Books by Butler

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How do the arts give us pleasure? This book seeks to answer this question and more. Covering a range of artistic works, it offers us an explanation of our enjoyable emotional engagements with literature, music, and painting. It presents an explanation of the enduring interest of artistic expression.

A renewed interest in the spiritual, with an increasing number of people today wishing to incorporate the contemplative in their active lives, prompts the reissue of this classic work, a doctrine that is at once elevated and practical. The writings are meant to be studied from three distinct points of view: religious philosophy, material for the study of those states between mind and body such as ecstasy and trance, and for the sake of their mysticism. Drawn from the writings and teachings of Saint Augustine, Saint Gregory and Saint Bernard, the writings form a coordinated body of doctrine with what three great teachers of mystical theology in the Western Church have written concerning their own religious experience and the theories they based on it. In addition, the book discusses such important topics as speculative contemplation, what mysticism is, the characteristics of Western mysticism, the practical, and the contrasts between the contemplative and active lives. No student of mysticism can possibly afford to neglect a volume so full of valuable suggestions and real insight into spiritual conditions.

Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada. Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over 60 illustrations, many in colour.