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.

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.

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 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.

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism.

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.

An original study of the transformation of Safavid Persia from a majority Sunni country to a Twelver Shi'i realm "Mysticism" in Iran is an in-depth analysis of significant transformations in the religious landscape of Safavid Iran that led to the marginalization of Sufism and the eventual emergence of 'irfan as an alternative Shi'i model of spirituality. Ata Anzali draws on a treasure-trove of manuscripts from Iranian archives to offer an original study of the transformation of Safavid Persia from a majority Sunni country to a Twelver Shi'i realm. The work straddles social and intellectual history, beginning with an examination of late Safavid social and religious contexts in which Twelver religious scholars launched a successful campaign against Sufism with the tacit approval of the court. This led to the social, political, and economic marginalization of Sufism, which was stigmatized as an illegitimate mode of piety rooted in a Sunni past. Anzali directs the reader's attention to creative and successful attempts by other members of the ulama to incorporate the Sufi tradition into the new Twelver milieu. He argues that the category of 'irfan, or "mysticism," was invented at the end of the Safavid period by mystically minded scholars such as Shah Muhammad Darabi and Qutb al-Din Nayrizi in reference to this domesticated form of Sufism. Key aspects of Sufi thought and practice were revisited in the new environment, which Anzali demonstrates by examining the evolving role of the spiritual master. This traditional Sufi function was reimagined by Shi'i intellectuals to incorporate the guidance of the infallible imams and their deputies, the ulama. Anzali goes on to address the institutionalization of 'irfan in Shi'i madrasas and the role played by prominent religious scholars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in this regard. The book closes with a chapter devoted to fascinating changes in the thought and practice of 'irfan in the twentieth century during the transformative processes of modernity. Focusing on the little-studied figure of Kayvan Qazvini and his writings, Anzali explains how 'irfan was embraced as a rational, science-friendly, nonsectarian, and anticlerical concept by secular Iranian intellectuals.