to the intelligible; the West is the material universe, an identification already made by Manichaean gnosis; Qairawan is at once the body and the whole world of bodies; the father (Guide, son of the Good) is the primordial Emanation and the cosmic Nous [p 23 to 24]. "Yemen," meaning "right side," recalls the right side of the valley from which God called Moses (Qur'an 28:30); Mir Damad would oppose a "Yemeni philosophy" to the Hellenic one, and Christian Rosenkreutz's biographer sent his hero to the Sages of Yemen [p 24].
Act II. The decisive moment repeats the order given to Noah: board the ship (11:43). The hoopoe, read by the commentator as mental inspiration and active imagination, leads. The sun, the narrator says, stood above their heads when they reached the end of the shadow [p 26]. The commentator turns this into Peripatetic hylomorphism (Sun as Form, shadow as Matter); Corbin finds that reading makes the rest of the story impossible and turns instead to alchemy and to Zosimos's vision of the Position of the Sun in the middle of the Sky, which Sohravardi elsewhere uses for the imaginal world, the midday of the sensible Night [p 26 to 27]. Episodes of Noah, Moses and Alexandre Dhu'l-Qarnain (suras 11 and 18) follow as figures of the Quest for the Spring of Life. The narrator loses his son in the waves (the pneuma of life, says the commentator), throws his nurse into the sea (the physical pneuma), tears holes in the ship as Moses's companion did (18:70), and passes the island of Gog and Magog [p 27 to 28].
Figure 6. Act II of the recital [p 26].
Figure 7. How hikayat turns a verse into the reader's own event.
Act III. At the Spring of Life the pilgrim asks the fishes about the mountain and the rock. One answers that the mountain is Sinai and the rock the oratory of his father; and the fishes themselves? «Ce sont autant d'images de toi-même. Vous êtes les fils d'un même père.» (editor's translation: ‘They are so many images of yourself. You are the sons of one father.’) [p 30]. On the summit he sees a Sage so beautiful and luminous he is almost annihilated. He is told he is saved, yet must go back to the western prison, since he has not shed all his fetters; he may return to Sinai whenever he wishes, until he is wholly free [p 31]. Then comes the last mystery of his origin: above this Sinai is another, where the Sage's own "father" lives, and so on up to the Unfathomable, Light of Lights. «Je suis une partie de lui, comme à mon tour je te contiens.» (editor's translation: ‘I am a part of him, as in my turn I contain you.’) [p 31]
Figure 8. The answers of the fishes in Act III.
The beautiful Sage is the Angel at the lowest rank of the archangelic hierarchy, Gabriel, Angel of Humanity. The unio mystica here joins a human soul to a being of light who is not the absolute God of theodicy or positive Law. Such a union presupposes a theogonic angelology that bursts the frame of an abstract monotheism, the angelology of every gnosis [p 31 to 32]. The postlude turns back to the reader: «C'est de moi qu'il s'agit dans ce récit» (editor's translation: ‘It is I who am spoken of in this recital’), ending in the prayer to be saved from the prison of Nature and the fetters of Matter [p 32]. For Corbin the young master had an imagination strong enough to make his own philosophical ideas into the characters of a personal drama, "perhaps unique" in Arabo-Persian philosophy [p 33].
Figure 9. The unio mystica of the recital.
2. The Alchemical Key
The hoopoe's letter matches, almost word for word, the call of the Philosophers' Stone in the Book of Twelve Chapters attributed to Ostanes the Persian mage:
Corbin chooses the stronger option: the recital is a particular formulation of the alchemical symbolism, not the reverse, and he follows C. G. Jung's analyses on this point [p 34]. The alchemists' materia prima is a psychic phenomenon, and its organ is imaginatio vera et non phantastica, true imagination, not fiction: the capacity to produce a world, as all Creation is a divine Imagination for a Boehme or a Novalis [p 34]. In the recital this organ and world are the hoopoe, Sheba or Yemen, and the Sun at the meridian. Its process is a prolonged active meditation, a colloquium internum of the human being with himself, with God or with his Angel, which is exactly the structure of the recital [p 35]. Its fruit, sublimation of the Stone or Ascent to Sinai, ripens in the psychic kingdom of subtle bodies, the middle Orient [p 35]. The true Imagination is both organ and product of its own work: it must bring forth the transfigured body of the Resurrection, what Chinese alchemy calls the Diamond Body [p 36].
Figure 10. The organ of alchemy [p 34].
| Recital of the Western Exile | Pseudo-Hallaj alchemical treatise |
|---|---|
| Son of Noah drowned | Stone separated from the impure Earth |
| Ship torn open | Dissolution by Water and Fire; Lunar Elixir |
| Gog and Magog, jinn blowing on copper | Work with fire, same verse 18:96 cited |
| Narrator as a mystical Alexander | Treated body named Dhu'l-Qarnain, white and red |
| Sinai, the Great Ordeal | Four mountains: Qaf, Sad, Nun, Sinai at the centre |
| Fish in the Spring of Life | Rebirth by the Water of Life |
Table 3. One sequence, two notations [p 37 to 38].
Figure 11. What the recital and alchemy point to.
3. The Myth of Hermes and the "Perfect Nature"
Sohravardi's dialogues raise the vision above the old pair «l'homme et son âme» (the human being and his soul) to «l'homme et son Ange» (the human being and his Angel) [p 41]. The Angel who is origin and place of return is neither the impersonal divine Abyss nor the extracosmic God of a formal monotheism. The search therefore turns toward a Unique that is not arithmetical unity but an archetypal Unity that "monadises" each unique being: a mystical kathenotheism (kath'ena, one by one). Reunion does not abolish the polarity of the two terms: it is the mystery of the One that is Two and the Two that is One [p 41 to 42].
Two questions follow. Is this Angel the First or the Tenth in the hierarchy? And is he the archetype-Angel of human nature, or the individual Angel that the Hermetic texts call the Perfect Nature (al-Tiba' al-tamm)? Corbin will treat four themes "quickly": the Angel of Humanity and Hermes's Angel; the Perfect Nature; the Manichaean and Mazdean syzygy; the Puer aeternus of alchemy [p 42 to 43].
Figure 12. The two questions of section 3.
First or Tenth?
In Sohravardi's scheme each species is the "theurgy" of its own Angel, who bears a Mazdean name; the human species has Gabriel, sometimes identified with Sorush (Avestan Sraosha) and always with the Holy Spirit [p 44]. Gabriel is also called the Active Intelligence, which would make him the Tenth Intelligence of the Peripatetic cosmos, the one born of the Intelligence of the Moon. The fifteenth-century commentator Jalaloddin Dawwani saw the difficulty: how then can the Crimson Archangel call himself the First-Born? Corbin's reading: the two schemes overlap without coinciding, and the plain identification of Gabriel with the Active Intelligence is perhaps the typical accident of the meeting of Hellenic and "Yemeni" philosophy [p 44 to 45]. In philosophical terms the darkened wing means contingency, the non-necessity of being; but the Angel's own claim to be First-Born, captive of darkness long before the mystic, reveals a drama that happened in the Angel himself [p 45].
Figure 13. The names Gabriel carries in Sohravardi [p 44].
The answer comes from Ismaili cosmogonic angelology. From the primordial dyad (Intelligence and Soul, Logos and Sophia) proceed seven cherubic hypostases; the first of them hesitates, in a mysterious stupor, to recognise the divine Unity and the primacy of the first Intelligence. It loses its rank, the third, and despite an accepted repentance falls to the Tenth. That drama, more vivid than any appeal to contingency, is the origin of the dark left wing [p 46]. The humans who are its "members," the Elect at every degree, have as the meaning of their life to help it abolish that Darkness in themselves, so that the Angel climbs back to his original rank [p 46 to 47].
Figure 14. The Ismaili drama behind Gabriel's darkened wing, as Corbin summarises it [p 46 to 47].
Hermes and his Perfect Nature
In the Book of Conversations Hermes asks the beautiful spiritual being who appears to him who it is, and hears: «Je suis ta Nature Parfaite.» (editor's translation: ‘I am your Perfect Nature.’) [p 48]. In the Book of Elucidations Hermes keeps vigil at night in the Temple of Light before a Sun, sees a land with its cities swallowed up, and cries: «Sauve-moi, toi qui es mon père» (editor's translation: ‘Save me, you who are my father’). The answer: «Agrippe-toi au câble du rayon illuminateur et monte jusqu'aux créneaux du Trône.» (editor's translation: ‘Grip the cable of the illuminating ray and climb to the battlements of the Throne.’) [p 48]. The commentators read the Earth and Heaven he then finds as the imaginal world, the one where, in Mohsen Fayz's phrase, «se spiritualisent les corps et où se corporalisent les esprits» (editor's translation: ‘bodies are spiritualised and spirits are corporealised’) [p 48]. Through hikayat, every perfect soul will "recite" Hermes's experience in the present, as Zarathustra and Kay Khosraw did [p 49]. Sohravardi's unpublished Psalms invoke the Perfect Nature as at once Father and Child: «Tu es le Père au Ciel de l'Esprit et l'Enfant au Ciel de la Pensée.» (editor's translation: ‘You are the Father in the Heaven of the Spirit and the Child in the Heaven of Thought.’) [p 50]. The terms may change gender (the gnostics conceived the Holy Spirit as divine Mother), but the symbol always points to the inexpressible: a dual unity, a mode of being in "dualitude" [p 50 to 51].
Figure 15. The Perfect Nature as the Hermetic text defines it.
The celestial Double in ancient Iran
Hermes is the Child of his Perfect Nature and separated from it; the end of his earthly pilgrimage must be a new birth in which he joins it in a dualitude that is no longer two distant beings but «le mystère de Deux en un Unique» (the mystery of Two in a single One) [p 59]. Corbin suspects that the strongly personal features of Sohravardi's Hermeticism come from the hierosophies of ancient Persia, where the archetype of a syzygic mode of being, a celestial Double of light given to the earthly psyche, appears most clearly [p 59].
Figure 16. Two ways for the soul to come down.
He traces the archetype through four bodies of material:
| Tradition | The pair | Key point Corbin draws |
|---|---|---|
| Mazdean | Fravarti and its Daena | The Fravartis (literally, those who chose) pre-existed and agreed to come down and fight; the earthly soul is the Fravarti itself, and its Double is its Daena, its celestial Self. If the soul gives in to Darkness, it meets a false Daena, «reflet de lui-même réduit à lui-même» (a reflection of himself reduced to himself) [p 60 to 61] |
| "Mithras Liturgy" | The mage and his Perfect Body | Invoked as «Primordiale Genèse de ma genèse» (primordial genesis of my genesis); the corpus subtile of the Resurrection, both father and mother [p 61 to 62] |
| Manichaean | The soul and its Manvahmed; Mani and his Twin | The Great Vahman (from Avestan Vohu Manah) and the individual Vahmans; the Angel who appeared to Mani at 24 as his "twin" [p 62 to 66] |
| Cathar | Anima, Spiritus Sanctus sive Angelicus, Spiritus principalis | Each elect soul has its own Holy or Angelic Spirit [p 64] |
Table 4. The syzygy of soul and celestial Double across the Iranian and gnostic sources [p 60 to 67].
The Daena: meeting one's Angel after death
The theme culminates in Iranian eschatology [p 74 to 75]. Corbin regrets that no Zoroastrian could have been a pupil of Schelling or Baader [p 75]. Daena was first split into two meanings, the transcendent Self and "Religion"; the two converge in a single idea, the pre-existent, celestial personality of the soul, which is also its "religion" because the soul chose it before its earthly cycle. To see a hypostasis born in an act of thought is not philosophical poverty but ontological generosity and superabundance [p 75]. On the third day after death the Elect sees a dazzling maiden:
Figure 17. The two meanings of Daena converge [p 74 to 75].
Figure 18. The Daena is made by the soul's own life.
| Figure | Where it appears | What it is to the soul |
|---|---|---|
| Al-Hadi, the father on Sinai | Recital of the Western Exile | Origin and guide; Angel of Humanity |
| Perfect Nature | Hermetic texts, Sohravardi | Personal Angel, Sun of the philosopher, birthing and born |
| Daena | Mazdean eschatology | Celestial Self, made more beautiful by one's deeds |
| Maiden, the Wise Guide | Manichaean texts (Fihrist, Sogdian) | The soul's own Action, guiding it to the Light |
| Child of Renewal | Jaldaki's alchemy | The new being born of the conjunction |
Table 5. One archetype, five figures: Corbin's convergence at the end of Study 1 [p 41 to 80].
Study 2. Ismaili Initiation, or Esotericism and the Word
The second lecture (Eranos, 1970 per the foreword [p III]) turns from the Angel to the Book. Every religion of the Book lives the drama of the Lost Word: once the inner sense of revelation is refused, the Word is mutilated. Corbin sets Swedenborg's reading of the white rider of the Apocalypse beside a tenth-century Ismaili initiatory novel, The Book of the Sage and the Disciple, unpublished at the time, and follows its plot scene by scene [p 81 to 93].
1. The Lost Word
The community the Qur'an calls Ahl al-Kitab, the people of the Book, takes in the three Abrahamic branches. If the true sense of the Book is the inner sense hidden under the letter, then whoever ignores or refuses it mutilates the integrity of the Word, the Logos, and the drama of the Lost Word begins [p 81]. In philosophy it takes the form of nominalism and agnosticism; in theology, of literalism, whether the literalism of pious agnostics afraid of all gnosis or that of a theology competing with sociology, a theology that has lost its Logos [p 81 to 82]. Recovering the Word is beyond the means of fashionable linguistics; it is not a progress of language but a recovered access to the inner sense, which frightens exegetes who prefer an exegesis at ground level [p 82].
Figure 19. The drama every religion of the Book lives.
Swedenborg and the white horse
The clearest vision of the drama, Corbin thinks, is Swedenborg's commentary on the white horse of Apocalypse XIX, whose rider is called Faithful and True, wears a garment dipped in blood and bears a name no one knows but himself; his name is the Word of God [p 82]. Swedenborg does not turn the vision into allegory: the hidden inner reality is what produces the visionary phenomenon [p 82 to 83].
| Detail of the vision | Swedenborg's inner sense |
|---|---|
| The open Heaven | The inner sense of the Word, seen by those whose inner Heaven is open in this world |
| The white horse | Spiritual understanding of the Word |
| The rider | The Lord as Word |
| A name no one knows | Only he, and those to whom he reveals it, see the Word in its inner meanings |
| Garment dipped in blood | The letter of the Word, which suffers violence whenever its inner sense is refused |
| Armies on white horses, in white linen | All who are in the spiritual understanding; white is truth in the light of Heaven |
Table 6. The white rider of Apocalypse XIX, 11 to 16, read by Swedenborg [p 82 to 83].
Five shared features
Swedenborg's hermeneutic uses the same principles as the spiritual hermeneutic of the other two Abrahamic branches, and resonates especially with Shi'i gnosis, Twelver and Ismaili [p 84]. Corbin lists the common traits [p 85 to 88]:
- The inner sense is the true sense. Official literalist Islam has, in Ismaili eyes, lost the Word; the Ismailis say the doctors of the Law have made of the divine Word a corpse [p 85].
- The Imam is the counterpart of the white rider, both dispenser and content of the esoteric sense, hermeneut and hermeneutic at once: the speaking Qur'an (Qur'an natiq). The keys he holds are not a juridical magisterium but spiritual understanding [p 85 to 86].
- The Ark of the Covenant, which for Swedenborg is the Word uniting Heaven and Earth, appears in the novel as the image of the absolute Religion gathering the esotericism of the three branches [p 86].
- The second death. For Swedenborg the regenerated person already lives among the Angels without knowing it, and death is the moment he becomes aware of it. For the Ismailis, as Nasiroddin Tusi later analysed, initiation preserves from the second death: those spiritually dead never leave this world, since to leave it one must be alive, resurrected. Entering the Ismaili Order is entering the paradise in potency (jannat bi'l-quwwat) [p 86 to 87].
- Prophecy must continue. Without the Imam, the Qur'an is only a silent Imam (samit), the Word is lost, and the dead are not raised; humans cannot do without prophets. The novel says so with vehemence, in harmony with Western medieval Spirituals who held that the time of prophets is not closed [p 87 to 88].
Figure 20. Five traits shared by Swedenborg and Shi'i gnosis [p 85 to 88].
2. A Tenth-Century Ismaili Novel
Kitab al-'alim wa'l-ghulam is an unpublished Arabic text that shows in an ideal scheme what it means to become an Ismaili and how one becomes one [p 89]. It differs from classical Fatimid literature and has magnificent audacities. It has been attributed to Mansur al-Yaman (third/ninth century) or to his grandson or great-grandson Ja'far ibn Mansur al-Yaman (fourth/tenth century), but Corbin holds both attributions doubtful; it is surely early, at the latest fourth/tenth century, and its vehemence may betray a Qarmati influence [p 89 to 91]. His pupil Habib Feki prepared a critical text from three manuscripts; Corbin has had to prune and condense, keeping the turning points of the dramatic action [p 90].
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| The Sage (al-'alim) | The perfect Ismaili da'i, a Persian from Fars; never named |
| The disciple, Salih | The neophyte who becomes a master in Part Two, where his name is first given |
| The Shaykh | Substitute of the Imam; appears at the summit, in the initiation rite |
| Shaykh al-Bokhtori | Salih's father |
| Abu Malik | The mulla and adviser of the town's notables |
Table 7. The five dramatis personae, plus a brother-host and Abu Malik's friends as a kind of chorus [p 92].
Figure 21. Prologue and two acts of The Book of the Sage and the Disciple [p 91 to 92].
In the prologue the Sage recalls his father's saying that the best work in this world is the resurrection of the dead, and reflects: «j'étais moi-même un mort; Dieu a fait de moi un vivant» (editor's translation: ‘I was myself a dead man; God made me a living one’). His task now is to hand on the deposit (al-amana) as it was handed to him; it came down from the supreme Pleroma, is not his property but the gain of those before him, and he himself is their gain [p 93].
Figure 22. The Sage's reflection in the prologue.
The two leitmotifs: resurrection and the deposit
Corbin makes plain at once that the resurrection in question is not biological. Spiritual death is unknowing and unconsciousness, agnôsia (jahl) in all its forms; resurrection is waking to the esoteric (batin), the invisible and the hidden sense [p 94]. Everything apparent (zahir), whether the phenomena of Nature or the letter of the revealed books, carries a hidden sense, and the awakening is brought about by ta'wil, the hermeneutics that raises all things to the rank of symbols, to the extent that it brings about a new, spiritual birth. That is why the initiator is always called "spiritual father" [p 94].
