Overview

This book explores two influential intellectual and religious leaders in Christianity and Buddhism, Bonaventure (c. 1217–74) and Chinul (1158–1210), a Franciscan theologian and a Korean Zen master respectively, with respect to their lifelong endeavors to integrate the intellectual and spiritual life so as to achieve the religious aims of their respective religious traditions. It also investigates an associated tension between different modes of discourse relating to the divine or the ultimate—positive (cataphatic) discourse and negative (apophatic) discourse. Both of these modes of discourse are closely related to different ways of understanding the immanence and transcendence of the divine or the ultimate. Through close studies of Bonaventure and Chinul, the book presents a unique dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism and between West and East. In the examination of these two figures, religious traditions are explored not only from social, political, cultural, philosophical, and doctrinal perspectives, but also from a perspective that integrates both intellectual and spiritual aspects of religious life. Furthermore, the book presents unexplored models of integrating these two aspects of religious life.

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9781793600707

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Yongho Francis Lee has written a fascinating and detailed account of the intellectual and spiritual life in western Christian mysticism and eastern Buddhism. Examining the mystical journey in the medieval Franciscan theologian Bonaventure and the spiritual quest for rebirth in the Buddhist philosopher Chinul, Father Lee uses the Dionysian categories of apophasis and cataphasis to discern the similarities and differences between the Franciscan theologian and the Buddhist scholar. In doing so, he draws out where east meets west and where these spiritual traditions are distinct. This is the type of study critically needed today, especially since the western Christian mystical tradition has in the past overpowered the rich spirituality of the east, and Buddhism in particular. I encourage everyone interested in the mystical quest for ultimate reality to read this book and reflect on the spiritual capacity of the human person, for east needs west and west needs east, if we are to see the human spiritual experience within the unity of cosmic life. -- Ilia Delio, OSF, Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology, Villanova University Yongho Francis Lee's Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism is an impressive and much-needed contribution to our understanding of spiritual and mystical theology, and thus to the emerging field of comparative theology. He places Saint Bonaventure's Franciscan theology and prayer alongside Master Pojo Chinul's Korean Buddhist wisdom and practice, in order to explore more deeply the tensions between theological learning and contemplative practice, between positive discourse about the divine and what can be experienced only in silence and meditation. We are invited to learn from two great European and Korean thinkers never studied together before-but also to think anew about the integration of religious learning and practice in our time and place. -- Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University

Yongho Francis Lee has written a fascinating and detailed account of the intellectual and spiritual life in western Christian mysticism and eastern Buddhism. Examining the mystical journey in the medieval Franciscan theologian Bonaventure and the spiritual quest for rebirth in the Buddhist philosopher Chinul, Father Lee uses the Dionysian categories of apophasis and cataphasis to discern the similarities and differences between the Franciscan theologian and the Buddhist scholar. In doing so, he draws out where east meets west and where these spiritual traditions are distinct. This is the type of study critically needed today, especially since the western Christian mystical tradition has in the past overpowered the rich spirituality of the east, and Buddhism in particular. I encourage everyone interested in the mystical quest for ultimate reality to read this book and reflect on the spiritual capacity of the human person, for east needs west and west needs east, if we are to see the human spiritual experience within the unity of cosmic life.--Ilia Delio, OSF, Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology, Villanova University Yongho Francis Lee's Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism is an impressive and much-needed contribution to our understanding of spiritual and mystical theology, and thus to the emerging field of comparative theology. He places Saint Bonaventure's Franciscan theology and prayer alongside Master Pojo Chinul's Korean Buddhist wisdom and practice, in order to explore more deeply the tensions between theological learning and contemplative practice, between positive discourse about the divine and what can be experienced only in silence and meditation. We are invited to learn from two great European and Korean thinkers never studied together before--but also to think anew about the integration of religious learning and practice in our time and place.--Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University

Yongho Francis Lee has written a fascinating and detailed account of the intellectual and spiritual life in western Christian mysticism and eastern Buddhism. Examining the mystical journey in the medieval Franciscan theologian Bonaventure and the spiritual quest for rebirth in the Buddhist philosopher Chinul, Father Lee uses the Dionysian categories of apophasis and cataphasis to discern the similarities and differences between the Franciscan theologian and the Buddhist scholar. In doing so, he draws out where east meets west and where these spiritual traditions are distinct. This is the type of study critically needed today, especially since the western Christian mystical tradition has in the past overpowered the rich spirituality of the east, and Buddhism in particular. I encourage everyone interested in the mystical quest for ultimate reality to read this book and reflect on the spiritual capacity of the human person, for east needs west and west needs east, if we are to see the human spiritual experience within the unity of cosmic life.--Ilia Delio, OSF, Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology, Villanova University Yongho Francis Lee's Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism is an impressive and much-needed contribution to our understanding of spiritual and mystical theology, and thus to the emerging field of comparative theology. He places Saint Bonaventure's Franciscan theology and prayer alongside Master Pojo Chinul's Korean Buddhist wisdom and practice, in order to explore more deeply the tensions between theological learning and contemplative practice, between positive discourse about the divine and what can be experienced only in silence and meditation. We are invited to learn from two great European and Korean thinkers never studied together before--but also to think anew about the integration of religious learning and practice in our time and place.--Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University Notwithstanding the real and fundamental differences among religions, and without resort to baseless pluralist assertions of their ultimate equivalence, it is important that the field of comparative theology take careful note of the common challenges that adherents of all religions face as they seek to live to the full their respective faiths. One such is the challenge to balance studious and reasoned intellectual engagement with the scriptural sources and basic doctrines professed with the imperative to bring those sources and convictions to life in the immediacy of salvific experience. Father Lee's comparative study of the teachings of the thirteenth century Franciscan friar and Doctor of the Church, St. Bonaventure, with those of the only slightly earlier and comparably authoritative Korean Son (Zen) monk, Pojo Chinul--the first-ever concerted comparison of Zen with Franciscan theology--is a model of how the study of substantively contrasting but structurally analogous responses to this universal challenge, emerging in two quite different and unrelated religious traditions, may shed on each teacher and his tradition the kind of reciprocal illumination that only comparative study can generate. Fr Lee shows that appreciation of Bonaventure's wedding of rigorous theological reflection (speculatio) to ardent cultivation of the affective dimension of the spiritual life is enhanced when it is compared to Chinul's efforts to combine scriptural erudition and doctrinal dialectic with certain regimens of psycho-somatic meditation of a kind that can profitably unsettle, if not actually subvert, the conventional language of scripture and doctrine. And the understanding of Chinul's accomplishment both scholar and mediation master is similarly sharpened when refracted through the Bonaventurian lens. An especially valuable and innovative feature of Fr. Lee's study is his demonstration of the roles that negative and affirmative discourse (apophasis and kataphasis, and their Buddhist counterparts), and the contrasts between the two, play for both thinkers in their respective programs to fuse the intellectual and the spiritual life. Fr. Lee has brought to his study both the meticulous attention to text and argument that one expects of a careful scholar and the sensitivity to the spiritual resonances and nuances of those sources that one can expect to find in a Franciscan friar. Thus, both historical theologians and those pursuing their own personal spiritual paths are likely to find this study a valuable resource.--Robert M. Gimello, University of Notre Dame du Lac

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Yongho Francis Lee is professor at the Pontifical University of Antonianum.

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