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After this course you will have insight from philosophical, theological and historical perspectives in the relation between spiritual discourses and practices and the fundamental transformations of religion in modernity. You will be able to explain how early modern and modern mysticism critically deals with the general problem of the modern subject. You can explain why this makes the early modern and modern mystical tradition interesting for both believers and non-believers.
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The basic thesis elaborated in this seminar is that our contemporary ego-mania, going however hand in hand with a strong penchant for selflessness, is rooted in the typically modern self-understanding that emerged in seventeenth-century Western Europe. At this time, the perspective from which we related to the world (including ourselves) shifted from God to our own free, independent ego. René Descartes’s cogito is the most reflective and influential expression of this. The establishment of this self-assured Cartesian ego aroused all kinds of countermovements, however. One of the movements that profoundly questioned the Cartesian ego and analyzed it in a highly critical way was the mysticism that permeated seventeenth-century French spirituality.
The first part of the seminar deals directly with early modern Christian mysticism, and more specifically with the French spiritualité and the discussions centered around the problem of the pur amour, i.e. of what it means to love God in a pure, radically unselfish way. That question as discussed in the works of Fénelon, Malebranche and Madame Guyon has influenced the way a similar kind of ‘love’ has been used in non-religious contexts, for instance in ‘love for the revolutionary state’ as we find in Robespierre, among others.
The second part explores the paradoxical dialectics between Self and Selflessness in relation to the way Christian religion deals with its own identity. If Christian love is selfless, why Christianity as such has in the end not to give up its own self, its own identity? We follow that question in the works of the French mystic Simone Weil, the Dutch theologian Miskotte, the French mysticism scholar Michel de Certeau and in the novel Silence by Endo Shūsaku Endō (made into a film by Scorsese)
The third part of the seminar discusses the dialects between self and selflessness in three other domains: the popular phenomenon of today’s spirituality, the field of politics, and the one of modern science. It makes clear that ‘selflessness’ is not limited to mysticism, but is both a fascination and a problem/paradox for modernity in many of its fields.
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BA-level in theology, philosophy, religious studies or literary studies.
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You will have to give class-presentation(s) and write a paper (MA-level).
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| Deze cursus wordt aangeboden door het Titus Brandsma Instituut. |
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