“WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO BE LIFTED UP and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness?” Could you use “some relief from misery, from melancholy”? Are you seeking a way to feel less “anxious, wretched, bored”? No, nobody is asking you to pay for Transcendental Meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, or a detox diet. Perhaps, Simon Critchley suggests, you might be better served by closely reading the love songs of Hadewijch of Antwerp, a thirteenth-century Christian mystic who wrote rapturous, erotic descriptions of receiving the Eucharist.
Out of context, some lines from the introduction to Critchley’s highly original and enjoyable new book Mysticism read like something off the self-help shelf. But Critchley is not evangelizing. He’s not hawking a quick fix for what ails modern life. He’s certainly not taking the piss. His topic has always been a little plagued by such misinterpretations, especially in the field of academic philosophy. Critchley is a philosopher by training and by trade, and he’s known for applying classical philosophy to contemporary life, writing books on topics from soccer to David Bowie to baldness. Philosophers, he explains in this book, tend to dismiss mysticism—the pursuit of ecstatic self-transcendence, or, as the English theologian and writer Evelyn Underhill put it, “experience in its most intense form”—as too earnest, too hyperbolic, and too irrational to take seriously. Yet this is exactly what Critchley, through a winding path, succeeds in doing—without being self-serious. Mysticism is a “personal, affective, visionary, embodied, autobiographical” tradition; it demands an unorthodox and even playful approach.
In a concise note at the beginning of the book, Critchley describes a fabled world “once upon a time” when “hermit-like” sufferers of an unnamed plague became painfully aware of contagion and withdrew from social life. He thankfully refrains from a ham-fisted thesis about how the Covid era was akin to the apocalyptic plagues of yore and turned us all into visionaries—what he’s saying is that world-shaking catastrophes send (the surviving) people to the edge of the cliff of existence, seeking the more-than-human, the bigger than ourselves, the terrifyingly, ecstatically incomprehensible. To use the favored term of fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich: we are not alone in our “woe.” Medieval mystics can teach us, by which Critchley mainly means secular Westerners, how to get beyond our selves, even if we don’t practice the hardcore monasticism or penitence that they did.
MEDIEVAL MYSTICS DIDN’T CALL THEMSELVES MYSTICS. Mysticism is a “troubled, anachronistic category” retroactively conferred on a collection of heterogeneous practices developed over centuries that, while connected, do not form a self-evident or linear canon. According to the French priest and scholar Michel de Certeau, the concept emerged under the name la mystique in the seventeenth century, an era that, Critchley points out, “goes hand in hand with the narrowing of the sacred to what we now blithely call ‘religious experience.’” In other words, mysticism as a concept was invented at the historical moment when the phenomenon itself began to decline and be relegated to the fringe.
“Mysticism is not a religion,” Critchley writes, “it is a tendency” that arises in religious contexts because they foster and structure intense devotional practice. (William James, for his part, believed that profound mystical knowledge could also be brought on by sublime encounters with nature or by huffing ether.) Due to the radical freethinking of mystics—take French Beguine Marguerite Porete (1250–1310), who was burned at the stake for circulating her banned writings—their behavior teetered on the border of what the ever-consolidating church deemed heretical. Ecclesiastical authorities were constantly weighing the pros and cons of religious fervor: too little and nobody’s paying their dues; too much and you risk sectarianism or rebellion. Many mystics claimed to have had firsthand encounters with God, and direct access has always been the greatest threat to middle management. “The Church is very sensitive to issues of what we might call populism,” Critchley writes. “To be vulgar, such movements are good for business,” as long as they can be “contained.”
Mystical texts form a parallel and sometimes overlapping lineage with theological work based in textual analysis. While mystics often provide shockingly lucid interpretations of theological material, their conclusions tend to be drawn from personal experience; they are reading themselves. Some of them had no choice but to discover divinity this way: they were not literate and instead learned through religious imagery and liturgy. Many dictated their writings, and though these texts were translated and often widely circulated, they were rarely codified and ordered like the treatises of learned men or church doctrine. Mystical texts often take the form of itineraries—spiritual guidebooks—that record extreme, painful pursuits on the path to self-transcendence. As Porete puts it in her beautiful book The Mirror of Simple and Annihilated Souls, to find God, “one must crush oneself, hacking and hewing away at oneself to widen the place in which Love will want to be.”
