Alone with the Alone

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With a newpreJace by Harold Bloom

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Sufismof Ibn 'Arabi

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CopynghtO 1969by PrinceronUnivenityPress,under the tirle Creatie Imaginaion in the Safrsmof lbn 'Anhi New prefaceto the MJtios edition @ 1997by Harold Bloom Publishedby PrincetonUniversityPress,4l Wlliam Streer" Princeton,NewJersey08540 ln the UnitedKingdom:Princeton University Press, Chicherter,WestSussex Publishedin Frenchzs L'Imaginationcftatice dansle Soufrsme d'Ibn 'Anhi by Flammarionin lg58; PartsOne and Two were originallypublishedin French(in a slighdydillerentform)in Ennex-JahrbucherXXIV (1955)andIiXV (1956)by Rhein-Verlag. Zurich Thie is the ninety-firsrin a seriesof worls sponsoredby BollingenFoundation AII RighrsRcserved

CONTENTS List of Plates Preface,by HaroldBloom INTRODUCTION l. BetweenAndalusiaand Iran: A Brief Spiritual Topography 9. The Curveand Symbolsof Ibn 'Arabi's Life At Averroes'Funeral The Pilgrim to the Orient The Discipleof Khi{r His Maturity andthe Completionof HisWork g. The Situationof Esoterism

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ISBN 0-691-05834-2 PrincetonUniversityPresstrools are printed on acid-freepaper and meetthe guidelineslor permanence and durability of theCommittee on Production Guidelines o[ theCouncil on Library Resources Fint Princetory'Bollingen paperbackprinring, l98l; sixth paperlnck printing, and fint Myrhosedition printing, with a new prefaceby Harofd Bloom ar'd entitledAlone with the Alone, 1998 http://pup.princeton.edu Prinredin rhe United SratesofAmerica 3579108 6 4 2

PARTONE SYMPATHYAND THEOPATHY andCompassion Ch. I. Divine Passion r. The Prayerofthe HeliotroPe 9. The "PatheticGod" 9. Of Unio Mitstica as Unio Slmpathctica Ch. II. SophiologyandDmotioSlmpathetica t. The SophianicPoemofa Fcdeled'amote g. The Dialecticof Love 9. The CreativeFeminine

r05 105 tt9 120 r96 196 146 167

PART TWO CREATIVE IMACINATION AND CREATIVE PRAYER Prologue Ch. III. The Creationas TheoPhany t. The Creative Imagination as TheoPhany, or the "Ood from Whom All Being Is Created" g, Thc Ood Manifested by the Theophanic Imagination , v

179 r8'l l8'1 l9o

CONTENTS s. The "God Createdin the Faiths" 4, The Recurrence of Creation 6. The Twofold Dimensionof Beings Ch. IV. Theophanic ImaginationandCreativityof the Heart t . The Field of the Imagination e. The Heart as a SubtileOrgan 9. The Scienceof the Heart Ch. V. Man's Prayerand God's Prayer t. The Method of TheophanicPrayer 9. Homologations 9. The Secretof the Divine Responses Ch. VI. The "Form ofGod" t. The \Iadtth of the Vision 2. Aroundthe Mystic Ka,aba

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Epilogue

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Notes and Appendices List of Works Cited Index

985 991 999

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LIST OF PLATES 2t6 9r6 291 957 946 946 267 962

FnoNflspruce The Image of the Ka'aba,Miniature from Bibliothbquenationale,Paris,MS suppldment persan1989,fol. 19,sixteenthcentury.p: Courtesy nationale.(SeeP. 91 and.n. s+.) ofthe Bibliothbque

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Elijah andKhi{r at the Fountainofl-ife. Persian, SchoolofHeret, late fifteenthcentury.r: Courtesy of the SmithsonianInstitution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington,D. C. (Sccl!. 65f. for tlc rclationshiPbetwcn Elijah and Khi/r.)

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e Joseph and His Brothers in Egypt. Persian miniaturefrom Fariduddin'A.t.ter,Manliq al-Tay. Staatsbibliothek,Marburg, MS or. oct. 268, fol. 114,,fifteenthcentury.n: Courtesyofthe Staatsbibliothek, Marburg. (Su pp. zssJ.)

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The Philoxenyof Abraham.Detail from a mosaic, Cathedralof St. Mark, Venice,thirteenthcentury. p: Alinari. (SecP. Iso ond Ch. I, nn. 7,, and 75.)

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PREFACE by Harold Bloom As Men's Prayersare a Diseaseof the Will, so are their Creedsa Diseaseof the Intellect. -Ralph WaldoEmerson l. Emerson tells us neither to pray nor to believe,if we would free the self. One part of the authenticself wanderslight yearsout in the interstellar spaces,in exile from us. The otler part is buried, so deep within us tlat to resurrect it would be another return from exile. We find the God without lessaccessiblethan the God wit}in, but that is illusive. Descendingto 'the deepestself is so diffrcult that I havearrived tlere two or tlree times only in twothirds of a century. In that Fullness, we know and are known, in solitude, a peopled solitude. So knowing, and being known, our diseasesof the will and of the intellect ceaseto trouble us: Why pray to tlre StrangerGod? He is so alienatedfrom our cosmological emptinessthat he could never hear us. We might want to pray ..y6rhim, but to whom? As for believingthat he erisrs:we haveno term for his wandering on t}te outer spaces,so existence does not apply. What matters most is necessarilyeither too far outside us or too far within us to be available,evenif our readinesswere all What is the use of gnosis,if it is so forbiddingly elitist? Since the alternativesare diseasesof tle will and of the intellect, why invoke the criterion of usefulness? Prayersare a more interesting literary form than creeds, but eyen the most impressive of prayerswill not changeus, let alone changeGod. And nearly all prayersare directed anywayto t}re archons,the angelswho made and mlrred this world, and whom we worship, William Blake warncd, or Jcsusanrl Jehovah,Divinc Namesmisappliedto our ixl

Preface prison warders. The Accuserswho are the gods of dris world have won all of the victories, and they will go on triumphing over us. History is always on tleir side, for they are history. -performs Everyone who would return us to history always tle work of the Accusers.Most scholarsworship history, the Com_ posite God who rewards their labors by granting them their illusion of value. Emersonremarked that there was no history, only biography,which is another Gnostic recognition. Do not pray; do not believe; only know and be known. Many among us know without knowing tlrat we krow; Bentley Layton catchesthis when he suggeststhat gnosisshould be translatedas 'acquaintance"rather than as "knowing." Acquaintancewit} your own deepestself will not come often or easily,but it is unmis takablewhen (and if it comes.Neither the will nor the intellect spurs such acquaintance,but botl come into play once it is achieved.To be acquaintedwith what is best and oldest in yourself, is to know yourself as you were, before the ,,rorlj *", made, before you emergedinto time. At sixty-seven,I look back, and for a while I see nothing but time. Yet I can recall tlree timelessmoments,tlre first when iwas eleven or twelve, and had only just reread all of Blake and Hart Crane. The streetsof the East Bronx fell away,and I was in the imaginal world that Henry Corbin describesin his eloquent commentaries upon the Sufi mastersof Shi'ite Iran of centuries aqo. That world, by readingCorbin, I havelearnedto call Hurqalya,f,ur it takesvariousnamesin other traditions, and sometimesno name except poetry itself, in many visionary poets. By "visionary" I do mean tnostic" in a precisesense;I do not mean overtly orthodox Christian poets (Hopkins, Eliot, Auden among them) who found themselvesupon the canonicalNew Testamentand tJre Church Fathers. Corbin's works are among the best guides to visionary tradition. Corbin was the peer, in his generation, of Gershom Scholemand of Hans Jonas,but he differs from their oyert stance of historical and philosophicalscholarshipin regard to gnosisand gnosticism.Scholem,like Mosheldel after him, wasboth kabbalist

Pnfou and scholar of kabbalah,yet Scholemrarely amrmed his gnostic affinitiesto MosesCordovero. Corbin was a passionatepartisanol lbn 'Arabi of Andalusia, and of Suhrawardi and Shaikh Ahrnad Ahsa'i oflran: lor Corbin, Shi'ite Sufismwasa gatewayto all ofthe gnostic traditions. Prayer,in thesetraditions, hasnothing in common with the "diseaseof the will" that Emerson rejects, just as creedor belief, "a diseaseof the intellect," hasnothing in common with the "knowing" of Corbin and his traditions.This prefaceseeks to examineonly one aspectof Corbint work: what doeshe mean by "creativeimagination"in lbn 'Arabi, andby 'the imaginalrealm" in his SpiritualEodvood CelestialEarth and other books?

Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was an Iranologist by profession, whose teaching and research, in Paris and Teheran, centered upon Islamic mysticism and philosophy, particularly in Shi'ite Sufism. I came late to the study of Corbin, my interest in him aroused by conversations with Hans Jonas and Gershom Scholem,and I regret havinghad no opportunity to meet Corbin before he died. Since 1979, I havereread many times all I could discover of Corbin's writings, and regard myself as being much under his influence, as my recent book, OmensoJ Millenniun (1995) reflects throughout. Expounding Suhrawardi,Corbin locatestle imaginal realm in "the mystical Earth of Hurqalya": Between the world of pure spiritual Ughts (luces victo oles, the world of t}e "Mothers" in the terminology of /sirog) and thc sensoryuniverse, at the boundary of the ninth Sphere(the Sphereof Spher6s)diere opens a mundusimoginalitwhich is a concretc spiritual world of archetyPe-Figures,apparitionaL Forms, Angelesof speciesand of individuals; by philosophical (lialccticslts necessityis deducedand its plane situated;vision ol to the visionaryaPPercePtion ol'it ln ectualityir vouchsafccl

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Preftce the Active Imagination.The essentialconnectionin Sohravardi which leadsfrom philosophicalspeculationto a metaphysicsof ecstasyalso establishestlre connectionbetween tlre "rrg.totogy of this neo-Zoroastrianplatonism and the idea of thJ rnund-u, imaginalis.This, Sohravardideclares,is the world to which the ancient Sagesalluded when they affirmed that beyond the sensory world tlere exists another universe with a contour and dimensionsand extension in a space,although these are not comparablewith the shapeand spatialityas we perceive tlem in the world of physicalbodies. It is the ,,eighth"lesilar, t}re mystical Earth of Hurqalya with emerald cities; it is situated on the summit of tle cosmic mountain, which the traditions handed down in Islam call the mountain of eaf. (The Man oJ Light in lrcnian Sufsn ll97tl, pp. +2-43) ln Alonewith theAlone(p.20), Corbin remarks tlat Suhrawardr and lbn 'Arabi share "the same spiritual family." The imaginal realm of Hurqalyaappearsin lbn 'Arabi as the "Creative Imaiina, tion" of part two of Alonewith theAlone,but the link (reallv the fusion) between Suhrawardi'scognitive image and lbn ,Arabi's is marked out most clearly by Corbin in Sp.irirualBodyand Celatial Eath, pp. I 35-43. There Corbin translatesfrom chapter g of lbn 'Arabi's masterwork, The BoohoJ theSpiritual Conquests oJ Mecca: Know that when God had created Adam who was the first human organism to be constituted, and when he had established hirn as the origin and archetype of all human bodies, tlere remained a surplus of the leavenof the clay. From this surplus God created the palm tree, so r}at Gis piant (nalilo, palm tree, being feminine) is Adamt si.srer; for us, therefore, it is like an aunt on our father's side. ln tlreology it is so described and is compared to the faithful believerl No other plant bears within it such extraordinary secretsas are hidden in this one. Now, after the creation of the palm tree, there remained hidden a portion of the clay from which the plant had been made; what was left was the equivalent of ,es"-" "