Figure 23. Resurrection is not biological [p 94].
The second leitmotif, the ethics of the entrusted deposit, follows from the Sage's awareness that he is not the last link in the chain of gnosis (silsilat al-'irfan). Hence a double Quest: the quest for gnosis, which is resurrection, and then the quest for the one whom the gnostic in turn can raise and make his heir [p 94]. Corbin cites a classical Ismaili maxim: «l'adepte fidèle n'est véritablement un fidèle, que lorsqu'il a suscité un autre adepte fidèle semblable à lui» (editor's translation: ‘the faithful adept is truly faithful only when he has raised up another faithful adept like himself’) [p 94].
Figure 24. The double Quest of the novel.
The scene at the village
Arriving at evening, he joins some villagers talking in what Corbin calls, for convenience, a chay-khaneh or tea house (his note admits he does not mean that tea was already in use in the 4th/10th century) [p 96]. They greet him as «Ya fatâ!» and Corbin glosses: «O compagnon! ô Chevalier!» (editor's translation: ‘O companion! O knight!’) [p 96]. Asked what he works at, he says: «Quant à mes besoins, c'est chose réglée. Quant à mon travail, je suis précisément à sa recherche» (editor's translation: ‘As for my needs, that is settled. As for my work, I am precisely in search of it’) [p 96]. His work is the heir he has not yet found. After a sermon that brings tears to every eye, all go home except the youngest and most intelligent, the son of an eminent Arab shaykh, Shaykh al-Bokhtori [p 97].
Over a meal at the Sage's lodging the young man asks his question, repeating without knowing it both leitmotifs: he too is in distress, someone once brought grace to the Sage, so let the Sage now pass it on. He ends: «Cette chose à laquelle tu appelles, qu'est-elle donc? De qui vient-elle?» (editor's translation: ‘This thing to which you call, what is it? From whom does it come?’), and toward whom it goes [p 97 to 98].
The first lessons
The Sage defines what he offers: «L'exotérique de ce que je te propose, ce sont des usages établis et des institutions. Son ésotérique, ce sont de hautes sciences et connaissances» (editor's translation: ‘The exoteric of what I propose to you is established customs and institutions. Its esoteric is high sciences and knowledge’) [p 98]. The disciple then raises the objection everyone raises who hears of the esoteric without knowing what it is: if this is God's gift, what made you worthier than others? The answer is the ethic of the deposit: no one speaks a word of truth without having taken it from the same sources. There is no personal merit; the Ismailis simply kept the deposit whole, exoteric and esoteric, while others squandered it [p 98 to 99]. The squandered treasure is the Lost Word, the esoteric content that is green grass and sweet as the Euphrates, while the bare exoteric is dead leaves or foam bitter as sea water [p 99].
Figure 25. What the Sage offers.
The hexaemeron of religions
Before anything else the disciple must grasp the relation among the revealed Books, the phenomenon of the Book at the center of the communities of the Book. The Sage asks whether he imagines that the Words of God (Kalimat Allah) and the Books of God contradict one another, the older belying the newer [p 102]. The answer is the ecumenism of the esoteric that Ismaili theosophy professed from the start, later set out by the great Iranian da'i and philosopher Nasir-e Khosraw (11th century) and in the late Alamut treatises [p 103 to 104].
| "Day" | Religion |
|---|---|
| 1 | Sabians, under Seth (some hesitation) |
| 2 | Brahmins (some hesitation) |
| 3 | Zoroaster |
| 4 | The Jews |
| 5 | The Christians |
| 6 | Islam |
| 7 | The day of Resurrection, still to rise |
Table 8. The six "days" of the creation of the religious cosmos, with the seventh to come [p 104 to 105; seventh day from the notes, p 103 to 105].
Five conditions, the key and the pledge
The disciple accepts this ecumenism and asks for conditions. The Sage gives five [p 106]:
| # | Condition |
|---|---|
| 1 | Squander nothing I entrust to you (the ethic of the deposit) |
| 2 | Hide nothing from me when I question you |
| 3 | Do not press me to answer |
| 4 | Ask me nothing before I take the initiative |
| 5 | Do not mention my command before your father |
Table 9. The Sage's five conditions [p 106].
The text does not reveal the formula of the pledge. The Sage recites it aloud and the disciple repeats it phrase by phrase, shaken, his tears flowing until the last word; he then knew he had entered «le parti de Dieu et le parti des Amis de Dieu» (editor's translation: ‘the party of God and the party of the Friends of God’) [p 107]. The first phrase is Qur'anic (58/22); the second, Awliya' Allah, names the Imams and their faithful. Walayat literally means "friendship," Persian dusti; when the time of the walayat follows the time of prophecy, the time of the Law (shari'at) gives way to spiritual initiation by the Friends of God [p 107].
III. Initiation into the secret of the prophets' Word
Teaching begins with cosmogony: the law of the septenary and the law of the dodecad, foundations of the correspondences between worlds and of their common structure, their "isomorphism" [p 109]. When the disciple asks why Sages renounce a world so ordered, the da'i shows that the truth of any attitude to the world depends on grasping the true relation of exoteric and esoteric. Everything points to the dialogue's end: either the time of prophets is closed and the Word is lost, or the Word endures and that time is not closed [p 109].
At the origin of origins the Principle (Mobdi') institutes a Light from which proceed three Words (Kalimat): Will (Iradat), inner Imperative (Amr, compared to Philo's inner logos), uttered Imperative (Qawl, the uttered logos) [p 109]. The uttered Word is the creative Word, the "vocation" of being put in the imperative: KN, to be translated Esto, not fiat. Being first appears as its imperative, not as infinitive or participle; naive emanationism and creation ex nihilo are both left behind. From being-in-the-imperative there answers, without interval, the being that is: Kon fayakun, whose Arabic spelling has seven letters, the seven source-letters [p 110].
Figure 26. The septenary cosmogony of the novel: three Words, seven Sources [p 109 to 110]. The pairing of each source with a Word follows the order in which Corbin lists them.
The esoteric hierarchy and the cosmos
For this Religion God instituted on earth a spiritual elite, the temples of the prophetic Word (boyut al-nobowwat), treasuries of its wisdom and interpreters of its revelation. Their hierarchy mirrors the universe: each degree is the esoteric of an outward form, a thing symbolized (mamthul) by a visible symbol (mathal), or better, each symbolizes with the other [p 112 to 113].
| Esoteric degree | Cosmic symbol |
|---|---|
| The Enunciator (Natiq), who "speaks" the exoteric of revelation; each of the six great prophets, called Imam-Natiq here | The sun |
| His Threshold (Bab) or "proof," in whom the esoteric is vested (classically the Imam-Wasi, foundation, asas, of the Imamate of his period) | The moon |
| The preachers who "call" (do'at) | The stars |
| The seven great prophets | The seven Heavens |
| The seven Imams of each prophet's period | The seven Earths |
| The twelve noqaba (spiritual chiefs) with each prophet | The twelve signs of the Zodiac |
| The twelve hojjat (proofs, guarantors) for each Imam | The twelve jazira |
Table 10. Hierocosmos and macrocosm in the novel [p 112 to 113].
The Sage's own summary is, Corbin says, the whole charter of Ismaili gnosis [p 114]:
«L'ésotérique (le sens intérieur), c'est la Religion divine que professent les Amis de Dieu.» (editor's translation: ‘The esoteric (the inner sense) is the divine Religion professed by the Friends of God.’) The exoteric, he goes on, is the religious Laws (shara'i') and the symbols of the divine Religion. [p 114]
Figure 27. The charter of Ismaili gnosis: exoteric and esoteric as body and spirit [p 114].
Why the Sages renounce the world
Then the disciple is troubled. If the world is so ordered, why do the Sages disparage it and renounce it, while the Ignorant love it; are the Ignorant not the ones who hit its hidden sense? No, says the Sage: the Ignorant cannot aim true, since they do not know the hidden sense, and whoever ignores a thing misses it [p 115]. The answer Corbin calls moving: because the Ignorant do not know the Spirit and life of worldly things, they handle only a corpse; and those who ignore or refuse the esoteric of religion have made religion a corpse. A corpse may not be touched without contracting impurity. That is the drama of the Lost Word [p 115 to 116].
Figure 28. Zahir li-batin [p 116].
Corbin sums up the method: Ismaili pedagogy does not set one dogma against another or initiate into a dogma; it teaches how to find the hidden sense of all things, dogmas included. He calls it an anticipation of the motto of the second Faust, «Tout l'éphémère n'est que symbole» (editor's translation: ‘All that is transient is only symbol’) [p 117]. The Sage concludes that this world with all its symbols is the exoteric of the other world, which is Spirit and Life; whoever works here only for this world works astray, without outcome [p 117].
Figure 29. Ismaili pedagogy as Corbin sums it up.
