“Whereof one cannot speak . . .”

We have long had a seemingly intractable problem in our attempts to find a word which will effectively and unambiguously describe – or signify – those experiences which used to be called ‘transcendental’, and which never anyway belonged to the realm of science. How can we give voice to these things without appearing either ridiculous or completely misunderstood – that is to say, either ‘woolly’ or in hoc to some absurd (and doubtless pernicious) sect? Jonathan Bishop, in his Emerson on the Soul (Harvard, 1964) eloquently describes the problem:  

How can we understand what Emerson meant when he so variously argued over a lifetime that the only thing of value was the active soul? One had best start with the word “soul” itself. Any sentence worked out to concentrate in little the whole of Emerson’s doctrine about human possibilities would need the word for a grammatical subject. But its contemporary connotations are all wrong—religiosity, gentility, hypocrisy—“soul” has a whole set of unhappy associations. Yet in the midst of prejudice a second thought can remind us that we have lost something by the modern degradation of this word. There is nothing that will really replace its useful chord of meanings. [My emphasis]

That last sentence is, I think, rather wonderful. I agree that it’s impossible to use the word ‘soul’ publically – without being misunderstood – but I see no problem in using it privately. But it is – to use Terry Pratchet’s words – something of an ‘embuggeration’ that we cannot use it in conversation. Another possibility occurs to me: we could talk about our ‘being’ – that is, everything about us that is subjective, quirky, ‘dis–integrated’, messy, unique, unresolved, irrepressible, and – in a word – represents the finally unclassifiable us. Yet, the concept of ‘being’ essentially belongs to Existentialism, and although it is a useful technical term within that philosophical movement, it hardly has general currency today. Moreover, it sounds pretentious, and can hardly be considered a serious candidate in any attempt to replace ‘soul’.   

The same problem attaches to ‘mysticism’. If anything, New Age mumbo jumbo has pretty well put paid to this word or concept. However, it has to me a perfectly respectable place in both language and experience. There are times when we have experiences which are so overwhelming that language ‘breaks down’. I would describe it like this: our consciousness is flooded with some experience so immediate that we are – so to express it – given a meaning that we could never put into words or describe to another person. Perhaps Wordsworth came closest to describing this in the famous lines from ‘Tintern Abbey:

Turner, Tintern Abbey, West Front. c 1794

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. 

This could of course be described as a ‘spiritual’ experience. But in a primarily secular (occidental) world that too seems somehow weak – almost, lame – and does not do justice to the depth of Wordsworth’s emotion. Equally, revelation will not do. Because there is nothing biblical in Wordsworth’s lines: we are not given ‘a truth from on high’, but a report in poetry of the immediacy of the emotions  that went through Wordsworth’s mind in the particular ‘earthbound’ situation in which he found himself. In other words, they are not the thoughts of a monk living in a silent order.

Arthur Koestler, in his second autobiographical work, The Invisible Writing, refers – as he does in his suicide note – to what he describes as the “oceanic feeling”:  

The “I” ceases to exist because it has, by a kind of mental osmosis, established communication with, and been dissolved in, the universal pool. It is the process of dissolution and limitless expansion which is sensed as the “oceanic feeling,” as the draining of all tension, the absolute catharsis, the peace that passeth all understanding.

This book was published in 1953, and for many years the “oceanic feeling” was in vogue among the ‘thinking classes’, and seriously considered as a contemporary equivalent to replace what would have previously been described as a mystical experience. But it didn’t stick, and – like Malcolm Muggeridge and London smog – can only be found on the dusty shelves of the minds of people of a certain age.

It is impossible now, I think, to revive either ‘soul’ or ‘mystical’. Still, I shall keep these terms to myself, given that, indeed “there is nothing that will really replace [their] useful chord of meanings.” And these things are anyway, ineffable . . .

Thomas Gainsborough, Tintern Abbey, 1782