Antiquitopia

It has been a long while since I have posted anything, and now, as the semester is about to start, seems the worst time to start posting things.  Nonetheless, I have a few things to create a series of posts about - and hopefully I'll have the time to bring them through to completion - due to my many busy activities this summer. This summer I led a group of students on the Camino de Santiago, walking a portion in France and the final portion in Spain.  I also presented at the International Society of Biblical Literature's Hebrews Group in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  I will also present on a similar theme (space, time, etc. in Hebrews) at the annual meeting this November.  Finally, I am slated to turn in an Encyclopedia article on the general trends of methods of studying mysticism in the past century or so. I want to use the blog as a (hyper)space to recall issues from the Camino and round out some comments on methods of researching mysticism (since the article leng...

Anthony LeDonne seeks out the answer to this question that other scholars of the historical Jesus have seemingly shied away from (I wonder what Freud would think of this telling omission). As Anthony notes, the breast-feeding image of Madonna and Child becomes quite popular in medieval Europe.  What is even more interesting are the depictions of Christ offering his own breast milk among the writings of mystics, usually among women mystics but not exclusively so.

So I found out (a couple days ago now) that my paper proposal for the Society of Biblical Literature's Group, Esotericism and Mysticism in Antiquity , has been accepted.  Here is my title and abstract: “God and the Senses:   Smelling, Tasting, and Touching God in Early Christianity” The study of ancient Jewish and Christian mystical thought, writings, and practices has typically focused on divine visions and auditions, how seeing and hearing God is portrayed or represented or the practical steps involved to see or hear God in a ritual context, whether esoteric or in broader liturgical contexts.   While justified by many of the writings themselves, this focus nonetheless overlooks that much ancient Jewish and Christian mystical thought and practice engaged all five senses.   In this paper, I propose to investigate how early Christian writings variously spoke of encountering God not only by sight and hearing, but also by smelling, tasting, and...

I just saw the following is coming out from Mohr Siebeck sometime this month via Brian Small at polumeros kai polutropos , who seems to be becoming a full-time Hebrews bibliographer.   Jody A. Barnard The Mysticism of Hebrews Exploring the Role of Jewish Apocalyptic Mysticism in the Epistle to the Hebrews Jody A. Barnard examines the role of Jewish apocalyptic mysticism in the epistle to the Hebrews. Jewish apocalyptic mysticism is defined as a phenomenon occurring in late Second Temple Judaism (including early Christianity), which finds literary expression in the apocalypses and related literature, and exhibits a preoccupation with the realities of the heavenly realm, and the human experience of this realm and its occupants. The author demonstrates that there are numerous apocalyptic and mystical themes appropriated in Hebrews, and that there is evidence to suggest that this is not merely a conceptual and literary phenomenon, but is born out of, and infor...

As noted in my previous post, I think it would be helpful to think about the many different ways in which the sense are activated or engaged, whether physically or metaphorically, for Jewish and Christian (and Islamic) mysticism.  In that post, I discussed one of the hymns in the Acts of Thomas.  In the forthcoming posts, I have collated a few different Jewish, but primarily Christian works that engage multiple senses at once:  some of the hymns of Hekhalot Rabbati, Origen's Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs, and the Gospel of Philip.  A little further afield, I have also noticed this recurrence among Sufi poets, particularly in Rumi's poetry.  I will be hitting upon the ancient Jewish and Christian works in the next few weeks when I have some time after doing my research and teaching work for the day (so rather occasionally).  I wondered, however, if anyone had any other ideas for texts to investigate that engage multiple senses (if not all five...

In an earlier post , I noted that while vision and audition are the predominant aspects of sacred or divine encounters (hierophany and theophany respectively) that there is a dearth of comment from a modern perspective on the engaging of other senses.  It is not just seeing God or hearing God, but also smelling, tasting, and touching.  Taste, indeed, will play an important role in Christian encounters, largely due to the Eucharist.  But Jewish, Christian, and Islamic works (and I limit myself to these since I am most familiar with them; not because I think it is lacking elsewhere) often engage multiple senses at once when speaking of the self and God.  Of these, perhaps smell is the most interesting:  it permeates and envelops but is not enveloped by you; it is evanescent but ever-present; it may surround you, but you cannot grasp it.  Touching often gives a sense of immediacy and intimacy, and tasting is perhaps most intimate, but also can be used to discu...

