Preserving Scriptural Harmony

Only one allusion to the phrase “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) survives from the early church, in Book 10 of Origen’s Commentary on John. This article establishes that Origen is offering a close paraphrase of this saying, and suggests that it appears as a slogan, possibly reflecting use by other Christians, in favour of overriding the implications of the spiritual reading of John 2.20–22. It shows how Origen’s interpretative procedures – distinguishing literal and spiritual senses, and invoking the key principle of Scripture’s internal harmony – interact and combine to resist this deployment of Jude 3. Although this requires Origen to admit some kind of “change of good things once given to the saints”, it constitutes an application and further elucidation of his careful exegetical method which, ultimately, “preserves the harmony of the narrative of the Scriptures”.

Archeosophy and experimental metaphysics of Palamidessi

The centre of the reflections of Tommaso Palamidessi (1915 1983), starting from the first writings of the 1940’s, is the providing of the spiritual techniques capable of carrying forward the study of the metaphysical reality to anexperimental plane. The f ull realization of his “experimental metaphysics” is constituted by Archeosophy, understood as the experimental way, presented by him in 1968 and developed in the following years. The concrete basis of every supersensible experimentation for Palamidessi is the awakening of those which are the centres of force, identified with the “spiritual senses” of the Fathers of Church, which as such allow the superior worlds to be rendered sensible. In the thought of Palamidessi therefore the possibility of an experimental metaphysics and of a spiritual practice become implementable once the techniques of awakening and of the development of these subtle centres are provided.While taking into account the thematic vastness of the various “asceses” proposed by Archeosophy, with the relative methods, experiments and exercises, in this study we synthetically present three orders of spiritual practices suggested by Palamidessi in his writings, and widely diffused among Archeosophers: the meditation on the centres of force, the spiritual exercises with the “rite of the eucharistia lucernaris ” and the Cardiognosis with the “prayer to the Sapience".

“May we not see God?”: Henry David Thoreau’s Doctrine of Spiritual Senses

This article argues that Henry David Thoreau believed in the essential unity of the five senses and privileged each as a source of wild and divine knowledge, which, when combined, created a full picture that might result in a true approximation of God in and beyond nature—the hallmark of Thoreau’s fundamentally incarnational theology. Thoreau treated each sense not only as a source of divine knowledge but as a site of theological discourse: for touch, the relationship between sin and grace; for smell, the conundrum of an eternal divinity acting in historical time; for taste, the efficacy of sacraments; for hearing, the possibility of continuing revelation; and for sight, the ability for human beings to actually see God. The senses were the practical entry point to Thoreau’s theological system, which was concerned with the discovery and redemption of internal “wildness” and reconnection to the mysterious, divine source of that wildness, to the unaccountable in nature.

Did God Answer That Prayer?

In his recent book Petitionary Prayer, Scott Davison presents an epistemological challenge to petitionary prayer. He asks: If S prays for God to bring about event E, and E in fact occurs, how could one be justified in believing that E was an answer to S’s prayer? Apart from direct revelation in which God explicitly provides reasons for believing that E was an answer to prayer, Davison argues, S could not know that S’s prayer had been answered by God. Thus, the person praying should remain agnostic about answered prayers. I argue that in failing to attend to two theological resources available in the Christian tradition—the concept of spiritual senses and teachings about the relational nature of prayer—Davison’s conclusion is premature. Drawing upon recent literature on the epistemology of perception and the theology of prayer, I argue that one can be confident that God has answered one’s prayers.

Situating the Holy Land: Juxtapositions and Circular Paths

In endowing the Holy Land with sanctity, the Crusades established it as an object of territorial desire and a site of spiritual transcendence. Cultivating this desire for the Holy Land involved several interrelated Crusade concepts: the power of pilgrimage traditions, perceptions of the Eastern enemy, fear and curiosity about the unknown, and delineations of the position of the Holy Land within a larger globe. These factors converged to redefine Jerusalem within a sacred landscape, where Crusaders sought to walk in the very steps that Christ had impressed in the sacred terrain. Such concepts were explored in Crusader maps, and articulated in Crusade lyric. The rhetoric of Crusade song variously relied upon circular and linear motions, dualistically juxtaposed nearness and distance, sameness and difference, and yearning and attainment. This chapter demonstrates ways in which Crusade songs, such as Ara pot hom conoisser by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, mapped space, articulated geographic beliefs, and explored physical and spiritual senses of movement.

Mystical Theology and Human Experience

Human experience is central to mystical theology but it cannot define it, because, according to mystical theology, the experience is not merely human but divine. After an orientation in the current debate on mystical experience, the puzzling quality of the experience, as both fully human and more than anything human, is elaborated through an exposition of three historical examples, Augustine, Meister Eckhart, and Teresa of Avila. The dual, expansive character of the experience elicits growth into an enlarged capacity for seeing God as both immediately present and wholly other. An increasing integration of key tensions—between divine presence and divine absence, inner and outer knowing, spirit and body, and contemplative and active—emerges in this transformative process. This perspective is finally reviewed with reference to the tradition of the ‘spiritual senses’.

Discerning the Body of Christ: A Retrieval of Thomas Cranmer’s Eucharistic Theology by Way of the Spiritual Senses

Thomas Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology has been the source of no small amount of scholarship and dispute. I argue that these disputes are in part due to the fact that Cranmer wavers between describing two distinct realities and that these realities are not necessarily coincidental. There is the reality of the consecrated elements, which he understands figuratively as being the body and blood of Christ. But Cranmer also describes a second reality, which is the direct connection between the soul of the recipient and the actual body and blood of Christ. I highlight the latter reality by recourse to recent work on the notion of the spiritual senses in the Christian theological tradition.