Mystical Languages of Unsaying

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

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.

Unsaying God

Author: Aydogan Kars
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190942452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
Focusing on the first seven centuries of the Islamic intellectual history, Unsaying God examines the ways in which Muslim, and some Jewish, scholars negated what they said about God in order to indicate the limits of human thought on the absolute. Ardogan Kars argue that contemporary studies on apophasis and negative theology in Islam are strongly motivated by the challenges and demands of modernity, and tend to preserve European universalism in the language of pluralism.

Christian Mysticism

Author: Dr Kevin Magill
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409480496
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
This book introduces students to Christian mysticism and modern critical responses to it. Christianity has a rich tradition of mystical theology that first emerged in the writings of the early church fathers, and flourished during the Middle Ages. Today Christian mysticism is increasingly recognised as an important Christian heritage relevant to today's spiritual seekers. The book sets out to provide students and other interested readers with access to the main theoretical approaches to Christian mysticism – including those propounded by William James, Steven Katz, Bernard McGinn, Michael Sells, Denys Turner and Caroline Walker-Bynum. It also explores postmodern re-readings of Christian mysticism by authors such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-François Lyotard. The book first introduces students to the main themes that underpin Christian mysticism. It then reflects on how modern critics have understood each of them, demonstrating that stark delineation between the different theoretical approaches eventually collapses under the weight of the complex interaction between experience and knowledge that lies at the heart of Christian mysticism. In doing so, the book presents a deliberate challenge to a strictly perennialist reading of Christian mysticism. Anyone even remotely familiar with Christian mysticism will know that renewed interest in Christian mystical writers has created a huge array of scholarship with which students of mysticism need to familiarise themselves. This book outlines the various modern theoretical approaches in a manner easily accessible to a reader with little or no previous knowledge of this area, and offers a philosophical/theological introduction to Christian mystical writers beyond the patristic period important for the Latin Western Tradition.

Wandering Joy

Author: Meister Eckhart
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 9780970109712
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
In this remarkable work, Reiner Schürmann shows Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century Christian mystic, as the great teacher of the birth of God in the soul, which shatters the dualism between God and the world, the self and God. This is an exposition of Eckhar's mysticism--perhaps the best in English--and, because Eckhart is a profound philosopher for whom knowing precedes being, it is also an exemplary work of contemporary philosophy. Schürmann shows us that Eckhart is our contemporary. He describes the threefold movement of detachment, release, and "dehiscence" (splitting open), which leads to the experience of "living without a why," in which all things are in God and sheer joy. Going beyond that, he describes the transformational force of approaching the Godhead, the God beyond God: "A man who has experienced the same no longer has a place to establish himself. He has settled on the road, and for those who have learned how to listen, his existence becomes a call. This errant one dwells in joy. Through his wanderings the origin beckons."

Sensible Ecstasy

Author: Amy Hollywood
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226349462
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism. What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.

The Bridge Betrayed

Author: Michael A. Sells
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520216628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
The Bridge Betrayed reveals the crucial role of the religious mythology of Kosovo in the destruction of Yugoslavia and the genocide in Bosnia. A new preface discusses the deepening crisis in Kosovo - the epicenter of that mythology.

Experience and Religion

Author: Wilhelm Dupré
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9789052012797
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
The enactment of humanity begins with experiences and culminates in the effects of coping with experiences. Experience confirms the human potential, but indicates also its limitations, both in the sense that the absence of experiences undermines established modes of behavior, and that disregard and misunderstanding of experiences lead to distorted forms of personal and cultural relations. This book is an attempt to localize religion, as well as the study of religions, within the context of experiences and as a topic of philosophical inquiry. Focusing on the question of specifically religious experiences and investigating various models of the relationship between religion and experience, the study suggests that no specific experiences are needed to understand the emergence and development of religious traditions and attitudes. Assessing the implications of basic questions and attitudes in religious studies, it presents a theory of religion which is rooted in the internal dynamics of being human and cultural, and marked by a culture-oriented understanding of philosophy. The book concludes with a discussion of various phenomena which can be addressed as modes and forms of implicit religion, since they do not comply with expectations of traditional or explicit religion.

The Unnaming of Aliass

Author: Karin Bolender
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1953035132
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description

War and the Cosmos in Picasso's Texts, 1936-1940

Author: Lydia Gasman
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595399002
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Book Description
Vert ciel ciel ciel ciel vert vert ciel ciel ciel ciel noir vert vert ciel marron ciel ciel ciel noir noir noir noir blanc blanc noir vert marron ciel ciel cahce dans ses poches ses mains la nuit ciel aloes fleur ciel cobalt de corde livre de chevet ciel Coeur eventual violet ciel robe de soir bouquet de violettes violet violet ciel Pierre de lune ciel noir vert ciel marron roué de fue d'artifice perle ciel noir jaune vert citronnier noir ciseaux ombre jaune neige vert marron crème remplie d'eau-de-vie un vol de canaries bleu vert noir loup ciel ciel ciel jaune linge brodé vert nuit ciel soufre blanc plat d'argent terre labourée ciel ciel blane ciel ciel ciel blanc ciel ciel ciel ciel blanc blanc ciel bleu bleu bleu

Early Islamic Mysticism

Author: Michael Anthony Sells
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809136193
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
This volume makes available and accessible the writings of the crucial early period of Islamic mysticism during which Sufism developed as one of the world's major mystical traditions. The texts are accompanied by commentary on their historical, literary and philosophical context.