Love and Suffering in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s workThis study asks how love and suffering are expressed in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Light ofthe Flowing Godhead, with an emphasis on how the two are connected. What do the two termsmean and how do they influence each other and Mechthild’s understanding of them? Empirically,this study is based on Mechthild’s book, which was composed between about 1250 and 1283 inseven parts and distributed even while Mechthild was still working on later parts. The study alsodraws upon modern research to explain the wider religious contexts in which Mechthild wasworking, such as the clerical understanding of suffering as a means of contrition, and the use ofromantic and erotic metaphors to express a relation to God. In accordance with this, both love andsuffering are found to have shifting meanings depending on their respective contexts. Both havethe ability to bring humans closer to God, but, if used for the wrong purpose, can separate thehuman entirely from God. However, a shift in focus can be found over time. While the concept oflove becomes less allegorical and more abstract, the concept of suffering becomes more prevalentand central for Mechthild’s understanding of life and spirituality. At the same time, Mechthild’spositive relation to her faith and its power remains mostly unchanged.This study shows how Mechthild understands and interprets the themes of love and sufferingas a lay sister, woman and human being. Using Barbara Rosenwein’s term “emotionalcommunity”, Mechthild is found to be part of such a community, tying together academic religiousunderstandings of suffering and female mystics’ understandings of love. By examining one thinkerand drawing possible connections to a bigger, as of yet mostly unexplored, community, itcontributes to the overall picture of medieval mysticism.

In this thesis attention is focused on two religious movements, Mysticism and Pietism, both of which made significant contributions toward the enrichment of the German language. The 14th century was the "golden age" of German Mysticism. For this reason special consideration is given to this period of history and to the three most prominent 14th century German mystics: Meister Eckhart, Johann Tauler, and Heinrich Seuse. In order to understand their struggle with the language a brief synopsis of mystic theology is given in particular their concept of how the unio mystica, the mystical union of the soul with God, can be realized. It is shown that in their attempts to “express the inexpressible” they employed several stylistic devices which greatly enhanced the language by expanding the vocabulary and exploiting the various possibilities of expression. Though separated by several centuries in time, Mysticism and Pietism shared a common bond. The late 17th century and early 18th century pietists were responsible for reviving the terminology of the mystics, and for helping incorporate their vocabulary into the German language. The religious lyric of Gerhard Tersteegen has been singled out as representative of the influence which pietism exerted on the German language. Tersteegen was greatly influenced by the 17th century quietists, who in turn were influenced by the mystics of the Middle Ages. His language bears a striking resemblance to that of Meister Eckhart. From the 18th century even down to the present his songs have struck a responsive chord in the hearts of German speaking people and have helped mold German religious thinking. One of the key words found repeatedly in the vocabulary of both the mystics and the pietists is the term Gelassenheit. I have, therefore, chosen this word as an example of the impact which Mysticism and Pietism have had on the language. As used by both the mystics and the pietists Gelassenheit meant “submissive acquiescence to the will of God”. In the course of time the word lost its religious connotation and acquired the meaning of “calmness, serenity, or inner tranquility” The importance of Gelassenheit is not so much the change in meaning, but the fact that it is still used in modern German thanks to the influence of the mystics and pietists.

Abstract The essay’s purpose, which is a qualitative study with an inductive approach, is to investigate how the concept of mystagogy is described. The goal of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of the concept of mystagogy. The study also wants to study and investigate whether it is possible to link mystagogics to the theoretical framework of lived religion.  Based on the purpose of the study and the goals, there are two research questions that will be addressed. The first question is about how mystagogics is described in a Swedish-language context and the second question is about how the seven dimensions of the theoretical framework of lived religion can be discovered in the material.  The study's results show that mystagogy described as teaching or as a pedagogy to make people believe. Mystagogy about people being led into what is mysterious, into the mystery, through teaching in different ways. But it is also about the fact that it is something that touches the heart, which makes the mystical indistinguishable from life. The mystagogic learning is about community, sharing and belonging, an environment and a context where there is an opportunity for spiritual deepening. A place where you get the opportunity to learn from each other. As for my second research question about whether it is possible to see any connection between mystagogics and Live Religion, the study shows that connection is most evident in four of the dimensions that Ammerman describes - spirituality, materiality, physicality and the story.

This study focuses on the portrayal of Zen buddhism according to the counterculture icon Alan Watts; to see how he distinguishes the relationship between east and west, what differences Zen has in its character compared to other schools of buddhism, and how Zen could be of use for the western world. To acquire relevant and important information the chosen method is therefore a qualitative content analysis to decode the content of two books. Mentioned books are: The way of Zen and Talking Zen Reflection on Mind, Myth, and the Magic of life. The relationship between east and west has been, and still is, a complex phenomenon. Therefore, to ensure a clear picture the study has chosen to proceed with orientalism as its theoretical standpoint. More specifically; Richard King's use of the term orientalism and the mystic east. With orientalism as a ‘tool’ the inquiry could more easily proceed to show the importance of why religion should be seen in light of the cultural context. This due to the common occurrence of how westerners put the label religion on eastern peoples way of living without regards to their culture.  The results show that even though Alan Watts had immense knowledge of Zen and the orient, he still saw it through the lens of orientalism. Watts paints a picture of eastern cultures such as Zen, as peaceful and living in harmony with nature, whilst the west is plagued by problems. One solution according to Watts, is to embrace the way of Zen, and experience true freedom.

