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Psychosynthesis is a transpersonal psychotherapy. It was founded by Dr Roberto Assagioli, an Italian psychiatrist who lived from 1888 to 1974. He was involved in some of the early psychodynamic activity early in the twentieth century, but split from Freud at about the same time as Jung. Psychosynthesis was developed between 1910 and the 1950s in Florence and Rome, but in the 1960s became more internationally known with centres opening round the world. This study is an investigation of the ideas lying behind psychosynthesis: these ideas spring partly from scientific study of the unconscious, but they also originate in the long mystical tradition of both the Eastern and the Western world. In tracing back these ideas to their sources, the nature of the knowledge underlying a modern spiritual, or transpersonal, psychotherapy is inevitably discussed. Roots of such a discipline lie in a split tradition within the Western world - psychology aspires to be scientific, religion or mystical knowledge is studied within the discipline of theology, and the two are very little related in our present conception of knowledge. Roberto Assagioli's framework is thus a 'synthesis' in several senses: in the attempt to relate the soul and theology to the personality and psychology: in the attempt to perceive personal developmental patterns as a microcosm of larger social and historical patterns: and in the particular characteristics of his therapy with the individual. The meaning of these syntheses is examined within the context of the knowledge on which he explicitly and implicitly drew. Psychosynthesis is a product of the twentieth century. It originated at the turn of the century when many new ideas were questioning the old certainties of nineteenth century thought. It began to flourish at the time in the 60s when once again criticism was being levelled at the direction of Western development. An examination of its origin and development throws light on many aspects of our present values.

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The key objective of this research is to explore Matthew Fox’s mystical immanence, as developed in his panentheistic Creation-centred theology. Focussing on the key theme in his thought, the relationship between prayer and social justice, this thesis provides what is essentially an auteur critique. That is to say, his theology is excavated by means of biographical analysis, exploring his principal formative influences. In Chapter One the thesis seeks to identify and chronicle his spiritual odyssey, from his home environment via his seminary training within the Dominican Order to his acceptance into the Episcopal priesthood in 1994. Chapter Two focuses on the main influences on Fox’s thought, particularly: Marie-Dominique Chenu, who transformed Catholic thought in the twentieth century; Jewish spirituality, as developed by Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, and Otto Rank; and Robert Bly, the American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement. Turning specifically to the principal developments in his theology, the third chapter, analyses Fox’s mysticism. His consistent use of the term ‘Creation’ is an indication of the cosmic orientation of this thinking, while his ‘creation spirituality’ is undergirded by his embrace of Thomas Aquinas, the Rhineland mystics and his rejection of Augustine. This chapter also evaluates the diverse scholarly critiques which have attempted to classify his work as New Age, pantheist, and monist. The fourth chapter turns to his complex understanding of the historical Jesus and his quest for the ‘Cosmic Christ’ in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Church Fathers. The thesis concludes with an examination of, firstly, Fox’s understanding of ‘Wisdom’, focussing on the ‘sophiological problem’ within the Russian religious consciousness and, secondly, his interpretation of liberation theology and social justice, as developed in his theology of work, Gaia, and eco-feminism.

‘Essentialism’ and ‘constructivism’ are two epistemological perspectives that have been used in the philosophical analysis of mystical experience. ‘Essentialism’ attempts to establish mystical experience as a distinct category of experience, cutting across cultural boundaries. ‘Constructivism’ attempts to establish mystical experience as unique to its various cultural contexts. The two viewpoints are variously held in opposition. ‘Constructivism’ often appears as something of an assumed perspective and is rarely, if ever, defended (in any depth) by the individuals whose views it apparently represents. Recent ‘essentialist’ thinkers (‘non-constructivists’) have taken issue with this tendency to assume ‘what is to be proved’, and have reasoned in attempts to establish ‘constructivisim’ as inappropriate to certain experiences that appear to be found recurring in reports of mystical experiences across cultures. However, those analyses have been concerned to recommend their own (‘essentialist’ / ‘non-constructivist’) position and have, therefore, operated with a certain amount of bias, despite elements of commendable intent. Indeed it is in virtue of these commendable elements i.e. by exploring the epistemological assumptions of authors who attempt to make mystical experience culture specific, that ‘essentialists’ posit and provide justification for the classification of ‘constructivism’ as a distinct philosophical approach to the data of enquiry. ‘Constructivists’ (so-called), on the other hand, tend to emphasise the importance and role of context in their discussions, and in some cases reject the classification of their views as particularly ‘constructivist’. The thesis examines the reasonable defensibility of ‘nonconstructed’ mystical experience from three perspectives: ‘essentialist’, ‘constructivist’ and ‘contextualist’ – outlining considerations for anyone approaching the material via each, and addressing the relevant issues of diversity at tension between these recognisable philosophical viewpoints.

