scholarly journals Michel de Montaigne and John of the Cross – Two Sceptics of the Early Modern Age

Author(s):  
Zbigniew Kaźmierczak ◽  
Savoring God ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 167-182
Author(s):  
Gloria Maité Hernández

The last chapter explores some insights taken from the comparisons as they address questions crucial to modern readers and humanity scholars. John of the Cross and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theologians had in mind an “ideal reader” who would invest all her emotions and intellect into the act of reading. For John, this is a reader who knows how to “savor” the text and the “divine truths” contained within it. The Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theologians envision a reader who reads “with the heart,” a sahṛdaya. Although these expectations may differ from those of modern readers who approach these texts through a comparative theopoetic lens, we can still ask what the qualities of a modern “ideal reader” are. What could today’s scholars and teachers learn from these Early Modern ways of reading and teaching how to read? And how might their practices of theopoetic impact the way we read and compare texts?


Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau

This work surveys the ways in which theologians, artists, and composers of the early modern period dealt with the passion and death of Christ. The fourth volume in a series, it locates the theology of the cross in the context of modern thought, beginning with the Enlightenment, which challenged traditional Christian notions of salvation and of Christ himself. It shows how new models of salvation were proposed by liberal theology, replacing the older “satisfaction” model with theories of Christ as bringer of God’s spirit and as social revolutionary. It shows how the arts during this period both preserved the classical tradition and responded to innovations in theology and in style.


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