Mysticism Sentence Examples

Mysticism did not cease within the Catholic Church at the Reformation.

St Bernard's mysticism is of a practical cast, dealing mainly with the means by which man may attain to the knowledge and enjoyment of God.

These are the permanent outlines of what may be called the philosophy of mysticism in Christian times, and it is remarkable with how little variation they are repeated from age to age.

The systematic theosophy of Plotinus and his successors does not belong to the present article, except so far as it is the presupposition of their mysticism; but, inasmuch as the mysticism of the medieval Church is directly derived from Neoplatonism through the speculations of the pseudo-Dionysius, Neoplatonic mysticism fills an important section in any historical review of the subject.

Mysticism first appears in the medieval Church as the protest of practical religion against the predominance of the dialectical spirit.

Jan van Ruysbroeck (1294-1381), the father of mysticism in the Netherlands, stood in connexion with the Friends of God, and Tauler is said to have visited him in his seclusion at Groenendal (Vauvert, Griinthal) near Brussels.Ruy sbroeck.

In Erigena mysticism has not yet separated itself in any way from the dogma of the Church.

But, inasmuch as a God is affirmed beyond reason, the mysticism becomes in a.

Their mysticism represents, therefore, no widening or spiritualizing of their theology; in all matters of belief they remain the docile children of their Church.

Mysticism, on the other hand, is marked on its speculative side by even an overweening confidence in human reason.

The scholastic mysticism was, for the most part, practical and psychological in character.

Nevertheless, mysticism did prepare men in a very real way for a break with the traditional system.

In later times Orphic theology engaged the attention of Greek philosophersEudemus the Peripatetic, Chrysippus the Stoic, and Proclus the Neoplatonist, but it was an especially favourite study of the grammarians of Alexandria, where it became so intermixed with Egyptian elements that Orpheus came to be looked upon as the founder of mysticism.

Such was the seedground in which what is specifically known as German mysticism sprang up.

The wild doctrines of Thomas Miinzer and the Zwickau prophets, merging eventually into the excesses of the Peasants' War and the doings of the Anabaptists in Minster, first roused Luther to the dangerous possibilities of mysticism as a disintegrating force.

In the 17th century mysticism is represented in the philosophical field by the so-called Cambridge Platonists, and especially by Henry More (1614-1687), in whom the influence of the Kabbalah is combined with a species of christianized Neoplatonism.

The first influence of Boehme was in the direction of an obscure religious mysticism.

But in that case it might be difficult to find a systematic philosopher who would escape the charge of mysticism; and it is better to remain by long-established and serviceable distinctions.

So, again, when Recejac defines mysticism as " the tendency to draw near to the Absolute in moral union.

But such a position is not describable as mysticism in any recognized sense.

Hamann (1730-1788), the term mysticism may be fitly applied.

Schelling's explicit appeal in the Identitdts-philosophie to an intellectual intuition of the Absolute, is of the essence of mysticism, both as an appeal to a suprarational faculty and as a claim not merely to know but to realize God.

But the link that connects him with churchly realism, as well as with the NeoPlatonic mysticism, is the conviction that complete and certain knowledge rests wholly on divine revelation, i.e.

The so-called mysticism of the Persian Sufis is less intense and practical, more airy and literary in character.

This externality of religious truth to the mind is fundamental in scholasticism, while the opposite view is equally fundamental in mysticism.

Mysticism was more systematically developed by Bernard's contemporary Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141).

The Augustinian monastery of St Victor near Paris became the headquarters of mysticism during the 12th century.

They are the last representatives, of mysticism within the limitations imposed by scholasticism.

Mysticism was pieced on somewhat incongruously to a scholastically accepted theology; the feelings and the intellect were not brought together.

In St Theresa (1515-1582) and John of the Cross Other the counter-reformation can boast of saints second Forms of to none in the calendar for the austerity of their Mysticism.

But, as was to be expected, their mysticism moves in that comparatively narrow round, and consists simply in the heaping up of these sensuous experiences.

Philosophy since the end of the 18th century has frequently shown a tendency to diverge into mysticism.

The later philosophy of Schelling and the philosophy of Franz von Baader, both largely founded upon Boehme, belong rather to theosophy (q.v.) than to mysticism proper.

He invented a religious system founded on the speculative mysticism of the Neoplatonists, and founded a sect, the members of which believed that the new creed would supersede all existing forms of belief.

A " circular system " was advocated by the eminent botanist Fries, and the views of Macleay met with the partial approbation of the celebrated entomologist Kirby, while at least as much may be said of the imaginative Oken, whose mysticism far surpassed that of the Quinarians.

