The Middle Ages have been fruitful in the production of a literature that was born out of the desire to fully live the mystery of faith. This always implied a rediscovery of the depth of the human in all its potentialities. It was then decisive to unveil the fundamental disposition that would make it possible to open up a space of interiority where the search for God could be founded and sustained. This literature was created, not without setbacks, in the heart of diverse ways of life. All of them were configured around an individual deployment that necessarily expanded towards the demands of a personal link with others in circles of varying breadth. But in their nodal experience, it was a question of living this constitutive dimension of a "we" as a vocation inherent to their own faith. From their experience, both subjective and interpersonal, this literature implied a hermeneutic exercise rooted in faith, but directed both to the founding texts of each current and to their own experiences, also felt as signs of the divine that challenged the times.
For those believers, the spiritual was thought of and lived as the force and dynamism of God working within each person in the triple personal, communal and social experience. Spiritual literature, in the plurality of its genres and styles, was a creative phenomenon that expressed and nourished the longing to live a new life, engendered in the experience of the divine, its excess and its nothingness. His challenge was to bring that experience to the word, in its hermeneutic, testimonial and parenthetical side. An impossible challenge that had to forge a destiny for itself over its own difficulties and in the midst of often irreducible misunderstandings.
Mode of Work:
The programme will cover various chapters of reading and commentary in conjunction with the participants. The interest of the programme will be to study particular cases of this Spiritual Literature, analysing its plot, its vocabulary, its history. To this end, the reading will be extended with the study of other traditions and literatures that are related to each of the texts. In all cases, the reading will be accompanied by the recording of the specialised bibliography.
