Teresa of Avila and Jonathan Edwards on Prayer and Spirituality

Contemplative prayer has been a major source of contention in evangelical spirituality. Contemplative prayer is frequently mentioned as one apparent spiritual activity that is foreign to the scripture and Christian worldview and more resembling the New Age Movement and pantheistic Eastern religion by people who are skeptical of the mystical Christian tradition. This article will examine Teresa of Avila’s thought on mystical prayer, which is sometimes misinterpreted as a notion incompatible with evangelical theology of prayer. Hence, Teresa’s ideas of mystical prayer will be examined and compared with Jonathan Edwards’ concepts of prayer, which is considered to reflect evangelical theology of prayer. The comparison suggests that the contemplative, mystical prayer of Teresa is compatible with evangelical theology of prayer in its progress and purpose. Teresa and Edwards both understood prayer as an experience and progress that leads to the complete union with God, mediated by Christ and his words in scripture. This spiritual union with God will transform the devoted one with tremendous passion and strength to love and help others in their struggle and suffering. This study of Teresa’s thought of mystical prayer is expected to reinvigorate evangelical theology and praxis of prayer by learning from the rich spirituality of the Christian mystical tradition.

Antropological Concept in Mystical Poetry of Parvin Etesami

The essay reflects on the creativity of Parvin Etesami (1907 – 1941), a distinguished Persian poet, little known abroad. We highlight anthropological teaching based on the religious worldview as one of the aspects of her mystical poetry. Created in the era when Persian literature and its classical tradition were breaking, Parvin’s poems affirm loyalty to the mystical tradition and the ways of self-creation of an individual laid down in it. The article shows that the Muslim science of behavior guides a person striving for wisdom and determines their path. The preaching of morality in Parvin’s poems, coupled with her mystical enlightenment, attempts to return her contemporaries to the classical world of their tradition. This research investigates the concept of man and is based on the only collection of 60 poems published in Russian (Journey of Tears, 1984), as well as on the new poetic translations. Two of the poems translated by M. Yahyapour and M. L. Reysner are introduced to the readers for the first time. The paper describes different facets of personality and fate, found in poetic self-reflection, the most significant of which is Parvin’s Auto-Epitaph. The values corresponding to Parvin’s spiritual personality are revealed: purity of soul, strictness, restraint, intellectualism, moral seriousness. Following the Sufi teachings about men, Parvin criticizes deviations from the true path —such as susceptibility to passions and pride. The poet considers them the destroyers and believes that they occur because of the evil forces distorting the human soul. The poet proposes a way out for the soul captured by the world — the knowledge of the Truth and the appeal to the experience of the righteous. The essay demonstrates that in Parvin’s poetry, fidelity to a thousand-year-old spiritual tradition and individual creativity appear as an organic unity. In the era that leads a person of the West and the East away from the spiritual roots of culture, the poet becomes a gnostic and a mystic in his individual creative life and, abandoning modern trends, consciously takes the path of mystical enlightenment and brings to her readers the wisdom found on these paths.

Merawat Mistisisme di Surakarta

Mystical rituals in a tradition experience conflict in society because of things that are irrational in nature. For example, the grebeg maulid tradition, grebeg sudiro, lawung mahesa ceremony, mbah meyek village clean, sadranan, and slametan. However, the government has not lost the way to maintain this mystical tradition to maintain society's social order. This research is qualitative research with an ethnographic approach that focuses on the traditions that exist in Surakarta, which contain mystical but still growing. This research was conducted from 2019 to 2020. The data collected came from observations made in 5 sub-districts in Surakarta. Second, interviews with mystical actors. Third, documentation obtained from books, journals, and mass media explaining the mystical traditions in Surakarta. The data validity used the triangulation method, member check, time extension, peer debriefing. Data analysis using ethnographic analysis model. The result is that there are six ways to rationalize the mystical tradition, namely connecting the mystical with something rational, using a different name that can be accepted by the public at large, making the tools used in the tradition no longer mystical, and accommodating technological developments. such as the e-wom method to spread tradition.

