A careful observer of cultural trends would have spotted, over the last few years, a cautious shuffling back towards the suspicion that religious language might be more than just a muddle of vacuous uplift, morally dubious fairy tales and homicidal fanaticism. This does not mean that there has been a measurable rise in religious observance or the kind of literary-celebrity conversions that were seen in the 1930s (the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Edith Sitwell). The statistics charting the decline of religious practice speak for themselves, and there is no ground for complacency on the part of traditional communities of faith and their leadership.
Some of those who have written sympathetically in recent years about religion have been professed believers (Francis Spufford, Nick Cave, Paul Kingsnorth), some have lingered in the church porch (Tom Holland, Philip Goff), some are still on a bench in the grounds (Alain de Botton). But what has apparently shifted is the old default setting of uncomprehending contempt. A figure such as Bertrand Russell comparing belief in God with believing that an invisible chocolate teapot was circling the solar system might raise fewer laughs now than half a century ago.
Simon Critchley’s new book is a particularly interesting and intelligent example of this altered perspective. Critchley has identified himself in the past as an atheist, but this study of mystical literature allows him to recognise and explore what religious language, in some of its most intensified and challenging forms, offers us. He steadfastly refuses to get into any kind of intellectual scrap about whether such language “refers” to a reality beyond the world in quite the way that traditional faith claims. However, he is clear that the literature he discusses presupposes that part of the repertoire of human response to the world is “ecstasy”, a condition in which we are carried on currents deeper than we can itemise and explain.
“Ecstasy” is a tricky word. It will suggest dramatic swooning raptures of the kind classically pictured in Critchley’s cover image of Bernini’s famous sculpture of St Teresa. But we are invited to stand back and consider it as something more familiar than we might have thought. Framing the book are Critchley’s reflections on music. “It is impossible to be an atheist when listening to the music one loves,” he writes; and – with a characteristically mischievous touch – he takes us not to the classical concert hall but to the world of German pre-punk (Krautrock) and some of its later avatars. The point is that music’s energy is a “recharging” of the environment. It makes no propositional claim, it advances no moral programme, but it changes the relation of mind and feelings to reality – a reality that is no longer just a series of manageable objects and problems to be solved. Familiar environments are opened up to (literally) the rhythms that connect and sustain them.
Critchley understandably – and rightly – sees aesthetic experience and the mystical as closely aligned. There are moments when we are no longer in a simple subject-object relation with what we encounter: it may be the “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused” of which William Wordsworth writes; or the “you are the music while the music lasts” of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. At such times the apparently isolated self is shown to be already caught up in a patterned flow of life that is shaping and suffusing the particular standpoint of the self. It is not a moment of “trance” or suspension of consciousness, but an intense and intelligent presence – think of the complete inhabiting by the musician of the music that is played, which demands both radical openness and concentrated presence.
But – and here is one of the major virtues of the book – Critchley does not want to reduce the mystical to a chronicle of unusual experiences. He wants us to take it seriously as a way of thinking, a way of making sense that works very differently from conventional philosophy but is no less a genuinely intellectual activity. He notes that a good deal of significant literature about the sort of knowing or presence that he evokes does not in fact describe individual Wordsworthian experiences. We may know quite a bit about what visionaries such as the 14th-century Julian of Norwich or the 16th-century Teresa of Ávila experienced. But we have nothing in a strictly autobiographical vein from Meister Eckhart, the foremost expositor of contemplatively oriented theology in the 14th century, or the anonymous 6th-century genius known as “Dionysius”, whose analysis of language about God became fundamental for every serious religious thinker of the Middle Ages, or the brilliantly idiosyncratic Marguerite Porete, burned as a heretic in 1310.
Critchley is well aware, far more than most non-religious writers on the subject, that “mysticism” is simply not a word that any traditional religious community uses to describe experiences or activities. There is no credible Hebrew or Arabic equivalent and the term is equally impenetrable to Hindus and Buddhists.
The problem is that when applied to religious writing the word “mysticism” has come to represent at least three different things. There are accounts of unusual experiences – visions, physical trances, clairvoyance about present or future affairs, and so on. There are “roadmaps” of the disciplines and habits that will open you up to other kinds of awareness, not as a matter of episodic experiences but as a matter of continuous perception of the world in the light of God. There are instructions about how to silence the mind and still the body, words and images for sustained meditation, the challenges that arise in prolonged contemplative prayer or solitude. And there are theoretical accounts of how a life lived in anticipation of an altered and deepened awareness embodies the basic teachings of a tradition, fleshing out the doctrinal language of the community.
This last may also include expositions of what is unhelpfully called “negative theology”, the analysis of conventional religious language as provisional. To speak at all adequately about the divine, or the “Unconditioned” (as a Buddhist would say), requires the acknowledgment that the divine is not an object among others. It cannot be included in any category of existing beings, since existing beings have a context and a source, a set of empirically identifying characteristics, whereas the divine – as the source of any and every reality – cannot be depicted against a background, picked out as an isolated object.
