Martin Hrdina
The Discovery of Inner Light in the Soul of Modern People
Th?e study describes the discovery of ideas of inner light in people, which was inspired in the Czech lands by an Oriental renaissance and which manifested itself in the thinking of the philosopher František Čupr. A new resonance of archaic ideas in the modern era, dominated by physical theories of light, is mapped out in the religious discourse of the 1860s and 1870s, based on the example of the discussion about Christ at that time. Čupr's concept of Christ, drawing on the texts of the ancient Indian Upanishads and Puranas, is compared with the interpretation in the biography of Christ by Ernest Renan, which was widely read at the time. At the end of the article, attention is devoted to manifestations of the new concept of light in this segment of the Czech literary field, whose authors had the greatest preconditions for interiorising
stimuli coming from Oriental cultures.
design by Bedřich Vémola
