Avicenna and the Visionary Recital

by Henry Corbin

In this work a distinguished scholar of Islamic religion examines the mysticism and psychological thought of the great eleventh-century Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna (Ibn Sina), author of over a hundred works on theology, logic, medicine, and mathematics. Henry Corbin's discovery in an Istanbul library of the manuscript of a Persian translation of and commentary on Avicenna's Hayy ibn Yaqzan, written in Arabic, led him to an analysis of three of Avicenna's mystical "recitals." These form an initiatory cycle leading the adept along the path of spiritual progress. In Part I Corbin summarizes the great themes that show the philosophical situation of Avicennan man in the cosmos and presents translations of these three great Avicennan recitals. Part II is a complete translation, with notes, of the Persian commentary.

Genres: Philosophy, Islam, Religion

440 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

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

[Abdullah Başaran · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess Corbin is confused a little bit about why Avicenna wrote the recitals with a metaphorical language. He attempts to end up interpreting Avicenna with some mysticism or Imamism. However, metaphors are rhythms of thought. There not exist only some references to one's previous works, they are also a new way of thinking about being and existence for Avicenna.

[Sheyda Heydari Shovir · Rating 4 out of 5]

ترجمه عربيش بغايت زيباست. بعنوان عضو ارشد كمپين "متنفران از تمثيل" تمثيلش رو ناديده گرفتم و از زبان لذت بردم.

[jackson, this is olive · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains one of the few translations that I could find of Ibn Sina's (Avicenna) 'Hayy Ibn Yaqzan' in English. Compared to many of his contemporaries, I think that Corbin offers a fairly refreshing analysis. A quote from Cobin's analysis of the recital.

'This sketch will not duplicate the commentary translated elsewhere. As we shall have occasion to repeat, these commentaries display a common fault in deciphering the symbols of our recital as if with the help of a "code." They disregard the entirely different mode of perception that appre-hends sensible or imaginable data and transmutes them into symbols. Instead of taking the recital in its phase of noetic transmutation, they as it were force it to retrogress by reducing its symbolic perceptions to the patencies and propositions of natural knowledge, that of the didactic treatises. Making every effort to reconvert its symbols into rational patencies, they end by degrading them into allegories'

I was struck with a a very real happiness when I read this because it resonated with a concept that I've been encountering in some of the new 'post-modern' type anthropology texts that ive been reading, in particular 'Australianama' (author who's name is slipping my mind, Samia?)
In the book, Samia mentions the recurrent fault of Western anthropologists who seek to analyze 'the other' like a scientist dissecting a frog in a laboratory. The decoding and dissecting often ruins the whole and misses the alterity aspect of mystical knowledge all together.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talks a lot about angels