Mystical Writings Research Articles

Aesthetic Culture

Aesthetic Culture* György Lukác (bio) and Tyrus Miller (bio) Translated by Rita Keresztesi-Treat (bio) Editor’s Introduction “Aesthetic Culture” is one of the most important statements of György Lukács’s philosophy of culture in the period prior to his departure from Hungary in 1912 to study in Heidelberg. First published in the journal Renaissance in 1910 and reprinted in 1913 in the essay collection to which it lent its title, “Aesthetic Culture” appeared in immediate proximity to the essays in his first major book, The Soul and Forms, and shares a number of concepts and concerns with that work. In Lukács’s early essays, concepts from the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) fashionable at that time in the German-speaking world mingled with such heterogeneous literary sources as Christian mystical writings, German romantic criticism, the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hauptmann’s and Ibsen’s naturalist drama, and the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and D’Annunzio to lend his meditations a vague but thickly elaborated terminology of “life,” “soul,” “form,” “mood,” “solitude,” “depth,” “culture,” “heroism,” and “tragedy.” At the same time, despite this idealist conceptual framework, these texts reveal surprising continuities between Lukács’s pre-Marxist, ethical criticism of modernist literature and his mature, Marxist opposition of an historically grounded “critical realism” to a subjectivistic and decadent modernism. Directly attacking the aestheticist stance that Lukács thought characteristic of modern art and literature generally, “Aesthetic Culture” is an especially revealing work to compare to his later communist polemics against expressionism and the modernist novel. Lukács’s title embodies a paradox, which he unfolds in the course of the essay. At present, he argues, there is no culture, and especially no “aesthetic culture.” Indeed, it is precisely the emphasis on the “aesthetic” in present-day art and life that is symptomatic of culture’s definitive disappearance and, at the same time, that is inimical to any culture’s forming in modern society. Wherever aesthetic culture has appeared, Lukács asserts, “there is no architecture, no tragedy, no philosophy, no monumental painting, no real epic.” The key to this paradox lies with the problem of form, which the aesthete ironically has no ability to bring into being. Instead of authentic artistic or cultural form, the aesthete emphasizes the “mood,” the fleeting inner sensation that an artwork or even the outer world more generally may occasion. The task of the artist shifts from giving form to life towards a new, peculiarly “modern” imperative, that [End Page 365] of provoking aesthetic sensations in the inner selves of spectators and readers. Artistic forms evaporate in this hothouse atmosphere in which beautiful feelings are forced to effloresce. Genuine, unified form appears only when the artist actively struggles to overcome the powerful resistances of life to being contained within the forms of art. Aesthetic culture, however, allows the artist to piece together surfaces effortlessly, creating pleasant appearances with nothing of the endurance that forms have against the passing of time. “The admirers of ‘form,’” Lukács concludes, “killed form; the priests of l’art pour l’art paralyzed art.” The novelty of the aesthetic sensation and the ephemerality of artwork’s value are two sides of a single process in which objective substantiality of artistic form progressively gives way to the aesthetic effect’s fleeting presence in the isolated soul. Lukács suggests that aesthetic culture—this paradoxical absence of any genuinely formed, objectively substantive art or culture—has appeared only recently, at the end of the 19th century. At this threshold of the new century, he believed, inner experience had rapidly come to supplant form not just in art but in all spheres. Aesthetic culture emerged when the whole of life might be judged not according to any intrinsic value it might have, but rather according to a shifting “aesthetic” standard: its ability to occasion moods, to bring about pleasant or intense sensations in solitary men and women who live passively disengaged from their own lives, like a spectator might enjoy a theatrical performance from a darkened box. The German idealist tradition had looked to tragedy as the dialectical means by which the seeming antinomies of a character’s...

