Transcending Self-Consciousness: Imagination, Unity and Self-Dissolution in the English Romantic and Sufis Epistemology

Mahsa Vafa,Maryam Soltan Beyad

doi:10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.8.2

Mahsa Vafa, Maryam Soltan Beyad

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.8.2

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Abstract

English Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often recounts an individual life journey which depicts physical and spiritual pilgrimage and traverses both the inner and outer world to liberate the self and reach a revelatory moment of unification where the division between human mind and the external world is reconciled. For the Romantic poets this reconciliatory state cannot be achieved through rational investigation but via the power of imagination. In this regard, there is striking resemblance between the mystical and philosophical thought of Sufism and the idealistic thought of the English Romantic poets as they both strive for a sense of unification with the Divine or the Ultimate reality, and they both rely on imagination and intuitive perception to apprehend reality. Applying an analytical-comparative approach with specific reference to Northrop Frye’s anagogic theory (1957) which emphasizes literary commonalities regardless of direct influence or cultural or theological distinctions, this study endeavors to depict that certain Romantic poets’ longing for the reconciliation of subject and object dualism via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, echoes the mystic’s pursuit of transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divinely infinite. Through analysis of the concept of self-dissolution (fana) in Islamic mysticism and Sufi literature, particularly the poems of Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Balkhi (1207-1273) known in the West as Rumi, the outcome of this study reveals that the Romantics’ yearning for a state of reconciliation, which is prevalent in the major works of the Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), corresponds to the mystic’s pursuit of unity or the Sufi’s concept of self-annihilation or fana.

Highlights

1 The Romantic period was an epoch of significant political and philosophical transformations which witnessed an increasing conflict between traditional Christianity and the skeptical rationalism of the Enlightenment
Through analysis of the concept of self-dissolution in Islamic mysticism and Sufi literature, the poems of Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Balkhi (1207-1273) known in the West as Rumi, the outcome of this study reveals that the Romantics’ yearning for a state of reconciliation, which is prevalent in the major works of the Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), corresponds to the mystic’s pursuit of unity or the Sufi’s concept of self-annihilation or fana
The present paper endeavored to reveal that despite the time span of about six centuries, geographical distance, ideological and cultural distinctions and theological divergence that separate the Romantic poets from classical Sufi mystics and poets, viewed from an anagogic perspective, the Romantics’ yearning for the coalescence of the subject/object dualism through imagination and intuitive perception resonates the Sufi’s mystical goal of identification of the temporal selfhood with the transcendental Self or the Sufi concept of Fana

Summary

Introduction

IJLLT 4(8): 08-18 disillusionment with fulfilling the revolutionary promise, the Romantic writers internalize the political concepts and the millennial hope of the Revolution, “by translating them into mental, moral and cognitive terms” (1973, p. 350). This article illustrates that the Romantics’ yearning for a state of reconciliation and their pursuit of unity, which is prevalent in the major works of the Romantic writers such as William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), echoes the mystic’s longing for unity with the divine or the Sufis’ concept of dissolution of selfhood in the Godhead which in Sufi terminology is known as fana To this end, first the critical role of imagination in the process of perception in the epistemology of both Romanticism and Sufism need to be explored

In Pursuit of Unity

Conclusion