World Thought and Culture II Syllabus, Summer 2014

Northrup Frye (U of Toronto † 1991) “Trends in Modern Culture,” The Heritage of Western Culture (1952), 110: on “Contemporary [American] Deism” “Wisdom is the human capacity to apply knowledge, and since knowledge is progressive, wisdom must be progressive too, so that the wisdom of the past derives its validity from its relevance to the present.” George Grant (Dalhousie and McMaster † 1988) from Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969). Charles Taylor (McGill & Oxford, born 1931) from The Malaise of Modernity (1991). Kant († 1801), Hegel († 1831), Marx († 1883), Nietzsche († 1900), & Heidegger († 1976). James Doull (Dalhousie † 2001), “Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?” (1970): “In antiquity Prometheus could be subdued and taught to live under the power of Zeus. But now he has captured the citadel of Zeus and founded technology on the sovereign right of the individual. The principle of the modern age is the unity of theoretical and practical. A more dangerous principle there could not be.” Frye writes: “liberal education, the pursuit of truth for its own sake … is an act of faith, a kind of potential or tentative vision of an end in human life.” (114) B. WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS: AN ALTERNATIVE STORY In 1997, we first started lectures on Plotinus († 270) and Neoplatonism. The lectures included not only blacks like St Augustine († 430; his mother, St Monica, was a Berber), but Persians: Al-Farabi († 950) & Ibn Sina († 1037); Syrians: Iamblichus († 330) & Dionysius (6th century); Jews and Moslems writing in Arabic in Spain: Moses Maimonides († 1204), Ibn Tufayl (12th century), Ibn Rushd (12th century); the greatest Neoplatonic syncretizing philosopher, Proclus († 485), was from Asia Minor, a religious and racial melting pot. As the Odyssey begins, Poseidon is visiting the pious Aethiopians for relief from the ever quarrelling Greeks. In the 4th century, Iamblichus used the Homeric types to mutually characterize Hellenes and barbarians. The old ‘pristine’ Eastern cultures give weight and wisdom. The Hellenes are “experimental by nature and eagerly propelled in all directions, having no proper balance,” they endlessly alter “according to [their] inventiveness and illegality.” Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, VII.5. I Hellenism in Arabic and Persian, our Forgotten Heritage. II. Jewish and Christian Hellenisms in Greek and Their Successors III. Bringing in the Latins IV. The modern western civilization of secularised Protestantism George Grant from Technology and Empire: “The absence of natural theology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This had to be sought and served not through our contemplations but directly through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that position came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeasable responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theological context. The external world was unimportant and indeterminate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the soul’s ambiguous encounter with the transcendent.” Dr Eli Diamond on “Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age” (2007) in 2010: The ‘buffered self’, “is defined by its sense of self-completeness, invulnerability, being author of our own laws and master of the meaning of things. On the side of the self, through a gradual discipline, there emerges a rationality disengaged from powerful feeling and bodily processes, a narrowing of our sphere of intimacy and the emergence of an ideal of polite and civilized behaviour. On the side of the world, there is disenchantment of the world, a mechanized view of the universe, a view of time as homogeneous, and a leaving behind of a Platonic world of hierarchical complementarity. The result of this buffered self is the modern sense of power, an ability to self-govern, a feeling of self-reliance and self-sufficiency.” C. HOPE WITHIN AND WITHOUT I. Prince as the “Dionysian Christian”: an Itinerarium corporis in deum In “Prince as a Dionysian Christian” Dr Diamond says: “Dionysus is the God of the transgression of boundaries. And you see in Prince, embodied in his lyrics and his music and his person, the transgression of every single boundary imaginable. Between the sacred and the secular, and the body and the spirit, man, woman, racial divides and especially every single musical genre. … Prince, from the beginning, is intensely spiritual. But there’s a sense with him that you’re blocked from God if you’re living in the political, if you’re living in the social according to conventions, according to all these repressive binaries, and that it’s really by entering into and listening to our corporeal bodily nature that you actually have a feeling of self-transcendence through sexuality into the divine. II. The old west and Indigenous spiritualities Five aspects:1) Story and myth are essential and contain what reason cannot find or say on its own. 2) Philosophical or scientific reason is absolutely necessary and has its own laws, but it is not the highest form of knowing because inspired theologians tell the stories of spirit. Thus, reason and religion are different, but mutually necessary. 3) Effective healing and union with divinity comes through practices that cooperate with the natural rhythms, sacred places and times of the cosmic order, implanted by the Creator. Theory is not enough. The one who discerns and can invoke these realities is demanded, be she, or he, called priest, theurge or medicine man. 4) The cosmic mediating and animating spirits are manifold: saints, heroes, and daimonic beings. 5) Finally, the modern Disenchantment of the material cosmos is blindness. The cosmos is, as Thales, the first philosopher, said, “full of gods”. It is the living appearance of divinity, theophany, not dead matter. III. Jean Trouillard: Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary Augustine, Confessions: “The three aspects I mean are being, knowing, willing. … Knowing and willing I am. I know that I am and I will. I will to be and to know. In these three … contemplate how inseparable in life they are: one life, one mind, and one essence, yet ultimately there is distinction, for they are inseparable, yet distinct. The fact is certain to anyone by introspection.” Jean Trouillard (Sulpicien † 1984) judged: “The danger is … to reduplicate the distinctions inherent in created spirit in order to found them in the Absolute. One of the weaknesses of the Augustinian tradition is … not to have understood that the requirements of criticism and the necessities of religious life converge in order to liberate Transcendence from all that would draw it back within what we can know. Without this transcendence we perpetually risk the quiproquo [exchange], as it results in the Hegelian dialectic where no one is able to say if this is of God, or this is of man, and which plays upon this ambiguity.” Stanislas Breton (Passionist † 2005), De Rome à Paris. Itinéraire philosophique (1992), 154: “What they inaugurated under the appearance of a return to the past was well and truly a new manner of seeing the world and of intervening in it, of practicing philosophy, of comprehending the givenness of religion, both in its Christian form and in its mystical excess; since, and I hasten to add, they reconnected the old West to its Far Eastern beyond.” IV. Eriugena’s Neoplatonism: A cultural miracle Philosophy turned from seeking rest and security above change and fate to the most radical creativity and humanism. What is before thought and being, the Nothing by Excess, Uncreated Creating, founds reality by creating itself in the human as its workshop. All things were created in the human. This optimistic unity, of physics, psychology, and theology, & of East and West, became the underlying assumption of every future western total system. A freedom within Neoplatonic western civilization opens it to the spirituality of the indigenous in this land where we can only live if both live in harmony. The Middle Ages seemed to be an end of civilization, in fact, there contemplation built a new one. Silence is the place where hope opens.