Thesis advisor: M. Shawn Copeland / Thesis advisor: Amy Hollywood / This dissertation offers a constructive theological reflection on transformational anger. It proposes two theories of transformational anger that aim to contribute to the alleviation of suffering in marginalized communities, especially those marginalized by sex, sexuality and gender. First it proposes a theory of the transformational power of anger drawn from the work of Judith Butler; second, it demonstrates that there is also a theory concerning the transformational anger of the meditative body in the work of Julian of Norwich. While Julian's and Butler's theories have distinct merits, I fuse the two in order to propose a third theory of transformational anger that integrates Butler's theories with Julian's meditative training of the mind and body. Chapters 1 through 3 investigate the work of Judith Butler to show how she articulates new relationships between anger and subjectivity, ones that alleviate suffering. Chapter 1 outlines several important concepts as background for Butler's theories of anger. These include her ideas about gender binaries, genealogy, the materialization of reason, and scenography. Butler shows that a series of binaries--which may seem at first sight unrelated to gender--establish the cultural acceptance of inequality. Matter and Reason prove to be especially important among those binaries. They function like a root system that predetermines the shapes of the leaves that gender will take. Consequently, the investigation of those binaries is a radical investigation into gender. Chapters 2 and 3 explain how the root system of binaries moves into psychic life through a consideration of Butler's account of melancholic anger and her ethics of survival. These investigations show that although people feel anger towards the demands of this root system, Western culture provides no outlet for their expression, which causes them to psychically redirect that hostility inwards as self-punishment. I then propose a theory of anger and its role in the alleviation of suffering by introducing a new category--transformational anger--that is not present in Butler's account of melancholy, but that takes its direction from her account. In my account of transformational anger I suggest a role for public mourning of the loss of fluid relationships, those that would operate outside of the demand for rigidly opposed ideals of masculinity and femininity. Mourning loosens the rigidity of internalized anger. This results in a more fluid and less violent relationship between parts of the self. Applied to communal dynamics, public mourning creates more fluid and less violent relationships between classes of bodies that are marked by masculinity and femininity, and hence a method of survival for those bodies most vulnerable to violence. The second part of the dissertation applies the theory of transformational anger to a reading of Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love. In chapters four through seven Butler's lens reveals the previously unexamined role of anger in Julian's text. It allows us to see that Julian's project is systematically directed by her scandalized grief: she is scandalized and grieved that she feels sensitivity to divine and human suffering, but that the all-powerful deity's failure to prevent suffering shows that he does not feel sensitivity to her human suffering. She therefore questions whether the deity is responsible for suffering. While Julian initially rejects her sense of scandal and outrage as sinful, thinking about Julian together with Butler's method of genealogy enables us to see that Julian's anger is at work throughout A Revelation and its insistent return to her experience of outrage at God's seeming indifference to human suffering. As Julian repeatedly returns to her own feeling of outrage, she gradually converts the role of her scandal from a sinful act into the guiding message of her theology. Through these returns she progressively revises the root system of traditional Western binaries that would exclude her anger towards the deity as unintelligible. Julian's reiterations of outrage model an extensive training of awareness and bodily sensation that seek out tensions in her background thoughts and feelings, which are at odds with each other about basic human categories. Through her mature meditative awareness she sees the inconsistency of the Western binaries that frame categories of meaning; this then allows her to revise these binaries and to replace them with new theological ideas. Because these new ideas erode authoritative binaries in the Western imaginary, they also oppose common church teachings about the responsibilities that the deity and human beings hold for suffering, replacing traditional sources of authority with new ones that encourage her anger rather than exclude it. This dissertation therefore emphasizes more than previous scholarship the shifts in sources of authority that occur across Julian's Revelation. Her revision of binaries, her new theological ideas, and her changing patterns in relation to authority model a melancholic anger that turns into transformational anger enabled by the meditative body. Butler's framework reveals that Julian's idea of mother Jesus plays two key roles in the transformational anger at work in the Showings. According to the first role, Julian calls the motion of this transformational anger mother Jesus--a term that is shown to be a practice rather than a personified ideal. Further, reading Julian against the framework provided by Butler suggests that before Julian introduces the idea of mother Jesus late in the text, the revisions that she previously made to Western binaries have already evacuated the feminine and the masculine of their usual meanings. As a result, mother Jesus occupies a third position to which the Western imaginary cannot easily apply categories of femininity or masculinity. According to the second role, mother Jesus is a practice that answers Julian's anger towards the unequal sensitivity that she perceives between divine and human sensitivity to suffering. The dissertation suggests that in this role Julian uses aspects of motherhood as an ideal in the Western imaginary to represent sin or debt. She provisionally uses the maternal ideal in order to erode the boundary between blameworthy human beings and the innocent deity. Motherhood serves to transfer responsibility for suffering from human beings to the deity in the form of divine motherhood. As a result, mother Jesus may owe human beings salvation, for in the Western imaginary femininity is an imperfection, and so may be considered a debt. Through these investigations I show that Butler and Julian use transformational anger through different skill sets to expose the arbitrary nature of binary social ideals. I propose their combination as a contribution to studies in Butler and in Julian as well as to the theologies of marginalization, especially in relation to sex, sexuality and gender, that those two may inform. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

This thesis investigates the acute phenomenology of altered states of consciousness induced through psychedelics and various Zen practices through the lens of comparative mysticism. Through inductive reasoning, tentative conclusions are drawn regarding how the acute phenomenological qualities of these states compare to one another. This topic had not been meaningfully studied, so the data from which these conclusions were drawn is limited. Though these findings are tentative, they have important implications for the study of comparative mysticism involving psychedelics, and for policy decisions regarding the credentialing of newly trained psychedelic therapists. Further research is required to draw more definitive conclusions on whether psychedelics users and Zen practitioners are having the same sorts of experiences, and this thesis identifies some of the theoretical challenges that can be expected with such research, particularly with regards to the reliability of qualitative data collection methods. To address these challenges, a novel theoretical approach to the study of comparative mysticism involving psychedelic and non-psychedelic altered states of consciousness has been developed.

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