Continental Philosophy of Religion (Philosophy)

One of the most persistent and poignant human experiences is the sensation of longing—a restlessness perhaps best described as the unspoken conviction that something is missing from our lives. In this study, Drew M. Dalton attempts to illuminate this experience by examining the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas on longing, or what Levinas terms “metaphysical desire.”

Metaphysical desire, according to Levinas, does not stem from any determinate lack within us, nor does it aim at a particular object beyond us, much less promise any eventual satisfaction. Rather, it functions in the realm of the infinite where such distinctions as inside and outside or one and the other are indistinguishable, perhaps even eliminated. As Levinas conceives such longing, it becomes a mediator in our relation to the other—both the human other and the divine Other.

Dalton follows the meandering trail of Levinas’s thought along a series of dialogues with some of the philosophers within the history of the Western tradition who have most influenced his corpus. By tracing the genealogy of Levinas’s notion of metaphysical desire—namely in the works of Plato, Heidegger, Fichte, Schelling, and Otto—the nature of this Levinasian theme is elucidated to reveal that it is not simply an idealism, a “hagiography of desire” detached from actual experience and resulting in a disconnect between his phenomenological account and our own lives. Rather, Levinas’s account of metaphysical desire points to a phenomenology of human longing that is both an ethical and religious phenomenon. In the end, human longing is revealed to be one of the most profound ways in which a subject becomes a subject, arising to its “true self,” and hearing the call to responsibility placed upon it by the Other.

Throughout, Dalton explicates the nuance of a number of key Levinasian terms, many of which have been taken from the Western philosophical tradition and reinscribed with a new meaning. Eros, the “Good beyond being,” shame, responsibility, creation, the trace, the il y a, and the holy are discovered to be deeply tied to Levinas’s account of metaphysical desire, resulting in a conclusion regarding longing’s role in the relationship between the finite and the Infinite.

timelessness. We experience this oneness within the world and the world within oneness; we experience non-duality within duality and duality within non-duality. We are beings in the world. We can experience purity within polarities, love within hate, and hate within love. This is the true purity of appearance and eventually the purity of apparitionalness.

The doorway into continental phenomenology and the doorway into the understanding of the praxis of Dzogchen is our experiential focus on our awareness and our experiential lived experience within our innate experiential field  of our pre-reflective non conceptual knowingness of our own awareness. The innate awareness field is our direct knowingness of Being. The direct knowingness of our awareness is our primal openness to Being. Awareness is our  knowingness of Being. Heidegger called this knowingness
Da Sein. Our awareness knows Being non dualistically.

Our knowing of our awareness is distinct from our mind's knowing of phenomena and from our mind's knowing the appearance of phenomena, and the forms of  phenomena. Our mind knows subject and otherness. Our mind knows the essence of phenomena.. The distinction between our ordinary dualistic mind knowing of phenomenological forms and our primordial non dualistic non conceptual direct awareness of Being is of foundational importance in both Dzogchen and Existential Phenomenology.

Drawing a clear line between phenomenology and theology remains a challenging endeavor. This article has two parts: The first one argues that, from a methodological point of view, there is a need for a theo-phenomenology, a phenomenology which acknowledges religious faith as a given. The second part of the article tries to present the essence of religious call in Eastern Orthodox spirituality. Using ideas such as appeal and communion, divine grace, love, prayer, fidelity, apophatic intentionality, and a hyper-intelligible gaze before the Revelation, I will describe the phenomenon of religious call-God calling man and man calling God. The conclusion shows that religious call and answer are existential and theandric experiences, where one can work on askesis, the fidelity of thought, and mystical experience. Life in the Holy Spirit no longer distinguishes between call and answer for one who became a son of God by grace, faith, and good works.

An schematic outline of a coherent alternative to the "Anselmian" greatest-being theology that develops themes from the existential tradition, panentheism, process thought, and contemporary open theism. This approach depends centrally on a process-conception of perfection.

Religion was a constant theme throughout Paul Ricoeur’s long career, and yet he never wrote a full-length treatment of the topic. In this important new book, Brian Gregor draws on the full scope of Ricoeur’s writings to lay out the essential features of his philosophical interpretation of religion, from his earliest to his last work.

