Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi

Author: Corbin, Henry Year: 1969 (first English edition; originally published in French as L'imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d'Ibn 'Arabî, 1958) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series XCI)

Summary

Alone with the Alone is Henry Corbin's definitive study of the 12th–13th century Andalusian Sufi master Ibn 'Arabi (1165–1240), widely regarded as the greatest systematic mystical thinker in the Islamic tradition. The book centers on Corbin's foundational concept of the mundus imaginalis — the imaginal world, a distinct ontological realm between sensory reality and pure intellect that is the proper medium of visionary experience, prophetic revelation, and mystical encounter. For Corbin, Ibn 'Arabi's entire theosophical system depends on the reality of this intermediate world, and its denial by Western modernity is one of the central catastrophes of modern consciousness.

The book develops Ibn 'Arabi's doctrine that creation is a theophany — God's self-disclosure through an infinite variety of forms — and that the human function in the cosmos is to be the mirror in which God contemplates Himself. The concept of the "Lord" (Rabb) in Ibn 'Arabi's system is not an external deity but the individual's own divine dimension, the angelic counterpart of the soul encountered in the imaginal realm through the practice of active imagination and prayer. Corbin's famous formula — that in this system, "God needs man as man needs God" — captures the reciprocal, participatory structure of Ibn 'Arabi's mystical theology.

Relevance to Project

Corbin's articulation of the mundus imaginalis is one of the most important philosophical contributions to the project's conceptual framework. The imaginal world — which Corbin distinguishes rigorously from the merely "imaginary" (unreal, fictional) — provides a philosophical account of the ontological status of visionary experience, symbolic reality, and mythological knowledge. Where the modern disenchanted worldview dismisses inner vision as "merely subjective," the Corbinian framework insists that the imaginal is a genuine mode of being, neither purely material nor purely abstract. This has direct relevance to how the project interprets initiatory experiences, whether at Eleusis (TIM-0001) or in later mystical traditions.

Key Arguments

• The mundus imaginalis ('alam al-mithal) is a distinct ontological realm with its own space and temporality, the locus of prophetic visions, theophanic encounters, and post-mortem experience
• Creation is theophany: the world is God's self-disclosure, and to know the world truly is to know God's self-revelation
• Active imagination (himma) is not mere fantasy but a faculty of genuine ontological creativity — the organ by which the soul participates in divine self-manifestation
• The encounter with one's "Lord" in prayer is an encounter with one's own divine dimension, the angelic face of the self

Key Passages

"The creation of the world is a theophany, that is, a self-disclosure of the divine Being. As such, it is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic imagination." — p. 185

Agent Research Notes

This is the book that introduced the concept of the mundus imaginalis to Western scholarship, and it remains the primary source for this concept. The introduction by Harold Bloom in the 1998 Princeton paperback reprint is useful context. Corbin was also a translator of Heidegger into French and deeply influenced by Heideggerian phenomenology, which shapes his reading of Islamic mysticism in ways that are both illuminating and occasionally anachronistic.