Abstract: In what follows, I consider Lonergan's account of the nature of religious experience in comparison with the work of contemporary phenomenologist and philosopher of religion Jean‐Luc Marion, arguing that despite important differences in philosophical method both authors conclude that a particular form of love is the defining characteristic of such experience. Considered in light of one...
Abstract This article examines the theological poetics of John of the Cross, investigating both the conditions under which contemplative experience gives rise to speech and the theological status of that speech within John's account of divine revelation. Drawing on the prologues to his major works, I identify three spiritual conditions that make theological poetics possible: the pneumatological...
Abstract: Since early modernity, thinkers have rejected much of the Christian metaphysical inheritance. Aristotelian substance, for example, was judged to be an empty concept serving little purpose; Locke believed it was empty and unknowable, that which “we know not what, … which we take to be the substratum , or support, of those Ideas we do know.” This rejection was summarized and finalized...
Abstract This article is concerned with a ‘lightness that is as far as possible from triviality’. It argues, firstly, that a connection can be drawn between comic perception and pictures of reality that entail transcendence, understood as an otherness at the heart of things that may be indirectly glimpsed but never fully grasped as the object of fixed knowledge. To picture transcendence as...
Abstract This essay attempts to address a simple question: what does it mean to hear God? So much hangs upon learning something about hearing God: revelation, salvation, formation, vocation and mission, for example. What is the relationship then between hearing and knowing God? Before examining two particular passages from the Scriptures in which hearing and knowing coincide (the calling of...
AbstractOur current context is a “moving” and unstable one. We are facing not only a time of change, but what Pope Benedict XVI terms “an epochal change.” The impact of this transformation upon religion is unmistakable. In this article I reflect on one aspect of this impact: the one that affects and transforms the experience of God, also called mystical experience. I explore the concept of...
AbstractThough the authority of Dionysius as a virtually apostolic theological source remains unchallenged in the late Middle Ages, ownership of his inheritance is much disputed, in connection with two issues of “mystical theology” principally. The first controversy (broadly between “Intellectualist” and “affectivist” readings of Dionysius' Mystical Theology) concerns whether the soul, united...
AbstractThis essay reviews the nature and scope of Dionysius’ influence on the Hispano‐Christian mystics, especially John of the Cross and Theresa of Ávila. As background, it first surveys the broader reception of Dionysius in sixteenth‐century Spain, especially among the ascetico‐mystical precursors and contemporaries of both Carmelite saints. This will allow us to reconnoiter with some...
While much has been written on the dialogue between postmodernism and the Christian apophatic tradition, there has been little focus on the role of what lies at the heart of this tradition: the practice of contemplation. By looking at contemplative authors such as Evagrius Ponticus and others, this article shows that contemplative practice, situated in a life of contemplation, relates closely...
The deleterious effects of the modern divorce of spirituality and theology can and must be redressed by the revival of mystical theology, theology that is ultimately concerned with the union of God and humanity. Aquinas’Summa Theologiae provides a model of such a mystical theology, a work which is both an exhortation to contemplation and an act of contemplation. The mystical themes of the Summa...