“Do not go outside, return to yourself; in the inner man dwells the truth.” It is pointless, Saint Augustine explained, to go looking outside for a truth that man can find within his own inner conscience. Or in his inner temple, if we adopt the thought of the master of mystical Shi’ism, Henry Corbin, for whom “the contemplator, the contemplation, and the temple are one.” The metamorphosis that occurs in the temple, he insists in a welcome reedition of his work “Temple and Contemplation” published by “Entrelacs,” and in which his successors wanted to discern a spiritual testament, is that of the man who comes to “be born within himself.”
His first encounter with the work of the Iranian theologian Sohravardî, written in the 12th century, dates back to 1929. Corbin discovered in a manuscript given by Louis Massignon an invitation to travel from the West to the East, initiating both a return to oneself and expressing a desire to merge Islam and the philosophy of the Enlightenment to find that “confluence of the two seas” so dear to the Persian thinker. From his reading, Henry Corbin would lay, as Gilbert Durand explains in the introduction, a “fundamental stone” in his temple. Far from the syncretism which the French scholar always distrusted, the work quickly suggests to the reader this feeling of “confluence,” of reconciliation between the Johannine church, Masonic Scotsism, and the oriental tradition of the temple. To the extent of taking an active part in the creation, in 1974, of the University of Saint John of Jerusalem, an international center for comparative spiritual research whose first session opened at the Cistercian Abbey of Vauxelle. This opening was preceded, in 1973, by the execution by the orientalist of a conference on the occasion of a visit by the Brothers of the R.L. “Freiherr vom Stern” to the Orient of Bielefeld, before whom Henry Corbin lectured on “the state of the spiritual knight,” the common thread of his future work.
In a temple shielded from disturbing external influences, from the wind and the secular word always ready to seep under the doors, they would say today, time becomes “space.” But an infinite space, “messianic,” Corbin specifies. That is to say, the characteristics of this temple are found regardless of the places and eras as if the human being carried its essence at the bottom of his heart. The author easily illustrates his point by recalling that the Sabean temple is par excellence a temple-archetype. An inscription inspired by Socratic thought at the threshold of the great temple of Harrân (ancient Carrhae of Mesopotamia, today located in Turkey) is thus reported by Masudî, nicknamed the Arab Herodotus due to his extensive travels in the heart of the Islamic world of the 10th century: “he who knows himself is deified.” The religion of the Sabeans of Harrân thus extended, according to Corbin, the ancient Syrian cults “reinterpreted with elements borrowed from Platonic philosophy.”
The journey in the temple obviously aims at the mystical and initiatory decentralization of the individual: death and resurrection, but also exile, all interior, that Henry Corbin does not hesitate to discern in a hadith of the Prophet: “Islam began as an expatriate and will return as an expatriate; blessed are those who expatriate themselves.” Thus, Ismaelism incorporates, according to him, “this mental repetition of Abraham’s sacrifice,” the act par excellence of an esoteric ritual of spiritual death and regeneration. A “renunciation of carnal desire for possession,” Corbin further specifies, in favor of the child of the soul. The fate of the edifice accompanies that of man. In his thought, the temple is not an abstract place, purely figurative, but, built and nourished by the human who is inspired by it, it also shelters the divine spirit and breath. Any physical destruction of the temple entails an alteration of humanity. Symbolically, yet, this constitutes a necessary step for the “birth of man to the world of exile,” a “crossing” meant to enable him to reach the new world carried by a spiritual relationship between the people and their God. A God who returns through the “eastern gate” of the temple. The passage from the physical to the cosmic takes place, if one dares say, at this price.
Thus, the final chapter of his work, certainly one of the most admirable for its correlation of knowledge that is unaware of each other, is dedicated to “Imago Templi” by Sohravardî. He opens it with a quote from Elie Wiesel taken from the Talmud: “If the nations and peoples had known the harm they did themselves by destroying the Temple of Jerusalem, they would have cried more than the children of Israel.” When Sohravardî mentions the Light of the divine presence in the temple, the “Sakîna,” he does nothing less than retake, as Henry Corbin explains, its Hebrew equivalent, the “Shekhina”: the mysterious divine presence in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon. The transition to the manuscript of Qumran, the new Temple of the Essenes, and the Christian esotericism of Master Eckhart, or that of the Knights Templar, alongside the “replacement of the temple by Jesus,” becomes as clear as the obvious osmosis between heavenly liturgy and earthly liturgy. Does the circumambulation around the Kaaba not remind us of the angelic ritual witnessed by Muhammad during his ascent to the Heavenly Temple?
Henry Corbin, “Temple and Contemplation,” Preface by Gilbert Durand, Entrelacs Editions, 2007, 478 p., 21 euros.
William J. Hamblin and David Rolph Seely, “The Temple of Solomon, Myth and History,” Éditions du Seuil, 2007, 222 p., 38 euros.