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 2015

2021

Editorial: Memory, Mimesis, Meaning <strong>3</strong> <strong>Victor Ferrao</strong> <strong> 7</strong><br> The Touch of a Text: Promoting Healing and Compassion <strong>Ejekiel Lakra </strong><strong>13</strong><br> Freud on God and Religion as the<br> Sublimation of Unconscious Mind <strong>Thomas V Mathew </strong><strong>24</strong><br> Platonic and Aristotelian Views on Body-Soul Relationship:<br> A Comparative Approach <strong>Anmol Bara </strong><strong>44 </strong> Ambedkar's Philosophy against Degradation<br> of the Human Dignity <strong>P.S. Beskilin Sebastin</strong><strong> 55</strong> Samskaras: Their Significance and Benefits

This event, dedicated to the memory of Philip Sherrard, on the occasion of the twenty years from his death, will focus on various aspects of the always interesting topic of the sacred in life and art. The workshop tackles questions related to the notion of the sacred in the 21 st century, in life and art. The Sacred here is approached in the context of the many layers of the concept of the mystery, such as what we cannot fully understand, what is beyond us, the perception of the divine in religious discourse, the mystery of artistic creation, and the challenge of scientific research. Our event is intended as an occasion for presentation of work in progress, an exchange of ideas and perspectives as well as an opportunity for intercultural, intergenerational and interdisciplinary dialogue. We are becoming increasingly aware that the forms of our life and art — of our modern civilization generally — have over the last few centuries been characterized by the progressive loss of precisely that sense which gives virtually all other civilizations and cultures of the world their undying luster and significance: the sense of the sacred. In fact, the concept of a completely profane world — of a cosmos wholly desacralized — is a fairly recent invention of the western mind, and only now are we beginning to realize the appalling consequences of trying to order and mould our social, personal and creative life in obedience to its dictates. It is not even too much to say that we are also beginning to realize that unless we can reinstate the sense of the sacred at the heart of all our activities there can be no hope of avoiding the cosmic catastrophe for which we are heading.

Book reviews 93 BOOK REVIEWS CONSTANCE CLASSEN, The museum of the senses: experiencing art and collections, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic 2017, 171 pp. Hardback $26.95. ISBN 978-1-4742-5243-0.

It was by the spiritual fusion of metaphysics and morality, by the projection beyond ourselves-who are wicked and corrupt-of an absolute which makes it our duty to repent having been born, that monotheism without compromise was formulated for the first time in the doctrine of the Hebrew prophets. God was outside of the world henceforward, man could no longer attain Him save beyond the confines of his own life. This unity of the divine, which was asserted by the theologians, implanted in our nature that terrible dualism which was doubtless an indispensable trial for all of us, and which still remains so. It was this dualism that caused us to wander for long centuries in search of ourselves. It kept alive for a thousand years, in the depths of our minds, the painful conflict between the solicitations of the senses and the haunting idea of salvation. But it is perhaps, thanks to this dualism again, that we know that our strength lies in the harmony, which we seek in suffering and realize in joy, between our animality-which is sacred -and our reason-which is sacred.

Sufi Therapy Councelling, 2019

All my Master of Art writings collected in this book to help studends. It is sort of model and sample how to study and write in Religion and Culture. There are many possible ways to locate a post-colonial legacy, one them is train. In postcolonial times, former Soviet Union countries have slow trains and it portrays as a closed-minded society and exploitation. Modern Germany has fast train option that connects people faster than plane. Both train’s memory reminds for me different type of colonizers and their mentality either control and serves population. A train symbolizes either transnational connection or only local interaction. I haven’t ridden train in Canada, so first time I took a train ticket to go Montreal for the conference on March 4. I’ve attended the 21. Annual Graduate Conference: Meaning in Notion and presented my Sufi Therapy model. The Canadian train tells me the history of discrimination and racism. The Canadian Pacific railway was constructed mostly by Chinese migrant workers, while the Chinese immigrant Act of 1885 enforced the Chinese head tax. It was charged to discourage Chinese worker to enter Canada permanently, made them as a bachelor society. The tax was $50, then increased $100 and went up to $500. In July 1 1923, the day the Canadian Chinese Exclusion Act came into effect, was also known as "humiliation day". In 1947, Chinese Canadians regained voting rights and this discriminatory act completely eliminated in 1967. The imagery narrative of train became a storyteller if you can listen to… I traveled from Toronto to Montreal for attending conference as a speaker at Concorde University ın Montreal and Presented Sufi Therapy Mindfulness model. This is part of my life self journeying at Wilfrid Laurier University before starting my PhD study at Martin Luther. Hard struggle and joy... I decided to publish after five years. Regards Faruk Arslan 09 February 2020