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Ecstatic Confessions - The Heart of Mysticism (Paperback, New edition)
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Ecstatic Confessions - The Heart of Mysticism (Paperback, New edition)
Series: Martin Buber Library
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List price R438
Loot Price R405
Discovery Miles 4 050
You Save R33 (8%)
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First published in 1909, this brief, eclectic, appealing anthology,
ably edited (by Paul Mendes-Flohr) and translated, makes a welcome
addition to Buber's work in English. The four dozen or so excerpts
from the writings of notable mystics span an immense historical and
cultural territory, from the Mahabharata to Lao-Tse, from the Sufis
to the Hasidim, from Plotinus to Anna Katharina Emmerich. There
are, inevitably, may omissions (Francis of Assisi, Tauler, John of
the Cross, Swedenborg, George Fox, etc.). More surprising, perhaps,
is the very limited space allotted Jewish mystics, which may help
revive Buber's reputation as a Jewish theologian best appreciated
by Gentiles. (Mendes-Flohr, however, points out the ironic fact
that although Hebrew was thought to be quite capable of expressing
divine truth, it was a sacred language and thus unavailable as a
vehicle for fantasy and intimate experience.) The most striking
voices that Buber records belong to medieval Christian women, like
Christina Ebner (d. 1355), who felt that she was pregnant with
Jesus, or Jutzi Schulteiss (n.d.), who "had lost herself so
completely that she did not know if she was human." Angela di
Foligno (d. 1309) has a vision of Jesus saying, "You are I, and I
am you." Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510) wished "to be changed
completely into pure God." What does all this mean? Buber's
Introduction is sober but suggestive. In their ecstasies, he
argues, mystics experience the "unity of the l." But in being swept
above and beyond the "multiplicity. . .of the senses and of
thought," the ecstatic is also cut off from language, whence the
stammering inadequacy of these sometimes very powerful narratives.
"We listen to our inmost selves," Buber writes, " - and do not know
which sea we hear murmuring." A stimulating presentation for
non-specialists. (Kirkus Reviews)
Available for the first time in paperback, Ecstatic Confessions is
Martin Buber's unique, personal gathering of the testimonies of
mystics throughout the centuries expressing their encounters with
the divine. It features the author's seminal introduction to
mysticism, "Ecstasy and Confession", which probes the nature of
what Buber terms the "most inward of all experiences.... God's
highest gift". Buber sifted through texts from oriental, pagan,
Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim
sources down the centuries to cull those moving records that manage
to convey some quality of an experience that is essentially beyond
the power of words to capture. Ecstatic Confessions orchestrates
these reports from the edge of human experience into a revealing
look at the nature of the ecstatic experience itself and the
tension arising from the mystic's compelling need to give witness
to an event that can never truly be verbalized.
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