On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy

by Simon Critchley

Mysticism is about existential ecstasy - an experience of heightening one's senses and self into a sheer feeling of aliveness. Mystical experiences offer us a practical way to open our thoughts and deepen the sense of our lives, whether through a mainstream connection to God or by taking part in mind-altering experiences.

Here, Simon Critchley explores the history and practice of mysticism, from its origins in Eastern and Western religion, through its association with esoteric and occult knowledge, and up to the ecstatic modernism of T.S. Eliot and others. Through a discussion of the lives of famous mystics, like Julian of Norwich and Jesus Christ, Critchley reveals how embracing the spectrum of mystical experience can refresh our thinking and help us live deeper and freer lives.

Philosophical and playful, analytical and inventive, On Mysticism is a definitive account of humanity's quest to understand the divine, and a call to thinkers everywhere to broaden our minds to life larger than our selves.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Religion, Spirituality, Mysticism, History, Christianity

336 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 31, 2024

About the author

Simon Critchley (born 27 February 1960 in Hertfordshire) is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political. These two axes may be said largely to inform his published work: religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics [...]

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

bizarrely ego-forward for a book that is ostensibly about decreation … as someone who is like, the exact target audience for writing on and through christian mysticism i remain confused as to who or what this book is for - alternately way too in the weeds and way too conceptually breezy, and throughout consistently asymmetrical in weighting. i was obviously tainted going into this by attending the book launch where i found critchley a truly grating speaker and by talking to a friend who recently took his class at the new school who described him as “the last person who should be writing about mysticism” and “so earthbound” but ... yeah. read it if you want! excited to read a bunch of the stuff he references in here! god’s in everything all the time and don’t you dare forget it!

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doubt kindles our suspicious intelligence and at the same time extinguishes our capacity for love.

Nick Hornby cursed us. He gave white men a precedent for writing about music in lieu of the metaphysical and found apologies for immaturity and being irresponsible in the catalogue of popular music. Simon Critchley announces that no one is an atheist when listening to music. It is likely indecent to bracket a survey of the eschatological with such whim, yet I fear this is entirely the project which the learned professor is pursuing. He refers to a series of lectures he initially gave with Eugene Thacker about the mystic tradition and how such grew into this very book, he also pointedly notes how Thacker is funny and, well, he isn’t.
As Chesterton writes, the Eucharist is only the more mysterious for being visible.

Aside from intriguing readings of Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich this is a mess of a book, one which isn’t really an argument but more of a collage which point in a vague direction. The “experience” of mystic encounter has a written tradition but is not only at certain odds with philosophy but also the self-domesticating features of organized religion as well. It is nice to see Anne Carson parsed with enthusiasm but it ultimately didn’t mean much in terms of evidence as Dr Critchley was only performing and little else.

[Nathanimal · Rating 1 out of 5]

There may be an interesting book here, but unfortunately I will never know because the writer gets so inextricably in his own way writing it via excessive signposting and telling us what he is about to tell us and communicating what he wishes to communicate instead of just communicating it. The book is utterly distracted by its own etymological erudition, even as it proceeds in a groping, repetitive style that can never decide what it wants to say until the third time it has said it. Not to mention an irritating love of the word "indeed"—indeed, to the abuse thereof. Indeed the college professorial indeeding was too much for this poor creature.

[Carolyn]

The introduction of Mysticism promises the book almost as a self-help manual: "Wouldn't you like to have a taste of this intensity? Wouldn't you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness," Critchley offers readers in the opening paragraph, diagnosing the modern age as an age of depression and "poverty of experience." Ok, that's an interesting idea! Let's get into it! Unfortunately, this is not an idea he goes on to explore in the book, which focuses on how mysticism gives us access to other forms of knowledge of God and knowledge of the self that philosophy has long discounted. I am interested in the idea, but the book takes such a tortuous road to say anything at all, with lots of unnecessary throat-clearing and the author continually getting in his own way (as he admits) and repeatedly bringing up that writing is like trying to set yourself on fire (calm down). At the end of the work, he discusses whether mystical experience is still available to us today in a secular context and suggests that we can experience ecstasy through music. Here, the book overpromises and undelivers. Music makes us feel things-- OK, not exactly a revolutionary concept. Oddly, he undercuts even this modest thesis by offhandedly saying that some people have "no taste in music" and won't be able to understand what he's talking about.

I feel guilty about how much I disliked this book because it felt like the author was baring his soul. I was on board with the ideas he was trying to introduce, but I couldn't get over how bizarrely inconsistent in style and message this book was. It seems like Critchley is trying to be accessible, but the casual tone employed throughout most of the book is undercut by passages that are unnecessarily technical (in philosophical or literary concepts) and sentences that are unnecessarily elliptical and complex. Just because the topic of mysticism is amorphous, I think Critchley feels licensed to write amorphously. I simply found it frustrating to read. Also, he spent very little time discussing actual mystics. Why are we close-reading Annie Dillard and spending 30 pages on T.S. Eliot instead of any of the 15 mystics listed at the beginning of the book who are introduced only to be dropped forever (other than Julian of Norwich, who does get a full chapter treatment)? Critchley's answer is likely that he wants to explore how the mystic impulse in humans has been transformed into art and aesthetic experience today, and in that context examine how modern artists have referenced and re-interpreted mystic traditions. I tend to believe he's just writing about whatever he wants to write about (including his favorite post-punk bands??). The project is a deeply personal one, reflective of Critchley's interests, and does not seem to truly be an attempt at a general introduction to mysticism.

[ra · Rating 5 out of 5]

easily my favourite/the best thing i've read this year, rip my never realised MA thesis on affective contagion re: mysticism/mediating experience through fasting and reading but ANYWAY. he puts into words what i've been feeling my way through for the past 2 years and what a relief that is. it's happening to everybody

— "With Annie Dillard, we saw the intersecting axes of eternity and time, one vertical and the other horizontal, emanence on the one hand and immanence on the other. They can only be held together by the suspended, hanging body of the God-man, pulled upwards to the transcendent, and downwards by the gravity of sin and death. And both axes at once."

[Lobo]

To bardziej zbiór interpretacji niż spójny projekt filozoficzny, co nie jest wadą. Sama książka postuluje, żeby odejść od wielkich idei czy projektów wszystkiego i zająć się tym, co partykularne. Mistycyzm jest partykularnym doświadczeniem - przez większość trwania kultury religijnym, a obecnie, w odczarowanym, zsekularyzowanym świecie - estetycznym, doświadczeniem Ja rozpływającego się w czymś większym niż Ja. Czytało się fantastycznie.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Mysticism is about the possibility of ecstatic life. For the last couple of centuries, with obvious exceptions like Nietzsche and, more recently, Georges Bataille, philosophy has more or less successfully inoculated itself against the kind of experiences of ecstasy we find in the mystics. It is time to reintroduce the virus.’

