Thesis (M.A.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [42]-43).

Thesis (M.A.)--Wheaton College Graduate School, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-63).

Thesis (PhD(Practical Theology)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 458-483).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2010 May 31.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2008. / Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Dept. of History, Faculty of Arts. Degree awarded 2008; thesis submitted 2007. Also available in print form. Includes bibliography.

In the early ninth century Muslim renunciants developed the metaphor of devotion to God is a path to teach their disciples how to cultivate virtues that would enable them to escape attachment to the world. Alongside these virtues were ascetic practices, sometimes extreme, that demonstrated their commitment to God. The earliest example of this renunciant path is the ascetic manual Adab al-'ibadat attributed to Shaqiq al-Balkhi (d. 198/809-10). Al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 243/857-8) took exception to exaggerated practices of Shaqiq's path and insisted that religious devotion must adhere to the commands God gave in the Quran and in the Sunna. Unique in the ninth century, Muhasibi also insisted that God's commands were not limited to exterior actions, but included specific expectations of the interior dimension of religious devotion. Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz (d. 277/890-91 or 286/899) expanded the renunciant path of Saqiq's followers, but also responded to Muhasibi's censure and softened the more extreme practices of the renunciant path. He was firmly committed to the interior dimension of religious devotion, but gave no indication that he accepted Muhasibi's insistence that these virtues were incumbent. Rather, he argues that the noblest expression of these virtues exists only among God's friends, whose religious devotion has its origin in the excellence of their primordial condition. This thesis will introduce a conceptual hierarchy of religious devotion that facilitates the analysis and comparison of each of these authors. Current discussions of ninth-century Islamic piety are limited by inadequate definitions of asceticism and mysticism. A holistic approach to their religious devotion will provide tangible indicators of the ascetic or mystical orientation of their piety. This provides better parameters for discussing the relationship between asceticism and mysticism in the ninth century.

This essay explores the possibilities for thinking of the body as a site of exposure to and commingling with the world. I begin with Martin Heidegger’s engagement with the question of poetry as an encounter with the non-conceptual dimension of experience (earth). I then show how the disclosure of this non-conceptual dimension of experience in poetry requires an irreducibly bodily form of thought and experience. In the second chapter, I turn to the work of Georges Bataille in order to explore the bodily experiences and meditative practices he developed in the decades around and during World War II. First, I examine his writings concerning eroticism and laughter to show how these bodily experiences exceed conceptual determination and explanation. Lastly, I look at Bataille’s appropriation of medieval mystic Angela of Foligno’s practice of stigmatic meditation as a discipline of bodily exposure.

This thesis takes its cue from Roy Fisher's comment, in 1971, that his poems are 'to do with getting around in the mind'. This getting around, however, is not quite the simple process of 'propositions or explorations in aesthetic ideas', which Fisher suggests. This thesis discusses the relationship between Fisher's poetry and the empirical reality which his poems actually do describe and engage with. The thesis suggests that this engagement is of a mystical nature, in which Fisher's sense of linguistic play is allied to an acute awareness of instabilities in both the self and the empirical world. Such play in language and content makes Fisher's poetry a unique site, in contemporary poetry, for his further engagement with a mystery which is ineffable. Yet, this ineffability is held and controlled by Fisher so that it does not have a theological teleology. Fisher's poetry does not point towards a mystery which finds its manifestation and exploration in ways which are recognised within a contemporary religious framework. The thesis is organised into four chapters. The first chapter outlines some of the history and context of Roy Fisher's writing. It outlines the early critical reception of Fisher's first substantial publication, City, and his publications in the nineteen sixties. It then discusses some of the interviews that Fisher has given. These interviews are placed in the context of the critical reception of Fisher's work, during this time, that aligned Fisher with the avant-garde and 'Linguistically-Innovative' poetry of the period. In the second chapter, the thesis examines Fisher's relationship with the 'self' in his poetry. In the light of a sense of instability perceived in the self in Fisher's writing, the idea of the 'mystical' is introduced and defined. This is particularly relevant in the light of Fisher's tussles with the empirical world. A further exploration of the 'other' in Fisher's poetry is undertaken in the third chapter, which examines Fisher's relationship with the urban, the abject and the woman. In the final chapter, Fisher's long poem from 1986, A Furnace is discussed in the light of the foregoing, to highlight its own exploration of mysticism. The second half of the thesis consists of a portfolio of original poetry

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Added title page in English: Dialectics and harmony in the concepts of history and messianism of Rav Kook. / This essay will attempt to examine Rav Kook's corpus of thought from the viewpoint of its systems of methodological foundations: dialectic and harmonistic. These two elements are the dominant components of his thought, both from the methodological and ontological aspects. As to the harmonistic element, it should be noted that Rav Kook's entire corpus of thought is stamped with the idea of monistic unity, and he believes in the unity of existence from the point of view of ontological monism. The monism is inherent even in the center of the theoretical method, or in the words of Rav Kook: "The various thoughts actually don't contradict each other, everything is but a unitary revelation which appears in different sparks".