#156 Mysticism: The Heretics Who Got Too Close to God - Simon Critchley

35:36now um and and what she's trying to do which which i'm just thinking about now is to how do we connect together philosophy with life writing and and what's going on in that um and it's you it's rather, when I was taught philosophy, you know, the last thing, in either tradition, in the analytic tradition, the continental tradition, the last thing one was meant to be interested in was biography. It was unseemly. And that began to change really with the publication of a number of important biographies in the, I guess it was in the early 90s, like Ray Monk's Wittgenstein, and books like that. And you realize that actually, whatever Wittgenstein was about, this was a life.

36:37This was the life of a saint with all of its tortures and its sinfulness, all of that. But he was, in a sense, pointing away from what philosophy could do towards a life that could be lived. So I think there's always been this tension or there is a tension in philosophy between philosophy and life-rising and what it might mean to do philosophy from life in the way that an artist will draw from life. What's going on with that? I find that an interesting idea. With regard to the mystics, it's just the case that the origins of autobiography in a whole number of traditions, but particularly, no whole number of languages, but in particular the languages of Northern Europe, early Dutch, Middle High German, English, medieval French, are the autobiographies of women who were contemplatives, mystics.

37:52So in a sense, there's the let's just take the example of Julian because it's available in English and it's fascinating. She's using experiences from her life that didn't last very long, 12 hours of visions, and she is building those into a story which has an autobiographical feel to it. But she's doing that at the service of a theology, a theological vision. So I think that's the thing to, that's an important point to underline is that for us, whatever we are, moderns, wherever we are in 2026, whatever However, we've tended to take for granted the reduction of religion to experience. Religion is, do you believe in God or not believe in God?

38:55Have you experienced this or not? Do you have an experience of faith or do you not have an experience of faith? And we tend to end matters there. Now, for the people that I'm talking about and that interest me and other people working in this field, there's experience, but there's also theology. There's conceptual work that needs to be done, and the two things have to go together. so that Julian has these experiences, which we could go into if we wish, which are extreme. She's dying, and then she begins to receive the showings, the revelations. This leads her to a complete theological reframing of Christianity.

39:44The problem that Julian has, which is a fantastic problem to have, is that she saw all these things that she saw in her showings, but she did not see sin. I did not see sin. So she can't make sense of the category of sin, and therefore she ends up in the long version of her text retelling the story of the fall of Adam. and it's fascinating. So it's experience and theology working together. So I think that the relationship that someone like Claire Carlyle makes between life-writing Brahman traditions, Hindu traditions and stuff that's going on in the West, I think is fascinating. And Spinoza is kind of the conduit for all of that.

40:53Alex O'Connor:Sure. And something else that's quite noticeable, I think, when engaging with the mystical tradition is the presence of so many women, which is unusual, especially when it comes to medieval Christianity, let alone modern thought which itself is quite male dominated and yet we're hearing about julian of norwich and theresa of avila and we're hearing about uh even flannery o 'connor novelist who you quote you know you this this sort of conspicuous presence of women um and not only that but amongst female and male mystics who write about their experiences you often get this theme of femininity coming through the femininity of christ the feminine of the self even for males i i just wonder like you know looking at this from the outside it might just strike you as this slightly sort of peculiar uh fact about the mystical tradition and i just wondered if you had any thoughts on why?

41:56No, it's a most queer tradition. But within Christianity, it's most strange that the first thing is that you get the appearance of women writers from, let's say, the 11th, 12th century onwards, people like Hardewich writing in Antwerp and then on through others. Julian of Norwich in that sense is on the later side, writing in the late 14th century, early 15th century. But what is it that women have access to writing? They have access, and that's kind of what, One of the things that was on my mind in writing about this material and before that teaching it was that there have been these endless debates in philosophy about the nature of the canon, who gets to be in the canon and not in the canon, and can we have more female philosophers in the canon, please.

