Henry Corbin

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The Corbin Trilogy:
The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin
and Islamic Mysticism
By Tom Cheetham
Spring Journal Books, Conn., 2003

Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition

and the Battle for the Soul of the World
By Tom Cheetham
SUNY, New York, 2005

After Prophecy: Imagination, Incarnation, and

the Unity of the Prophetic Tradition (Lectures for
the Temenos Academy)
By Tom Cheetham
Spring Journal Books, Louisiana, 2007

Reviewed by M. Ali Lakhani

T his trilogy of works centers on the metaphysical thought of the

French Islamic scholar, Henry Corbin (1903–1978). A student of
Scholasticism under Etienne Gilson, and a close associate of Louis Mas‑
signon (whose position he succeeded, as Director of Islamic Studies at
the Sorbonne), Corbin was not only a pre-eminent theologian but also
a mystical philosopher. Influenced by the German theological tradition
of Boehme, Luther, Hamann, Heidegger, and Barth, among others, Corbin
developed a philosophy of mystical hermeneutics, which drew greatly
from Christian and Muslim mystics and philosophers who viewed reality
phenomenologically, as an unveiling of the inner Light of transcend‑
ent Reality. A major figure (along with Jung, Eliade, and Scholem) at
the Eranos conferences, Corbin spent many years living in the Muslim
world and was regarded in the West as an authority on medieval Muslim

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philosophy (particularly the teachings of Avicenna, Suhrawardi, and Ibn

‘Arabi). Also, as head of the Franco-Iranian Institute in Tehran, he was a
specialist in Irano-Islamic studies (particularly Suhrawardi’s revival of
Zoroastrian angelology), Persian Sufism (in particular, Mulla Sadra), and
Shi’a theosophy (including Isma’ili gnosis and hermeneutics). Corbin’s
legacy has been immense, ranging from his influence upon traditional‑
ist metaphysicians or those with traditionalist leanings (notably, Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, Toshohiko Izutsu, William C. Chittick, Sachiko Murata,
Hermann Landolt, Kathleen Raine and Philip Sherrard), and extending
beyond into the fields of literature and psychology (his ideas have in‑
fluenced, for example, the literary critic, Harold Bloom and the Jungian
scholar, James Hillman).
Dr. Cheetham is a scholar of Corbin, and a fellow of the Temenos
Academy, which—through its journal and lectures devoted to the Arts
of the Imagination, and to Perennial Philosophy, both arguably key
aspects of Corbin’s thought—has promoted Corbin’s work for several
decades. Cheetham also maintains an online blog on Corbin at “http://
henrycorbinproject.blogspot.com”.
In The World Turned Inside Out, Cheetham has provided perhaps the
best available introduction to Corbin’s thought for the general reader.
The second and particularly the third volumes of this trilogy, Green
Man, Earth Angel, and After Prophecy, respectively, are more interpre‑
tive works, exploring the relevance and significance of Corbin’s ideas
for our lives and the issues that confront us in the modern world.Those
volumes will be of especial interest to readers of Sacred Web, given
their interpretive focus. In the comments that follow, we have chosen
to review the works collectively, as a trilogy, rather than individually. For
readers unfamiliar with Corbin’s writings, they might do well to read
the books in the order they were written. For others who may be more
familiar with Corbin’s ideas—and this review will attempt to provide the
reader with an outline of the key ideas—and who wish to sample but
one book in this trilogy, we would recommend the final volume which
anthologizes Cheetham’s lectures for the Temenos Academy.
In considering Corbin’s ideas, Cheetham remarks on the “astonishing
variety of influences” that shaped them—“Christian theology, Heideg‑
gerian phenomenology, and Islamic mysticism fused with Zoroastrian
angelology; all united by a deep reverence for what in Islam is called