The Greek mystikos, meaning “hidden” or “secret,” comes from the verb muein—to close the eyes or mouth. But despite connotations of esotericism, occultism, and vagueness, and although mystical prose might be inscrutable, mystics do not want to keep their mouths closed. Critchley agrees with William James (whose mystical studies he affectionately critiques) in arguing that mystics do not purposefully obfuscate; they desperately want to relate what they have seen and learned. The trouble is that what they want to say is unsayable. It slams up against the limits of human language. (Hildegard von Bingen invented a whole lingua ignota, or unknown language, likely as an attempt to circumvent the unwritability of her revelations.) Mystics may be silent or retreat to the desert for a time, but “withdrawal is a practice,” not an abdication; it is but one stop on the itinerary to attaining knowledge beyond words that must nonetheless be written and shared. Anyone selling tickets to a secret society is probably not a true mystic.
CRITCHLEY IS DETERMINED to strip himself of both skepticism and irony in order to plainly ask how we can all increase our daily “capacity for belief and for joy.” His is foremost a practical, not a theoretical, project. He preemptively defends himself from the would-be assaults of philosophers who use mysticism as shorthand “for all that is weak-minded, lazy, and pretentious” by arguing that it requires “a different kind of rigor”—that is, “not the rigor mortis of academic philosophy, with its fantasies of neatly ordered historical subdivisions and its lists of great books.” (A large portion of mystical writing has been written, protected, and passed down by women, which can’t be irrelevant to its marginalization as a field.)
In an early section called “Brief Lives of Sixteen Mystics,” Critchley gleefully abstains from explaining his idiosyncratic list—“my mystics”—and lets the reader figure out why he loves them over the course of the book. The earliest of his figures is Dionysius, whose writings—likely written by more than one person—appeared circa 500; the latest is Madame Guyon (1648–1717), a French writer whose Bible commentary A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, about how anyone can commune with God, landed her in jail. With all of human history to choose from, Critchley’s range is geographically and historically narrow, and one might be tempted to ask why he doesn’t send a stray glance toward, say, Sufism or Buddhism. But no one can claim expertise over endless terrain. In the book’s final section, he divulges that his focus on medieval Christendom has to do with personal encounters with the church and a lifelong fascination with the central Catholic mystery: incarnation. He is driven by circumstance, inclination, and affection—or, as the writer Brian Dillon would put it, affinity. It’s a subjective project, not an encyclopedia.
I don’t pretend to be able to spot gaps in Critchley’s account as well as the average reader. My own fascination with mysticism was sparked when I took a class on the topic that Critchley co-taught with Eugene Thacker at the New School, during which they developed many of the book’s ideas in conversation with each other. I’m already schooled in the subject: not mysticism as such, but Critchley’smysticism. I recognized the ghosts of the syllabus, my favorite characters (Bernard of Clairvaux!), and the imprints of Thacker’s approach. Yet the book is its own living beast—it’s Critchley’s self-interrogation and quest in the tradition of the mystical itinerary, only what he’s reaching for isn’t exactly God. Finding out what he’s reaching for is a lot of what he’s doing.
The fact that I was briefly his student strikes me as fitting: the mystical tradition is a compendium of teachers and students finding surprising harmonies and picking up where another left off (sometimes centuries later), practicing what Critchley calls “ventriloquism, the act of allowing another’s words to speak to you by speaking through you.” The bulk of the book is spent doing just this: quoting and paraphrasing and elaborating on the teachings of his favorite mystics, and then drawing connections between their work and the work of another idiosyncratic collection of more recent writers and artists, such as Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, T. S. Eliot, Julian Cope, and Nick Cave. The argument is not that these figures are mystics themselves, but that their work can put us in touch with what the mystics felt. Today, Critchley contends, experiencing art is the closest to mystical experience that most of us can get.
“Mysticism lives on as aesthetic experience.” The claim sounds simple when taken at face value. But as Critchley grapples with it, he doubles back on himself. To be sure, mysticism does typically involve what we now call aesthetic experience—whether of a hymn, a stained-glass window, or the beat of a drum machine. And most people who think critically about art recognize some religiosity in the supposedly secular spaces where art is found, like the museum or the concert hall. But is aesthetic experience today really comparable to a mystical encounter in, say, 1200? The sense of “communicating with an animated universe” that I may feel when reading poetry during my lunch break can hardly be likened to the experience of a nun who lived in a cell, slept in a hole the size of a coffin, and prayed seven times a day. And as Critchley points out, most of us are not willing to do that to find our bliss. If the fervor and intensity of aesthetic experience depends on that level of commitment—and devoutness—is there an aspect to mysticism that could truly be called transhistorical? Or is mysticism (retroactively defined) a historical phenomenon whose lessons may be applied, whose texts may be studied and admired, but which can no longer be felt?
