Abstract
Autobiografia mistyczna (Mystical Autobiography) by Marianna Marchocka (1603-1652), a discalced Carmelite, forms a heterogeneous corpus of notes hastily edited at the request of her confessor, who was to destroy them immediately after reading. Though Marchocka’s text is not free from linguistic errors, it is free from any aesthetic ornamentation, providing a „brute” and reliable testimony of a mystical experience. Despite atomization of the composition and stylistic defects, it is a reflection of the transcendence and inexpressibility of the experience, conveyed in a manner characterized by a low degree of theological conceptualization and a large number of evidently apophatic phrases scattered throughout the text. It is a theologically asystemic, unaesthetic and apophatic statement, and as such emphatically exemplifies the essence of a mystical text – an account of personal experience of the love of God, which evades the laws of doctrinal generalizations and literary conventions. The inconspicuous idiom of Marchocka’s spiritual rough notes combined with a richness of content calls for an analysis within the context of significant but presently downplayed domains of negative theology and the theology of silence.
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