Teologi Mistik Pengharapan Bagi Sebuah Restorasi

Mystical Theology of Hope for a Restoration: The Interpretation of Ezekiel 37: 1-14. Various problems in the world have made humans live in suffering, especially when facing a pandemic which is still ongoing today. Humans need strength and certainty to face these difficult times in order to rise from adversity and experience restoration that is able to bring life into hope. This article examines efforts to cultivate hope theologically by describing a mystical theological view of hope in Ezekiel 37: 1-14. By using qualitative methods, especially through the approach of textual interpretation that examines the text to find the core of the news, the main message is found in the view of the mystical theology of the hope of the Prophet Ezekiel regarding the picture of Israel's recovery in exile, through Ezekiel's vision of the condition of dry bones scattered in the valley. The final findings of this article reveal that restoration from God is both a physical and a spiritual one that is represented by the act of God's Spirit awakening the dry bones. This event contains a bright hope for Israel, and for humans who believe, that life will be restored as long as humans are willing to keep themselves faithful as God's people. Abstrak: Teologi Mistik Pengharapan bagi Sebuah Restorasi: Tafsir Yehezkiel 37:1-14. Berbagai persoalan di dunia telah menjadikan manusia hidup di dalam penderitaan, terkhusus ketika menghadapi pandemi yang masih berlangsung saat sekarang. Manusia membutuhkan kekuatan dan kepastian untuk menghadapi masa-masa sulit ini guna bangkit dari keterpurukan penderitaan dan mengalami restorasi yang mampu mengantar kehidupan ke dalam pengharapan. Artikel ini mengupas upaya menumbuhkan pengharapan secara teologis dengan menjabarkan sebuah pandangan teologi mistik pengharapan dalam Yehezkiel 37:1-14. Dengan menggunakan metode kualitatif, khususnya melalui pendekatan tafsir tekstual yang meneliti teks untuk menemukan inti berita, ditemukan pesan utama dalam pandangan teologi mistik pengharapan Nabi Yehezkiel mengenai gambaran pemulihan Israel dalam pembuangan, melalui penglihatan Yehezkiel terhadap kondisi tulang-tulang kering yang berserakan di lembah. Temuan akhir dari artikel ini mengungkapkan bahwa pemulihan dari Allah merupakan pemulihan fisik dan sekaligus spiritual yang digambarkan melalui tindakan Roh Allah yang membangkitan tulang-tulang kering. Peristiwa ini berisi harapan yang cerah bagi Israel, dan manusia yang percaya, bahwa akan membuat pulih lagi kehidupan asalkan manusia mau tetap menjaga diri untuk setia sebagai umat kepunyaan Allah.

Bones, fire, and falcons: Loving things in medieval Europe

In three loving encounters between humans and nonhumans, this article explores different approaches to material love in medieval Europe. Beginning with an English bishop who attempted to eat the bone relic of Saint Mary Magdalene, it first considers how a series of medieval thinkers imagined God's love as mediated primarily through the consumption of matter. Further, it shows how the medieval commercialization of relics enabled a subversive, quasi-mystical counter tradition that located loving experiences within the unmediated physicality, or thingness, of Christian artifacts themselves. Moving next to Saint Francis of Assisi (d.1226), the article explores a curious case of self-negating devotion to fire. While contextualizing the saint's love against a background of scholastic materialism and ecstatic mysticism, it explores how fire gained a unique onto-theological status as the material essence of both love and the heavens in the 1200s. Finally, turning to love for animals, the analysis explores the astonishing care shown to falcons by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (d.1250). While surveying a series of trends in medieval ways of loving creatures, the article stresses how the emperor's radical empathy for beasts allowed him temporarily to surrender his sovereignty, melding the interest of king and bird. Just like the mystical theology that underpinned much of medieval devotion, it argues, these three loving encounters were all essentially structured as self-annihilating journeys into a “oneness” with the material landscape. Considering the ongoing threads of this forgotten type of self-erasing love, these medieval encounters can have intriguing implications for debates in the environmental humanities today.

