Walking to the monastery in Jordanville, New York one sharp October morning, I found myself at a peculiar intersection. I was visiting the Eastern Orthodox community to conduct research for my thesis, observing my surroundings from the cool, analytical distance of the academy. Unexpectedly, something shifted in my perception that day. Perhaps it was the sun falling over tilled fields or the miracle of the black cat turning to check if I was still trailing behind, but I glimpsed a more noetic understanding of mysticism. I felt, for an instant, the ravings of ecstasy, intensity, aliveness, a melting of the ego and a pouring into God. Surprised by myself, by childlike joy and unabashed sincerity, I became singularly fixated on the possibility of mystical experience.
Philosopher Simon Critchley is the author of a couple dozen books on topics ranging from suicide to David Bowie. His most recent effort, Mysticism, is to his readers the natural progression of a dizzying body of work. Critchley’s offer to the reader is simple: Wouldn’t you like to feel the transfigurative power of self-annihilation? The rapturous ecstasy of love? Wouldn’t you like to glimpse the ravishing far-near?
Critchley begins his inquiry with a ubiquitous figure in the academic study of mysticism: Evelyn Underhill, who defines mysticism as “experience in its most intense form.” Mysticism, Critchley clarifies, is not itself a religion, but rather a “tendency, a distillation of existing devotional practice, textual interpretation, theological teaching, and conceptual, philosophical reflection.” Critchley frames mysticism as a negotiation, between “via positiva” and “via negativa,” or what is and what is not. He observes that mysticism is performative in the sense that it is a form of expression that not only records the mystic’s experience but also produces experience. Mysticism is something we know about in operatio—through writing.
It is impossible to write about mysticism without writing about writing. Mystics write in paradoxes and negatives; words collapse and fall into themselves. Reading mystical texts is wading through an accumulation of quotations—metaphors, mirrors, repetitions—and the simultaneous stripping away of the “I.” The revelation in Mysticism is Critchley’s metaliterary attention to form; the work is eminently reflexive. The project is as much about Christian mysticism as it is the nature and aim of writing. Critchley writes to develop aesthetics, to reckon with how art steps into our lives and changes us. He illuminates the interdependence of aesthetics, affect, and transcendence. It is impossible to read Mysticism and not feel Critchley’s delicate hand writing what he believes to be true. I imagine him asking his reader the same question he quotes from Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm: “Do you think I don’t believe this? You have no idea, none.”
Critchley’s attention to aesthetics culminates in this question: “Can mysticism be said to live on for us in the experience of art and as the experience of art?” At what cost? Critchley theorizes it is no longer an intimacy with Christ that brings us to a higher ecstatic experience, but instead our intimacy with poetry. This substitution of the explicitly religious for the nebulously “spiritual” results in generalization, privatization, and secularization. He argues the mystical rendered as pure aesthetics is a loss. Instead, he urges the reader to consider how mystical writing both records and produces experience. In mystical texts, we find a dialectic rather than dualistic relationship between faith and aesthetics, between spirit and matter. We “allow the possibility that in the experience of art there is an experience of the sacred where things come alive and we come alive in the process of observing, attending, watching, listening, or reading.” This feeling of “aliveness” is the key.
In Mysticism, Critchley’s inquiry spans centuries and sensibilities; it is ancient and fiercely contemporary; it is practical and existential; it is high and low. He writes about the animism of music—punk, Krautrock, Nick Cave—and the most erotically mystical Biblical book, the Song of Songs. Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich is Critchley’s heroine. Reading Mysticism is the simultaneous experience of breadth and depth. It is a circling, a winding around God. He questions and reiterates, plumbing deeper into the great beating heart of the world. Critchley’s prose reminds the attentive reader that writing about mysticism is writing an asymptote, inching ever closer to a truth that evades capture in language.
At the end of Mysticism, we’re left with love: “What mysticism offers is an elevation and transfiguration of love.” Love, to Critchley, is “a process of stripping away, cutting away, tearing away, that opens us up to what exceeds the self and the realm of knowledge.” Love is the crux of mysticism. We meet the philosopher forty years after his own brush with the mystical, a moment of ecstasy in Canterbury. He is vulnerable, sincere, open, pouring himself onto the page in hopes that he can be understood.
To Critchley, the test of authenticity in a mystic’s account of transformation is whether the reader is transformed. Applying this test to Critchley’s writing, I feel myself return to my initial glimpse of the mystical in Jordanville. I recognize echoes and deepenings of my experience in his prose. Reading Mysticism, I was overcome with the familiar feelings of “idiot glee” and the gentle burn of love, reaffirming my belief that, as Julian of Norwich writes, “all shall be well,” after all.
NONFICTION
Simon Critchley
New York Review of Books
Published on October 29, 2024
