Espousing Intimacies: Mystics and the Metaxological (original) (raw)

Christian Mysticism: A Meta-Theoretical Approach – Part I

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2014

In this paper the work of three outstanding representatives of poetical (type III) mysticism is briefly considered. Although exemplars of speculative and systematic mysticism also engage in quasi-poetical prose in their formulations and sermons, they do not do so in the same highly expressive, direct and emotionally intense manner that is typical of the type III mystic. For this reason Richard Rolle, Henry Suso and Madame Guyon were selected as exemplars of poetical mysticism, and discussed in section 1. The poetically-inclined Christian mystic is not interested in either metaphysical speculation, or in Aristotelian analyses of the nature and elements of the mystic life (see paper 2). It is a deeply personal matter of the heart, of recounting one's experiences on the mystic journey and singing the praises of the divine, rather than merely a matter of the intellect. In section 2 the pragmatic (type IV) theologies of John Tauler, the anonymously authored Cloud of Unknowing, and the work of the Spanish mystic, Miguel de Molinos are reviewed. Their mystical writings and activities have a much stronger practical focus and action-orientation (in the subjectivist-empyrean mode), compared to the other mystics.

Approaching the Debate on the Subject of Metaphysics from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age: The Ancient and Medieval Antecedents

in "Medioevo", 34 (2009), pp. 9-59., 2009

The essay traces the history of the debate on the nature of metaphysics and its object from Late Antiquity to the 14th century in the frame of the history of the debate on the nature of the subject/object of science. As a consequence it identifies five elements constituting the question of the nature of metaphysics: the epistemological role of the subject/object of science; the degree of insight of metaphysics into that which it considers; the role assigned to God and separate substances within metaphysics; the relationship between metaphysics, or rational theology, and revealed theology; and the different conceptions that authors develop of the notion of being. The positions of a number of authors from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages concerning this themes are examined here and their historical relationships investigated. As for Thomas Aquinas, for instance, I argue that he does not consider the ens commune, which is the subject of metaphysics, as conceptually identical with transcendental being. For him, transcendental being includes all its inferiors; by contrast, common being includes some inferiors of being (general rationes; rationes of immaterial substances as far as the latter are taken as principles of being), but not all of them (particular rationes of material beings; rationes of immaterial substances different from those which characterize these substances when the latter are taken as principles of being). Thus, in Aquinas’s view, transcendental being is an ontological/metaphysical notion; common being is an epistemological notion. In reality they are identical, but before the mind they are not completely identical. Furthermore, one can notice that the Italian Dominican maintains that God is both cause of the subject of metaphysics and part of it. Ens commune, taken as it is in reality, is identical with transcendental being; hence, on the one hand, it is common both to material substances and to spiritual substances and, on the other, it is in a way posterior to the latter substances, since it depends upon them.

Between God and Metaphysics: An Interview with William Desmond

Christopher Ben Simpson [CS]: How would you characterize the broad shape, the trajectory of your thought over the 25 years that have passed between your first books (Art and the Absolute and Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness) in the mid-1980s and today? William Desmond [WD]: This is a question I would prefer were answered by someone else studying my work. In the main I see a deepening of certain insights, not least bearing on the fourfold sense of being I developed first in my doctoral work, published as Desire, Dialectic and Otherness (1986). There is a deepening of my understanding of the significance of this fourfold sense, as well as an extension of the range of considerations taken into account. The development is both more intensive and extensive, though the focus of it all is to

The Word in Which All Things Are Spoken: Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure on Christology and the Metaphysics of Exemplarity (draft)

Forthcoming in Theological Studies

This article reconsiders Anselm’s “ontological argument” by contextualizing it within the conjunction of Neoplatonist exemplarist metaphysics and Christology in the Augustinian tradition of Trinitarian theology. Instead of revisiting the philosophical claims of the ontological argument, or its specifics vis-a-vis other “proofs” of the existence of God, the article instead highlights the broader theological and metaphysical innovations it facilitates. It argues via a reading of Augustine’s De Trinitate book 8 that Augustine’s theological epistemology and Incarnational theology are in tension over the relationship of illumination and grace in the knowledge of God. This tension is inherited by Anselm and developed in the Monologion and Proslogion, where Anselm’s concern with divine simplicity and divine self-expression provide conceptual resources to address this tension. In Bonaventure’s Itinerarium, the metaphysics of the self-diffusive good from Pseudo-Dionysius and the Anselmian argument for “that than which nothing greater can be thought” provide the structure for a distinctively Franciscan Incarnational metaphysics that draws upon the Augustinian tradition.