A Look at the Life and Philosophical Legacy of Henry Corbin — Continued (2)

Corbin believed that Iran and Germany were not merely two lands on the surface of the earth but the latitude and longitude of a spiritual thought in an imaginal world for which no trace can be found on earthly geographical maps. He believed that his journey from Paris to Freiburg and from Istanbul to Tehran and Isfahan had not been a journey through geographical cities; these cities were symbolic stations on an initiatory path through another world, which he travelled as a spiritual journey.

He was never a rationalist, and perhaps this was one reason for his interest in Karl Barth. With his friends he published a journal called “Here and Now,” and in the introduction to its first issue, inspired by the Irish idealist philosopher George Berkeley, they wrote: “It is time to declare that human reason is not the reason for our existence. It is not ‘I think, therefore I am’; the truth is: I am thought, therefore I am.”

Corbin heard the cry of the Simurgh of Shaykh al-Ishraq: a cry which, in Suhrawardi’s promise, has its nest in the East but is not absent from the West; a cry that will finally awaken those who have slept for a thousand years. Following this enduring call, and in search of the wisdom of Illumination and the thought of Suhrawardi—whom he called the Imam of the Persian Platonists—Corbin came east. He went to Istanbul to recover rare and unpublished manuscripts of the Shaykh al-Ishraq preserved in the city’s museums and spent six years studying them amid the years of the World War. At the end of this period of research he published Suhrawardi’s collected works and, on returning to France, succeeded Louis Massignon’s chair at the Sorbonne—the mystic-philosopher who had first opened for him the gates of the East and Iranian thought by introducing him to Suhrawardi’s Hikmat al-Ishraq.

During these years, and for more than a quarter of a century, Corbin was also a member of a study circle of some of the most remarkable minds of his age, Eranos, which met annually in Switzerland. Among its well-known participants were Carl Gustav Jung, Mircea Eliade, Heinrich Zimmer, Erich Neumann, Alfonso Rosenberg, Karl Kerényi, Adolf Portmann, and Joseph Campbell. Their studies focused on mythology, psychology, religion, and symbolism. Corbin had an especially close friendship with Jung, beginning with an interpretation Corbin wrote of Jung’s Answer to Job. Whenever Corbin travelled to Switzerland, the source says, his meetings with Jung at Jung’s famous home sometimes lasted for hours.

In Iran too, and along the path through which his understanding of perennial wisdom developed, Corbin established relationships with a wide range of prominent Iranologists, philosophers, and scholars of Islam: Ebrahim Pourdavoud, Badi' al-Zaman Forouzanfar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Seyyed Jalal al-Din Ashtiani, Mahdi Elahi Qomshei, and Allameh Mohammad Hossein Tabataba'i, among others, with whom he maintained sustained scholarly cooperation for years.

The insight he gained through this path, the view of Iran that formed within him, and the deep understanding of this land that he developed will feel familiar to anyone who has fallen in love with the heritage of its wisdom. He believed that Iran was a land where earth and heaven meet, and that manifestations of Iranian art, from architecture to Persian miniature painting, express this suspension between earth and heaven: a suspension in an intermediate world between thought and feeling, reason and intuition. In his book on Henry Corbin and his ideas, Shayegan sets out several axes of Corbin’s understanding of Iran:

1. Iran is an intermediate and mediating land, looking in two directions toward West and East. Within the Eastern world it is also a centre where ideas arising from the Far East and Mesopotamia meet and interact. This gives Iranian thought a distinctive position and an understanding that transcends territory.

2. Iran is the world of imagination. Within this suspended world between heaven and earth, and reason and intuition, the imaginal realm and the world of Platonic Forms find a real bridge to this world through capacities latent in Iranian thought and philosophy.

3. Iran is a world between two times. Throughout history it has been a land of waiting, a world in which our worldly time is transformed into an intermediate realm awaiting the promised resurrection and humanity’s final salvation.