43:11but if you shift focus, you rotate the crystal a little bit. Here's this tradition, mystical tradition, which is entirely dominated by women. So they weren't

43:29clerics, and they weren't fully paid up masters of theology at the University of Paris, But they were there. And someone like Marguerite Porret, who is wandering around northern France, Flanders, with her book on refined love, and is then, you know, but as a heretic in 1310, as I mentioned before. But that book or the teaching in that book finds its way into the hands of Meister Eckhart. We know that for a fact. There's very good evidence to suggest that he had access to that. So it's a case where you have women writers and contemplatives influencing men. And then also you've got, on the other hand, you've got male writers like English tradition, people like Hinton and Richard Roll, who are writing in this incredibly evocative, very sexual way, but in a very vulnerable, you know, feminized manner about the experience of the divine.

44:39And then there's someone that I talk about briefly in the book who, let's see if I can find it, it's Henry Souzo. And Henry Souzo writes this book called The Clock of Wisdom, The Life of the Servant.

44:59These are the most popular books in the German language in the medieval period until the early modern period, second only to Thomas A. Kempis's Imitation of Christ. And in those texts, firstly, Suzo, who is a man, his experiences are written down by a woman. So it's not just a man writing down. The classic mystical view is you've got crazy, unstable, young woman experiencing the divine and some monk following around writing things down. He got the inversion of that, that his experience is written down by his follower, his novelist called Elspeth Stagel, I think her name is. And in those experiences, he describes his own feminization, that in a sense, he is experiencing Christ as a woman.

45:58And not only that, it gets weirder. At the center of Julian of Norwich's showings, and this is something which goes back into the Hebrew Bible and early Christian, say the church fathers, is the identification of Christ with a woman, Christ with a mother. So we have an idea of Christ as a nurturing mother, not just as an angry, bearded father in the sky. So Christ for Julian is a mother because he nurtures us with his blood, and the blood that's important is the blood that comes from the side wound just beneath the nipple, the breast of Christ as it were. That's the important blood. And the way that side wound was often depicted in medieval iconography was in a state that looks in a shape that's very similar to female sexual organs, and that was done for very clear reasons.

47:16So Jesus is feeding us from his blood, and there was a deliberate confusion of blood and milk in this period. And so Christ is a woman, and a man, and other things as well. So the idea that there is something essentially kind of macho about Christianity is really bizarre. It's a tradition which, insofar as this is where I would make a distinction between Christianity and the other Abrahamic faiths and with Hinduism on the other hand. For me, the idea of incarnation is paradoxical and powerful and important. It's that God takes on human form, and it takes on human form through the mediation of the maternal body, through Mary.

48:26and so insofar as christ is matter and christ has to be matter within christianity christ is female so i think the whole um marian side of this is is really important and that's you you can find approximations of that in different religious traditions but there's something about the extremity of that within christianity that kind of appeals to me because it also offends people which is good.

48:55Alex O'Connor:Yeah, but then also at the same time, the language is quite imprecise, right? I mean, like when we're talking about mysticism and describing mystical experiences and listening or reading the accounts of, you know, listening to, reading the accounts of mystical writers, there are sort of two literary themes that you identify with mysticism. One of them is negation, always talking in negative terms and one of them is exaggeration sort of really just like going overboard in our descriptions throwing so much at the wall that hopefully some of the the imagery will will stick but this concept of negation is particularly important because even outside of the mystical tradition there is this idea that because god is incomprehensible god is beyond all human concepts god exceeds all human imagination to talk about god you cannot talk in the positive sense you can't say god is this god is that instead god is not this it's not that god is you know um is powerful and god is loving and it's that god is unlimited god is you know ground less god is timeless god is you're taking things that you do know and you're negating them and this kind of way of talking about god called apophatic language which is saying what god is not um originates in the sort of pseudonymous writings of um someone claiming to be dionysus one of the someone claiming to be dionysus yeah it was a kind of elaborate yeah hoax but yeah it finds it sort of flourishing in thomas aquinas that the most important christian metaphysician of all time and a man who was no stranger to premises and conclusions and rational thinking, even in that context.

