Varieties of Aesthetic Experience by Craig Bradshaw Woelfel;

Author:Craig Bradshaw Woelfel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2018-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Dissociation of Belief and the History of Mysticisms

The Clark Lectures track a history of poetry and a history of thought, but Eliot also identifies each of his three metaphysical periods with a specific type of mysticism. His explicit point in doing so is to show that these mysticisms are “not of the same quality.”62 In other words, what it means to say “I believe X” has changed over time, and this change is reflected in the dissociation he has tracked in poetry and thought. The easiest type of mysticism to understand is that of Aquinas and St. Victor, which Eliot ties to Dante and labels “ontological,” as opposed to “psychological,” and “classical,” as opposed to “romantic.” Such mysticism indicates a quality of belief with a fully functioning, authoritative, undissociated revelatory epistemology that is felt to work in conjunction with—though superior to—human reason. By virtue of this epistemological harmony religious experience authorizes a definite intellectual content: a coherent vision of the universe and its meaning, by which all thought or emotion is assigned an absolute value which can in turn be represented in an ordered artistic vision. In Richard of St. Victor’s mysticism, as in Dante and in Aquinas’s philosophy, we have “the divine contemplation, and the development and subsumption of emotion and feeling through intellect into the vision of God. Thus St. Thomas: ‘it results evidently that it is only in the divine vision that intelligent beings can find true felicity.’”63

What, then, produced the seventeenth-century dissociation of belief? In sum: epistemological self-consciousness—the inescapable idea that all thought, emotion, even “vision” are subjective rather than objective products. Eliot says that he does not quite know where that came from, but his explanation of the shift summarizes the problems being tracked here:

dissolution so frequently begins from within, that I think the Jesuits had a great deal to do with it: their fine distinctions and discussions of conduct and casuistry tend in the direction of a certain self-consciousness which had not been conspicuous in the world before. I am here more concerned with defining clearly the difference in point of view, a true Copernican revolution which occurred centuries before Kant was born, a difference which marks the real abyss between the classic scholastic philosophy and all philosophy since. It was impressed upon the world by Descartes, like his own figure, and by his own figure, when he compared the impression of “ideas” on the mind to the impression of the seal on the wax; and when he clearly stated that what we know is not the world of objects, but our ideas of these objects. The revolution was immense. Instead of ideas as meanings, as references to an outside world, you have suddenly a new world coming into existence, inside your own mind and therefore by the usual implications inside your own head. Mankind suddenly retires into its several skulls until you hear Nietzsche … declaring that “nothing is inside, nothing is outside.” And the most brilliant of contemporary critics of criticism, Mr.

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