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the Primordial Revelation: the book of nature.” Cheetham traces the

early philosophical influences of Heidegger in Corbin’s hermeneutics
and phenomenology, clarifying that unlike for Heidegger, whose quest
for the “history of Being” remained situated entirely within the Western
philosophical tradition, Corbin’s research extended beyond and came
to be largely influenced by Irano-Islamic metaphysics, which led him
in the direction of a transcendentally rooted understanding of “Being”
as “Presence”—an understanding based on the reality of the “mundus
imaginilis”, the realm of the Creative Imagination.The reality of the ima‑
ginal world (Cheetham states: “Corbin called it the mundus imaginilis,
the imaginal world, to underscore the fact that it is not imaginary or
unreal”) was central to Corbin’s worldview. This domain of reality was
“a median and mediating power” between the sensible and the intel‑
lectual, the metaphysical threshold (“barzakh”) of transcendence and
of immanence. By contrast, Heidegger (in George Steiner’s appraisal of
him) based his metaphysics on an effort to view reality as immanence
without transcendence. In Cheetham’s words,“Heidegger tried to erect
a philosophy denying the need for the category of the Person and the
transcendence implicit in that Being.” Corbin, however, regarded “Be‑
ing” not as an escape from the particulars of mundane reality into the
realm of abstraction, but as an opening into the “spiritual corporeity”
of Divine Presence rooted in Personhood.
Corbin’s true influences in this regard were the Sufi and Shi’ite meta‑
physicians about whom he later wrote, including in particular,Avicenna
(981–1037), Suhrawardi (1155–1191), Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240), and Mulla
Sadra (c.1571–1640). Corbin was introduced to Suhrawardi’s works by
Massignon, and the influence on him of this twelfth-century Persian
mystic was seminal. Corbin later wrote: “[T]hrough my meeting with
Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny for the passage through this world was
sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of
ancient Persia, illuminated the path I was seeking.” From Suhrawardi,
the founder of the Illuminationist School of Persian mysticism, Corbin
learned of the importance of the intermediary imaginal realm as the
means of the visionary perception of the “sacral light” that was central
to Zoroastrian faith and to the Abrahamic traditions.Thus in the Zoroas‑
trian tradition, the Celestial Light of Ohrmazd and His six Archangels in
Avestan cosmology, is opposed to the Darkness of Ahriman.The Light is

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embodied for all created beings in their Fravarti or personal angel and
soul’s guide, and illuminates the path of the soul’s personal embodiment
of the Light through spiritual transformation. Similarly, the Light of God
appears as the “Burning Bush” in Judaism, the apparitions of Gabriel to
Mary and Muhammad, and as the symbolic “Light upon Light” of the
Surah of Light in Islam. These are images of the divine theophany and
of the soul’s destiny to actualize on earth the “Energy of sacral Light”
through spiritual transformation.
From the Muslim texts that he studied, Corbin learned how life could
be viewed as a “dramaturgy”, an awakening of the soul through its
encounter with its archetypal image in the “imago mundi”—with the
personified presence of the soul’s Heavenly Twin, its Guiding Angel or
Fravarti. The soul’s encounter with its “Angel” is to be understood here
as its submission to the active Intelligence. The Angel is identified with
such figures as the Paraclete in the Gospel of St. John, or Khidr in the
Qur’an, with the Archangel Gabriel, and with the Logos or Angel Holy
Spirit. Corbin was greatly influenced here not only by Suhrawardi’s
revival of Mazdean angelology, but also by the Kubrawite phenomenol‑
ogy of lights and colors developed by the central Asian school of Sufism
of Najm al-Din Kubra (1146–1220), and his followers Najmeddin Razi
(d. 1256) and Alaoddawleh Semnani (1261–1336), as well as the illumi‑
nationist metaphysics (of illumination as the “intensification of being”
and inner light) associated with the Persian, Mulla Sadra.This “imaginal”
encounter with the Angel, with “the light of that Presence which is the
ultimate source of all personification” formed the basis of the soul’s
individuation, its ethical valorization and its harmonization with the
world. Cheetham notes: “It is not too much to say that Corbin’s entire
work revolves around the ontological priority of the individual. It is the
Presence of the Angel that provides the conditions for the possibility of
the experience of the Person.”
It is only through our interiority and heliotropic orientation to the
Angel Face that we can hope to unveil the theophanies of the soul and
the world. The Angel is the inner Guide, the exegete, the Intellect, the
“Khidr of your being.” It is also the hermeneutical principle or ta’wil,
the opening to the Origin, unveiling the Divine Face that is uniquely and
“imaginally” discernable by each visionary. Here, knowledge and being
interpenetrate. How we see the world is dependent on the quality of