Every thing a symbol
The lesson turns into a practical exercise in symbolism, showing that the ability to read and think in symbols also sorts human beings into categories. It will culminate in the passage of the divine Word into the human Word in the person of the Imam-Natiq, which postulates the common Shi'i idea of the Imam as Qor'an natiq, the "speaking Book": his continued presence guards against the Lost Word when the one who spoke the Book is gone [p 118]. The disciple asks for the landmarks (ma'alim, milestones) of this world, setting symbols (amthal) beside the symbolized (mamthulat), their esoteric aspects (bawatin). The Sage answers that God created nothing, beast, bird, wet or dry, mountain, stone, tree, gold, silver or gem, great or small, without its proposing a SYMBOL; Corbin notes that this is exactly the principle of Swedenborg's Arcana caelestia [p 118].
| Symbol | Symbolized |
|---|---|
| Heaven containing all things | The speaking Imam (prophet) |
| Twelve signs of the Zodiac | The twelve Noqaba |
| Stars | The da'i |
| Earth in its vastness | The prophet's spiritual heir, the Imam proper, who knows the esoteric and its ta'wil |
| Twelve Jazira | The twelve Hojjat of each Imam |
| Seven Angels of the seven heavens | The intermediaries between God and each speaking Imam |
| Seven seas | The seven intermediaries between God and the Imams after the speaking Imam |
| Salt, bitter water | Knowledge of the exoteric alone |
| Sweet water | Knowledge of the esoteric |
| Space | That which symbolizes with nothing |
Table 11. The second lesson in symbolism [p 118 to 119].
The rope of God and the "good puzzle"
The disciple asks whether the rope of God is the Imam to whom he was called. The Sage: the Imam is its visible part (zahir), your rope, the "firm handle"; the rope of God itself is the goal of the guidance that leads you, the end at which the Sages arrive [p 124]. A note gives both symbols as Qur'anic (3/98 and 2/257, al-'orwat al-wothqa, the title also of a great treatise of 'Alaoddawleh Semnani) [p 124 n 1]. Corbin asks whether this dense allusion hints at what the esoteric of the esoteric is, as it reveals itself in the secret of each seeker at the end of his Quest [p 124].
The prophet is gone, leaving the Book he spoke, which is to his Word what his Word was to the divine Word. For the Spirit to stay present in that body, the Book must be not only the "spoken Book" but permanently the "speaking Book," Qor'an natiq, which Shi'ism names the Imam, master of hermeneutics (sahib al-ta'wil), without whom the Book would be mute and the Word lost [p 127]. He is «celui à qui Dieu donne la force de porter ce Verbe» (editor's translation: ‘the one to whom God gives the strength to bear this Word’) and his office is to lead the exoteric human Word back to the Word hidden and shown in it: ta'wil [p 127]. So the formula means: no tanzil and no ta'wil except through God. Whoever does not know the Imam has only a human word empty of the divine Word; the refusal of gnosis is the drama of the Lost Word, a Word emptied of its sense [p 127].
Figure 30. The double mutation (tahwil) of the Word [p 125 to 127].
The decisive question
Then, like Parsifal asking the question that admits him to the Grail, the disciple asks whether the hour has come to be led to the Imam's Temple of Light. Should he speak or keep silent? Say what you think you must. Has the time not come to lead him to the Threshold where his negligence will be effaced, to enter the Temple of Light (Bayt al-Nur) and receive the light himself, as part of the deposit whose price he now owes? [p 133]. The Sage, seeing the great moment has come, agrees, but it must be by his permission and decision: the call must come from the Imam, as the Grail calls its elect, or no one finds the way [p 133].
The Sage hurries back and finds his disciple ill and languid with sorrow at their parting; the good news dispels it. God, says the Sage, has cast Mercy toward him into the heart of His Friend (Wali, the Imam or his substitute): take your travelling things [p 134]. Weeping with joy and reverent fear, the young man leaves home for a long absence, while his father in the flesh, Shaykh al-Bokhtori, is kept ignorant of everything. Like Gurnemanz leading Parsifal to the Grail domain, the Sage leads him toward the Temple of Light and the mysterious "grand prior," the "greater sage" (al-'alim al-akbar) [p 134 to 135].
IV. The ritual of initiation and the mystery of the Name
The two pilgrims reach the Shaykh's residence; no topography is given, the novel going always to what happens in souls. A first courteous audience leaves them, by protocol, only to keep a smiling silence while the Shaykh speaks [p 135]. He tells his steward, really a "brother hosteller" and member of the fraternity, to lodge them with honor. The steward asks if this is the young man they had heard of; yes, the one whose news does hearts good. The disciple is moved: «Mon histoire est-elle déjà parvenue chez les Amis de Dieu, pour qu'ils parlent de moi au cours de leurs réunions» (editor's translation: ‘Has my story already reached the Friends of God, that they speak of me in their meetings’) [p 135]. A note finds the same feeling, that of the exile who suddenly finds he has a whole family that cares for him, in the pilgrim of the famous tale of the journey to the Green Isle in the White Sea [p 135 to 136 n 1].
At daybreak they ask leave to present themselves, and the inaugural liturgy of an initiation ritual opens: a sermon by the Shaykh, then a dialogue between him and the disciple. Both read, Corbin says, not as improvised but as the liturgical text of a ritual observed at each reception of a new member [p 136]. A note gives the clue: after the opening doxology the text is cut by amma ba'd, "and now...," the words that in every book mark the entry into the subject, which suggests the Shaykh is reading a set text [p 136 n 2].
Figure 31. The order of the initiation ritual [p 135 to 140].
The sermon, which Corbin can only quote in abridged form, opens: «Gloire soit à Dieu qui par sa Lumière a séparé des cœurs les ténèbres» (editor's translation: ‘Glory be to God who by His Light has separated darkness from hearts’) [p 136], a transposition into the world of hearts of the first act of cosmogony, the separation of Light and Darkness [p 136 n 1]. It goes on: devotion to the search (talab, the Quest) is a gift to intelligences; the outcome of searching is finding; and «Le signe qui marque l'acte de trouver, c'est la douceur que l'on goûte dans ce que l'on trouve» (editor's translation: ‘The sign that marks the act of finding is the sweetness one tastes in what one finds’) [p 136]. The visible part of all sweet water is a drink, the hidden part veiled; whoever seeks it never tires of meditating, while ordinary people understand nothing of what he seeks [p 136 to 137]. The search for gnosis is a right, and because it is a right it is a duty; whoever refuses to honor that right is an oppressor [p 137].
If seeking gnosis is a right, putting it to work is a duty, and that duty means fidelity to the Guardians of the Cause in good times and in trial [p 138]. A note explains the choice of words: Ulu'l-Amr is usually rendered as those who hold command, but amr also means the thing, the affair, which takes us back to the Latin causa; the divine thing is the divine cause entrusted to the Friends of God, and ta'at is devotion, the ethos of fotowwat, rather than formal obedience [p 138 n 1].
The liturgical dialogue of the Name
Then comes what Corbin calls an Ismaili liturgy of initiation for which no other example is known so far [p 138]. The Shaykh hails the newcomer as Ya fata, O knight (fata is the Arabic equivalent of the Persian javanmard), and asks his name. The disciple gives 'Obayd Allah ibn 'Abdillah, little servant of God son of the servant of God, a qualification that fits any anonymous believer, not yet a proper name [p 139]. Asked who freed him, he points to the Sage; but if the Sage is himself a servant, could he free anyone? No. Then what is your Name? The disciple, stunned, lowers his eyes [p 140].
The new-born asks for a name; the Shaykh will give it in seven days, out of respect for the new-born [p 140]. Notes explain that only the higher dignitary confers this freedom: the secret name given by the Imam, known only to him and to the one who receives it, is the name under which the initiate exists in the Malakut, and the da'i had no power to confer it [p 140 n 1]. Corbin's reading draws on the theory of divine Names that Ibn 'Arabi would systematize two or three centuries later: the Names long to be invested in those who bear them, so every proper name is theophoric, and its bearer is not its owner but its property, as the marbub belongs to his Rabb [p 143 to 144]. Profane names do not lift anyone out of anonymity; only the initiatory name does, and a man can bear it only if he is free, which means risen from the dead [p 142].
After seven days of spiritual conversation the young man performs full ablutions, puts on new clothes and returns to the Shaykh, who begins to say what thoughts cannot circumscribe and what no book may state, something revealed only in person to one who is worthy [p 145]. The reader is kept outside. A note guesses that this something is the esoteric of the Imamate and of walayat from the origins, perhaps with a pre-Fatimid tone that makes the reformed Ismailism of Alamut look closer to the original conceptions than the Fatimid texts would suggest [p 145 n 1].
The author's conclusion is at once an example of ta'wil: the initiate knew his Lord, seized the solid rope, and might now perform the pilgrimage and the rounds of the Ka'ba, although the scene never leaves the Shaykh's house [p 146]. The esoteric pilgrimage is the work of a whole life, a climb through the grades from neophyte to the one closest to the Imam; going round the Ka'ba means hastening toward the Imam, who is the Qibla and the Supreme Sign [p 146]. Knowing one's Lord recalls the maxim on knowing oneself, for in Shi'i commentaries the Imam often stands as figure of that Self [p 147].
Farewells and the return home
The two leitmotifs return. The disciple thanks his guide as one who was dead and has been given life, and the Sage replies that «la gnose lui a donné la vie au-delà de la mort» (editor's translation: ‘gnosis has given him life beyond death’) [p 147]. The Shaykh gives leave for three reasons: he is about to leave for another country; the young man left his father without warning, and there is hope for the father; and he must now in his turn call others [p 147 to 148]. They embrace, unable to speak except by gestures. Near the village the Sage parts from him with a last charge: vigilance and discretion (taqiyya) are the angels of his religion [p 148].
