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INTRODUCTION
of metaphysically founded initiation and examines Bruno’s mysticism on
the grounds of this scheme, focusing on Bruno’s view of the divine human,
the eroico furioso. Martin Moors’s study “Which Initiation does not Lead
Astray from the True Mysteries?” takes us to the German Enlightenment
and Idealism. Martin Moors looks for the meaning of initiation in F. W. J.
Schelling’s Introduction to his Philosophy of Revelation, and compares
his findings to what is yielded by a similar inquiry into Kant’s pre-critical
Nova Dilucidatio and later critical works. He concludes that only a positive
philosophy, expounded in the vein of Schelling can completely introduce
believers into the mysteries of being and existence. The tension between
human reason and divine mystery is the theme of Orsolya Horvath’s intensely
personal approach to Sartre’s reflection on the meditation of Kierkegaard on
the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. While in Sartre’s view there was no
“convincing sign” of the divine origin of God’s voice, Abraham’s challenge
illustrates, for Kierkegaard, how the human being exists when God, whose
authority is above the judgement of human reason, enters the space of human
experience. Hence, Abraham’s situation is not a hermeneutical one, as Sartre
argues, but one beyond the hermeneutical, and the challenge is whether his
own reason can stand by his experience of God, that is, the sign that he has
understood—which is a “compelling sign,” as Horvath puts it. Kate Larson’s
“Authentic Presence—A Phenomenology of Initiation” traces Simone Weil’s
reading of Plato “as a mystic” from the point of view of phenomenology and
specifically a phenomenology of initiation. The author turns to passages in
Plato’s writings as a form of phenomenology of initiation and locates their
influence on Weil’s thinking.
Part 3 deals with arts and literature. Gyorgy Zoltan Józsas “Initiation
Drama in Russian Symbolism” aims to reveal the origins of various codes
embedded in Alexander Blok’s The Rose and the Cross and Valery Bryusov’s
The Pythagoreans. Jözsa concludes that an analysis of the two types of
initiation hidden in Blok’s and Bryusov’s respective texts not only reveals
a tendency to reconstruct ancient functions of literature, but also suggests
a reconsideration of the notion of the reader’s perception. Léna Szilard’s
paper on “The Development of the Genre of the Initiation Novel in 20‘*¬
century Russian Literature—Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita”
considers that the plot of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel is the road to the spiritual
enlightenment (the via illuminativa) of Ivan Ponyrev. Next, Katalin G. Kallay’
paper on “Initiation and its Travesty in The River by Flannery O’Connor”
investigates the extent to which Flannery O’Connor’s story is a deliberate
travesty of the ritual of baptism and the extent to which the initiation is indeed
to be taken seriously. Carrying on with literature, Anita Rakéczy’s paper on
“Denials of the Divine: Traces of Ineluctable Presence in the Antecedents
of Samuel Beckett’s Fin de partie, Endgame, and Film” explores traces of
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