Life Of Soul Research Articles

Platonic Theology. Volume 3: Books IX-XI, and: Platonic Theology. Volume 4: Books XII-XIV (review)

Reviewed by: Platonic Theology. Volume 3: Books IX–XI, and: Platonic Theology. Volume 4: Books XII-XIV James Miller (bio) Marsilio Ficino. Platonic Theology. Volume 3: Books IX–XI. Translated by Michael J.B. Allen with John Warden, edited by James Hankin with William Bowen Harvard University Press 2003. viii, 376. US $29.95 Marsilio Ficino. Platonic Theology. Volume 4: Books XII-XIV. Translated by Michael J.B. Allen, edited by James Hankins with William Bowen Harvard University Press 2004. viii, 372. US $29.95 Renaissance art experts, intellectual historians, mystical theologians, wizard headmasters, and other cultural missionaries whom Harvard University Press has targeted as likely readers of its six-volume edition of Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Theology may well be surprised to learn from the great Florentine magus that studious training of the mind 'weakens the body and prevents us from living a comfortable life.' It is a warning they will probably not heed. Nor should they. Modern scholars can routinely be seen strengthening their bodies on university-supplied treadmills, the latest models of which, I've noticed, are equipped with convenient book rests. A comfortable life indeed, compared with the rigours of the academic past. From the third and fourth volumes of the new edition, spanning books 9–14 of the Latin treatise, we can infer that Ficino's original target readers must not have been very fit – at least not if they took to heart his dictum that 'the mind will be most perfect when it has soared completely away from the body.' Poets must have had an especially hard time keeping their bodies in shape because their high-performance souls were frequently shaken by furores, violent Platonic 'frenzies' for which there was no talismanic cure and no rehab centre specializing in Ciceronian prose therapy. So, if you were seeking to maintain a high research profile at the Florentine Academy, you just had to brace yourself for an out-of-body sabbatical. The academic soul aspiring to an eternity of tenure under Ficino's direction was simply expected to 'scorn the body's assistance like someone who is able to live at some point ... who may begin to live even now ... without the body's help.' To the eyes of the body volumes 3 and 4 will naturally appear as discrete physical entities, but to the eye of the mind – ever the Platonic theologian's preferred mode of vision – their philosophical contents mystically coalesce into a single stream of argument addressing two erroneous doctrines and a doubt. The doctrines are both Epicurean. The first is universal materialism, the belief that the soul is composed of matter like the body and everything else in the world. The second is its psychological corollary, a heresy now known as 'mortalism,' which denies that the soul lives after the body dies. Ficino devotes books 9–11 of his treatise (volume 3) to the refutation of both errors, and though he musters a host [End Page 397] of high-flown arguments from the Platonic and Patristic traditions to eradicate Epicureanism from his belief system, a lowly doubt lingers in his mind, a nagging legacy of the Sceptics. To demonstrate that the soul is essentially matter-free and therefore more itself after the death of the body is, alas, not quite to prove that it is 'an undivided and immortal form.' Who's to say that the soul, even if it should escape the body at death, might not lose its individual unity, its formal wholeness, in the eroding course of time? To overcome that spirit-sinking doubt, the Platonic theologian channels all his buoyant intellectual energy in books 12–14 (volume 4) against the Sceptics' attack on the anagogic model of higher education. In case the first three volumes in the Platonic Theology should fail to convince you that independence from your body is good for your soul, the fourth provides a multitude of proofs: (a) that despite your vacuous worldly desire for more wealth and power you do in fact have a soul; (b) that despite your insane ambition to live forever your soul is perfectly rational; and (c) that despite your absurdly short life-span your rationality is a miraculous...

?To and Fro?: Deepening the Soul Life of Women's Studies Through Play

This article explores the relationship between play and the development of a deeper “soul life” of the organization by examining ways to build stronger women’s studies programs. Our analytical method draws on Jungian psychoanalytic theory with its emphasis on the individual’s integration of polarities, and poststructuralism with its examination of power dynamics in cultural practices. To examine how play can serve the feminist political goals of fostering meaningful connections among members, we analyze three stories to illuminate the political possibilities and liabilities of play. We then propose five levels of play to show how each one can be used to support the intellectual, political, and emotional dimensions of women’s studies work within the academy: (1) critical play; (2) creative play; (3) healing play; (4) transcendent play; and (5) oppositional play. Each type of play provides a different dimension to the soul life of an organization and so can serve a different purpose in building the community necessary to sustain organizational activity. While play has been of interest to philosophers as an approach to analysis, the word can be dangerous, especially to feminists in academic settings, because it is more often associated with leisure time and children. “Play” is the opposite of serious work, but we consider play so vital to maintaining the critical edge necessary for Women’s Studies that we will argue that play is essential for women’s studies programs, and it may well be necessary for other organizations as well. As women’s studies scholars, we are often involved in a struggle for legitimacy. In this struggle, it sometimes seems that we dare not play or we will not be taken seriously by others. On the other hand, it seems that many other academic units envy us for the level of community they perceive us as having. Nevertheless, we realize both men and women struggle with the desire to play as part of their work. Building on the work of Maria Lugones who argues that play facilitates feminist philosophy (1987), we imagine play as a back-and-forth process among individuals that takes place in ways that fully engage the players and in this process changes them (Gadamer 1998, 109). This happens in a ball game where the ball moves back and forth, but more important, it happens in a conversation where each player responds to what is said by the previous player. Not only do the Platonic dialogues work this way, but also the everyday conversations when they become self-reflective (Freydberg 1997; Gadamer 1998; Locke 1989; Lugones 1987; Schorsch 1942). This sort of play goes beyond the rules of a game that enable players to

Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation ed. by Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul (review)

Reviews Anne clark bartlett and Thomas H. BESTUL, eds., Cultures ofPiety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. vii, 256. isbn: 0-8014-3443-2. $49.95 (cloth), 0-8014-8455-3. $17.95 (paper). Anthologies often bring together widely diverse selections to setve a non-specialist audience. In one way, Cultures ofPiety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation conforms to this expectation by offering seven short selections that could easily be included in undergraduate or graduate courses in medieval literature; in another way, the grouping of prayers, devotions, meditations, and dialogues is so carefully focused that it will engage the scholar who specializes in the religious and social practices oflate medieval England. By their own account, Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul have organized these readings 'to demonstrate the variety of late medieval devotional writing and to suggest its importance in defining the literary culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.' With this aim in mind, the editors have written a valuable introduction that surveys the development and popularity of Christian devotional practice, even as it provides an argument for considering devotional treatises as central components ofcanonical literature. Their claim is supported by the popularity and wide dissemination of these texts throughout the medieval period and by the great insight devotional literature offers into the social practices of those not usually represented in canonical texts. In this, the anthology is to be praised for enlarging our perceptions oflate medieval England and for reproducing writing that would have been read by several different medieval audiences. In addition to a specialized bibliography for each of the seven pieces featured here, individual translators include an ovetview of each text, a short discussion of its devotional importance, and an edition ofthe original. The translations arc suited to an undergraduate audience, even as the appendix, which includes the six Middle English texts, accommodates the specialist. The first selection, The Book ofHoly Medicines, is an allegorical treatise written for a lay, French-speaking audience and authored by Henry ofGrosmont, duke of Lancastet and father ofthe same Blanche honored in Chaucer's Book ofthe Duchess. The only Anglo-Norman text in this collection, the translation ofLe LivredeSeyntzMedicines, is by M. Teresa Tavormina, who describes Henry's use ofmaternal images in his meditation on the Virgin Mary and the particularly intimate relation he enjoys with her. Unfortunately, the editots elected not to include the Anglo-Norman text in the appendix, which would have cemented visually in an undergraduate mind the linguistic multiplicity of late medieval England, even as it would offer the specialist easy access to the original. The second translation in Cultures ofPiety, a selection from the Pseudo-Augustinian ARTHURIANA ??.3 (2??0) REVIEWS105 Soliloquies, is offered by Robert S. Sturges, who illustrates how the Soliloquies provide a strong condemnarion of the Wycliffian controversies regarding predestination and the use of images, which were seen as particularly harmful for women. The Soliloquies were written as a commentary on the dangers nuns face, which makes them particularly useful for those studyingwomen's communities. Mona L. Logarbo's contribution, The Gast ofGuy, is the most intriguing selection featured here. This account, which records a purported convetsation between a Dominican friar and a soul in purgatory, was understood as an orthodox text regarding penance and intercessory prayer, but the dialogue illusttates provocative moments ofheterodoxy: the friar summoning Guy's spirit to appeat; the layman's detailed knowledge ofthe scriprures and Christian theology, which he uses to admonish the friar about his preaching; and the indirect suggestion that laity's direct experiences with the divine can be more knowledgeable than those of invested religious persons. By contrast, Bartlett and Bestul offer two otthodox devotions that demonsttate lay interest in affective piety, including The Privity ofthe Passion and The Fifteen Oes, translated respectively by Denise N. Baket and Rebecca Krug. Read together, the two pieces illustrate the values of compassion, contrition, and contemplation encouraged by late medieval religious doctrine. Wide circulation of both texts demonstrates that the laity accepted these values and followed them in their meditations on the Passion. A fitting complement to the Soliloquies, Paul F. Schaffners translation of Life of Soul is a...

Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation (review)

Reviews 159 churches, where whoever ran might read. 'How', ask Aston and Richmond, 'do we explain this substantial body of English biblical texts, and their sometimes open use, which seem to conflict so markedly with the church's determination to root out meddlers with vernacular scripture?' (p. 19). A n excellent question, which none of the contributors here seeks to address, but which craves an answer. Soon, m a y w e hope? Mary Dove School of English and American Studies University of Sussex Bartlett, Anne C. and Thomas H. BestuI, ed., Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation, Ithaca/London, Cornell U versity Press, 1999; pp. vi, 256; R.R.P. US$17.95, £12.50. The texts collected here, all composed in England between 1350 and 1450 reveal the variety of genres and approaches which characterised late medieval religious writing. Most of the writings were previously available only in manuscripts, early prints, or nineteenth-century editions. Except for the anonymous English treatise, Life ofSoul, and he Livre de Seyntz Medicines (Book ofHoly Medicines), composed in Anglo-Norman by Henry Duke of Lancaster in 1354, the works are translations or adaptations into Middle English from Latin originals, sometimes via intermediate French versions . Their rendering into modern English extends the liberal theme of accessibility which no doubt also motivated their medieval authors. The Middle English source texts are printed in an appendix. Considered in their cultural context, an approach encouraged by the volume's title and introduction, the selections participated in the outpouring of vernacular writings which articulated the Church's efforts to care pastorally for its people and to contain unrest. The Wycliffite Life of Soul and the aristocratic Livre again stand out, however, as different or opposed cultural expressions. Apart from The Fifteen Oes, a series of prayers addressed to Jesus on the cross, the selections are excerpts from longer compositions, some ofwhich were widely disseminated. For example, The Privity of the Passion was one of seven Middle English adaptations of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi, the most popular of which 160 Reviews was Nicholas Love's Mirror ofthe Blessed Life ofJesus Christ. The survival the Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies, Life ofSoul, and S y m o n Wynter's L of St Jerome in four or fewer manuscripts nevertheless militates against some editorial claims of popularity (p. 141). Professors Bartlett and BestuI suggest various reasons as to why devotional writings of this kind merit attention. They give access to a range of social rankings and attitudes, clerical and lay, male and female, orthodox and heterodox. The complex internal discourses of these texts mediated an exceptionally unstable period in English history, sometimes offering 'sites of resistance to prevailing norms' (p. 14). Finally, such writings provide a context for interpreting the canonical literature of the period: 'We believe that it is impossible to assess the importance of a given author 's or text's cultural value without knowing where their contributions intersect with and depart from established and popular traditions' (p. 14). While all of these claims have merit, the diverse richness of the selections goes beyond them, a point which the editors also admit. A simple and passionate longing for the divine, antithetical to present-day intellectual circumspection, is the fundamental impetus behind several texts. In the Soliloquies this looks back to St. Augustine: 'when I seek m y G o d I seek a beauty, a brightness, a love, a spiritual sweetness that fleshly eyes m a y not see' (p. 54). It is a sign of the volatility of the period that the Middle English translator, w h o apparently wrote for a group of religious w o m e n , felt impelled to interleave such passages with commentaries reaffirming orthodox views on predestination, images in churches, the sacrament of the altar, clerical intervention in interpreting Scripture, and God's justice in instituting eternal punishment. By contrast, Life of Soul inherently challenges several of these positions. The afterlife is a recurrent concern of the selections. As early capitalism gradually displaced the social arrangements of feudalism, the ancient doctrine of purgatory became enmeshed both in mercantile metaphors and in ecclesiastical commerce. This is amply demonstrated...

Contemporary science of the history of Lithuanians: the conception of nation and the methodology of history

The conception of „nation" as any conception is an instrument. The conception of nation is implicated in the methodology of history. What links exist between this conception and the methodology of history? What are the differences between the conceptions of nation of those historians whose methodologies of history are various? In this article, the methodological positions of five contemporary Lithuanian historians are under analysis. The conceptions of nation of Rimantas Vebra, Egidijus Aleksandravičius, and Antanas Kulakauskas are typologically similar and are described as being in ethnocultural and social criteria. The looks for the methodology of history of these historians mean opposition to attachment great importance of economical factors in the Lithuanian Marxist methodology of history, and to the conception of humanistic history. The critical Marxist, Leonas Mulevičius, describes the conception of nation more according to economical criteria. Vincas Trumpa disposes to the study of consciousness, research of the „life of soul of man" and describes „the nation" according to historical, self-conscious criteria. The methodology of historians of Lithuania not only means changes of a world outlook and ideology, but it also marks off a new phase (and different directions) in the history of science.

The red shoes: On torment and the recovery of soul life

(1993). The red shoes: On torment and the recovery of soul life. Psychological Perspectives: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 135-136.

Horace and the Afterlife

Previous articleNext article No AccessHorace and the AfterlifeFrancis A. Sullivan, S.J.Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 37, Number 3Jul., 1942 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/362623 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Stephen R. L. Clark Classical Mediterranean Conceptions of the Afterlife, (Aug 2017): 41–57.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48609-7_3