The Immediacy of Mystical Experience in the European Tradition

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Antiquity and the Middle Ages

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Experiencing the Divine in Plato

      • Gerd Van Riel

      Pages 3-13

   3. Prayer as a drōmenon in the Hermetic Initiative Texts

      • Endre Hamvas

      Pages 15-22

   4. Mystical Experience in Theurgical Practice

      • Anna Judit Tóth

      Pages 23-30

   5. Gymnastics of the Mind: The Theory of gymnos nous in Maximus the Confessor

      • Miklós Vassányi

      Pages 31-37

   6. Ascending to the Third Heaven? A Missing Tradition of Latin Mysticism

      • Csaba Németh

      Pages 39-61

   7. The Experience of God in the Mystical Language of Meister Eckhart

      • Ferenc Bányai

      Pages 63-74

   8. Hugo van der Goes Reading Johannes Tauler? A Literary Context for the Berlin Nativity

      • Geert Warnar

      Pages 75-83

   9. Mediating the Immediate: Richard Rolle’s Mystical Experience in the Translations of his Self-Revelations

      • Tamás Karáth

      Pages 85-103

   10. Confined Meditation or Mediated Contemplation: Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ

       • Zsuzsanna Péri-Nagy

       Pages 105-119

3. Early Modernity

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 121-121

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   2. What Is the Purpose of Human Life? – Immediate Experience of God in Pico’s Works

      • Monika Frazer-Imregh

      Pages 123-141

   3. Characters of Giordano Bruno’s Mysticism

      • Antonio Dall’Igna

      Pages 143-155

   4. The Experience of God in Pascal’s Religious Texts

      • Tamás Pavlovits

      Pages 157-165

   5. Communicative Experience of God in Prayer

      • Martin Moors

      Pages 167-175

   6. What (If Anything) Can Justify the Objective Truth of an Alleged Immediate Experience of God?

      • Théogène Havugimana

      Pages 177-187

   7. Pantheistic Ways of Immediate Experience of God: Spinoza and the Early Schelling

      • Gábor Boros

      Pages 189-202

4. Modern and Postmodern Times

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 203-203

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   2. At the Sources of Simone Weil’s Mysticism

      • Enikő Sepsi

      Pages 205-214

This volume examines mystical experiences as portrayed in various ways by “authors” such as philosophers, mystics, psychoanalysts, writers, and peasant women. These “mystical authors” have, throughout the ages, attempted to convey the unsayable through writings, paintings, or oral stories. The immediate experience of God is the primary source and ultimate goal of these mystical expressions. This experience is essentially ineffable, yet all mystical authors, either consciously or unconsciously, feel an urge to convey what they have undergone in the moments of rapture. At the same time they are in the role of intermediaries: the goal of their self-expression – either written, painted or oral – is to make others somehow understand or feel what they have experienced, and to lead others toward the spiritual goal of human life. This volume studies the mystical experiences and the way they have been described or portrayed in West-European culture, from Antiquity to the present, from an interdisciplinary perspective, and approaches the concept of “immediate experience” in various ways.

• European Mysticism
• Experience of God
• Medieval Spirituality
• Mystagogy
• Mystical Experience
• Philosophy of Prayer
• Ritual mysticism
• Structure of a prayer
• Theurgical Practice
• Visio Dei

• Faculty of Humanities, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary

  Miklós Vassányi, Enikő Sepsi, Anikó Daróczi

Miklós Vassányi holds a Doctoral Degree in Philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He has published a book on the history of the anima mundi theory with Springer. He is Head of the Department for General Humanities at the Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest.



Enikő Sepsi holds a Doctoral Degree in Comparative Literature from Université Paris IV – Sorbonne and in History of Hungarian Literature from ELTE University of Budapest. She has published and edited several books, in France and in Hungary alike, on the philosophy and theatre conception of Simone Weil. She is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Head of the Institute for Arts Studies and General Humanities at the Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest. 



Anikó Daróczi holds a Doctoral Degree in the History of Dutch Literature from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a DoctoralDegree in History from ELTE University Budapest. She has published two books with Peeters (Leuven), and one with Atlas (Amsterdam) on Medieval Dutch Mysticism and Beguine Literature. She is Head of the Institute for German and Dutch Studies at the Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest.

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