50:52Alex O'Connor:The idea of talking about God in the positive sense was thought by Aquinas to be a bit of a useless project. So yeah, maybe you could just tell me about that story. Tell me about Dionysus and tell us why negative language is so important in mysticism. Well, it's important because we begin from the idea of God as incomprehensible, as you said. So the incomprehensibility of God and the incomprehensibility of God goes together with the idea that we cannot contain the divine within a proposition. So any proposition is going to miss its object, its target. That's where this tradition really kicks off from.

51:36And Dionysius, of course, was the name of the Athenian who was one of the two Athenians persuaded by St. Paul when he tried to preach to the stiff-necked. populace of Athens, stiff-necked, philosophically clever populace of Athens. So it's a kind of fiction that was developed in later centuries, a kind of literary fiction. But in these texts by Dionysius, or the pseudodionys of the Aria Pagetica, which was the hill of Aries where where trials for murder were adjudicated in Athens. He says, and I'll just quote this because it might be helpful, this is Dionysius, it's necessary to praise this negative method of abstraction differently from the positive method of affirmation.

52:37For with the latter affirmation, we begin with the universal and primary and pass through the intermediate and secondary to the particular and ultimate attributes. But now, in the negative side, we ascend from the particular to the universal conceptions, abstracting or attributes in order that, without veil, we may know that unknowing, agnosia, that is shrouded under all that is known and all that can be known, and that we may begin to contemplate the super-essential darkness that is hidden by all the light that is in existing things. That's a flavor of Tynesius. So we have the positive method of affirmation, that let's say the method that Aquinas adopts in the Summa, broadly.

53:33And then we have the negative method. I try to summarize this in terms of distinction between, what do I call them? Descending affirmations and ascending negations. So descending affirmations would be God is, or God, or nature, or whatever, and we go down from angels, creatures, whatever. The idea of ascending negations is we begin from the idea that God cannot be articulated, God is incomprehensible, and then we cut away with language negatively in order to reach up to that which cannot be articulated. That's the basic idea, is that the only path to the divine is through negation on the one hand, and then through exaggeration.

54:32The exaggeration part is fascinating because you've got in Dionysius, in that bit I just quoted, super essential darkness. I mean, what does that even mean? It's either essential darkness or inessential darkness, but super essential darkness. And he'll talk about the dazzling obscurity. How can obscurity be dazzling? Obscurity is obscurity. How can that dazzle? Or radiant stillness? or yeah, Eckhart talks of it. Whispering stillness. Whispering stillness. Stillness is stillness. How can it whisper? So language is being turned against itself in order to open to something that's beyond language.

55:18And that's the basic line. And I track that through these ancient sources, Dionysius, Cloud of Unknowing, Eckhart's Sermon, and then right the way forward into someone like T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, where T.S. Eliot is trying to say what can't be said. And the only way he can say what can't be said is by saying it in the form of a persistent kind of series of negations and undoings.

55:53And that idea of language kind of undoing itself, I find kind of fascinating. And it's also effective. It's not that it's just a clever intellectual enterprise. Look, I can speak in these negations and aren't you impressed? But it's also linked to an idea and a movement of love. So the two things that have to be put together are the apophatic tradition, we have to proceed negatively when talking about the divine, or through exaggeration, which also misses the target, but at least you get a picture of it on the one hand. And the second element is love, a love that gives, a love that opens out. And somehow it's a negativity which is at the service of an erotic sort of divine, something like that.

56:56Alex O'Connor:Yeah, and it's interesting how that concept does translate into Aquinas, even in a philosophical context. This isn't just a kind of mystical treatise that's trying to apprehend some vision. He's trying to lay out a sort of systematized philosophical treatise and explicitly says that it will have to be done with this apophatic or negating language. And of course, then Aquinas himself has a religious experience near the end of his life. That's right. That's right. And then refuses to finish the Summa Theologica, saying he can write no more because everything he's written is, quote, like straw. Like straw, exactly.

