cynthia ozick on romantic religion

This is a great piece!
(I have only included the beginning, but you get the idea)

December 10, 2006 New York Times

ESSAY; A Youthful Intoxication

By CYNTHIA OZICK

In my late teens and early 20s I was a mystic. It was Blake and Shelley who induced those grand intoxications, and also Keats and Wordsworth and Coleridge. At New York University, where Thomas Wolfe had once taught freshman composition, his shade -- O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again! -- sometimes still flickered. Dylan Thomas, not yet in his cups and not yet renowned, came to a handful of students in an ordinary classroom and chanted, as if to a hall of hundreds, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, syllables instinct with divine afflatus. Meanwhile I was writing an undergraduate thesis on the Romantic poets, and though I knew neither the word nor the concept, I was at that time seriously antinomian. Nothing was distinct, or of its own indivisible nature, nothing was fixed, nothing was demanded: all was wavering spirit and intuition. Rapture and ecstasy, ecstasy and rapture! -- these were imagination's transports, abetted by the piercing sweetness of melancholy. The sage was withered from the lake, and no birds sang; or else they chorused thrillingly, like celestial choirs.

Besides being a mystic and an antinomian, I was also a believing monist: all things were one thing, watercolor worlds leaching and blending and fading into porous malleable realms. Yearning and beauty were the heart's engines, shocking the waiting soul (mine, anyhow) into a pulsing blur of wonderment. In Xanadu, where Alph the sacred river ran, you might actually see the Blessèd Damozel leaning over the bar of heaven! As for where the Spirit of God dwelled ... well, where else but in you and me? (Primarily, of course, in me.) The Ten Commandments? In Xanadu nobody had ever heard of them.

At 24 I blundered, I no longer recall where or how, into ''Romantic Religion,'' a book-length essay -- or manifesto, or scholarly credo -- by Leo Baeck. His name, his stature, his personal history, his transcendent learning were all unfamiliar. That he was of that remarkable German Jewish generation which included, among many other humanist eminences, the historian Gershom Scholem and the philosophers Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin, I had yet to discover. Nor did I know that Baeck was a rabbi consumed, beyond the vastnesses of his own multifaceted tradition, by Greek and Christian thought; or that he was of that minute fraction of Jewish humanity to have come out of Theresienstadt alive. When I stumbled into the majesties of ''Romantic Religion,'' I was as one (so it seemed to me afterward) who had conversed with Socrates while ignorant of Socrates' origins and identity.