Some Notes on “playing Logos” in Ambiguum 71 of St Maximus the Confessor

In the Ambigua to John 71, Maximus the Confessor discusses a passage of Gregory Nazianzen describing divine Logos that “plays in all kinds of forms.” The article emphasises four main approaches of the Ambiguum 71 to ‘acquit’ the image of ‘playful’ God. Firstly, St Maximus involves the hyperbolic language of Pseudo-Dionysius to indicate the superiority of divine ‘game’ over any kind of prudency or playfulness. Secondly, God’s playing can be discovered in His providence towards the sensible creations. The third step introduces all the material world as a God’s plaything, which can nevertheless be an object of natural contemplation. The fourth approach is merely moral, and its pathetic language conceals tensions between St Maximus’ and St Gregory’s patterns of thinking. Finally, all four parts are linked in a single structure derived from the triad “practical philosophy – natural contemplation – mystical theology,” which was often used by St Maximus.

The Rise of the Ni‘matullāhī Order. Shi'ite Sufi Masters against Islamic Fundamentalism in 19th-Century Persia

How were the Ni‘matullāhī masters successful in reviving Ni‘matullāhī Sufism in Shi‘ite Persia? This book investigates the revival of Ni‘matullāhī Sufi order after the death of the last Indian Ni‘matullāhī master, Riḍā ‘Alī Shāh (d. 1214/1799) in the Deccan. After the fall of Safavids, the revival movement of the Ni‘matullāhī order began with the arrival in Persia of the enthusiastic Indian Sufi master, Ma‘ṣūm ‘Alī Shāh, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Persian masters of the Ni‘matullāhī Order were able to solidify the order’s place in the mystical and theological milieu of Persia. Ma‘ṣūm ‘Alī Shāh and his disciples soon spread their mystical and ecstatic beliefs all over Persia. They succeeded in converting a large mass of Persians to Sufi teachings, despite the opposition and persecution they faced from Shi‘ite clerics, who were politically and socially the most influential class in Persia. The book demonstrates that Ḥusayn ‘Alī Shāh, Majdhūb ‘Alī Shāh, and Mast ‘Alī Shāh were able to consolidate the social and theological role of the Ni‘matullāhī order by reinterpreting and articulating classical Sufi teachings in the light of Persian Shi‎‘ite mystical theology.

Surviving Desire: Reading Ḥāfiz̤ in Colonial India

This article contributes to scholarship on Muslim humanities, Islam in modern South Asia, and the Urdu literary tradition in colonial India. It does so by contextualizing and closely reading Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī’s (1863–1943) commentary on the Dīvān of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Ḥāfiz̤. Unlike his modernist contemporaries, Ashraf ʿAlī does not read Ḥāfiz̤ through the prisms of social reform or anti-colonial nationalist struggle. Rather, in his capacity as a Sufi master, he approaches Ḥāfiz̤’s Dīvān as a mystical text in order to generate insights through which he counsels his disciples. He uses the commentary genre to explore Sufi themes such as consolation, contraction, annihilation, subsistence, and the master-disciple relational dynamic. His engagement with Ḥāfiz̤’s ġhazals enables him to elaborate a practical mystical theology and to eroticize normative devotional rituals. Yet the affirmation of an analogical correspondence between sensual and divine love on the part of Ashraf ʿAlī also implies the survival of Ḥāfiz̤’s emphases on the disposability of the world and intoxicated longing for the beloved despite the demands of colonial modernity.

The Resurrection of Christ and the True Life of All Creatures

In light of the deep involvement of the divine ideas in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, it becomes possible to conceive of a new cultural imaginary in which the divine ideas permit mystical theology to hear the embodied reality of all creatures as a communication event. C. S. Lewis’ investigation of the mythopoetic imagination affords us an analogy for the rediscovered use of the divine ideas tradition in the contemplative calling of humankind. Recognizing the creation as, in and of itself, also a means of communion among creatures and between creatures and God, angels and human beings have a particular role in advancing the intelligible meaning of all creatures through the development of a contemplative consciousness. In encountering the crucified yet risen Christ, Christians believe their consciousness of reality is transfigured as they are drawn into the vindicated truth of all creatures in Christ.