Intellect/Mysticism

An excerpt from an essay by Donald Childs entitled 'Risking Enchantment: The Middle Way between Mysticism and Pragmatism in Four Quartets':

During an interview with Francoise de Castro in 1948, several years after the publication of Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot was prompted by the interviewer's observations about the inhibition of mysticism by intellect in Valery's creative process to talk about mysticism in general:

Eliot then said what seemed to me the centre and luminous point of the entire interview: 'But intelligence pushed to its depths leads to mysticism.'
'Do you not believe,' I asked him..., that intellect and mysticism are two faculties which are opposed in human nature?' A sign of denial was his only response, and this affirmation: 'All human faculties pushed to their depths end in mysticism.'

(From Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot's Four Quartets, edited by Edward Lobb)

This view of intellect and mysticism can also be seen in the writings of long gone alchemists as laid out for us by Carl Jung in his book 'Psychology and Alchemy', in which he explains the nature of the alchemical work as both physical and metaphysical, requiring the chemist to be in the correct state of health and in the right state of mind in order to pursue the philosopher's stone, focusing the intellect with a religious concentration. The examples he gives are not unlike the guidance offered by Shunryu Suzuki on the practice of zazen through Right Mind, Right Effort, etc. Descriptions of Atget's decisive moment and a sniper's steady hand also have a hint of the mystic in them, and many other human efforts bad and good.