In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries secular French scholars started re-engaging with religious ideas, particularly mystical ones. Mysticism in the French Tradition introduces key philosophical undercurrents and trajectories in French thought that underpin and arise from this engagement, as well as considering earlier French contributions to the development of mysticism. Filling a gap in the literature, the book offers critical reflections on French scholarship in terms of its engagement with its mystical and apophatic dimensions. A multiplicity of factors converge to shape these encounters with mystical theology: feminist, devotional and philosophical treatments as well as literary, historical, and artistic approaches. The essays draw these into conversation. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary range of contributions from both new and established scholars, this book provides access to the melting pot out of which the mystical tradition in France erupted in the twenty-first century, and from which it continues to challenge theology today.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries secular French scholars started re-engaging with religious ideas, particularly mystical ones. Mysticism in the French Tradition introduces key philosophical undercurrents and trajectories in French thought that underpin and arise from this engagement, as well as considering earlier French contributions to the development of mysticism. Filling a gap in the literature, the book offers critical reflections on French scholarship in terms of its engagement with its mystical and apophatic dimensions. A multiplicity of factors converge to shape these encounters with mystical theology: feminist, devotional and philosophical treatments as well as literary, historical, and artistic approaches. The essays draw these into conversation. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary range of contributions from both new and established scholars, this book provides access to the melting pot out of which the mystical tradition in France erupted in the twenty-first century, and from which it continues to challenge theology today.

Through a bold and historically rooted vision for the future of philosophy of religion, The Sacrality of the Secular maps new and compelling possibilities for a nonsecularist secularity. In recent decades, philosophers in the continental tradition have taken a notable interest in the return of religion, a departure from the supposed hegemony of the secular age that began with the Enlightenment. At the same time, anthropologists and sociologists have begun to reject the once-dominant secularization thesis, which both prescribed and described the demise of religion in modern societies. In The Sacrality of the Secular, Bradley B. Onishi reconsiders the role of religion at a time when secularity is more tenuous than it might seem. He demonstrates that philosophy’s entanglement with religion led, perhaps counterintuitively, to vibrant reconceptions of the secular well before the unraveling of the secularization thesis or the turn to religion. Through rich readings of Heidegger, Bataille, Weber, and others, Onishi rethinks what philosophy can contribute to our understanding of religion and the wider social and cultural world.

This handbook offers a comprehensive and varied study of deification within Christian theology. Forty-six leading experts in the field examine points of convergence and difference on the constitutive elements of deification across different writers, thinkers, and traditions.

In the six original essays included in this volume, the authors discuss how von Hügel, Blondel, Bremond, and Loisy all found inspiration in the great mystics of the past.

France in the eighteenth century glittered, but also seethed, with new goods and new ideas. In the halls of Versailles, the streets of Paris, and the soul of the Enlightenment itself, a vitriolic struggle was being waged over the question of ownership—of property, of position, even of personhood. Those who championed man's possession of material, spiritual, and existential goods faced the successive assaults of radical Christian mystics, philosophical materialists, and political revolutionaries. The Virtues of Abandon traces the aims and activities of these three seemingly disparate groups, and the current of anti-individualism that permeated theology, philosophy, and politics throughout the period. Fired by the desire to abandon the self, men and women sought new ways to relate to God, nature, and nation. They joined illicit mystic cults that engaged in rituals of physical mortification and sexual license, committed suicides in the throes of materialist fatalism, drank potions to induce consciousness-altering dreams, railed against the degrading effects of unfettered consumption, and ultimately renounced the feudal privileges that had for centuries defined their social existence. The explosive denouement was the French Revolution, during which God and king were toppled from their thrones.

Mysticism in the French Tradition introduces key philosophical undercurrents and trajectories in French thought that underpin and arise from this engagement, as well as considering earlier French contributions to the development of mysticism. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary range of contributions from both new and established scholars, this book provides access to the melting pot out of which the mystical tradition in France erupted in the twenty-first century, and from which it continues to challenge theology today.