The Communication of the Sacred in Tymieniecka’s the Three Movements of the Soul

Abstract

The above epigraphs are fitting for an article on the inward sacred as presented in The Three Movements of the Soul, the second book of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Logos and Life. The incommunicable part of the human being’s most inward experience challenges our abilities to express ourselves by some common means of language or signs. In other words, we are tempted to place it in some larger system, in a structure which would objectify it and, as a result, separate it from human life. Thus, the individual human life poses a task of seeing it either as a rare and singular specimen of particular consciousness or as a case belonging to some encompassing structure or system.

Points have we all of us within our souls Where all stand single; this I feel, and make Breathings for incommunicable powers; But is not each memory to himself ?

—Wordsworth

Prelude Book III, 189–191

Great is this power of memory, exceeding great, Oh my God, a vast and unlimited inner chamber. Who has plumbed its depths? Yet, this is power of my mind and it belongs to my nature; I myself do not grasp all that I am. Is then the mind too narrow to hide itself, so that the questions arise; where is this thing which belongs to it and it cannot grasp? Would it be outside it and not in it? How then does it not grasp it?

—Augustine

Confessions Book X, 15