Ricoeur’s central claim is that religion aims at the regeneration of human capability—in his words, “the rebirth of the capable self.” This book provides a rich thematic account of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of religion, showing how the theme of capability informs his changing interpretations of religion, from his early work on French reflexive philosophy and the philosophy of the will to his late work on forgiveness, mourning, and living up to death. Gregor exhibits Ricoeur’s original contribution to philosophical reflection on such themes as evil, suffering, and violence, as well as imagination, embodiment, and spiritual exercise. He also presents a critical reconsideration of Ricoeur’s separation of philosophy from theology, and his philosophical interpretation of Christian theological ideas of revelation, divine transcendence and personhood, atonement, and eschatology.

Additionally, Gregor provides an expansive look at Ricoeur’s interlocutors, including Marcel, Jaspers, Kant, Hegel, Levinas, and Girard. Theologically-inclined readers will be particularly interested in the book’s treatment of Karl Barth and the Protestant theology of the Word, which was a vital influence on Ricoeur.

The result is a study of Ricoeur that is both sympathetic and critical, provocative and original, inviting the reader into a deeper engagement with Ricoeur’s philosophical interpretation of religion.

This course examines the religious dimension of human experience; that is, some of the "big questions" that many do not want or even dare to ask before they absolutely have to. It focuses on the issues of God's existence, possibility of knowing and saying anything about God, compatibility of the notions of a loving God and evil in the world, and the understanding of God in major world religions. Course Goals: By the end of this course students should be motivated to think about the God-question with the seriousness it deserves, express their convictions clearly, fairly, and astutely, and respect those who have a different understanding of God.

Violence is essential to religion, while religion holds the promise of transcending violence. The designation religious refers not to a type of violence, but to a specific issue of violence, namely the claim to higher (theodical) justification. This religious aspect is not confined to religion; it is also evident in the secular domain. A critique of religious violence needs to show the gap between violence and its justifications, experienced affectively in horror. This horror in re-sponse to the unspeakable is structurally akin to mystical experience, the temporal structure of which indicates the failure of the theodical justification for violence.

The concept of “return” is an apparent phantasm throughout Derrida’s work with each new notion introduced, returning to the question alluded from the start of “Faith and Knowledge”: what is it, to talk of a “return”?  Derrida asks, “when we speak, we Europeans, so ordinarily and so confusedly today about “a return of the religious”, what do we thereby name?” . In this paper, I attempt to answer Derrida’s question by reversing it into “what we do not name” to discuss how is the “return” religious and what is religious in the “return”. Firstly then, the paper will focus on religious character of the “return” and then explore religious elements: how it comes to mean faith, promise and messianicity – a blind awaiting of a “to-come” that we do not name.

I will begin with an examination of Freud’s theory of religion. The father plays a central role in both the phylogenetic and infantile explanations of the origin of religious feeling. I will then look at several places where Freud alludes to the mother, especially with reference to the paternal origins of religion discussed prior. With regard to the phylogenetic origin, Freud mentions the “mother-goddesses” that probably predated father-gods, and with regard to the infantile origin, the protector role of the father originally belonged to the mother. There is, then, a supersessionism in Freud. The mother is done away with, replaced by the father. I will then examine Freud’s correspondence with French writer Romain Rolland that led him to address the oceanic feeling in Civilization and its Discontents. I will suggest that this oceanic feeling represents exactly the maternal origin of religion that Freud suppressed up until that point. Ultimately, though, Freud refuses the oceanic feeling in a gesture similar to the previous refusals of the religious mother. I will end by looking at some contemporary theorizing on the oceanic feeling.

Martin Heidegger's thesis in "Phenomenology and Theology" is "that theology is a positive science, and as such, therefore, is absolutely different from philosophy." 1 At face value, this does not seem like a very controversial claim. Indeed, such a claim only becomes suspicious when examined more closely in order to identify the contents and reasons for such a claim. This paper will be concerned with mapping out the reasons behind claim that there is an absolute difference between philosophy and theology. It will become clear that the impetus for such a claim includes Heidegger's desire to conserve the "ontological difference"-the difference between being and beings. The ontological difference is secured by Heidegger's phenomenological project because it says something about possible modes of inquiry for human beings (Dasein).