It was the Alexandrian theology that superseded them; that is to say, NeoPlatonic mysticism triumphed over the early Christian hope of the future, first among the "cultured," and then, when the theology of the "cultured" had taken the faith of the "uncultured" under its protection, amongst the latter also.

But mysticism and political servility between them gave the deathblow to chiliasm in the Greek Church.

It strengthened the hands of church democracy; it formed an alliance with the pure souls who held up to the church the ideal of apostolic poverty; it united itself for a time even with mysticism in a common opposition to the supremacy of the church.

How millennarianism nevertheless found its way, with the help of apocalyptic mysticism and Anabaptist influences into the churches of the Reformation, chiefly among the Reformed sects, but afterwards also in the Lutheran Church, how it became incorporated with Pietism, how in more recent times an exceedingly mild type of "academic" chiliasm has been developed from a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, how finally new sects are still springing up here and there with apocalyptic and chiliastic expectations - these are matters which cannot be fully entered upon here.

He carried this tendency to mysticism into his physical researches, and was led by it to take a deep interest in the phenomena of animal magnetism.

Vigour of reasoning and originality of view were not his characteristics as a writer; nor will the student who has raked these dust-heaps of miscellaneous learning and oldfashioned mysticism discover more than a few sentences of genuine enthusiasm and simple-hearted aspiration to repay his trouble and reward his patience.

Jewish orthodoxy found itself attacked by the more revolutionary aspects of mysticism and its tendencies to alter established customs. While the medieval scholasticism denied the possibility of knowing anything unattainable by reason, the spirit of the Kabbalah held that the Deity could be realized, and it sought to bridge the gulf.

From his earliest years he had been deeply impressed with the piety, beauty and thoughtfulness of the writings of the Christian mystics, but it was not till after his accidental meeting with the works of Boehme, about 1734, that pronounced mysticism appeared in his works.

A book on Clement's relation to Mysticism is wanted.

He was an ascetic, and was a keen opponent of the emotional mysticism which was known as the new Hassidism.

Spinoza is a materialistic monist with an inconsistent touch of mysticism and a certain concession, more apparent than real, to the spiritual side of experience.

Richard of St Victor, prior of the monastery from 1162 to 1173, is still more absorbed in mysticism, and his successor Walter loses his temper altogether in abuse of the dialecticians and the Summists alike.

They belong indeed (Gerson in particular) to the history of mysticism rather than of Scholasticism, and the same may be said of another cardinal, Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464), who is sometimes reckoned among the last of the Scholastics, but who has more affinity with Erigena than with any intervening teacher.

While this sceptical thesis was embraced by philosophers who had lost their interest in religion, the spiritually minded sought their satisfaction more and more in a mysticism which frequently cast itself loose from ecclesiastical trammels.

The 14th and 15th centuries were the great age of German mysticism, and it was not only in Germany that the tide set this way.

Thus mysticism was finally banished from the domain of biology, and zoology became one of the physical sciences - the science which seeks to arrange and discuss the phenqmena of animal life and form, as the outcome of the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry.

He produced in the end a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle with an admixture of Pythagorean or Oriental mysticism, and is closely allied to the Alexandrian school of thought.

These works, together with the Prodigios del amor divino (1641), are now forgotten, but Nieremberg's version (1656) of the Imitation is still a favourite, and his eloquent treatise, De la hermosura de Dios y su amabilidad (1649), is the last classical manifestation of mysticism in Spanish literature.

The identity and personality of this "Friend of God," who bulks so largely in the great collection of mystical literature, and is everywhere treated as a half supernatural character, is one of the most difficult problems -in the history of mysticism.

The first grand characteristic of Hippocratic medicine is the high conception of the duties and status of the physician, shown in the celebrated "Oath of Hippocrates" and elsewhere - equally free from the mysticism of a priesthood and the vulgar pretensions of a mercenary craft.

His next work, Geheimniss der gottlichen Sophia, published in 1700, seemed to indicate that he had developed a form of mysticism.

In his studies he had come under the influence of Schleiermacher, Hegel and Franz Baader; but he was a man of independent mind, and developed a peculiar speculative theology which showed a disposition towards mysticism and theosophy.

In primitive religions inclusive of almost every serious offence even in fields now regarded as merely social or political, its scope is gradually lessened to a single part of one section of ecclesiastical criminology, following inversely the development of the idea of holiness from the concrete to the abstract, from fetishism to mysticism.