57:41Alex O'Connor:had seen, which I think I've been saying for a long time, there's this sort of common thread that it doesn't surprise me that philosophers are able to apprehend this thing called God, which has been at the center of religious traditions for the longest time. But it seems to me that those who've had both, those who are geniuses in analytical thought and have also had the experience, universally say that the experience is the thing that was real. You know, Blaise Pascal is another example I talk about all the time as having his experience and writing down not the God of the philosophers, the God of fire, the God of Abraham, the God of Jesus.

58:18Alex O'Connor:And so I can also kind of understand why medieval Christianity being quite obsessed with scholasticism and philosophy and being influenced by the thought of Aristotle and proving God from first principles and all this kind of stuff. In fact, it's a dogma of the Catholic Church that God's existence can be known through reason alone. It's literally one of their actual dogmas. From De Philius, the same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason from created things. So if you don't believe that God is apprehendable through reason, you are anathema to the Church.

59:06Alex O'Connor:You're literally out of step with their teachings. Yet you have people like Aquinas coming in and saying that basically the best version that we have of that is like straw compared to what I've seen. I'm beginning to get a picture here then of why it might be that particularly the medieval church, which was quite scholastic, is a bit suspicious to say the least. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they've set up these institutions to teach theology and and canon law, these things that become the great European universities for specifically this purpose. And indeed, they're still around. And it sits in a very odd relationship.

59:53Just think about the pairing of Aquinas with Eckhart. It's a very odd pairing, yet they were near contemporaries and perhaps doing very similar things, or very similar commitments finally. Pascal is interesting. We used to talk about Pascal because Pascal has always been very important to me in the sense in which the emphasis upon reason, of which he was an expert as a geometer and a city planner and all the kind of practical things that Pascal could do. But then the idea that there's nothing more consistent with reason than the limitation of reason and the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

1:00:51And then that bit you quoted, the Night of Fire, that conversion text that were sewn into his doublets or whatever. That's the God, not the God of scholars and philosophers, but that God, God of Isaiah, who's he mentioned? Abraham, Moses. Yeah, that's the God. And it's that. Now, the difference there would be, is Pascal a mystic? No, Pascal is, because here's another thing we can think about, is that there is, after the Reformation has happened, after Luther has done his work, and then the version of the Reformation that we wind up with in France is Jansenism. and Pascal as the primate exhibit A of Jansenism.

1:01:53And there you've got this very... And the way in which this works in the history of theology, it seems to me, turns around Augustine.

1:02:08Augustine's central to what Luther's up to, and it's deeply central to what the Jansenists are up to. And in that Jansenist tradition, God exists, God is there, but we cannot talk of any union with God or any deification or anything like that. That's scurrilous and heretical because we cannot in any way have any awareness of grace. The grace of God is inscrutable. So the other side of Pascal, which is so interesting, is the inscrutability of grace. One can hope for grace, but one cannot do anything in order to enable grace to be bestowed. So there's a kind of, in the Pascalian vision, in what Lucian Goldberg used to call many years ago, the tragic vision of Pascal and Racine is a distance with God, a God who is absconded, the deus absconditus.

1:03:19and that's a powerful tradition. And on some days I'm more drawn to that than the kind of messy materiality of mysticism. But, you know.

1:03:35Alex O'Connor:Yeah, maybe people are wondering actually about where you stand here. I kind of forget that I know more about you than perhaps somebody who's just tuned in and this is their first introduction to you they might hear you talking quite sort of implicitly critically about religious traditions but with a lot of love for mysticism it looks like you might have a crucifix on the wall behind you i can't quite make it out um tell us about your yeah it's that it looks like it might be in the on the back wall and i'm not sure let's go check i know a lot of people who have them uh see that be sort of behind you to your right yeah it's the one that gives um extreme unction it's uh something we picked up in mexico yes i'm the kind of person to help i i literally have in my in my living room i have a have like a 16th century station of the cross or something on the wall just because i like the aesthetic but people are probably wondering where you um stand on this and what your sort of relation to mysticism is whether you consider yourself interested in mysticism a mystic yourself that kind of stuff interested in it um am i no i mean i'm just interested um and i i have a temperamental pull towards um forms of mystical thinking writing being um And I always have.

