Thread by @mullasadra

#Corbin was one of a group of young #Protestant intellectuals in #Paris who discovered the work of #KarlBarth (1886-1968) the Swiss reformed theologian whom he met in Bonn in 1931 1/

Barth was known for his dialectical theology starting with his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (#DerRömerbrief) published in 1919; in 1934 he openly opposed Nazi authority insisting upon the absolute sovereignty of the divine and returned to Switzerland 2/

‘Faith is awe in the presence of the divine incognito; it is the love of God that is aware of the qualitative difference between God and man and God and the world’ 3/

His unfinished Church Dogmatics remains a defining work of reformed theology published from the 30s until just before his death 4/

#Corbin sense of #hiérohistoire eschatology and the presence of the divine in the cosmos seems to owe much to #Barth and he was his first translator of Die Not der evangelischen Kirche as Misère et grandeur de l’église évangélique in the journal Foi et vie 1932 5/

Foi et vie was edited by Pierre Maury (1890-1956) who was a friend and leading translator of Barth into #French and remains a leading journal of Protestant culture foi-et-vie.fr/home/index.php 6/

#Corbin interest extended to historical #Protestant figures like the #Lutheran mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) archive.org/details/JacobB… whom he encountered through Alexander Koyré (1892-1964) who taught at #EPHE 7/

Another was Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) the Swedish Lutheran mystic and ‘prophet’ whose eschatology influenced #Corbin abd to whom he was introduced by Albert-Marie Schmidt (1901-1966) in Germany in 1930 8/

#Corbin later wrote a couple of essays on Swedenborg’s #eschatology and his biblical hermeneutics comparing them to #esoteric_hermeneutics in the Islamic mystical traditions 9/

The third figure was Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1789) another #Lutheran figure and prominent post-Kantian philosopher of the ‘counter-Enlightenment’ and #romanticism 10/

#Corbin was attracted to #Hamann notion of the embodied nature of language but especially how poetry approximated the #imaginal language of the angels - while Koyré was in Cairo in 1937-38 he taught classes on Hamann at #EPHE on philosophy of Lutheranism 11/

In 1931 #Corbin established a liberal #Protestant journal to promote the theology of #Barth entitled Hic et nunc which survived until 1936 along with Schmidt, Denis de Rougemont (1906-1985), Roger Jézéquel (1898-1948) and the Swiss pastor Roland du Pury (1907-1979) 12/

The first issue was published with a manifesto addressed to readers of Foi et vie seeking redress of religious thought, and moral and civilisations revival that restored the divine to transcendence 13/

Corbin led the philosophical aspect of the journal and published four pieces in it that brought philosophy into dialogue with Barthian and Lutheran theology as well as elements of Hamann 14/

The first considered the role of philosophy as a dialogue with the divine that followed the dictum of #Barth cogitor ergo sum and his dialectical theology 15/

The second concerned resurrection, the third the symbolism and philosophy of the cross and the final one was a set of notes on existence and faith 16/

In all of this - and he remained a #Protestant - we find features that reoccur in his thought: the concern with image, symbol, the imaginal, with eschatology and being towards death, with sacred history in which the divine presence is immanent beyond time and history 17/

In one reflection by Denis de Rougemont which seems very much after the fact he remembered that the journal was partly inspired by the idea of ‘Hérétiques de toutes les religions, unissez-vous’ or perhaps it was ‘ésotéristes’ a/

And he also suggested that Hic et Nunc was not only based on the ‘neo-calvinism’ of Barth but also the #christian_existentialism of #Kierkegaard and the neo-Nietszcheanism of #Heidegger with a smattering of the neo-Thomism of #Maritain - quite a mixed bunch b/

Early influences on #Corbin as a #Protestant intellectual included the brother Joseph (1876-1952) and Jean Baruzi (1881-1953), the latter being Chair of the history of religions at the Collège de France portail-collections.imec-archives.com/ark:/29414/a01… 6a/

They had been some of the earliest recipients of the thought of #Henri_Bergson that they juxtaposed with an interest in mysticism especially Juan de la Crux (1542-1591) 6b/

#Corbin may have come to engage more closely with #Barth when he visited #Marburg in 1930 and met the Lutheran theologian and specialist on mysticism Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) and his colleague the reformed theologian Theodore Siegfried (1894-1971) 1a/

It was on that trip to Marburg that he also first ‘read’ #Heidegger 1b/

A fourth whom I forgot to mention was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) another Lutheran theologian through his influence on Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), #Barth and #Heidegger and the insistence that #hermeneutics was doing #philosophy 11a/

In the 1930s he was also engaged in Recherches philosophiques a journal dedicated to disseminating the thought of #Husserl, #Jaspers and #Heidegger and one which he wrote a major introduction to Barth 1c/

This was ‘La théologie dialectique et l’histoire’, Recherches philosophiques 3 (1935), pp. 250-84