The Poetics of Mystical Experience and the Literary Forms of Mystagogy (2019 – 2021)
Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovak Republic
This is a currently running project within which is formed the scientific platform SMAL. The team of researchers focuses more closely on exploring mystical experience through literary reflection. This experience is defined as authentic and individual: it is accomplished by the descent of man into one’s own interior (the centre), where one acquires the knowledge of God's essence and hence the fullness of being or the universe. Although it is a personal and spontaneous event, it also has universal features: figurativeness as a mediating tool of ineffable content or an archetypal basis of spiritual tradition. The research interest of the project is also the literary form of mystagogy, or the interpretation of the mystery to which the experience of the mystic testifies. Both perspectives of vision offer guidance to the inexpressible as a response to today’s topical questions about the finality of being or the meaning of life. The key to the penetration of mystical and mystagogical texts is literary-theoretical analysis. It focuses on literary works with aesthetic value, which were or are created in the cultural context of the West. With regard to the nature of the topic, it is conducted in an interdisciplinary dialogue (with philosophy, theology, religion, psychology, etc.). The project is a follow-up to previous research carried out in 2014 - 2016 within the project The transformations in representing the spiritual journey in Western literatures (from the Middle Ages to present).
The project is supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic and the Slovak Academy of Sciences under number 1/0514/19.