Comment comprendre la relation entre la philosophie et la théologie ? La philosophie est-elle simplement la servante de la théologie ou est-elle plutôt une théologie exempte de superstition et d'idées irrationnelles telles que la révélation ?

The paper re-reads the Book of Job in the light of contemporary Jewish thought. It aims at purifying this mysterious text from its century-long misinterpretations, whose sedimentation stems from centuries of utilitarian lecture within the framework of Western philosophy, biased towards Christian misreadings. The paper attempts to give justice to the book in the Book of Job, paying attention to its textual materiality. The proposed re-reading focuses on the role of Law in the Book of Job, especially in its relation to justice. The starting point of interpretation, which builds a key distinction between Law and justice, consists in noting the fact that in this biblical text God is simultaneously a judge and a party in trial. Who or what is than tried? The paper aims to demonstrate that the Book of Job is not in fact a description of a trial over Job, but over Law itself.

In this chapter, I will focus on Ricoeur views on the intersection between the implicit poetic discourse in which the living metaphor emerges and the explicit philosophical discourse in which it is conceptually clarified. In this introductory section, I will zoom in on Ricoeur’s views on the transition from a living metaphor (poetic discourse) to a concept (philosophical discourse). This transition is needed because the semantic and the ontological gain of the living metaphor are brought to light by the living metaphor without being explicated in a concept yet.
In the other sections of this chapter, I will illustrate the intersection of discourses with the help of Augustine’s discussion of time in the eleventh book of his Confessions. This approach has a double advantage. On the one hand, Augustine’s search for a temporal vocabulary provides a perfect illustration of how the poetic discourse in which the living metaphor emerges can be taken up by a philosophical discourse that tries to derive a concept from this metaphor. On the other hand, this search also provides the foundation for an interpretative framework that underlies many of Ricoeur’s later works and that can be used to give some kind of unity to them. This framework will be explored in the next chapter as a more complex variation of the model of productive tensions in which many of the other variations can be included.

Representing a new generation of phenomenologists in the so-called “theological turn,” Emmanuel Falque presses the boundary between theology and phenomenology in a more radical way than many of his predecessors. Despite his conviction that “the more one theologizes, the better one philosophizes,” he adopts a very different approach from other theological phenomenologists — beginning from the point of immanence and incarnation rather than transcendence and height. Falque thus reclaims the essential goodness of the human body, even in its finitude and limitations. This approach yields numerous problems, however, when maximized into a comprehensive system by creating a paradigmatic or normative phenomenological perspective grounded in the experience of “the human as such” (l’homme comme tel). Consequently, I argue for a minimalist reading of Falque’s phenomenology — one that seeks to preserve its various insights and benefits (especially in the realm of pastoral care) while avoiding the problems of a comprehensive “grand narrative” of theological phenomenology.

In recent debate concerning the relationship between faith and reason, a pervasive assumption is evident according to which one or other is considered to be original and basic. This paper develops an alternative view of the status of both rational and religious modes of thought drawing on the work of Adriaan Peperzak, and bringing his suggestion in this area into dialogue with a series of interlocators including Pascal, Levinas, Heidegger, Desmond and Van der Veken. Accordingly, neither rational and/or scientific methods, nor by religious orthodoxies, can claim primordiality. Rather, both of these phenomena are determinate concretions of a more elemental pre-conceptual source that can be spoken about in terms of a background experiential faith, or a metaphysical trust. It is on this basis that an alternative account of the relation between religious faith and reason is offered, according to which they are understood to be distinct yet intimately related at source.

English Language Original Draft of “Имманентность и Жизнь” published in Логос: Философско-Литературный Журнал (“Immanence and Life: A Review Essay on Roberto Esposito’s Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy” in Logos:  Philosophical and Literary Journal)

The experiential language and the experiential view of Contemporary Phenomenology is amazingly similar to the language and view of the ancient Tibetan Meditative Tradition of Dzogchen. Both Dzogchen and Contemporary Phenomenology understand that the unfolding of the lived experience of self-liberation happens through our direct lived experience of Innate Awareness. Moreover, our lived experience of Innate Awareness is our Direct Lived Experience of Primordial Being.
Both Contemporary Phenomenology and Dzogchen are phenomenological ontological philosophical traditions. A metaphysical tradition is the thinking of Being mentally and conceptually. A phenomenological ontological tradition is the direct lived experiencing of phenomenological Being and the artful experiential articulation of the lived experience of phenomenological Being personally and symbolically.
Both Phenomenology and Dzogchen dramatically understand that in becoming aware of our own awareness we directly experience the field of Luminous Being. Both traditions in their historical unfolding understanding the we have two ways of knowing. The knowing of our mind  knows phenomena and the knowing of our awareness knows Being.