As he repeatedly circles back to these questions, Critchley is alternatingly hopeful and doubtful. “In moving from the narrowly religious to the broadly aesthetic, mysticism is both generalized and marginalized,” he writes. When mysticism loses “its institutional and political power in the churches and monasteries, mystical practice and its inspired tropes become peripheral to the socio-economic or commercial hubs of life.” In response, we must “refuse the privatization, subjectivization or secularization of aesthetic experience,” which I gather means we must pursue encounters with art outside the realms of entertainment and consumption. Critchley posits that when artists are not driven by fame or profit, “art can allow us to regain the ecstasy we have abdicated.” But then he hedges: “This may sound too lofty, grandiloquent, or just plain naive. I hope not.”
This self-questioning is totally in keeping with the way mystics write. They love a paradox. Central to Catholicism is the paradox of incarnation: the impossible simultaneity of immanence and transcendence, being and absence, literal and metaphorical, finitude and eternity. Tackling this and the many other unsolvable unsayables of divinity in writing demands circular, inconsistent, confounding rhetorical strategies. When reading the mystics “it is often better to think of circles rather than lines and see the movement of reflection as a form of repeated looping, sampling, and delving.” Contradictions abound. God is both far and near. God is both ultimate darkness and absolute light. It’s hard going. Critchley puts it nicely: “The mystics are constantly effing the ineffable, for as long as it effing takes.” The very experience of reading mysticism as it is written is part of that path to transcendence they’re effing about.
Critchley channels and emulates mystical methods to find liberation from rigid thinking and genre. There is nothing programmatic about the book’s structure, which includes dozens of sections nested within chapters nested within parts. Inside those sections are eccentric lists (“sixteen mystics”; “seven adverbs”; “five points”; “two implications”) that suggest an exhaustive catalogue or process of logical deduction that he elsewhere swerves away from. Sometimes he zooms in and dwells on one person or one text, sometimes he zooms out to sketch a sweeping history, other times he starts with a personal confession: “I think I am temperamentally a mystic.” He leaps across time and place, quoting liberally, and darts between the analytic and the diaristic. The subsections of Part Three include “What I have tried to do in this book,” “Animated materiality, paradox, and ritual (Mary Douglas),” and “Idiot glee, or music and the Jesus idea.” The seven adverbs he chooses to describe the way mystics work are obliquely, autobiographically, vernacularly, performatively, practically, erotically, and ascetically; these equally apply to his book.
CRITCHLEY’S MYSTICS ARE DELIGHTFUL WEIRDOS whose life stories may be difficult for contemporary readers to take literally. Christina the Astonishing (1150–1224) flew around, suckled her own breasts, then hung herself from the gallows and survived. Critchley responds to such biographies with unqualified belief: “I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels.”
Such a frank statement of belief calls to mind a recent book on the interpretation of nonrational experiences, historian Carlos M. N. Eire’s 2023 They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Eire writes that he believes saintly miracles really happened, without elaborating much on what he means by “belief.” In the New York Review of Books, Erin Maglaque argues that his nonchalant, noncommittal approach amounts to “evasion, even a kind of professional dishonesty.” He can’t really believe they flew, can he? So what does he mean? That he believes they believed it? That their miracles were tricks that might as well have been real?
Critchley confronts the belief question obliquely and indirectly (to use two of his terms) but not dishonestly—in other words, like a mystic. What I think he is saying is that belief, like mysticism, is not a transhistorical concept, and that rationality has not always been the way people construct reality, much less access truth. We can’t know what a time traveler from 2024 would see them do, but we know what they experienced, because they go to great lengths to describe it to us. And to believe that they experienced what they describe, we must accept the extent to which the European medieval order of reality differs from our post-Kantian one. We must “acknowledge vast swathes of human experience which are felt to be undeniably real but cannot defend themselves readily in the tribunal of reason.” In constructing a mysticism for today, our challenge is to seek kernels of the universal in the highly specific.
