Mystical Languages of Unsaying
Michael Sells
Univ. Chicago, 1994
204.22 S468m
The subject of Mystical Languages of Unsaying is an important but neglected mode of mystical discourse, apophasis. which literally means "speaking away." Sometimes translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this close study of apophasis in Greek, Christian, and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it.
This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite their wide-ranging differences in era, tradition, and theology.
-publisher
chapters:
Awakening without Awakener: Apophasis in Plotinus
The Nothingness of God in John the Scot Eriugena
Ibn Arabi's Polished Mirror: Identity Shift and Meaning Event
Ibn Arabi's Garden among the Flames: The Heart Receptive of Every Form
Apophasis of Desire and the Burning of Marguerite Porete
Meister Eckhart: Birth and Self-Birth
Porete and Eckhart: The Apophasis of Gender