A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch

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Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, Donna Lazenby shows how these thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from an entirely new direction. This book provides a warning against reductive scientific and philosophical models that impoverish our understanding of ourselves and the world, and a powerful endorsement of ways of knowing that give art, and a restored concept of contemplation, their consummative place.

Reviews

[A] valuable read for philosophers of religion, theologians, and literary scholars. * Religious Studies Review *
In this engaging study, Donna Lazenby indicates both the promise and the limits of post-Christian attempts to grasp the mystical. While Woolf's immanence hesitates between a projection of self and a loss of self in relation to the horizon of nature, Murdoch's ethical transcendence hesitates between a realism requiring transcendence and a mere transcendentalism that would after all abolish it. Negatively, this indicates our need for a contemporary reworking of a more traditional real transcendence which would also be an immanence, and so save the self in losing it. This work points the way in that direction with elegance and originality. -- Catherine Pickstock, Reader in Philosophy and Theology, University of Cambridge, UK

Author Bio

Donna J. Lazenby is an Anglican Priest. She has a PhD in Theology from Cambridge University, UK which won The John Templeton Award for Theological Promise 2011. Her current research is on conceptions of Life, Death and Afterlife in the contemporary Imagination, as revealed through popular culture and literary fiction.