Henry Corbin and the Secret of the Grail

Henry Corbin and the Secret of the Grail

John Carey — 1 recording in the archive.

The book: Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi by Henry Corbin.

Hori Kabul was as most or all of you are well aware one of the past centuries greatest interpreters of esoteric Islam you will also be aware however that he was considerably more than this the sages of whom he wrote with such learning and in such inspiring inside were not for him mere subjects for research there are teachers from whom he and through him we could learn guides back into a kingdom to which we have lost the key his interests accordingly extended to her ever the transcendent realities described by his Sufi or Shiite masters have been glimpsed or pursued in the East or in the West long ago or in more recent times is in these terms that we can understand Corbin's interest in the Grail which came to occupied increasingly prominent place in his thought in the course of the last fourteen years of his life korban regarded the Grail legend as representing in the West something comparable to the Shiite esotericism of Iran as a part of European literature it belonged to the cultural background of his French readers in a way that Islam did not even though traditionally minded Iranian as could for their part find that various of the Grail romances as he put it seemed indeed to speak the same language as their own thus korva spoke of the holy grail of our Western traditions of our rail cycle in the West were simply of our Grail cycle core believed the Grail legends enshrined a mystery of supreme importance he wrote that the esoteric theme of our Grail cycle enclose perhaps the secret of the truly Western spiritual tradition and spoke of the cycle where the West perhaps deposited its most profound mystical secret when men had become incapable of sustaining it that is the cycle of the Holy Grail the story of the Grail was for him the mystical epoch of the West but what is the most profound mystical secret the essential mystical secret the ultimate secret of which core believed the Grail to be the repository when a question like this is approached by someone with an academic background and I am such a person several further questions immediately suggest themselves when did Corbin begin to refer to the Grail and are there any indications that his ideas concerning it developed over time what earlier writers on the…