MICHAELMAS TERM 2023
Monday 2nd October 2023
‘Everything That Lives is Holy’: William Blake, Imagination and the Love of the World
DR VALENTIN GERLIER
In the Chair David Brazier
The current ecological crisis has brought new urgency in our trying to understand the world as woven together, deeply interconnected or ‘entangled’. Thinking with William Blake, this lecture will argue that the nature of such connections is brought to light not by abstract conceptions of systematic thinking, but by the ongoing work of the creative imagination.
Imagination is often conceived as a mode of vision, intuition or even revelatory understanding. Yet the ground of the imagination for William Blake, is Divine love, a love which longs to infuse and unite the created order rather than abstract away from it. As Blake puts it, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. Thus while imagination may guide to a creative union with the divine, the divine also paradoxically leads away from itself and into the created order, ‘so that God may be all in all’. Moved by this love, the imagination speaks the world into existence and creatively articulates intricate relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. It is thus through the imagination that divine love courses through the world and knits the various realms of being together, exulting in the enduring truth that ‘everything that lives is holy’.
VALENTIN GERLIER is Senior Lecturer in Poetics of Imagination at Dartington Arts School. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Grace of Words (Routledge, 2022) and regularly teaches and lectures at the Temenos Academy.
Venue & Timing
Brunswick Ltd (formerly the Lincoln Centre)
18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields
London WC2A 3ED
Nearest Underground Holborn
Doors open 6.10pm. Lecture starts 6.30pm.
Admission
£8 (£5 Members of the Temenos Academy/Concessions)
Full-time students with student ID card FREE
Booking
temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Monday 16th October 2023
The Journey After Death
SANDRA HILL
In the Chair Hilary Davies
Using the Han Dynasty Mawangdui Funeral Banner as a guide, this lecture will explore the mythologies and cosmologies of 2nd century BCE China, tracing the journey of the soul after death through both the watery underworlds and the paradise of the immortals.
The Mawangdui funeral banner is the earliest known example of Chinese painting on silk, and was discovered, remarkably intact, in the tomb of a female aristocrat, Xin Zhui, the countess of Dai. The tomb, excavated for the first time in 1972, was found to include over 1000 artefacts, and included texts of the Laozi (Daode Jing) and early medical treatises. The nature of several artefacts found in the tomb suggest that the woman was a Daoist adept. The preservation of her body was of great interest at the time of its discovery.
Our exploration through the imagery of the banner will be enhanced through references to textual sources, including the Daode Jing (The Way and its Virtue), the Huainanzi, and the Songs of Chu.
SANDRA HILL holds an MA in Fine Art and is currently engaged in doctoral research at the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts. She has studied classical Chinese with French sinologists Claude Larre s.j. and Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée, and co-founded Monkey Press to publish their work in English. Sandra teaches the Daoism module on the Temenos Foundation Course in Perennial Philosophy.
Venue & Timing
Brunswick Ltd (formerly the Lincoln Centre)
18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields
London WC2A 3ED
Nearest Underground Holborn
Doors open 6.10pm. Lecture starts 6.30pm.
Admission
£8 (£5 Members of the Temenos Academy/Concessions)
Full-time students with student ID card FREE
Booking
temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Monday 13th November 2023
Art and Enchantment
DR PATRICK CURRY
In the Chair Professor Grevel Lindop
At the heart of enchantment is sheer wonder, proceeding from charm, through delight, to rare but precious instances of joy. Painting, music, and fiction, each in its own way, can give rise to such wonder. But we can, perhaps, understand its dynamics and values. These include relationality, metaphor, wildness, disinterested love, and what Max Weber calls ‘concrete magic’. A powerful experience of life and of being alive, enchantment transcends the destructive binaries we have been trained to adopt: subjective vs objective, spiritual vs material. The experience of enchantment transcends these oppositions, not by rising above them but by going more deeply into the immanent core of moment (not time) and place (not space).
Enchantment can remind us of art’s true function: not representation, nor anti-representation, but presencing: enriching and adding to the world of what is. When this is apprehended, we not only share the artist’s experience but also the act of creation in nature, of which we are a part. To remind us of this truth is not the least of art’s potential services. But for that we need to refrain from putting art to work (even in the best of causes), rather letting it speak and show us what it will. For enchantment is finally a gift.
PATRICK CURRY is a Canadian-born writer and scholar who lives in London. He holds a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from University College London. He has been a Lecturer at the University of Kent and Bath Spa University, and remains a Tutor at the University of Wales Trinity St David. His books include Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (revised edition 2004), Ecological Ethics: An Introduction (revised edition 2017), Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life (2019) and most recently Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (2023).
For more information and some of his writings see www.patrickcurry.co.uk
Venue & Timing
Brunswick Ltd (formerly the Lincoln Centre)
18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields
London WC2A 3ED
Nearest Underground Holborn
Doors open 6.10pm. Lecture starts 6.30pm.