1:04:58I mean, I'm not by nature a skeptic. And so when William Blake says that he saw angels on a tree in Putney or whatever he said, I think, yeah, he did. He did see those angels. And that explains a lot. So my interest in mysticism is partially explained by my lifelong insurgency against philosophy, against professional philosophy, which of course is ridiculous because I get paid to be a professor of philosophy. So what on earth am I doing? Well, it's a form of self-hatred is what it is. So I find that the form of philosophy that I was educated within was a ferociously secular approach to philosophy.

1:06:07and if you were religious you were seen as soft-headed or weak-minded or something like that and um and you know and there were also together with that uh assumptions about the nature of let's say modernity and you know modernity equaling secularism equaling a whole series of other things. And I've always been suspicious of those easy periodizations that we could say that we are in this time and therefore what these people thought back then, like Eckhart, is just irrelevant. It's an interesting historical curiosity. I don't believe in the way in which philosophers and other scholars break up history into neatly organized units.

1:06:59And I think that there's a kind of there's a dogmatic rationalism in professional philosophy still, maybe less so now but it's still there and there's also a kind of a dogmatic

1:07:17adoration of critique at all costs in a sense that what we should be doing in teaching is teaching critical thinking, critical reasoning skills, whatever Now, these things are important. I'm not denying that. But I find that what's more important for me is trying to induce in students a willingness to read something that is extremely strange and counterintuitive, at least initially and maybe for some time afterwards. to suspend disbelief and to embrace a vision of things or an account of things that doesn't seem to make any sense at all. And philosophers are very good at keeping things out. They're trained to keep things out, things that cause irritation, things that don't chime with their sense of what's important and not important.

1:08:24And I've always rebelled against that. So I find that I want to hang on to, I think philosophy is a discipline that needs to be taught. I think it helps. You can do it on your own up to a point, but I think it really helps to be taught. But I think it has to be done with an open-mindedness and a generosity of spirit and a sympathy for the things that we're talking about rather than an attempt to blot things out and that can be done so again i find this like where i am in you know in in teaching in in new york it's it's the last 10 years have been a kind of um you know a kind of culmination of the obsession with critique uh at all costs of everything and you know that's no way to proceed you've got to try to understand things whatever they are, forms of life, books, in their terms in order to understand the people that are moved by them, that are swayed by them.

1:09:32So I think that's very important. So my interest in mysticism is part of that. Maybe this is interesting. It began with, I had some interest in something that I was calling mystical anarchism back in the day in response to a whole series of things. I had 30-40 pages of material. Then a colleague of mine, a new colleague of mine at the time called Eugene Thacker was interested in similar sorts of things. We began to think about a class on mysticism. We began to teach it, largely with guest speakers.

1:10:45who miraculously showed up. It was great. And then what happened next is that often when you're teaching the kind of material that I teach, say, I don't know, Heidegger's being in time or something like that, you're trying to persuade people, explain a chapter of the book and to persuade them of it and for them to find some resonance in it. But I found with these mystical texts, this was combustible. People found their way to this incredibly easily, and they were really turned on by this in ways that I hadn't really seen before in teaching. So you sort of realize there's a fire in this material, which is fascinating.

1:11:39So that was important, realizing that there's something about this material which really animates people in ways that can lead down some pretty strange alleys, right? I, you know, pretty soon you're in tarot readings and theosophist sessions and whatever it might be. But, you know, we still have to retain an open mind.

