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L’oca del Cairo Edizioni Musicali |
Prima edizione: 2004
ISBN: 978-88-89750-06-3
pp. 140
11,00 €
Daniela Rossella
Poetry and poetic Devotionalism in the Indian and Western Traditions
This brief essay contains the texts of the seminars held in the “Oxford Centre for Hindu and Vaishnava Studies” during the Hilary Terms 2004. It represents the first step of a research concerning the relationship between “sacred and profane love”: in fact, several Indian thinkers belonging to the Vishnuitic medieval bhakti-movement cultivated not only devotion, but the most ardent love for God. As this essay concisely explains, the texts that give voice to those spiritual yearnings found their subject matter, images, lexicon and, above all, their rhetorical structure in both older and contemporary Indian secular poetry. At the comparativistic level, it is shown that also in some trends of Western mysticism, in the context of the so-called nuptial mysticism, the soul’s yearning and the aim of the mystic’s life is the achievement of the unio mystica with God, interpreted in terms borrowed from romantic love. Thus, mystics’ compositions often ring with the same ecstatic and passionate tone of secular poetry, and they make frequent use of erotic metaphors to describe mystic’s actions, attitudes and experiences. In particular it seems that at doctrinal level, in some sectors of mysticism that are both Western and Indian, the fondness for God takes the shape of an ascent aimed to reach a condition of “union” made of perfect bliss coming from perfect love.
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