Teofilo F.

Ruiz

Outline # 1

HIS
2C

THE TERROR OF HISTORY:

Mysticism, Heresy and Witchcraft,
1000 - 1700

I. The Problem: Appollonian and Dionysian in Western Culture

II. The Terror of History

a) Aeschylus
b) Nietzsche
c) Huizinga
d) Walter Benjamin

III. Escaping History. "The Sleep of reason produces monsters."

IV. Mysticism
a) The Context: Europe, 1000 - 1700
i) Political: Lord and vassal; the making of the nation state; the New Monarchies;
Bureaucracy and War
ii) Social: Lord and peasant; the rise of town; the crises of the fourteenth century;
society and life in late medieval and early modern Europe
iii) Economic: The manor; the urban economy (God's time and merchant's time);
the rise of Capitalism
iv) Cultural: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century; courtly love; religion and
science; secularization; the coming of the Scientific Revolution
b) Mysticism. An introduction. Apollonian and Dionysian; Freud's "oceanic feelings"
c) Reality and Escapism
d) Introspection
e) Emanation and Immanence
f) Mysticism and Symbolism
i) Pilgrimage;
ii) Love;
iii) Desire for Perfection.

V. The Mystic way

a) Awakening
i) religion;
ii) pain;
iii) beauty.

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 b) Self-Knowledge/Purgation
i) purification of the self;
ii) return to a "natural" self;
iii) contrition and asceticism.
c) Illumination
i) voices;
ii) visions;
iii) compulsive writing
d) Surrender, or the Dark Night of the Soul
i) introversion;
ii) quiet
e) Ecstacy/Union with God
i) mono-ideism;
ii) physical trance;
iii) psychological;
iv) mystical;
v) the marriage of the soul with God.

VI. Mystics in Action

a) Ancient roots: Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine

VII. Mysticism and Mystics in the Western Tradition. Case Studies