A Literary Approach to Wisdom: Modern Writers and Mysticism

3 units

This class will examine the ways in which modern authors, poets and mystics have sought to answer the question of how to account for the reality of suffering in the world. We will start with the Wisdom books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job in the Hebrew bible, and consider how those books might be reinterpreted through the lenses of the works of Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Julian of Norwich, and A M Almaas. We will also be looking at how poets as diverse as Mary Oliver, T S Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Herbert and Thich Nhat Hanh, amongst others, have addressed this issue and responded to the mystic writers.