Mysticism As Modernity

This work reconsiders the connections between mysticism, nationalism and modernity in twentieth-century German cultures. Disengaging mysticism from occultism, the author creates a new space for reconsidering mysticism's links to larger structures of modernity already at play at the turn of the century. Rather than dismissing mysticism as a strain of anti-modern irrationalism with troubling links to radical politics such as Nazism, the author reconceptualizes modern mysticism as an unwittingly logical expression of the same compression of time and space created by the emergence of the newspaper, radio, railways and telegraph and reflected in the novels of Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil and Max Frisch.

In Mysticism After Modernity, Don Cupitt argues that the extensive modern literature about mysticism has rested upon a mistake - the belief that there can be meaningful experience prior to language.

This is a transnational and bilingual investigation of the cross-fertilisation of mystical religiosity and modern poetical imagination in the works of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. The book demonstrates how their commitments to transnational mysticism deeply form and inform the modernist literary projects of these poets as well as their understanding of cultural modernity. Although its primary interest lies in their poetry and poetics, the monograph also includes some of their relevant prose works. This study begins with a close look at and around the phase of 1912-1913, when Yeats and Tagore met over the collection of the latter’s English translations of his spiritual verses, Gitanjali, and took mutual interests in each other’s works and cultural significances. The monograph then expands on both sides of that phase, selectively covering the whole career of the poets in its exploration of their parallel mystic-modern cultural-poetical projects.

In the six original essays included in this volume, the authors discuss how von Hügel, Blondel, Bremond, and Loisy all found inspiration in the great mystics of the past.

This volume brings together leading representatives of the recent debate about the persistence of kabbalah in the modern world. It breaks new ground for a better understanding of the role of kabbalah in modern religious, intellectual, and political discourse.

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America