We have made philosophy and literature the subject of our intellectual research, because they, apart from religion, also claim the right to an intellectual and artistic exploration of the experience of spirituality. Therefore, we discuss the experience of spirituality in a philosophical and literary context. We did not want to reconstruct any theory that would free the object under study from the unknowability and ambiguity attributed to it by the interpretative tradition. Our intention is much more modest: we want to talk about the experience of spirituality in two languages: the philosophical and the literary. The first part of the book is therefore characterized by a greater degree of generality of the formulated considerations, whereas the second part focuses on the analysis of the literary experience of spirituality, i.e on its artistic visualizations. First of all, we write about a certain significant potential of literature, which manifests itself in transcending its narrowly understood poetic function. It boils down to the will to artistically grasp a category that has always been associated with religion and philosophy – spirituality and its experience. In this way, a unique intellectual bridge is built between the general and the specific. |