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our vision. What we perceive is dependent on how we choose to see.

According to the doctrine that “like can only be known by like”, what
is known corresponds to the mode of being of the knower: Light can
only be perceived by light. We can come to know the hierarchies of
being through a growth of consciousness—through dhikr or prayerful
and contemplative remembrance, which is central to Corbin’s praxis
of spiritual awareness and transformation. Cheetham remarks that for
Corbin, “Prayer is the supreme form of the creative imagination, and
as such is the ultimate exercise of human freedom.” It is through the
discipline of dhikr or the intensification of spiritual awareness that we
are enabled to ascend to the divine. Our growth in spiritual conscious‑
ness effects our alchemical transformation into an ontologically higher
“mode of presence,” so that our growth in knowing corresponds to the
intensification of our being as light.
The mediate realm of “imaginal” archetypes and the symbolic signifi‑
cance of the “image” that corresponds to the visionary’s degree of recep‑
tivity are central to Corbin’s ideas. They are the basis of his theophanic
worldview of creation as the “Face of God”, and of his doctrine of the
Guiding Angel that is the soul’s heavenly counterpart and the means of
its spiritual transformation into the “Body of Light.” It is in this context
that one can understand Corbin’s critique of the official Church doc‑
trine of the Incarnation by which Jesus is the hypostatic union of God
and man, a divine person with two natures—fully human and fully God.
Historically, the doctrine of the Logos reconciled Christian theology with
Greek philosophy in respect of the possibility of the Supreme Being’s
ability to relate personally to His creatures. But if the Logos was identified
with Christ, it became necessary to consider the theological difference
between the Father and the “human” personality of Christ as the Word
of God. The Council of Nicea in 325 had rejected the Arian view that
Christ, though the first among creatures, was not co-eternal with God,
decreeing instead that Father and Son were of one substance—homo-
ousis. In a further elaboration of this position, the Council of Chalcedon
in 451 had decreed the official doctrine of Incarnation—that the Son
was consubstantial with the Father, being “of two natures in one person”
so that the divine and human were united substantially, yet by nature
distinct. Corbin found the official doctrine of the Incarnation to be
deeply flawed because it had reduced the theophanic significance of

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the Incarnation to a mere doctrine, a dogma rather than a “dokema” or

