A mística de Plotino e a experiência religiosa do Agostinho de Cassicíaco: uma análise à luz de William James

Abstract

Tomando como chave de leitura o misticismo religioso de William James, de “As variedades da experiência religiosa”, vamos aproximar e comparar a mística de Plotino com a experiência religiosa do Agostinho de Cassicíaco. O caminho que percorreremos para atingir nosso objetivo pressupõe quatro momentos distintos. No primeiro momento, falaremos sobre misticismo, mística e experiência religiosa (de uma forma geral), para em seguida discorrer sobre o misticismo religioso de William James. No segundo, vamos traçar um esboço do neoplatonismo de Plotino, para situar nele a mística plotiniana. No terceiro, iremos tratar da experiência religiosa do Agostinho de Cassicíaco, a partir de um estudo contextualizado dos Diálogos de Cassicíaco. No quarto, verificaremos quais as características do misticismo religioso de William James podemos divisar na mística de Plotino e na experiência religiosa do Agostinho de Cassicíaco. Queremos saber se há, e quais são as semelhanças e as diferenças entre a experiência mística de Plotino e a experiência religiosa do Agostinho de Cassicíaco, e que tipo de influência a primeira teria exercido sobre a segunda.

This research addresses questions concerning the relationship between the religious and the secular ideals of modernity with regard to the demand for personal meaning for life. Therefore, we seek to place the proper place of the religious in the context of modernity from the answer he provides to the question of the personal meaning of life. For this purpose, we use as a reference the philosophical work of Miguel de Unamuno, in order to demonstrate the current religious philosophy of the Spanish thinker and poet of the early twentieth century. Among Unamuno's wide written production, his capital work The Tragic Sense of Life (1912) is taken as the guiding thread for a critical analysis of the basic assumptions of modernity. After contextualizing his philosophical thinking, an analysis is made of his critique of modernity, which is based on the crisis of meaning and nihilism generated by the overconfidence in technical-scientific reason experienced by the philosopher himself. To solve the question, a study was made of the demand for the purpose of consciousness for the world and the search for the historical realization of this purpose through the unamunian concept of person. Unamuno's teleological conception of consciousness places the need of meaning for existence on the affective level of human life. Awareness of death arouses the tragic feeling of life by bringing the question of the meaning of life to the religious dimension. Man seeks for an ultimate meaning for life since the question of the purpose of his existence is at bottom, the problem of the fate of his personal consciousness after death. Therefore, the religious is defined by Unamuno as the economic-transcendental, that is, as caring for the future of personal consciousness after death. It is found the anthropological accent of Unamuno's religious thought, which roots religious feeling in the yearning for immortality, the man's desire not to die. God is presented as the substantiation of this religious feeling, which is the feeling of transcendent purpose in human life, because only He could save man from becoming nothing, that is, from the disappearance of his personal consciousness after death. Being, therefore, an irrational question, which contradicts the data of objective reason, the religious can only be felt by modern man from an agonic faith that lives, by the poetic word, the contradiction between his hope and the data of scientific reason. For Unamuno, only this faith, which rehabilitates the poetic character of modern speech, can answer the demand for global meaning for the life of modern man.