"You who enter here, give up on hope" indicates Dante on the frontispiece of the Hell doorway.
"Isn't it the warning Henry Corbin should have meditate on when he entered freemasonry at sixty three years-old, in 1966 ? " asks Jean Clergue-Vila, ironically... Henry Corbin was famous as a philosopher, specialist of Iran and of Shiite gnosis.
However his passion in the twelve last years of his life to study the (hypothetic) links between "freemasonry and the Order of the Temple is still unknown.
Indeed, during the sixties, the reading of the famous book of René Le Forestier "La franc-maçonnerie occultiste et templière au XVIIIème siècle" was received by Henry Corbin as a revelation.
This book showed the existence of a spiritual masonic quest full of Christian sensibility... A quest extended in an Inner Order, chivalrous by nature and an exact archetypal transcription of the ideal developed by Corbin: the figure of Parsifal following the Opera by Richard Wagner, from the legend of Wolfram von Eschenbach.
When he still was a student, Henry Corbin declared to his friend Robert de Chateaubriand:
"it is only by the ways of a spiritual elite, a true chivalry of the spirit that soul will be able to evolve in a world as ruined as ours from its antique metaphysics vitality..." so to Henry Corbin waits with impatience for the edification of a true spiritual chivalry built on the ruins of the old society.
The deep ambition of Henry Corbin to an ideal chivalry drove him after a brilliant university career and an international fame for his books, to get closer to different French masonic groups.
He brought with him some of his former students (who became famous since then) such as Gilbert Durand, Antoine Faivre, Richard Stauffer, Frédérick Tristan and Jean-Claude Frère.
Thus, between Paris and Teheran, through the group they created, "L’Ordre de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem", Corbin and his disciples tried to renew the invisible wire which bounds historicity to sacred History, freemasonry to temple chivalry, and let's extrapolate "Church of stones" to "Inner Church"….
Did Corbin find in his time's Freemasonry the universal spiritual chivalry he sought his whole life ?
Element s of answer with Jean Clergue-Vila in this conference filmed during the 6th debate of the days of the Amis d’Henry et Stella Corbin.
