In “Mysticism, Modernity, and the Invention of Aesthetic Experience,” Niklaus Largier tells the story of how, increasingly isolated from its institutional context, mystical practice re-emerges in a new realm of enchantment, namely a world of aesthetic experience which pretends to be neutral in religious terms. In a word, mysticism lives on as aesthetic experience. Mystical practices of inspired reading and interpretation are rewritten as a form of poetic self-fashioning and world making. […]
There is a shift in the scope and place of the concept of experience here. Namely, experience is no longer linked to visionary events that occur within a tightly defined religious practice (think of the fact that Julian’s showings begin when she is administered last rites by her priest). Rather, what is at stake is the self’s entire experience of the world.
Concepts like love, suffering, sweetness, and pain move out from the institutional confines of the Church to a feeling of wonderment often connected with the experience of nature. Mysticism becomes the basis for a cosmopoiesis, a world making, where mind and the book of nature poetically converge. It is no longer intimacy with Christ but poetry that gives a heightened, broadened, ecstatic experience of self and world—a foretaste of heaven. […]
Examples of this transformation of the meaning of mysticism from the religious to the aesthetic, from the institutional to the cosmopoetic, are legion. Think of Blake’s childhood vision of a tree full of angels, or Wordsworth’s intimation of the sublimity of nature in the ascent of Mount Snowdon in The Prelude, or Emerson’s stunning perception of himself as a vast “transparent eyeball” absorbing the All of nature while crossing Boston Common, or Whitman’s vision of the flood-tide crowds on the Brooklyn Ferry.
Think too of the way in which the word “mystical” pops up all over Melville’s Moby-Dick, from the opening scene of the water-gazers who come down to the edge of the “insular city of Manhattoes” and throughout that oceanic book. Melville goes on—as only Melville can—to ponder the connection between human beings and the sea: “Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity?” He concludes that we witness something mysterious about ourselves and our origins in the contemplation of the sea, something vast, sublime and incomprehensible. “It is,” Melville writes, “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life.”
Simon Critchley, Mysticism
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