theophany. By allowing God to be seen as entering history and so into
social and material reality, the Incarnation had effectively secularized the
sacred and dissolved the transcendent God into the natural world. By
adopting the viewpoint that Jesus was God, the Church had effectively
compromised the metamorphic function of the Logos as a theophanic
vision. Corbin preferred to regard the Incarnation in terms of a fusion
of docetism (the view that Christ was an apparition of God) and early
Ebionitism (the view that Christ was a Prophet, a human messenger of
God). He emphasized that a thread of docetic angelology—that of the
True Prophet and Guiding Angel—runs through each of the Abrahamic
faiths and this was a key to his ecumenic regard for the monotheistic
faiths as an Abrahamic Harmony that he termed “Harmonia Abraha-
mica.” Corbin’s docetic interpretation of the Incarnation eliminates any
schism between matter and spirit, so that Christ’s reality is not based
on a bifurcation of Christ’s dual nature but on the theophanic reality
of his unique personhood, representing each human being’s potential
for spiritual transformation and the realization of his or her own per‑
sonhood. The Incarnation was the reality of the Word made flesh—not
matter.The significance is that “flesh” is not impersonal or abstract (like
matter) but is the concretely unique personified fragment of the Real
Presence of God. Rightly understood, Corbin claimed that Christ was
the Angel Holy Spirit, a theophanic vision and archetypal embodiment
of Personhood, of the Real Presence of the Person—both “ensouled flesh
and personal substance,” the imaginal reality and potential of each soul.
Cheetham discusses how Corbin’s views share some similarity with
those of the Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and how it also
differs from Balthasar’s Trinitarian emphasis which it rejects. Balthasar
interprets the Incarnation in terms of God’s self-giving (kenotic) love
through Christ, who is the immanent and intimate aspect of God’s
transcendent mystery. But while for Balthasar Christ is the absolute
guarantor of objectivity (the only Son of the Father), for Corbin Christ
is the Heavenly Twin who, in appears in various other guises, as the Soul
of the World and is the source of all Presence. Christ is the Christos
Angelos, the theophanic vision of God coming into contact with human‑
ity only by transforming the latter. Cheetham summarizes:“Theophanic
psychocosmology is based upon this transfiguration. In it ontology and

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epistemology are united in a cosmogenesis of the individual.”The key to

understanding this alchemical “transfiguration” is the role of the trans‑
figuring presence of the Christic Image and its ability to ignite the soul
of the seer. In the imaginal realm, thought is united with being and the
mode of presence is dependent on the orientation of the soul because
“whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.”
This “unveiling” of the soul of the self and the world is the herme‑
neutical counterpart to our orientation to the Divine Face. It is only
by our receptivity to the Word that we can decode the true meaning
of the cosmic Book—which includes ourself. By orienting ourselves to
transcendence, by interpreting the world and our selves imaginally as
manifestations of a greater reality, we are able to unveil the innermost
Self that pervades all creation. For Corbin, the aim of hermeneutics,
which he regarded as the proper function of phenomenology, was
the recovery of the interiority of the text of the soul and the world.
The aim is to unveil the Face of the Self, to recover the “Lost Speech”,
the integral Word or Logos. But Corbin was clear that ta’wil, the her‑
meneutical orientation to the Origin or awwal, “is not theory; it is an
initiation to vision.”And this vision is transformative. Knowledge is real‑
izational: to know is also to be. Reality, in its corporeal intimacy cannot
be properly reduced to an abstract idea, nor can its essential mystery
be reduced to its outer surface or literal form. Rather, the world must
transcend both abstraction and literalism and be perceived imaginally,
symbolically, and participatively, as a continually renewing theophany
of the unveiling of Presence so that each unveiling is in respect of a
unique and individualized manifestation of the divine theophany that
is the Face of God. Corbin explained that “the Divine Being is not
fragmented, but wholly present in each instance, individualized in
each theophany” because, as Ibn ‘Arabi taught, “Each being has as his
God only his particular Lord, he cannot possibly have the Whole.”This
“wholeness” (“holiness”) or “Presence” means that each being can, by
choosing to see the Other in this participative mode, view the world
conjunctively rather than disjunctively, through “a kind of reciprocal
imaginative interaction, a sympathy between self and world.”This kind
of engaged interpretive envisioning entails an imaginative sympathy
between subject and object so that what we see in our clarified per‑
ception is the unveiling of the Presence of the Supreme Reality of the

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Divine Subject who manifests that continually renewing theophany

