The Mystics' Enlightenment: Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme

FAIN: FA-53493-07

Margaret Anne Doody
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

An exploration of the thought of Mirandola, Paracelsus and Boehme (who might be termed "positive Gnostics") on important European writers and thinkers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These include writers as diverse as Locke, Pope, Richardson, Diderot, Lessing, Johnson, Kant. Beyond these, we can the influence on Hegel,Thoreau, Emerson and others. The influence survives into our own times, affecting thinkers in fields like science and business. Consideration of this mystic strain can illuminate our achivements, our "irrational exuberance," and our current problems and inclinations.