So close to a five (not sure exactly why I can’t be moved enough to round it off, even though my copy of this is well vandalised with colourful, fluorescent lines and such). This isn’t about (the conventional ‘meaning’ of) mysticism at its core (or least not what one would expect it to be — it mostly just 'play' with the ideas ‘religion’ or religious beliefs (rather those are used for the sake of comparison? And historical context?) — it’s more so about aesthetic experiences and all sorts of imprecise spirituality(?)). And/but this is precisely what makes me love it. I don’t consider myself a ‘religious’ person in a conventional sense, but more in a way that if you believe in ‘science’ and ‘love’, you got to believe in the ‘unknown’ (and the open-ended ‘possibilities’), you know? It’s just not possible to be otherwise, I feel. In any case, this reminds me of Mallo’s The Book of All Loves. Anyone picking that up wanting anything conventionally (pop) romantic will be well disappointed. Same goes with this, but in the direction of ‘mysticism’ (or whatever it is to one? It’s a little subjective, no? But not in a way that feels ‘off’, on the contrary — it is rather otherwise).

‘Ecstasy is what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us. And sadness does cling to us. Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force, a violence, which drains our energy and dissipates our capacity for belief and for joy. The world deafens us with its noise; our eyes sting from the ever-enlarging incoherence of information and disinformation and the constant presence of war. We all feel, we all live, within the poverty of contemporary experience. This is a leaden time, a heavy time, a time of dearth. As a result, we feel miserable, anxious, wretched, bored.’

‘The thinkers to whom this book is dedicated did not see themselves as enemies of reason. Neither did they think of themselves as heretics. On the contrary. They were intensely religious people whose practices and beliefs grew out of their commitment to living the truth of their life. Nor were the mystics traders in the kind of occult, hermetic, and commercially lucrative wisdom which has proved so trendy in recent times. Mysticism is not a religion, it is a tendency, a distillation of existing devotional practice, textual interpretation, theological teaching, and conceptual, philosophical reflection.’

‘My offer to the reader in this book is simple: wouldn’t you like to have a taste of this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.’

‘The point is that mysticism is conceptual articulation that can become part of the fabric of our existence, the very movement of its breath.’

Critchley quotes Lispector in this one. And (because of that) by default, I feel I should be giving this a five. Maybe I will come back and bump it up to a five later. Have heard great things about Dillard but never read/browsed any of her work, but now that I am teased with all the wonderful lines that Critchley has decided to include in the text, I am extremely intrigued. I think I need a bit of Dillard in my life. Tremendously fiery metaphors with regards to all things existential — tempting to say the least.

‘One writes in order to disappear, evade, merge, or become something other. As Clarice Lispector puts it, “I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest” (the word “rest” will be important in relation to Julian). Of course, this is the source of my interest in Anne Carson and in mystical practice: I too only want to disappear completely, to annihilate myself, to find the condition of rest. But the self keeps getting in the way, like the earth’s shadow falling across the moon.’

‘(Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time. — Dillard) The line that separates eternity from time can be glossed or crossed through violence, the violence of language, the violence of incarnation, the scandal of particularity that cuts through word to flesh.’

‘Let’s be clear, although this will sound like raving: to write is to try and immolate yourself. It is to go at your life with a broad-axe, to become a wick for the sake of the flame. I take what Dillard says very seriously and I don’t care if it sounds romantic—what is art without a decent dollop of romantic naivety? Some endless morality play of social manners?’

‘To write is to try and set yourself on fire, to seek to immolate yourself. The name, the identity, the interiority, the subjectivity of the writer or the artist is of absolutely no interest. One writes without a face. As Dillard puts it, in her wonderfully extreme way, either a writer’s life goes up in flames in the work, or it does not. And if it does not, then the work is a failure. But if it does burst into fire, then it is the flame that we look at. The work and not the wick. The art and not the artist.’

‘To write, to try and craft meanings in words, even to philosophize in the right climate, is not to commit yourself to a search for happiness or even fulfillment. It is not fun. You are not serving some higher expressive purpose nor are you giving shape to some transformative normative political vision. These are comforting careerist illusions. Rather, to write is to lead a non-life devoted to the possibility of fire, of being engulfed by flames.’

‘To write is to try and get yourself out of the way so that the reader can see the moth, or the peregrine, or Julie Norwich, or the godhead. And the people one writes for (if one is lucky enough to find some) do not care about you. They care about the fire. The flame and not the wick. As they should. So, the only question when it comes to writing is whether you are going to try and set yourself on fire or not.’

The bits about music as/being (or rather the most/the closest thing to) a religious experience remind me of something else that I read recently — in particular, Anton Hur’s Toward Eternity. Read that, and go figure (the connection/similarities)? Hands down (easily) one of the best books I’ve encountered/read this year. Superbly well-written that, and to think of it (now that I have just finished Critchley’s) — it would be such a complementary text to this one. Or this one to that one, the sentiment remains the same either way. Another thing worth mentioning is the introduction of/to the lives of ‘saints’. More interesting than I would have (before) imagined/thought. A little unhinged honestly (excuse my sacrilegious comments) — but in a fully entertaining, and beautifully absurd way. I suppose it's a little ‘enlightening’ too (how fitting though).

‘This book tries to describe a countermovement. A movement not from doubt to lovelessness, but from dereliction to delight, from woe to weal. Pushing ourselves aside, ascending above and outside ourselves, we will try to find something else, some kind of joy, some kind of liberation and elevation, a sense that, despite everything, all shall be well.’

‘It is not just a question of an intellectual belief in the existence of God as some kind of metaphysical postulate which can be affirmed or disputed. Rather, mysticism is existential and practical. It is—and this can serve as a rough and ready definition—the cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits, your usual fancies and imaginings and see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically.’

‘Fine, you might say, as long as you believe in God, as Julian does. And perhaps that is right. Perhaps the vision of love provided by Julian is easier to understand if it is shaped by a divinity. Yet, what I will try and show in this book is how mysticism lives on as an aesthetic experience, in the world of enchantment opened in art, poetry and—especially—music.’

