Misticismo y escritura en el Tractatus logico-philosophicus

En este ensayo se plantea que la escritura filosófica de Wittgenstein es una escritura mística, que es heredera de la filosofía mística alemana, iniciada por Böhme y posteriormente desarrollada por los místicos barrocos, entre quienes destaca Angelus Silesius, a quien Witgenstein leyó en el frente austríaco, durante la Primera Guerra Mundial. Dicha influencia se aprecia de manera muy clara en la expresión aforística del Tractatus logico-philosophicus, que recupera la poética paradójica y sintética de los epigramas de Angelus Silesius, en la exposición del análisis lógico del lenguaje, que distingue entre aquello que se puede decir y lo que sólo se puede mostrar en el lenguaje. Palabras clave: Wittgenstein, Silesius, mística, escritura filosófica, trascendencia

On Borges’s B/baroque

This article examines Jorge Luis Borges’s ingenious, largely dehistoricized interpretations and imitations of seventeenth-century writers typically called Baroque. It contends that the aesthetic, epistemological, and metaphysical values Borges assigns to works by Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Gracián, Marino, Browne, Pascal, Leibniz, Angelus Silesius, and Spinoza depend largely on his conservative notions of how style and, specifically, metaphor should work. While writers from the historical Baroque often require readers to embrace hermeneutic difficulty, Borges, despite the ingenious difficulty of his own writings, refuses to countenance this stance. This refusal turns also on Borges’s distinction between writing he fervently praises as “classic” and writing he ambiguously blames as “baroque.” The former serves as the explicit model for his own invention; but the latter implicitly, agonistically, informs much of his thinking and writing as well. Borges’s unwillingness to distinguish the historical Baroque from a recurring, eternal baroque is understandable, given his philosophy of art and history; however, it ignores how periodization can have the heuristic and conceptual function of finding unity in multiplicity, a unity that includes divergent styles and ideologies.

The Void of God, or The Paradox of the Pious Atheism: From Scholem to Derrida

My essay will take as its point of departure the paragraph from Gershom Scholem’s “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in which he depicts the modern religious experience as the one of the "void of God" or as "pious atheism". I will first argue that the "void of God" cannot be reduced to atheistic non-belief in the presence of God. Then, I will demonstrate the further development of the Scholemian notion of the ‘pious atheism’ in Derrida, especially in his Lurianic treatment of Angelus Silesius, whose modern mysticism emerges in Derrida’s reading as the ‘almost-atheism’ (presque-atheisme). The interesting feature of this development is that, while for Scholem, the ‘void of God’ is a predominantly negative experience, for Derrida, it becomes an affirmative model of modern – not just Jewish, but more generally, Abrahamic – religiosity which, on the one hand, touches upon atheistic non-belief in the divine presence here and now, yet, on the other, still insists on commemorating the ‘withdrawn God’ through his ‘traces.’ What, therefore, for Scholem, constitutes the ultimate cry of despair, best embodied in Kafka’s work – for Derrida, reveals the more positive face of the modern predicament in which God has absented himself in order to make room for the creaturely reality. And while Scholem envisages redemption as the full restoration of the divine presence – Derrida redefines redemption as the ‘pious’ work of deconstruction to be undertaken in the ‘almost-atheistic’ condition of irreversible separation between God and the world.

Mystical Poetics

The development of Christian mysticism is deeply bound to poetics. This examination first considers Platonic poetry, Hebrew creation, and Christian kenosis as sources of poetic mysticism, before turning to an elaboration of the role of rhythm, language, and the poetic imagination. The appraisal then considers the historical development of mystical poetry, beginning with early Christian reflection on the figurative and lyrical use of scriptural language to express a deep personal relationship with God. The development of vernacular mysticism, and its adoption of this scriptural model, is then explored through a detailed consideration of four mystical poets (Dante, Jacopone, Hadewijch, and Angelus Silesius). The interaction of poetic form and spiritual content is elaborated throughout, with the aim of demonstrating how poetics allows the mystical writer to achieve a result for the reader otherwise not possible in discursive forms of communication.

THE RECEPTION OF FRANCISCAN MYSTICS IN EUROPEAN POETRY OF THE 17TH CENTURY

European poetry of the 17th century has its own complicated metaphoric language the interpretation of which depends on understanding of different contexts. It is especially true about religious poetry that does not only use metaphors, motifs and stories from the Bible but also perceive the biblical text through some confessions and often through some directions within a confession. Such cultural and historical code is important and necessary for reception and interpretation of poetical text. Franciscans as a special direction in Roman Catholic spirituality influenced very much on European literature and especially on religious poetry of Middle ages, Renaissance and Baroque i.e. the late 16th – 17th centuries. The main point of the article is studying of key images and motifs of Franciscan spirituality that were expressed in German mystical poetry (on texts by Johannes Scheffler familiarly known as Angelus Silesius). Except traditional motifs of poverty, God’s love, one can find out thoughts about relationships between the Creator and its creature popular in theology and religious experience of Franciscans in his poetry. In poetry such ideas as an experience of communication with God are transmitted through poetical language, metaphors and also through special mean of concordia discors or connecting unconnectable.