Over the past several years, "Western" Christianity has left me a bit hungry, and jaded, seeming to be something of an amalgam of Christianity conflated with the "American" spirit, as if the two are directly connected, that God somehow favors America. I won't go there but let me just say that God does not play favorites - God isn't interested in nation building.
Anyhow, this, along with the often baffling theology of Christianity, caused me to search out Islam as a viable path. It's an old story on this blog but it led me to Henry Corbin's writings. It also led me to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. It was through reading Vladimir Lossky's works, specifically The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, that I began to get a good grasp on the Eastern church's theological perspective. I find, in many ways, my Christian thought life aligning with this view.
While not radically different than that of the Christian West, specifically the American West, it is different. More intellectual, more reasoned and less emotionally driven than the Christianity I am familiar with, it provides a solid foundation and helps me to understand more deeply Christianity as it evolved.
Henry Corbin, on the other hand, while not denouncing Christianity, as such, providse a more 'gnostic' view, giving approval to the "docetic" view of Christ (though understanding his definition of docetic is key to understanding what this means). Yet in reading his writings and those of Vladimir Lossky I have come to realize that there is common ground here, there are similarities, even if certain theological constructs are different.
Though I have only begun to research this, there is a similar approach to God's communication in the world in Lossky's dissection of God's "essence and energies" and Corbin's fascination with the "emanation" and "angelology" present in 'gnostic' Christianity as well as in the Shi'ite/Isma'ili variations within Islam.
This isn't to elevate Corbin or Lossky's writings to authoratative. Accepting the basic premise of "People of the Book" no one's writings achieve this status. However, it does reveal to me that there is something similar in Eastern Christianity and that of the Islam that evolved in the lands of the Eastern Church. To what extent one influenced the other is difficult to say and it's quite possible that "causality" is an oversimplification of a worldview that is inherent in the people who populated this region.
I don't know that Corbin rejected Christianity wholesale or embraced Islam or if he just lived out his own faith that he had carved. But it's interesting that in trying to present an alternative "Christian" spirituality via Islam, Corbin has stepped writing into the spiritual universe of the Orthodox Church. It seems, in preliminary thoughts, that the two would find much to talk about were they to have ever met.
