Esoteric Doctrines Research Articles

Trinity and freedom

Despite the renaissance of trinitarian reflection during the last half-century of Christian theology, the doctrine of the immanent Trinity – God's triune being in se as distinct from God's acts or operations ad extra – has suffered significant neglect. Following Karl Rahner's now famous axiom that ‘the “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity’, contemporary theologians have focused primarily on the economy of salvation as the means by which God's triune being is known. Speculation about the inner life of God, abstracted from God's own self-revelation, has been eschewed for its tendency to turn the immanent Trinity into a rarified, esoteric doctrine with little influence on practical piety. Thus for most contemporary theologians, the neglect of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is quite benign.

Queen Christina’s esoteric interests as a background to her Platonic Academies

In 1681 the blind quietist, Francois Malaval, stated that Queen Christina of Sweden late in life had ‘given up’ [Hermes] Trismegistos and the Platonists, in favour of the Church fathers. The statement does not explain what role the Church fathers were to play in her last years, but it does show that Christina really had been interested in the rather elitist and esoteric doctrine of Hermetic Platonic Christianity. In this article the author looks at her library to show the depth of this Hermetic involvement. Her interest serves as a background to her life as ex-queen in Italy after her famous abdication from the Swedish throne in 1654, when she was 27 years old.

Влияние религиозных и эзотерических учений на развитие психологии

It is the author’s opinion that the differentiation of scientific and religious doctrines lies in the ways they answer the question about the determinants of human activity. Theologians’ works, multitudes of ethic principles, complex models and principles of analysis stated in religious and esoteric doctrines are taken as the positive influence factors. Religious doctrines’ aspiration for monopolization of rights of the knowledge about the sense of human life and about the basis of the ethic rules are taken as the negative influence factors.

From the Prayer of the Apostle Paul to the Three Steles of Seth: Codices I, XI and VII from Nag Hammadi Viewed as a Collection

AbstractWhile the individual texts in the various codices found near Nag Hammadi have been studied and discussed, relatively little attention has been paid to the motives underlying their original selection and organisation. Codices I, XI and VII in particular have been shown on palaeographical and codicological grounds to make up a sub-collection within the larger Nag Hammadi collection. Despite their doctrinal diversity, the texts found in these three codices were intended by their compilers to be read in sequence. The purpose of this article is to examine the logic behind this choice and arrangement of texts, and to advance the hypothesis that this three volume collection is intended to progressively introduce the reader to a heterodox and esoteric doctrine of religious conflict and polemic, in which the reader is invited to identify him- or herself with an embattled minority group within the larger Christian community, a group who nonetheless see themselves as enlightened and as being of the "lineage of the Father."

On a Five-Colored Cloud: The Songs of Mount Wutai

The Mount Wutai poems' take as their theme the Buddhist concept of nirmanakdya, or bianxian l: the idea that buddhas and bodhisattvas can transform themselves and vary their manifestations at will according to the needs of individual beings. These transformations and manifestations take place on Chinese soil, and even, more importantly, in the Chinese imagination. However, in the Mount Wutai poems, a unique Buddhist imagination also emerges: a cloud no longer appears as the floating cloud so familiar in the Chinese literary tradition but as a five-colored cloud or nimbus surrounding the bodhisattva Mafijuiri and his various forms. The five-colored cloud is one of many numinous traces (lingji M~p), or holy traces (shengji w`E), of Mafijuiri and other extraordinary beings which appear repeatedly in the Mount Wutai poems. Buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats, and other divine beings change into forms both understandable and suitable to the person experiencing the manifestation. Although the goal of these transformations and manifestations is to save the recipient, they are colorful, magical, entertaining, and far more comprehensible than abstract or esoteric Buddhist doctrines.

