The debate gets confused because of confusion over the definition of
definition. In this discussion there are wild swings between defining
the _word_ "mysticism," a matter of linguistic history and of
differentiating among the various senses in which the word is or has
been used, and identifying what Eliot meant when he used the word (and
in what sense  he used it). And confusion is confounded because some 
participants are, some are not, making ontological claims as to the
existence of whatever it is they are using the word to identify. Some
will see it (in most of its senses) as pointing to a certain kind of
subjective experience, and so forth. I think it's worth noting that on
the whole when the word itself appears in a literary text that is
presumptive evidence that the text does _not_ report a mystic experience
but is using some notion of mysticism as a metaphor for some non-mystic
experience. See Whitman's "Vigil Strange I Kept in the Field One Night."
He uses the word but clearly he is claiming that the experience was
_like_ what mystics speak of, not that it itslef was mystic.

Carrol

DIana Manister wrote:
> 
> 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.
> >