The book opens with a passage on the essence of mysticism, the union of the soul with God in love, and the bulk of it is a compendium of the spiritual teachings scattered throughout her letters.

Bahya portrays an intensely spiritual conception of religion, and rises at times to great heights of impassioned mysticism.

Even the readaptation of the Catholic system to a scientific doctrine was plainly in his mind thirty years before the final execution of the Positive Polity, though it is difficult to believe that he foresaw the religious mysticism in which the task was to land him.

In 1781 Frederick William, then prince of Prussia, inclined, like many sensual natures, to mysticism, had joined the Rosicrucians, and had fallen under the influence of Johann Christof Wollner (1732-1800), and by him the royal policy was inspired.

While he was fundamentally at one with Luther in opposing both Romanism and Calvinism, his mysticism led him to interpret justification by faith as not an imputation but an infusion of the essential righteousness or divine nature of Christ.

In the popular mind the hosts of exciting oriental cults, which in the 3rd and 4th centuries of the Empire filled Rome with the rites of mysticism and initiation, held undisputed sway; and with the more educated a revived philosophy, less accurate perhaps in thought, but more satisfying to the religious conscience, gave men a clearer monotheistic conception, and a notion of individual relations with the divine in prayer and even of consecration.

From these three arguments he developed an elaborate theosophy which was a syncretism of oriental mysticism and pure Greek metaphysic, and may be regarded as representing the climax of Jewish philosophy.

Leaving all detailed descriptions of these schools to special articles devoted to them, it is sufficient here to say that their doctrines were a synthesis of Platonism, Stoicism and the later Aristotelianism with a leaven of oriental mysticism which gradually became more and more important.

Clement, as a scholar and a theologian, proposed to unite the mysticism of NeoPlatonism with the practical spirit of Christianity.

He is passionate in his denunciation of everything which, like mysticism, tries to veil reality.

But it served as a powerful stimulus to Zeno, who by descent was imbued with oriental mysticism.

This is a compilation of ritual, ethics and mysticism, and had a profound influence on Jewish life.

In Geneva especially his religious views and tendencies were turned in the direction of mysticism.

Ghazali (q.v.) in his Tahafot al-Filasifa (" The Collapse of the Philosophers ") is the advocate of complete philosophical scepticism in the interests of orthodox Mahommedanism - an orthodoxy which passed, however, in his own case into a species of mysticism.

They are powerful poems written with great vigour of language, but enveloped in clouds of mysticism.

The doctrine of Plotinus is mysticism, and like all mysticism it consists of two main divisions.

Some of them (Themistius in particular) are known as commentators on the older philosophers, and others as the missionaries of mysticism.

They not only formed one of the bridges by which the medieval thinkers got back to Plato and Aristotle; they determined the scientific method of thirty generations, and they partly created and partly nourished the Christian mysticism of the middle ages.

It began to bear fruit in Christian mysticism, and to diffuse a new magical leaven through the worship of the church.

It indoctrinated the church with all its mysticism, its mystic exercises and even its magical cultus as taught by Iamblichus.

The works of the pseudoDionysius contain a gnosis in which, by means of the teaching of Iamblichus and Proclus, the church's theology is turned into a scholastic mysticism with directions on matters of practice and ritual.

And as these writings were attributed to Dionysius, the disciple of the apostles, the scholastic mysticism which they unfold was regarded as an apostolic, not to say a divine, science.

In medieval theology and philosophy mysticism appears as the powerful opponent of rationalistic dogmatism.

In 1811, while residing with his wife's relations at Hardenberg, near Göttingen, he was brought into contact with German mysticism, which considerably modified his earlier sceptical views on religion.

Though the spirit and the language of Plotinus is closely allied to that of pantheism, the result of his thinking is not pantheism but mysticism.

Such a view is not pantheism but mysticism (q.v.), and should be compared with the theology of Oriental races.

About the year 1337 this hesychasm, which is obviously related to certain well-known forms of Oriental mysticism, attracted the attention of the learned and versatile Barlaam, a Calabrian monk, who at that time held the office of abbot in the Basilian monastery of St Saviour's in Constantinople, and who had visited the fraternities of Mount Athos on a tour of inspection.

In addition to this, literary and theological studies were pursued, and the mysticism of pseudoDionysius was cultivated.

Many of its most distinguished exponents are Flemings by birth, and their writings reflect the characteristic Flemish scenery; they have the sensuousness, the colour and the realism of Flemish art; and on the other hand the tendency to mysticism, to abstraction, is far removed from the lucidity and definiteness associated with French literature properly so-called.

