Image source

Maine de Biran

The prominent researcher of French literary romanticism, Henri Pierre, deeply analyzed the influence of the French spiritualist philosopher Maine de Biran(1766-1824) on the writers and poets of the Romanthians in his native country, who worked at the beginning of the 19th century. He lists the three studies with which Maine de Biran fits as a "respected builder" of the tendency towards mysticism in the spiritual atmosphere of Romanticism: "Scientific study on the habit" , "Scientific study of vague perceptions" , Considerations concerning sleep and dreams ".

In his intimate diary, this French thinker has fixed the moment in which the peculiar sense of the Infinity of the World as the creation of God has arisen in him. One evening, he writes, during a lonely walk, I felt in myself some momentary illumination for this inexpressible delight, which I had tasted before, this pure sweet joy that seems to pull us out of everything on the earth and help us sense the taste of the sky ... Above all my sensations and vague, incomprehensible reflections that arose from the surrounding things and the inner he set me up sense of Infinity, which sometimes grabs us from the world of real things soars us to God to unite us with Him as the only reality. It seems that in this state when all our inner and outer senses are calm and filled with bliss, there appears in our country a particular sensation predisposing us to perceive the heavenly gifts, which, muffled by our present way of life, may be predetermined to speak out clearly one day when the soul will leave its corpses.

Maine de Biran distinguishes two types of sensations: one that we can call the perceived term "sensations" is passive; others are accompanied by some effort of consciousness and could be called perceptions. This second type of sensation, the perceptions play a more important role in differentiating the individual among the other people's community, since they release it from the despondent passivity of the thought: "Even in my early childhood, I was overwhelmed by the wonder that I felt and existed the instinctive ability to look deep inside" says Maine de Biran. One of the constitutive peculiarities of romantic literary artistic analysis is the constant view of the author in his intimate nature, which is a projection of his own self-absorption as living primarily through his spiritual insights.

Image source

Louis-Claude de Saint Martin

One year after the outbreak of the Great Revolution, Louis-Claude de Saint Martin (1743-1802) directs his research into the inherent sphere of mystical admonitions, insights and interpretations of his work Man of Desire (1790). Influenced by the famous German mystic Jacob Böhme/ Aurora or Rising Morning Dawn (this French philosopher claims that matter does not have its own existence: the visible world is only a space of symbols, the outer manifestation of the all-embracing creation of the invisible Spirit. People are doomed to "wander under the overlapping shadow of the Spirit in an atmosphere populated by the envious." It is the part of man to understand and interpret these visions, to seek the root of their appearance, to establish the correlation between them and their creative power, to discover the significance of the phenomena and the processes surrounding it that are absent from the analyzes of reason.

If one is able to free himself from self-confidence as a self-styled scholar and realizes what he constantly lacks during his earthly existence. If he persists as a "desirable person," he could, at the end of his efforts, feel the spiritual harmony in the universe and perceive the spiritual unity that arose in the early epochs of human civilization when "light emitted sounds, and music has given light. " According to Saint Martin, one of the most convincing proofs of the majesty of man is the speech that he regards as the earthly echo of the original Word as it enables the speaker to create things by naming them.

In seeking the eternal and unchangeable Truth one must open his soul to his neighbor, perceive human love as an irrevocable virtue constantly guided by God. The mystic Saint Martin thinks of God as an unbearably bright light, too intense to be perceived by human eyes that respond only to its tolerable glare. Only at the moment of death man manages to ascend to the shining Bliss, to join God's wisdom and to become a "man of desire" in the "man of the Spirit."