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4 - Repetition, Craft-Knowledge, and Richard Rolle’s Creaturely Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2021

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Summary

I learned it by heart. Often at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it, the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.

Simone Weil (d. 1943) on repeating George Herbert's (d. 1633) poem ‘Love III’

When the passion of love goes as far as vegetative energy […] We must become nothing, we must go down to the vegetative level; it is then that God becomes bread.

Simone Weil on ‘decreation’

In an account of her first experience of divine possession, the twentieth-century philosopher and mystic Simone Weil describes how repeating a poem to herself opened her attention and directed her energy to make possible this encounter. Centuries earlier, sitting by himself in a chapel, the English contemplative writer Richard Rolle's (d. 1349) repetition of psalms enabled him to perceive the sounds he understood to be heavenly song.

These accounts gesture to the long-lived purchase of repetitive and cyclical experiences of language as a means of mental sensitization and attunement among contemplative thinkers, suggesting that such experience has been crucial to religious techniques of knowing, both medieval and modern. Such spiritual and devotional techniques, I argue, have profound aesthetic stakes, which become clear when we examine them in relation to ‘stuplimity’, a term coined by the contemporary critical theorist Sianne Ngai. Ngai has explored repetition as a technique of aesthetic experience and shown how repetitive language and style among modernist and contemporary authors facilitate a certain aesthetic experience she calls the ‘stuplime’: a portmanteau of ‘stupor’ and ‘sublime.’ Ngai's stuplime emerges from the tradi-tional sublime of romanticist thinkers like Immanuel Kant. But the stuplime differs from a Kantian sublime because it resists resolution: spirit and mind do not ascend above matter and body; the human subject does not triumph over nature.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2021

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