All the World an Icon : Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings

" All the World an Icon is the fourth book in an informal ""quartet"" of works by Tom Cheetham on the spirituality of Henry Corbin, a major twentieth-century scholar of Sufism and colleague of C. G. Jung, whose influence on contemporary religion and the humanities is beginning to become clear. Cheetham's books have helped spark a renewed interest in the work of this important, creative religious thinker. Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was professor of Islamic religion at the Sorbonne in Paris and director of the department of Iranic studies at the Institut Franco-Iranien in Teheran. His wide-ranging work includes the first translations of Heidegger into French, studies in Swedenborg and Boehme, writings on the Grail and angelology, and definitive translations of Persian Islamic and Sufi texts. He introduced such seminal terms as ""the imaginal realm"" and ""theophany"" into Western thought, and his use of the Shi'ite idea of ta'wil or ""spiritual interpretation"" influenced psychologist James Hillman and the literary critic Harold Bloom. His books were read by a broad range of poets including Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, and his impact on American poetry, says Cheetham,