After Prophecy: Imagination, Incarnation, and the Unity of the Prophetic Tradition-Lectures for the Temenos Academy by Tom Cheetham. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2007. xiii + 183 pp. $22.95.

Had Henry Corbin confined himself to writing about the philosophy and mysticism of Islam, the range and depth of his oeuvre would have been imposing enough. But his erudition, and his vision, reached well beyond the horizons even of that vast spiritual terrain. His books reflect close study of the Neoplatonists, of the early Gnostics, and of the Mazdaeans of ancient Iran; of the ethos of amour courtois and the legends of the Grail; of resonances and sympathies extending from the Rhineland mystics, via Boehme and Paracel-sus, to Swedenborg and Hamann. Passages in his writings hint at hypotheses concerning the roots of Mahayana Buddhism. His comparative phenomenology builds upon (and surpasses) the thought of Heidegger, of whom he was the first French translator.Are we to explain this versatility simply in terms of insatiable curiosity, and a formidable intellect? These Corbin certainly possessed; but to leave the matter there would be to tell much less than half the story. The sages and visionaries of Islam were not, for him, mere objects of study, inert specimens in the vitrines of scholarship. Rather, he saw them as teachers of a truth, a truth vital to our experience of the Imagination, to our relationship with the Divine, to our survival as persons in the world, and to the healing of the age-old sectarian tragedy which divides the spiritual progeny of Abraham. It was to this truth, for its own sake, that Corbin dedicated his existence: he found it best represented in ShFite Iran, but he was alert to its traces everywhere.

It is in such terms, as a scholar whose work 'has significance far beyond that of most academic specialists', that Tom Cheetham has approached Corbin, undertaking to make it easier for a broader readership to encounter the challenge of his insights. Cheetham does not so much seek to transmit what Corbin says about the masters whom he invokes, as to convey what he—and they-have to say to the rest of us: T have been less concerned with presenting a balanced view of the details of [Corbin's] position, and more with how we might interpret and appropriate some of the powerful ideas that he presents.'

This is Tom Cheetham's third book about Corbin. The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism (2003; reviewed in TAR 8) was the first comprehensive introduction to Corbin in English: besides giving a biographical sketch and a bibliography of Corbin's writings, the author discussed such fundamental themes as the roots of Corbin's phenomenology; the reality of the Imagination and of the 'imaginal' realm to which it grants access; the illuminative role of esoteric exegesis; and the centrality of the Angel to human personhood and Divine presence. Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World (2005) comprises five essays in which Corbin's thought confronts the modern spiritual predicament. Thus Cheetham calls for a 'participatory empiricism' which can enable us to experience matter integrally, rather than in terms of the alienated 'objectivity' of mainstream materialism. As an image for such openness he proposes the Feast, a celebration in which the world enters into us and to which the gods may come as guests. Exploring the alchemical mysteries which fascinated Jung as well as Corbin, Cheetham articulates the distinction between the demonic darkness of the abyss and—perhaps in some ways no less terrifying— the Black Light which has been the goal of so many mystics. We can school ourselves to dare the same adventure by cultivating the discipline of 'mystical poverty', a renunciation of the opacities of literalism and solidification; and it is here, in the endlessly unfolding theophanies of esotericism, that the reconciliation of the Abrahamic faiths is to be found.

This book takes a similar approach, and in the process revisits much of the same ground. It is in fact characteristic of Cheetham's writing that he comes back again and again to the same issues, the same texts, sometimes the same passages or phrases. Far from being mere repetitiveness, this is a testimony to the passionate sincerity of his project. Cheetham has undertaken the sustained contemplation of Corbin's thought, and of the realities with which that thought concerned itself-realities which are, by their nature, inexhaustible mysteries. For one with such a vocation there can be no question of 'moving on' to 'something new': the call is to go inward, to strive for ever deeper apprehension in what Corbin would have called a progressio harmonica. Corbin's own writings exhibit similar recurrences, for just the same reason;

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and one can say of Cheetham, as he has said of Corbin, that 'each of his works repays detailed study for the light that it throws on all of the others'. 

After Prophecy consists of seven chapters: five were presented at the Temenos Academy (two of these subsequently appearing in the most recent issues of this journal), while another originated as a lecture to the Master's Programme in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination at the University of Kent. In his first chapter, Cheetham returns to the theme of mystical poverty. He describes it as an openness to all reality, whereas attachment to possessions can become 'a dangerous restriction of experience'-words which recall Saint Catherine of Siena's warning that earthly wealth can 'dispossess [us] of the dignity of the infinite'. 'Mystical poverty is the true state of all beings: each and every thing has nothing in itself, is nothing in itself.' To be open to the world is to encounter all things in a spirit of wonder, vulnerability and dialogue: in a discussion of the roots of the concept of 'theory', Cheetham describes hermeneutics as an interpretive process which does not seek to dominate or to absorb the phenomena with which it engages, but to surrender to them. Language itself is in its essence participatory, not assertive: 'We speak because the world speaks .... Language and the symbols upon which it depends are the Breath of God.' Recognizing the capacity of our utterances and imaginings to carry us, transformatively, beyond ourselves, we can begin to understand that the ultimate expression of the Imagination is in prayer.