1:12:07Alex O'Connor:What would you recommend people, I mean, of course there's your book, which is linked in the description, that much is obvious. But when it comes to primary sources, somebody who, particularly as used to like, you know, the more philosophical approaches to religion. where would you point people like first like I just want to experience what this sort of mysticism stuff is all about I don't want it to be too difficult to comprehend I kind of want to get a feel for it you know where should someone go Bernard McGinn The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism McGinn is a formidable scholar of the history of Christianity he's still ongoing, I believe he's still very much with us, a book called The Presence of God, which is now in its seventh or eighth volume.

1:12:59But he did this, and that's a kind of, what would you call it, a diachrytical approach, historical approach, beginning with the earliest Christian text right the way through. But in around 2010 or so, he does this, what we call this, what's the opposite of diacritical oh gosh um forgetting my sorcerian distinctions anyway like a like a like a like a window on mysticism and he basically selects a number of themes which are the key themes and then finds texts from the last 2 000 years and the texts are quite short sometimes a page, a couple of pages, and you really get a sense of how the mystical tradition, the Christian mystical tradition, functions.

1:13:51And you can dip your toe into two pages of Marguerite Porret. If you decide that's for you, then good. Or you read a little bit of Thomas Burton, you decide that's for you, and you can go further. So it's an incredibly engaging book. And also, it works like mystical texts in the medieval period and until much later on, circulated as compendia of fragments, little shards of text that would be copied and recopied. So often, many of the texts that we have, we don't have them in the original language because they were lost. We have them in translations and copies and copies and copies of copies. So there's something about that approach to mysticism that you get in the McGinn book.

1:14:41If you want a more philosophical approach, then aside from my own humble efforts in that regard, I'd recommend William James. William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, and the Varieties of Religious Experience Gifford Lectures from 1901 or something like that, I'm not sure. For him, the center of things is mysticism. It's about 80, 100 pages, depends which edition you've got. Again, James for me is the idea of what a philosopher should be, someone who's got questions, searching critical questions, but who is open to new things and prepare to take them on their own terms. So the chapter on mysticism from the Varysa Ridders experience and McGinn's essential writings of Christian mysticism.

1:15:38Alex O'Connor:Well, plenty to be getting on with, but of course people should start with yours. Of course, which is the best book on the topic I think ever written. no it's it's it's a humble a humble effort and um it's uh yeah it's it's uh it's imperfect but the bits that i the bits that i'm proudest of are the bits the discussion of t.s elliott i'm very that was uh because that was like 30 35 years of thinking and i really i really have to say something about the four quartets before i yes before i die and i was going to ask you it seemed you sort of the at least the paperback edition i have is sort of interspersed with all kinds of images and at first i thought that the images were kind of related to what was being said but it seems like they're just these sort of mystical sort of thematic um paintings and there's bits bits from like sort of ballet and yeah you've got this just a kind of general um illustration to the sort of theme of the text did you just feel like it would sort of get the right mindset to see a few mystical paintings or i just wonder what that was about oh yeah writing writing books for me is always uh i've been lucky in my career to have editors who become friends and uh one editor that's become a friend of mine is a guy called Mark Ellingham, who's one of the important people at Profile Books.

1:17:17Mark is brilliant in many ways, in all sorts of ways, but he's particularly brilliant when it comes to doing picture research. We did a book on football and a book on the Greeks, but mainly the book on football is we really played around with pictures. and then um i was sitting in his place in london about three years ago and he pulled together a whole series of images and was beginning to sort of put them in relation to the text so they're meant to stand in relationship to the text as kind of juxtapositions they follow the line of the argument but in a kind of uh in the manner of a counterpoint rather than illustration yeah and quite they're just they're just interesting to look at yeah i think so and

1:18:06Alex O'Connor:And as is the book interesting to read. Well, Simon Critchley, I recommend that people pick up the text. I hope they've enjoyed this brief introduction to the history of mysticism. There's so much more to say, of course, but thank you so much for your time. It's been fun. Thank you very much, Alex. It was great fun. Thank you for your questions.