By Michael A. Sells
The topic of Mystical Languages of Unsaying is a crucial yet overlooked mode of mystical discourse, apophasis. which accurately ability "speaking away." occasionally translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming anything that's ineffable via regularly turning again upon its personal propositions and names. during this shut examine of apophasis in Greek, Christian, and Islamic texts, Michael Sells deals a sustained, serious account of the way apophatic language works, the conventions, common sense, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any try to study it.This ebook contains readings of the main conscientiously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative connection with very important apophatic writers within the Jewish culture, corresponding to Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells finds crucial universal good points within the writings of those authors, regardless of theirwide-ranging transformations in period, culture, and theology.By exhibiting how apophasis works as a method of discourse instead of as a destructive theology, this paintings opens a wealthy historical past to reevaluation. Sells demonstrates that the extra radical claims of apophatic writers—claims that critics have usually disregarded as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic—are very important to an sufficient account of the paranormal languages of unsaying. This paintings additionally has vital implications for the connection of classical apophasis to modern languages of the unsayable. Sells demanding situations many greatly circulated characterizations of apophasis between deconstructionists in addition to a few universal notions approximately medieval concept and gender family in medieval mysticism.
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Extra resources for Mystical Languages of Unsaying
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Dered the burning of the books then in · the possession of Amalric's disciples; among those books was P · h seon. :swarming with the worms of heretical perver- 0 \ · 62 • CHAPTER TWO pies that are given their most dramatic articulation in Eriugena. 65 The CHAPTER THREE terms "monism" and "pantheism" as applied to specific authors like Eriugena or to generalized trends of thought are replete with refer ence to the divine as substance. Common generalizations about mono Ibn cArabi's Polished Mirror: theism, about the difference between Western and Eastern concepts Identity Shift and Meaning Event of deity, and the divinity itself-whether viewed as existing or non existing-are based upon a substantialist understanding of deity.
E. 24 The tension between these two modes of the real is also evoked by the term in the first line signified by ( ) . " Such terms abound in Islamic dis course and sound repetitive in English. They are usually taken as a sign of piety. However, in Ibn 'Arabi the term may have another purpose as well, as an apophatic marker (like the Plotinian hoion). " The polished-mirror imagery of passage l a gains its effect as per formative apophasis by acting out semantically the aporia evoked mythically in the story of the nonexistent divine names complaining of their tension.
Common generalizations about mono Ibn cArabi's Polished Mirror: theism, about the difference between Western and Eastern concepts Identity Shift and Meaning Event of deity, and the divinity itself-whether viewed as existing or non existing-are based upon a substantialist understanding of deity. However, the nutritor's critique of substantialist understandings of "creation from nothing," leaves no doubt that to make his "nothing" into a "something" is to betray his thought. Language "overflows" with meaning as the reified and substantial deity momentarily re cedes.