This mirrors Critchley’s investigation of whether contemporary aesthetic experiences are comparable to medieval ones: the order of difference between the rapture of the mystic receiving a vision of Christ and the rapture of the secular Krautrock-listener is not exactly, or not only, a matter of belief versus nonbelief, but of secular life versus religious life with all its material trappings and practice. He advances this line of thought by discussing the work of Caroline Bynum, whose brilliant study of medieval material culture reveals the absolute otherness of that time. To begin to grasp this alterity, all you have to do is accept what you see at face value: Christ’s wound is depicted in many a premodern manuscript like a hovering vulva; nuns are pictured harvesting large penises from trees; Jesus is referred to as a father and a mother and a hard stone. The familial, erotic, sacred, and profane were all mixed up in a way that would genuinely freak out the type of Pentecostal Bible study group in a Midwestern basement that I joined exactly once as a teenager.
Belief is a tautology. It justifies and reinforces itself. The harder you believe, the truer it has to be. Bear with me: when I watch reality dating shows, I believe that the contestants are deluding themselves that they are falling in love. But I also believe that they are truly falling in love. Love is delusion. Delusion is real. That’s why love brings us out of ourselves; that is what it means to annihilate the self. In his book Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti describes American Christian Revivalist conventions in the 1800s where preachers stoked the fear of God’s punishment so effectively that thousands of converts were induced to pass out (before rising to be born again). He writes: “They feign death like hunted animals, but their fear is so great that they really lose consciousness.” They believe it so hard that it becomes real.
People trying to “reveal” the phoniness of mysticism will tell you, to give one example, that Joan of Arc had migraines that caused her to hallucinate transmissions from God. So what? If she did, those migraines gave her access to a superhuman perception that produced a way of thinking that I still find astonishing and revolutionary. Secular and sacred, reason and perception, skepticism and belief: these are not mutually exclusive. As Critchley puts it: “The standard philosophical refutations of mysticism as delusional or nonsense or charlatanry always miss the point.” Not because mysticism isn’t ever these things, but because it can be a little of these things and still be brilliant, ecstatic, and true.
CRITCHLEY CAN’T HELP BUT ASK: Does writing a book on “the weirdest and most dubious dimension of religious life” mean that he, an avowed atheist, is “deliberately contradicting” himself? Maybe, but again, contradictions are welcome here, as is doubt—a crucial step on any mystical journey. When Julian of Norwich received a rapid succession of vivid visions in 1373, her first reaction was to doubt herself, like most people would. Was she insane? She spent the rest of her life interpreting the images, and in her examination she moved from doubt to belief to divine love.
There’s no need for debates about “intellectual belief in the existence of God as some kind of metaphysical postulate which can be affirmed or disputed” in order to truly engage with mysticism. But obviously God is not irrelevant. It is “not just a question” of God’s existence—but it’s not not. It seems to me that belief in an actually existing God is only necessary to take mysticism seriously if you understand the divine in that very particular way—as opposed to believing in a more expansive interpretation that might include the feeling of earthly love, immersion in nature, dancing all night, doing drugs, or, like Critchley, having a sacred experience with art.
When considering my divine, I return to the most deceptively simple of Julian’s visions, in which she holds a mysterious thing “no bigger than a hazelnut” in the palm of her hand and recognizes in its littleness the eternity and enormity of God’s love. Or I return to the image Critchley invokes from a passage by Annie Dillard in Holy the Firm: “the corner where eternity clips time.” Mysticism for today, as ever, requires attention to the infinite universe outside of us and the quantum universe within us, the fundamental and wondrous unknowability of life, matter, and—most of all—the self.
Critchley is wading through the muck of the impossible questions of existence, and does not pretend to find a clear philosophical path out. There is, he declares, “a certain savagery in [his] approach.” If so, I find it akin to the savagery of the enthusiastic fan, which especially shines in the final chapters where he nerds out about post-punk music—he thinks music is the best art form for losing oneself. Critchley’s Mysticism “will make no sense to the skeptical or the plain-minded. But this book is not for them.” As with most mystical writing, whether you buy it is up you. Either the writer is an obnoxious hack who can’t or won’t articulate what they’re saying, or someone with bombastic knowledge earnestly trying to articulate it by any means necessary. “One either feels mystical speech is saying something utterly important that cannot be said any other way, or one does not. There is no middle ground.” Either you like the winding, backtracking, switch-backing, self-contradicting, self-searching style, or you don’t. Either you believe they want to hide or you believe they want to share. Do I believe that Critchley wants to share? Absolutely.
Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York.