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 : 200

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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 : Cloud of unknowing
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description


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.

Denying Divinity

Denying Divinity PDF Author: J. P. Williams
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191583766
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The classical texts of Christianity and Zen Buddhism contain resources with potent appeal to contemporary spirituality. The 'apophatic', or 'negative', may offer a means to integrate the conservation of traditional religious practices and beliefs with an openness to experience beyond the limits of doctrine and of rational thought. Denying Divinity argues for a new understanding of what is meant by apophatic theology, supported by extensive analysis of the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite, St Maximus the Confessor, and Zen Master Dogen. It demonstrates how an apophatic spirituality might inform personal and communal spiritual development; and sketches out the contribution it can offer to modern debate on theology and postmodernism, entropy, and interfaith dialogue, and to development of an active theological commitment to humanity.

Mysticism

Mysticism PDF Author: Bruno Borchert
Publisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 9780877287728
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Mystical experience is not really understood in our modern Western culture, but we have a rich history and traadition that can be traced from remote ages to the present day. It is a phenomenon common to all religions and races, differing in manifestation, but sharing a similar foundation#8212the realization from personal experience that all things are interdependent, that the source is One. The mystical experience is often brief, immediate, maybe mysterious#8212a last experience that rbings all-embracing emotion (love) into the bounds of concrete reality. Bruno Borchert brings mysticism into sharp focus by exploring ideas and concecpts from world religions and explaining Christian mystics in history, in perspective, and through art. He takes us from Zoroaster to European alchemists, explores the Hellenistic world, the feminine world-view, and the experience of God shard by saints and well-known mystics such as St. Theresa and St. Francis. Modern approaches explored by psychologists like Jung and Maslow, and the contemporary search for mystical love make this a necessary book for people who want to understand the spiritual path.

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.

Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives

Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004365834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives examines the interaction between medieval English worshippers and the material objects of their devotion. The volume also addresses the afterlives of objects and buildings in their temporal journeys from the Middle Ages to the present day. Written by the participants of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded seminar held in York, U.K., in 2014, the chapters incorporate site-specific research with the insights of scholars of visual art, literature, music, liturgy, ritual, and church history. Interdisciplinarity is a central feature of this volume, which celebrates interactivity as a working method between its authors as much as a subject of inquiry. Contributors are Lisa Colton, Elizabeth Dachowski, Angie Estes, Gregory Erickson, Jennifer M. Feltman, Elisa A. Foster Laura D. Gelfand, Louise Hampson, Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Heather S. Mitchell-Buck, Julia Perratore, Steven Rozenski, Carolyn Twomey, and Laura J. Whatley.

Fifteenth-Century Carthusian Reform: The World of Nicholas Kempf

Fifteenth-Century Carthusian Reform: The World of Nicholas Kempf PDF Author: Dennis D. Martin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004477918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Fifteenth-Century Carthusian Reform argues that monastic theology offers a medieval Catholic paradigm distinct from the scholastic theology that has been the conventional source for medieval-oriented interpretations of Renaissance and Reformation. It is based on thorough study of the manuscript record. Nicholas Kempf (ca. 1415-1497) taught at the University of Vienna before becoming the head of Carthusian monasteries in rural Austria and Slovenia. Faced with calls for reform in church and society, he placed his confidence in the patristic Christian idea of reform: the reform of the image of God in the human person. This contemplative monastic idea of reform depended on authoritative structures, especially the monastic rule and rational -- yet divinely inspired -- discernment by a spiritual director. What seemed like simpleminded submission to monastic structures was actually a way to avoid relying on human effort for salvation. By returning to one's true self (the image of God), one opened oneself up for genuine social relationships. To activist reformers, whether adherents of medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, or modern Enlightenment, this monastic idea of reform has seemed escapist, backward-looking, and "womanish." Monks accepted these labels but read them as signs of hidden strength. This book attempts to read through monastic lenses.

Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative

Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative PDF Author: Suzanne M. Yeager
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052187792X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
An original study of the political, religious and literary uses of representations of the holy city in the fourteenth century.

Nicholas of Cusa and His Age: Intellect and Spirituality

Nicholas of Cusa and His Age: Intellect and Spirituality PDF Author: Thomas M. Izbicki
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004473653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This volume commemorates the 6th centennial of the birth of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a Renaissance polymath whose interests included law, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, theology, mysticism and relations between Christians and non-Christian peoples. The contributors to this volume reflect Cusanus' multiple interests; and, by doing so they commemorate three deceased luminaries of the American Cusanus Society: F. Edward Cranz, Thomas P. McTighe and Charles Trinkaus. Contributors include: Christopher M. Bellitto, H. Lawrence Bond, Elizabeth Brient, Louis Dupré, Wilhelm Dupré, Walter Andreas Euler, Lawrence Hundersmarck, Thomas M. Izbicki, Dennis D. Martin, Yelena Matusevich, Bernard McGinn, Clyde Lee Miller, Thomas E. Morrissey, Brian A. Pavlac, and Morimichi Watanabe. Publications by Charles Trinkaus: • Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print)