Henry Corbin - Life and Work

Life and Work

The philosophical life and career of Corbin can be divided into three phases. The first is the 1920s and 1930s, when he was involved in learning and teaching western philosophy. The second is the years between 1939 and 1946, in which he studied Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi and School of Illumination in Istanbul. The last begins at 1946 and lasts until his death, in which he studied and reintroduced eastern and Islamic philosophy.

But his spiritual quest extended well beyond the vast landscapes of western scholasticism and Islamic mysticism. During the 1920s and the early 1930s he simultaneously pursued studies that in themselves would have marked him as an eclectic Protestant theologian. In his maturity Corbin presented himself as a Protestant Christian. He became deeply engaged with the German theological tradition and lectured on Luther, Kierkegaard and Hamann. He was the first to translate the early works of Karl Barth into French. In 1930 a second defining encounter in Corbin’s spiritual odyssey took place. This was his reading of Martin Heidegger's foundational work of phenomenology, Being and Time. It gives us some sense of the unique perspective of this truly catholic philosopher to note that his copy of the notoriously difficult and very German work was marked throughout by glosses in Arabic.

In 1933 he married Stella Leenhardt. In 1939 they traveled to Istanbul to collect manuscripts for a critical edition of Suhrawardi. They remained there until the end of the war. In 1945, the Corbins traveled for the first time to Tehran where he was to teach as a member of Tehran University. . Corbin came to love Iran as a second home and the symbolism of the Persian landscape figures prominently in his spiritual universe. They returned to Paris one year later in July 1946. In 1949, Corbin first attended the annual Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland, where he was to become a major figure along with Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Adolf Portmann and many others. In 1954 he succeeded Louis Massignon in the Chair of Islam and the Religions of Arabia. From the 1950s on he spent autumn in Tehran, winter in Paris and spring in Ascona.It was during those stays in Tehran that he made acquaintance with Allameh Tabatabaei with whom he met and exchanged views, on a regular basis

The three major works upon which his reputation largely rests in the English speaking world were first published in French in the 1950s: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi' (see below) and Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth. His later major work on Central Asian and Iranian Sufism appears in English with an Introduction by Zia Inayat Khan as The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. His magnum opus, as yet untranslated, is the four volume En Islam Iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques. His life was spent teaching, writing, lecturing, and editing critical editions of Persian and Arabic manuscripts. His published work includes over 200 critical editions, translations, books and articles. He presented his last paper in June 1978, entitled “Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire: the Science of Gnosis.” He died on 7 October of that year, in the same city he was born, at the age of 75.