Martin D’Arcy

[Mysticism seems] to gather together under one heading the strongly-felt beliefs of the churchgoer, the emotions felt by sensitive souls in the presence of sublime natural beauty, vivid and passionate faith, and the mystic states of such diverse persons as St. Plotinus, Francis of Assisi, [Percy Bysshe] Shelley, [William] Blake and St. John of the Cross.
— Martin D'Arcy

In The Nature of Belief (1931), Martin C. D’Arcy, a philosopher, Jesuit priest, and Master of Campion Hall, Oxford, took a different tack to William Inge. For Inge, the newfound interest in mysticism was part of a shift in the religious landscape. Mysticism, now understood in psychological terms, represented a newly significant religious phenomenon that spoke to contemporary needs. For D’Arcy, proponents of this new mysticism were merely confused. The pervasiveness of mysticism in contemporary society was not due to the emergence of new spiritual phenomena, but rather a willingness to gather under a single term, namely mysticism, several of the aspects of religion that were not dogma, theology and ethics. Mysticism, spirituality, the sacred more broadly, removed from their context in religious lives and practice, became divorced from reason and the production of knowledge and as a result transformed into mysterious, unknowable otherness. This process of intellectual ‘cleavage’ is, according to Michel de Certeau, one of the central features of an emerging secular age (Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. by Luce Giard, trans. by Michael B. Smith, 2 vols [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2015], 2, p. 10).

Image: Howard Coster, Martin Cyril D'Arcy, half-plate film negative, 1938, NPG x11222. Image © National Portrait Gallery, London. Used via a Creative Commons license.

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David Jones