suitable expression for what was intended."

Al Ghazzali gives then, as the essence of ecstasy, its unconscious nature. Ecstasy is related to longing for something unknown. All people experience in their hearts states demanding things unknown to them. He compares the situation to that of the innocent and ignorant youth in puberty who is in a state unexplained to him. Al Ghazzali is one of the first of modern critics to formulate the theory of ecstasy as the end of poetry, and his argument explains the vogue of love and mystic poetry. He recurs, it is true, to the influence of metre in poetry in inducing ecstasy, but he is always thinking of the ecstasy of love of man and God as the element of poetry, and in this he is a predecessor of Tolstoy. He also gives rules as to one's behavior in the ecstatic state and does not sanction undue madness.

A much higher form of the literature of ecstasy than the product of the immoral rites of Dionysus or the mystic poetry of Persia is the prophecy as it was known and delivered among the ancient Hebrews. Indeed, prophecy is the ideal form of the literature of ecstasy and represents the zenith of its achievement. It is the emotional verbal utterance of the unconscious of the poet, who is usually in a state of ecstasy, and who, as passages in the Bible testify, receives his message in a vision or dream. The act of prophesying was even contagious. The early prophets were like dancing dervishes in their prophesying and influenced others to do as they did. We recall how Saul stripped himself naked. The Hebrew word prophecy means utterance and the idea of foretelling the future was incidental to it. If the idea of futurity emanated from prophets, it was such insight as any gifted person may experience when he notes certain facts from which he can predict inevitable results. But the ecstatic state was always associated with the idea of prophecy, the only person, according to the account of the Bible, exempt from this state being Moses. The prophetic state was not allied to divination but resulted from moral and aesthetic inspiration such as we find in modern poets. When the Bible says, God spoke to the prophet, or the hand of God touched him, it means that the prophet was in a state of ecstasy due to a highly developed moral and social viewpoint. The true prophet's ecstasy was not accompanied by immorality or superduced by drugs or physical abuse. Music, however, was at one time used to produce the prophetic state. The aesthetic mechanism of the ancient prophets was no different from that of any great poet with a message of modern times. Moses Maimonides in his _Guide to the Perplexed_ analyzes the ecstatic state of prophecy 

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