Alone with the Alone is the English title of the major study of the 12th–13th-century Andalusian Sufi master Muhyiddīn Ibn ʿArabi by the French philosopher and Islamicist Henry Corbin, originally published as L'Imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d'Ibn ʿArabi by Flammarion in 1958 and translated by Ralph Manheim for the Bollingen Series in 1969. Corbin reconstructs Ibn ʿArabi's metaphysics of the creative imagination (khayāl) and the intermediate realm of the mundus imaginalis (ʿālam al-mithāl) — a level of being between sensory matter and pure intellect — as the proper ontological location for visionary experience, prophetic dream, and theophany.
The Princeton University Press edition carries a preface by Harold Bloom. The book opens with a brief spiritual topography of the medieval Arabo-Persian world before moving to Ibn ʿArabi's life and doctrines; two complementary essays follow — on sympathy and theosophy, and on creative imagination and creative prayer — with a section of notes and appendices that includes Corbin's own translations of several Sufi treatises.
Reception
The book is the foundational English-language reference on Ibn ʿArabi and Corbin's most-read work outside specialist Islamic studies; it is widely credited with bringing the concept of the mundus imaginalis into 20th-century philosophy, depth psychology, and comparative religion. Corbin was a central figure at the Eranos conferences alongside Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem, and his framing has shaped subsequent readers from James Hillman's archetypal psychology to Tom Cheetham's imaginal-studies work. Specialists in Islamic philosophy (William Chittick, Sachiko Murata, Michel Chodkiewicz) have argued that Corbin's existentialist and theosophical-Iranian framing imports later Shi'ite and Suhrawardian categories onto Ibn ʿArabi that the texts themselves do not carry — but the book remains the indispensable entry point in any Western-language bibliography on the subject, and Princeton University Press has kept it in continuous print.
Frequently asked
What is Alone with the Alone about?
It is Henry Corbin's sustained study of the 12th–13th-century Andalusian Sufi master Ibn ʿArabi. Corbin reconstructs Ibn ʿArabi's metaphysics of the creative imagination (khayāl) and the mundus imaginalis — an intermediate realm between sensory matter and pure intellect — as the proper ontological site of visionary experience, prophetic dream, and theophany.
What is the mundus imaginalis?
Corbin's term for Ibn ʿArabi's ʿālam al-mithāl — a level of being he identifies between the sensory and the purely intellectual. He argued it was the proper ontological location for visionary and prophetic experience, and that its absence as a recognized category in modern Western philosophy had impoverished both philosophy and the interpretation of religious visions.
Why is Alone with the Alone considered a foundational text?
It is the foundational English-language reference on Ibn ʿArabi and Corbin's most-read work outside specialist Islamic studies. It is widely credited with bringing the concept of the mundus imaginalis into 20th-century philosophy, depth psychology (via James Hillman's archetypal psychology), and comparative religion. Princeton University Press has kept it in continuous print.