Therese of Lisieux offers an example of what Bergson calls 'pure mysticism', that is to say divested of everything which surrounds mystical experience without constituting its essence: visions, theological formulae or even belief in a revelation. This article deals with the status of what is left after this purification. Images, images of darkness which show nothing but the blindness of the Carmelite. An examination of them, in order to go beyond the paradox, brings us to think out the whole of Teresa’s poetics, poetics which are inseparable both from the theology of the 'little way' and from the pragmatics of writing as a tool for conversion.

Published as part of the special issue "New Life of German Idealism" edited by Kirill Chepurin.

The Russian version of the article appeared in: http://www.logosjournal.ru/cgi-bin/arch.pl?action=show&id=86&lang=en

The paper turns to the thought of G.W. F. Hegel and its convergence with Meister Eckhart's thought in order to explore the possibility of a speculative and affirmative relationship between philosophy and religion. It argues that these thinkers, taken together, offer a possible way of rejecting one of the binary structures prevalent in recent continental philosophy, namely the division between an atheistic defense of philosophy and its (secular) egological subjects on one hand, and the affirmation of the primacy of transcendence and alterity (in a quasitheological vein) on the other hand. Hegel's and Eckhart's works suggest that such binaries foreclose a third possibility of annihilating the subject as a way to affirm a speculative and infinite immanence. Utilizing different discursive spaces and theoretical vocabularies , Hegel and Eckhart propose to annihilate the subject as the site from which transcendence could be affirmed in the first place. Moreover, here, God no longer functions as a name against which to struggle in the name of atheism, or one to uphold for a theological critique of the secular. Rather, it becomes the name for the possibility of absolute desubjectivation, of self-emptying and annihilating the subject— processes that are no longer open to transcendence, but reveal the ungrounded immanence of life. In tracing these logics, this paper questions the dominant distribution of concepts structuring the recent turn to religion in continental philosophy, and suggests one possibility for the democratization of thought that would dislocate the imperialism of secular and atheistic discourses without elevating theology to a renewed position of power.

Alex  Dubilet’s  essay  “The  Catastrophic  Joy  of  Abandoning  Salvation:  Thinking  the  Postsecular  with  Georges Bataille” explores  the  way  Bataille  belies  the  established  divisions  between  theological  and  philosophical  modes  of  thought  in  order  to  develop  a  critique  of  subjection  as  being  enacted  by  theologico
- religious  concepts,  operations,  and  structures  no  less
than  philosophico-secular  ones.  Building  on  Bataille,  Dubilet proposes rethinking the status of immanence and transcendence,  by  decoupling  them  from  their  usual  semantic  associations  that  align  immanence  with  secularity  and  transcendence  with  the  religious.  Dubilet  finds  an  important  element  for  a  novel  theory
of the postsecular in Bataille’s elaboration of catastrophic joy as a critique of investments in futurity and salvation found across the secular-religious divide.

Published in "'The Universe is Indifferent': Theology, Philosophy, and Mad Men" (Cascade Press, 2016)

This essay explores the paradox of television show Mad Men's lead character, Donald Draper, from the perspective of philosopher Jean-Luc Marion's 'erotic reduction.' Rather than attempting to dissolve the paradox of Don Draper I argue that Draper is an exemplary fictional enactment of Marion's insistence that love seeks assurance -- not certainty.  Moreover, Draper's paradoxical nature vividly illustrates Marion's distinction between the 'seducer' and the 'lover' and, consequently, the 'idol' and the 'icon.' Thus Mad Men brilliantly traverses the distance between Draper's (and our) madness and iconicity by way of the lover's advance.

https://www.routledge.com/Mysticism-and-Materialism-in-the-Wake-of-German-Idealism/Goggin-Hannan/p/book/9780367546137

