Le Paradoxe du Monothéisme

by Henry Corbin

French

Genres: Religion

258 pages, Paperback

Published March 27, 2003

About the author

Henry Corbin was a philosopher, theologian and professor of Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. As a boy he revealed the profound sensitivity to music so evident in his work. Although he was Protestant by birth, he was educated in the Catholic tradition and at the age of 19 received a certificate in Scholastic philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris. Three years later he took his "licence de philosophie" under the great Thomist Étienne Gilson. In 1928 he encountered the formidable Louis Massignon, director of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne, and it was he who introduced Corbin to the writings of Suhrawardi, the 12th century Persian mystic and philosopher whose work was to profoundly affect the course of Corbin’s life. The stage was then set for a personal drama that has deep significance for understanding those cultures whose roots lie in both ancient Greece and in the prophetic religions of the Near East reaching all the way back to Zoroaster. Years later Corbin said “through my meeting with Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny for the passage through this world was sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia, illuminated the path that I was seeking.”
Corbin is responsible for redirecting the study of Islamic philosophy as a whole. In his Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964), he disproved the common view that philosophy among the Muslims came to an end after Ibn Rushd, demonstrating rather that a lively philosophical activity persisted in the eastern Muslim world – especially Iran – and continues to our own day.

Reviews

[MM · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual, Corbin provides amazing insights, but with some leaps in explanation that make them more useful as insights or points to mull over, rather than strictly demonstrated conclusions. The translated volume I read contained two essays: The Paradox of Monotheism and Apophatic Theology as an Antidote to Nihilism.

The first essay focussed on what Corbin considers a concern with monotheism: in making God utterly different from creatures yet (cataphatically) acknowledging Him, we are prone to anthromorphize Him. Yet in trying to exalt His transcendence, others may start divinizing regular things and seeing them as illusory. The ideal, in Corbin's view, is to see unity in diversity: God is real as Being (NOT an [determined] existent) while things are real as existents (determined, made unified by God). This essay contains many other interesting passages, such as diagrams by Shaykh Amouli, Ismaili cosmology, and musings on Mormonism, Proclus, and neo-gnosticism. Corbin's main point seemed to be that saving monotheism from becoming a type of ossified idolatry requires a cosmology where the One is uniquely Being, causing other things to exist in acts of creation. The hierarchy of cosmologies (angels) is crucial to this because, presumably, it explains how the One's names and attributes relate to Him.

Despite the many gems in this essay, I continue to be confused as to how Corbin's explanation of unity-in-diversity doesn't amount to saying that God constitutues (is the formal cause of) all things. The idea of an abstracted "being" is bizarre to me and seems more a mental concept than an actual existing entity. However, it does raise the interesting question--to which I have no answer--of how (if at all) God can have an essence if an essence is a type of determination or limitation.

The second essay is Corbin's response to the claim that nihilism arises out of personalism (focus on personal identity). Corbin argues that negative theology is prior to cataphatic theology, but that the former entails the latter since the Absolute is not a subsuming nothingness, but a productive indeterminate Being. The personal God is the Absolute's self-revelation, and so personalism is in fact rooted in a type of impersonalism that maintains the personal integrity of God and humans. By trying to overwhelm themselves in ego-death and reach the Absolute, humans run the risk of denying the plurality of existents. Instead, we should realise that personhood is a form of self-revelation (same as God's), and strengthen our personhood to be in dialogue with God Himself. In this way, we can also be in dialogue with others since we would not be two shadows dialoguing, but two persons with the same spiritual orientation.

I enjoyed the second essay very much. In particular, the explanation of negative theology being a type of nihilism, but a PRODUCTIVE one compared to a subsuming abyss, was very enjoyable. It reminded me of Allama Iqbal's concept of strengthening one's khudi, which seems to be based in God's personalism even in his thought.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I gave it 3 stars instead of 4 simply because, as always, there is a lot of STUFF in Corbin's work and I just can't follow along all the time. But it was great! And it highlights how important cosmology, angelology, and questions of personal identity are for understanding dialogue. The practical implications that he spells out in his second essay are an excellent complement to the highly theoretical claims of his first essay.