Tom Cheetham > Quotes

“It is the mythic experience, the mythic imagination that opens, reveals depth and mystery, which places the human in the context of the nonhuman, and so, forces retreat, humility, and awe, in the presence of spaces beyond our will.”
― Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World

“The symbol is not an artificially constructed sign: it flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise. It is the unique expression of the thing symbolized as of a reality that thus becomes transparent to the soul, but which itself transcends all expression.”
― Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

“The world is too much for us. Rationality as we have come to know it works by ignoring most of experience: laws are arrived at by selective abstraction.”
― Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World

“The literal is always abstract ‒ because reality is so much more than we can ever know or experience or imagine.”
― Tom Cheetham, Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman

“Events, or acts of understanding, are the actions of a subject expressed as a verb, the reality of which derives from the person who conjugates it.3 For”
― Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

“And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.”
― Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World

“He refers to the Imagination as an organ of perception. Without it, all the phenomena of religious experience are impossible. It is the means by which we perceive symbols. The Active Imagination guides, anticipates, molds sensory perception; that is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning Bush is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs. In order that Moses may perceive the Burning Bush and hear the Voice calling him “from the right side of the valley”—in short, in order that there may be a theophany—an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed.22”
― Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

“Having Khidr as a master gives the disciple a transcendent dimension. It confers a 'personal, direct, and immediate bond with the Godhead' . . . Each disciple becomes what Khidr is, the center of the world.”
― Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

“Only through the perception of the indissoluble unity of the two faces of being in creation, the poverty of the soul of humanity and of the world, can we perceive the beauty and the animation and the personification of the things of the world. It is only by the continual perception of this beauty-in-poverty that our certainties, our graspings, our hardnesses of heart can be perpetually undone.”
― Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World

“Because you were born in a sin that was sinned before you, and Thou you have had fear, great fear, and you have cried, cried because the Earth is immense, cried because the Woman was too beautiful, cried because the Angel was invisible, and because Thou you were Adam, and Adam would want to live.”
― Tom Cheetham

“Corbin is making the case for the indissoluble link between philosophy and spirituality. He writes, “henceforth we must cease to separate the history of philosophy from the history of spirituality. Philosophy itself is only a partial symptom of the secret that transcends all rational statement and that tends to express itself in what we may comprehensively term a spirituality.”6 If philosophical reflection does not reach a state of spiritual consciousness, then “philosophical discussions have scarcely more significance than an administrative conversation. This is why the history of philosophy should never be treated apart from the history of spirituality, and indeed of daily devotional experiences.”7”
― Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

“Many people, especially non-Muslims, who read the Qur’an for the first time, are struck by what appears as a kind of incoherence from the human point of view. It is neither like a highly mystical text nor a manual of Aristotelian logic, though it contains both mysticism and logic. It is not just poetry, though it contains the most powerful poetry. The text of the Qur’an reveals human language crushed by the power of the Divine Word. It is as if human language were scattered into a thousand fragments like a wave scattered into drops against the rocks at sea. One feels through the shattering effect left upon the language of the Qur’an, the power of the Divine whence it originated. The Qur’an displays human language with all the weakness inherent in it becoming suddenly the recipient of the Divine Word and displaying its frailty before a power which is infinitely greater than man can imagine.5”
― Tom Cheetham, All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

“The Shaykh had a voice so low one could hardly under- stand him, and murmuring as if to himself, he responded: "The fall is neither a lack, nor a defect, even less a sin; if it had not been for the forbidden fruit of the tree, the inexhaustible possibilities of Being would never have been manifested.”
― Tom Cheetham, World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin And Islamic Mysticism

“Corbin was a Platonist, and his theory of knowledge is “illuminationist.” All knowledge comes from above by means of a vision of, or union with the archetypes, the Platonic Forms. The “giver of Forms” is the Angel.”
― Tom Cheetham, Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman

“Perhaps we can think of fundamentalism as a stifling, an asphyxiation, and constipation of the soul.”
― Tom Cheetham, Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman