This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Introduction by Evelyn Underhill. "Jacob Boehme, who reveals to us in this book some of the secrets of his inner life, was among the most original of the great Christian mystics. With a natural genius for the things of the spirit, he also exhibited many of the characteristics of the psychic, the seer, and the metaphysician; and his influence on philosophy has been at least as great as his influence on religious mysticism.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Being the Story of Mysticism through the ages told in the biographies of representative seers and saints with excerpts from their writings and sayings. Contents: The Golden Age and the Mystic Poet Lao-Tse; The Buddha, the Great Light, and the Bliss of Nirvana; The Age of Reason in Greece: Pythagoras and Plato; The Tardy Flowering of Greek Mysticism: Plotinus; Christian Mysticism, from the Founders to St. Bernard; The Medieval Flowering: Eckhart and the Friends of God; Fra Angelico, the Saintly Painter and Tool of God; Jacob Boehme, the Shoemaker-Illuminate of the Reformation; Brother Lawrence, the Lay Monk Who Attained Unclouded Vision; A Mystic in the Age of Enlightened Skepticism: William Blake.

Jacob Behmen (Boehme), the greatest of the mystics, and the father of German philosophy. Whyte gives a brief account of the life and writings of Behmen. An excellent primer for the student of Jacob Behmen. Contents: Autobiographic; The Aurora; Persecution of Behmen by Gregory Richter; Behmen's Depth; His Style; The Three Principles; The Threefold Life of Man; The Fourth Questions; A Treatise of the Incarnation of the Son of God; Signatura Rerum; The Way to Christ; A Treatise of the Four Complexions; His Apologies; Upon Election; Theoscopia, or Divine Vision; Holy Week; As a Theologian; His Doctrine of God; Eternal Nature in Behmen; The Heart of Man; The Wrath of God; Sin; Love; His Death.

Contents: Essays on the Life of the Soul in God. A collection of thirty-two Essays in Three Parts. Lamps of Quest: The Path of Reality: An Ex-parte Statement; Oblation and Service; Consecrations of Life and Thought; The Higher Understanding; The Sense of the Infinite; Life and Doctrine; A Study in Contrast; The Higher Aspect; Spiritism and the Mystic Quest; Official Churches and Spiritism; The Path of the Mysteries. Lamps of Life: Of Crowned Masters; The Dionysian Heritage; The Everlasting Gospel; The Message of Eckehart; Ruysbroeck's Journey in the Divine Distance; A bride of Christ; Voices from Carmel; Post-Reformation Mystics; Molinos and the Quietists; Later Witnesses to the Life of Life; In the Shadow of Revolution; A Modern Daughter of Desire; . Lamps on Heights: Mystical Realization; Faith and Vision; The Path of Contemplation; The World to Come and the World of the Holy One; Grounds of Unity in Grace and Nature; The Poet's Glass of Vision; A Study in Christian Pantheism; The Grades of Love; The Inward Holy of Holies.

The High and Deep Searching Out of the Three Principles. Contents: Of the Original Matrix, or Genetrix; Further of the Genetrix; Concerning the Birth of Love; Of the Wellspring of Light; Of the Wisdom of God, and of the Angelical World; Of the World, and also of Paradise; Of the True Corner Stone; Of the Transitory, and of the Eternal Life; Of the Threefold Life; How Man may find himself; Of the True Knowledge, what man is; Of the True Christian Life and Conversation; Of Christ's most precious Testaments; Of the Broad Way, and of the Narrow Way; Of the Mixed World and its Wickedness; Of Praying and Fasting; Of God's blessing in this World; Of Death, and of Dying.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This comprehensive anthology will serve both as a text for serious students of mysticism and a reflective collection for those first exploring its thought. Biographical and historical data, as well as the mystic's key ideas and information about why the particular text was selected introduce each mystic to the reader.

Fifty-five mystics or mystical theologians, ancient and modern, are represented, including: Origen, Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, the anonymous author of "Cloud of Unknowing, " Thomas a' Kempis, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Karl Rahner.

In the half century since its first publication in English, this small book has become a classic of medieval theology. Directing his attention to 'perhaps the most neglected aspect' of Cistercian mysticism, the great French medievalist and philosopher Etienne Gilson directs attention to 'that part of [Bernard's] theology on which his mysticism rests', his 'systematics'.Cistercian Publications brings this important book back into print in celebration of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Saint Bernard, hoping that new generations of scholars will find it food for thought and further research.

Margery Kempe, a middle-class English housewife at the turn of the fifteenth century, was called to weep and to pray for her fellow Christians and to adopt an unconventional way of life. Separating herself from her husband and many children, she became a pilgrim travelling around England and as far away as Jerusalem. In old age, she dictated to scribes an autobiography that recounts her extraordinary intimacy with Christ as well as her intense, commotion-filled life. At first glance, she does not seem very saintly in character or disposition, and her spiritual experiences can easily appear to be extreme or egotistical. To appreciate and interpret Margery Kempe's life and spirituality properly, one must go beyond conventional categories of social and religious history.

In Mystic and Pilgrim, Clarissa Atkinson does this from six perspectives: the character of Margery's autobiography, her mysticism and pilgrim way of life, her social and family environment, her relations with her church and its clergy, the tradition that shaped her piety, and the context of late medieval female sanctity. Margery's Book was shaped by the writings of famous holy women and by pressures on memory and motivation that come with age.

The vocation that called Margery to mysticism and pilgrimage made her unusual, therefore open to suspicion. It required her to leave her husband and children, to dress in white (a color usually reserved for virgins), to go on pilgrimage as a way to participate in Christ's earthly life and death. It graced her with a conspicuous gift: tears she could not control or resist. Her domestic and social background (she came from a powerful merchant family) gave her the courage to persist in her strange vocation and unpopular way of life. She met scorn from most of her relatives, but found encouragement in Christ, the saints, and the representatives of the Church. During Margery's lifetime the Church displayed intense anxiety over the related issues of religious enthusiasm, discernment of spirits, and female visionaries. Yet many church officials, including Dame Julian of Norwich, advised Margery to accept what God sent her and judged her feelings to be "the work of the Holy Ghost."

Having examined these aspects of Margery's life and piety, Atkinson goes on to make an original and significant contribution by explaining their specific spiritual context. It is in the tradition of affective piety and of late medieval female sanctity, she argues, that Margery's religious emotions and expressions can best be understood. From Anselm of Canterbury, through Francis of Assisi, to Nicolas Love, affective writers and preachers aimed to promote intense feelings. Principal among these were compassion and contrition. Margery incorporated these feelings in her own devotional life: identification with the human Christ, conspicuous humility inspired by Saint Francis, and "boistrous" emotion in sympathy with Mary grieving at the Cross.

Against this background, the religious life of Margery Kempe seems neither aberrant nor even very unusual. Rather, it is her unique response to a tradition established by great saints. Among the saintly persons of late medieval Europe were many women: Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich. They characteristically saw visions, communicated directly with God, found scribes or biographers who publicized their experiences. An increasing number of them were wives and mothers who struggled, like Margery, with the married state and eventually transcended it, becoming in effect "honorary" virgins through their holiness and by God's special favor. Traveling widely, speaking publicly, departing from traditional women's roles, these women were a new creation of the late Middle Ages.

Included in this collection of Medieval writings are Ray Petry's careful essays on the province and character of mysticism and the history of mysticism from Plato to Bernard of Clairvaux.

Long recognized for the quality of its translations, introductions, explanatory notes, and indexes, the Library of Christian Classics provides scholars and students with modern English translations of some of the most significant Christian theological texts in history. Through these works--each written prior to the end of the sixteenth century--contemporary readers are able to engage the ideas that have shaped Christian theology and the church through the centuries.

For centuries readers have comfortably accepted Julian of Norwich as simply a mystic. In this astute book, Denys Turner offers a new interpretation of Julian and the significance of her work. Turner argues that this fourteenth-century thinker's sophisticated approach to theological questions places her legitimately within the pantheon of other great medieval theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Bonaventure. Julian wrote but one work in two versions, a Short Text recording the series of visions of Jesus Christ she experienced while suffering a near-fatal illness, and a much expanded Long Text exploring the theological meaning of the "showings" some twenty years later. Turner addresses the apparent conflict between the two sources of Julian's theology: on the one hand, her personal revelation of God's omnipotent love, and on the other, the Church's teachings on and her own witnessing of evil in the world that deserves punishment, even eternal punishment. Offering a fresh and elegant account of Julian's response to this conflict-one that reveals its nuances, systematic character, and originality-this book marks a new stage in the century-long rediscovery of one of the English language's greatest theological thinkers.

