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Imagination, Image of God and
Wisdom of God: by © 2006 Appendix C: Mesocosm A .pdf version of the entire article can be downloaded here. Click here to go back to Introduction. Or select a different part of this article using the navigation bar at the left. Appendix C: Corbin’s Idea of the Mesocosm and the Mundus Imaginalis As discussed in the main body of this article, Henry Corbin (1903-1978) puts forward the idea of a mesocosm. Versluis points out that ,although Corbin wrote about Islamic esotericism, he arrived at these studies through the visionary mysticism of Boehme, Oetinger, Pordage and Baader. Thus, some writers have called Corbin a “Protestant theologian.” (Versluis, 165). Corbin draws parallels between the ideas of Ibn Arabî and Pordage, especially in their use of the symbols “eye, heart and breath.” The eye of the heart reveals the spiritual world, which is alive with the “outflowing breath” of God. Versluis comments on this parallelism regarding a “path of spiritual vision”:
But does Corbin’s idea of a mesocosm really correspond to Dooyeweerd’s idea of an intermediate aevum? There are some similarities, but also some important differences. Corbin used the term ‘mundus imaginal’ or ‘imaginal world’ because he wanted to differentiate his view of imagination from that of the merely fantastic and unreal. In his view, the imaginal is the realm of the truly real. To that extent, there is a correspondence with Dooyeweerd. The main problem is Corbin’s association of the imaginal world with a trichotomy of intellect, soul and body. For Corbin, intellect concerns the relation to God’s eternity and ideas, soul refers to the imaginal world, and the body refers to the temporal world. Dooyeweerd denies any such trichotomy, and says that the only division is between our supratemporal selfhood and its temporal mantle of functions [220]. Dooyeweerd specifically disagrees with any view that would make our highest center an intellectual one in the sense of rational thought. He views that as an absolutization of the rational. So whereas he can speak of creation as being a realization of the thoughts of God, he is not using this in the sense of a rationalistic understanding of thoughts of God, nor in the sense of a rationalistic Logos doctrine [221]. He makes this clear in ‘Kuyper’s Wetenschapsleer.’ This does not mean that Dooyeweerd does not have a Logos doctrine of his own, but for him, Logos is the realm of meaning, and not just the rational [222]. Furthermore, Corbin’s view of the mesocosm tends to isolate this imaginal world from the temporal world. Corbin says that the imaginal world is less material than the temporal world and more material than the intellectual world. Again, this is contrary to Dooyeweerd. It is also contrary to the emphasis by Christian theosophy on an incarnational reality, and of discovering structure within the temporal world. And so unlike Corbins’s wonderful stories of those who leave the earthly realm behind to travel to the 8th heaven, Dooyeweerd concentrates on our discovery of God’s Wisdom as it is reflected in our temporal world, particularly as it is expressed in our own functions of consciousness. In this life, our experience of the fullness of the supratemporal is restricted to the way it is refracted through time [223]. But this refraction is something that makes our temporal life spectacular:
But Dooyeweerd specifically says he does not speculate on what may occur after death. For after death, we are separated from our temporal functions. Furthermore, Dooyeweerd says that our present knowledge is not restricted to our temporal functions of consciousness. We are limited by but not to these temporal functions:
In addition to this spectacular refracted experience of the eternal, we also have, even before death, a supratemporal experience of our selfhood, which we know by religious self-reflection. And Dooyeweerd in several places refers to our supratemporal experience. For example, he refers to our experience of the ‘identity’ of the temporal modal functions: In this intuition I implicitly relate the intermodal meaning-synthesis to the transcendent identity of the modal functions I experience in the religious root of my existence (NC II, 478-79). For in the supratemporal religious root, the meaning of all temporal functions coincides. And without our supratemporal selfhood, we would not be able to form Ideas of the ontical conditions that transcend the temporal, and that make possible any kind of thought whatsoever [224]. In fact, all of our experience depends on our transcendent unity of self-consciousness:
On the same page, Dooyeweerd says that true knowledge of the cosmos is bound to true self-knowledge, and the latter to the true knowledge of God.