Critchley deals sensitively with this multiplicity of meanings, showing how various writers fall in different areas of the spectrum. He notes both the ubiquity and the diversity of women writers in the tradition. Those writers who focus on the deconstruction and reconstruction of language about the divine rather than on specific experience are by no means all male, as some less careful commentators have suggested. And those who weave together the autobiographical and the theoretical, such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa, also understand their own personal visions as authorising a certain kind of life – reflective solitude for Julian, radical reform of religious communities in poverty and simplicity for Teresa. Julian, whom Critchley presents as the real hero of the book, is in fact both a vivid chronicler of her “revelations” or “showings” and an exceptionally bold mind, subtly reworking a whole range of theological ideas with a radicalism that continues to astonish. For Critchley, she is “a healing tonic against melancholia”, and he sums up her central insight as the conviction that “Love precedes creation” – so that to receive and embody eternal love, we must in some sense undergo a “decreation”.
The language of “decreation” is drawn from one of the greatest and most enigmatic writers in this area in the 20th century, Simone Weil. The ego we take for granted has to die, Weil believed, if it is not to collapse into its own obsessions and terrors. Something must be un-knotted in us, laid open to what we could call a greater “bandwidth” of awareness that will allow us a deeper freedom from addictive self-protection and the violence and suspicion that this breeds. “An unravelling of the self that allows us to see the love that is without end” is Critchley’s summary. And this is nothing to do with morbid self-hatred. Granted, there are passages in most “mystical” writers that might give that impression, and undoubtedly few such writers escape some ambiguity on this (Weil is a stark instance, with her deep unease about her body and her grating alienation from her own Jewish heritage). Yet the point is precisely not to generate yet another kind of obsession – the loathing of the body – but to nourish a readiness to sit with the present moment in spirit and body without anxiety, craving, or self-mythologising.
Julian is important largely because she is so clear about this. She is not, Critchley reminds us, presenting us with a bland world-view in which conflict is ignored, or suffering and violence minimised. Those who know her only by way of the fridge-magnet slogan “All shall be well” have not begun to understand the imaginative challenge of her writing. Something in us never falls away from God; creation is not at arm’s length from God, since God is always its sustaining energy and centre. God does not need to be cajoled or manipulated into love or forgiveness, “satisfied” by blood-sacrifice; the problem is our own confusion and fear. The Fall of Adam was not a great act of Miltonic rebellion but the result of immaturity, confusion and wanting to grow faster than nature allows. God is both father and mother, both source and nourishing fidelity. There is no way in which we can simply avoid sin – sin in the sense of being fatally at odds with what is most real – but at the same time there is nothing that can ultimately break the bond between the eternal love of the Holy Trinity and all that is created, including our own flailing, stupid, self-hurting hearts. There is no thing called “sin”, only a complex state of maladjustment to a truth that is always dependably loving.
Behind and within all Julian’s extraordinary evocations of her graphic visions of the crucifixion and her renderings of the voice of Christ – gentle, wry, “courteous” as she likes to say, authoritative – stands a profound theological certainty: we have no theoretical purchase on just how God will “make all things well”, but if God is truly the God we claim God is, there is ultimately no possibility of the universe being abandoned by its maker to chaos, misery and dissolution. But to arrive at that point is a costly affair of letting go of the urge to be justified, to possess leverage over God and the world, to know a set of answers. Decreation.
W hen we perform music, Critchley writes, we are utilising the best of our mental and physical energies to allow an action that is not ours to be as fully at work in us as possible. Concern with how we are doing, competitiveness, fear, distraction, irritation, all the rest of the ego’s habits, will wreck the performance. It is a partial picture of the more sustained opening up to something authoritatively real that “mystical” literature deals with. As Critchley hints, the important question may be not how I acquire interesting “Religious Experiences” (which leaves my hectic, acquisitive ego pretty much where it was) but what the effect is of allowing myself to be drawn – or jolted – out of self-centred perception into another level of engagement with truth, inner and outer – an “empathy beyond words”, in Critchley’s phrase, an immersion in what Julian calls our “kindly substance”, our deepest natural orientation.
Without any vague waffle about the “spiritual”, without any merely anecdotal interest in non-standard psychical experiences, Critchley does an impressive job of showing how this kind of religious writing is genuinely thinking about the universe and the human place within it. Like all his books, it is at once dense, witty and fresh. Its discussions of artists such as Eliot and Annie Dillard – not to mention Iggy Pop– are always illuminating, and there is a real sense of careful engagement with both the scholarly treatment of “mystical” writers and theological interpretation (Critchley makes excellent use of the encyclopaedic work, both historical and theological, of the great American expert in the field, Bernie McGinn).
On Mysticism is not only a provocative, sympathetic essay on aspects of religious language and self-description but a significant and courageous invitation to think again about the kinds of thinking that matter; the kinds of thinking that keep us awake.
On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy
Simon Critchley
Profile, 336pp, £18.99
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[See also: The return of the boozy, leisurely lunch]
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