This lecture is the second part of my discussion and critique of Dr Seyyed Javad Tabatabai’s book The Political History of Iran, focusing on Dr Tabatabai’s criticism of Henry Corbin’s intellectual “torch” in chapter six of that work.

The lives of many people have been transformed by reading a single book, and this is what happened to Henry Corbin when Louis Massignon, the great French scholar of mysticism and author of The Passion of al-Hallaj, gave him Suhrawardi’s Hikmat al-Ishraq and asked him to read it. Reading that book—which Corbin later translated into French—deeply affected the young Corbin and awakened in him an extraordinary passion. He decided to travel East, not only to read Suhrawardi’s other works but also to encounter the culture from which such wisdom had emerged and within which such thought had developed.

Before beginning this journey towards the “Orient of the intellect”, which became a path he followed for the remainder of his life, Corbin had established deep roots in Western philosophy. One indication of his historical importance in Western philosophy is that he was among the first to translate Heidegger’s work from German into French in direct intellectual contact with Heidegger himself. This collaboration gave the French translation particular precision and importance, and Jean-Paul Sartre encountered Heidegger’s Being and Time through this French intellectual context before writing Being and Nothingness, a major turning point in existentialist philosophy. Corbin had also earlier translated works of Karl Barth from German into French.

For more than a quarter of a century, Corbin was also a member of the Eranos circle, a study group that brought together many leading thinkers of its time and met in Switzerland in intellectual proximity to Carl Jung and the tradition of depth psychology. Corbin had a particularly close friendship with Jung. Their relationship was strengthened by Corbin’s interpretation of Jung’s Answer to Job and by extended encounters in Ascona. Jung is reported to have regarded Corbin’s interpretation of Answer to Job as among the most penetrating readings of that work.

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