The deposit is the new initiate's viaticum. The Quest for gnosis, once ended, opens a second Quest that prolongs it: the Quest for the one to whom the deposit can be passed on, since a believer is a true believer only when he has raised up another like himself [p 149]. Only now do we learn the hero's profane name, Salih, the just, the one who has the aptitude [p 149].
Figure 32. The chain of the deposit [p 149].
V. The ethics of the Quest and the ethics of the deposit
Back home Salih is inconsolable, and his father, the shaykh al-Bokhtori, storms in: he never disowned his son until the stranger (gharib) came; if the man was right, the son hid the truth from his father; if wrong, the son has ruined his own soul [p 150]. Corbin notes the word: stranger is the gnostic's characteristic name in other gnoses too, the allogene, foreign to this world, as in Sohravardi's Recital of the Western Exile [p 150 to 151].
Salih answers with a dilemma of his own. Either you are one who knows and barred me from your knowledge, so do not blame me for seeking salvation elsewhere; or you are ignorant, and then you need the stranger more than I do, and had you gone to him before me you would be my elder [p 152]. The father's eyes fill with tears; he asks to be told, ready to accept the thing if true and to turn his son from it if false [p 152 to 153].
Figure 33. Salih's dilemma [p 152].
The storm is calmed. Father and son talk at length; Salih sends word to the Sage that all is well, and Corbin notes that the conversion of two such notables cannot pass unnoticed [p 153]. Alarmed, some townspeople go to their Molla, 'Abd al-Jabbar Abu Malik, a man of great rectitude nicknamed the Cube of the learned (Ka'b al-ahbar), whose first merit is perhaps to have the soul of a sincere seeker [p 153].
Abu Malik teaches the notables to search
The notables fear for the generosity of al-Bokhtori and admit they can neither follow nor refute the converts [p 154]. Abu Malik warns them against stoning the absent with what they do not understand, like the ancient peoples who decreed that after their prophets God would send no more, a theme sketched early that the finale will develop [p 154 to 155]. What he wants to instil is the spirit of the Quest, which in the West is the Quest of the Grail and here the Quest of the Imam, the speaking Book (Qor'an natiq) [p 155]. The pedagogy is the Ismaili one: not to oppose a new dogma to the old, not to strike the face of the exoteric (wajh-e Din), but to call others to discover what lies beneath [p 155].
Recognizing truth and denouncing error does not make one a seeker but a doctor in the science of prophecy [p 156]. The converts know what you know and something more; if you will not ask them, they will provoke you; so they will have the triple advantage of priority, of search and of struggle [p 156 to 157].
Awareness of search begins with knowing oneself poor; the upright heart does not keep accusing everything of falsehood, so it lets the true show itself [p 157 to 158]. The dogmatist who denounces wounds himself, since he has never lived what he denounces; the first imperative of the Quest is to feel the limit of the zahir as unbearable [p 158]. And if the object of the search proved vain? Abu Malik: the humility is addressed to God, and honoring the ethics of the Quest is already the reward [p 158]. He then imposes an exodus toward God; the notables propose three days, then two; he answers, today, with you or alone [p 159].
The speaking reversal
At al-Bokhtori's house Abu Malik asks after Salih. The father: Salih is now his father, and he is Salih's son, and Salih is with his Lord [p 159 to 160]. Abu Malik, misunderstanding, utters the formula of mourning. The father: «Sâlih n'est pas mort, et jamais plus ne mourra; il est vivant pour l'éternité» (editor's translation: ‘Salih is not dead, and will never die again; he is alive for eternity’) [p 160]. Corbin compares Fatima's title, mother of her father, and the initiation of the Chaldaean Oracles lived as a sacrament of immortality [p 160 to 161].
Figure 34. The chain of the deposit in the novel, with the reversal of natural kinship [p 147 to 160, 192 to 193].
Salih's three seekers
Two Quests now walk toward each other: Abu Malik seeks gnosis, Salih seeks the heir of that gnosis [p 161]. Salih first refuses the role of warner (nadhir): a warner is a prophet and a witness, and Abu Malik has stayed outside the message [p 162 to 163]. He asks whether Abu Malik came out of suspicion or out of conformism (taqlid); a note sets out the shades of taqlid, from conformism to the Twelver usage of rallying to a Mojtahid, and insists that in Ismaili gnosis there can be no taqlid: the da'i is not a Mojtahid [p 162 n 1].
| Seeker | Who he is | What he seeks |
|---|---|---|
| The one who knows (talib 'ani) | The divine Sage, theo-sophos | The dead, to raise them by gnosis; the heir of the deposit |
| The one learning (mota'allim) | The apprentice who has some degrees | To go to the end |
| The one who wants to learn | The ignorant aware of his ignorance | Those who know, so as to learn |
Table 12. The three ranks of those who enter the Quest (al-talibun) [p 163 to 164].
Abu Malik places himself in the third rank. Salih: did you know it or understand it? «Savoir, c'est recevoir une information d'un autre. Comprendre, c'est voir soi-même de ses propres yeux» (editor's translation: ‘To know is to receive information from another. To understand is to see for oneself with one's own eyes’) [p 164]. What follows Corbin calls a phenomenology of ignorance as anguish: the one who understands his ignorance is in anguish, and that anguish drives him toward the wide space of the height, for knowledge is vastness [p 165].
Figure 35. Salih's distinction.
Abu Malik hurries. Salih tempers him: no doctor of prophecy pointed you to me; are you not still seeking the comfort of taqlid? Corbin says that in modern terms Salih refuses projection and transference; initiation, the potestas clavium of the Imam, does not impose a dogma but initiates into the esoteric of dogma [p 166]. Abu Malik still thinks he owns a jewel, and Salih says the lapidaries have already judged it glass [p 166 to 167]. Then the Molla touches the explosive point without seeing it: the time of prophets is past, no prophet is promised, the communities of the Book have only historical traditions (riwayat) [p 167].
What is Religion?
Salih separates gnosis from historical faith: a religion received purely by transmission does not deserve the name of Din, what Luther called fides historica seu mortua [p 168]. Abu Malik admits the terrible word, «Nous ne nous cramponnons plus qu'au seul nom de la religion» (editor's translation: ‘We cling now only to the mere name of religion’), and defines religion as commandments and prohibitions, licit and forbidden [p 168]. Is that all? He does not know whether anything is left. Salih's answer comes lyrically: Religion is that whose Veil protects it from corrupters, whose doors are open to seekers, the link between Heaven and Earth, «l'Arche de la Sakîna (tâbût al-Sakîna), l'Arche du salut; elle est la Lumière de la vie» (editor's translation: ‘the Ark of the Sakina, the Ark of salvation; it is the Light of life’) [p 169].
VI. The time of the prophets is not yet ended
Salih calls Abu Malik to recognize divine equity. That seems harmless, but in Shi'i esoteric theosophy the divine Essence receives neither Name nor Attribute; the Imams, the Friends of God, are the supports of the Names and Attributes [p 172]. When Abu Malik recites the edifying doctrine, Salih replies that such names are as abstract as saying fire is hot when there is nothing to warm; if the name stood for the thing, saying fire would burn the tongue [p 173]. Corbin calls the result pure nominalism, which, when it concerns God, is the lost Word [p 174]. An ideographic exercise on the written word ALLH asks where the Name ends and the Named begins; Corbin abridges it [p 174 n 1]. Pressed, Abu Malik murmurs: «Cette fois la Parole est partie; il n'y a plus de parole à dire» (editor's translation: ‘This time the Word is gone; there is no word left to say’) [p 175].
The decisive novelty, for Corbin, is that Salih puts ta'wil on an equal footing with tanzil as to its source in revelation; the only priority is that the esoteric presupposes the exoteric [p 176]. Classical Shi'i hadith keep wahy for the prophet and ilham for the Imams; this Ismaili text places both under wahy [p 178 n 2]. So creatures are never cut off from revelation, and only for those who refuse ta'wil is the divine Word lost [p 177]. Abu Malik draws the conclusion that every ta'wil is «une révélation venant de Dieu» (editor's translation: ‘a revelation coming from God’) [p 178], which grounds what Corbin calls the ecumenism of esotericism.
Figure 36. Ta'wil on an equal footing [p 176 to 178].
The indictment
How did the imposture begin? Each time the same way: «un Satan rebelle, un orgueilleux obstiné, un docteur de la Loi (faqih) hypocrite» (editor's translation: ‘a rebel Satan, an obstinate proud man, a hypocritical doctor of the Law’) who, wanting a state, persuaded each people that no prophet would come after theirs [p 179 to 180]. Placed on the hexaemeron, the Mazdeans shut themselves in their fire temples, the Jews said no Envoy after Moses, the Christians none after Jesus [p 180 to 181]. Then the Muslims: they followed the others, bowed to proud jurists and declared no Envoy after Muhammad [p 181 to 182]. The earlier peoples are more truthful than you, says Salih, by a triple mark: they came first, you accept their prophets, and none of them accepts yours [p 182 to 183].
Figure 37. The authors of the imposture.
Corbin has read nothing so bold in classical Ismaili literature. It helps explain the trial of Sohravardi two centuries later: the doctrine the 'olama of Aleppo imputed to him, that God can raise a new prophet every day, is the doctrine here [p 183 to 184; p 194 n 1].