In the ancient and medieval period, in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, writers often use the metaphor of an eye or mirror interacting with the light of the sun to explain humanity’s ability to participate in the presence (or glory) of the divine. In this dissertation, I focus on a particular type of mirror imagery, what I call “the mirror of glory,” from the 2nd to 4th centuries in Greek and Syriac literature, from the extracanonical Odes of Solomon and Acts of Thomas to Plotinus’s Enneads to the writings of Athanasius (d. c. 373) and Ephrem (d. c. 373). I conclude with parallel themes in the later east-Syriac tradition and early Sufism, from John of Dalyatha (d.c. 780) of present-day Iraq to the Qur’anic commentaries attributed to Ja‘far al-Sādiq (d. 148/765). In all these texts, I argue the “mirror of glory” articulates and enacts, for the reader, a convergence in the meeting of gazes between oneself, the divine, and other glorified beings (such as angels), where seers and seen and speakers and spoken to merge in a regenerative encounter. Through examining these writers’ optical theories when possible, I demonstrate how this mirror imagery is predicated upon a link between the soul and the senses. In the highest stages of giving glory, these writers describe an embodied reflexivity that is neither singular (I and I), nor double (I and Thou), but collective (I and We)—a self-vision that parallels the communal quality of the ritual context in which giving glory often occurs. In this way, I bring sources from the eastern Mediterranean and Near East into conversation with western genealogies of “knowing thyself” and demonstrate how intrinsically linked our understanding of the senses is to the way we know and the way we imagine communion and empathy.

Cette thèse a pour objet le rapport d’Aragon à la croyance à travers l’examen de son oeuvre poétique, du Crève-coeur au Fou d’Elsa. Si l’engagement n’est pas son unique expression, l’amour fonctionnant comme pôle d’attraction complémentaire, le besoin de croire a trouvé dans la rencontre avec le communisme une incarnation à la fois providentielle et problématique, qui met l’oeuvre à l’épreuve. Après avoir analysé la façon dont la « rupture de cadre » due à la guerre permet à Aragon de renouer avec la poésie, vecteur privilégié d’une foi polymorphe qu’elle reflète autant qu’elle l’alimente, on voit le poète prendre pleinement la mesure de son rôle et endosser la posture hugolienne du prophète, assignant à l’écriture une vocation pragmatique très forte tout en faisant fond sur un syncrétisme éblouissant qui mêle constamment références religieuses et enjeux politiques de défense nationale. Cette période effervescente se clôt avec l’entrée dans la Guerre froide, qui se caractérise par une démarche gestionnaire des emblèmes plus spécifiquement communistes et la dégradation du poème en catéchèse, sur fond de dénégation de la crise de la croyance. C’est en affrontant poétiquement cette crise, en faisant place aux étranglements de la voix, que Le Roman inachevé peut la surmonter, livrant un constat lacunaire et ambivalent sur la perte de l’utopie. Le tournant mystique pris par Le Fou d’Elsa permet de figurer par le destin de Grenade la tragédie de l’Histoire et de préserver, au prix de la déréalisation de l’objet aimé, la passion d’un absolu désormais orphelin de toute incarnation politique. / This doctoral thesis explores the complex set of beliefs espoused by Louis Aragon in his poetical oeuvre from Le Crève-coeur to Le Fou d'Elsa. He drew his inspiration from love and the support for the communist cause. Aragon's life-long commitment to communism was providential and problematic - it put his literary prowess to the test. This thesis examines how the second world war marked a turning point in his life and how it prompted him to resume writing poems. He became a prophet who relentlessly paced his quarterdeck bellowing hugolian stanzas that combined religious references with national politics. In his poems the captain-prophet spelt out the grammar of the all-encompassing communist militant. Aragon then rethinks the role of the poem and transcends its limitations, his aesthetics being based on efficiency. These times came to an end with the advent of the cold war during which he doggedly preached the gospel of communism. His poems recited the catechism and painted the glorious emblems of his faith. He confronted the crisis as a poet and overcame it in Le Roman inachevé by denouncing in an ambivalent whisper the demise of the utopian ideal. In Le Fou d'Elsa Aragon mustered his mystical powers to reveal the tragic dimension of History through the ordeal and fall of Grenada. He was intent on preserving and reaffirming the preeminence of the passionate search for an absolute now devoid of any political motive.

