Program
Mysticism, poetry, and philosophy are three paths that give access to experiencing the impossible. The cycle of lectures “Experiencing the Impossible” examines these paths not so much in their striving to clarify and explain the world, but on the contrary – in their pursuit of the origins of all knowledge, the pre-linguistic foundations of speech and thinking, to the nature of reality.
Details
The cycle “Experiencing the Impossible” consists of three parts. They will be presented by the lecturers: Maksim Kalinin, Olga Sedakova, Alla Gorbunova, and Petr Rezvykh.
The first course presented by Maxim Kalinin examines the revelatory experience in the Syrian Eastern Christian mystical tradition. Course participants will be able to get acquainted with the experience of mystics through their texts, in which the experience of amazement and the possibility to communicate this experience to another is given a key role.
Maksim Kalinin is a researcher of the history of the Aramaic language and the Mesopotamian Christian mystical tradition who engages in the search and publication of lost texts of East Syriac mystics. He is the editor-in-chief of the Poznaniye Foudation media projects, a researcher at the General Church Postgraduate and Doctoral Courses Department, a lecturer with the “Christian East” programme at the Institute of Classical East and Antiquity of the Higher School of Economics, a participant of the Moscow Aramaic circle, and the head of the seminar Syrian Mystics of the 7th-8th Centuries in the Laboratory of Unnecessary Things.