Harold Bloom, the late Yale literary critic, makes a related case in his admiring preface to an edition of Corbin’s Creative Imagination, pointing out that both the Iranian Sufis and Corbin himself were much more eclectic than Corbin wants to admit.45 Indeed, Bloom wants to push Corbin’s imaginal history and hermeneutic into the professional study of Shakespeare and modern English literature, both well outside any Iranian or even religious register. I think Bloom wants to do this, partly or mostly, because of his own gnostic revelations, with which he tells us, point blank, he was gifted in
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