The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology

The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology PDF Author: Rosemary Ann Lees
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cloud of unknowing
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology

The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology PDF Author: Rosemary Ann Lees
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cloud of unknowing
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description


“The” Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology

“The” Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology PDF Author: Rosemary Ann Lees
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology

The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology PDF Author: Rosemary Ann Lees
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cloud of unknowing
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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The Dionysian Mystical Theology

The Dionysian Mystical Theology PDF Author: Paul Rorem
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 145149582X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This book introduces the Pseudo-Dionysian mystical theology, with glimpses at key stages in its interpretation and critical reception through the centuries. Part one reproduces and provides commentary on the elusive Areopagites own miniature essay, The Mystical Theology, impenetrable without judicious reference to the rest of the Dionysian corpus. Stages in the reception and critique of this Greek corpus and theme are sketched in part two, from the sixth-century through the twelfth and to the critical reaction and opposition by Martin Luther in the Reformation.

Pseudo-Dionysius

Pseudo-Dionysius PDF Author: Paul Rorem
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195360362
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
"Dionysius the Areopagite" is the biblical name chosen by the pseudonymous author of an influential body of Christian theological texts, dating from around 500 C.E. The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, and The Mystical Theology offer a synthesis of biblical interpretation, liturgical spirituality, and Neoplatonic philosophy. Their central motif, which has made them the charter of Christian mysticism, is the upward progress of the soul toward God through the spiritual interpretation of the Bible and the liturgy. Dionysius continually reminds his readers, however, that all human concepts fall short of the transcendence of God and must therefore be abandoned in negotiations and silence. In this book, Rorem provides a commentary on all of the Dionysian writings, chapter by chapter, and examines especially their complex inner coherence. The Dionysian influence on medieval theology is introduced in essays on specific topics: hierarchy, biblical symbolism, angels, Gothic architecture, liturgical allegory, the scholastic doctrine of God, and the mystical theology of the western Middle Ages. Rorem's book makes these texts more accessible to both scholars and students and includes a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources.

Negating Negation

Negating Negation PDF Author: Timothy D Knepper
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
ISBN: 0227902653
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
'Negating Negation' critically examines key concepts in the corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: divine names and perceptible symbols; removal and negation; hierarchy and hierurgy; ineffability and incomprehensibility. In each case it argues that the Dionysian corpus does not negate all things of an absolutely ineffable God; rather, it negates few things of a God that is effable in important ways. Dionysian divine names are not inadequate metaphors or impotent attributes but transcendent divine causes. Divine names are not therefore flatly negated of God but removed as ordinary properties to be revealed as divine causes. It is concluded that since the Dionysian corpus does not abandon all things to apophasis, it cannot be called to testify on behalf of (post)modern projects in religious pluralism and anti-ontotheology. Quite the contrary, the Dionysian corpus gives reason for suspicion of such projects, especially when they relativize or metaphorize religious belief and practice in the name of absolute ineffability.

Mystical Languages of Unsaying

Mystical Languages of Unsaying PDF Author: Michael A. Sells
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226747875
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The subject of Mystical Languages of Unsaying is an important but neglected mode of mystical discourse, apophasis. which literally means "speaking away." Sometimes translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this close study of apophasis in Greek, Christian, and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it. This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite their wide-ranging differences in era, tradition, and theology. By showing how apophasis works as a mode of discourse rather than as a negative theology, this work opens a rich heritage to reevaluation. Sells demonstrates that the more radical claims of apophatic writers—claims that critics have often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic—are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying. This work also has important implications for the relationship of classical apophasis to contemporary languages of the unsayable. Sells challenges many widely circulated characterizations of apophasis among deconstructionists as well as a number of common notions about medieval thought and gender relations in medieval mysticism.

Negative Theology

Negative Theology PDF Author: Johannes Aakjær Steenbuch
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 166674218X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
How do we speak about God if God is ineffable? This paradoxical question lies at the heart of one of the strangest traditions of philosophical and theological thought: negative theology. As a tradition of thought, negative (or apophatic) theology can be traced back to the convergence of Greek philosophy with Jewish and Christian theology in the first century CE. Beginning with a seemingly simple claim about the ineffability or unsayability of God, negative theology evolved into a complex tradition of thought and spirituality. Today, together with a growing interest in patristic and medieval studies, negative theology enjoys renewed attention in contemporary philosophy and theology. This short introduction presents an overview of how the tradition developed from antiquity until present.

Time: Sense, Space, Structure

Time: Sense, Space, Structure PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004312315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
The essays in this volume explore the nature of time, our God-given medium of ascent, known, as Augustine puts it, through the ordered study of the “liberal disciplines that carry the mind to the divine (disciplinae liberales intellectum efferunt ad divina)”: grammar and dialectic, for example, to promote thinking; geometry and astronomy to grasp the dimensions of our reality; music, an invisible substance like time itself, as an exemplary bridge to the unseen substance of thoughts, ideas, and the nature of God (theology). This ascending course of study rests on procedure, progress, and attainment — on before, following, and afterwards — whose goal is an ascending erudition that lets us finally contemplate, as Augustine says in De ordine, our invisible medium — time — within time itself: time is immaterial, but experienced as substantial. The essays here look at projects that chronicle time “from the beginning,” that clarify ideas of creation “in time” and “simultaneous times,” and the interrelationships between measured time and eternity, including “no-time.” Essays also examine time as revealed in social and political contexts, as told by clocks, as notated in music and embodied in memorializing stone. In the final essays of this volume, time is understood as the subject and medium of consciousness. As Adrian Bardon says, “time is not so much a ‘what’ as a ‘how’”: a solution to “organizing experience and modeling events.” Contributors are (in order within the volume) Jesse W. Torgerson, Ken A. Grant, Danielle B. Joyner, Nancy van Deusen, Peter Casarella, Aaron Canty, Jordan Kirk, Vera von der Osten-Sacken, Gerhard Jaritz, Jason Aleksander, Sara E. Melzer, Mark Howard, Andrew Eschelbacher, Hans J. Rindisbacher, James F. Knapp, Peggy A. Knapp, Raymond Knapp, Michael Cole, Ike Kamphof and Leonard Michael Koff.

Medieval Nonsense

Medieval Nonsense PDF Author: Jordan Kirk
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 082329448X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning over and against the shell of the mere letter. This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was voxnon-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.