Dear Peter,
What a curious variety of definitions of mysticism! They range from
spiritualism to divine Love. I'm puzzled.
Diana
Sent from my iPod
On Mar 24, 2010, at 7:35 PM, Peter Montgomery <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> "It would be easy, but not particularly profitable, to classify
> Williams as
> a "mystic." He knew, and could put into words, states of
> consciousness of a
> mystical kind. and the sort of elusive experience which many people
> have
> once or twice in a life-time. (I am thinking of certain passages in
> The
> Place of the Lion, but there is no novel without them.) And if
> "mysticism"
> means a belief in the supernatural, and in its operation in the
> natural
> world, then Williams was a mystic: but that is only belief in what
> adherents
> of every religion in the world profess to believe. His is a
> mysticism, not
> of curiosity, or of the lust for power, but of Love; and Love, in the
> meaning which it had for Williams-as readers of his study of Dante,
> called
> The Figure of Beatrice, will know-is a deity of whom most human beings
> seldom see more than the shadow. But in his novels he is as much
> concerned
> with quite ordinary human beings, with their struggle among the
> shadows,
> their weaknesses and self-deceptions, their occasional moments of
> understanding, as with the Vision of Love towards which creation
> strives. "
>
> Intro to ALL HALLOWS EVE, 1948.
>
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