Being and Becoming Anticolonial: The Life of Sayyid Fadl and the State of History

History has been difficult to dislodge from its colonial trajectory in spite of at least a half-century of post-Orientalist critique. Accordingly, a critical theory that is genuinely global in its lineaments is difficult to establish as practice without more decolonial histories of the modern world. This paper thus moves on two fronts in order to meet the stated objectives of expanding the field of critical theory while tracking “untimely traditions” and the horizons they’ve drawn. It will offer a history of anticolonial practice that was simultaneously theorized within a distinct Islamic mystical tradition and against a globally emerging conception of state sovereignty (on which much of history writing wittingly or unwittingly concentrates). These political and intellectual histories converge around the biography of a nineteenth-century itinerant Sufi, Sayyid Fadl Ibn Alawi. The critical potentiality of this life will be extrapolated into the present by considering the death-defying horizons opened by the newly expanded repertoire available to a mystical tradition, which allows us to reflect on the anticolonial as an ontology refused and yet a promise. Finally, the paper seeks to answer a question that was only treated partially in my recent book For God or Empire. Does the mysticism of this tradition devolve into apolitical practices or does its survival and even proliferation compel a revisioning of emancipation in history and in theory?

Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Foundations of Authority

This chapter is dedicated to reconstructing Gershom Scholem’s analysis of Jewish messianism in light of political theology. Scholem’s political thought is often associated with a critique of any attempt to endow Zionism with messianic traits. This chapter, instead focuses on Scholem’s conception of legal authority, arguing that his historiographical work on the mystical tradition of Judaism shows that the authority of the law is a function of the abdication of divine sovereignty and of a mystical idea of God’s Nothingness. Scholem articulates Jewish political theology around motifs found in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and nihilism. His is a political theology of the law after the “death of God.”

Introduction

Sixteenth-century church reformers needed not only to define the content and sources of truth, but also to teach Christians how to discern between truth and falsehood and how to shape their lives accordingly. This study of Martin Luther and his first intra-Reformation critics, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, shows that each connected suffering and truth, drawing upon teachings about annihilation of the self and union with God found in the Eckhartian mystical tradition. At the same time, Luther, Karlstadt, and Muntzer understood the concepts of annihilation and union differently, and each worked to form Christians into distinct kinds of ecclesial-political actors. The reformers not only democratized mysticism, as some scholars have recognized, but they used mysticism in the service of division—to define true versus false faith and doctrine, and to teach discernment of true versus false teaching and teachers. Such arguments required a sophisticated conception of false suffering that dismissed opponents’ suffering as a mere show or as suffering in the service of falsehood. This book seeks to bridge a gap between classical Reformation scholarship and more recent studies of discipline, asking how reformers wanted to equip Christians for discernment and self-discipline. Suffering especially threatened to unmoor self-discipline and cloud discernment.

Tasting the milk of celestial knowledge. Note about the rhetoric of the portrayal of the sacred in Alonso Cano’s painting The Lactation of St. Bernard (1653–1657) from the National Gallery in Prague

This is an attempt of interpretation of a picture that draws from mystical tradition. It is about the comprehension of a topic in a painting by the Spanish artist Alonso Cano (1601–1667, Granada), from the National Gallery in Prague (O 14 690) Lactatio S. Bernardi – presenting the miracle of lactation, in which the Virgin Mary is squirting milk from her breast into the mouth of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (a historically very famous saint and major representative of the Cistercian Order). Traces of iconography lead up to the Coptic Church, where the typology of the milking Virgin was probably first originated (Galacto Trofusa in Greek or Maria lactans in Latin). The starting point is perhaps the portrayal of the virgin goddess Isis milking her son Horus. In many cultures, milk symbolises physical and spiritual food (e.g. the Milky Way evoking the ancient myth about spurted divine milk). On the other hand, milking is also present in the Old Testament as the image of special blessing; it is a symbol of eternal beatitude and wisdom. The dream/vision of her milk is then – apart from the rest – a sign of abundance, fertility, love, and fullness. The lactation of St. Bernard is an allegory of the penetration of the divine science in the soul. Thanks to this act the saint receives God’s guide, which he can then discharge into his writings.