‘—though I listened to music throughout its writing. We know that the modern world is a violently disenchanted swirl shaped by the speculative flux of money that presses in on all sides. Yet, when we listen to the music that we love, the world seems reanimated, bursting with sense, utterly alive. The only proof of animism I know is music. When we listen, it is as if the world falls under the spell of a kind of natural magic. In music, the cosmos feels divinely infused.’

‘Music can grip us with the energy of a religious conversion. Once it is heard, one never experiences the world in quite the same way.’

It would be a bit of a shame to exclude the chunks where Critchley goes on and on about Hamlet ever so passionately, obsessively, but no less wonderfully. Makes me crave a bit of Shakespeare. Can’t say I’m a massive fan of Billy S., but (also won’t be honest/fair to deny that) his stuff always leaves a lot of crumbs for thoughts, and that can be quite — a riveting and rewarding experience, to put most simply.

‘All is always woe, seen in a certain reassuring twilight. Misery never lets you down. Melancholy is a boon companion, reliable in how regularly it shows up in our lives. Nothing is more reassuring than giving in to our own heaviness, the weight of our being that drags us down and from which there seems to be no escape. As Hamlet’s endlessly chattering soliloquies attest, there is even a perverse consolation in feeling tragically riveted to oneself. It is often what passes in our culture for being smart, a vastly overrated quality in my opinion.’

‘Take Hamlet, and for argument’s sake let’s say he’s the most intelligent person we could ever imagine meeting or even being. He is a creature of doubt where all the grounds for certainty in the world and in himself have evaporated in verbal and physical violence, fear, paranoia, and murderous crime. Hamlet is the anti-mystic par excellence, who seeks to control everything with his solitary cascades of reasoning, with words, words, words. With his doubt, Hamlet kills in himself all love: for Ophelia, for his mother, for the world, and for himself. Man delights not him, no nor woman neither. And we, most Hamlet-like, spin downwards into a melancholy that sits in brood on us like an all-pervading toxic cloud. We find the world to be a sterile promontory, an unweeded garden full of things dead, rank, and rotting.’

Left below some of the ‘saintly bits’ that I found most charming — fascinating, no? Or are most just more well-read/well-informed (and much less ignorant) about these ‘religious/historical accounts’ than I? Very likely the latter.

‘At her own funeral mass at the age of twenty-one, Christina suddenly revived. Her body rose into the air and levitated to the ceiling until the mass was over. Christina felt such loathing for humanity that she fled into the wilderness and lived from milk from her own breasts. She threw herself into burning-hot ovens, ate only garbage and immersed herself in River Meuse while it was frozen. For two days, she even hanged herself from the gallows. She was astonishing.’

‘Her experiences have a terrifying, violent intensity. She spends an awful lot of time screaming. Where Dionysius is the progenitor of a theology of darkness and negation, Angela practices a corporeal apophaticism, literally tearing away at herself to bring about a bodily darkness. To our eyes, reading Angela is like watching a horror movie. Her visions culminate in her crawling into the darkness of the side wound of Christ.’

And finally to conclude — Critchley’s very well-composed discourse on the relationship between/of ‘breath’ and ‘consciousness’ that are so very Clarice Lispector coded. The Stream of Life ? Breath of Life? Love it, love them all. The text/writing’s got a certain ‘meditative’ quality without being — how shall it put it? Without lacking an intellectual heart? (Awfully and rather inaccurately phrased, but something close to that, ‘that’ adjacent).

‘Breath is the original form of “spirit.” The philosopher’s “I think, therefore I am,” might be more properly conceived as “I breathe and thus it is.” Consciousness is a limited and unhelpfully restricted and dualistic way of conceiving what William James calls “the stream of life,” a stream that embraces both the breath of our thoughts and the vast, slow-breathing cosmos that enfolds us—breath is the original form of “spirit,” and Kant’s “I think” might be more properly understood as “I breathe.” Consciousness is a limited and unhelpfully dualistic way of conceiving what James calls “the stream of life,” a stream that has to embrace both the breath of our thoughts and the vast slow-breathing cosmos that enfolds us.’

Also not to forget, Critchley’s mention of J.A. Baker’s masterpiece, The Peregrine (and also Werner Herzog — what a fucking treat). One of my favourite parts from the book, without any doubt.

‘The work of art empties itself in a fantasy of self-annihilation. Both divinization and death find the form of beauty. As the protagonist (who might be dying, and who is clearly suffering physically), in J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine puts it at the point of his transformation into the bird of prey which he has been pursuing: “Beauty is vapor from the pit of death.” In the self’s death leap, the self is finally released into what it has been seeking: a sacrificial self-immolation. An ecstatic truth which is fatal. This is not a social truth demanding objective embodiment in a stale norm, but a truth of illumination that requires a subjective act of imagination and self-transformation. Here, perhaps, eternity clips time.’

‘Dave Rahm’s final dive is a work of art as the riding of a line, shedding a ribbon in space, a wordless, selfless act that inscribes the air and dissolves in fire. It is transient, improvised and evanescent. Rahm, like the moth, like Julie Norwich, like indeed every hero in the movies of Werner Herzog, immolates himself in a loud band of beauty. At this point of self-annihilation, Dillard sees a liberty that is only possible when one is filled with the Absolute. Here death and divinization fuse in an unsettling and inordinately powerful way, a way that my friend Tom McCarthy and I used to describe as necronautical, where beauty is a downward plunge into the space of death and art is its song.’

Finally, not entirely sure if it’s just his ‘tone’ that I really, really ‘like’ or it’s just his writing/work as it is — in its entirety— in general(?). Regardless, I feel it always leaves one with an indescribably good feeling afterwards, post-reading. Felt a very similar thing with his other one, Memory Theatre I reckon. That one packs a bit of an unhinged morsel somewhere in the middle as well. Most of it he/the narrator discusses/goes on and on ever so ‘seriously’ about philosophy and existential matters, and then very ‘smoothly’ pops in a cheeky, sweet lozenge of astrological ravings (or whatever that is) in the midst of everything for the readers to ‘suck on’ on the side. How bloody unhinged. And/but I love (that about him/his work).

‘—the last box, marked Pisces—My star sign—There was a compendious number of obscene epitaphs written in Latin denouncing several of Michel’s academic enemies, of which one has many in France, bien sûr—Then, at the bottom of the box, I discovered a stack of what initially looked like unframed lithographic prints on large pieces of stiff card. On closer inspection, however, they were a series of circular charts covered with numbers, dates and masses of cramped handwriting. Each chart was arranged in concentric circles. Each circle was intersected by irregularly divided lines radiating out from the centre which was left empty apart from some writing. Knowing Michel’s predilection for astrology, I assumed they were star charts—I felt a chill, as if someone had walked over my grave. I knew I’d stumbled onto something interesting. But the charts were impossible to read.’ — from Memory Theatre .

[Adam Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: An agnostic explores the history and philosophy of Christian mysticism to understand how mystical experience seems to be a part of being human.

This is an odd book. Simon Critchley is an agnostic philosopher writing primarily about Christian mysticism because he wants to explore the ways that mystical experience inform what it means to be human without really grappling with whether God is involved. I am going to start at the end because I think that helps to make sense of the project. Critchley moves to modern art, particularly punk music, as a type of mystical experience that he has felt, that transcends the traditional rational categories of philosophy and experience.

In some ways he is coming at the argument that Dallas Willard makes about the reality of a category of spiritual knowledge in reverse. Willard wants to suggest that divine revelation and experience are trustworthy types of knowledge and experience. I think in both Critchley and Willard's books, the rough point that the category exists has been made sufficiently to agree. But the next step is harder. Once you agree that there is a category, what do you do with it? Willard is mostly arguing against a type of hyper rationalism that I don't think carries much weight. And Critchley is arguing that the mystical experience of feeling one with "God" or the world or those around us, while also getting a sense of divine love and belonging that he associates with the mystical experience in part of the human experience and a good that draws us away from hyper individualism and maybe even depression and loneliness.

My on-going reading project on Christian discernment had little help from this book because my project is at least in part about the evaluation of that mystical experience or Willard's spiritual knowledge and I have just naturally assumed that they already exist when I am asking the question about how we evaluate them.

There was an interesting discussion of mystical experience that draws one into a relationship with the divine or infinite and the type of mystical experience that results in the annihilation of the self within the divine. Historically within the Christian tradition, both of these metaphors have been used, but I personally think the former is more aligned with the Christian tradition than the later. This can somewhat be connected to apophatic and cataphatic conceptions of our understanding of God and whether we can really use description to speak of either God or mystical experience or can we only talk about what is not. In this sense, these are philosophical questions, but at the same time, philosophy apart from theology has limits to what it can say.

Critchley is not overtly making a Christian argument and he is (by his own admission) using Christian terms and history because he and the Western philosophical tradition has been shaped by Christianity more than eastern philosophy and he has less connection to those traditions. But as a Christian, some of the discussion seems to just miss the point because he isn't going to that next step. There is no real discussion of eschatology here and I think that matters to the way he talks about mysticism. For instance when he discusses Julian of Norwich's negation of creation to affirm it, the tension that he was trying to draw is minimized by affirming creation, but holding it loosely because of the greater "realness" of the coming world.

One of the other reviewers on Goodreads talks about the way that CS Lewis uses Joy as a type of mystical reality, and I agree but I also think that Lewis' description of heaven in The Great Divorce as being more real is also a type of understanding of the way that mystical experience is a revealing in part of how the world and human experience will be "more" not just a negation of the creatureliness of the physical world.

Critchley does not ignore the modern world. He has good discussion of TS Elliot and Annie Dillard, but he speaks of them as writing about the mystical world and nature not experiencing it. The experience of the mystical that is an experience of a personal God and not just an experience of oneness with nature or beauty would require more than what Critchley can give because of his agnosticism, or at least his reluctance to fully embrace Christianity. For him, that mystical experience of God is not part of the modern discussion of mysticism.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/on-mysticism/

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

The medieval Christian mystics don't really do anything for me, but Simon Critchley makes pretty much anything well worth reading, especially when he moves into art and poetry as contemporary vehicles of mysticism.

[Bodies in the Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

I downloaded this audiobook from NetGalley and was so interested in the author’s opinions that I listened to it straight in one day.

I’ve read quite a few books and articles on Mysticism, especially women mystics. They’ve all been written by theologians and / or feminist historians, and this is the first time I’ve read something by a philosopher.

Because of this, I finished with a very long list of additions to my To Be Read list - Critchley’s interest is not how mystical experiences bring people closer to God but in how they impact on their lives. He states up-front that he believes mysticism is a way to combat the sadness he takes to be something that naturally creeps up on us in our lives.

Naturally, in making his own argument he cites other people who have written about mystical experiences from a human-focused point of view. There’s a huge amount about narrative and autobiography that I want to read in print (as opposed to listening as I did today).

Certainly, I’ll be buying a copy of the printed book to delve into again and add to my “Julian of Norwich” shelf on my bookcase.

Many thanks to publishers Profile Books and NetGalley for my copy of the audioARC in return for an honest review.

Three word review: mysticism is human.

[Divine Angubua · Rating 5 out of 5]

within this very simple but very dense text is a hunger to push against sadness and overcome melancholy, to liberate the writer-reader from pain and achieve, through mystic or aesthetic experience what Critchley calls “idiot glee” or “sheer mad joy”: an ecstatic sensation of idiocy which will save us from ourselves and from thinking the worst of others. It is also a critique of philosophy’s fetish for reason, the obsession with rigor which turns into rigor mortis, in its reliance on un-reason.

A profound achievement and articulation of contradiction, a delicious feast of emotion.

[Eve · Rating 1 out of 5]

a really quite bad book about really interesting stuff. how did this get published?

using this book to make a list of other books you want to read is probably the best thing you can do with it...

sorry to be harsh, but really...

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most compelling books I've read in quite a while. I've dabbled in the histories of mysticism, inspired partly by Dante, partly by Jungian dreamwork, and partly by Thomas Merton's fascination with the connections between Christianity and Asian approaches to related issues. Critchley's beautifully written, deeply researched book brought numerous threads that had been disconnected into much clearer focus. It's not because he does the focusing himself; he has a broad range, but his emphasis is clearly on the Christian tradition and western philosophy more generally.

By delving as deeply as he does into the traditions emanating from St. John of the Cross and, most importantly, Julian of Norwich, whose "all shall be well" serves as a mantra, Critchley invites readers to engage the questions surrounding the relationship between the material and spiritual spheres--ultimately not really separate or separable--in relation to their own experience. I loved his closing thoughts on music (and aesthetic experience more generally) as the key to understanding late 20th and 21st century mysticisms. His taste isn't mine--though he did get me to swing back to the Krautrock bands I hadn't listened to for quite a while and I'm glad I did. But that doesn't matter. The dynamics of music, which has the power to calm all the anxieties that assail us in this more than a bit screwed up world.