Mysticism may broadly be described as the effort to give effect to the craving for a union of the soul with the Deity already in this life; and asceticism as the effort to give effect to the hankering after an ever-progressive purification of the soul and an atoning for sin by renunciation and self-denial in things lawful.

In this system we distinguish not only the asceticism of Pythagoras and the later mysticism of Plato, but also the influence of the Orphic mysteries.

As a youth Rothe had a bent towards a supernatural mysticism; his chosen authors were those of the romantic school, and Novalis remained throughout his life a special favourite.

Like Schleiermacher he combined with the keenest logical faculty an intensely religious spirit, while his philosophical tendencies were in sympathy rather with Hegel than with Schleiermacher, and theosophic mysticism was more congenial to him than the abstractions of Spinoza, to whom Schleiermacher owed so much.

He afterwards led the French forces in Italy, but after his defeat before Alessandria in 1657 retired to Languedoc, where he devoted himself to study and mysticism until his death.

It is conspicuously free from that Oriental mysticism which stultifies so much of the later pagan philosophy of Europe.

By some considered as a fanatical devotee, and by others as given up to mysticism, he is generally described as kind and gentle in disposition, and devoted to the interests of his country.

The public appetite, however, for " mysticism " was not keen.

Yet the shrewd common-sense, the biting humour, the power of graphic description and the imaginative " mysticism " give them a unique attraction for many even who do not fully sympathize with the implied philosophy or with the Puritanical code of ethics.

More modern, and much more elaborate, forms are given in the Yogavacaras Manual of Indian Mysticism as practised by Buddhists, edited by Rhys Davids from a unique MS. for the Pali Text Society in 1896.

An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into the banner of revolutionary ideas.

The first of these attitudes taken alone is dogmatism; the second, when similarly isolated, is scepticism; the third, when unexplained by its elements, is mysticism.

Thus Hegelianism reduces dogmatism, scepticism and mysticism to factors in philosophy.

A friend of his mother's, Susanne Katharina von Klettenberg, who belonged to pietist circles in Frankfort, turned the boy's thoughts to religious mysticism.

In law he was a Zahirite, in theology a mystic of the extreme order, though professing orthodox Ash`arite theology and combating in many points the Indo-Persian mysticism (pantheism).

Orthodoxy needed to counter heretical logic not with mysticism, itself the fruitful mother of heresies, but with argument.

Apart from the adoption by Hume of the association of ideas as the explanatory formula of the school - it had been allowed by Malebranche within the framework of his mysticism and employed by Berkeley in his theory of vision - there are few fresh notes struck in the logic of sensationalism.

The term Mysticism has properly a practical rather than a speculative reference; but.

Thus, to take only one prominent example, the profound speculations of Meister Eckhart (q.v.) are always treated under the head of Mysticism, but they might with equal right appear under the rubric Theosophy.

In other words, while an emotional and practical mysticism may exist without attempting philosophically to explain itself, speculative mysticism is almost another name for theosophy.

Besides the books mentioned under Mysticism, and those referred to under individual authors, Baur's Die christliche Gnosis in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1835) and Hamberger, Stimmen aus dem Heiligthum der christlichen Mystik and Theosophie (1857), may be mentioned.

He attended the meetings of the Saint-Simonists, lent an ear to the romantic mysticism of Pere Enfantin and later to the teaching of Abbe Lamennais.

Joseph von Gdrres read the medieval mystics in the light of the newer mysticism of Schelling.

It is only certain that at this epoch the fabric of Catholic faith was threatened with various forms of prophetic and Oriental mysticism, symptomatic of a widespread desire to grasp at something simpler, purer and less rigid than Latin theology afforded.

The naturalism of which we have been speaking found free utterance now in the fabliaux of jongleurs, lyrics of minnesingers, tales of trouveres, romances of Arthur and his knights - compositions varied in type and tone, but in all of which sincere passion and real enjoyment of life pierce through the thin veil of chivalrous mysticism or of allegory with which they were sometimes conventionally draped.

In these compositions, remarkable for their lacile handling of medieval Latin rhymes and rhythms, the allegorizing mysticism which envelops chivalrous poetry is discarded.

Humanism, as it actually appeared in Italy, was positive in its conception of the problems to be solved, pagan in its contempt for medieval mysticism, invigorated for sensuous enjoyment by contact with antiquity, yet holding in itself the germ of new religious aspirations, profounder science and sterner probings of the mysteries of life than had been attempted even by the ancients.

Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism.

His chief work is his Lezioni di letteratura italiana, of which the dominant note is the conviction that Italian literature "is as the very soul of the nation, seeking, in opposition to medieval mysticism, reality, freedom, independence of reason, truth and beauty" (P. Villari).

As a lad he was attracted by the mysticism of Luria (q.v.), which impelled him to adopt the ascetic life.

But Alexander's conquests brought the Jews into contact with Hindu and Greek mysticism; and this probably explains the growth of the ascetic Essenes some two centuries before the Christian era.

He rapidly passed on, through books like Inferno (1897), the diary of a semi-lunatic, up into the sheer mysticism of To Damascus (1898), where he reconciles himself at last to Christianity.

The Relic conveys the impressions of a journey in Palestine and in parts suggests his indebtedness to Flaubert, but its mysticism is entirely new and individual; while the versatility of his talent further appears in The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes, where acute observation is combined with brilliant satire or rich humour.

The professors of philosophy there failed to interest him, but he was strongly attracted by the writings of Schleiermacher, which awoke his keen dialectical faculty and delivered him from the vagueness and exaggerations of romantic and somnambulistic mysticism.

The History is defective in its lack of objectivity; Graetz's judgments are sometimes biassed, and in particular he lacks sympathy with mysticism.

This was due to a growing scepticism, which caused him much mental unrest and which gradually gave way to mysticism.

True in this respect also to his anticipation of the coming age, he was the first Italian poet of love to free himself from allegory and mysticism.

His gospel is completely denationalized, humanitarian; but, while equally universalistic, is quite unsympathetic towards the doctrine and the mysticism of Paul.

Certainly the most able metaphysician and the most influential religious thinker of America, he must rank in theology, dialectics, mysticism and philosophy with Calvin and Fenelon, Augustine and Aquinas, Spinoza and Novalis; with Berkeley and Hume as the great English philosophers of the 18th century; and with Hamilton and Franklin as the three American thinkers of the same century of more than provincial importance.

The academies of the day represented the prevailing intellectual tendency of Renaissance humanism, namely, an absorbing enthusiasm for classic letters and for the transcendental speculations of Platonic and neo-Platonic mysticism, not unmixed with the traditions and practice of medieval alchemy, astrology and necromantics.

The results of this introspective mysticism were collected by him in a series of fifty-four (originally forty-eight) treatises, arranged in six "Enneads," which constitute the most authoritative exposition of Neoplatonism.

For his list of categories, see Categories; also Logos; Mysticism; Magic.

It was a period of religious revival, and of reaction against abuses that followed in the wake of the feudal system; and this religious movement was informed by a new mysticism - a mysticism that fixed its attention mainly on the humanity of Christ and found its practical expression in the imitation of His life.

They tend always to mysticism and the comtemplation of things transcendental.

Their chief contributions to thought were Cudworth's theory of the "plastic nature" of God, More's elaborate mysticism, Norris's appreciation of Malebranche, Glanvill's conception of scepticism as an aid to Faith, and, in a less degree, the harmony of Faith and Reason elaborated by Culverwel.

In1338-1339Tauler was in Basel, then the headquarters of the "Friends of God" (see Mysticism), and was brought into intimate relations with the members of that pious mystical fellowship. Strassburg, however, remained his headquarters.

His earliest work was directed against Quaker mysticism and appeared in 1656.

It was certainly immoral as held by Enfantin, by whom it was developed into a kind of sensual mysticism, a system of free love with a religious sanction.

Confronting the various systems co-ordinated as sensualism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, with the facts of consciousness, the Elects= sm ?

He occupies an important position in the history of the acceptance by medieval Jews of the Kabbala (q.v.); for, though he made no fresh contributions to the philosophy of mysticism, the fact that this famous rabbi was himself a mystic induced a favourable attitude in many who would other- 'wise have rejected mysticism as Maimonides did.

He travelled through Asia and visited Nineveh, Babylon and India, imbibing the oriental mysticism of magi, Brahmans and gymnosophists.

If so, Mysticism includes in itself a prophecy of modern Christian Platonism or idealism, with its cry of " Back to Alexandria."

Such speculative views are associated with the revival of another traditional piece of mysticism - the Holy Spirit the Copula or bond of union in the Godhead.

Upon the Church, Ritschl, who very much disliked and distrusted mysticism, poured out the same wealth of emotion which the Christian mystic pours out upon his dimly visualized God or Christ.