within which we immanently participate and which transcends the
disjunctive vision of our egoic subjectivity.
Corbin’s epistemology is founded on the doctrine of participation
and it is sympathy that is the foundation of his ethics. His hermeneutics
engage our capacity for angelic vision, for the iconoclastic rendering of
the idol as transparent to the light invested in it. This involves a way of
seeing that Corbin speaks of in terms of the hermeneutics of “transmut‑
ing the idol into an icon.” To endow things with ontological presence,
to see them in all their spiritual corporeity, one has to perceive them
imaginally, with a participative sympathy.This involves breaking “through
the mutual isolation of consciousness and its object, of thought and be‑
ing,” writes Corbin, adding:“here phenomenology becomes ontology.”As
Cheetham explains,“It is sympathy that is the prerequisite of ta’wil…It
is the ability to open oneself to the presence of things and of persons.”
This is what Corbin refers to as the “cognitive function of sympathy” or,
adopting the terminology of Etienne Souriau, calls “the angelic function
of a being.”What is at stake here is the recovery of the meaning of spirit
as substance, not as dichotomies of mind and matter, but as the embod‑
ied Presence of body, mind, and being, poised here and now in what
the poet Gary Snyder calls the “mythological present”—as a concrete
reality that is a theophany opening into mystery. To open ourselves to
such a Presence requires us to have “a sensate, imaginative sympathy”
where images carry an ontological force, and where the natures of the
world and the soul interpenetrate and so each can meet the “Other” in
mutual Presence.As Cheetham notes,“This kind of attention is intensely
relational because it is felt, it is sensuous, and it is embodied.”
It is easy to understand why, for Corbin, prayer, love, and beauty would
play a central role in spiritual transformation. He regarded prayer as the
supreme act of the Creative Imagination, as one’s orientation to the Pole
Star of transcendent Being. Thus it was “the expression of a mode of
being” and the means by which Creator and Creature were irrevocably
entwined in mutual sympathy. Prayer, thus understood, is the response
of each soul to the prophetic summons to experience divine love
and beauty through seeing the world as a theophany, through seeking
the Angel Holy Spirit in our encounters with the Other, and through
incarnating love with other persons whom we encounter not merely

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abstractly, through their personas, but as the iconic face of the Beloved,
in the esoteric unity of Love, Lover and Beloved.
For Corbin, beauty is the essential divine attribute and the source and
reality of our love. To perceive this divine beauty, however, requires a
quality of attention and perception that has an ethical foundation, one
that is premised on the profound connections between ascesis and
aesthetics, between renunciation and beauty. Cheetham uses this idea to
provide a critique of modernity in respect of the loss of this dimension
of perception, suggesting that is required to regain an appreciation of
beauty in the world is a quality of detachment. To “refuse to become
unconsciously ensnared by the allurements of a commercialized world…
(t)o begin to be sensitive to the manifold effects of this impersonal
world on our actions, thoughts, and emotions and so gain some distance
from it is already an act of renunciation and of aesthetic discrimination.”
[Though Cheetham uses the word “renunciation” in this quote, the bet‑
ter term might have been “detachment.”] But the detachment that pulls
us away from things must be balanced by the sympathy that draws us
to them. Aesthetics, Cheetham observes, is rooted in a cosmological
synaesthesia: “All the beings of the world are connected within and
among themselves by the vibrations of harmonic sympathy. Our place
among them is not one of dominion, but of interconnection.”The imagi‑
nation is synaesthetic, filled with harmonic sympathy:“When harmonic
sympathy is fully in operation, then to speak is to be. Understanding
something, we say we can make sense of it, and now it is clear that this
making sense is not theoretical, but is primarily aesthetic, concrete, and
sensuous.” It is the function of beauty to awaken us to the spiritually
embodied realization of Presence:“When imagination and renunciation
are wed, then all the world becomes sensuous and my individual world,
my life, can make sense to me. The spiritual world is no longer abstract
and distant, but alive and intensely real.” Cheetham laments, “The true
meaning of the word substance has faded from our consciousness.The
spirit is substantial. Understanding this can help reclaim a sense of the
concrete significance of the individual.”
In the second and third volumes of the Corbin trilogy, in particular,
Cheetham considers Corbin’s ideas and their significance in providing
a critique of modernism.The defining characteristic of modernism is its
loss of a cosmological sense of wholeness, of a hierarchical continuum

