By John Ferguson
Starting from Christian mystical theology to Sufism, from the traditional philosophers to the Cambridge Platonists, from visionaries corresponding to William Blake and the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing to the function performed by way of medicines, yoga, song and the dance, this Encyclopaedia presents crucial info at the manifold points of mysticism and may function a accomplished and priceless paintings of reference for a few years to return. contains two hundred illustrations.
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Example text
Jesus Entered 17 I say besides: for man to be a virgin does not take away any of the work he has ever done; of all this he keeps himself virginal and free, without any impediment to the supreme truth, just as Jesus was free and void and virginal in himself. Since the masters say that only the likeness of the like establishes union, he who is to receive the virginal Jesus must himself be virginal and free. This paragraph defines the condition that makes possible the union with Christ through his reception or conception.
We can say that imperative thought and indicative thought differ from each other in their understanding of being: according to the first, being is known when a concrete existence assumes the path of detachment, which is the condition and the sole content at the same time of its understanding; according to the second, being is represented as the totality of objects comprehended by the mind. It is not by chance that Meister Eckhart chose to preach. His word calls upon a hearer. " In this confrontation, however, we should grant to the prosecution, whom the defendant suspects of malice and "short and imbecilic intelligence,"47 that the epistemology of Meister Eckhart, selected as it is from diverse currents of thought, can sometimes make one imagine a formal, entitative, identity between the intellect and God.
The former has been amply developed by Aristotle in his treatise on the soul, and like the theory of ideas was well known in the period in which Meister Eckhart taught. It is probably through Thomas Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle that Eckhart came under the influence of this current of thought. " Thus the necessary bond, according Jesus Entered 13 to Meister Eckhart, between virginity and the reception of Jesus in the mind is based on the Aristotelian philosophy of the receptive intellect. Meister Eckhart integrates both traditions, the Platonic and the Aristotelian, into a new context by blending the theory of the preexistence of the soul and that of the receptive intellect.