Modernism and the Initiation of Ruben Dario's Centaurs

de los centauros enables Dario to integrate ancient themes from Leconte de Lisle with fashionable esoteric doctrines from Schurd for three aims germane to worldwide modernism: to subordinate tradition to novelty, to reconcile science and religion, and to elevate cultural creativity to a religion. or decades, Hispanists conceived modernism as the preciosity and imitation of Ruben Dario in Prosasprofanas (1896). Yet current criticism contextualizes Hispanic modern- ism within world modernism. Modernism signifies not a literary movement, but an outlook on all spheres of culture, including architecture, music, painting, and every genre of literature. On five continents, modernism denotes a mindset of cultural creativity which (1) appre- ciates innovation over static tradition, with tradition subordinated to the desire to be modem; (2) springs from the economic and post-Darwinian cognitive crisis of the mid-nineteenth-century, tending to liberalize religion; and (3), given this religious instability, it elevates to a religion creative effort in all endeavors (Gamache 33, Orringer 29). Dario shows this mindset even in Prosasprofanas. The purpose of the present study is to show that the most ambitious poem of that anthology, Coloquio de los centauros (henceforth CC), incorporating motives visible in other poems of the same collection, illustrates modernism as here defined. Dario pits his creativity against that of French Pamassian Leconte de Lisle. He employs Greek mythological tradition to serve his new purpose: to find a tentative poetic solution to the cultural crisis of science versus religion. That solution is an esoteric religion of poetic creation. Dario integrates ideas from Edouard Schure's book Les Grands Inities (1889) with elements from Leconte de Lisle's poem Khir6n in harmony with the worldwide modernist sensitivity. The learned Arturo Marasso Roca (13) long ago noted Schure's presence throughout Dario's poetry. He observed isolated borrowings in CC, though without detecting Dario's modifi- cations of Schurd and without making a total interpretation of that poem. Moreover, Marasso showed some reluctance to acknowledge Leconte de Lisle's sustained influence. Scholars after Marasso sporadically refer to Schure (Skyrme, Jensen), yet a concentrated study of his and Leconte de Lisle's contributions to CC still remains to be made. First, I summarize Schur6's thinking on Orphism and Pythagoreanism. Next, I show how Dario strives for greater depth than Leconte de Lisle by introducing Pythagorean doctrines into CC. Finally, I point out Dario's alteration of those doctrines by integrating them with a sensual estheticism germane to Orphism as described by Schur6 (cf. Jensen 10). The poetic result exemplifies modernism as here conceived. Les Grands Initids has the main aim of reconciling religion and science, whose conflict, the greatest evil of Schur6's times, has shaken civilization to its roots. The Church privileges faith over reason, while science, agnostic and materialistic, overlooks spirit. Philosophy, powerless and skeptical, has opened a fissure in individual souls and in society (ix-x). Schur6 laments that literature and art have lost the sense of the divine. Literary materialism calls itself naturalism, thereby debasing nature. Positivists like Comte and Spencer conceive truth as the accumulation of facts. But Schur6 thirsts for a superior, total, eternal truth. He finds Europe a collective Hamlet, undecided whether to be or not to be (xxvi). The solution lies in esoteric knowledge. A

Philosophy, politics and contestability

The essential contestability thesis continues to enjoy widespread support, and has been invoked as an explanatory fact in analysing ideological morphology. This paper argues, however, that the general form of the thesis faces incoherence or failure: it violates plausible constraints on concept-possession, and is forced to rely either on an esoteric doctrine which shortcircuits the thesis's original explanatory rationale, or on an error theory which cannot do the explanatory job the thesis requires. The thesis started by aiming to explain a common political phenomenon, that of endemic disagreement, but is forced to turn away from the world of politics towards ideal theory. The limit of explanation is reached when we apply the thesis to the concept of politics itself. For the point of essential contestability was to understand political disagreement, and if the thesis is true of politics itself, it is not clear how the explanandum can even be specified. This casts doubt on the viability of political design, the characteristic project of modern philosophical liberalism, since it is not clear that the project can even be coherently specified in advance of politics.

:The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614-1698)

If he had lived among the Greeks, he would now be numbered among the stars. So wrote Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his epitaph for Francis Mercury van Helmont. Leibniz was not the only contemporary to admire and respect van Helmont, but although famous in his own day, he has been virtually ignored by modern historians. Yet his views influenced Leibniz, contributed to the development of modern science, and fostered the kind of ecumenicalism that made the concept of toleration conceivable. The progressive nature of van Helmont's thought was based on his deep commitment to the esoteric doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah. With his friend Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, van Helmont edited the Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), the largest collection of Lurianic Kabbalistic texts available to Christians up to that time. Because the subject matter of this work appears so difficult and arcane, it has never been appreciated as a significant text for understanding the emergence of modern thought. However, one can find in it the basis for the faith in science, the belief in progress, and the pluralism characteristic of later western thought. The Lurianic Kabbalah thus deserves a place it has never received in histories of western scientific and cultural developments. Although van Helmont's efforts contributed to the development of religious toleration, his experience as a prisoner of the Inquisition accused of Judaising reveals the problematic relations between Christians and Jews during the early-modern period. New Inquisitional documents relating to van Helmont's imprisonment will be discussed to illustrate the difficulties faced by anyone advocating philo-semitism and toleration at the time.