A Medieval Welsh Dominican Treatise on Mysticism

The aim of this paper is to draw to the attention of readers not conversant with Welsh the significance and importance of a work little known at present outside Wales but deserving of a far wider readership. This is the anonymous medieval Welsh prose treatise on mysticism called Ymborth yr Enaid (Sustenance of the Soul), the third and sole surviving book of a larger work called Cysegrlan Fuchedd (Holy Living). Ymborth yr Enaid has several claims to distinction. First, it is the only example of a medieval Welsh treatise on mysticism, and for that reason, as well as its intrinsic merits, it is important in the context of medieval vernacular mystical writings. Second, it is the work of a man who was not only a considerable theologian and philosopher but also a very gifted artist. Third, the work represents a unique fusion of native Welsh bardic learning and mainstream scholastic theology, a fact which is not only remarkable in itself but also, in this case, far-reaching in its implications for the Welsh prose literature of the period generally, both religious and secular, not least with regard to such fundamental questions as the dating, provenance, and authorship of much of it. Ymborth yr Enaid is a work rich in variety and pregnant with significance.

A history of heaven: the singing silence

This text explores the brighter side of eternity, namely, heaven. Dispensing with cliched images of heaven, the author aims to stimulate readers' imaginations with a history of how the joy of paradise has been conceived by writers, philosophers and artists, for whom heaven was not immediate reality. He not only explores concepts found among the ancient Jews, Greeks and Romans, as well as early and medieval Christians, but also addresses the intellectual problems heaven poses: how does time pass in eternity? is heaven a place or a state? who is in and who is not? what happens to the body and soul between death and Judgement Day? Russell argues that the best way to approach the logic-defying concept of a place occupying neither space nor time is through poetry, paradox and the writings of such mystics as Bernard, Julian of Norwich and Eckhart. The book culminates in a lively analysis of how Dante described the glories of the indescribable.

Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women ed. by Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth Maclean (review)

REVIEWS147 Pickens, Kevin Brownlee, Sarah Beckwith, and Kate Greenspan show, masculine or feminine perspectives can be donned at will to displaydifferentvarieties ofexperience. Christine de Pizan, forexample, rejects outright the notion ofan essentialized feminine nature, deliberately displaying her virtuosity by engaging in an epistolary exchange between male and female writers. Such mystical writers as Margery Kempe,Julian of Norwich and Magdalena of Freiberg, too, exploit preconceived notions of female difference as a way of inscribing their own voices and experiences as authoritative text. Any conclusions we might retain about women's subjectivity in the Middle Ages are largely belied, however, by the very interesting essays ofPart III, which focus on the experience ofthe body andwhat the editor calls 'transhumanization' in subjective experience. These essays use the analyses of individual case studies to challenge dominant trends in psychoanalysis and feminist essentialism, insisting on the unique aspects ofsubjective experience as mediated through both writing and physical body. Highlights include Christina Mazzoni's powerful counter to Lacanian psychoanalysis in her essay on Angela of Foligno; Claire Nouvet's discerning of a new theory of authorship in Christine de Pizan; and Mary Giles' observation that the corporeal nature ofSpanish women's mystical experiences reflects not so much an expression of 'the feminine' as it does an exploitation ofthe affective characteristics of theater. These essays make a powerful statement against precluding the complexity of subjective experience by overtheorizing it, or what is worse, authorizing the theory to speakfor the text itself. Such endeavors to identify the feminine may well, in Mazzoni's words, 'silence the very possibility ofwoman's self representation (258). Instead, the essays in this final section—and indeed, in the book overall—seek to particularize experience and textuality. This volume is a valuable addition to the critical canon, not only for its insights into 'women's writing,' but for its highly capable and insightful readings ofsome too-long neglected texts. LAUREL AMTOWER California State University, San Marcos Jennifer carpenter and sally-Beth Maclean, eds., Power ofthe Weak: Studies on Medieval Women. Champaign: University ofIllinois Press, 1995. isbn: 0-252-065042 . $39-95 (hard), $14.95 (paper). The essays in Powers ofthe Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, edited by Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean, examine the influence available to medieval women, and the limitations of such influence, through a series of case studies. Although the editors are rightly wary of elaborating any 'overarching theory' or 'artificial unity,' the collection identifies three general avenues of access to power: piety, politics, and, in the somewhat exceptional case ofGracia Mendes, finance. The opening essay, by Jacqueline Murray, is perhaps the weakest. This may be inevitable, since the author attempts to provide an overview both of medieval texts on sexual difference, and of contemporary scholarship on the issue. The result is somewhat too general for specialists, although it may serve as a useful introduction 148arthuriana to non-medievalists or to those unfamiliar with women's history. The last part ofthe essay, on Chobham and Grosseteste, is more valuable, suggesting that writers who had extended contact with women because ofdieir pastoral duties are less likely to endorse the misogynist assumptions ofscholastic writers. Two essays, byJocelyn Wogan-Browne and Jennifer Carpenter, examine a pair of very different holywomen, St. Etheldreda, Anglo-Saxon queen and virgin wife, and Juette of Huy, a twelfth century recluse. Wogan-Browne considers die evolution of Etheldreda's cult through Latin and vernacular vitae, concluding that Etheldreda served different functions for different audiences: in Bede, she is a type ofvirginity; the twelfth century LiberEliensis also represents Etheldreda as an ideal rather than a person, using her to assert a continuing tradition of post-Conquest monasticism. Only the vernacular Vie scinte Audree fully develops her as a female protagonist. Wogan-Browne links this transformation to the probable audience ofthe Vie, AngloNorman noblewomen for whom chastity might be not just an ideal, but a way of controling one's selfand property. ForJuerte, forced to marryand unable to preserve her virginity like Etheldreda, mothering provided a way ofmodeling her life on that of the Virgin, but also tied her firmly and against her will to worldly concerns. Carpenter's essay provides a nuanced discussion ofthe dilemma ofmotherhood for...

Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages ed. by Jane Chance (review)

146ARTHURIANA But not too serious! Let the student, the teacher, and the lover ofmedieval stories treat this volume as an extensive emporium ofscholarly resource; but let them, once loaded and equipped, never confuse being ready with being there—let them haul hastily to the highlands and resume breathing the bracing oxygen ofliterary play. ALAN T. GAYLORD Dartmouth College jane chance, ed., Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages. Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1996. Pp. xv, 342. isbn: 0-8130-1391-7. $59.95. Gender and Text in the Later MiddU Ages, a collection of essays based upon a 1991 symposium at Rice University, is devoted to reconstructing the 'aesthetic' of female writing in the Middle Ages. Invoking sophisticated new approaches to feminine discourse as a 'double-voiced' strategy that reacts to the specific ideological constraints that inscribe both culture and writing, these essays explore the relationship between the role ofgender and the textual traditions ofauthority and discursive representation of subjectivity. As such, the volume seeks to repudiate the common charges that women's writing constitutes some ofthe most 'homogenous' and 'mediocre' texts of the Middle Ages, finding within these texts instead poignant reminders ofthe extent towhichwe have perhaps oversimplified and marginalized some ofthe most interesting examples ofour literary and cultural history. Though Chance's introductory essay is fairly theoretical and wide-ranging, the essays themselves are specific and tightly reasoned, closely analyzing the rhetorical strategies, manipulations, or dissimulations that take place in particular case-studies. Indeed, the articles in this volume are as valuable for their careful readings ofotherwise neglected female writers as they are for their theorizing the issue of 'gender in the Middle Ages.' The individual chapters are careful to present accurate portraits ofthe women they frame. Heloise, Hadewijch, Birgitta of Sweden, Christine de Pizan, Marie de France, Margery Kempe, and Angela of Foligno, among others, speak in these chapters in their own voices. Careful contextualization of these voices within both specific localities and the more encompassing history and tradition of ideas round out the examinations. The volume is divided into three sections addressing voice, subjectivity, and the experience ofthe body in gendered writing. Part I, comprised ofessays by Catherine Brown, Saskia M. Murk-Jansen, Claire Sahlin, and Earl Jeffrey Richards, examines how the various voices of'female expression' employed by women writers reflect not so much the enactment ofgender stereotypes as they do the deliberate manipulation of gendered rhetorical masks that allow the female writer to speak from various authoritative stances. From writers as disparate as Heloise to Birgitta ofSweden, the 'passive' and 'obedient' natures ofthe feminine may be invoked as rhetorical devices to countetmand and aesthetize the strong authoritative demands they make upon an audience of men. This is an observation that has a great deal of relevance for the section on the construction of female subjectivity that follows, where, as Rupert T REVIEWS147 Pickens, Kevin Brownlee, Sarah Beckwith, and Kate Greenspan show, masculine or feminine perspectives can be donned at will to displaydifferentvarieties ofexperience. Christine de Pizan, forexample, rejects outright the notion ofan essentialized feminine nature, deliberately displaying her virtuosity by engaging in an epistolary exchange between male and female writers. Such mystical writers as Margery Kempe,Julian of Norwich and Magdalena of Freiberg, too, exploit preconceived notions of female difference as a way of inscribing their own voices and experiences as authoritative text. Any conclusions we might retain about women's subjectivity in the Middle Ages are largely belied, however, by the very interesting essays ofPart III, which focus on the experience ofthe body andwhat the editor calls 'transhumanization' in subjective experience. These essays use the analyses of individual case studies to challenge dominant trends in psychoanalysis and feminist essentialism, insisting on the unique aspects ofsubjective experience as mediated through both writing and physical body. Highlights include Christina Mazzoni's powerful counter to Lacanian psychoanalysis in her essay on Angela of Foligno; Claire Nouvet's discerning of a new theory of authorship in Christine de Pizan; and Mary Giles' observation that the corporeal nature ofSpanish women's mystical experiences reflects not so much an expression of 'the feminine' as it does an exploitation ofthe affective characteristics of theater. These essays make a powerful...

Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other.

Since his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau's reputation as a thinker has steadily grown both in France and throughout the English-speaking world. His work is extraordinarily innovative and wide-ranging, cutting across issues in historiography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, theology, philosophy and psychoanalysis. This book represents the first full-length study of Certeau's thought. It is organized around the central theme of interpretation and alterity, which Ahearne uses to illuminate Certeau's work as a whole. The author also examines Certeau's theory and practice of historiography; his reflection on the relations between changing historical forms of writing, reading and orality; and his distinction between the strategic programmes of the politically powerful and the tactics of the relatively powerless. Ahearne places Certeau's work in its general intellectual context, relating it to the views of important contemporary thinkers, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and demonstrating the decisive importance to Certeau's thought of the writings of the early modern mystics and travellers. This book constitutes an excellent critical introduction to Certeau's work, while also providing a comprehensive and nuanced reading for those already familiar with his thought.

The ABC and the Mystic Writing PAD

The ABC and the Mystic Writing PAD

St Symeon the New Theologian (969-1022): Byzantine spiritual renewal in search of a precedent

St Symeon the New Theologian is, without question, one of the most original and intriguing writers of medieval Byzantium. Indeed, although still largely unknown in the West, he is surely one of the greatest of all Christian mystical writers; not only for the remarkable autobiographical accounts he gives of several visions of the divine light, but also for the passionate quality of his exquisite Hymns of Divine Love, the remarkable intensity of his pneumatological doctrine, and the corresponding fire he brings to his preaching of reform in the internal and external life of the Church. He was a highly controversial figure in his own day. His disciples venerated him as a saint who had returned to the roots of the Christian tradition and personified its repristinization. His opponents, who secured his deposition and exile, regarded him as a dangerously unbalanced incompetent who, by overstressing the value of personal religious fervour, had endangered the stability of that tradition. The Vita which we possess was composed in 1054, in an attempt to rehabilitate Symeon’s memory and prepare for the return of his relics to the capital from which he had been expelled when alive. This paper will investigate how he himself understood and appropriated aspects of the earlier tradition (particularly monastic spirituality), hoping to elucidate why he felt himself inspired to reformist zeal, and why many of his contemporaries (not simply his ‘worldly opponents’ as his hagiographer would have us believe) regarded him as unbalanced. It will end by attempting some reflection on what the controversy reveals on the larger front about how the Church ‘selectively looks back on itself, so to paraphrase our president’s description of the conference theme, and whether the model of tradition and its reception exemplified in this Byzantine writer can offer anything to the dialogue between history and theology which the doctrine of Tradition (Paradosis) inevitably initiates.

