Shadow of the Living Brightness
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Date
2024-09
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
Shadow of the Living Brightness comprises a collection of poems informed by theories of unknowing in Christian mystical theology. Although written from a position of secular faith, the dissertation pulls from the gloomy, passionate writings of the Christian mystics (Gregory of Nyssa, Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil) to further ideas about negative capability, the metaphorical image, desire, loneliness, and suicide. These poems attempt to embody what I value in much unorthodox, mystical theology: a focus on the emotion of religion, and a desire for transcendence that has less to do with overcoming aspects of the physical world, and more to do with uncovering layers of proximity to unknown modes of being.
The critical introduction to the poetry is made up of four interconnected sections. I look at the metaphorical image’s unknowable properties, as partially defined by Robert Bly’s theory of the emotive imagination (aka “deep image”) and Federico Garcia Lorca’s theory of duende, and I evaluate the paradox of divine union in mystical theology— mysticism’s insistence on the annihilation of selfhood to be near the incomprehensible divine. I also examine mystical loneliness and the concept of objectless desire (desire with no definable end-consolation). Finally, I look at the possibilities of an unfixed, unknowable despair and how these interact with suicidality.
Rather than “remaining content” with not-knowing (as Keats famously asks of a poet), the Christian mystics make a point of embracing the agony of unknowing. Mysticism, based on my readings, allows for the painful sense of being meaningfully torn between the corporeal and the transcendent. It relies on ideas of God that abandon the possibility of consolation: “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it" (Weil 132).