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that includes the verticality of transcendence. Just eight months before

his death, Corbin had written: “To confuse Being with being is the
metaphysical catastrophe.” This “metaphysical catastrophe” has led, in
Cheetham’s recounting of the implications to modernity of Corbin’s
ideas, to “three great crises: a rupture between the individual and the
Divine, a severing of the felt connection between human beings and the
living earth, and a profound breakdown of long-held assumptions about
the nature and function of language In traditional terminology, we are
witnessing a collapse of the structures that make sense of the relations
among God, Creation, Logos, and the human person.”These are respec‑
tively, the crises of the spirit, the environment, of the loss of meaning.
Cheetham notes that a shift from a conjunctive to a disjunctive mode
of perception occurred in Western Europe around the 12th century, re‑
sulting in a “withdrawal of participation”, a disharmony between man
and nature, and the birth of a mechanistic cosmology based on abstract
materialism. “It was Corbin’s contention that European civilization
experienced a ‘metaphysical catastrophe’ as a result of what we might
call the Great Disjunction.This was signaled by the final triumph of the
Aristoteleanism of Averroes over Platonic and neo-Platonic cosmology
championed by Avicenna. To the defeat of that cosmology is coupled
the disappearance of the anima mundi, the Soul of the World. The
catastrophic event that gave rise to modernity is the loss of the soul
of the world.”
The loss of the imaginal realm has both materialized and abstracted
reality, leading to the loss of the theophanic sense of Presence, the
sense of the sacred. Cheetham considers at some length the attempts
by modern psychology, particularly through the theories of Jung and
his research into traditional alchemy, to recover this lost realm. He cites
Corbin’s criticism of Jung that his theories were overly empirical and
not grounded in sound metaphysics. Readers of this journal will know
that traditionalist authors, notably Titus Burckhardt, have criticized Jung’s
conflation of the spirit and the psyche. This conflation is at the heart
of Corbin’s critique. Cheetham focuses on Corbin’s criticism that Jung
failed to transcend the realm of the psychic world, and so to properly
distinguish between two kinds of metaphysical darkness: the demonic
darkness of nihilism and the hypertrophic (Faustian or Nietzschean)
self, and the mystical darkness of poverty that opens into the plenitude

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of theophanic light. In Corbin’s traditional metaphysics, there exists

a higher consciousness than our ordinary consciousness, one that is
intensely personal, in contrast to Jung’s undifferentiated consciousness
that is “collective” and unable to transcend the impersonal laws of the
natural world. This higher consciousness is signaled by the Black Light
of fana’ (or egoic death), and associated in the spiritual journey with the
flight into the Darkness of the Deus absconditus, the Hidden Treasure
of the celebrated hadith (“I was a Hidden Treasure and yearned to be
known, so I created the world in order to be known”). It precedes the
Green Light of baqa’, of the ultimate theophany, which is associated with
pleroma of the Deus revelatus. Jung failed to distinguish between these
two types of darkness. For Jung, good and evil were psychic projections
that needed, as opposites, to be integrated within the self. In Jungian
therapy, therefore, the dark side, represented by the psychic shadow of
our struggle with material darkness, was an element to be integrated
within the individuated self, not to be overcome or repressed. But as
Corbin explained, only complementary elements could be integrated, not
contradictory ones. God was Good, not evil, and therefore the demonic
darkness of the Black Light of the psychic shadow was to be vanquished
by the spiritual transformation of the self into the Body of Light (as the
Illuminationists claimed), and not integrated (as Jung claimed).The task
of putting on the Body of Light occurs by the simultaneous growth in
spiritual consciousness and illumination of being, and represents for
Corbin the path of spiritual ascent. Of this ascent, Cheetham observes
that even though it involves purgation of darkness, the necessary self-
emptying (though not integrative in the Jungian sense) is a path to
wholeness: “This ascension does involve increasing wholeness, since
one does become more complete, more real, closer to God.To attain the
full possibilities of human perfection human beings have to experience
to some degree all the attributes of God. But the journey toward the
Divine consists in overcoming that which is lower, not in integrating
it to become whole. The lower is the less real; one includes it only by
surpassing it.The wholeness to be attained is a wholeness of perfection,
not a wholeness of inclusion.” In the end, the path to Light lies through
Darkness: we can know only through our own unknowingness, and we
can be born into Being only through our own mystical poverty.

