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.