No interregnum
Abu Malik still asks where the Friends are now that no prophets come. Salih turns his own words back: would God's equity stop with us [p 186]? There was never an interregnum: after Abraham came Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Jonah, Jethro, up to Moses; after Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Saul, David, Solomon, Zachariah and John the Baptist, up to Jesus [p 187]. In times of danger the Friends propagate the call in secret, «car le monde terrestre ne peut jamais rester privé, fût-ce un seul instant, de celui qui en est le contrepoids devant Dieu» (editor's translation: ‘for the earthly world can never remain deprived, even for a single instant, of the one who is its counterweight before God’) [p 187]. Corbin reads in this the supreme secret of Imamism, the Imam as mystic pole, and in the absence of the Twelver occultation a sign that the text may be pre-Fatimid, perhaps Qarmati in tone [p 188].
Figure 38. No interregnum [p 186].
Why the occultation? Salih asks which counterweight Abu Malik would like to see: a murdered one sent back from death, or a fugitive brought back to be killed [p 189]? The jurists pity the victim but never weigh the killer's guilt; Abu Malik himself has dressed the rulers' injustice in the diadem of his equity [p 189 to 190]. «Si vous aidiez les Amis de Dieu, alors ils se manifesteraient à découvert» (editor's translation: ‘If you helped the Friends of God, they would show themselves openly’) [p 190]. Abu Malik asks the question Salih once asked: is there a way to life for me? Salih, in tears, consults his Sage; after the needed trial the Friend of God opens the way, and the new initiates become warners in their turn [p 190 to 191]. The author closes: this is no invented story but testimony to the divine Disposition [p 191].
Epilogue: Joachim and the Grail
Salih is the hero-archetype of Ismaili gnosis; his story is true because it is exemplary like a parable [p 192]. From initiate to initiate the chain of gnosis lengthens [p 192 to 193]. All Shi'ism accepts that legislating prophecy is closed, but holds that something continues: the line of the Friends of God and the awaited revelation of the sense of all revelations at the parousia of the last Imam [p 193]. A note gives Molla Sadra's nuance: what continues is an inner prophecy that can no longer be called nobowwat, so it is called walayat, a teaching prophecy [p 194 n 1]. The novel goes further, yet even it expects no new Book: what it awaits is the full manifestation of the Imam, the speaking Book, while the Book reduced to its letter is a silent Imam [p 195 to 196].
A long note warns against confusing time and history: inner history has its own time, hierohistory needs a transcendental schema that positive history does not, and contemporaneity is existential, so that Salih and Cola di Rienzi are contemporaries, as are Ja'far Kashfi and Joachim [p 197 to 200 n 1]. Cola is quoted through Ernst Benz: why pray for the Holy Spirit to come if we deny that it can still come [p 197].
The Grail closes the study. In Robert de Boron the words of the sacrament cannot be written, as if, since the Grail vanished, no Mass had been said in truth [p 203]. In the prologue of the Estoire del saint Graal the hermit receives a Book in vision, finds it gone on Easter morning like the empty tomb, recovers it after a hard Quest and copies it before it returns to heaven on Ascension Day [p 204]. So the Grail Book also belongs to the phenomenon of the Book come down from Heaven, and each knight at the end of his Quest is called to become the speaking Book [p 205].
Study 3. Youth and Chivalry in Iranian Islam
The third lecture, signed Ascona, August 1971 [p 261], takes a single word that means both youth and chivalry: Arabic fotowwat, Persian javanmardi [p 207]. Corbin's main source is the Persian Fotowwat-Nameh of Hosayn Kashefi, of the end of the fifteenth century, which preserves citations going back to the ninth [p 210]. A note says the references are given in full in En Islam iranien and are not reproduced here [p 207 n 1].
1. The word and the thing
Fotowwat is, Corbin says, the ethical category par excellence: it gives its spiritual sense to every human company and inspired the guilds of the Islamic world [p 208]. Its origins are sought in Shi'i Iran and beyond it in Zoroastrian Iran, though the Turkish guilds were studied first because Persia was far from the Mediterranean before the age of aeroplanes [p 208]. In Iran it gave the trades rituals, initiation, grades, pacts and secrecy; a guild ritual of the cloth-printers questions the candidate on the symbolism of every tool, gesture and printed figure, so that all becomes liturgy [p 208 to 209]. The dean of letters at Isfahan told Corbin that the royal mosque could be conceived only as the work of knight-builders; Corbin compares the cathedrals and the French Compagnons du Tour de France, and notes that Iran's builders of traditional mosques still keep a discipline of the arcane [p 209].
Arabic fata has the Persian equivalent javan, of the same Indo-European root as Latin juvenis; literally it names a man of about 16 to 30 [p 210]. In its technical sense, which is here the spiritual sense, it names a youth on which time has no hold, because it is a reconquest over time and its scleroses [p 210]. The pilgrim (salik, the homo viator) who has freed himself from the carnal soul reaches the station of the heart and the dwelling of youth, manzal-e javani [p 211]. Javanmardi is the victory of the Light of man's original nature (fitrat) over the Darkness of the carnal soul [p 211].
The pact and the triple attestation
Fitrat is fixed by the answer each soul gave in Adam to the question A-lasto bi-rabbi-kom?, Am I not your Lord? (7/171). All said yes, but Shi'is know there are several ways to say yes [p 212]. The Sunni profession affirms divine Unity and Muhammad's mission; the Shi'i adds a third clause, the walayat of the Imams, and only this triple shahadat makes a true believer (mu'min), so that iman is often used as a synonym of fotowwat [p 212 to 213]. The third Imam, Hosayn, defines fotowwat as fidelity to that pre-eternal pact; man is pre-existentially responsible for his destiny [p 214].
Figure 39. Several ways to say yes [p 212].
Fotowwat is a branch of the science of Sufism and of tawhid, and so stands in the triad shari'at (the literal religion of the Law), tariqat (the mystical way) and haqiqat, a word with perhaps fifteen translations: the true that is real and the real that is true, theosophic truth personally realized [p 214 to 215].
Figure 40. The triad in which fotowwat stands.
2. Three cycles that cross
Sunni Islam accepts a cycle of prophecy closed by Muhammad, the Seal of the prophets, after which religious history is complete; Shi'ism adds the cycle of walayat, the Friends of God, who receive the esoteric sense of revelations [p 215]. Fotowwat crosses both [p 216].
Adam, leaving Paradise, could only be the man of the Law; to his son Seth, first Imam of his period, was entrusted the esoteric of prophecy [p 216]. While Adam's other sons took up trades, Seth, a mystic weaver, wove only the garment of Sufism; Gabriel clothed him in a robe of green wool, and the visiting Angels, who had asked whether God would create one who sheds blood, were astonished to find this one clothed in wool [p 216 to 218]. In Abraham's time men could no longer bear the khirqa; it was too heavy, and they asked Abraham for a new way. He put them on the ship of the tariqat, launched it on the sea of haqiqat and landed them on the island of fotowwat [p 218 to 219].
Abraham is the father of the knights of faith by a resolution that anticipates the saying of the sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq: «L'Islam a commencé expatrié et redeviendra expatrié comme il l'était au début» (editor's translation: ‘Islam began expatriate and will become expatriate again as it was at the beginning’) [p 220]. The idol-breaker is called fata in the Qur'an itself (21/61) [p 220]. Kashefi says those who know put a veil over the science because many who retain only words pass themselves off as its people: fotowwat is essentially esoteric [p 220 to 221]. It passes from Abraham through Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joshua and Joseph, through Christianity in the Seven Sleepers of the Qur'an, so that it embraces Jews, Christians and Muslims, and it is never without a support on earth [p 221].
Figure 41. The crossing cycles of prophecy, walayat and fotowwat [p 216, 222].
As all prophets before Muhammad stand to him as Seal of prophecy, so all Friends of God after him stand to the Twelfth Imam, the hidden, awaited Imam; so every knight stands to him [p 222]. Fotowwat is the characteristic ethos of walayat: each person, where he is, is the knight of the Imam, which makes each responsible for the future of the parousia, an event that happens first inside each believer [p 222 to 223]. A hadith sums up the archetype: «Point de chevalier sinon 'Alî; point de glaive sinon Dhû'l-fiqâr» (editor's translation: ‘No knight but 'Ali; no sword but Dhu'l-fiqar’), the sword being the symbol of the hermeneutic that cuts the ambiguities of the literal religion [p 223]. Corbin heard it sung in chorus by Sufis at a feast of the first Imam's birth [p 223]. In the West Wolfram expresses an ecumenical chivalry of Christendom and Islam, the Templars of the Grail, while Sohravardi repatriated the heroes of ancient Iran into a mystical epic [p 223 to 224].
To take rank in this line each knight must pass through a second birth; the tradition of fotowwat is not a funeral procession but a perpetual renaissance [p 224 to 225]. Shi'is were Johannites, citing the Gospel of John: no one enters the Malakut who is not born a second time [p 225].
Walayat, not sanctity
Corbin says he took years to understand walayat. Wilayat, written the same but for one vowel, is usually translated sanctity, a Western canonical concept it does not cover [p 225 to 226]. Walayat is first the Imams' qualification as Friends and Close Ones of God; every Rasul, sent with a Book, is a Wali to whom mission is added, but not every Wali is a Rasul [p 226]. It also names the knight's love and devotion toward the Imam (Persian dusti), a share in the eternal love of which the pleroma of the Fourteen Immaculate is the object [p 227]. Paired with mahabbat, love, it shows that apart from Sufism Islam can be a religion of love, because this love goes not to an unknowable God but to his theophanies; a knightly service toward a God who cannot be known would make no sense [p 227 to 228]. Its cosmic function differs from the soufi's subjective states, and from this follows the whole question of how Sufism was born in Shi'ism and separated from it [p 228].
