Light, vision and religious experience in Byzantium

Louth, A.

Light, vision and religious experience in Byzantium

Louth, A.

Authors

A. Louth

Contributors

Matthew Kapstein
Editor

Abstract

This chapter is principally concerned with the experience of the divine, uncreated light in monastic writers belonging to the hesychast tradition (a term I shall explain in a moment); this is, I think, natural, for it is this tradition that dominates our perception of the Christian Byzantine tradition, whether one is looking at the historical era of the Byzantine world, brought to an abrupt conclusion in 1453 with the sack of Constantinople by the Ottomans, or is concerned with the increasingly significant presence of the Byzantine Orthodox tradition (including the Slav Orthodox tradition, but in distinction from the Oriental Orthodox tradition, of the Syrians and Copts, for instance) in today’s world, a result of both the fall of the iron curtain and emigration from traditionally Orthodox countries over the past two centuries. But the question of light and religious experience is a wider one than what we might call the “light mysticism” of the hesychasts, and I want to start by indicating something of that.

Citation

Louth, A. (2004). Light, vision and religious experience in Byzantium. In M. Kapstein (Ed.), The presence of light : divine radiance and religious experience (85-103). The University of Chicago Press

Publication Date	2004
Deposit Date	Nov 11, 2008
Publicly Available Date	Nov 11, 2008
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Pages	85-103
Book Title	The presence of light : divine radiance and religious experience.
ISBN	02264249010
Keywords	Byzantine hesychasm, Saint Maximos the Confessor, Saint Symeon the New Theologian, Theophanes of Nicaea.
Publisher URL	http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/16396.ctl