This book argues that the rediscovery of mystical theology in nineteenth-century Germany not only helped inspire idealism and romanticism, but also planted the seeds of their overcoming by way of critical materialism. Thanks in part to the Neoplatonic turn in the works of J. G. Fichte, as well as the enthusiasm of mining engineer Franz X. von Baader, mystical themes gained a critical currency, and mystical texts returned to circulation. This reawakening of the mystical tradition influenced romantic and idealist thinkers such as Novalis and Hegel, and also shaped later critical interventions by Marx, Benjamin, and Bataille. Rather than rehearsing well-known connections to Swedenborg or Böhme, this study goes back further to the works of Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Catherine of Siena, and Angela of Foligno. The book offers a new perspective on the reception of mystical self-interrogation in nineteenth-century German thought and will appeal to scholars of philosophy, history, theology, and religious studies.

How to read a text and how to hear a text. How to open words and syllables so that knowledge arises within your own body, within your inner awareness. When you are located in mind alone, when you are located in conceptualness and concrete mind alone, you will be locked in and contained. William Reich described concrete minds as living machines. Concreteness can be described as rigidity, a mode of tense cognitive activity. Strangely enough, concreteness with its compulsiveness, its drivenness can distort the sense of presence and the sense of reality. The concrete mind in its literalness struggles to find the right solution. The literal view can be narrow, highly vigilant and stimulus−stimulation bound. The concrete mind struggles to find the right solution relentlessly. Of course whatever the solution, it never is enough. One becomes stuck in the stimulus of the word and stuck in the signification of the word. The nexus between the signifier and signified is without space and is densely bound.

Nicholas of Cusa’s deployment of an omnivoyant image in the De visione Dei has been said to deconstruct Leon Battista Alberti’s mathematical determination of space in single-point linear perspective. While there has been some debate over whether the omnivoyant functions like a medieval icon or instead like a Renaissance painting, what has been neglected is a more careful analysis of what underlies the very structure of omnivoyance, namely the milieu from which its contradictions and paradoxes emerge. In this article, I will show how thinking the milieu of vision, implicit in Cusa’s optics, lets us overcome any overly simple binaries in these debates and deepen our understanding of the meaning of omnivoyance.

In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.

Kierkegaard is not a dramatist nor an academic; he calls himself " a kind of philosopher " and has been called " a kind of poet " , and he is a Christian who is at the same time one of Christendom's most devastating critics. I read him as " a dramatic philosopher " analogous to Shakespeare's dramatic poet, where his strategy and method in his philosophical journey to selfhood is a performance on the stage. However, this is no conventional stage but rather Kierkegaard creates a new landscape that allows himself and the reader to penetrate deeper into the plurality of the subject. His authorship is both experimental and dissident in that he defies the various genres and is located rather in the interlude of disciplines and activities. Kierkegaard fuses the combination of being an avid lover of theatre and fairytale, ancient and modern Western philosophy and German Romanticism , and having being brought up in a strict Christian background, into a rich retelling and unlocking of human existence. Central to my analysis is the short essay " The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress " which contains the three aspects of Kierkegaard: the performance itself, the philosophical analysis of the performance and a philosophy of life worth living. I interpret the author of this text, called Inter et Inter, as creating a modification on the activity of faith, where transformation (through the analysis of the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg) takes priority as a way of overcoming the failures of repetition in time, the continuous impossibility of faith, and the modern " age of disintegration " in ideas and society. Of course, Inter et Inter is yet another masked signature, located at the interlude, and we are invited to endless re-readings in this pioneering philosophical and theatrical space that Kierkegaard – as dramatic philosopher – has created for exploring and unfolding the elusive self in modernity.

[Published in e-book "From Hamann to Kierkegaard" - Experimentation & Dissidence Workshop 1, 2017: http://experimentation-dissidence.umadesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/From-Hamann-to-Kierkegaard_e-book.pdf]