Admission
£8 (£5 Members of the Temenos Academy/Concessions)
Full-time students with student ID card FREE
Booking
temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Thursday 23rd November 2023
Faces of the Infinite: Neoplatonism and Poetry at the Confluence of Africa, Asia and Europe
PROFESSOR STEFAN SPERL
In the Chair Emma Clark
Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophy of Late Antiquity, inspired not only the intellectual traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but also their arts. Neoplatonic notions of the ascent of the soul, the nature of love and beauty, divine immanence and transcendence, and the interplay between the many and the One, have for centuries left comparable marks on the poetry of Western Asia, North Africa and Europe. The writings of figures such as Boethius, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn ‘Arabi and C.P. Cavafy reveal the many guises in which this common heritage pervades the poetic traditions of the Greater Mediterranean, from Late Antiquity to the modern period.
Based on the recently published findings of a collaborative research project, this lecture will present Neoplatonism as a cross-cultural phenomenon of outstanding importance which has given rise to a distinct ‘Neoplatonic Poetics’. The tradition it has brought about remains relevant by pointing the way towards an inclusive sense of identity commensurate with a pluralist world.
STEFAN SPERL is a graduate of Oxford (Arabic) and SOAS (PhD 1977) and a former staff member of UNHCR (1978-1988). He is now Emeritus Professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS. His publications include articles on Arabic, Islamic and Refugee Studies, as well as Mannerism in Arabic Poetry: A Structural Analysis of Selected Texts (1989), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Africa and Asia (with Christopher Shackle, 1996), The Cosmic Script: Sacred Geometry and the Science of Arabic Penmanship (with Ahmed Moustafa, 2014) winner of the 2016 Iran Book of the Year Award, and The Qur’an and Arabic Poetry (The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies, 2020).
Venue & Timing
The Royal Asiatic Society
14 Stephenson Way
London NW1 2HD
Nearest Underground Euston Square
Doors open 6.10pm. Lecture starts 6.30pm.
Admission
£8 (£5 Members of the Temenos Academy/Concessions)
Full-time students with student ID card FREE
Booking
temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Past Michaelmas Term Events
Tuesday 5th September 2023
Love as a Cosmological Force
PROFESSOR RAVI RAVINDRA
In the Chair Hina Khalid
The sages in all the great traditions have said in many ways that Love is a fundamental quality of the cosmos. Not only a quality but a basic constituent of Ultimate Reality. The Rig Veda (X,129.4) says, “In the Beginning arose Love, which was the primal germ cell of the mind.” And the New Testament affirms: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” (1 John 4:16). The search for this great Love at the very heart of the cosmos is both the beginning and the end of the spiritual paths. In this presentation we will explore in two important spiritual texts, The Bhagavad Gita and the Gospel According to St. John, the place of a searcher’s love for the Divine and more importantly the call to the searcher to be loveable by the Divine.
RAVI RAVINDRA is a Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he served as a professor in the departments of Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Physics. He was a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, and the founding director of the Threshold Award for Integrative Knowledge. Among the books he has authored are Whispers from the Other Shore: Spiritual Search – East and West; The Yoga of the Christ; Science and the Sacred; Krishnamurti: Two Birds on One Tree; Wisdom of Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras; Heart Without Measure: Gurdjieff Work with Madame de Salzmann; The Bhagavad Gita: A Guide to Navigating the Battle of Life; The Pilgrim Soul: A Path to the Sacred Transcending World Religions.
Monday 18th September 2023
Orality and Symbolism as Repositories of African Knowledge of the Self
DR ELVIS IMAFIDON
In the Chair Professor Grevel Lindop
Cultures have many different ways of gathering and transmitting knowledge. Today’s ‘Western’ cultures – cultures derived from northern Europe and its traditions – are largely based on written text. But text is only one way of keeping and transmitting knowledge. Cultures all over the world have used other modes, such as oral and symbolic ones. In this talk, I shall examine traditions of orality and symbolism as providing access to knowledge produced in sub-Saharan Africa. Focussing primarily on the knowledge of self and personhood, I explore aspects of the oral and symbolic repositories in the Akan, Yoruba and Bini cultures of West Africa. These reveal fascinating understandings of who we are and what gives our lives meaning. I conclude that the current threat posed by electronic media to the relevance of text may, perhaps, be an opportunity to think beyond text and re-embrace more diverse ways of producing and transmitting knowledge.
ELVIS IMAFIDON is a Lecturer in the Department of Religions and Philosophies and Director of the Centre for Global and Comparative Philosophies at SOAS, University of London. He is also a Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science, University of Johannesburg. His areas of research include African Philosophy, the philosophy of difference, the philosophy of corporeality, the philosophy of healthcare, ethics, and ontology, primarily from African philosophical perspectives. He is the author and editor of several books including African Philosophy and the Otherness of Albinism: White Skin, Black Race (Routledge 2019), Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference (Springer 2020) and Handbook of African Philosophy (Springer 2023).
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[Image: Part of a larger Batik painting, The Holy City, by Thetis Blacker]