In 'The Un-Refused Feast', Cheetham considers how we can regain the 'organ of trans-sensory perception' (Corbin's phrase) which will restore our imaginative sympathy with the world. He contrasts idols, congealed fixations which entrap our consciousness, with icons, vehicles of revelation and illumination. Icons, always referring beyond themselves, can by their nature never be literal; and it is in literalism that Cheetham, following Corbin, sees the roots of the mutual estrangement of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. 'Henry Corbin's work is an elegant and extended plea for us to commit ourselves to the perpetual struggle to save the Abrahamic religions from idolatry and literalism, and give them back to soul, to Imagination, and to Life.' Our guide in this struggle is the enigmatic figure of Khidr, whose shattering of the certainties of Moses in the eighteenth sura of the Qurcan is one of the great parables of esotericism.

'The Flame of Things' invokes Saint Paul's description of love in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, as a prelude to examining love's role in the inner life. This is a chapter rich in essential distinctions. Cheetham contrasts feeling, which is one of our modes of apprehending the world and one another, with emotion, which acts upon us in ways which tend to limit our awareness and our freedom. Similarly, he opposes agape, the self-giving love which traditionally found its expression in the sharing of a Feast, to the passionate attachments of eras, which all too often are only expressions of the hunger of the ego. These clarifications are central to the spirit's quest. 'In one of the most vital passages in his great book on Ibn Arabi, Corbin wrote that the angelic function of beings is to prevent us from misunderstanding transcendence by separating it from the beauty of the world and of those we love. For it is through these alone that transcendence is manifested.'

The fourth chapter begins with a passage in the apocryphal Acts of John, which describes how the 'Angel Christos' revealed a 'Cross of Light' to the apostle at the same time that the man Jesus hung on the cross of wood at Calvary. Cheetham discusses Corbin's docetism, and the way in which his understanding of Christ was inseparably bound up with the mediating figure of the Angel: the chapter is a useful guide to some of the subtleties of Corbin's ideas concerning monotheism and the Incarnation. These are not matters of historical or theoretical interest only: for Corbin, and for Cheetham, it was insistence on the literal physicality of Christ which first, calamitously, polarized the spiritual and the material.

In 'Touching Grace', Cheetham juxtaposes Corbin's thought with that of Ivan Illich. Both men were troubled by the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, but in fundamentally different ways. For the docetist Corbin, it is a pernicious error, which has led the whole of our civilization astray. For the devoutly Catholic Illich, it is a miraculous reality, but one which entails a terrible danger. By bringing the Ultimate into the midst of the contingent, the Incarnation has given mankind a supernatural freedom-but also the opportunity blasphemously to betray that freedom, through 'the secularization of the Samaritan', the 'technicization' of love and compassion. Cheetham is drawn to Illich by the latter's sense of the warm and earthy rootedness of

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embodiment, which he finds helpful in his struggle to keep Corbin from 'dragging me off into Heaven prematurely'. There is an intriguing discussion of Illich's adoption of medieval theories of vision, leading to the suggestion that Corbin's 'eyes of fire' can be identified with Illich's 'eyes of flesh'.The sixth chapter, 'Words of the Heart', compares Corbin's teachings concerning the revelatory Imagination with those of C. G. Jung, James Hillman and Harold Bloom: Corbin and Jung both participated in the Eranos conferences, while Hillman and Bloom have in various ways sought to appropriate aspects of Corbin's thought. Although both Jung and Hillman have influenced Cheetham profoundly, he finds all three to be lacking in a valid understanding of the imaginal realities which Corbin expounded: Jung, because his concern with psychic wholeness leads him to seek to integrate aspects of being which in Corbin's view must be left behind; Hillman, because his preoccupation with the labyrinth of pathology appears to have led him to lose belief, or even interest, in the possibility of escaping from it; Bloom on account of his (ultimately perhaps rather frivolous) identification of the imaginal realm with the literary imagination. In all three cases there seems to be a failure to grasp, or adequately to value, the transcendent. Our way to the transcendent, again, is through encounter with the Angel, a revelatory presence which must be neither anthropomorphized nor abstracted. 'Any search for the Angel is a search for both the divine face and the human .... It is through the imaginative power of language that we may best be able to seek that Angel, who confronts us intimately in the face of another person.'

The title of the short concluding chapter, 'A Personal Story', has a twofold signification. Cheetham attempts to take stock of the impact which Corbin's ideas have had upon his own life—but he also writes of narrative, of 'recit', as the vehicle through which the soul can best contemplate or indeed create its own existence; and of our dependence on the Imagination, and on 'the story that is ours', for life itself. 'It lies within the power of the recit to make us present and open to Things, to other people, and to the Angel. It is the Lost Speech of the spirit, without which we are doomed.'

In endeavouring to convey some impression of the wealth of themes covered in this book, I have not said nearly enough about the qualities of the writing itself. Tom Cheetham addresses us lucidly and accessibly, in a prose often kindled into lyricism by his dedication to his subject. His enthusiasm is infectious, the range of his knowledge daunting, the depth of his commitment an inspiration. The book is full of wisdom. In a field whose exoticism and difficulty could easily tempt one to play the mystagogue, Cheetham's sincerity and humility are disarmingly evident.

This is an important and very valuable book, the culmination of an important and very valuable trilogy. It sheds precious light on the profoundest levels of what it means to be human—of what it means to be. It holds open a door which, for some at least among Cheetham's readers, may bring them face to face at last with their true nature.

John Carey

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