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The stance that is involved in spiritual growth, then, is one of self-

discipline (ascesis), not indulgence, of sympathy (aesthetics), not an-
aesthetization, of love (caritas), not power. Cheetham is rightly critical
of the lustful, desensitizing and power-driven forces that pit man against
nature and that dominate the modern world. He writes: “…in so far as
we live in a world dominated by the products of the human economy,
oriented towards producing and gratifying human desires, we will suffer
from a dangerous restriction of experience, thought, and expression,
and of our capacities for love and relationship, lacking even the memory
of the desire for transcendence…A degree of poverty is a prerequisite
for the experience of the fullness of this world. This poverty is the re‑
sult of letting go of a desperate grip upon the world. Creation unfolds
only when power is renounced. For the things of this world grow
opaque when we try to control and possess them. They withdraw into
themselves and block our access to the riches at the roots of things.”
Paradoxically, we must open into the darkness of the unknown in order
to discover the Presence that we, and the world, are. Corbin presents
an alternative vision of life grounded in the renunciation of power, in
mystical poverty, freed from passions for control, “because everything
is gratuitous—it is all a Gift.”This higher consciousness is the basis of a
spiritual ecology that is implicit in Corbin’s ideas. Cheetham is critical
of the materialistic scientism that overreaches, that enacts the creed that
there is nothing in the universe that cannot, and should not, be unveiled,
or that is inviolate. It secularizes and demystifies the world to the point
that the soul becomes unmoored, and enters what Corbin terms its
“vagabondage and perdition.” From Corbin’s traditional perspective, the
soul and the world should not be pitted against each other, but should
be seen as mirrors of each other, as microcosm and macrocosm within
the same cosmos. In contrast to the technologies of modernistic science,
which are grounded in the lustful desire for power and its ideological
assumptions (“that knowledge is synonymous with power, and power
is always good, and that knowledge must invariably be exercised by
changing the world”), Cheetham advocates the development of counter-
technologies in modernity to “help us reveal that everything we need
is already at hand.”And it is to poetry and the project of recovering the
Lost Speech that he turns to search for a solution.

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At the heart of Cheetham’s critique of modernism is his contention

that man has experienced a loss of meaning through his loss of the
imaginal realm. Corbin correctly identifies the need for the application
of a hermeneutical corrective to address this loss of meaning. In Islamic
metaphysics, creation is divine speech, and all creatures are revealed
“words of God.” The world is an ever-renewing theophany, made and
unmade in each moment. For us to perceive the theophany afresh in
each moment requires us to be engaged in a “perpetual hermeneutics”
of continual openness to its ever-new Presence. This dialogue of inner
and outer, the Adamic language of “naming,” is the Lost Speech that we
need to recover. Meaning is to be sought through transmuting idols
into icons, so that we can perceive Truth, in the constantly changing
yet ever-present here and now, as Presence. But the modern world is in
danger of becoming, in George Steiner’s celebrated description of the
post-literate world, an “After-Word”, lacking the imagination to perceive
“Real Presences.” The recovery of meaning in this world requires us to
discover the primordial techniques of sympathetic awareness, a kind
of therapeutic literacy that Ivan Illich describes as “an ontologically
remedial technique.” We need to rediscover the power of language as
symbolic, of its potential to imaginally awaken within us an awareness
of our participation in, and harmony with, that synaesthetic substrate
of reality in which spirit and substance are unified. Cheetham writes:
“When harmonic sympathy is fully in operation, then to speak is to be.
Understanding something, we say we can make sense of it, and now it
is clear that this making sense is not theoretical, but is primarily aes‑
thetic, concrete, and sensuous…When imagination and renunciation
are wed, then all the world becomes sensuous and my individual world,
my life, can make sense to me. The spiritual world is no longer abstract
and distant, but alive and intensely real. The true meaning of the word
substance has faded from our consciousness. The spirit is substantial.
Understanding this can help reclaim a sense of the concrete significance
of the individual.”
The loss of the imaginal dimension in modernity is evident in the loss
of its primordial poetic sympathy, which Cheetham calls “that forgotten
language and the energies that would return us home to a world we
dimly recall.” We can therefore define the urgent task of modernity as
the need to recover the Lost Speech of the angels, or the recovery of the

