CORBIN, HENRY (b. Paris 14 April 1903, d. Paris 7 October 1978), French philosopher and orientalist best known as a major interpreter of the Persian role in the development of Islamic thought.
CORBIN’S LIFE AND THOUGHT
Corbin was the son of Henri Arthur, a business executive, and Eugénie Fournier Corbin. He was graduated from the abbey school of St.-Maur in Paris in 1922 and studied with Étienne Gilson at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Ve Section) beginning in 1923; he received his degree in philosophy in 1925. From Gilson he learned how to interpret early texts, as well as the importance of the Latin translations of Arabic philosophical texts. In Corbin’s later editions and translations of Islamic texts he tried to apply the same rigor that Gilson had devoted to the recovery of Latin texts. He also began to study Arabic and Sanskrit at the École des Langues Orientales. In 1928 he was graduated from the École des Hautes Études with a thesis on stoicism and Augustinianism in the thought of the 16th-century Spanish poet Luís de León, for which he was awarded the Luís de León prize by the University of Salamanca. He became an adjunct at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the following year received a degree in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish from the École des Langues Orientales and made the acquaintance of the Iranist H. S. Nyberg.
In 1930 he made his first trip to Germany and began to read the works of Martin Heidegger; two years later he visited Germany again and then went on to Sweden. In this period he met such leading intellectuals as Rudolf Otto, Karl Löwith, Alexandre Kojève, Bernard Groethuysen, André Malraux, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, and Georges Dumézil. In 1931-32, stimulated by an intellectual interest in Protestant theology from his reading of Barth, Corbin and his friends Denis de Rougement, Roland de Pury, and Albert-Marie Schmidt founded a journal entitled Hic et Nunc. The four articles he published there and other early works already dealt with themes important in his later works—notably hermeneutics, the link between knowing and being, and eschatological time. In 1933 he married Stella Leenhardt, daughter of the celebrated anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt. He spent 1935-36 in residence at the Institut Français in Berlin, where he met Heidegger and completed his translation of Was ist Metaphysik? (Qu’est-ce que la metaphysique? Paris, 1938, with an appendix containing passages from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and a lecture on Hölderlin). In 1937 he succeeded Alexandre Koyré at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, teaching courses on the Lutheran theologian Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) and on Lutheran hermeneutics.
His encounter with German thought, especially with the hermeneutics of Heidegger, provided Corbin with the “hermeneutic key” (clavis hermeneutica). As he noted, “The enormous merit of Heidegger is to have focused even the act of philosophizing upon hermeneutics” (“De Heidegger à Sohrawardī,” in Jambet, p. 24). He was also influenced by the Protestant theology then being taught at the Collège de France by the brothers Joseph and Jean Baruzi, a theology based on the thought of the young Martin Luther, then fashionable in Germany, and of such Protestant intellectuals as Sebastian Franck, Caspar Schwenkfeld, Valentin Weigel, and Johann Arndt. What particularly caught Corbin’s attention was the “phenomenon of the holy book” and the hermeneutic approach. He discovered the works of Emanuel Swedenborg—particularly the theme of correspondences between natural and spiritual things—as well as the dialectical theology of Barth. He was the first translator of Barth’s work, as he had been for that of Heidegger; his translation of the little work entitled Die Not der evangelischen Kirche appeared under the title “Misère et grandeur de l’église évangélique” (Foi et vie 39, 1932).
The most influential event in Corbin’s intellectual life, however, was his discovery of Šehāb-al-Dīn Yaḥyā Sohravardī (d. 578/1191). Louis Massignon gave him a lithographed edition of Sohravardī’s principal work, Ḥekmat al-ešrāq. “The young Platonist that I was then could only take fire from contact with “the imam of the platonists of Persia”” (“Post-Scriptum à un entretien philosophique,” in Jambet, p. 41). In 1935 Corbin published his first important orientalist work, an edition and translation, in collaboration with Paul Kraus, of Sohravardī’s Avāz-e par-e Jebrāʾīl (“Le bruissement de l’aile de Gabriel,” JA 227, 1935, pp. 1-82), followed by Suhrawardî d’Alep (ob. 1191). Fondateur de la doctrine illuminative (Paris, 1939).
In 1939 he and his wife went to Turkey to obtain microfilms of the manuscripts of Sohravardī held in the Istanbul libraries. They planned to stay three months, but World War II kept them there until 1945. Corbin’s study of Sohravardī and his involuntary exile taught him “the virtues of silence and the discipline of the arcane.” In September 1945 he went for the first time to Tehran, where he published Les motifs zoroastriens dans la philosophie de Sohrawardî (1946).
Corbin returned to Paris in 1946, and his subsequent career was divided between Paris and Tehran. He was head of the department of Iranian studies at the Institut Français d’Iranologie in Tehran until 1954, when he was named to succeed Massignon in the chair of Islam and the religions of Arabia in the division of religious sciences at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In that year he presented a paper on the thought of Avicenna (Ebn Sīna) and Imamism in Tehran, at the congress celebrating the millennium of Avicenna’s birth. From 1334 Š./1955 to 1352 Š./1973 he taught regular courses on Islamic philosophy in the faculty of letters at the University of Tehran, where in 1337 Š./1958 he was awarded an honorary doctorate. Between 1949 and 1978 he was also an active participant in the Eranos circle, a heterogeneous society of international scholars that met annually in Switzerland; he delivered many lectures at its meetings, on themes that he later developed in his publications. The first two volumes of his major work En Islam iranien appeared in 1971 (see below). In 1974 Corbin retired from the École Pratique des Hautes Études and became one of the founding members of the Université Saint-Jean de Jérusalem, centered in Paris; it was a society of scholars dedicated to comparative studies in spiritual matters. He continued to return each autumn to Persia at the invitation of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, director of the Imperial Iranian academy of philosophy; Nasr was the editor of Mélanges offerts à Henry Corbin, which was published in Tehran in 1977.