The cycle of prophecy is the descent (nozul) of exiled humanity; the cycle of walayat from the first to the twelfth Imam is the ascent (so'ud); Ismailism calls itself paradise in potency [p 231]. The twelfth Imam brings no new Book or shari'at but the hidden sense of all revelations, and the rejuvenation leads back to the origin, the apokatastasis [p 232]. Corbin compares the miracle of the octave and the hall of mirrors: whatever step we take, we move toward the same fundamental, and the image comes nearer [p 232]. Some Shi'i authors identified the Twelfth Imam with the Paraclete; one identified the Woman clothed with the Sun of Apocalypse XII with Fatima and the child taken into the desert with the hidden Imam [p 230]. «Nous avons à lire ensemble le même Livre» (editor's translation: ‘We have to read the same Book together’), Corbin says to the heirs of the Abrahamic tradition [p 230].
Figure 42. Descent and ascent [p 231].
3. The Zoroastrian roots of the knight's ethos
The second talk turns to the Friends of God (Awliya' Allah, Gottesfreunde). In John 15/15, «Je ne vous appellerai plus des serviteurs, mais des amis» (editor's translation: ‘I will no longer call you servants, but friends’), Corbin finds the passage from servus Dei to amicus Dei, and in Arabic the same passage from 'Abd-Allah, name given to the Prophet, to Wali-Allah, name given to the Imam [p 233 to 234]. The Sunni profession stops at the servant, the Shi'i goes on to the friend [p 234]. Hence theophoric names; dropping 'Abd from them is to him a secularization that is a profanation [p 234 to 235].
Ohrmazd, the Lord Wisdom, is all-wise but not all-powerful: he needs the Fravartis, celestial selves of every being of Light, who freely came down to fight Ahriman [p 236]. Ahriman is not a mere privatio boni but the paradoxical being of non-being, pure negativity, the no without yes [p 236]. In Ja'far Kashfi's scheme each plane of the world of Light has a letter, and the anti-world that rises from the abyss has the same letters written backwards; a being of light casts no shadow, and its wholeness is itself plus its Fravarti, not itself plus a shadow [p 237 to 238]. The Fravartis fight beside Ohrmazd as knights beside their suzerain until the frashkart, the rejuvenation, after twelve millennia [p 238].
Figure 43. The two powers of the Zoroastrian drama [p 236].
| Zoroastrian | Shi'i |
|---|---|
| Saoshyant, a Zarathustra redivivus | Twelfth Imam, a Muhammad redivivus [p 239] |
| Wish: to be among those who will rejuvenate the world | Salutation: may God hasten the Joy [p 239] |
| Twelve millennia of the Aion | Twelve Imams as twelve millennia, twelve Veils of light [p 240] |
| Companions of the Saoshyant | Companions of the Twelfth Imam [p 256] |
| Frashkart | Resurrection, apokatastasis [p 246, 256] |
Table 13. The consonances Corbin finds between Zoroastrian and Shi'i chivalry.
A seventeenth-century Shi'i, Qotboddin Ashkevari, pupil of Mir Damad, identified the Twelfth Imam with the Saoshyant; others identified him with the Paraclete. Between Saoshyant, Imam and Paraclete Corbin sees the outline of one chivalry from the borders of Iran to the West [p 240 to 241].
Kathenotheism
Since Shi'ism holds the deity unknowable, its Names and Attributes belong to the theophanies, above all the Fourteen Immaculate; the Imams say «C'est Nous qui sommes les Noms; c'est Nous qui sommes les Attributs» (editor's translation: ‘It is We who are the Names; it is We who are the Attributes’) [p 241]. This divine anthropomorphosis must be kept apart from anthropomorphism, which arises from ignoring it [p 241 to 242]. The Almighty needs no knight; the Imams, theophanies fragile like every appearance of beauty and goodness in this world, need the service of their faithful [p 242]. Each believer may choose one Imam, or Fatima, as axis of devotion, for each is wholly the others: the middle term between monotheism and polytheism Corbin calls kathenotheism, the One in each [p 242 to 243]. The precept tawalla wa tabarra binds the knight to the Imam's friends and parts him from his enemies [p 243].
| Ethos | Suffering is | Response |
|---|---|---|
| Hinayana Buddhism, as Corbin presents it | Existence itself | Cross the ford, leave the wheel of samsara [p 243 to 244] |
| Exoteric Christianity, as he presents it | A trial sent by an almighty God | Resignation, until the scandal of Jung's Answer to Job [p 244] |
| Zoroastrian and Shi'i chivalry | A defeat suffered by the God of Light in each of his members | Face it, never resign [p 244 to 245] |
Table 14. Three ethics of suffering in Corbin's contrast.
Corbin recalls a Sanskrit verse learned under Alfred Foucher, quoted from memory forty years on, praising the one who has found rest in abandoning all hope, and his young protest: Non possum [p 244]. For the knight, being and its manifestation are not a wound; they have suffered a wound, the invasion of Ahriman [p 245]. The hadith of the Hidden Treasure answers those who long to dissolve the Many in the undifferentiated One: «J'étais un Trésor caché. J'ai voulu être connu» (editor's translation: ‘I was a hidden Treasure. I wished to be known’); to suppress the manifestation is to oppose the Treasure's most secret wish [p 246]. Exile, Abraham's going out, is not flight from the world but leaving it in order to turn and fight [p 245].
The philosopher as knight
Ruzbehan of Shiraz says of the Friends of God: «Ce sont les yeux par lesquels Dieu regarde encore le monde» (editor's translation: ‘They are the eyes through which God still looks at the world’) [p 247]. To a student at Poitiers in July 1971 who felt solidarity with the massa perditionis, Corbin answered: could there be deeper solidarity than being the eyes of that blind mass [p 247]? First among these knights stand the philosophers in the sense of theosophos: identifying the Active Intelligence with the Holy Spirit, the Angel Gabriel, they share the prophet's vocation and keep open communication with the Malakut [p 248]. The Kabbalists' theme of the exile of the Shekhina answers to the exile that resists Ahriman: «Pour que cesse l'exil de Dieu, il faut que l'homme s'exile du monde dont Dieu est exilé» (editor's translation: ‘For the exile of God to end, man must exile himself from the world from which God is exiled’) [p 249].
Molla Sadra (died 1640, per the book) made a metaphysical revolution: the act and degree of existing determine what a being is, and movement enters the very category of substance [p 249]. With it goes Imagination as a spiritual faculty, the subtle body of the soul [p 249 to 250].
Figure 44. Three modes of existence in Molla Sadra as Corbin sums them up [p 250].
The middle world, lost in the West, is the imaginal, not the imaginary: a subtle body is not an unreal body, and the body can exist at the sensible, imaginal and spiritual levels [p 250]. Without the prophetic philosophy of these theosophers humanity would be deaf, blind and amnesiac; the West since Descartes, caught between res extensa and res cogitans, has lost the concrete metaphysical [p 251]. In the theosopher doctrine becomes an event of the soul, and metaphysics a mystical epic, as in Sanai and 'Attar [p 252]. The Round Table, open to knights of «païennie» as well as of Christendom, and Albrecht von Scharfenberg's New Titurel, where knightly service becomes a sacramental act, as javanmardi makes every act of a trade liturgical, belong to the same chivalry [p 253 to 254].
4. A dream and a prayer
A religion speaks above all in the dreams and prayers of its faithful [p 254]. A young Iranian student in Switzerland, unable to go on pilgrimage to Qomm in body, went in a dream: he fought dragons in the desert, came within sight of the golden dome, was shown the open door of the house of the awaited Imam a few hundred paces away, and woke [p 255].
The pilgrim's prayer to the Twelfth Imam, which can be said at Samarra, at Jam-Karun, or in one's own oratory, closes the talk [p 257]. Its knight says: «alors, me voici, moi, ton chevalier» (editor's translation: ‘then, here I am, I, your knight’), and, if death comes first, asks to be among those granted to return (raj'at) at the Imam's parousia [p 258 to 259]. Every death before the parousia is premature for such companions [p 257]. Molla Sadra observed that the esoterist is closer to the naive believer than to the rationalist theologian, who flees into allegory; for the esoterist the symbols, understood spiritually, become literal truth at that level [p 259].
Figure 45. The Imam as celestial Self.
For the Shi'i knight one question matters: where is the Imam, invisible to the senses but visible to the heart of his knights? For Parsifal entering the Grail domain one question matters too, on which the rejuvenation of the world depends: where is the Grail [p 260]?
Part 4. Notes on the Text
Only slips the book itself shows are listed: places where it disagrees with itself or prints an evident misspelling. Nothing here relies on outside knowledge.
Part 5. Synthesis
Key Takeaways
- Corbin, through his foreword writer, proposes the human being and his Angel in place of the human being and his soul: two who remain two in one, not two juxtaposed realities and not one absorbed into the other [p I to II].
- Gnosis is a Way, not a body of knowledge; this is why Sohravardi writes recitals, in which the reader must live the story as his own.
