René Guénon and Henry Corbin

A recent publication, New Perspectives on Henry Corbin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), edited by Hadi Fakhoury, available here, has prompted me to reflect on the relationship between Corbin (pictured left) and Guénon.

At first sight, Corbin and Guénon were very different types of people. Corbin was a scholar who spent his life within French academia, occupying several prestigious posts. Guénon was rejected by French academia, and spent his life outside it, often criticizing it. On the other hand, their paths did somehow cross, given the close relationship between Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and the Italian scholar Francesco Piraino has recently drawn our attention to their very similar contemporary impact: reading Corbin, like reading Guénon, is often important for the trajectories of French converts to Sufi Islam. The Traditionalist author Patrick Laude has written about Corbin together with Guénon and Schuon (see here).

Fakhoury’s volume helps make clear where Corbin and Guénon agreed and where they differed. Firstly, Corbin was not a self-distancing academic scholar. He was never just a historian of ideas, or even a philosopher in the normal sense. He engaged actively in the exploration of the human relationship with the transcendent, and was as interested in actual spiritual experience as in written attempts to explain it. Secondly, he was in many ways a perennialist, believing in an “Oriental” or “Iranian” “Hellenism” that included Zoroastrianism, Plato, Proclus, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi—not as a succession of historical figures, but as ways of accessing truth. Thirdly, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric was central to his thought, as was—to a lesser extent—initiation. Fourthly, he had a low opinion of the modern West, preferring Oriental Hellenism to “Latinism,” and seeing modernity as lamentably desacralized. Finally, at least towards the end of his life, he sought for surviving transmissions of what Guénon would have called the primordial tradition in ancient orders (the Order of St Jean of Jerusalem) and Freemasonry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s chapter on “Henry Corbin as Knight of the Temple” in Fakhoury’s volume sheds much light on this quest.

And yet Corbin’s perennialism was not Guénon’s. Even if Corbin was never just a scholar, he worked on original texts in their original languages with considerable scholarly rigor. When it came to perennialism, Corbin was interested in Christianity and Iranian Hellenism, while Guénon was interested in Hinduism and Arab Islam. Corbin was a Protestant, and Guénon abhorred Protestantism. Corbin valued Plato, and Guénon did not. Guénon’s perennialism derived from Theosophy, while Corbin’s (perennial) Hellenism derived from the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). The esoteric/exoteric pair is hard to avoid if one looks in certain areas of Islam, and while Corbin’s esoteric was located primarily in what he famously termed the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginary” between the realm of the forms and the experiential world, Guénon’s esoteric was mostly in the teachings of the primordial tradition. For Guénon, anti-modernism was primary, but for Corbin it was secondary.

In the end, the two men were also of different generations. Most of Corbin’s (1903-1978) work was published after Guénon’s death in 1951. Corbin's crucial Sohravardi d’Alep, fondateur de la doctrine illuminative was published in 1939, but—presumably because of the disruption caused by the Second World War—was not reviewed in Études traditionnelles until 1947. And even then it received only one (rather dismissive) paragraph, which can be read here.

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