Quick Answer
This is the book that invented the word imaginal, and the invention was necessary. Corbin read Ibn Arabi and found a tradition in which imagination is an organ of perception opening onto a real world, then discovered that English had no way to say so without implying make-believe. The book is formidably difficult, its portrait of Ibn Arabi is selective in ways later scholars have documented, and the concept it introduced has outlived every objection to it.
Key Takeaways
- Imaginal, not imaginary. A real world, not a mental content.
- Imagination as an organ of perception rather than a faculty of invention.
- Selective on Ibn Arabi, and the selection is philosophically motivated.
- Hard prose. Translated French phenomenology about Arabic metaphysics.
- Downstream influence far beyond Islamic studies, into archetypal psychology and beyond.
🕑 16 min read
What This Book Is
Published in French in 1958 as L'imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d'Ibn Arabi, and in English in 1969 as Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. The Princeton reissue of 1997 retitled it Alone with the Alone, which is how most readers now encounter it.
It is a study of Ibn Arabi, the Andalusian Sufi of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose work became the theoretical foundation of much later Sufism, and it is not a survey of his thought.
Corbin is pursuing one theme: the status of imagination, understood as a mode of knowing rather than as fancy, and the world that this mode of knowing discloses.
The book runs to around four hundred pages, includes lengthy translated passages, and is organised around a set of concepts rather than around Ibn Arabi's biography or bibliography.
The retitling matters. The phrase alone with the Alone is Corbin's rendering of a formula from Plotinus and captures the book's Neoplatonic sympathies. It also makes the book sound like devotional literature, which it emphatically is not. The original title told you what you were getting.
Who Henry Corbin Was
Corbin was born in Paris in 1903 and trained in philosophy at a moment when French thought was absorbing German phenomenology.
He produced the first French translation of Heidegger, published in 1938, which places him at the centre of the reception of that work in France. What he then did with it is unusual.
Instead of following the phenomenological programme into French philosophy, he turned to Islamic and specifically Iranian material, learning Arabic and Persian and devoting himself to texts almost nobody in Europe was reading.
He spent years in Istanbul during the war, then divided his time between Tehran and Paris for decades, editing and publishing Persian philosophical texts, notably Suhrawardi, and building the field of Iranian Islamic philosophy in French scholarship almost single-handed.
He was a regular presence at the Eranos conferences in Switzerland, the annual gathering that also drew Jung, Eliade and Scholem, and the intellectual style of that circle marks all his work.
The Title and the Editions
A practical note before the substance, since the bibliography confuses people.
The same book circulates under two English titles. The 1969 Bollingen edition is Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. The 1997 Princeton reissue is Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi.
The translation is Ralph Manheim's in both cases. There is no revised text.
The Princeton edition carries a preface by Harold Bloom, which is worth reading as an index of how the book landed outside Islamic studies, and which tells you nothing reliable about Ibn Arabi.
The Man at the Centre of It
Corbin assumes his reader knows who Ibn Arabi was, which many will not, and the biography is worth having because it bears on the argument.
He was born at Murcia in Muslim Spain in 1165, into a well-connected family, and received the education of a young man expected to enter administration. In his teens something happened that redirected the whole life: a retreat, an experience he described afterwards as a meeting rather than an insight, and an abrupt turn to the contemplative path.
He travelled through Andalusia and North Africa, then east, and finally settled at Damascus, where he died in 1240. Along the way he produced a body of writing so large that the count of titles is still disputed, the two central works being the enormous Meccan Openings and the compact and difficult Bezels of Wisdom.
He reports that the Bezels was handed to him in a vision by the Prophet with the instruction to bring it to people, which is a claim about the book's origin that its readers have had to decide what to do with for eight centuries.
The detail that matters for Corbin's purposes is the encounter at Cordoba with the philosopher Averroes, then old and famous, who had heard about the young man and wanted to meet him. Ibn Arabi's account of the meeting is brief and it stages the whole question of the book: the philosopher asks whether what he reached by reasoning is what the young man reached by opening, and the answer given is yes and no.
Corbin takes that scene as emblematic. Two ways of knowing, meeting, neither reducible to the other, and the tradition afterwards attempting to hold both.
The Problem He Was Solving
Corbin's starting point is a diagnosis of Western thought, and the book only makes sense once you see it.
