The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition by Andrew Louth

The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition by Andrew Louth

By Andrew Louth

Students of the patristic period have paid extra awareness to the dogmatic culture of their interval than to the improvement of Christian mystical theology. Andrew Louth goals to redress the stability. spotting that the highbrow kind of this practice was once decisively prompted by way of Platonic rules of the soul's dating to God, Louth starts off with an exam of Plato and Platonism. The dialogue of the Fathers which follows indicates how the paranormal culture is on the middle in their suggestion and the way the dogmatic culture either molds and is the mirrored image of mystical insights and issues. This re-creation of a vintage examine of the varied affects upon Christian spirituality encompasses a new Epilogue which brings the textual content thoroughly modern.

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The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition

Students of the patristic period have paid extra recognition to the dogmatic culture of their interval than to the advance of Christian mystical theology. Andrew Louth goals to redress the stability. spotting that the highbrow kind of this custom used to be decisively prompted via Platonic rules of the soul's dating to God, Louth starts with an exam of Plato and Platonism.

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What sort of yearning is it? And what satisfaction does Philo envisage 3 This idea of God manifested through His rule and bounty reXects a Hellenistic, rather than a biblical, notion of kingship. Philo 21 its Wnding? It is this yearning to know the unknowable God that leads to the mystical dimension of Philo’s thought. In De Abrahamo Philo discusses the appearance to Abraham of the three angels at the oak of Mamre. Three men appear to Abraham, and yet Abraham addresses them as ‘My Lord’ (singular), and, on at least one occasion, the text introduces their words by saying, ‘The Lord (singular — in the Hebrew, Yahweh) said’.

So the central Being, with each of His powers as His squire, presents to the mind which has vision the appearance sometimes of one, sometimes of three; of one when the mind is highly puriWed and, passing beyond not merely the multiplicity of other numbers, but even the dyad which is next to the unit, presses on to the ideal form which is free from mixture and complexity, and being self-contained needs nothing more; of three when, as yet uninitiated into the highest mysteries, it is still a votary only of the minor rites and unable to apprehend the Existent alone by Itself and apart from all else, but only through Its actions, as either creative or ruling.

It is an allegory of a passage from Leviticus (2:14), which in Philo’s version runs: ‘What is oVered in the oVering of the Wrst-fruits is Wrst the new, then the roasted, then the sliced, and last the ground’ (Sac. 76). The detail is complicated, but his conclusion is: ‘When then you acknowledge in a spiritual sense these four things: the ‘‘new’’, that is the blossom or vigour; the ‘‘roasted’’, that is the Wre-tested and invincible reason; the ‘‘sliced’’, that is the division of things into their classes; the ‘‘pounded’’, that is the persistent practice and exercise in what the mind has grasped, you will bring an oVering of the Wrst-fruits, even the Wrst and best oVspring of the soul’ (Sac.

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