The second, from 1835 to 1885, profoundly influenced by German idealism, was increasingly rationalistic, though its theology was largely flavoured by mysticism.

He is typically English in his reverence for facts, whether facts of sense or of living consciousness, in his aversion from abstract speculation and verbal reasoning, in his suspicion of mysticism, in his calm reasonableness, and in his ready submission to truth, even when truth was incapable of being fully reduced to system by man.

The uncompromising mysticism of this view may be at once compared and contrasted with the philosophical severity of Stoicism.

Erigena's contemporaries, and was certainly unorthodox enough to justify the condemnation which it subsequently received from Honorius III.; but its influence, together with that of the Pseudo-Dionysius, had a considerable share in developing the more emotional orthodox mysticism of the 12th and 13th centuries; and Neoplatonism (or Platonism received through a Neoplatonic tradition) remained a distinct element in medieval thought, though obscured in the period of mature scholasticism by the predominant influence of Aristotle.

In its more moderate form, keeping wholly within the limits of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, this mysticism is represented by Bonaventura and Gerson; while it appears more independent and daringly constructive in the German Eckhart, advancing in some of his followers to open breach with the church, and even to practical immorality.

Hugh was more especially the initiator of a movement of ideas - the mysticism of the school of St Victor - which filled the whole of the second part of the 12th century.

Langlois, "is learned, unctuous, ornate, florid, a mysticism which never indulges in dangerous temerities; it is the orthodox mysticism of a subtle and prudent rhetorician."

Among those works with which Hugh of St Victor may almost certainly be credited may be mentioned the celebrated De sacramentis christianae fidei; the Didascalicon de studio legendi; the treatises on mysticism entitled Soliloquium de arrha animae, De contemplatione et ejus operibus, Aureum de meditando opusculum, De arca Noe morali, De arca Noe mystica, De vanitate mundi, De arrha animae, De amore sponsi ad sponsam, &c.; the introduction (Praenotatiunculae) to the study of the Scriptures; homilies on the book of Ecclesiastes; commentaries on other books of the Bible, e.g.

Palamas endeavoured to justify the mysticism of the Hesychasts on dogmatic grounds.

His mysticism, however, is far from being as absolute as that of the Victorines.

At the moment when it seemed as if everything had been made that could be made out of the fragments of Aristotle, and the compilations of Capella, Cassiodorus and others, and when mysticism and scepticism seemed the only resources left for the mind, the horizon of knowledge was suddenly widened by the acquisition of a complete Aristotle.

In either case, but especially in the former, it frequently becomes pure mysticism.

In 1771 Saint-Martin left the army to become a preacher of mysticism.

An amalgam of mysticism, psychotherapy and pure science fiction, the content invited the derision which was inevitably forthcoming.

What does mysticism have to teach us about consciousness?

How has the mysticism of the Gnostic Gospels affected her?

Perhaps it is time for us to embrace a certain mysticism.

Writer and feminist theologian Sara Maitland is currently exploring mysticism, madness and silence.

Fox calls mysticism a ' resurrection story for our time ' .

Don't think - just go with the flow; eastern mysticism minus the ascetic self-discipline!

The origins of Islamic mysticism can be traced back to the 8th century.

It opens with an X-Files effect - Celtic mysticism, anyone?

Stuart led a group studying Quaker history, religious history and medieval mysticism.

It is a nature mysticism, or ethical vitalism imbued with spirituality.

Organized religion has given way to individualistic new age mysticism.

Rheticus added astrological predictions and number mysticism, which were absent from Copernicus's work.

And again this is a new gnostic pagan mysticism, dethroning reason, they say, so the soul can be free.

The basics of this procedure was eloquently described by Steve Wilson in his article results mysticism in C.I 15.

Wimber himself campaigns for a perception change, transforming the outlook from historic Christianity to Eastern mysticism.

Malevich's, conflation of a particular kind of world-denying mysticism with the ideals of industrial production is quite perceptive.

Through understanding plate tectonics, we have banished much of the mysticism surrounding natural hazards.

The dark night of the soul in mysticism is just a prolonged spell of abreactive resentment or bitterness.

It is the only position that avoids subjectivism, relativism and mysticism.

At Cassel Forster formed an intimate friendship with the great anatomist Sommerring, and about the same time made the acquaintance of Jacobi, who gave him a leaning towards mysticism from which he subequently emancipated himself.

A curious mixture of mysticism and Aristotelianism is seen in Isaac Aboab (about 1300), whose Menorath ha-Ma'or, a collection of agadoth, attained great popularity and has been frequently printed and translated.

