To Unite Life with Mystery

They are not frequent visitors, the uncommon threshold moments when reading reverberates inwardly, leading not to revelation but to a kind of recognition: something always half-known, now briefly illuminated. I often stand before the bookshelves that house what I can only call my pantheon, those tutelary thinkers whose voices form an external map of inward terrain. What draws them together is not doctrine or style but a shared orientation: they are, in Bely’s phrase, voices destined to unite life with mystery.

That phrase arrives in an essay by Andrei Bely, “Olenina-d’Alheim”, from Between Crisis and Catastrophe. I began reading these essays with no expectation of understanding. I have not read Petersburg. I picked up the book as an act of disruption: an attempt to fracture a reading block with something unassimilable. I did not anticipate that a phrase would stay with me, or that I would begin to feel that phrase was mine, not in possession but in response, converging lines of reading, music, painting, dance finding form.

Bely writes of a concert singer, but the passage moves far beyond its subject. It opens into that rare territory where thinking seems to dissolve into something preparatory, tentative, reaching. I quote it at length, not for agreement or argument, but because it re-articulates the conditions under which reading might again become necessary:

‘The epoch of geniuses and great thinkers has passed. Here and there they are being replaced by personalities in whom we see a prophetic pathos and who are destined to unite life with mystery.

Olenina-d’Alheim unfurls before us the depths of the spirit. On how she unfurls these depths and what she reveals before us lies the shadow of prophecy. That is why we feel strongly that she herself is a link uniting us with mystery.

Our consciousness is a fine boundary between the subconscious and the superconscious. Different relations between given psychic spheres cause variations in this boundary. By introducing new combinations of emotions into our soul through symbols that are being unfolded, we provide new material for our nerves. And since the variable atmosphere of nerve effects can lead to new regroupings of the material of our conscious activity, this atmosphere is capable of affecting variations of the boundary between the superconscious and the subconscious . . . By changing our psychic structure we will be able to change not only the particular elements of consciousness but also the general forms of the latter.

Defined externally, religion is a system of successively unfolded symbols. This inner connectedness of symbols differentiates religious revelation from artistic creation. From the external side there is no boundary between art and religion. There is only a difference in the quality and quantity of internally connected images. The purpose of art is to express ideas; the deepening and purification of every idea invariably extend this idea to a universal significance. Thus, all ideaness in art has a religious nuance.

The symbol that is deepened and expended analogously to an idea is therefore connected with the universal symbol. This is the final and invariable background of all symbols. The relation of the Logos to the world Soul as the mystical principle of humanity is such a symbol. That is why the foundations of symbolism are always religious.’