Aspects of the Sūfism of the Rifaciyya in Bulgaria and Macedonia in the light of the study published by Canon W. H. T. Gairdner in The Moslem World

Abstract Amongst the major Sufi orders, the Rifaciyya has received less attention than several others. It is only recently that detailed studies of its branches in the Balkans have been published by Alexandre Popovic, Nathalie Clayer and Liliana Masulovic‐Marsol This fact alone makes Canon Gairdner's article on the Rifaci dhikr and the spiritual path (tariq) of the order, which was published in The Moslem World (Vol. 11, 1912, pp. 171–181 and 245–257), an unusually interesting one. This is so, despite the narrowly focused view of the spiritual vision of the order which he obtained from two converted, or Christian‐influenced, Turkish ‘Shaykhs’ from Bulgaria. He met them in Potsdam during those years when he was a ‘wandering scholar’ in Germany (1910–1911) immediately prior to the publication of his translation of al‐Ghazali's, Mishkat al‐anwar in Der Islam in 1914. His information is sparse in regard to factual details about the distribution and the importance of the order in Bulgaria and Macedonia at that time. On the other hand, his description of the dhikr and the complicated esoteric scheme of the Sevenfold Spiritual Path that was followed by the initiated prior to his attainment of the Divine Reality (al‐haqiqa) is vividly conveyed and is remarkably detailed. In this respect, his study is a pioneer discovery. It predates, for example, J. P. Brown's, The Darvishes, or Oriental Spiritualism (London, 1927), Dr K. Dittmer's, Riten des Rufaci‐Ordens ('Heulende Derwische') in Serajevo (Berlin, 1939), and John Kmgsley Birge's, The Bektashi Order of Dervishes (London and Hartford, USA, 1937). The article assesses the value of Gairdner's discoveries today and the light shed by him upon the esoteric doctrines taught in the Sūfi orders in Bulgaria at that time. It also questions the criteria adopted in the Christian approach to Sūfism, in general In some current Sufi studies the existence of ‘heterogeneous baggage’ which exists at all levels in the orders is sometimes overlooked. The relationship between Sūfism in the Balkans and the prevailing Eastern Orthodoxy, which at a popular level is equally ‘heterodox’, is a subject which deserves to be re‐examined urgently. It has a bearing on the misunderstandings and the current strained, even inimical, relations between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans at the century's close.

Imitatio Deiin Maimonides'Guide of the Perplexed

There is probably no topic in Maimonides' philosophy more thoroughly explored than that of human perfection, many of the studies dealing explicitly with the notion ofimitatio Dei. Maimonides' view of ultimate perfection has been interpreted alternatively as primarily either intellectual, political, ethical, or halakhic. Many have interpreted Maimonides as positing a harmonious combination of the contemplative life and the life of socially oriented activity—bios praktikos—despite the evident tension between the two.Others have explained the apparent inconsistency in Maimonides' approach in terms of the distinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrines. The appropriate texts in Maimonides' writings have been analyzed in detail, and the sources at his disposal have been discussed at length. The challenge facing the student of Maimonides' thought, however, lies not only in explicating the individual texts which deal in a direct manner with the topic, but also in identifying all the issues and texts which are relevant to the topic, as well as their sources, and how they are related.

On Mysticism and Esotericism among the Zoroastrians

The idea of Zoroastrian mysticism might at first glance seem a contradiction in terms. The Good Religion, after all, is čīmīg, “rational,” above all else: Zoroaster elegantly solved the most intractable mystery of all faiths, theodicy, by the revelation of cosmic dualism. The mere assertion that there are esoteric doctrines within Zoroastrianism has been criticized. This criticism springs in part from a flawed perception of mysticism itself, which, as it will be argued, is not an independent entity, everywhere the same. Rather, each religion has a mysticism of its own, often irreconcilable in some of its features with the mainstream, and, in the case of Zoroastrianism, with some of the religion's plain logic. Also, the existence of mysticism within a religious tradition does not imply its centrality to that tradition. Mysticism exists in Christianity, but could scarcely be called essential to it, considering the claim, elaborated as the Christian church rose to universal prominence, to the radically overt and sufficient truth of the Gospel.

