This article examines Surrealism's philosophical foundations through esoteric interpretations of Hegel's dialectics. Using Glenn Alexander Magee's systematization as heuristic tool, I demonstrate how three Hermetic structures-initiation, holism, and magic/imagination-organized Surrealist poetic practice through Romantic and Symbolist mediations. Analyzing Breton's sublime point, automatic writing, and Les grands transparents, I argue Surrealists engaged with Hegelian-Hermetic frameworks that had already sublimated theological operations into philosophical method. Unlike readings emphasizing Christian secularization, this reveals "theology without theism": poetic practices deploying theological operations (transformation, correspondence, and mediation) while refusing transcendent referents. Surrealism represents neither religion's disappearance nor return, but theology's reconfiguration through heterodox poetic experimentation.
It is common to associate Friedrich Holderlin with Martin Heidegger. The latter not only contributed to the twentieth-century revival of interest in the work of Holderlin but also extended the influence of this poet beyond the confines of literature. However, despite its undeniable significance, the Heideggerian interpretation of Holderlin is not the only one possible. This article shows that, around the time Heidegger was working on this author, two Catholic theologians, Romano Guardini and Erich Przywara, also published their own work on the poet. It is clear that alongside the "Heideggerian Holderlin," there is also a "Catholic Holderlin." The Catholic interpretation of this author shares many similarities with that of Heidegger, and yet there are a few notable differences. Like Heidegger, Guardini, and Przywara viewed Holderlin as offering an antidote to the challenges of modernity. Unlike him, however, they also found in Holderlin a poetic expression of their analogical and theological thought-forms. This Catholic reading of Holderlin enriches our understanding of Holderlin and provides us with a symbolic and analogical worldview that is worth recovering.
This paper explores Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan through an ecological-theological framework, focusing on the integration of Chinese philosophical traditions-Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism-within the novel's narrative. By examining the interactions between culture and nature, this study reflects on the theological and ethical dimensions inherent in these traditions, with particular attention to their contributions to environmental stewardship, respect for creation, and moral responsibility. Tan's novel critiques human-centric views on environmentalism, offering a more holistic view rooted in harmony between humanity and nature, as seen through the lens of these non-human spiritual frameworks. This theological analysis expands the discourse on ecocriticism by demonstrating how Tan's narrative aligns with key theological principles, emphasizing the moral imperative for ecological justice and cross-cultural dialogue in global environmental ethics.
In her Pohvala Svetom Knezu Lazaru, Jefimija transcends the traditional role of courtly widow to emerge as a proto-theologian within the Hesychast milieu of late medieval Serbia. Written in the wake of the Kosovo defeat, her gold-threaded poem is not merely a lament but a mystical act of intercession. By invoking saints, channeling divine justice, and framing Lazar's martyrdom within Orthodox soteriology, she weaves theology directly into the material body of the saint. Her voice, rooted in humility yet rich with eschatological urgency, demonstrates how Orthodox women, through lament, could participate in shaping both the spiritual and political landscapes of their time. Jefimija's Pohvala is thus not only a cultural artifact but also a liturgical-theological performance, resonant with the Hesychast pursuit of divine union and national salvation.
This essay examines the "character" of Leslie Stephen's agnosticism. It mainly considers "An Agnostic's Apology" (1876), deemed by many the first written defence of agnosticism, but also assesses his other works of controversy, especially his multiple attacks upon the theologian F.D. Maurice. The central claim is that Stephen did not only advocate a certain set of arguments in his agnostic writings but also recommended, by means of tone, style, and voice, a "character" about how a thinker ought to go about "not knowing" God. In contrast to more theistic versions of agnosticism popular at the time, this character was an uncompromising, "muscular," and bracing "not knowing" that strove towards disagreeable "realities" rather than shying away from them, and which refused to venerate anything approximating the supernatural.
This article explores the literary representation of Jewish women's prayer experience taking place in the women's section (ezrat nashim) "behind the mehitza" of the Israeli Orthodox synagogue. The very act of literary writing about the synagogue prayer experience from a female perspective constitutes a distinctive and relatively recent phenomenon in Modern Hebrew literature, one which opens a window onto the complexity of women's existence within Jewish culture. The article opens with a poem by Yehuda Amichai, one of the great figures of Modern Hebrew poetry. Amichai's secular identity appears to inform his distinctive perspective, which contrasts with that of the three women poets whose work is examined in the remainder of the article. Amichai, the male poet, portrays the women's section from the perspective of a child, casting it in an idyllic light. In contrast, the poems of the three women poets-Hava Pinchas Cohen, Esther Ettinger and Avigail Antman-are written from a maternal point of view, illuminating the difficulties and tensions inherent in that space. In the women's poems, which describe the prayer service taking place on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, key dates in the Jewish calendar, mothers' care for their children is elevated to a sacral sphere. Via prosaic and everyday maternal existence, the poems express theological insights extending far beyond their ostensibly "feminine" and "restricted" context, and provide an authentic reflection of the complexity of female life in Jewish culture.
The essay asks a question of Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall that is as theological as it is ecological: how might a human life oriented around both the care of other (non-human) lives and a dependency upon nature itself-in brief, an orientation around "somethingness"-be reinforced rather than contradicted by an equally full orientation toward the existential sense of immanent, and potentially also imminent, nothingness? This question's mystic undertones prompt a comparison with Meister Eckhart's thinking of detachment in pursuit of a clearer understanding of how Haushofer's protagonist develops and enacts a rule of life radically structured around solicitude that is as ancient as it is (post)apocalyptic. That life's radicality is due not just to its rootedness in place, but also to how it reconfigures a relation between nature, the soul, and the Absolute as intimated in Eckhart's mysticism.