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Pr{oce seed. And it was in this remainder that God laid out an immense Earth. Sincehe arrangedin it the Throne and what it contains, t}te Firmament, the Heavensand the Earths, the worlds underground, all the paradisesand hells, this means that the whole of our universe is to be found there in that Earth in its entirety, and yet the whole of it together is like a ring lost in one of our desertsin comparisonwith the immensity of that Earth. And that same Earth has hidden in it so many marvels and strangethings that their number cannot be counted and our intelligenceremainsdazedby them. (Spirituol Bodyarul CelestialEarth, pp. 135-37) It is one of the most extraordinary creation myths tlat I have ever encountered: God, fashioningAdam out of the adamah,or moist red clay, had a remnant, and from it he made the palm tree, "Adam's sister." And even from the palm tree's formation there was a remainder, the size of a sesameseed. In this tiny fragment, Cod "laid out an immense Earth," called tle Celestial Earth of Hurqalya by Suhrawardi. This alternate Earth, Ibn 'Arabi affirms, is the world "where theophaniesand theophanic visions take place.' Suhrawarditells us that Hurqalya, the alternate Earth, is an Imaginative universe that standsbetween two worlds, our sensory Earth and the intelligible universe of the Angels. AnotJrer great lranian Sufi, Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa'i, calls Hurqalya the Interworld, and a later sage says that "it is the world through which spirits are embodied, and bodies spiritu. alized." Of Hurqalya, as "Earth of Visions," Corbin remarks that this is where Hermes dwells, Hermes being t}re tutelary spirit of all gnosis, from the Hermetic Corpus through Christian Gnosticism, the Sufis, and the Jewish Kabbalah.BecauseHermes is at home there, Hurqalyais the "Earth of Resurrection." I rcturn to Alone with the Alone, where Corbin laments our dcgradationof the Imaginationinto fantasy(seeDuke Theseusin A Mllsummcr Ntghti Drean) ancl somberly notes that "there has ccarerlto bc an intcrmcdiatclcvcl betweenempiricallyverifrable

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Preface

Preface

reality and unreality pure and simple" (p. l8l). Very suggestivelS Corbin blames for t}is debacleall the normative theologicalaccounts of d qeatio ex nililo, accountsagainstwhich all gnostics forever rebel. Later in ,{/oncwith the Alone, Corbin again distinguishes "the field of the Imagination" from the creation out of nothingness, and urges that "we must think rather of a process of increasingillumination." Corbin's gr€at strength is that he writes from Hurqalya, asit were; I will suggesta translationinto someof our more mundaneconcerns.In doing so, I will still follow Corbin, with particular reference to the new prelude tlat Corbin added to the second edition of Spititual Bodyand CelestialEarth. There, Corbin begins by noting "that between the sensep€rceptions and the intuitions or categoriesof the intellect there has remained a void." This spacebetween, of the Active Imagination, hasbeen left to tle poets, but Corbin wishesto reclaim it for the spiritual life as a cognitive power in its own right. I myself, without disagreeing with Corbin, nevertheless would say that for our culture, at this time, it may be more pragmaticfor seekersto discern the reality of the Active Imagination in Shakespeare,rather than in lbn 'Arabi or Suhrawardi,though under Corbin's guidance Ibn 'Arabi and the other Sufi sages will help us to define the imaginal realm in Shakespeare. My motivation is double: without de-esotericizingCorbin, I hope to make him more available,and while Shakespeare needsno rescue, lzebadly need to be rescued from the cultural materialists who are alienating students from Shakespeare by reducing him to the supposed"social energies"of what tlrey call "Early Modern England."I don't wish either to turn Shakespeare into a Sufi, or Henry Corbin into Shakespeare, but instead to link the two in a "processof increasingillumination."

FrancisBaconthat the Imaginationwas only a messengersent out by the mind, a messengerwith a tendencyto usurp the authority being not of an that the reasonattemptedto assert.Shakespeare, age but for all time, invented or reinvented both the Imagination and human personality, both pretty much as we have known them since. lncredibly more diverse in temperamentand cognition than Milton and tle Romantics, Shakespeare provided the materiapoeticothat helpedlead visionarieslike William Blake, P B. Shelley,and the later Goethe to their conviction that empirical senseitself can be a metaphor for spiritual emptiness.Corbin's Imaginal Realm is portrayed more fully and vividly by Shakespeare than by the Sufi sages, and not only in overtly visionary dramas like A MidsummerNight\ Drcan, Pericles,and The Tbmpest. The cosmos of the high tragedies-Harnlet, Kng Leo\ l,las$ashintermixes the empirical world with a transcendentelement, one that cannot be identified with normative Chrjstian ideasof order or of the supernatural. One of Corbin's Sufic names for the Imaginal Realm is "the Angelic World,' which is perfectly applicable to Shakespeare'scosmos provided that you conceive of t}te Angelic order as being rnore Hermetic than Christian. Hermetic angelolog;1, studied by Corbin in his Avicennaand the Visionaty Recito,l,posits a middle reality between sensoryperceptionsand divine revelations. Elsewhere, Corbin translates Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa'i as declaring: "The world of Hurqalya is a material world (the world of matter in the subde state), which is otAer."Being material but otAeris a splendidmetaphorfor what we tend to call the alter ego, who in Sufism,as in allied traditions, is the guardian angel who strangely is our own self. Hurqalya, like Shakerpeare'screation, is not just a representationof material or hisshows us aspectsof experience tlat torical reality. Shakespeare doubtlessexisted belore him, but he illuminates what we could not sec witlout him. That preciselyis what Corbin meansby the lnoglnol world, the place of the soul or souls. Corbin, it is true, rarely does, not belr cxpounding theophany,and Shakespeare In8 rn ei(rterirt, but a poet-playwright. Hegel praised Shake-

The Imagination was viewed as a lesser faculty in Shakespeare's age, though there were visionarieswho did not agree witl Sir xiv

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Prefaee speare above all other dramatistssince Euripides by sayingthat only the Shakespearean protagonistswere "free artists of themselves."The Sufis,interpreting the Koran, like the Kabbalistsand Gnostics interpreting the Bible, also were "free artists of themselves," I myself am in dangerof violating a warning made by Corbin as he concluded the prelude to t}re second edition of Spiriruo,l Bodyand CelestialEarth: In this connection, we wish to give a caution. We have come to see for ourself, with pleasure though not unmixed witl.L some anxiety, that the word "imaginal'as used specificallyin our researcheshas been spreadingand even gaining ground. We wish to make the following statement.If this term is used to apply to anything other than the mundusinaginalis and the imaginal Forms as tley are located in the schema of the worlds which necessitatetl.remand legitimise them, there is a great danger that the term will be degradedand is meaning be lost. By t}re same token we would remind the reader that the schemain which the imaginal world is by its essencethe intermediate world, and the articulation between the intellectual and the sensible,in which the Active Imaginationas imaginatio vera is an organ of understandingmediating between intellect and senseand as legitimate as these latter and that world itself. If one transfers its usageoutside this precisely de6ned schemaone setsout on a falsetrail and straysfar flrom the intention which our lranian philosophershave induced us to restore in our use of this word. It is superfluousto addt}re reader will alreadyhaveunderstoodt-his-that the mundus imdginalishas nothing to do with what the fashionof our time calls "the civilisation of tlre image." (Pp. xviii-xix) As an admirer of Corbin, I am a touch uneasywith this, partly becausehe seemsin tlis moment of 6ne caution to forget how eclectic in their spirituality his Su6s are, and he himsllt was. When Corbin quotes from Balzac'sHermetic novel, LouisLamxti

Prrfuu berr, he is as much in contemplation of Hurqalya as when he interprets lbn 'Arabi, and Shakespeare is a much larger form of Balzac,amidst much else. Corbin's work has a particular emphasistlat distinguishesit from the comparableresearchesof Jonas, Scholem, and ldel: it sweepsout, with marvelous universalism,to make incessantsurveys of what Corbin calls "the situation of esoterism." Sufism is an esoteric interpretation of Islam, even as Christian Gnosticism was of early Christianity, or Kabbalah of Judaism, or Jacob Boehmeand Blake were of Protestantism,or Emersonwas of the post-Protestantismof New England Unitarianism. One of the crucial paragraphs of Alone with the Alone centers upon lbn 'Arabi's precise parallel to Emerson'sSe{-Rehance: This is the very relationship we outlined above in the idea of the Angel compounded with the idea tllat every theophany necessarilyhas the form of an angelophany.This should avoid any misunderstandingwhen we come to speak of the "Self" and the knowledge of "self.' The "Self" is a characteristicterm by which a mystic spirituality underlines its dissociationfrom all the aims and implications of denominationaldogmatisms. But it enablesthese dogmatismsto argue in return that this Self, experiencedas the pure act of existing, is only a natural phenomenonand consequentlyhas nothing in common witl a supernaturalencounter with the revealedGod, attainableonly within the reality of the Church. The term "Self," as we shall employ it here, implies neither the one nor the other acceptancc. It refers neither to the impersonal Self, to the pure act of existing attainablethrough efforts comparableto the technigues of yoga, nor to tlre Self of the psychologists.The word will bc employed here solely in the sense given it by lbn 'Arabi and numerous other SuF theosophistswhen they repclted thc famoussentence:He who knows himself knows fiis l"ord, Knowlng onc'r relf, to know onci God; knowing one's l.nr -c-

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