The Question of Believing

For Michel de Certeau, believing was rooted in a foundational experience, situated in a Christian tradition where the relationship to scriptures is central. Now, in this immense inheritance, he chose as object of election and familiarity mystical texts, not ‘mystical experience’ but the writings of mystics, that is, a particular type of writings implying a mode of believing. He loved the mystics not because they would be ‘elect’ but because he saw in them the wounded and often the relegated to the margins of the social group, disgraced people, the monastery idiot in the patristic tradition (see chapter 1 of la Fable mystique), Surin long regarded as mad by his Jesuit brethren and whose writings were dispersed, corrected, partly lost. There, in shame and suffering, madness or defection, the ‘corruption’ that haunts President Schreber in Freud,’ something essential is tied between believing and its defection. It seems to me, to take up an expression he employed about Foucault, that that is the ‘black sun’ of his thought and that it explains the turn to ‘history of mysticism’ as well as the turn to ‘cultural anthropology of the present’ in his work.The platform that provided the force and originality of I'Invention du quotidien was the reflection on believing, beyond ecclesial institutions on every side. The disclosure of ordinary life as ‘mystical', in the proper as well as figurative sense, inspired the analysis of practices. He hoped to complete volume 2 of la Fable mystique in 1986 and counted then on writing an Anthropology of believing , which he had already announced as the theme of his seminar at the Ecole des hautes etudes in 1985-86.

The Enlightened Will Shine: Symbolization and Theurgy in the Later Strata of the Zohar (review)

Book Reviews 111 sixteenth century marked the beginning of a new phase in jewish history, and therefore the end of the medieval experience. Kenneth Stow has written a valuable study not only for students of medieval jewish history, but for medievalists in general. The projected audience of the book, which is apparently advanced students and up, generates a stylistic criticism. The bibliography, which is extensive and to which students would naturally turn for references, was rather sloppily done. On the whole, however, this book was enjoyable to read, provocative in its ideas, and extremely useful for educational purposes. Frederic Krome University of Cincinnati/ Northern Kentucky University The Enlightened Will Shine: Symbolization and Theurgy in the Later Strata of the Zohar, by P. Giller. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 180 pp. $12.95 (p). Among the myriad jewish mystical writings, the Zobar is undoubtedly the most highly valued. Its legendary origins as a classical rabbinic text sequestered for a thousand years and revealed in the thirteenth century, combined with sheer midrashic genius and theosophical luminosity, have resulted in its canonical status. Although the Zobar is commonly thought of as a multi-volumed commentary on the Torah and several other books of the Hebrew Scriptures, it is neither a homogeneous work nor the product of a single individual. The Zobar is actually a compilation of approximately two dozen discrete texts. Whereas its components are identifiable, the same cannot be said for its authors; nevertheless, Yehuda IJebes has succeeded in shattering the Scholemic myth of R. Moses de Leon as the sole author of the Zobar in his penetrating essay, "How the Zohar Was Written" (see his Studies in tbe Zobar). To date, most scholarship has concentrated on the main body of the Zobar. Among those texts that have not benefited from sustained investigation are the interconnected compositions: Tiqqunei ba-Zobar (hereafter r.z.) and Ra'aya Mebeimna. These two difficult and unwieldy classics are the focus of Pinchas Giller's fine study. They were composed by an anonymous, early fourteenth-century mystic, and Giller offers the first full-fledged exploration of this last stage ofZoharic writings. Although Giller asserts at the conclusion to chapter one, "It is the aim of this study to show that the Tiqqunim played an important part in the acceptance of 112 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 the Zohar as canonical literature" (p. 6), his discussion of this issue is not evident. Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview of these expansive, homiletical collections, Giller judiciously chose to explore important themes. His distillation is lucid and well written. There are chapters on kabbalistic hermeneutics, the role of the mystic, and the myth of chaos. The final three chapters focus on the relationship betweenJewish religious law, ritual, and theosophy, especially as it pertains to the Sabbath. Giller's discussion of theurgy is an important contribution to this fledgling topic. Despite the overall strength of Giller's presentation, one can take issue with some specifics. His translation of T.z. as "Infrastructures of the Zohar" (p. 4) is puzzling, as is his etymology of tiqqun (p. 130, n. 6), which claims an Arabic derivation for the word, without indicating any of the Hebrew usages of the word. Also disconcerting is his continuous rendering of the pivotal term kinnui as "euphemism" (p. 13 and throughout). Euphemism entails the substitution of one term for another, prompted by concerns for propriety. The homilies in T.z. are based on intricate associations of Divine epithets, symbols, and metaphors. Any of these terms would have been preferable to "euphemism." Giller is correct in directing our attention to R. Joseph Gikatilla's discussion of kinnuyim, and he concludes that "the author of the Tiqqunim was influenced by Gikatilla ..." (p. 15). A stronger case could have been made. Like a worthy disciple, 1:Z. is totally suffused with the spirit and methodology of Gikatilla's Sha'arei 'Orah. Viewing Gikatilla and T.z. in a master-student relationship may also explain why both evince strong connections to the 'Idrot sections of the Zohar-it is precisely this material that is not found in R. Moses de Leon's writings. Giller regularly offers an...