His claim is that Western philosophy since roughly Descartes admits two categories: the real, meaning what can be measured and verified, and the unreal, meaning everything else. Imagination falls in the second category, where it becomes the faculty of the false.
Given that division, a report of visionary experience has two possible descriptions. Either it is a physical event, which it is not, or it is a psychological event, which reduces it to a happening inside a person's head with no object.
Corbin's argument is that this exhausts the possibilities only because the middle term was lost, and that the Islamic philosophical tradition preserved a third category that Western thought abandoned.
Everything in the book follows from wanting that category back.
The Imaginal
The contribution, and the reason the book is still cited outside its field.
The Arabic term is alam al-mithal, the world of images or of similitudes, and it names an ontological level between the world of pure intelligence and the world of physical bodies. Suhrawardi had given it a systematic place a generation before Ibn Arabi.
Things in this world have form, extension, colour and shape, and they have no matter. They are as determinate as physical objects and as immaterial as ideas.
Corbin found that translating this as the imaginary world destroyed it, since imaginary in English and French means unreal by definition. So he coined imaginal, from the Latin, precisely so that a reader would have to stop and ask what it meant.
The coinage worked. The word entered the language, remains in use, and does the job it was invented for.
The move is more radical than the terminology suggests, and it is worth being clear about the cost. Corbin is not saying that visions are meaningful, or that they tell us about the psyche, or that they should be respected as expressions of something. He is saying they are perceptions of a world that is there, and that the perceiver can be right or wrong about it. That is an ontological claim with no obvious way to assess it, and accepting the vocabulary while declining the claim is a compromise the book does not offer.
Imagination as an Organ
The corollary, and the piece most useful to a reader who cannot follow the metaphysics.
If the imaginal world is real, then something perceives it, and that something is imagination. Not imagination as the faculty that makes things up, but imagination as a sense organ with its own proper object, standing to the world of images as the eye stands to the world of colour.
Corbin insists on the analogy. An eye can be trained or untrained, healthy or diseased, attentive or careless. So can the imaginative faculty, and its reports can be accurate or distorted in the same way.
This gives a criterion the psychological reading cannot supply. If visions are contents of the psyche, one is as valid as another. If they are perceptions, some are better than others and there is such a thing as looking properly.
The tradition's insistence on discipline, on a teacher, on discernment of what appears, follows straightforwardly from this and is otherwise hard to explain.
Theophany and the Divine Names
The theology underneath, in the form Corbin gives it.
For Ibn Arabi, the divine essence in itself is unknowable and does not enter into relation with anything. What is knowable is the divine names: the attributes under which the hidden makes itself manifest.
Creation is the self-disclosure of those names. Every existing thing is the locus in which some name appears, so that the world is a field of theophany rather than a set of objects that God made and then stood apart from.
Corbin's phrase for this is the theophanic imagination, meaning both the divine imagination through which forms appear and the human imagination that perceives them. The two are aspects of a single movement.
The system is thoroughly worked out in Ibn Arabi and Corbin follows it closely here, with the translated passages doing most of the argumentative work.
The God Created in Faiths
The teaching that gets quoted most and misread most.
Ibn Arabi holds that each believer knows God in the form their own capacity permits. The God of one person's faith is not the God of another's, and neither is false.
The shallow reading makes this ordinary pluralism: all religions lead to the same place, everyone has their own truth. Corbin blocks that reading firmly.
The point is not that the different forms are equally valid approximations of something none of them reaches. The point is that theophany is necessarily particular, that the divine appears in the form the receiver can receive, and that this is a structural feature of disclosure rather than a limitation to be regretted.
The consequence Ibn Arabi draws is demanding rather than comfortable: to condemn another's God is to condemn a genuine theophany, and to absolutise your own is to mistake a form for the essence it discloses.
The Prayer That Runs Both Ways
A section of the book that startles readers and is central to Corbin's reading.
Ibn Arabi treats prayer as reciprocal. The worshipper's prayer to God is matched by a divine sighing toward manifestation, so that the relation is not a creature addressing an unmoved absolute.
Corbin develops this into what he calls the sympathy between the divine and the human: the human being is the form in which a divine name knows itself, and the name requires the human being in order to be manifest.
