Modus Loquendi Mysticorum: Mystical Speech and Mystical Poetry

Abstract

The article approaches the subject of mystical speech by way of mystical theology, as developed by Dionysius the Areopagite. The basic characteristics of this speech is identified in Christo-mimetic (particularly kenotic) structure, i.e. the movement from a cataphatic towards an aphophatic mode of utterance, or rather, from positive predicative affirmation towards negation, which ends in denegation, a negation of negation, which is a verbal channel of trans-referential meta-ontological reality. The means of uttering this reality again acquires a positive dimension; however, it is now a positivity of a second order, which can only be objectified into hymnic-doxological utterances. Another aspect of mystical speech is mystical silence, originating in the basic negativity of the mystical experience and separating cataphatic and apophatic theologies. Mystical silence in a mystical text is communicated into various verbal forms of silence, such as paradox, ellipsis, anacoluthon, etc. – From there, we have approached Christian mystical poetry through the »discourse of praise« (Jean-Luc Marion), inscribing itself in apophatic utterances of meta-ontological positivity, on the one hand, and through Biblical hymns on the other. We have, somewhat provisionally, suggested a distinction from ordinary religious poetry which – proceeding from the experience of nothing-but-divine – takes its hymnic mode of utterance at face value: the speech of ordinary religious hymns is not fatally marked by negativity, which would drive it beyond the essentially always phantasmal realm of the ontic and into the impenetrable realm of Nothing, of God as the absolute Mystery, and by so doing, liberate it from the omnipresent menace of idolatry. Conversely, mystical poetry generates a distinctly theological (Godhead) dimension; it originates in the very experience of a radically hidden God, God as Godhead, and also returns into Him, but bringing with it, by means of its mystagogical structure, the potentially “true” recipient. It is therefore forever permeated with silence: with silence before the poem, in the poem and after the poem. Furthermore, we have thematized the difficult relationship between mysticism and poetry and pointed out their differences as well as common features. In essence, it has been necessary to allow for the possibility of dynamic convergence, due to the phenomenological affinities between the two realms of speech.