Later he published Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917); Mysticism and Logic (1918); The Analysis of Mind (1920) and (after a visit to Russia) The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism (1920).

Mysticism, it will be seen, is not a name applicable to any particular system.

He was also called upon to do battle for his principle against men like Caspar Schwenkfeld (1490-1561) and Sebastian Franck (1500-1545), the latter of whom developed a system of pantheistic mysticism, and went so far in his opposition to the letter as to declare the whole of the historical element in Scripture to be but a mythical representation of eternal truth.

It strengthened the hands of church democracy; it formed an alliance with the pure souls who held up to the church the ideal of apostolic poverty; it united itself for a time even with mysticism in a common opposition to the supremacy of the church; nay, it lent the strength of its convictions to the support of states and princes in their efforts to break the political power of the church.

The formal elegance and conventional grace, alike of thought and of expression, so characteristic of Persian classical literature, pervade the works of the best Ottoman writers, and they are likewise imbued, though in a less degree, with that spirit of mysticism which runs through so much of the poetry of Iran.

He calls himself an Eclectic. He was in the main a Neoplatonist, drawing from that school his doctrines of the Monad and his strong tendency towards mysticism.

Although some of his quatrains are purely mystic and pantheistic, most of them bear quite another stamp; they are the breviary of a radical freethinker, who protests in the most forcible manner both against the narrowness, bigotry and uncompromising austerity of the orthodox ulema and the eccentricity, hypocrisy and wild ravings of advanced Sufis, whom he successfully combats with their own weapons, using the whole mystic terminology simply to ridicule mysticism itself.

The grandly conceived system of Erigena (see Erigena and Mysticism) stands by itself in the 9th century like the product of another age.

But the fame of " the Seraphic Doctor " is connected more closely with the history of mysticism (see Mysticism) than with the main stream of Scholastic thought.

The first founded of surviving European academies, the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (1651),2 especially confined itself to the description and illustration of the structure of plants and animals; eleven years later (1662) the Royal Society of London was incorporated by royal charter, having existed without a name or fixed organization for 1 The medieval attitude towards both plants and animals had no relation to real knowledge, but was part of a peculiar and in itself highly interesting mysticism.

Amort, who had the reputation of being the most learned man of his age, was a voluminous writer on every conceivable subject, from poetry to astronomy, from dogmatic theology to mysticism.

It is true that Niclaes claimed to hold an impartial attitude towards all existing religious parties, and his mysticism, derived from David Joris, was undogmatic. Yet he admitted his followers by the rite of adult baptism, and set up a hierarchy among them on the Roman model (see his Evangelium Regni, in English A Joyfull Message of the Kingdom, 1574?; reprinted, 1652).

In 1811, while residing with his wife's relations at Hardenberg, near Göttingen, he was brought into contact with German mysticism, which considerably modified his earlier sceptical views on religion.

But though Philo sees the difficulties of the orthodox Judaism he cannot accept pantheism or mysticism so far as to give up the personality of God (see Logos).

At Athens, the philosophers who taught in the schools hallowed by memories of Plato still openly professed what passed for Paganism, though it was really a body of moral doctrine, strongly tinged with mysticism, in which there was far more of Christianity and of the speculative metaphysics of the East than of the old Olympian religion.

These reacted upon this institutional religion, which readapted and reinterpreted itself from time to time, and when they did not help to build up another theology (as in Christianity), they ended by assuming too rigid and unprogressive a shape (see Qaraites), or, breaking away from long-tried convention, became a mysticism with mixed results (see Kabbalah).

But in his attempt to draw still closer the realms of faith and knowledge he approaches more nearly to the mysticism of Eckhart, Paracelsus and Boehme.

He has abandoned himself altogether to this mysticism (Pierre could not tolerate mysticism in anyone now).

Pearls provoke much mysticism and mystery due to their rarity and beauty.

Depending on the style and design of the candle holder, the dragonfly can add a touch of mysticism, whimsy or romance.

The Knapp-Hall Tarot is flavored with a bit of eastern mysticism and philosophy.

Still, some individuals prefer the mysticism of the divination arts, and these people fuel the fortune telling community.

Wands are a symbol of mysticism and change.

Stars-these can be a representation of mysticism, happiness, spirituality, or even be whimsical depending on the shape and details added to a star tattoo.

While some of the mysticism of the moon has dispersed, our interest remains intact and many people enjoy learning more about the lunar cycle and studying the moon in more detail.