This is close to language that orthodox theology in every Abrahamic tradition resists, and Corbin is unbothered by that. He is drawn to precisely the material that strains the boundaries.
Whether Ibn Arabi meant it as strongly as Corbin takes it is one of the specific points where the scholarly criticism bites.
The Angel of the Self
The theme Corbin returns to throughout his work, present here and developed elsewhere.
In the Iranian material he spent his life with, the soul has a celestial counterpart: an angelic figure that is the person's own perfect nature, encountered in vision, and toward which the whole spiritual life is oriented.
The encounter is not a merger. The relation stays a relation, two terms facing each other, and Corbin repeatedly refuses the readings that dissolve one term into the other.
This is the deepest difference between Corbin and the interpreters of mysticism who make union the goal. His tradition is one where meeting rather than absorption is the highest state, and where the individuality of the soul is preserved rather than transcended.
It also explains the title. The alone meets the Alone, and both are still there afterwards.
Corbin and Jung
A relation that has caused more confusion than any other aspect of his reception.
The two men knew each other through the Eranos circle, shared an interest in symbol and vision, and their vocabularies overlap enough that readers routinely assimilate one to the other.
Corbin rejected the assimilation flatly. For Jung, the figures encountered in active imagination are contents of the psyche, and their reality is psychic reality. For Corbin, they are perceived, and what is perceived exists independently of the perceiver.
He regarded psychologisation as the modern form of the error he was diagnosing: another way of putting visionary experience inside a person's head where it can be safely admired and need not be believed.
The irony is that Corbin's readership arrived largely through channels Jung opened, and that the milieu that took up the imaginal has mostly used it in the psychological sense he objected to.
The Scholarly Objections
Three, and they are made by scholars who know the material.
Selection. Ibn Arabi's corpus is enormous and heterogeneous. Corbin works with a portion of it chosen to support a particular reading, and a scholar working from the Meccan Openings as a whole produces a noticeably different figure.
Imported framework. The phenomenological vocabulary is Corbin's, not Ibn Arabi's, and it does interpretive work that is not always flagged. Readers absorb Heidegger through the translation without knowing it.
Overreach on the imaginal. The concept is genuine in the tradition. Whether it carries the full weight Corbin puts on it, as the answer to the crisis of Western thought, is a separate question and the answer is probably no.
The fair verdict is that Corbin is a philosopher using Ibn Arabi rather than a historian reporting him, that the philosophy is serious, and that a reader should know which they are receiving.
What He Leaves Out
The omission that most troubles specialists and that a reader should hold in view.
Ibn Arabi was a Muslim jurist operating inside a legal and communal tradition. He wrote on ritual, on law, on the obligations of the community, and his metaphysics is embedded in that setting rather than floating free of it.
Corbin's Ibn Arabi is almost entirely a visionary metaphysician. The legal material is absent, the communal dimension is thin, and the result is a figure considerably more congenial to a European reader than the historical one.
The same pattern runs through Corbin's treatment of Iranian Islam generally, where the esoteric and philosophical strands are foregrounded and the ordinary religious life they were embedded in recedes.
This is a real distortion and it does not invalidate the philosophical reading. It does mean that a reader taking this as an account of Sufism will be missing most of it, and a broader survey is the corrective.
On the Difficulty
Honest warning, because readers regularly abandon this book and conclude the failure is theirs.
The sentences are long and heavily subordinated in the French intellectual manner, and Manheim's translation preserves the structure rather than domesticating it.
Technical terms in Arabic and Persian appear frequently, sometimes glossed and sometimes not, and the philosophical vocabulary assumes a reader who has met phenomenology.
The argument does not advance linearly. Corbin circles, returning to the same concepts at greater depth, so that a reader looking for a thesis and its development will be disoriented for two hundred pages.
Twenty pages at a time, with the willingness to leave things unresolved, is the way through. Read at speed it produces nothing.
Where the Influence Went
Wider than the field, and traceable.
Within Islamic studies, Corbin made Iranian philosophy visible to European scholarship and his editions remain in use, whatever the arguments about his interpretations.
In archetypal psychology, James Hillman took the imaginal directly from Corbin and built a substantial body of work on it, largely in the psychological register Corbin rejected.
In the broader literature on vision, dream and religious experience, the word has become standard, often used by writers with no idea where it came from or what it was meant to prevent.
