Jan van ruysbroeck biography of mahatma
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Robert Charles Zaehner
British academic on Eastern religions
Robert Charles Zaehner (8 April – 24 November ) was a British academic whose field of study was Eastern religions. He understood the original languages of various sacred texts, including Sanskrit, Pali, and Arabic. At Oxford University, his first writings were on the Zoroastrian tro and its texts. Starting in World War II, he served as an intelligence officer in Iran. Appointed Spalding Professor at Oxford in , his books addressed such subjects as mystical experience (articulating a widely cited typology), Hinduism, comparative religion, Christianity and other religions, and ethics. He translated the Bhagavad Gita, providing an extensive commentary based on Hindu tradition and sources. His last books addressed similar popular culture issues, leading to his talks on the BBC. He published under the name R. C. Zaehner.[3]
Life and career
[edit]Early years
[edit]Born on 8 April in Sevenoaks, Kent,
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‘Satan Smut & Co’: poet and the Suppression of Evil Literature in the Early Years of the Free State1
1Julian Barnes the novelist and critic recently recalled a hundraårsdag exhibition at the Royal Academy in London entitled ‘ Art at the Crossroads’, which had displayed
without preferential hanging or curatorial nudge, a cross section of what was being admired and bought as the previous century had turned, regardless of school, affiliation or subsequent critical judgment. … If such an exhibition had been organised in , you could imagine visitors feeling baffled and affronted by the enormous aesthetic squabble in front of them. Here was the cacophonous, overlapping, irreconcilable actuality that would later be argued and flattened into art history, with virtue and vice attributed, victory and defeat calculated, false taste rebuked.2
2Such cacophonies are very familiar from microbiographies.3 I wonder how a micro-biography of selected textual lives might benefit f
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In setting out the via negationis (or ‘negative’) approach to God, ‘De Theologia Mystica’ treatise of the 5th century mystic and theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite describes the ineffability of God as “the Divine Dark”:
“The Divine Dark is nought else but that inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell. Although it is invisible because of its dazzling splendours and unsearchable because of the abundance of its supernatural brightness, nevertheless, whosoever deserves to see and know God rests therein; and, by the very fact that he neither sees nor knows, is truly in that which surpasses all truth and all knowledge.”
– The Pseudo-Dionysius: ‘De Mystica Theologia’
Referencing the Sufi poem ‘The Colloquy of the Birds’, Evelyn Underhill’s ‘Mysticism’ (’A study of the nature and development of man’s spiritual consciousness’) says that the sixth of the ‘Seven Valleys’ along the road to the hidden Palace of the King is known as the Valley of Amazement in which “t