Critchley's writing is a humbling model for those of us who worked in universities, but want to express the ideas that matter to us without jargon or simplifications. The prose feels conversational, but it can drop into profound philosophical excursions without scattering riders and readers along the path. (He'd never mix up a metaphor like that.). He's not a literary scholar but his readings of Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets stand with the best of the literary critical genre. Loved the way he draws on Caroline Bynum's scholarship to contemplate the image of Jesus as Mother and the significance of material objects in devotional practice.

Ultimately, Critchley seeks not to resolve the seeming and real contradictions in mystical experience, but to paradoxically erase himself and the writers he loves from the foreground in order to open the path to a deeper apprehension of something that can't be but has to be written or said. He calls this "decreation" and the zen masters I love would nod their understanding. As he writes in response to T.S. Eliot's phrase "Where you are is where you are not," "this is not a contradiction which resolves itself into a higher synthesis, but an oxymoronic logic that opens onto an abyss."

[Trojan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a tension throughout between the Christian tradition and Critchley's effort to maintain agnosticism. Underlying it all is the question, 'Is it possible to have the 'mystical' elements of religious faith if faith is lacking?' He spends the second half focussing more and more on poetry and music, in an effort to answer this with a 'Yes'. Yet the penultimate chapter ends, 'And we are the music for as long as it lasts: Rabboni', echoing Mary Magdalene in John's account of the resurrection, while tells us in the postscript that 'perhaps we can experience this enjoyment, not in the transitory excitations that press in from all sides, but with the deep, abiding persistence of love'. Why does Critchley, in his most lyrical and important passages turn back to faith? Even when he focusses on music, he keeps his attention on the specifically Christian within it. Perhaps religious faith, even if subconsciously held, is necessary for mystical experience after all.

There are, unsurprisingly, a few areas where we disagree. Firstly, he follows McGinn's distinction between 'two forms of union with the divine': '(i) a union of the of the creature with the creator, the finite with the infinite in a larger, more complete, fulness of substance' and '(ii) a union of indistinction where God and the soul merge by virtue of the soul annihilating itself, and perhaps ultimately with the idea of God as substance annihilating itself as well' (pp.51-52). Either of these could be taken in the wrong way, if we are considering Christian mystics: (ii) in particular might be a mischaracterisation of Christian mysticism, as the 'annihilation of the soul', or the 'death of the self' is always a death that leads to the fuller life, since it is in surrender to the divine that perfect freedom is found. What it is not is a simple 'decreation'; it is a remaking, a resurrection.

This issue becomes particularly acute in his description of Julian of Norwich: 'she affirms it [creation] in order to negate it', Critchley writes. True, but he misses the following step - that it is precisely out of negating creation that it is most affirmed. Such thinking recurs throughout the book, and a little more academic attention to the mystics' theological ideas of resurrection, incarnation and the trinity would have cleared it up (he never considers them as having logical coherence, as opposed to emotional or 'spiritual' appeal). But that is the underlying problem - Critchley is unwilling to engage with truth-claims or the system of faith that the mystics believed in, and instead tries to take the mystics on their own, leading to misunderstanding. In his own words, 'Religion ... is inseparable from collective social practice - what we call church.' (p288) In considering the mystical heights of religion without journeying through the church below, there is a skewed presentation of what the mystics themselves would have considered their faith.

Related to this is the peculiar fact that his consideration of Christian mysticism stops after the Middle Ages. He doesn't spend much time wondering how the Church has continued to exist, and whether there are still many people with similar 'mystical' experiences alive today, who reach them not through music or literature, but through meditation on Christ. The Christian 'mysticism' he presents is exotic and far away; he finds its modern counterpart in music and poetry.

But far-off medieval mysticism lives on in what CS Lewis called religious joy. This might be more prosaic and less aesthetically pleasing than the highs of music and poetry, but it is life to millions. What about the Charismatic Movement? The mid-century boom in Religious Life? Why are these left out? The mystical faith he describes is vibrant even today, but he considers only the great mystics of centuries past. Perhaps modern Christian mystics might have ideas as to how to achieve the 'ecstatic' as well. Why should this century just have poetry and music? How can he largely leave faith out of a book on a religious phenomenon?

The flip side of this is his belief that Philosophy is limited because of its neglect of such areas. This is true, but philosophy is a developed discipline that doesn't deal in revealed truth or subjective experience of the divine. There is a different subject - theology - that specializes in precisely that. Philosophy doesn't suddenly need to become more mystical (theology has that covered); we need to become more mystical. Philosophy is philosophy, and is doing just fine.

I wonder if Critchley has read C S Lewis' 'Surprised by Joy'. What Critchley sees as the 'mystical' and 'ecstatic' Lewis sees, with the typical linguistic restraint of a good early-20th C. academic, as 'joy'. Lewis' analysis eventually lands on religious conversion, which he describes with much less overt dramatism than Critchley describes his own lack of conversion. Lewis goes in the opposite direction from Critchley's book - from aesthetic 'joy' to religious faith, rather than the mysticism of Eckhart to post-punk ecstasy. I know which I find more coherent.

So... an interesting book, but not necessarily correct.
Comparison with McGilchrist might be constructive.

[Bogi Takács]

Did not finish. I expected it to be Christian-centric, but I did not expect it to be so author-centric; Critchley constantly universalizes his experience. (This was especially frustrating about the COVID lockdowns early in the book.) He also brings up a lot of intriguing topics that he then drops - it might be best to read this book while looking up the interesting tangents. It was an impulse borrow from my public library's new acquisitions shelf, sometimes those work out for me, sometimes they don't - this was sadly one of the latter.
___
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library

Find me elsewhere: My Patreon | My Bluesky account

[Linards Jansons · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Palimpsest’. For me, this word represents one – but only one – of the many things I’ve taken away from this wonderfully engaging book. But first, a brief description of what Critchley’s Mysticism is all about.

We generally associate mysticism with some kind of personal religious experience. Mystics are those whose intense devotion has led them close to the divine, who like St Paul have been “taken up to the third heaven”. Looking at it this way, mysticism results in some kind of vision, even union, with the divine. While acknowledging this dimension, Critchley seeks to expand the notion of mysticism as ‘religious experience’ in several important ways.

First mysticism is not only religious. In a post-belief, even post-God era, “mysticism lives on as aesthetic experience, in the world of enchantment opened in art, poetry and – especially – music”. That somehow we might push past the confines of self and live ecstatically, that somehow we can learn to take “a sheer, mad joy, at the fact of life and the world”, that just somehow, we are brought to the realization that “All shall be well” – these possibilities do not just belong to a privileged religious minority. Such an expanded vision and sense of self (or loss of self) can take place through poetry, nature, art and music.

