This is an important little book. It is Cheetham’s 5th book on Henry Corbin, as well as on his influences on and similarities and differences from James Hillman and Carl Jung. This current book provides an easy entry into Corbin’s work and why he was so influential in the fields of spirituality, psychology and poetry. The book is informative, providing summaries of Corbin, Hillman and Jung’s work, while also being a work of beauty, poetry, and I dare say, even theophany and gnosis – as it helps us understand to see and understand the role of the imagination in Creation and how we are creators and participators as well as createds.

The book also achieves a good balance of a conversational tone in which Cheetham is present and works alongside Corbin and Hillman and shares of himself as well as engaging in scholarly work. Perhaps it is no coincidence as Cheetham is releasing his first book of poetry, Boundary Violations, this year.

The primary focus of Imaginal Love is on the central or at least integral role of imagination in spirituality, poetry, and humanity. Corbin wrote of a tripartite model of reality, with the typical dualism of matter and spirit being linked by a third realm, which he referred to with various concepts, such as the mundus imaginalis, the Imaginal, or the ‘alam al-mithal. Those familiar with Hillman and Jung’s work will see the influence of these concepts in the methods of Active Imagination and the emphasis on the imaginal and mythopoetic. Regardless of what he called this realm, its importance was that it was here that matter was spiritualized and spirit materialized. This third realm connects and orients matter toward spirit. Corbin traced the loss of this realm to the 12th century with the beginning of philosophical systems that separated spirit from matter.

Awareness of or connection to this intermediate realm creates a different state of being, it engenders a different mode of seeing, being and experiencing the world. This state, the Sufis called ta’wil, is a state of interpretation of texts, world and being with continuous reference to the Divine or the secular could say the numinous. This state of being is crucial to understand visions and dreams, whether they are from indigenous traditions (which did not develop the matter-spirit division) or of modern experiencers of visions, such as Carl Jung or Philip K. Dick. The Imaginal is thus not only crucial to understanding mysticism, poetry and visionary consciousness, but it is also a way of life or a path in which an individual can strive to be open to states of being that come from the imaginative connections between spirit and matter.

Orientation toward the Imaginal, Love of it, or connection to the Love that it is a source of, re-spiritualizes and re-humanizes. Corbin writes that one is human only in relation to God, or God’s intermediary, the angel of one’s being (the ‘alam al-mithal is also the angelic realm, the intermediaries between Spirit and matter). His work is thus a therapeutic endeavour in which an individual moves from a state of disconnected matter (an object) toward a state of spirit and matter in constant back and forth creation, in which the object can move toward becoming a subject, or a Person. Thus we are fully human only when we let go of our views of ourselves as egos and material, physical objects. We become human or re-humanized through letting go of our insistence on ourselves as separate matter and egos and open our hearts to Relationship.

This is a wonderful and beautiful book, important for establishing Cheetham as a Person as well as in illuminating the importance of the imaginal and the works of Corbin and Hillman.

Brand	N/A
Rating	4.7 (75 ratings)
Price	$22
Category	Agnosticism

Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman