Spiritual Master Research Articles

Un portrait de Jean Tauler selon Rulman Merswin ?

A portrait of Tauler according to Rulman Merswin. In Strasbourg in the xrvth century, John Tauler was not the only figure who merited the title of Spiritual Master. He knew several « Friends of God », and the latter appreciated him. Tauler'tomb represents an unknown document which allows us to grasp a witness by this Friends of God to the dominican preacher we find on it numerous symbols which illustrate the manner in which John Tauler was perceived in 1361. By means of simple images, a column, a book, a lamb, the tomb of John Tauler represents veritable mystic treatise, whose central theme is its exposition of the divine inhabitation. The study of this monument leads to a study of the Friends of God, and in particular of Rulman Merswin the debates that have portrayed the latter as a mystifier must from now on integrate his most important work : the only known portrait of John Tauler, made just after his death.

Proust: Philosophy of the Novel , and: Postmodern Proust (review)

Reviewed by: Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, and: Postmodern Proust David R. Ellison Vincent Descombes . Proust: Philosophy of the Novel. Trans. Catherine Chance Macksey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992. 320 pp. $37.50. Margaret E. Gray . Postmodern Proust. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 189 pp. $24.95. At the conclusion of an article on John Ruskin published one week after the letter's death in January of 1900, Proust provided us with a melancholy definition of literary criticism in which the themes of distance and death predominate: "It is when Ruskin is far from us that we translate his books and try to focus into a recognizable image the traits of his thought. Thus you [readers of this essay] cannot know the fervor of our faith or our love, and it is only our piety that you perceive here and there, cold and furtive, devoted, like the Theban virgin, to the restoration of a tomb." Proust, like Antigone, can do no more than bury his brother Ruskin/Polynices; his critical prose can describe at a far remove but not bring back to life the lessons of his spiritual master. A closer analysis of the paragraph leading up to these concluding remarks would show that Proust is equating literary criticism with what he will later call mémoire volontaire, whereas he will reserve for the novel and novelistic discourse the vivifying powers of mémoire involontaire. Implicitly, this would mean that Proust's "fervor" for Ruskin would emerge only within the Recherche, in his re-writing of his mentor, whereas criticism as such is condemned to remain "cold" and "furtive" in its rational, analytic mode. In his Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, Vincent Descombes sets out to demonstrate that Proust falls victim, within his own novel, to the reductiveness of theoretical propositions—propositions on Time and Memory and Art that are too often taken at face value by Proust critics who themselves fall prey to a certain rhetoric of Romanticism when they are seduced by Marcel's moments of epiphany. For Descombes, Proust's overt theorizing or philosophizing (those pages about Bergotte, Elstir, Vinteuil, and Art in general that have made Proust's reputation as a "philosopher of the novel") are precisely the weakest moments in the novel: the theoretical propositions on which Proust's aesthetics are based are, in Descombes' somewhat harsh formulation, "scarcely intelligible." On the other hand, however, Descombes advances the thesis that the labor of the novel—that is, the "intellectual and moral work" that goes into the creation of characters, the concatenation of scenes and the formation of a novelistic world—contains a philosophy of the novel. Proust is like a philosopher, his work resembles that of philosophers, insofar as his enterprise is "to clarify what has remained obscure (fleeting thoughts, confused emotions, paralyzing situations"). Professor Descombes' book is at its strongest and most persuasive when he dismantles Proust's "pseudo-philosophical" arguments (two examples: [End Page 413] the logical incoherence of Proust's equating of subjectivity and perspective or perspectivism; and Proust's oscillation between two concepts of the self—the self as part of the world and the self as condition of the world). In passages such as these, Descombes applies his impressive philosophical training to the Proustian text, and the result is always elucidating. At the same time, Descombes has considerable respect for Proust as novelist, and his efforts to convey what is proper to the novel as form, as discourse, are also admirable. Professor Descombes is especially careful to remind his readers that all the theorizing that occurs in the Recherche takes place within a novelistic context: theory is contained, enveloped within a narrative, and cannot extract itself from this embeddedness. It must be said, however, that Proust: Philosophy of the Novel is a long and sometimes tedious work in which repetitions abound and in which very little detailed textual interpretation takes place (the one notable exception to this being Chapter Eight, "The Modern Regime in Art," which contains some good detailed readings of specific passages). Some of the chapters end on disappointingly bland notes (in Chapter Eleven, which offers an interesting sociocritical view of Proust, the final sentence is a pale...

Writing Metafiction: Khatibi's "Le Livre du sang"

ABDELKEBIR KHATIBI'S LE LIVRE DU SANG proceeds from multiple writing strategies. One of the major difficulties the reader encounters is to locate the site-historical, poetical, or rhetorical-in which such a text is inscribed or, more precisely, the site from which it attempts to tear itself away. I would argue that the apparent hermeticism of this book, the extreme complexity of its "composition" as well as the mode of its "invention" come directly from the literary tradition of Arab mystical poetry and narrative. From such a perspective, Le Livre du sang presents itself simultaneously as a radical attempt to rewrite and surpass such a tradition. What is original about Khatibi's work is that this same attempt to rewrite and surpass does not start from some outside or neutral point of view, but deliberately from a real fascination for--or even a primitive seduction bythe form this tradition has historically taken, in the Hikayat, or mystical epic genre. What strikes and unsettles the reader of Le Livre du sang right away is the disquieting feeling of strangeness that seizes him/her as soon as the narrative begins. The narrative first resembles a meditation book in the manner of Swedenborg or of the metaphysical poems of El Hallaj-as suggested by the Retreat into the Asylum of the Inconsolables, the presence of a spiritual Master and his disciples, and by the Narrator's flights of lyricism. Little by little, however, the presence of the androgynous Echanson ("Cupbearer") and his/her sister Muthna comes to corrupt or "gangrenate" the narrative, to jam the reading and throw its rhythm into a turmoil:

The Sufi Master as Exemplified in Persian Sufi Literature

THE Sufi master is the representative of the esoteric function of the Prophet of Islam and by the same token the theophany of Divine Mercy which lends itself to those willing to turn to it. The shari’a, the Divine Law, is meant for all Muslims and, in fact from the Islamic view, for all men if its universal meaning is considered. But the tariqa, or spiritual Path, is only for those who seek God here and now and who search after that immutable Truth which although present here and now is also the eternal source of all revelation. The tariqa is thus a means whereby man can return to the origin of the Islamic revelation itself and become in a spiritual sense both a companion and a successor of the Prophet and the saints. The role of the spiritual master, the shaikh, murshid, or pir, is to make this spiritual rebirth and transformation possible. Being himself connected through the chain of initiation (silsila) to the Prophet and the function of initiation (walâya) 1 inherent in the prophetic mission itself, the Sufi master is able to deliver man from the narrow confines of the material world to the illimitable luminous space of the spiritual life. Through him, acting as the representative of the Prophet, spiritual death and rebirth take place by virtue of the baraka present in him. Fallen man grows old, decays and dies, whereas the regenerated spiritual man is always inwardly in the prime of youth. Having drunk from the fountain of eternal life and having gained access to the elixir of immortality he lives in the perennial spring of the soul even if his body passes through the winter of life. And that is why he is able to endow the disciple with youth, whatever age he may formally be. To behold the perfect master is to regain the ecstasy and joy of the spring of life and to be separated from the master is to experience the sorrow of old age.