Mysticism in The Books Store

This first-time translation from Russian into English of Nil's complete writings includes: The Tradition, The Rule, his letters (only four of which have actually been attributed to him) and his last will and testament. The Tradition is his earliest attempt to give his disciples a written but very simplified rule of skete monasticism, which he practiced on Mt. Athos. The Rule is an extended ascetical treatise on what Nil calls "mental activity" or, in today's terms, perpetual or continuous prayer.

Yet such a program faces three serious challenges: theological misgivings about the compatibility of Jung's psychology with Christian belief, long-standing misinterpretations of St. John's doctrine on contemplation, and the need to clarify the relationship between Jung's process of individuation and contemplation.

Parts I and II are devoted to resolving these first two problems, while Part III gives a practical demonstration of the relationship between individuation and contemplation in St. John's life and writings and in a variety of contemporary spiritual problems.

Let me put it more concretely. I am enthusiastic about the prospect of using Jung and St. John as practical guides in the interior life. But when this enthusiasm begins to run away with me I see Victor White deep in conversation with Jung in the tower at Bollingen and their subsequent estrangement. Or I see Juan Falconi and Antonio Rojas in the Madrid of the late 1620's evoking the name of John of the Cross with the best of intentions to fuel a popular enthusiasm for contemplation, yet paving the road that led to a distrust of mysticism that has lingered to our own day.

Nostradamus (1503-66) is one of the most controversial writers of the Renaissance and one of the most widely read. Whatever his other accomplishments, he is best remembered as an enigmatic seer, the man who could foretell events, though he could not specify when in the future they would occur. Modern readers tend to view Nostradamus either as a relic from a superstitious age or as an inspired visionary. In this book Georges Dumézil, renowned scholar of myth and religion, takes Nostradamus very seriously indeed. Can one foresee the future, Dumézil asks, and fail to understand it?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, commentators on Nostradamus found in the twentieth quatrain of Nostradamus's Century 9 a bundle of precise details that seemed to predict the arrest of Louis XVI as he fled the French Revolution. Other details in the quatrain remained unexplained. Why was the person described as "le moyne noir"? What did the second verse signify: "Deux parts, vaultorte, Herne, la pierre blanche"? What can scholarship contribute to the understanding of these puzzles?

Dumézil explores three possibilities: a philological and historical study of the text to clarify its enigmas by a deeper investigation of Louis XVI's unsuccessful flight to Varennes; a logical analysis, determining how Nostradamus would have interpreted a view of the eighteenth century from his vantage in the sixteenth; and, finally, a metaphysical inquiry into the status and process of prediction. Written in dialogue form, The Riddle of Nostradamus is one of Dumézil's most arresting works, challenging dogmas, even scholarly ones, and raising sharp questions about how much we want to know, and why. Shunning the usual forms of academic inquiry to probe the grey regions that stretch between knowledge and belief, the book not only studies, but exemplifies, the role of the riddle in discussing portentous events.

"This book by Georges Dumézil is about Dumézil -- about his scholarly methods and even about his life. It is a tour de force application of his methodology. As such, it amounts to a brilliant exercise in comparative method and reconstruction. It is easy to speak here of his methods; to speak of his life will be more difficult." -- from the Foreword, by Gregory Nagy