Lent Term 2025 Evening Lectures
Monday 27th January 2025
William Shakespeare, Francesco Giorgi and the Harmony of the Spheres
ANDREW BAKER
In the Chair Professor Grevel Lindop
In her 1979 book The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age Frances Yates suggested that Lorenzo’s speech about music in Act V of The Merchant of Venice, and possible kabbalistic symbolism of the key characters in the play, might be influenced by the Venetian friar Francesco Giorgi’s book De harmonia mundi (1525). This talk will introduce Francesco Giorgi as a leading Franciscan intellectual in Venice, with close links to the Jewish community and a political involvement with England. Drawing on recent research it will give an overview of his book and its influence in England in France. Shakespeare may have had other sources for his musical imagery, possibly the anonymous Praise of Musicke (1586) but Giorgi was primarily a Franciscan, a movement which encouraged spiritual and scientific learning. Shakespeare, it appears, had an extraordinary sympathy for the Franciscan Order.
ANDREW BAKER is a composer, a retired librarian, and historical researcher. He has particular interests in the little-known Platonists of the 18th century and Franciscan tradition. He has published Hidden Music, a Franciscan Musical Theology (2023) and Thomas Anson of Shugborough and his Friends (2024).
Venue & Admission
Brunswick Group, 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3ED
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Monday 3rd February 2025
Scholarship and the Sacred
PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY
In the chair Hilary Davies
Those attracted by the work of the Temenos Academy are frequently people for whom words like ‘academe’ and ‘academic’ have uncongenial connotations: rationalism, positivism, reductionism, careerism, pedantry, arrogance, susceptibility to intellectual fashions. It is easy to caricature ‘academics’, and such caricatures are often not wide of the mark. Why then should the Temenos community be, of all things, an ‘Academy’?
This question can be seen in a different light if we view it not from the perspective of the embattled present but from that of tradition – which is, after all, the perspective of Temenos. In former times, while the dangers of intellectual pride were certainly recognised, it was nevertheless also held that knowledge is closely akin to wisdom, just as wisdom is akin to holiness. Drawing primarily on patristic and medieval sources, but with reference to other traditions as well, we will seek to learn from these older insights.
JOHN CAREY is Professor of Early and Medieval Irish at University College Cork. His books include A Single Ray of the Sun: Religious Speculation in Early Ireland (1999, 2011), Ireland and the Grail (2007), Ten Basic Principles That Inspire the Work of Temenos (2015), and The Mythological Cycle of Medieval Irish Literature (2018). He is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy, serving on its Academic Board and Council; and he is general editor of the Temenos Academy Review.
Venue & Admission
Brunswick Group, 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3ED
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Monday 17th February 2025
Living in an Age of Spiritual Crisis
DR RUPERT SHELDRAKE & DR MARK VERNON IN DIALOGUE
In the chair Emma Clark
Much of the modern world has become uncoupled from the transcendent in a cultural experiment Nietzsche called the death of God. But might this spiritual crisis prove to be a time of rebirth? In this dialogue, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the evolution of wisdom traditions from west and east alongside the great modern enterprise called science and its continuing development. As the materialist, progressive ideology that has dominated the sciences for two centuries wanes, and as scientific studies show that religious and spiritual practices have major benefits for physical and mental health, what insights might we cultivate, as we live in and through these times?
RUPERT SHELDRAKE, PhD, is a biologist and author of more than a hundred technical papers and nine books, including Science and Spiritual Practices. He studied at Cambridge and Harvard Universities. He was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and also a research fellow of the Royal Society. He worked at the University of Malaya on rain-forest ferns, and in Hyderabad, India, on tropical crops. In India, he also lived for two years in the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu. He is currently a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California and of the Temenos Academy. He lives in London and is married to Jill Purce. His web site is www.sheldrake.org
MARK VERNON is a psychotherapist, podcaster and writer of journalistic articles as well as books. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and degrees in theology and physics. His books include A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, and the forthcoming, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, to be published in June 2025. He used to be a priest in the Church of England and lives in south London. For more see www.markvernon.com
Rupert and Mark have a dialogue series that can be found via their websites and at other places online including YouTube. In over 90 conservations, they have considered matters from Rewilding Christianity to Purposes in Nature and Minds.
Venue & Admission
Brunswick Group, 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3ED
Doors Open 6.40pm, Dialogue Begins 7pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Thursday 13th March 2025
Imagination: The Hospitality of Being
DR VALENTIN GERLIER
In the chair James Harpur
For many artists and thinkers, the imagination has been a primordial realm for the discovery of wisdom, understanding and spiritual knowledge – an approach which underpins the expression ‘the learning of the imagination’. Far more than a mere mental faculty for creative and associative thinking, the imagination is here understood as the realm in which both ‘the True’ and ‘the Beautiful’, to borrow the language of the Platonic tradition, come to living form and articulation.
This lecture, however, begins from the sense that the imagination is also the realm of expression of ‘the Good’. Through a meditation on the motif of hospitality, this lecture will seek to bring to light the scope of the imagination not only as creative or revelatory power, but also as a profound ability to welcome, to receive, to heal, to comprehend and to respond. To imagine, in this sense, means an openness to the radical surprise of the other, the stranger that turns up at the threshold of our being.
Whilst other contemporary popular and seductive ethical stances call for prompt radical action and change, the ‘learning of the imagination’ elicits first of all a profound hospitality – a creative enactment of the goodness of Being as a gesture of love and receptivity towards one another and towards the things and beings of the world.
VALENTIN GERLIER is Long-standing tutor for the Temenos Academy, is Lecturer at Schumacher Wild and Research Associate at the Institut Catholique Toulouse, France.
Venue & Admission
St George the Martyr, Holborn, 44 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AH
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
Monday 17th March 2025
Humanity and Nature in Eastern Orthodox Christianity
PAUL KINGSNORTH
In the Chair Dr Jeremy Naydler
What is our human relationship to the natural world, according to Christian cosmology? In an age of ecological overshoot and collapse, the question is urgent, and yet it is often assumed or claimed that the Christian faith has no answers to it. It is common to hear that Christianity is an anti-ecological religion, which separates humans from the rest of creation and instructs them to dominate and exploit it. Calls are sometimes made for Christians to ‘modernise’ their thinking in the face of climate change, or adopt an ‘eco-theology’ which departs from traditional Christian teaching.
This lecture will explore the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church about the place of humanity in the world, and explain that, far from being anthropocentric or anti-creation, it in fact offers a deep, subtle and radical answer to the ecological crisis.
PAUL KINGSNORTH is a writer and former ecological activist. He is the author of nine books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including the Man Booker-nominated novel The Wake. He was received into the Orthodox Church in 2021, and now writes about his ongoing journey into the Eastern Christian tradition.
Venue & Admission
Brunswick Group, 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3ED
Doors Open 6.10pm, Lecture Begins 6.30pm
£10 General Admission
FREE for Temenos Academy Members/Full-time students with student ID card
Bookings: temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or 07513 883 335
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[Image: Part of a larger Batik painting, The Holy City, by Thetis Blacker]
