Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England

Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England
Author: Professor Michael Martin
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472432681

Each of the figures examined in this study—John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead—is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced. Michael Martin analyzes the ways in which the encounter with God is figured among these early modern writers who inhabit the shared cultural space of poets and preachers, mystics and scientists. The three main themes that inform this study are Cura animarum, the care of souls, and the diminished role of spiritual direction in post-Reformation religious life; the rise of scientific rationality; and the struggle against the disappearance of the Holy. Arising from the methods and commitments of phenomenology, the primary mode of inquiry of this study resides in contemplation, not in a religious sense, but in the realm of perception, attendance, and acceptance. Martin portrays figures such as Dee, Digby, and Thomas Vaughan not as the eccentrics they are often depicted to have been, but rather as participating in a religious mainstream that had been radically altered by the disappearance of any kind of mandatory or regular spiritual direction, a problem which was further complicated and exacerbated by the rise of science. Thus this study contributes to a reconfiguration of our notion of what ‘religious orthodoxy’ really meant during the period, and calls into question our own assumptions about what is (or was) ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox.’

Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England

Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England
Author: Michael Martin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2014
Genre: English literature
ISBN:

Each of the figures examined in this study-John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead-is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced. Michael Martin analyzes the ways in which the encounter with God is figured among these early modern writers who inhabit the shared cultural space of poets and preachers, mystics and scientists. The three main themes that inform this study are Cura animarum, the care of souls, and the diminished role of spiritual direction in post-Reformation religious life; the rise of scientific rationality; and the struggle against the disappearance of the Holy. Arising from the methods and commitments of phenomenology, the primary mode of inquiry of this study resides in contemplation, not in a religious sense, but in the realm of perception, attendance, and acceptance. Martin portrays figures such as Dee, Digby, and Thomas Vaughan not the eccentrics they are often depicted to have been, but rather as participating in a religious mainstream that had been radically altered by the disappearance of any kind of mandatory or regular spiritual direction, a problem which was further complicated and exacerbated by the rise of science. Thus this study contributes to a reconfiguration of our notion of what 'religious orthodoxy' really meant during the period, and calls into question our own assumptions about what is (or was) 'orthodox' and what 'heterodox.'

The Submerged Reality

The Submerged Reality
Author: Michael Martin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2015-02-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781621381150

In The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, Michael Martin challenges us to reimagine theology, philosophy, and poetics through the lens of sophiology. Sophiology, as this book shows, is not a rogue theology, but a way of perceiving that which shines through the cosmos: a way that can return metaphysics to postmodern thought and facilitate a (re)union of religion, science, and art. "This is a brave, powerful, and intensely fascinating book that will certainly prove controversial. The notion of the divine Wisdom, Sophia, has always proved contentious in theology, but has remained persistent. For Michael Martin, it is essentially a poetic intuition, challenging our ways of perception and understanding. Exploring writers left in the shadows by conventional theology, he taps sources from which theology and the life of the Church could find renewal."--ANDREW LOUTH "In The Submerged Reality, Michael Martin suggests why a radicalized orthodoxy in the future will need more to 'walk on the wild side' and appropriate what is best in the esoteric, occult, and even gnostic traditions. He intimates that the past failure to do this is linked to a one-sidedly masculine theology, downgrading the sacrality of life, immanence, fertility, and the 'active receptivity' of the feminine. The consequence of this has been the perverse liberal attempt to distill 'order out of disorder, ' or the denial of real essences, relations, gender difference, and the objective existence of all things as beautiful. Finally, Martin argues that such a genuinely feminist theology would also be concerned with a space between the openly empirical observation of nature on the one hand, and the reflective exposition of divine historical revelation on the other. In this space, continuously new poetic realities are shaped and emerge under the guidance of holy inspiring wisdom."--JOHN MILBANK "This is a very clearly written and lively work of Catholic apologetics. Professors would be well advised to assign it as a text for undergraduate courses in theology. The Submerged Reality could win the hearts and minds of contemporary young people for Christian belief."--FRANCESCA ARAN MURPHY "Sophiology is best understood, not as a 'doctrine, ' but as a way of seeing and feeling the deepest mystery of reality. In this wide-ranging and exhilarating book, Michael Martin gives us the most important theological apologia for the contemplation of divine Sophia since the great Russian Sophiologists of the last century. Drawing on the Russian genius of Vladimir Soloviev and Sergius Bulgakov, Martin's meditation on Sophia ranges across the contributions of figures such as Jacob Boehme and Rudolf Steiner, Edith Stein and Pavel Florensky, Hans Urs von Balthasar and John Milbank. In so doing, he weaves a rich tapestry that illumines how a deeper gaze toward the feminine figure of Sophia begins to yield a more adequate response to the crisis of post-modern secular culture."--AARON RICHES MICHAEL MARTIN is Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Marygrove College. He is the author of Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Ashgate, 2014), a work of literary criticism, and a volume of poetry, Meditations in Times of Wonder (Angelico Press, 2014).

The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought

The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought
Author: Kevin Killeen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2023-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503635864

Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.

Thomas Vaughan and the Rosicrucian Revival in Britain

Thomas Vaughan and the Rosicrucian Revival in Britain
Author: Thomas Willard
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2022-09-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004519734

Thomas Vaughan’s challenging books on alchemy, magic, and other esoterica make better sense in the context of the Rosicrucian ideas he introduced to English readers in the seventeenth century. This is the first scholarly book on his life, sources, writings, and subsequent influence.

Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert

Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert
Author: Russell M. Hillier
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1644532263

This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern poet-thinkers. The contributors illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggestion new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take.

Marvelous Protestantism

Marvelous Protestantism
Author: Julie Crawford
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2005-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801881129

Crawford examines accounts of monstrous births in popular pamphlets along with the strikingly graphic illustrations accompanying them, demonstrating how Protestant reformers used these accounts to guide their public through the spiritual confusion and social turmoil of the time.

Poetic Relations

Poetic Relations
Author: Constance M. Furey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-06-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022643429X

What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God. As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions. The same early modern writers who bequeathed to us the modern distinction between self and society reveal here a different way of thinking about selfhood altogether. For them, she argues, the self is neither alone nor universally connected, but is forever interactive and dynamically constituted by specific relationships. By means of an analysis equally attentive to theological ideas, social conventions, and poetic form, Furey reveals how poets who understand introspection as a relational act, and poetry itself as a form ideally suited to crafting a relational self, offer us new ways of thinking about selfhood today—and a resource for reimagining both secular and religious ways of being in the world.