Julian of Norwich
Cód:
491_9780268022082
In May 1373, the English mystic Julian of Norwich was healed of a serious illness after experiencing a series of visions of the Blessed Virgin and of Christs suffering. Her account, A Revelation of Love, is considered one of the most remarkable documents of medieval religious experience. In Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ, Frederick Bauerschmidt provides a close and historically sensitive reading of Julians Revelation of Love that addresses the relationship between our understanding of God and our vision of human community. By locating Julians images of Christs body within the context of late medieval debates over the nature and extent of divine power, Bauerschmidt argues that Julian presents an alternative account of divine power in which the crucified body of Christ becomes the locus and shape of divine omnipotence. For Julian, divine power serves as the norm of all human exercise of power, rendering the possibility of the mystical body politic of Christas the exemplary form of human community. In this reading, the theological is irreducibly political and the political is irreducibly theological. As such, Bauerschmidt shows Julian to be both a theologian of the first rank and one who imagines the political. Much recent writing on the medieval mystical traditions seems either to take a thin slice of concepts through the complex matrix of historical context, or else to offer historical focus at the expense of contemporary relevance. Bauerschmidts Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ is a remarkable achievement of synthesis between a theologico-political analysis of distinct contemporary relevance and historical faithfulness to Julians own fourteenth century world.-Denys Turner, H.G. Wood Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, England With astonishing lucidity, Bauerschmidt proves himself to be a most delicate reader of Julian at the same time as he draws, always with relevance, on a ran
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