Second, mysticism is more than experience. While not denying that many mystics have been passively subject to overwhelming and often inexpressible experiences, the greater part of mysticism consists of a pattern of life that one actively cultivates: a discipline, an ascesis, a set of meditative practices. Not only in Christianity, but in many religious traditions, such practices involve reading, prayer, fasting, meditation, silence, liturgical observance, and so on.

These two points are just the bare bones definition of a phenomenon that Critchley enfleshes and nuances throughout the book with considerable verve, passion and humour. I have to confess that initially the notion of a ‘secular mysticism’ sounded a bit worn and dull, like Alain de Botton and others trying to retrofit the various benefits of religion for contemporary unbelievers. However, it was nothing like that at all. The resulting, multilayered mysticism that Critchley’s advances is quite intensely religious and spiritual.

Which is strange. While Critchley, by his own admission, is not a triumphal atheist, he’s certainly no card carrying believer. And I don’t suspect him of being a clandestine apologist either. But he does confess to an “intense fascination for religion, especially Christianity” which in the context of the “fiercely secular world of British academic philosophy” has always felt to him “like a slightly grubby personal passion”. Somehow, I don’t think he needs to be concerned for his reputation at this point in his career. So he confesses “to an almost intoxicating fascination with the concept of incarnation” and devotes many pages to the flesh and blood of Christ as meditated on and experienced by the mystical tradition in Christianity.

Mostly, and this comprises the bulk and heart of the book, Critchley pursues this fascination via close readings of some key Christian mystics. A short section on Meister Eckhart introduces the apophatic tradition (more on this below), but the heroine of the book is Julian of Norwich who exemplifies many of the mystical dimensions that so captivates the author: a fundamental optimism (‘All shall be well’), the notion of a love that is greater than thought and precedes our existence, and a deeply aesthetic understanding of the incarnation. The 50 or so pages devoted to Julian serves not only as an excellent introduction to the mystic herself, but strongly suggests that the mystical tradition is full of promise, not only for the religious life, but for philosophical reflection as well.

Most of the contemporary figures discussed are in some way inspired by Julian. Sections on authors Anne Carson and Annie Dillard bring out the autobiographical nature of mysticism (Julian is the first female “I” in English literature), as well as the vexed status of the self in the writing process. Dillard’s mysticism “is the effort to find a holy firmness at the core of things that connects those things to God and to us” and T.S. Eliot sought to weave words so finely that the poetry itself would become redundant, serving only as “a fabric so diaphanous, so that it could be seen through”; or in the imagery of ‘The Four Quartets’ the struggle via words to arrive at “the still point of the turning world”.

Many other individuals figure in Critchley’s pursuit to articulate and justify an aesthetic expression of mysticism: the philosopher William James (of whom Critchley is particularly fond), medievalist Caroline Bynum, anthropologist Mary Douglas, and musicians Nick Cave and Julian Cope.

So, what is a ‘palimpsest’? Harking back to pre delete key days, a palimpsest is a manuscript on which a new text is written over a scrubbed out older text. And the point is? Mystical texts were endlessly copied, circulated and recopied. Every time this happened, the text was reinterpreted, experienced anew, thought through from a different angle, and passed on to a new audience. And because this process is nothing if not personal “the mystical palimpsest is more authoritative than the original text”. Does it matter what the original text may have said? Sure. But what really counts is how whatever truth that text contains passes through and into the heart of the current reader. As opposed to “a fetishism for the original text….mysticism, by contrast, lives through an ongoing, transformative history of reception”. Why this insight proved being so important to me, I’m still working out. Let me just say that it dislodged a particularly persistent hermeneutical hang up of mine.

Another take home. It is telling that Julian’s mystical experience lasted all of 11 hours (in 1373, during the month of May, one day from 3pm to 4am). But she reflected on it for the next several decades. The sequence her Short Text (which recounts her 16 visions) to the Long Text (in which she elaborated their meaning) is the movement from experience to theology, from the book of experience to the book of experience. There were no more startling irruptions of the divine for Julian, but there was a lifetime of reflection leading to theological insights no less startling for her era. And it is the reflection, not just the original visions, which have proved to be transformative for later generations.

A third mentionable insight relates to ‘apophatic theology’, or ‘negative theology’ (the via negativa). This is a theological approach which acknowledges that no words, thoughts or concepts can describe the reality we name ‘God’. Says Eckhart: “If you visualise anything or if anything enters your mind, that is not God; indeed he is neither this nor that”. God is neither father, nor a ‘he’ nor even any kind of supreme ‘being’ (and certainly not a toaster). But if words cannot depict the inexpressible, why use words at all? Critchley discusses the somewhat paradoxical way that apophatic theology puts into words what cannot be put into words. Rather than saying less, apophatic theology circles around the unknowable with an excess of words, enlisting hyperbole and superlative, contradiction and antithesis (God, for Eckhart, is thus a ‘brilliant darkness’ or a ‘dazzling obscurity’). In fact, all poetic and symbolic expressions of the divine can be thought of as ‘negative theology’. God is all poetry.

(I’m reminded of Les Murray’s wonderful poem, Poetry and Religion: “God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned”)

Of (final) note is that most of the mystics, authors and scholars discussed are women. This is deliberate, for Critchley is questioning many of the assumptions which philosophy tells itself about its origin and nature. As an antidote, mysticism is “a tradition that has been underacknowledged by philosophy, a tradition that is intimate, personal, affective, visionary, embodied, autobiographical, and substantially maintained by women”.

There are many ways to address the deepest questions of life, and to approach the living of the one life we have been given (our find ourselves “thrown” into: Critchley is a Heidegger scholar, after all). One way, taken by Western philosophy, is the path of critique and of the hermeneutic of suspicion, a “cult of clarity” with its “codes of parsimony, rigor and validity”. I’m the first to acknowledge the value of this tradition. But another approach, advocated in this book, is the way informed by mysticism: a way of the heart, and not only of the mind, the path of love, when knowledge has exhausted itself, the choice to surrender, when what we thought we could control has slipped through our fingers.

And if you’re Critchley, this also includes getting off on Krautrock (and yes, I wrote this review listening to Cluster and Can).

[Aevjsi1273 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 - dostałam trochę podsumowania jak i nowych punktów zaczepienia, jednakże z samej książki wypływa strumień myśli i poszukiwań, których autor nie potrafi spiąć i przyjąć w całości, bez wymigiwania.