And in comparative religion, his insistence that a tradition be read in its own terms, from the inside, aligned with what Eliade was doing and shaped a generation of work.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are serious about Ibn Arabi and want the most philosophically ambitious treatment in a European language.
Read it if the status of visionary experience is a live question for you and the choice between physical and psychological feels wrong.
Read it if you use the word imaginal, which is a good reason to find out what it was coined to protect.
Do not read it as an introduction to Sufism, to Islam, or to Ibn Arabi. It presumes all three and misrepresents the proportions of the last.
The lasting service of this book is a distinction most people have never been offered. When something appears to you that is not physically present, you have been trained to file it in one of two boxes: it happened out there, or it happened in your head. Corbin's whole effort is to show that the two boxes are a recent invention, that they were not always the only options, and that a great deal of human experience has been discarded by being forced into them. You do not have to accept his metaphysics to notice how quickly you reach for one of those two boxes, and how little examination the reaching gets.
The book that gave English a word for the world where visions happen.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's difficulty and of the scholarly objections to it is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Alone with the Alone about?
Henry Corbin's study of the thirteenth-century Sufi Ibn Arabi, focused on the creative imagination as a faculty of knowledge and on the world of images where visionary experience takes place.
Who was Henry Corbin?
A French philosopher and Islamicist, 1903 to 1978, who edited and translated Persian philosophical texts, taught in Tehran and Paris, and shaped Western understanding of Iranian spiritual thought more than any other scholar.
What does the title mean?
It renders a phrase from Plotinus describing the soul's meeting with the divine as the flight of the alone to the Alone. The book was first published in English as Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi.
What is the imaginal world?
Corbin's term, coined to translate the Arabic alam al-mithal, for a real intermediate world between intellect and matter where forms have shape without physical substance. He invented the word to keep it separate from imaginary.
Why did he coin a new word?
Because imaginary in English means unreal, and the tradition he was translating treats this domain as fully real. He judged that no existing English word could carry the claim without destroying it.
What is theophanic imagination?
The imagination understood as the organ that perceives divine self-disclosure. For Ibn Arabi as Corbin reads him, God appears in forms suited to each perceiver, and imagination is the faculty that receives them.
How difficult is the book?
Very. Corbin writes long sentences in a phenomenological idiom translated from French, uses Arabic and Persian terms freely, and assumes familiarity with both Islamic thought and continental philosophy.
Is Corbin a reliable guide to Ibn Arabi?
He is a partial one. Later scholars accept his learning and argue that he selects heavily, reads through Heidegger and Jung, and downplays the legal and communal dimension of the tradition he describes.
What is his relationship to Jung?
Close and contested. Corbin took part in the Eranos meetings alongside Jung and shared vocabulary with him, while insisting that the imaginal is an objective world rather than a content of the psyche.
What is the God created in faiths?
Ibn Arabi's teaching that each believer knows God in the form their own capacity permits, so that the divine appears differently to each without any of the appearances being false and without them being merely subjective.
Should I read Ibn Arabi first?
Some direct exposure helps considerably. Reading a translation of the Bezels of Wisdom or a general study before Corbin will show you how much of the framing is his and how much is in the source.
Who should read it?
Readers serious about Sufi thought, about the philosophy of imagination, or about the status of visionary experience. It is not an introduction to anything and it rewards prepared readers only.
Notice the box you reach for
The next time you hear an account of something seen that was not physically there, watch what happens in the first two seconds. Either you decide it did not happen, or you decide it happened in the person's mind, and both decisions are made before any thinking occurs. Corbin spent a career arguing that this reflex is cultural rather than necessary, that other people in other centuries had a third option, and that losing it cost more than we know. He may be wrong about the metaphysics. He is right that the reflex is there and that almost nobody examines it.
Sources & References
- Corbin, Henry (1969, 1997). Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, trans. Manheim.
- Ibn Arabi. The Bezels of Wisdom and The Meccan Openings, the primary sources.
- Corbin, H. Editions and studies of Suhrawardi and Iranian Islamic philosophy.
- Chittick, W. C. Scholarship on Ibn Arabi offering a broader account of the corpus.
- Hillman, James. Archetypal psychology and its debt to the imaginal.
- Eranos conference proceedings and the intellectual circle around them.