- In the Recital of the Western Exile the Qur'anic and Alexandrian episodes are re-enacted in the first person, so that the text becomes an event of the soul.
- The Angel met at the end of the Quest is the Angel of humanity and also the personal Angel; the Perfect Nature of Hermes and the Daena are its figures.
- Every religion of the Book faces the drama of the Lost Word: once the inner sense is refused, the letter is all that is left.
- The tenth-century Book of the Sage and the Disciple stages that drama as a novel with two leitmotifs: the resurrection of the spiritually dead and the ethics of the entrusted deposit.
- Ismaili pedagogy is hermeneutic, not dogmatic: it does not attack the exoteric but calls the seeker to what lies under it.
- The initiatory Name owns its bearer; claiming to own it would make one an idol, and betraying it is to lose the Word.
- The Quest for gnosis ends in a second Quest, for the heir of the deposit; a believer is a believer only when he has raised up another.
- In spiritual kinship natural order reverses: Salih gives life to his father, who becomes his son.
- Abu Malik's ethics of search: the flashes of the false come with agreement of opinions, those of the true with ordeal; humility before the object of the Quest is its own reward.
- To know is to receive information; to understand is to see for oneself. Ignorance that knows itself is already knowledge, because it is anguish that drives toward vastness.
- Religion that clings to its name, or to transmitted traditions only, is what Luther called fides historica seu mortua.
- The Friends of God are divine equity itself: counterweights to human ignorance, without whom God would have left creatures in an ignorance he demands they overcome.
- The novel ranks ta'wil with tanzil as revelation; hence the time of the prophets is not closed, a position Corbin finds bolder than classical Ismaili texts.
- Every community has decreed that no prophet would come after its own; Salih applies the charge to Islam too.
- There is never an interregnum; when danger requires it the Friends are hidden, not absent, and the world cannot exist one instant without its counterweight.
- Shi'i and Joachimite esotericism expect no new Book but the full understanding of all Books: the speaking Book, the eternal Gospel, the Church of John.
- Time in this hierohistory is existential: those who live in the same inner age are contemporaries across centuries.
- Fotowwat means youth and chivalry at once: a youth that is a reconquest over time, the victory of original nature over the carnal soul.
- The cycles of prophecy, walayat and fotowwat cross; Abraham initiates chivalry, the first Imam is its pole, the Twelfth Imam its Seal.
- Walayat is divine friendship, not sanctity; it makes Shi'ism a religion of love directed to theophanies, not to an unknowable God.
- The knight's ethos has Zoroastrian roots: Ohrmazd needs the Fravartis, suffering is a defeat of the God of Light, and the right answer is to fight, not to resign.
- Kathenotheism, the One in each, describes devotion to any one of the Fourteen Immaculate, each wholly the others.
- The theosopher is the knight par excellence, keeping humanity in contact with the world of the Angel through the imaginal world.
- The book closes where it opens: the Imam is the celestial Self, the Angel, and the knight's one question, where is the Imam, is Parsifal's, where is the Grail.
Frameworks and Mental Models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Two who remain two in one | Union that does not abolish the partners | Thinking about identity, partnership and guidance |
| Recital versus treatise | Some knowledge is transmitted only by a story the reader re-enacts | Deciding how to teach what must be lived |
| Exoteric and esoteric as body and spirit | Neither survives alone; the letter carries the sense | Reading any canonical text or rulebook |
| Quest, then deposit | Learning ends in the duty to pass on to a capable heir | Succession and teaching |
| Name and Named | One belongs to one's Name, not the reverse | Questions of role, title and vocation |
| Knowing versus understanding | Information from others differs from seeing oneself | Testing whether learning has happened |
| Three seekers | The one who knows seeks the ignorant; apprentice and beginner seek those who know | Mapping roles in a learning community |
| Counterweight | Human limits are balanced by those who carry living knowledge | Asking who keeps an institution's knowledge alive |
| No interregnum | Hidden is not absent | Judging whether a tradition has truly ended |
| Existential contemporaneity | Inner situation, not date, sets one's time | Comparing thinkers across centuries |
| Defeat, not trial | Evil is something to fight, not a test to accept | Framing responses to suffering and failure |
Table 15. Portable frameworks from the book.
A closer look
- Corbin reads as a participant. He adopts his authors' terms (the Imams as divine equity, the novel's claim to be a true story) and rarely sets majority positions beside them except as foils.
- His parallels (Imam and Grail, Joachim and Shi'ism, Saoshyant and the Twelfth Imam, Rhenish and Iranian Friends of God) are typological. He presents them as resonance between spiritual facts, and the reader should not take them as proof of historical contact.
- The novel was unpublished when he wrote, and he summarizes much of it in his own words; readers cannot check most of it from the book.
- His sketches of Buddhism and of exoteric Christianity are deliberately brief, as he says himself, and serve as contrast rather than as fair portraits.
- The lectures were given years apart and repeat themes (the ethics of the deposit, the speaking Book, Joachim); repetition is not added evidence.
- Polemic against secularization, socialization and historicism is frequent, and its targets are often unnamed.
Who's Who
Dates are given only as the book prints them.
| Name | Date as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Henry Corbin | Author; lecturer at Eranos | |
| Roger Munier | Author of the foreword | |
| Sohravardi, Shaykh al-Ishraq | ob. 587/1191 | Author of the initiation recitals; his trial at Aleppo is echoed in Salih's doctrine |
| Avicenna | His recitals foreshadow Sohravardi's | |
| Hermes | Visionary of the Perfect Nature | |
| The Sage, Salih, al-Bokhtori, the Shaykh, Abu Malik | novel of the 10th century | Characters of the Book of the Sage and the Disciple |
| Swedenborg | Commentator on the white horse of Apocalypse XIX | |
| Ibn 'Arabi | two or three centuries after the novel | Theory of the divine Names |
| Qosta ibn Luqa | 10th century | Dialogue on knowing one's God |
| Molla Sadra Shirazi | died 1640 | Metaphysics of existence, active Imagination |
| Joachim of Fiore | 12th century | Ages of the world, eternal Gospel |
| Cola di Rienzi | The Spirit still comes each day | |
| Hosayn Kashefi | end of the 15th century | Author of the Fotowwat-Nameh |
| Imam Hosayn | Third Imam; defines chivalry as fidelity to the pact | |
| Ja'far al-Sadiq | Sixth Imam; saying on expatriation | |
| Rulman Merswin | 14th century | Rhenish mystic: the time of cloisters is past |
| Wolfram von Eschenbach | Ecumenical chivalry of the Grail | |
| Ja'far Kashfi | ob. 1850 | Shi'i gnostic; letters of the world and the anti-world |
| Qotboddin Ashkevari | 17th century | Identified the Twelfth Imam with the Saoshyant |
| Ruzbehan of Shiraz | 12th century | The Friends as the eyes of God |
| Zarathustra (Zoroaster) | Oldest prophet on Corbin's horizon; announcer of the Saoshyant |
Table 16. People in the book.
Part 6. Glossary
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| ishraq | Rising of the dawn; Sohravardi's Oriental theosophy of Light |
| Initiation recital | First-person account of a vision lived as one's own Quest |
| Perfect Nature | The philosopher's spiritual entity, his Angel, in the Hermetic tradition |
| Daena | The soul's celestial Self, met after death as a figure formed by one's thoughts, words and acts |
| Fravarti | Zoroastrian celestial pole of every being of Light; fights beside Ohrmazd |
| da'wat | The Ismaili call or convocation; the esoteric brotherhood |
| da'i | The one who calls; here the Persian Sage, the stranger |
| zahir / batin | Exoteric and esoteric, letter and inner sense |
| tanzil | Bringing down the revelation in its literal form |
| ta'wil | Spiritual hermeneutic leading the Word back to its archetype |
| wahy / ilham | Revelation to a prophet / inspiration to the Imams; the novel ranks both as wahy |
| taqlid | Conformism; rallying to another's opinion |
| taqiyya, ketman | Discretion; the discipline of the arcane |
| Din | Religion in the absolute sense, the esoteric theosophy |
| Sakina | For Corbin's Ismaili reading, the divine Presence, akin to the Hebrew Shekhina |
| Friends of God (Awliya' Allah) | The Imams and those who serve them; counterweights of human ignorance |
| nobowwat | Prophecy; the legislating kind is closed with Muhammad |
| walayat | Divine friendship; the esoteric of prophecy; the believer's love for the Imam |
| wilayat | Usually rendered sanctity; Corbin distinguishes it from walayat |
| fotowwat / javanmardi | Youth and spiritual chivalry |
| fata / javanmard | Young man, knight, companion |
| fitrat | The original nature of the human being |
| shari'at, tariqat, haqiqat | The Law, the mystical way, the realized truth |
| khirqa | The Sufi's mantle of consecration |
| Speaking Book (Qor'an natiq) | The Imam who speaks the hidden sense; the Book in its letter is the silent Imam |
| ghaybat | Occultation of the Imam |
| frashkart | Zoroastrian rejuvenation or transfiguration of the world |
| Kathenotheism | The One in each: devotion to one theophany that is wholly all |
| mundus imaginalis | The real intermediate world perceived by active Imagination |
| Hierohistory | Sacred history governed by a transcendental schema, not by chronology |
Table 17. Key terms.
About this book
L'homme et son ange: Initiation et chevalerie spirituelle 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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