So although Dooyeweerd is similar to Calvin (and to Christian theosophy), in emphasizing that our imagination and theory are to be centered on God’s Wisdom as it is reflected and refracted in time, we must not deny the pre-theoretical and immediate knowledge of the supratemporal heart, which places us in a more immediate relation to God’s Wisdom. For it is in our supratemporal heart that we are addressed by God’s Word and Holy Spirit. How do we reconcile Dooyeweerd’s emphasis on this supratemporal knowledge, and his insistence on restricting our theoretical knowledge to the way that God’s Wisdom has been refracted within time? I think that the following quotation is helpful:
In other words, what Dooyeweerd is objecting to is a purported knowledge of the supratemporal that is separated from the temporal. The knowledge that we have in our hearts, or the unity and coincidence of the aspects, is not separate from the temporal world. It is the root, which is unfolded temporally. We have knowledge of both. And so we can also have knowledge of God’s Word as it speaks to us in the central sense, as well as God’s Word as it is refracted and revealed within time. Dooyeweerd only objects to a spiritualizing flight away from the world. And this emphasis on the incarnational reality of Wisdom is what is common to Dooyeweerd, Calvin and Christian theosophy. So how does this relate to Garofalo’s painting of Augustine’s Vision, which I reproduced in the Introduction to this article? Was the vision by Augustine (and his mother Monica) a vision of a world that is totally separate from our world? Was it a vision of something totally unrelated to their temporal bodies? I don’t think so. The fact that they both had the vision together says something about its relatedness to incarnational reality. They retained their separate identities, but had a common vision. This was not a case of losing one’s selfhood in some kind of acosmic trance. The painting depicts more of a mirroring of of different levels of reality. There is no doubt that the realm in the clouds depicts the supratemporal, the realm of angels and of the Madonna and Holy Child. What is the Wisdom that Augustine and Monica are writing down? Let’s look at what Augustine says about in the Confessions, Book IX, Chapter X [225]. He says that he and his mother Monica were looking out the window of a house. They could see the garden in the courtyard, and they were talking together “very pleasantly.” I think that this is itself important. The vision was not due to any special ascetic practice, but occurred during the course of a conversation. There were no special preparations for the vision; they were talking about eternal things, and then suddenly saw reality from a different point of view. Augustine says that they were "forgetting those things which are past, and reaching forward toward those things which are future." The reference is to Phil 3:13. In fact, much of what Augustine writes about the experience incorporates Scriptural references. Using Dooyeweerd’s terms, I interpret this “reaching forward toward those things which are future” as an anticipation, in contrast to mere retrocipations and memories. Augustine says,
The “soaring higher” is by an “inner musing.” And they were still speaking and marveling at God’s works. But as evident from the continuation, this is all still within their “minds.” They then sought to climb beyond their minds to the Wisdom by whom all things are made: And we came at last to our own minds and went beyond them, that we might climb as high as that region of unfailing plenty where thou feedest Israel forever with the food of truth, where life is that Wisdom by whom all things are made, both which have been and which are to be. Wisdom is not made, but is as she has been and forever shall be; for "to have been" and "to be hereafter" do not apply to her, but only "to be," because she is eternal and "to have been" and "to be hereafter" are not eternal.
