Introduction: Wavering Orthodoxy

Abstract

introduCtion: waVering ortHodoXY 'I loathe the word mystic -it might mean anything', the modernist artist and poet David Jones, writing to a friend in 1927, opined. 1 He was clarifying his religious views and distancing his own work from the phenomenon.Coming from a practising Roman Catholic, Jones's statement might well appear odd, given that he had encountered the lives or writings of revered mystics such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Genoa.He worshipped in a church that counted numerous mystics among its saints and doctors and celebrated them in its liturgical calendar.Far from meaning 'anything', mysticism was -Jones might well have told himself -exemplified by such luminaries.Jones's exasperation points to a shift in the term's usage.By the late nineteenth century, mysticism had decoupled from what Amy Hollywood calls the 'specifically Christian context' from which it initially arose. 2 Alex Owen has observed that 'the terms mysticism and mystical revival' referred to one of 'the most remarked trends' of the 1890s: the widespread emergence of a new esoteric spirituality and a proliferation of spiritual groups and identities that together constituted what contemporaries called the new 'spiritual movement of the age'.3 Jones might well have worried that the label misrepresented his commitments.Yes, Catholics had their own mystics, but had they now been replaced by new figures who had little in common with those celebrated on feast days?More worrying still, had, as modernists such as Ezra Pound and H.D. claimed, this 'new esoteric spiritualty' always been a subterranean