Taoism

Circumscribing the place of taoists in Chinese society is not straightforward for any period: honored by emperors and members of the nobility, they were scorned, as a rule, by literati-officials and treated with a mixture of reverence and familiarity by ordinary people. The paradoxical strength of passivity, the power of compliance, and the endurance of the peripheral already form a central theme in the mystical writings gathered in the fourth and third centuryb.c.Lao-tzuandChuang-tzu. The Taoism of these ancient texts advanced a doctrine of liberation through submission, of control by means of noninterference, and of transcendence as a result of physiological and mental regimens. The ideal of liberation from the physical, epistemological, and social constraints of the human condition in time translated into a quest for immortality which, by the Ch'in unification of the empire, became quite explicit. Huang-Lao thought, named for the Yellow Emperor and patron of the immortals (Huang-ti) and Lao-tzu, dominated court politics from this period through the middle of the second centuryb.c.

Nakagami Kenji's Mystic Writing Pad; Or, Tracing Origins, Tales of the Snake, and the Land as Matrix

Nakagami Kenji's Mystic Writing Pad; Or, Tracing Origins, Tales of the Snake, and the Land as Matrix

Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre's Devotional Poetry

Offering new readings of Marguerite de Navarre's verse works by situating them within their contemporary religious and literary context, this work reviews theological and mystical writings, but pays particular attention to the devotional writing which flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries and which is virtually unknown today. Four theological issues central to the Reformation are discussed: the nature of justification; the role of the Church and the sacraments; the problem of faith and works; and the question of the Bible and its interpretation. Examining the religious structures and language that inform de Navarre's poems and plays, Ferguson draws conclusions regarding the author's religious beliefs as they are mirrored in her poetry. This text should be of interest to students of French Renaissance literature.

