every nation and every religion is and should be to some extent
clannish and sectarian, still no literature that is purely so can have a
universal appeal. Hence, morbidly mystical poems, celebrating union with
an anthropomorphic God, poems chanting the praises of conquest and
imperialism, poems seething with hatred for people of other races or
religions, poems poisoned by hatred for humanity, are all examples of
the literature of ecstasy of a low order. On the contrary, however, the literature of ecstasy may be both
religious and patriotic, and still appeal to the world at large. I
suppose the best illustration of such kind of literature is the psalms
in the Old Testament. They strike a universal note and move Christians,
Mohammedans, Jews, free thinkers alike. The ecstasy here does not depend
upon the author's attachment to a dogma, but springs most frequently
from a love of righteousness and humanity; hence the emotional appeal of
the poet touches even those who are not deists. There are also fine
touches and poignant prayers here and there that move even the
non-Christian in some of the works of St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis,
Pascal and Bunyan. We are not concerned here with the idea of ecstasy as a state that is
supposed to give us glimpses of the deity, nor with any attempt to
purify us by divesting our soul from the imperfect body and liberating
it from the frailties of the flesh. On the contrary, ecstasy is nothing
more than accumulated ordinary emotions and it speaks not only with the
body, but with all the memories of the body. It makes use in its
communications to us of those very physical infirmities that mystics
assume it shuns, those residing in the body as a medium. Ecstasy employs
the mind, and thus depends on the brain, the nerves, the physical
senses, which are unconsciously active even in a trance, and speak out
of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of the body. Generally speaking the ecstasy we mean in speaking of poetry is not the
same as that known to mysticism. However, the ecstasy in both springs
from the unconscious and is the fruit of an emotional soul because of
inherited memories of past emotions. In the ecstasy of the mystic, which
is usually what is called "religious experience," there is really little
application of the reason. It is even often pathological and is both the
product and the cause of a belief in absurd dogmas. It is often merely a
sublimated passion for morality, or the result, as Freudians have shown,
of a hysterical attachment to parents, or the idealization of a father.
It is often a sublimated sex love due to repression. Every one has been
struck with the sensuous images in the conceptions of the mystics.
Broadly speaking, mysticism seeks a condition of being united to a

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