The last reference is to Wisdom. See Wisdom 7:27:
Augustine says that he and Monica “just barely touched” Wisdom. They experienced the “first fruits” of ecstasy, but then returned to the temporal world of speech, with a beginning and end. They contrast this temporal speech with the God’s Word, “which remaineth in himself without becoming old.” 25. What we said went something like this: "If to any man the tumult of the flesh were silenced; and the phantoms of earth and waters and air were silenced; and the poles were silent as well; indeed, if the very soul grew silent to herself, and went beyond herself by not thinking of herself; if fancies and imaginary revelations were silenced; if every tongue and every sign and every transient thing--for actually if any man could hear them, all these would say, “We did not create ourselves, but were created by Him who abides forever”--and if, having uttered this, they too should be silent, having stirred our ears to hear him who created them; and if then he alone spoke, not through them but by himself, that we might hear his word, not in fleshly tongue or angelic voice, nor sound of thunder, nor the obscurity of a parable, but might hear him--him for whose sake we love these things--if we could hear him without these, as we two now strained ourselves to do, we then with rapid thought might touch on that Eternal Wisdom which abides over all. And if this could be sustained, and other visions of a far different kind be taken away, and this one should so ravish and absorb and envelop its beholder in these inward joys that his life might be eternally like that one moment of knowledge which we now sighed after--would not this be the reality of the saying, “Enter into the joy of thy Lord” [Matt. 25:21]. But when shall such a thing be? Shall it not be”`when we all shall rise again,” and shall it not be that “all things will be changed” [1 Cor. 15:51]. The vision seems to have to relate to going out of time into a more fulfilled kind of time. Whatever else may have been included here, it must have included the experience of the center out of which we act, the experience of the fullness of meaning, where the meaning of the separate temporal modal aspects coincide. Dooyeweerd says that in self-reflection, the truth of the fullness of meaning in our inner concentration point is “immediately evident” (NC I, 15). Augustine and Monica touched this supratemporal Wisdom and returned; there was a movement back to earth. They did not journey to other worlds and then describe the strangeness of that world, like Swedenborg’s descriptions of his visions. This kind of mysticism is different. It is not metaphysical speculation of a rationalistic kind. Augustsine and Monica saw the centrality of the Word, speaking to us not in temporal terms but (to use Dooyeweerd’s terms) to our supratemporal heart. And they returned to the temporal. And it is this movement back and forth that is shown by Blake in his painting of Jacob’s Ladder. The reference is to Genesis 28:12, the angels ascending and descending. [227] There is both an ascent and a descent, a way up and a way down. Or, if we use Dooyeweerd’s words, a transcendental direction and a foundational direction, the anticipatory and the retrocipatory, the relation to the center and to the temporal periphery. C.G. Jung reports a very interesting vision of a ladder by Edward Maitland, who reflected on ideas and reached their source. The vision also had to do with the distinction between a central and a peripheral consciousness. Maitland says that he “resolved to retain my hold on my outer and circumferential consciousness, no matter how far towards my inner and central consciousness I might go.” Maitland reported,
And just as Dooyeweerd speaks of a coincidence of the meaning of the modal aspects, Maitland refers to a convergence of his rays of consciousness, and says that when he focused the convergent rays of consciousness into a unity, “a glory of unspeakable whiteness and brightness,” “the unindividuate individuate, God as the Lord…” Jung interprets experiences like these in Biblical terms, as participating in Christ. He quotes St. Paul: “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” And “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” There is a pneumatic body that is put on like a garment (Ibid, para. 77). For Dooyeweerd, the relation to our supratemporal selfhood is not a fleeing from temporal reality, but a back and forth relation. We have seen that Dooyeweerd speaks of our beholding intuition as moving “to and fro,” connecting our experience of the correspondence of the intentional Gegenstand with the real act of thought of our supratemporal selfhood:
