Niklaus Largier

The Plasticity of the Soul: Mystical Darkness, Touch, and Aesthetic Experience

1 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica (Halle: Hemmerde, 1779. Reprint Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1982). Baumgarten, Aesthetica, ed. and trans. Dagmar Mirbach (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007), §511: “Hic anime fundus . . . a multis adhuc ignoretur, etiam philosophis.” 2 Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §1: “Aesthetica (theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae.” The Plasticity of the Soul: Mystical Darkness, Touch, and Aesthetic Experience

Scripture, Vision, Performance: Visionary Texts and Medieval Religious Drama

‘W e are going to show you an image.”—“Wy willen ju eyn bilde W gheven.” This is how one of the late medieval northern German Easter plays introduces the viewer and listener to the performance. The play has been written down, as the manuscript tells us, in the year 1464 in Redentin, but it testifies to a much older tradition of religious drama.1 In a similar way, the guiding voice of the “proclamator” informs the viewer and listener at the beginning of a Passion play from Donaueschingen that the upcoming performance is to be seen as “a series of beautiful devotional images” [gar meng schon andachtig figur] that should be “contemplated” by the viewer.2 With these words, the play presents itself as a “figure,” as an “image” that has not only the function to stage the narrative “story” (geschieht) of the Gospel and to instruct the viewers, but also to produce the effect of a devotional image that should be “contemplated.”3

Die Kunst des Weinens und die Kontrolle der Imagination

Based on the example of Paracelsus, this article shows how the medieval culture of stimulated emotion and imagination is increasingly stigmatised and controlled during the early modern period. Shedding tears, which had a central place in older pious traditions and which not only represented the conversion of the believers but also performed it emotionally and imaginatively, is increasingly outlawed. Shedding tears is considered as a sign of excessive (described as ›female‹, ›Jesuitical‹, ›Jewish‹) arousal which contradicts a controlled and ›enlightened‹ way of dealing with the feelings and the imagination.

Bibliography compiled by Niklaus Largier (DC Berkeley)

Deutsche Mystik im abendliindischen Zusammenhang. Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansiitze, neue theoretische Konzepte. Kolloquium Kloster Fischingen 1998. Walter Haug and Wolfgang Schneider-Lastin (eds.). Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Nach der Verurteilung von 1277. Philosophie und Theologie an der Universitiitvon Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts. Studien und Texte. Jan A. Aertsen, Kent Emery and Andreas Speer (eds.). Miscellanea Mediaevalia, Vol. 28. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2001. Cheminer avec Jean Tauler.Pour Ie 7e centenaire de sa naissance. MarieAnne Vannier (ed.). In: La vie spirituelle 738, March 2001.