But he made a system of his own by combining the teaching of his master with parts of the doctrines of others, and with mysticism imbibed from the great teacher Ghazali.

Here she met two men, one of whom indoctrinated her with religious mysticism,- the other with advanced socialism, Lamennais and Pierre Leroux.

But he does not follow his idea into the details of human duty, though he passes in review fatalism, mysticism, pantheism, scepticism, egotism, sentimentalism and rationalism.

As a thinker, he shows little sympathy with that strain of medieval mysticism which is to be observed in all the poetry of his contemporaries.

Mysticism is often the expression of a revolt against authority, but in Luria's case mysticism was not divorced from respect for tradition.

Though his teaching was largely directed against superstition, he seems to have been inclined to mysticism, and perhaps for this reason various kabbalistic works were ascribed to him in later times.

He had a strong inclination to mysticism, but whether certain kabbalistic works are rightly attributed to him is doubtful.

Numerous works, representing the extreme of mysticism, were published by his pupils as the result of his teaching.

In spite of his own leaning towards mysticism he was a strong opponent of the IIasidim, a mystical sect founded by Israel Ba'al Shem Tobh (Besht) and promoted by Baer of Meseritz.

Schwenkfeld's mysticism was the cause of his divergence from Protestant orthodoxy and the root of his peculiar religious and theological position.

The first is the philosophic side of mysticism; the second, its religious side.

Hence the speculative utterances of mysticism are always more or less pantheistic in character.

On the practical side, mysticism maintains the possibility of direct intercourse with this Being of beings - intercourse, not through any external media such as an historical revelation, oracles, answers to prayer, and the like, but by a species of ecstatic transfusion or identification, in which the individual becomes in very truth " partaker of the divine nature."

Mysticism differs, therefore, from ordinary pantheism in that its inmost motive is religious; but, whereas religion is ordinarily occupied with a practical problem and develops its theory in an ethical reference, mysticism displays a predominatingly speculative bent, starting from the divine nature rather than from man and his surroundings, taking the symbolism of religious feeling as literally or metaphysically true, and straining after the present realization of an ineffable union.

At times they merely bring into prominence again the ever-fresh fact of personal religious experience; at other times mysticism develops itself as a powerful solvent of definite dogmas.

A review of the historical appearances of mysticism will serve to show how far the above characteristics are to be found, separately or in combination, in its different phases.

In the East, mysticism is not so much a specific phenomenon as a natural deduction from the dominant philosophic systems, and the normal expression of religious feeling in the lands in which it appears.

It is only with the exhaustion of Greek and Jewish civilization that mysticism becomes a prominent factor in Western thought.

Mysticism is not the voluntary demission of reason and its subjection to an external authority.

But such a temper of mind is much more akin to scepticism than to mysticism; it is characteristic of those who either do not feel the need of philosophizing their beliefs, or who have failed in doing so and take refuge in sheer acceptance.

Asceticism is thus the counterpart of medieval mysticism; and, by his example as well as by his teaching in such passages, St Bernard unhappily encouraged practices which necessarily resulted in self-delusion.

It proves that much of the terminology of German mysticism was current before Eckhart's time.

Ruysbroeck's mysticism is more of a practical than a speculative cast.

Mysticism instinctively recedes from formulas that have become stereotyped and mechanical.

The mysticism of William Law (1686-1761) and of Louis Claude de Saint Martin in France (1743-1803), who were also students of Boehme, is of a much more elevated and spiritual type.

The religiosity of the Quakers, with their doctrines of the " inner light " and the influence of, the Spirit, has decided affinities with mysticism; and the autobiography of George Fox (1624-1691), the founder of the sect, proceeds throughout on the assumption of supernatural guidance.

Stripped of its definitely miraculous character, the doctrine of the inner light may be regarded as the familiar mystical protest against formalism, literalism, and scripture-worship. Swedenborg, though selected by Emerson in his Representative Men as the typical mystic, belongs rather to the history of spiritualism than to that of mysticism as understood in this article.

The term mysticism is indeed often extended by popular usage and philosophical partisanship to the whole activity of the post-Kantian idealists.

The pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann does not, however, exclude a certain ultimate mysticism, which bears some analogy to that of Buddhism.

Religious training was confined to instruction in the forms of the Orthodox Church and the repetition of prayers by rote; dogmatic questions Nicholas neither understood nor cared about; and, in spite of his reverence for his brother Alexander, the latter's mysticism had not the faintest influence upon him.

The first is letter mysticism explaining the secrets of God's nature.

These are the favourite similes of mysticism, wherever it is found.