Spiritual Imagination in the Work of Henry Corbin, C.G. Jung and James Hillman

Spiritual Imagination in the Work of Henry Corbin, C.G. Jung and James Hillman

Tom Cheetham — 1 recording in the archive.

The book: All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings by Tom Cheetham.

Tom Cheetham, welcome. Thank you. Hi. So, Tom, you are the author of four books on the implications of Henry Corbin's work for the contemporary world. You're a fellow of the Temenos Academy in London. Is it Temenos or Temenos? Temenos. Temenos Academy in London and an adjunct professor at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. And you lecture regularly in Europe and the United States. And we're up at Sonoma State University with an incredibly sophisticated audience. I must say the quality of the questions and their persistence just blew me away. I mean, you know, I you know, taught another used to teach political philosophy at Yale in the '70s. And I got to say the students were not as good. Yeah. Yeah. so, you've done four books on Henry Corbin. But let's start with a really simple question. What is the elevator speech on Henry Corbin? Who was Henry Corbin? He was a French theologian and philosopher and mystic. one of the most important 20th century scholars of Islamic mysticism. He did lots of work particularly in Iranian Sufism. And he was a colleague of him at Eranos lectures. He was a professor of the religions of Arabia at the Sorbonne. He followed Louis Massignon. and he also taught at the University of Tehran in Iran for many years until he died in 1978. and his major contribution in one sense is scholarly in that he oversaw the translation and publication of all sorts of medieval manuscripts which otherwise, well, I mean, he was the first Westerner and the first person to show a real interest in that tradition and to make sure that those books were translated and the scholarly work done on them. And his most famous book is Probably, it's now called Alone with the Alone published by Princeton University Press. The original title and the sub-now subtitle is Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Okay. And Harold Bloom wrote the introduction to the that new version. And again, Harold Bloom, we were talking over lunch, you know, a very great Yale literary critic, a scholar of Shakespeare, but also amazingly prescient in terms of the breadth of his vision and what he considers important. And he considers Corbin extraordinarily important. Yeah. He compares him to Gershom Scholem, the great Jewish scholar of Jewish mysticism. so, he considers him…