Burns & Oates are proud to reissue Ruth Burrows' critically acclaimed work of spiritual theology, "Guidelines for Mystical Prayer". When first published in 1976, spiritual theology as reflection on spiritual experience was a growing trend; but at the same time there was a new interest in, and a return to, the classical Carmelite theology of prayer, with an effort to formulate that theology in contemporary thought categories. "Guidelines for Mystical Prayer" embodies both tendencies. It offers a personal narrative, a reflection on the spiritual history of two gifted people, St Teresa and St John of the Cross; and yet it speaks clearly out of the Carmelite tradition, and in the language of today. Strong interest in Carmelite theology of prayer and the spiritual life has continued into the present; the recent success of Burrows' "Essence of Prayer" is testament to this.

Apart from the introduction by Fr Steuart, The Mystical Doctrine of St John of the Cross consists wholly of passages from St John's own writings. It sets out in continous and convenient form all the essential points in his teachings. St John of the Cross was born near Avila in 1542 and dies at Ubeda in 1591. A Carmelite friar he was an enthusiastic supporter of St Teresa's campaign to restore the original and strict rule. His untiring work to spread the reform led to imprisonment, during which he wrote his first poem. He was canonized in 1726 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

This book is an in-depth, comparative study of two of the most popular and influential intellectual and spiritual traditions of West Africa: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing a unique methodological approach that thinks with and from-rather than merely about-these traditions, Oludamini Ogunnaike argues that they contain sophisticated epistemologies that provide practitioners with a comprehensive worldview and a way of crafting a meaningful life. Using theories belonging to the traditions themselves as well as contemporary oral and textual sources, Ogunnaike examines how both Sufism and Ifa answer the questions of what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how it is verified. Or, more simply: What do you know? How did you come to know it? How do you know that you know? After analyzing Ifa and Sufism separately and on their own terms, the book compares them to each other and to certain features of academic theories of knowledge. By analyzing Sufism from the perspective of Ifa, Ifa from the perspective of Sufism, and the contemporary academy from the perspective of both, this book invites scholars to inhabit these seemingly "foreign" intellectual traditions as valid and viable perspectives on knowledge, metaphysics, psychology, and ritual practice. Unprecedented and innovative, Deep Knowledge makes a significant contribution to cross-cultural philosophy, African philosophy, religious studies, and Islamic studies. Its singular approach advances our understanding of the philosophical bases underlying these two African traditions and lays the groundwork for future study.

In God, Mystery, and Mystification, Denys Turner presents eight essays covering the major issues of philosophical and practical theology that he has focused on over the fifty years of his academic career. While a somewhat heterogeneous collection, the chapters are loosely linked by a focus on the mystery of God and on distinguishing that mystery from merely idolatrous mystifications. The book covers three main fields: theological epistemology, medieval and early modern mystical theologies, and the relation of Christian belief to natural science and politics. Turner develops the implications of a moderate realist account of theological knowledge as distinct from a fashionable, postmodernist epistemology. This modern realist epistemology is embodied in connections between theoretical, speculative theologies and the practice of the Christian faith in a number of different ways, but mainly as bearing upon the practical, lived connections between faith and reason, between reason and the mystical, between faith and science, and among faith, prayer, and politics. Scholars and advanced students of theology, religious studies, the history of ideas, and medieval thought will be interested in this book.

This is the extraordinary story of Knight and Lomas's fourteen year quest to uncover the secret teachings buried beneath Roslin Chapel near Edinburgh. Their quest ends with extraordinary revelations about early human history - the origins of Christianity, of Freemasonry and of science. They show that all were charged with a belief in a secret cosmic code, linking, for example, the Exodus from Egypt, the founding of Solomon's Temple and the Star of Bethlehem. This book reveals for the first time why there were such high expectations of a Messiah at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. The Book of Hiram will change everything you thought you knew about both the Bible and Freemasonry.