I just saw that there is a new version of Attar's Conference of the Birds!  I am excited to check it out, since I teach the Conference of the Birds in my Exploring Mysticism course. Check it out here .

As I am revising my dissertation into a book for publication, I was thinking about smells and taste, especially smelling and tasting God. The Epistle to the Hebrews uses "taste" to describe salvific experience: "For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then commit apostasy..." (Hebrews 5:4-6a; RSV). Tasting and partaking are, in fact, strong indicators of proximity to God throughout ancient Jewish and Christian literature. There is the famous Psalm that says "taste and see that the LORD is good" (Ps. 34:8). But olfactory language is vibrant whether interpreted metaphorically or more literally. Most analyses of Jewish and Christian mysticism focus primarily on vision and audition, and rightfully so since these are the primary senses...

One of the more interesting things I have begun to notice in biblical literature in my past year of reading or so is something of "uncreation." This is not necessarily the cataclysm of the end of time, although it can be that. It is not quite that final. It is more of a working backward from order to chaos in order to reintroduce an element of chaos in the world, showing that God is the God of chaos and not just order. I find traces of this in Isaiah, but it is all over the poetry in Job, including Job's own personal "uncreation" in Job 3 (an observation I owe to one of my students) to God's cosmic "uncreation" in Job 38 onward (an observation I owe to Carol Newsom's book on Job). With this interest in mind, I read the following from Rumi's poems that is almost an uncreation at points: I am sprung from you and likewise you have devoured me, I melt in you since through you I froze. Now you press me in your hand, now under your foot wit...

Only on the level of analogy have I ever experienced intellectual pleasure. For me the only manifest truth in the world is governed by the spontaneous, clairvoyant, insolent connection established under certain conditions between two things whose conjunction would not be permitted by common sense. As much as I abhor, more than any other, the word therefore , replete with vanity and sullen delectation, so do I love passionately anything that flares up suddenly out of nowhere and thus breaks the thread of discursive thinking. What comes to light at the moment is an infinitely richer network of relations whose secret, as everything suggests, was known to early mankind. It is true that flare quickly dies out, but its glimmer is enough to help measure on their dismal scale the exchange values currently available that provide not answer except to basic questions of a utilitarian nature. .... Poetic analogy has this in common with mystical analogy: it transgresses the rules of deduction ...

Peter Schaefer has published a new book with Mohr-Siebeck entitled the Origins of Jewish Mysticism . Here's the (English) blurb: This book provides the reader for the first time with a history of pre-kabbalistic Jewish mysticism. It covers a wide range of quite diverse literatures, from the biblical book of Ezekiel to the ascent apocalypses, the Qumran literature, Philo, Rabbinic literature, and finally the Hekhalot literature, which provides us with the first full-fledged mystical movement in late antiquity (Merkavah mysticism). Instead of imposing on these different literatures a preconceived notion of "mysticism," Peter Schäfer offers a close reading of the key texts and asks what they wish to convey about the age-old human desire to get close to and communicate with God.The author of this book has dedicated much of his scholarly life to the history of Jewish mysticism. The Origins of Jewish Mysticism summarizes his views in an accessible way, directed at specialists a...

Jim Davila posts that Morton Smith's translation of Hekhalot Rabbati is available online here . It is in .pdf format. I have had a copy of this for years; indeed, for years it has circulated among Columbia graduate students. My copy has Alan Segal's marginal corrections. I, of course, made my own marginal notes. A few years ago, however, Alan lost his copy (I think), and so we had to run copies of my copy for a class. And so we sent out copies of Smith's translation with Alan's notes, with my notes on that, and presumably a new set of notes on those notes would be made by students in that class. The whole notes on notes on notes sounds very Rabbinic.

I just received my Routledge catalogue for religion . There were numerous interesting books listed, but two caught my eye: Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston. Here is its product description: Fascinating texts written on small gold tablets that were deposited in graves provide a unique source of information about what some Greeks and Romans believed regarding the fate that awaited them after death, and how they could influence it. These texts, dating from the late fifth century BCE to the second century CE, have been part of the scholarly debate on ancient afterlife beliefs since the end of the nineteenth century. Recent finds and analysis of the texts have reshaped our understanding of their purpose and of the perceived afterlife. The tablets belonged to those who had been initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus Bacchius and relied heavily upon myths narrated in poems ascribed to the mythical singer Orpheus. A...