Our intuition relates the theoretical intermodal meaning-synthesis to the transcendent identity of the modal functions experienced in our religious root. The experience of this supratemporal convergence or identity is not to be interpreted as God Himself. But it is an experience of our selfhood as the image of God. And here we can see a relation to Jung, who says that all that psychology can speak of is the ‘God-Image.’ [228] For Dooyeweerd (and for Jung), there is a movement to and fro, from our supratemporal central to the temporal peripheral. This is not an escape from the temporal world. So this seems to be quite different from Corbin’s descriptions of visions of the imaginal world. Corbin’s descriptions are not of a to and fro, but of a separation from the material temporal world into another world. If we bear these differences in mind, we can find some other interesting observations in Corbin’s view of the mesocosm. One is with respect to his view of the meaning of ‘in the mesocosm.’ Does not the word ‘in’ have a temporal meaning, related to the spatial? How can we refer to something being in the supratemporal, which is beyond the spatial? Or, in Dooyeweerd’s terminology, how can we speak of something occurring within the supratemporal heart? Isn’t that giving temporal meaning to the supratemporal? Are we not treating the heart like a temporal location? I like Corbin’s explanation–that when we enter into the supratemporal mesocosm, all of the temporal functions are contained within it. It is the supratemporal that gives meaning to the very expression ‘in.’ And there is another beautiful passage in Corbin of the ‘where’ of supratemporality:
Corbin explains that this is Utopia, ou-topia, literally No-where, a “place outside of place.” And I like Corbin’s explanation of diversity within the supratemporal mesocosm. This is an issue that has troubled commentators of Dooyeweerd. Are there many supratemporal hearts? Dooyeweerd seems to acknowledge the continuance of individuality in the supratemporal (see Kuyper's Wetenschapsleer). What does it mean for individual supratemporal hearts to participate in Christ, the New Root? How does supratemporal individuality fit with the Idea of supratemporal Totality? Corbin’s explanation relies on the last three Enneads by Plotinus (who influenced both western and Islamic Arabic thinkers). He explains that each spiritual entity is
And Corbin speaks of visions of the archetype images, in both their pre-existent state and in their fulfilled state, represented as eastern and western regions of the beyond:
However interesting such statements may be, for Dooyeweerd they are speculation, since they deal with what our life after death will be like, when we are separated from our mantle of functions. He seems to be content with the belief that it will be a fulfillment of our present existence. And it seems to me that such fulfillment will include the fulfillment that we have helped to achieve by completing the reality of the temporal world. Go to Appendix D: Excerpts from Twilight of Western Thought Endnotes: [220] This seems similar to Calvin’s acceptance of only a twofold division, and not Augustine’s threefold division. See Appendix A. [221] See Christos Yannaros, who rejects a single-dimensional view of Logos as relating only to rational essences. [222] In his “Advies over Roomsch-katholieke en Anti-revolutionaire Staatkunde” (February, 1923, cited by Verburg 48-61), Dooyeweerd has 10 pages entitled "Kosmos en Logos.” He says that the cosmos is the whole ordered world of creation; logos is the realm of meaning. We can only speak about the cosmos when we have looked at the area of logos. The logos is cosmic in character and precedes all knowledge. It therefore seems that logos, as meaning, is wider than the cosmos, which is temporally ordered meaning. In this very early article, Dooyeweerd says
[223] That is also what Calvin seems to mean when he rejects speculaton. Yet it should not be forgotten that Calvin, too, emphasizes the direct knowledge given bgy the Holy Spirit to our heart. See Appendix A. [224]Encyclopedia 80-81, discussed above. [225] Augustine: Confessions,
Book IX, Chapter X. Online at [http://www.ccel.org/pager.cgi?&file=a/augustine/confessions/confessions-bod.html&from=12.6&up=a/ [226] Augustine’s reference is to Psalm 36:9. The verse makes reference not only to the fountain of life, but to a vision of light:
[227] See See C.G. Jung, “Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” Psychology and the East, (Princeton, 1978), p. 28, para. 40. [228] Jung emphasizes that his statements about the Self refer only to the manifestation of the God-image and of the God-concept in the human psyche:
[229] Henry Corbin: Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, tr. Leonard Fox (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation, 1995) [‘Corbin’], 12, 14. Go to Appendix D: Excerpts from Twilight of Western Thought Revised Jul 2/06 |
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