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6 - Visions of the Self in Late Medieval Christianity: Some Cross-Disciplinary Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2024

By
Sarah Coakley
Edited by
Michael McGhee
Michael McGhee
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

In a volume devoted to philosophy, religion and the spiritual life, I would like to focus the later part of my essay on a comparison of two Christian spiritual writings of the fourteenth century, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing in the West (1981), and the Triads of Gregory Palamas in the Byzantine East (1983). Their examples, for reasons which I shall explain, seem to me rich with implications for some of our current philosophical and theological aporias on the nature of the self. Let me explain my thesis in skeletal form at the outset, for it is a complex one, and has several facets.

Type
Chapter
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Spiritual Life , pp. 144 - 169
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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