This essay explores the nature and significance of aesthetic approaches to the study of word politics.  More specifically, it contrasts aesthetic with mimetic forms of representation.  The latter, which have dominated international relations scholarship, seek to represent the political as authentically as possible.  An aesthetic approach, by contrast, assumes that there is always a gap between a form of representation and what is represented therewith.  Rather than ignoring or seeking to narrow this gap, as mimetic approaches do, aesthetic insight recognises that the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics.  The essay argues for the need to reclaim the political value of the aesthetic, not to replace one orthodoxy with another, but to broaden our abilities to comprehend and deal with the key dilemmas of world politics.  Images, narratives and sounds could then be appreciated alongside more accepted sources of knowledge about the international.  But embarking on such an aesthetic turn amounts to more than simply adding an additional, sensual layer of interpretation.  It calls for a significant shift away from a model of thought that recognises external appearances and channels them into one form of common sense, towards an approach that generates a more diverse but also more direct encounter with the political.  The latter allows for productive interactions across different faculties, including sensibility, imagination and reason, without

Von »Ich und Du« bis zum Nachwort zu den diesbezüglichen Schriften versammelt der Band Bubers Grundtexte zum dialogischen Prinzip. In ihnen geht es um Begegnung, den Dialog zwischen dem Ich und dem Anderen, zwischen Mensch und »ewigem Du«, also Gott. Auf der Grundlage der Bedeutung von Beziehung vertieft Buber die Frage nach dem Einzelnen, den Anderen und nach Gottes Ort in der Zwischenmenschlichkeit. Für den Kenner des Hauptwerkes von Buber wird insbesondere der Zugang zu den handschriftlichen Vorlagen der Haupttexte wie »Ich und Du« oder »Zwiesprache« wertvoll sein.
Kommentierung: Andreas Losch unter Mitarbeit von Bernd Witte

In Maurice Blondel's work, the problem of immortality is dealt with in terms of one's resolution of the problem of human destiny articulated in the forms of a self-determinative option. Although this option can take many forms, it is ultimately one between egoism (or selfishness) pr mortification and charity. I outline this opposition and indicate how it bears on intellectual life and culture.

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The grinding and wearisome Spirit of War, a perversion of the oft-lamented but inescapable Struggle for Existence, is suddenly unmasked as the pathological reflection of the Soul of the World and its Infinite Life. Concrete and wide-ranging evidence in modern physics and neuroscience shows how it embroils the Life of Man, leading to ever-greater moral malignancy and a Final Crisis.

Compare on this page independent discussions of the immanent Final Crisis and evidence for it:

https://www.academia.edu/44692464/The_Antichrist

https://www.academia.edu/44275896/Thematic_Apperceptions_Surrounding_Max_Picards_Human_Face_1930_With_Ancillary_Illustrations

https://www.academia.edu/41144933/The_Last_Day_Illustrated_Essay_

The discussion within 'The Spirit of War' ranges widely and steps into the Paleolithic, the Holocene, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, 5th-century Classical Greece, and 17th- and 19th-century Germany, finally emerging into the global forum of modern brain science.

Classical German Idealism is shown in intimate relation to the highest (pythagoric) reaches of Greek philosophy in order to dissect the problem of Trifurcated Man through novel approaches within the philosophies of mind and nature, theology, paleontology, ontology of animal development, the fascinating neurology of Left and Right, and the once alluring goal of an integral psychology.

Lastly, the grimacing Visage of Man--a three-fold cliche of modern life--is exposed as an aesthetic failure contemporaneous with the very birth of Mankind and the onset of continuous psychophysical war within Man himself. (Note: Fair Use and Quotation freely granted to world scholarship.)

Paul de Tarse est une énigme qui a fasciné de nombreux penseurs (Augustin, Luther, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Ricoeur). Pour l’atteindre au plus près, Olivier Boulnois se propose ici de remonter, en-deçà de toutes les interprétations qui l’adaptent en prétendant le respecter, jusqu’à ses Épîtres elles-mêmes. Il discute ainsi ses principaux interprètes du XXe siècle, en s’appuyant sur des recherches historiographiques récentes.

Our lack of awareness of Being results in bewildering experience. The intrinsic inner radiance, the inner light of Being arises out of primordial luminous spaciousness, the unbound openness of unbound pure potentiality. When this primordial ground of Being is veiled and obscured by the lack of experiential awareness, we can be locked into dualistic experiences, and consequently the non-dual nature of the field of Being is experientially foreclosed. The sense of indivisibility of all phenomena and awareness is experientially foreclosed. The capacity to see into, feel into and see through the lucidity of phenomena as the very field of Being becomes foreclosed and densified. We then live contained in mind alone. There is no experience of the field of Being. Without the field of Being we easily become things and objects both to our self and to others.