Esercitarsi a morire. Mistica e filosofia

Through these eight essays, centered on figures from the spiritual tradition such as the Bishop of Ippona, Maximus the Confessor, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Margherita Porete, and Simone Weil, the author aims to restore the two terms—mysticism and philosophy—to their original meaning, so that it becomes clear they essentially point to the same thing: the detachment from oneself. The “practice of dying” discussed in the book does not, in fact, concern physical death, but rather detachment from passions, so that the intellect may free itself from all conditioning and move toward the heavenly “plain of truth,” and from all those inner bonds that nourish egotism and obscure the light of reason, which is the very light of grace. The author urges us to rediscover the thought of numerous spiritual authors of the past, thereby compelling Western culture to reconsider the forgotten relationship between mysticism and philosophy. Such knowledge has been largely lost in the superficiality of what are today called the “natural human sciences,” which reduce the human to the sole dimension of time, the body, and the manifold; and this explains the disorientation and existential suffering that pervades our society today. Bringing to light that spiritual tradition which still accompanies, albeit underground, the philosophical and religious history of the West is what this book attempts to do.