[aymee brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

super interesting but i wish he spent more time discussing what i thought was the best part: mysticism through aesthetic experience, namely through art and music.

[Naava Guaraca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened on audiobook and I need to reread in a physical way bc I had shit to underline

Loved the parts about julian of norwich/annie dillard/ts eliot the most, and loved how he finished by likening listening to music as the closest we humans get to the feeling of ecstasy. Such a provocative read I feel like I learned so much and have just scratched the surface.

I’m so intrigued by the idea of mysticism as needing to revolve around a god figure and he does make it clear he’s analyzing through the lens of western christianity.. but still it leaves me wanting more by way of eastern religions/anything other than the abrahamic religions.

[VoHooman · Rating 5 out of 5]

این ریویو بر اساس نسخه انگلیسی کتاب نوشته شده است و در حال حاضر بنده اطلاعی ندارم که این کتاب ترجمه شده باشد.

این کتاب یکی از جذاب‌ترین کتاب‌هایی است که من اخیراً خوانده‌ام. در این کتاب، کریچلی به شکلی بسیار شخصی به بررسی صوفی‌گری (ترجمه‌ای برای Mysticism، گرچه به نظرم چندان دقیق نیست) می‌پردازد. صوفی‌گری مورد نظر او، اما، مسیحیت قرون وسطا است که به نظر من از علاقه شخصی کریچلی به زبان انگلیسی میانه نشأت می‌گیرد. نثر کتاب فوق‌العاده جذاب، روان و گیراست. گرچه بخش‌هایی از این کتاب چندان مورد علاقه من نبود، اما نگارش آن مرا دوباره به خود جذب می‌کرد.

محتوای کتاب حتی از نگارش آن نیز جذاب‌تر است. کریچلی در ابتدا خواننده را به میان پاندمی سال ۲۰۲۰ می‌برد؛ جایی که انسان معاصر، تنها و دورافتاده، پس از "مرگ خدا" در تکاپوی کشف حقیقتی از خود و جهان پیرامون خود است. کریچلی سپس خواننده را در سفری از قرون وسطا و مایستر اکهارت تا به حال و تی. اس. الیوت می‌برد و در این میان، سعی می‌کند مفاهیمی چون جدایی (Detachment)، بازآفرینی (Decreation)، رهایی (Release) و در نهایت محو شدن خود (Self) را از دیدگاه‌های مختلف بررسی کند. قسمت‌هایی از این کتاب که مربوط به مایستر اکهارت و جولین نورویچ بود، برای من به‌ویژه بسیار گیرا بودند.

در نهایت، کریچلی آن برانگیختگی مورد نظر خود را در موسیقی پیدا می‌کند، به‌ویژه موسیقی پانک انگلیسی. در این بخش، کریچلی به از بین رفتن آئین‌ها (Rituals) اشاره می‌کند، که مرا به یاد بیونگ چول-هان و مرگ آئین‌ها در دنیای مدرن می‌اندازد.

در کل، این کتاب را به علاقه‌مندان اکیداً پیشنهاد می‌کنم.

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s enjoyable to read, but to be honest, it feels a bit unfocused and meandering. The transition to argue that art, in this case music, functions as an experience of 21st-century secular mystical ecstasy seems, in my view, entirely incomparable to the ecstatic and devotional experiences of medieval Christian mystics. For me, if we consider the trajectory of pre- and post-Kantian philosophy, the experience of listening to music falls within the realm of post-Kantian aesthetic sublimity. In contrast, medieval mystics built their ecstatic experiences through devotion, which might be incomprehensible to those who do not share their level of faith. This, to my mind, is a crucial point when discussing mysticism: faith and belief are not afforded sufficient space for philosophical reflection, including in this book. That said, I learned a great deal about some of the fascinating mystical characters within medieval Christendom through this book.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

very disappointed. details to follow

[Hugo Collingridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting if rather challenging book. The author discusses medieval mystics like Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart but also what he sees as the mystical aspects of TS Elliot's poetry. He talks about Julian Cope and 'Krautrock', arguing that listening to music can open a door to the mystical, which is something I would agree with. I'll admit that there were chunks of the book that I didn't completely understand but I'm glad I stuck with it. If nothing else, it introduced me to 'Hallogallo' by Neu!.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Critchley makes a compelling case for adding a little mysticism in our lives: an unleashing, ecstatically.

In particular, I like the playfulness being advocated: "The bloodless duty of critique in the service of Enlightenment blinds us to what is rich, strange, and provocative about the tradition of thinking and experience that we label as mystical. The obsession with rigor ossifies into rigor mortis, an inflexible unwillingness or obsessional rigidity that refuses to acknowledge vast swathes of human experience which are felt to be undeniably real but cannot defend themselves readily in the tribunal of reason. ... We forget that in addition to the identification of philosophy with dutiful critique, there is also a manic philosophical tradition in the Platonic sense of mania as transcendence, exaltation, even the madness of love."

You can hear Zarathustra in this. "Mysticism becomes the basis for a cosmopoiesis, a world making, where mind and the book of nature poetically converge."

[Aislinn Noble · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think much of my brain space will be occupied by this for years to come. If you have spoken to me once in the last 6 months you know I am freaking out — this made me feel like that means something? unification with higher power/surrender to feeling, I am doing this (I think).

The selfs desire to disappear into God requires elaborate acts of literary subterfuge which are doomed to fail… successfully. Self annihilation ineluctably leads to self assertion. The self, in seeking to make itself disappear, keeps reappearing, ghost-like, center stage.

Love that shit

[vr reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

reminds me why I got into literature years ago. Critchley's note that mysticism has much in common with literary modernity, especially that of Pound & Eliot, hit very close to home. not quite intellectual self-help, but inviting, beckoning, to that point where timelessness intersects with time. may this book find you as it found me, suddenly.

[Gigi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Worth it for the bibliography, which is probably the most readable chapter.

[Zane Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are plenty of folks that won’t enjoy this book, but those that do enjoy it will LOVE it. I think Critchley and I are tuned to very similar vibes and share many sympathies. He’s a marvelous writer, conveying a sense of sharing something he is excited about in a very generous and accessible way. Maybe he’s annoyed at that description, that he left too much of himself in the book, but it’s joining him on the journey that makes it so pleasurable.

[Simha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leí este libro después de Capitalist Realism y Post-Capitalist Desire de Mark Fisher, y creo que esa secuencia no fue casual. Fisher insiste en que el capitalismo no solo captura la economía o el trabajo, sino también el deseo. Justo cuando leí la contraportada de On mysticism pensé que quizá ahí podría haber una fisura.

