ABSTRACT
The mystics to whom Jung was most attracted were members of the apophatic tradition, who underwent an experiential dissolution into a nothingness which they understood as a moment of identity beyond difference with the divine. Jung equates this experience with the deepest regression of the ego into the unconscious and into a moment of “identity” with God. In a Jungian context, the sublime could thus be understood as the experience, in varying degrees, of the study of consciousness with its unconscious origin within Jung’s immensely deepened and extended boundaries of the psyche.
Contemporary scholarship has shown the metaphysical import of this experience, especially in the affinity of Jung’s psychology with nineteenth-century German Romanticism and Idealism and their roots in the earlier German mystical tradition. But Jung’s perspective here also has profound aesthetic implications. The sublime would be revisioned as alive in any art form expressive of that dimension of psyche where divine and human coincided. Recent criticism has shown nineteenth- and twentieth-century expressionist/abstract art, particularly the work of Kandinsky and Arp, was in conscious continuity with the mysticism and theosophy of Boehme and other mystics.