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poetic sensibility. The function of poeisis is, in this regard, to unveil for
us the reality of that personified and qualitative and sensate Presence
through language that is both concrete and resonant of transcendence.
Cheetham views poets, therefore, as “the guardians of the person and
of the soul of the world,” both inextricably linked so that “a violation of
either is a violation of both.” He contrasts poets with scientists.While the
latter would leave no room for mystery and wonder in their quest for
abstract and literal Truth, Cheetham says this about poets: “They speak
to us out of intimacy.They are the guardians of the inviolate individual,
of the mystery of the Person.” But the responsibility to perform as po‑
ets rests with each of us, and it is a heavy responsibility for to lose our
poetic sensibility would be to deface the soul and the world: “To the
degree that the language of the imagination is lost, to that degree are
people and all the elements of Creation de-personalized, turned into
objects, into abstractions. The final result is Hell. The final result is a
world without a Face.”
Cheetham is wary at times of Corbin’s mysticism, of his “nostalgia
for the Elsewhere and his desire for the Body of Light.” He prefers a
more grounded counterpoint to his views. For this “coagulating” coun‑
terpoint to Corbin’s “sublimating” tendencies, Cheetham turns to the
polymath thinker, Ivan Illich (1926–2002). He finds in Illich’s ideas a
complementary but more developed sense of meaning and Presence
that opens up a way into the Beyond through the deepest reality of the
present. He discusses Illich’s dislike for the depersonalizing influences
of institutions—including the Church—and of secularism in society, and
his critique of Western culture’s attempts to (in Cheetham’s language)
“institutionalize grace and the call that is implicit in the divine face of
the other person.” For Illich, the Incarnation is central to Christian rev‑
elation. It represents the possibility of a profound continuity between
“the eyes of the flesh” and the “eyes of fire” that forms the condition
of the “ethical gaze.” Illich explores the medieval connections between
optics and ethics, the view that how we discipline our seeing through
ascesis can condition how we see. We need to look with eyes of inner
light (or lumen), rather than be passive recipients of the light of exter‑
nal vision (lux). The secularization of images occurs through the loss
of inner light or “in-sight”, and this has profound implications for moral
conduct, leading to the “secularization of the Samaritan” and an outlook

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that conditions our definition of the “neighbor” instead of allowing us to

respond through a willingness to remain open and surprised by our faith,
and an interiority that demolishes the constraints of our conditioning.
The moral decline of modernism is marked by our loss of the openness
and interiority of the ethical gaze, the vision of love, of our potential to
perceive the iconic face of all creatures, and by the corresponding loss
of our ability to “prolong the Incarnation” by incarnating our spirituality
in personal relationships.
The Corbin trilogy deserves a wide readership. Cheetham presents
Corbin’s ideas accessibly, in a manner that will not deter the general
reader who is interested in them. These ideas are important not only
because Corbin is a seminal thinker whose influence has extended be‑
yond the fields of his specialization, but also because of the profound
implications of his ideas to the issues that confront us in the modern
world. Cheetham interprets these ideas for his readers in a personally
engaged and critical manner, drawing on related ideas from a wide
variety of other thinkers, and demonstrating the connections between
Corbin’s ideas and theirs in a way that will no doubt inspire the reader
to explore their ideas and to seek a deeper meaning in their personal
quests for Truth as Presence in their own lives.

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