Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin (born April 14, 1903 in Paris , † October 7, 1978 ibid) was a French philosopher, theologian and professor of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Life
Corbin was born in Paris. As a teenager he developed a keen interest in music, which left its mark on his later work. Although Protestant , he developed an early interest in the Catholic tradition and at the age of nineteen received a certificate in Scholastic Philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris. Three years later he finished his philosophy studies with the renowned Thomist Étienne Gilson . In 1928 he came across Louis Massignon , director of the Islamic Studies Faculty at the Sorbonne, who brought Corbin closer to the writings of the Iranian mystic and philosopher Suhrawardi from the 12th century. The writings of this thinker, whose philosophical roots lie alongside Islam in ancient Greece and other prophetic religions of the Middle East , had an enormous influence on Corbin's life and work.
His spiritual search, however, went far beyond Western scholasticism and Islamic mysticism. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he studied Protestant theology in depth and saw himself as an Evangelical Christian. He studied the German theological tradition, taught Martin Luther , Søren Kierkegaard and Johann Georg Hamann and translated the early works of Karl Barth into French. Another station was his encounter with Martin Heidegger's phenomenological work Being and Time in the early 1930s.
In 1933 he married Stella Leenhardt . In 1939 the couple traveled to Istanbul to collect manuscripts for a critical Suhrawardi edition. They stayed there until the end of the war. In 1945, the Corbins were traveling for the first time in Iran , where he accepted a one-year teaching at the University of Tehran. Corbin soon saw Iran as a second home that left clear traces in his thinking. In 1949 Corbin first attended one of the annual Eranos conferences in Ascona , Switzerland , where he was one of the most important participants alongside CG Jung , Mircea Eliade , Gershom Scholem , Adolf Portmann and others. In 1954 he took over Louis Massignon's professorship for Islam and Arabic religions. Since the 1950s, he has alternated between Tehran, Paris and Ascona. During his stays in Tehran he made the acquaintance of Allameh Tabatabai , with whom he was in lively intellectual exchange.
His published work includes more than 200 critical editions, translations, books and articles. His last work appeared in June 1978 with the title "Eyes of Fire: The Science of Gnosis". He died on October 7 of the same year at the age of 75 in Paris.
plant
Corbin is instrumental in a paradigm shift within the study of Islamic philosophy. In his Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964) he refutes the widespread view that philosophy among Muslims after Ibn Rushd has come to an end, and instead traced the lively philosophical activity that took place in the eastern Islamic world - especially in Iran - went away and continues to our time.
Corbin's biography and career can be broken down into three phases. In the first phase in the 1920s and 1930s, he primarily researched Western philosophy. In the period from 1939 to 1946 he studied the works of Suhrawardi and the so-called illumination philosophy . A third phase began in 1946 and was dedicated to the introduction to Eastern and Islamic philosophy.
The three major works on which his reputation is largely based were published in French in the 1950s and are dedicated to Avicenna , Ibn Arabi and Sufism in general. His later work on Central Asian and Iranian Sufism appeared in English with an introduction by Zia Inayat Khan under the title "The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism". His main work, which is still neither in German nor in English, is the four-volume “En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques”.
Positions
One of the most important positions in Corbin's work is the defense of spirituality and the emphasis on imagination as a means of gaining access to God and an understanding of creation. Corbin regarded prayer as the highest form of creative imagination. As the opposite of all of this, he saw a strong, literal textual orientation in the religions. Corbin voiced vehement criticism of idolatry , dogmatism and the institutionalization of religion, combined with a radical evaluation of the doctrine of the Incarnation of God . He considered himself a Protestant Christian, but rejected a Christ-centric view of history. His conception of the theology of the Holy Spirit embraces Judaism , Christianity and Islam as manifestations of a single coherent history of the ongoing relationship between the individual and God . He pleaded for the recognition of a superordinate unity of the Abrahamic religions . He was a passionate defender of the central role of the individual as the ultimate reflection of the divine . It is the connection between the human soul and the face of the heavenly twin that appears unique to each of us and is the ethical bond par excellence. This mystical spirituality depends on the ability of the human soul to find its way towards the angels and thus towards perfection. Status of the person is not simply a gift that the individual receives at birth - it is a goal to be achieved. The true journey of our lives, according to Corbin, takes place on a vertical scale. Our progress along this path is measured by our ability to love and, related to that, our ability to perceive beauty. Corbin's mysticism is not a world-negating asceticism, but he regards the entire creation as a theophany , ie as an appearance of the divine. Beauty is the highest theophany, and love for a human being of equally beauty is not an obstacle to our union with the divine, but a threshold of divine passion. This vision shares much in common with what has come to be known as creation spirituality, and the figure of the heavenly twin resembles the concept of the cosmic Christ.
Legacy and Influence
Corbin's work has been criticized by a number of authors for a variety of reasons. Colleagues such as Algar, Adams, Chittick, Walbridge & Ziai, and Wasserstrom questioned his scientific objectivity, which is occasionally suspended in favor of his own theological bias for Shiite views. He was also accused of being ahistorically naive and politically reactionary; his spiritual and political stance was criticized as being elitist. Furthermore, he was attested to be close to Iranian nationalism. From the beginning, Corbin's ideas exerted a strong influence on various authors and scholars. These include, first and foremost, a number of renowned scholars of Sufism and Islamic thought, such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr , William Chittick , Christian Jambet , Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi , Hermann Landolt, Pierre Lory, James Cowan, James Morris and Todd Lawson. In England his writings made school with the members of the Temenos Academy. Corbin was an important source for the archetypal psychology of James Hillman and others who advanced CG Jung's psychology. The American literary critic Harold Bloom quotes Corbin as someone who had significant influence on his own conception of gnosis . Friends and colleagues of Corbin founded a society in France for the dissemination of his work through meetings, colloquia and the publication of his written estate (L'Association des Amis de Henry Corbin et Stella).
Publications (selection)
-
Avicenne et le récit visionnaire. 2nd Edition. Tehran 1954.
- Translation: Avicenna and the visionary recital. Princeton University Press, Princeton (New Jersey) 1960 (= Bollingen Series. Volume 66).
- Histoire de la philosophie islamique , Collection idées No. 38, Gallimard, Paris 1964
- Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi . Princeton University Press, 1969. (Re-issued in 1998 as Alone with the Alone .)
- En Islam Irania: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques (4 vols.). Gallimard, 1971-3. ( Summary ; PDF; 127 kB)
- Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran . Princeton University Press, 1977.
- Le Paradoxe du Monothèisme . Ed. de l'Herne ( Le Livre de Poche ), 1981.
- Cyclical Time & Ismaili Gnosis . KPI, 1983.
- L'Homme et Son Ange: Initiation et Chevalerie Spiritual . Fayard, 1983.
- Face de Dieu, Face de l'homme: Hermeneutique et soufisme . Flammarion, 1983.
- Temple and Contemplation . KPI, 1986.
- The emerald vision: the light man in Persian Sufism (French orig .: L 'homme de lumière dans le soufisme iranien ). Munich: Diederichs, 1989
See also
Web links
- Literature by and about Henry Corbin in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Corbin, Henry |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 14, 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 7, 1978 |
| Place of death | Paris |