Simon Critchley no ofrece una guía espiritual ni una celebración de la experiencia mística. Más bien, hace una genealogía filosófica y poética del misticismo como una forma radical de disolución del yo. Ahí el cruce con Fisher me parece muy interesante: ¿será que hay un alza en la demanda de experiencias místicas —ceremonias de ayahuasca, chocohongos, mindfulness etc etc— justo porque hay un hartazgo con el deseo colonizado por el mercado y lo individual? (Esto no se responde en el libro, pero creo que Critchley sí apunta a ello en un par de momentos)

Algunas ideas a registrar del libro en sí:

El misticismo no es un fenómeno religioso fijo, sino un concepto moderno, inventado para aislar ciertas experiencias religiosas como si fueran raras, marginales o irracionales. En realidad, esas experiencias están en el centro de muchas tradiciones, y nombrarlas “místicas” puede ser una forma de relegarlas a lo fantástico y ya.

La experiencia mística es una inmediatez mediata. No es que se acceda a lo divino sin más, siempre hay mediación del ritual, los conceptos, incluso el cuerpo. Pero tampoco se puede simular. Es algo que exalta y a la vez disuelve la subjetividad.

Me pareció fascinante el capítulo de Juliana de Norwich, su imagen de Dios como madre y su teología de la ropa. Me pregunté muchas veces cuál sería la contraparte judía de una figura como ella. ¿Tal vez el concepto de Shejiná?

Y bueno, fue una lectura medio distraída y lenta, pero estoy segura que en algún momento la volveré a visitar.

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is, quite frankly, a profaning of the whole concept of mysticism in a very weird attempt to point it toward nihilism. This book is like reading an atheist-philosopher trying to intellectualize that which is accessible only through devout belief, which is something that seemingly eludes this author.

Hence, we are left with the ramblings of an erudite philosopher trying to figure out how to “believe”, but refusing to take the leap of faith that requires jettisoning the intellect, at least for a bit. As a result, what we get here is a cold, sterile imprint of faithlessness that is void of the spiritual fecundity necessary to blossom into a passionate religious experience. The closest Critchley can get to this sort of epiphany is the elation he feels in certain forms of music. Critchely is certainly not a mystic, but he ends this book with some marvelous music recommendations which I’ve come to enjoy.

Love vs Doctrine vs Intellect

However, I can’t altogether dismiss Critchely’s effort here. Critchley does explore the power of love, most particularly in his examination of the lives of some of the traditional Christian mystics.

There are those who recognize God as love and who embrace love as the true spiritual power necessary for knowing God. Alternatively, there are those who practice a religion of rules, professions, commitments, rituals, and theologies such that they sometimes lose sight of love or relegate it to secondary consideration. This latter position became inherent to orthodoxy because, if love alone can suffice, then there is less need for the sacraments and organization of the Church.

In fact, one who finds stillness in prayer and actualization in love can become indifferent to ecclesiastical authority; because, for him, love authenticates truth. It is a matter of the power of “loving” exceeding the power of “knowing”. Such a one finds authority internally, as opposed to within religious hierarchy, and matures to equate all action with the same importance as ritual. Religious history provides many examples of mystics who have been labeled heretics and persecuted because they put love ahead of doctrine in this way.

One whose religious life is formed in this way is not embracing the sort of negative theology that Critchely presents here. Contrary to Critchely, negation is not the pattern that permits an ascent into love. Critchely misconstrues the idea of reducing the ego to make interior room for Christ with the idea that God is found in nothingness. In reading this, one senses the existential angst apparently confronting this author, who seems to deeply desire religious feelings but can’t find his way there through the force of mere intellect.

Experience

We all want a life journey that involves a consciously guided experience, but the key question involves the source of that guidance. Is it God within us or is it our ego seeking to somehow intellectualize God? It seems this author is struggling with the idea of how exactly one goes about letting God in, and the best he can do is compare it to the way he releases himself in music or art. On the contrary, one must approach God as a little child, vulnerable, and accepting. Sadly, those who approach God analytically or intellectually with this sort of philosophical probing are often far from the transcendence they’re seeking. When God becomes manifest, the Presence occupies both our inner and outer acts, i.e. how we respond to others, how we exhibit God within our being, and how we distribute the sort of compassionate love that Christ demonstrated.

As Critchely rightly recognizes, the test for authenticity of mystical experience is whether or not it is transformative to others. Another good point Critchely makes is about the quality of our experiences. As Critchely suggests: “we benefit when we live that which has heretofore been un-lived”, that is, when we experience that which is new, foreign, and even baffling for us. It is not unsound to seek after some peculiar experiences in your life. Referencing William James, Critchely compares our life experiences to a mosaic in which we keep adding pieces of multicolored experiences to fashion the whole, which is forever changing, adapting, and growing in perspective.

Expansion of experience is in fact expansion of our field of consciousness and expansion of consciousness brings us closer to God because it increases our discernment. As Critchely says, “the margins of experience are (to be) pushed aside and massively expanded.” This section of Critchely’s work motivated me to make a list of things that I can actively do to expand and diversify my experiences:

(1) travel widely,
(2) engage in new activities like yoga, pickleball, boxing, quilt making, etc.
(3) learn new skills like woodworking, another language, etc.
(4) meet new people especially those of alternative race, sex, or socioeconomic position,
(5) read & study more widely especially about things I don’t know about, i.e. geology, astronomy, etc
(6) meditate and pray often about the special relevance of my experiences

Conclusion

Contrary to Critchely, mysticism isn’t about self-annihilation or even dying to self. Why would God bequeath us with selfhood if our only task is to annihilate it? Could it be that the more trying test is to manage it?

Critchely seeks to paint God and religion as absurd in such a subtle manner as to coax the reader into entertaining his premise. The reality is that the spirit develops and matures in the medium of matter.

The symbology of the virgin birth must be properly understood beyond the literalistic context. Are we to believe God impregnated a human to bear Jesus or that God impregnated Jesus with the Holy Spirit, thereby transforming Jesus such that Jesus morphed into Spirit after death, a spirit that continues to endure materially across the world, now more than 2000 years later? Christian mysticism is centered on these concepts of incarnation. Of God becoming human within us, spirit and matter conjoined, materializing, becoming integral within human bodies that can love and be loved with such intensity that they willingly endure suffering on behalf of those beloved. It is in this understanding that one can disrobe themselves of atheism and begin the journey of love that culminates in Godliness. As Critchely says, “as one surrenders to a warm bath.”

-End-