Kafka's Geometry

In Kafka's fiction there are many journeys but few arrivals. A typical example is the protagonist of Ein Landarzt riding naked through the blizzard, insisting, Niemals komme ich so nach Hause (E 205). 1 The abrupt switch to present tense at this point, which suggests that the preceding story is past but the return journey continues even to the present moment, strengthens the impression that the journey truly is unending. Yet this is the same ten mile distance that he had previously travelled in a moment (nur einen Augenblick). He expresses no concern about direction, only about the horses' sluggishness (langsam wie alte Manner). Common sense insists that if the wagon is advancing homeward, however slowly, it must eventually arrive. This apparent paradox may be dismissed by saying that the account is to be interpreted symbolically. But this is not quite satisfactory, for it denies the intense physical realism of Kafka's narrative. If it is symbolic truth that we are to read here, then we still ought not to gloss over the form, which is quite precise and realistic on the small scale, though contradictory on the large. While vaguely described fantastic journeys are common in fairy tales and mystical writings (cf., Jofen 32-33), Kafka's stories are exceptional for the minute care and tenacity with which they explore and flesh out a fairly consistent alternative of distance which underlies the fantasy. It might seem unwarranted to seek motifs of abstract in Kafka's writings. While geometry appears in the titles of important critical works on Kafka (cf., Stoltke; Sussman), it is used only as a general word for logical precision. Kafka is supposed to have been a poor student of mathematics and theoretical science, and to have suffered paralyzing incompetence in the

The Library of John Blacman and Contemporary Carthusian Spirituality

The library of John Blacman represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of devotional and mystical writings known to have been owned by any individual in late medieval England. On that ground alone it would merit attention. Buthis library repays study for other reasons. Firstly it is possible to place it within a detailed context. We know a considerable amount about Blacman himself and this knowledge of the man is paralleled by our knowledge of his books. Our perception of the private libraries of late medieval England is normally based on bald lists of books, occasionally supplemented by a handful of surviving manuscripts. These lists are usually derived from wills, which can all too frequently be shown to be seriously defective as a complete record of the libraries concerned. And, in particular, such lists can give only a static and skeletal picture of the relationship between the books and their owners. However, in the case of Blacman's library, while our major source is indeed a list of his books, it is a list which is exceptionally revealing. To some extent this is because part of the list is more informative than usual in providing the complete contents, insteadof a single portmanteau title, for about a third of the books. Hence we can reconstruct the precise nature of a number of the composite volumes in the library. More important is the fact that we have, properly speaking, not This article began life, in very different form, as a paper given to the Exeter Conference on ‘The medieval mystical tradition in England’. I am much indebted to the kindness and forbearance of the editor of the conference proceedings, Miss Marion Glasscoe.

Writing and Mystical Experience in Marguerite d'Oingt and Virginia Woolf

COMMENTATORS have often noted the quality (Morris Beja 112) of the writings of Virginia Woolf. A term so laden with religious connotations may seem badly chosen to describe the works of a writer who maintained a thoroughgoing skepticism toward matters religious, and who was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, one of Victorian England's most famous agnostics. Yet Woolf complained that her father and his agnostic friends lacked imagination (Diary 3: 246), and her novels seem to many readers to be punctuated by moments of insight into the presence of a hidden reality. Beja preferred James Joyce's notion of epiphany to describe these moments, rather than the concept of mysticism, which he limited to a sense of union with God (24). Recent feminist scholarship, however, has returned to the category of the mystical in interpreting Woolf's work. Drawing upon the resources of women's history and the writings of women mystics, many studies have attempted to examine Woolf's mysticism historically. Jane Marcus has demonstrated the influence on Woolf's thought and writing of Quaker spirituality, embodied in her Aunt Caroline Stephen and her friend Violet Dickinson; and Catherine F. Smith has attempted to place Woolf in the tradition of English visionary women's prophetic writing, exemplified by the seventeenth-century mystic,Jane Lead. Such studies offer new forms of contextualization for Woolf which

