IKONEN OCH IDEOLOGEN och LUTHER – en obetydlig parentes.

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En av vår tids framträdande mystiker var Simone Weil. Under sitt korta liv upplevde hon två världskrig och hon drevs av ett glödande engagemang för fattiga och utstötta människor

”One of the main reasons mystic and its cognates would be better avoided is that in popular mind, and in many scholarly minds, contemplation and so-called mysticism have become linked with modern notion of experience , as we have seen, in spite of the fact that, as writers from the earliest Hebrew Scriptures through the pre-Socratics, Evagrius, Cassian, Richard of St. Victor, the Cloud-author, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Martin Buber, and Simone Weil – to name a few – all tell us, often specifically, that experience is the opposite of contemplation.

Saint-Maximos By contrast, the work of silence that opens the person to contemplation relinquishes all claims to experience. Ironically the Theologica Germanica (c 1350), translated bu Martin Luther, has the same message as the Cloud-authors text, but by Luther´s time the clerical church had lost the work of silence and Luther associates the text´s message with experience, the opposite of the Theologica Germanica´s message” Maggie Ross