The Academic Study of the Religious Imagination

In the Emersonian grain...

Here at the beginning I wish to stress my own conviction that it is fruitless either to literalize or to dismiss spiritual experience, whether ancient, medieval, or contemporary. This conviction is pragmatic, and I follow William James in acknowledging religious experiences that make a difference as being authentic differences: from one another, and among us…

I am not a Jungian, and so give no credence to the archetypes of a collective unconscious. But I am both a literary and a religious critic, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern, and I have enormous respect for recurrent images of human spirituality, no matter how they may be transmitted. Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human.

Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium (1996), 4, 11.