The Hermeneutics of “Lovingly Return” in Sohrevardi’s Resālat al-Abrāj Based on Henry Corbin’s Illuminative Phenomenological Approach

Resālat al-Abrāj or Kalemāte Zowqiye is one of Sohrevardi’s symbolic treatises in Arabic studied less. With Henry Corbin’s phenomenological hermeneutics, we understand it represents the story of lovingly returning of a soul to his original homeland, in which is revealed to the soul his story of travelling through the phenomena of real and live symbols, in such a manner that he is saved and returned to his origin through this revealing. Corbin believes "returning to the Origin" is the very principle that contemporary man has forgotten following the body-mind dualism of post-Descartian cosmology, caused by disappearing of an intermediator i.e. the world of soul in his active and spiritual imagination. What makes imagination agent and spiritual is the love for returning to the true homeland; with gnosis reminding it and referring to the angelic origin. Corbin describes the spiritual hermeneutics as returning to the origins and archetypes of phenomena, revealed to the soul through dematerialization and active imagination in the intermediate world. He tries to represent the contemporary aspect of “mundus imaginalis” as the theory of “active imagination” and his especial phenomenology. Here we present this lovingly returning in the mirror of symbols wherein the origins of phenomena appeared.