On the Practice of Esotericism

Esotericism, formerly called esoterism, is a complex phenomenon which does not permit any simple or uniform explanation. The practice of esotericism or the detection of esoteric doctrines has a lengthy history involving occultists, alchemists, kabbalists, numerologists, poets, mystics, and astrologers. In almost every case the contention that a book or a doctrine contains an esoteric or arcane message generates controversy. But perhaps nowhere is the subject more controversial than in the suggestion that esotericism was practiced by philosophers of the past. My intention in this essay is to consider some general aspects of esotericism as it applies to philosophy and philosophic communication and then focus on a particular type of it which has become quite neglected.

Exploring The Changing Light at Sandover: An Interview with James Merrill

visionary epic suggests an extensive work expressing sublime revelations, in high artistic style and language. mode is rare nowadays. Yet given its centrality in the tradition of great poetry (Dante, Milton, Blake), it is heartening to find someone ambitious enough to attempt a contemporary work in the genre. work in question is Changing Light at Sandover (New York; Atheneum, 1982), a 560-page poem by Pulitzer prize-winning poet James Merrill. poem charts communications with spirits over a twenty-five-year period, even as it tells the story of the poet's life during that time. Its other-worldly protagonists offer revisionary readings of material from such diverse sources as the Bible and Blavatsky, integrating such material with (especially scientific) and the poet's personal life. I undertook this interview with the purpose of clarifying some of the more difficult aspects of the epic trilogy. First I sought clarification in exploration of the poem's background and mode of composition. Second, since the poem partly challenges the largely Christian perspective of visionary epic since the Middle Ages, a perspective I share, I thought that another mode of clarification might be to explore the ideological divide between Merrill's new age doctrines and mainstream Christian beliefs and values. This also enabled me to pursue the question whether the trilogy trivializes the Great Tradition--Genesis, Milton, Dante--by revising it in line with modern knowledge and the occult, a question the poet himself addresses, with some anguish, early in Mirabell (CLS 136). So the interview progresses from discussion of the poem's background and composition to a skeptical exploration of its esoteric doctrines. interview took place in the poet's home in Stonington, Connecticut. Here Merrill and David Jackson, his partner at the ouija board, received many of the revelations that underpin the poem. Indeed, the ensuing dialogue took place in the very stardeck or attic room mentioned in Ephraim. CB: Let's begin with 1946, and an incident referred to in your poem A Tenancy. You make a pact with the Source of Light; you seem to commit yourself to some visionary project. JM: Well no. It was nothing that grand. What had happened by 1946 was that I had been, for several months in the Army, perhaps been in more physical danger than I had ever been in my life. I had begun to understand some of the implications of Hiroshima, what another war might mean. I was frightened, and I wanted time to do what I had to do on earth, and I think what I was bargaining for was simply a fairly unbroken time without too many outside disturbances. CB: One thing you wanted to pursue without such disturbance, of course, was your writing career. Did you have any difficulty, at that early stage, in getting your work published? JM: No, I don't think so. Of course poets have multiplied according to a geometric progression. Every generation there are more of us. There were many fewer poets--there were fewer periodicals too--in 1945. But by and large the poems that got sent out were taken. Where I felt more at a loss was during the years after First Poems appeared. It had by then come to me that I had really nothing to do except to write, and a kind of stage fright took over. Could I devote that many waking hours to being a poet? So I wasted a great deal of time trying to make the transition from school discipline, where you were told what to write and when to hand it in, to the discipline which you imposed upon yourself. How much time you gave to distraction. How that fitted together with your working time. CB: About 1953 you certainly seem to undergo some sort of writer's block; The Mirror hints at a temporary failure of inspiration. JM: Maybe I had begun to feel that the individual consciousness was not all that reliable, or was not the final court of appeal, and was a rather flimsy perishable affair. …

A Great Writ while It Lasted

This is a brief essay on the emergence of an esoteric legal doctrine, or, more precisely, on the confluence of several legal doctrines. It is also a brief snapshot of how the Supreme Court hopes, or believes, that some of its esoteric doctrines of criminal procedure and jurisdiction can play a role in the amorphous social campaign to fight violent crime in America. The essential point is this: in a pair of decisions handed down this Term,' the Supreme Court substantially eviscerated federal habeas corpus jurisdiction as an instrument for constitutional law. And though we know no motives for Supreme Court cases other than those announced in the decisions, one can speculate that the Court was simply frustrated with the inadequacy of the execution rate of America's death row inmates.

