Maria Vittoria Comacchi

The French scholar Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) is widely known as a self-proclaimed prophet and visionary Christian Kabbalist. In this article, I provide a new account of his concept of restitutio, arguing that it is driven by a fundamentally political and Christian agenda rather than a purely conciliatory religious vision. I focus on the first part of his earliest published cosmographical work, De universitate liber (1552), which has hitherto been largely overlooked. First, I provide the historical and cultural context in which Postel’s work was conceived. I then analyze the text, showing how Postel’s representation of different spaces has a central role in his vision of a unified cosmos. The article shows how symmetries and correspondences between celestial, terrestrial, geographical, and political spaces are instrumental to Postel’s idea of universal restitutio. This idea is ultimately conceived as the establishment of a perfect form of universal sovereign rulership, explicitly and necessarily Christian, grounded in the structure of the heavens and inscribed in humanity’s ancient history. Against this background, the paper also reevaluates a variety of disciplines and sources, including mystical and prophetic material, that Postel combined to support his political program.

In its literal meaning, the term ἔκστασις (ekstasis) indicates a displacement, ‘being out of immobility’, and ultimately being outside oneself. To some extent, this term takes on a mystical connotation in late Antiquity, notably in book VI.9.11.24 of Plotinus’ Enneads, where ekstasis is described as a non-ordinary way of seeing. The notion of ecstasy, often inseparable from the concept of vision, would keep its mystical role, though altered in some ways, over the centuries, conceptualizing a specific kind of knowledge, which goes beyond the subject-object opposition, addressing the epistemological issues of perceiving and knowing the divine, and often challenging the nature of the self. This issue offers some attempts to track the constant reshaping and migration of the notions of ecstasy and intellectual or spiritual vision over the history of Western thought, unearthing their structural and constant persistence, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary ages, recurrently in many different non-ultimately-dialectical metaphysical systems. The papers in this volume provide some illustrative examples of the tangled history of the divergent meanings that the notions of ecstasy and vision have taken on, and their considerable reassessments and adaptations to constantly evolving conceptual frameworks, often redefining further notions such as those of rapture, prophecy, sleep, dream, and death.