This distinctive comparison of Islamic and Christian mysticism focuses on the mystic journey in the two faith traditions - the journey which every believer must make and which leads to the Divine. ...The author clears away misconceptions and highlights similarities and differences in the thought and lives of six key mystics.
Around the year 1215, female mystics and their sacramental devotion were among orthodoxy’s most sophisticated weapons in the fight against heresy. Holy women’s claims to be in direct communication ...with God placed them in positions of unprecedented influence. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages female mystics were frequently mistrusted, derided, and in danger of their lives. The witch hunts were just around the corner. While studies of sanctity and heresy tend to be undertaken separately, Proving Woman brings these two avenues of inquiry together by associating the downward trajectory of holy women with medieval society’s progressive reliance on the inquisitional procedure. Inquisition was soon used for resolving most questions of proof. It was employed for distinguishing saints and heretics; it underwrote the new emphasis on confession in both sacramental and judicial spheres; and it heralded the reintroduction of torture as a mechanism for extracting proof through confession.
The Golden Age of Spanish mysticism has traditionally been read in terms of individual authors or theological traditions. God Made Word , however, considers early modern Spanish mysticism as a ...question of language and as a discourse that circulated in concrete social, institutional, and geographic spaces.
Proposing a new reading of early modern Spanish mysticism, God Made Word traces the struggles over the representation of interiorized spiritual union – the tension between making it known and conveying its unknowability – far beyond the usual canon of mystic literature. Dale Shuger combines a study of genres that have traditionally been the object of literary study, including poetry, theatre, and autobiography, with a language-based analysis of other areas that have largely been studied by historians and theologians. Arguing that these generic separations grew out of an increasing preoccupation with the cultivation and control of interiorized spirituality, God Made Word shows that by tracing certain mystic representations we come to understand the emergence of different discursive rules and expectations for a wide range of representations of the ineffable.
The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts, teachings that have been passed down through the millennia. Yet, as this groundbreaking new study shows, ...Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, emerging in response to the social prejudices that Jews faced.
Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane.Kabbalistic Revolutionproposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a radically empowering political discourse. While the era's Christian preachers claimed that Jews were blind to the true meaning of scripture and had been abandoned by God, the Kabbalists countered with a doctrine that granted Jews a uniquely privileged relationship with God. Lachter demonstrates how Kabbalah envisioned this increasingly marginalized group at the center of the universe, their mystical practices serving to maintain the harmony of the divine world.
For students of Jewish mysticism,Kabbalistic Revolutionprovides a new approach to the development of medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book's central questions should appeal to anyone with an interest in the relationships between religious discourses, political struggles, and ethnic pride.
In the Hellenistic world, ‘mystical’ referred to “secret” religious rituals, specifically starting with the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece. The mysteries were taken up in the same form in the ...Roman Empire and then morphed, as the dominant religion in the West shifted from the Olympians to the Way. This paper first focuses on the original meaning of the word, specifically as it refers to the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most significant Pan-Hellenic transcendence initiation ceremony aimed at accepting death and opening the consciousness into the superhuman understanding. The origins of the concept of mysteries, exploring in particular the Eleusinian mysteries, are briefly described, by investigating accounts from classical texts and archeological evidence. In the beginning of the last century the term mysticism reappeared and evolved in definition in religious studies and an account of the understanding is presented in the second part. The definition of the term “experience” is complex in general and even more complex for a term such as “mystical experience”. The last part of this paper explores the idea of what constitutes a mystical experience and how it relates to the accounts from the Eleusinian Mysteries. This paper uses literary and scholarly sources, in Ancient Greek, Greek and English.
Emotional states and their representations are gaining increasing attention in the historical study of mysticism. Building on the notion that mystical texts ca.n be utilized to form a relation with ...the divine, in the current article I explore the intersection of emotional expressions, auditory elements, and devotional traditions as central praxes in Ottoman society. While focusing on a late offshoot of the Sabbatean movement, the Ma'aminim of Salonica, a contextualized analysis of previously unexplored sources demonstrates that during the first half of the nineteenth century the Sabbateans reshaped their communal practices according to contemporary cultural conventions in the Ottoman sphere. This study suggests that viewing mystical texts as generators of affect and sensorial ritual draws the focus from the spiritual world of a mystic-author to the experiences of community members, and it proves that neighboring soundscapes and appropriation of popular culture may serve as fundamental components in the historicization of religious phenomena.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Pico della Mirandola, one of the most remarkable thinkers of the Renaissance, has become known as a founder of humanism and a supporter of secular rationality. Brian Copenhaver upends this ...understanding of Pico, unearthing the magic and mysticism in the most famous work attributed to him,The Oration on the Dignity of Man.
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