Circumcision and the Divine Name: A Study in the Transmission of Esoteric Doctrine

Circumcision and the Divine Name: A Study in the Transmission of Esoteric Doctrine

Paul Gauguin's “Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake”: The Artist as Initiate and Magus

Gauguin's Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake (Fig. 1) can be given a reading based on esoteric doctrines; such a reading, proposed below, will demonstrate the importance of this belief system as a key to identifying and relating the major themes of Gauguin's oeuvre. An esoteric interpretation of the image makes explicit what the artist's contemporaries Albert Aurier, Émile Schuffenecker, and Odilon Redon accepted as self-evident: that Gauguin saw himself as an initiate and a magus. This is not surprising: esoteric beliefs enjoyed a revival in the 1880s and 1890s and were very popular among Symbolist writers and artists. The Great Initiates, a synoptic account of the tradition of esotericism, published in 1889 by Edouard Schuré, conveniently summarizes these beliefs.

Le Langage Secret De Marc Papillon

Justly can we apply the definition of hermetic poetry to the works of Marc Papillon de Lasphrise, both as they mirror a world deeply influenced by the esoteric doctrine of Hermes Trismegistus and because the poet resorts to metabolic devices whose aim is to complicate the message and make communication difficult. In this study we examine a few examples of these metabolic expressions such as specular writing — where the decrypting mechanism can be easily identified — but also devices much more difficult to decipher. In the "Sonnet en langue inconnue" (S. LXXXI in Diverses Poésies) the process involved in the message alteration suggests a double or triple metaplastic encoding similar to the one applied in the loucherbem language. The reason underlying this linguistic experimen-talism is ultimately philosophic as it attempts to go beyond the limits imposed on man and writer.

Cycle. For ABC

forward: ive discovered a need to revert to notebook sloppiness some instances, having tried to prune & trim and failed. this is not Kerouac's dictum of spontaneous composition, that only works at times-and there are times when that has been the reason for going back to the original notebook entry: that the language flowed best then, the original. but mainly it's the need to feel free & unrestrained, to reiterate and reiterate, as many forms as feels necessary to one's own ear, the same thing. recently i got back a paper on Forster's PASSAGE TO INDIA complaining that in spite of your protest, i sometimes needed to express things with more philosophical clarity. first, i couldn't figure out what was meant by protest: that i had said class that i had no knowledge of Hinduism? that at some point the paper, on the contrary, i had implied a knowledge of certain esoteric doctrines? secondly, there occurred to me two reasons for the confusion R. the instructor complained of: a, that he was not hip enough to what i assumed he was hip to, and b, that i would dash off a concept one (what, to me, seemed graceful) trope, like referring to the Moment by Forster's trope of the snake (Ouroborous, the snake of eternity that devours itself) or by my trope of the trinity of BrahmaVishnu-Shiva, the perpetually regenerating-preserving-destroying character

Faith and Experience III: Experience and its Interpretation

In some, perhaps most, cultures metaphysics and mysticism belong together. Even in our own society organizations which bear the name ‘metaphysical’ are likely, an examination, to be found to be concerned primarily with more or less mystical and esoteric doctrines and practices. But it is still typical of the Anglo-Saxon academic world that philosophers have, on the whole, not been frightfully eager to; tangle with mystics, nor mystics with philosophers. As a result of this it has been lamentably easy for philosophers to assume that they know what mystics are saying, without bothering to verify their allegations, and for a whole trend of spirituality to thrive off a naive rejection of the ‘God of philosophers’ in favour of the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and God knows who else’.Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis is an important symptom that this situation is changing.Most of the contributions are not concerned directly with the philosophical issues posed for philosophers as such by mysticism. Intuition and the Inexpressible by Renford Bambrough tackles the logical problem of ineffability; Nelson Pike and George Mavrodes discuss the epistemological status of mystical experiences. But otherwise most of the essays are concerned with clarifying the methodology of investigation of mysticism, and with developing and studying the concepts needed for such investigation.The ten contributors were left entirely free to choose their own topic and tactic; it is all the more impressive that a certain coherence definitely emerges from their various essays. Almost all the essays contain some kind of attack on two much loved doctrines: first, the belief that, underlying the diversity of expression to be found in mystical writings, there is either a single or at most a few varieties of essential mystical experience; and secondly, the belief that it is, in principle, fairly straightforward to disengage the essential experience or experiences from their interpretative garments.

Pirandello and Theosophy

AS A "WISDOM-RELIGION" with marked mystical concerns, theosophy has been rooted from time immemorial in the history of mankind, and its original religious beliefs and practices. As a speculative system with both religious and philosophical implications, however, theosophy can be traced back to Plato, and to such early mystical movements and esoteric doctrines as Orphism and pre-Christian gnosticism.