The ins and outs of mysticism

IMACaNE AN trtO~C;RADUATE who did not wish to study anthropology, history, politics, sociology, or any of the humanities, but had come to university to learn about mysticism. It would not be easy to recommend which department he or she should approach. Departments of Philosophy usually offer a subject called "Philosophy of Religion', but it tends to be a disguised course in metaphysics, its curriculum consisting of the standard proofs of God's existence and a consideration of the problem of evil. The list of prescribed reading is more likely to include works by Aquinas and Hume than by Julian of Norwich or Walter Hilton. Here mystics may be studied in terms of culture, poetics, rhetoric or stylistics; but even if they are read in their own right, and not just to illumine a canonical literary text such as Piers Plowman, they will never be studied alongside Jacob Bohme, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Genoa or St Teresa of Jesus. One might think that a Department of Theology would be the best place to study mystical writings in depth. But again one would be disappointed. Mysticism generally falls outside vocational training, and theologians have traditionally regarded it with suspicion, perhaps fearing (not unreasonably) that some of its most seductive motifs are independent of Christianity. If the study of mysticism falls between disiciplines, it is because it requires an interdisciplinary approach. One of the things that has characterised Max Charlesworth's intellectual life is a profound commitment to interdisciplinarity. That commitment does not overlook a due stress on the classical disciplines. Their histories, methodologies and protocols must be respected; but that is a different thing from accepting them as a natural way of dividing the world of ideas. (Learn some philosophy, literature and theology, Charlesworth would advise the student, but do not keep them in separate mental compartments.) To say that Charlesworth's work has centred on the philosophy of religion would be to miss one point of that work. It begins, often enough, with questions traditionally posed there but develops by putting pressure on both 'philosophy' and 'religion'. When thinking about spirituality, Charlesworth draws from anthropology as

Between Reform and Reformation: The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Forty years ago the story of the Church in late medieval England was a simple one and not very different from the version which had prevailed half a century before that. The interpretation presented by W. Capes in 1900 had been slightly modified but largely underlined by 1950, and the Church and its development which was commonly depicted in that year would not have been strikingly unfamiliar to him. The current version was that, after the reforming efforts of the thirteenth century, which failed to achieve their end, and the advent of the friars, who even by the middle of that century were departing from their earlier zeal and purity, the Church in the following hundred years was exploited by the pope when it was not saved or oppressed by the Crown. The resulting corruption of the clergy contributed to its negligence and provoked an eruption of heresy which in due course was savagely suppressed and virtually expunged; rid of this threat, the fifteenth-century clergy were so notorious for their laxity, greed and mediocrity that a few devout members of the laity, perhaps inspired by the mystical writings, took refuge in private devotions which anticipated the individualism of the Protestant. The Reformation was viewed as the inescapable result of these circumstances.

“To be God with God”: The Autotheistic Sayings of the Mystics

W THEOLOGIANS of the late 20th century reflect on the nature of their discipline and on the way it differs from the theology of the past, they frequently refer to contemporary theology's need to be in dialogue, not only with philosophy but with many other branches of learning. Perhaps few would disagree with the general validity of that suggestion, but one might still legitimately ask just how such dialogue could prove valuable in particular cases. One of the main purposes of this article to show how insights from contemporary psychiatry and psychology can help elucidate a phenomenon which theologians and ecclesiastics of the past tended to find at best puzzling, at worst heretical. The phenomenon in question the tendency of many mystical writers to use language that sounds pantheistic or, more properly speaking, autotheistic, i.e. language that bespeaks a strict identification of oneself with God. Throughout the history of the three great monotheistic religions that began in the Near East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam— such language has at times been a source of much tension and debate among the constituted religious authorities and the mystics. This identification of oneself with God has been relatively rare in Judaism, with its strong affirmation of the divine transcendence, but even here the phenomenon not unknown. Abraham Abulafia (b. 1240), the outstanding representative of ecstatic kabbalism, once wrote that anyone who has truly felt the divine touch and perceived its nature is no longer separated from his Master, and behold he his Master and his Master he; for he so intimately adhering to Him that he cannot by any means be separated from Him, for he He. In Islam such claims have been more frequent, especially among the Sufis. The martyrdom of al-Hallaj in the tenth century was occasioned by his insistence that ultimately he and God were one. The tradition

St John of the Cross and the Mystical ‘Unknowing’

This paper is concerned with the nature of mystical knowledge in the higher stages of mystical realization, with particular reference to the teachings of St John of the Cross. Correspondences and parallels with the writings of other mystics may be noticed, but it is not the purpose of this discussion to elucidate these in detail.