Mystical Compositions of the Self: Women, Modernism, and Empire explores women's early 20th-century literary inscriptions of mysticism's entanglement with empire and the figure of the female at the center of each. Through an examination of selected texts by Evelyn Underhill, Eva Gore-Booth, May Sinclair, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Butts, and Virginia Woolf, Mystical Compositions argues that the discourse of mysticism underwrites modernist aesthetic strategies and ethical questions, particularly the pressing concerns of the self's relation to gendered, religious, colonial, and socioeconomic others within the strictures of British imperialism. Employing a combination of postcolonial, feminist, and religious studies methodologies, this dissertation begins by briefly tracing the discursive history of "mysticism" from ancient mystery religions to its late 19th- and early 20th-century "revival" in British culture, paying particular attention to the prominent use of Woman as a figure of mystical unity in modernist literature and imperial scholarship and propaganda. The project then argues that selected women writers lace their characters' lives with mystical discourses in ways that suggest the skepticism and hopeful longing of living within an imperial system of inequalities and interactions: mysticism can engender connection with others and can offer counter-cultural resistance to the oppressive powers of state, empire, and patriarchal family. It also comes with the potential for minimizing the consumption of the other and for losing the self during a historical moment when women are organizing to actualize their political selfhood through suffrage campaigns, World War I efforts, and non-conscription movements. Instead of providing a taxonomy of mysticism or a singular categorical definition, the project's chapter studies present a prismatic array of the various mysticisms, the diverse "mystical compositions of the self" that proliferate through the dynamic of modernism's ambivalent relation to empire. The dissertation then proposes that these compositions operate, to varying degrees, within a "mystical economy of the impossible," in which the willing offering of the self to others paradoxically brings about self-abundance. Ultimately, Mystical Compositions highlights the mutually-shaping nature of early 20th-century British mystical, modernist, and imperial discourses and considers the gifts and costs of collaborations between politics, art, corporate religion, and personal spirituality.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis presents a new assessment of the identity and historical significance of Marguerite Porete, burned for heresy in Paris in 1310, and reconnects her to a vigorous, lay, discourse community that threatened the authority of the later medieval church. The thesis argues that a bilateral annihilation of Porete as an historical subject has been brought about by medieval and modern representations, and that this has served to obscure the presence of a subaltern religious discourse in the period. The historiography of Porete has followed distinctive stages of development that reflect, and are affected by, concurrent advances in the study of medieval female religious participation. This interplay has led to the development of a particularly influential hermeneutics that serves to exclude Porete from her contemporaries. Analysis of documentation issuing from Porete’s condemnation has similarly been influenced by hermeneutic issues that manipulate the ways in which Porete is perceived as an identity. This thesis challenges dominant representations of Porete in the scholarship and argues that Porete’s identity and discourse reflect a particularly vigorous, fluid and cross-discoursed lay engagement with religiosity that has roots in the precocious socio-religious environment of the Southern Low Countries. Central to the aims of this thesis is the question “how did Porete ‘fit’ the religious landscape of her period?” A seeming obstacle to this pursuit are claims from within the scholarship that Porete did not ‘fit’ at all, but was, rather, as an aberration amidst other female mystics of the period. Clear links, however, have suggested a wider discourse community and some have identified her, in conjunction with those that condemned her in Paris, as a beguine. Yet this affiliation is refuted by Porete within her book and the term, as an indicator of identity, is highly problematic. This thesis explores the historiographical issues that cloud Porete’s case and offers a reassessment of the possibilities her reconnection to the major religious currents of her day presents. It will be argued that her condemnation represents a major historical development wherein the boundaries of institutionally accepted discourse were hardened at the very moment when the possibilities for religious discourse were at their peak. Porete will thus be reassessed as a major figure in an alternative religious discourse that represents the excluded voice of lay engagement in the later Middle Ages.

Thesis (M.A.R.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-63) and vita.