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

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.Simon Critchley is a British philosopher, author and professor at The New School in New York. He is best known for his work on existentialism, mysticism, ethics and continental philosophy, and is the author of books including The Book of Dead Philosophers, Faith of the Faithless and Mysticism.Get Simon's book Mysticism here.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Is Mysticism Always Religious?7:52 - What is Mysticism?18:58 - Unification With the Divine29:58 - Mysticism and the Self40:38 - Why Are So Many Mystics Women?48:41 - The Limits of Language59:54 - Was Pascal a Mystic?01:03:21 - Where Does Simon Stand on Mysticism?01:11:22 - Where Should We Start With Learning About Mysticism?01:15:36 - Imagery in Simon’s Book - CONNECTMy Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkeptic - CONTACTBusiness email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]

I saw my friend on the other side of the street. I was heading to school with the kids. I let go of mom's hand to wave. I had already forgotten their lunches. I ran over to hug her. She came out of nowhere. And then... It stopped.

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Look forward in your change. Simon Critchley, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Alex. Very nice to be here. Do you think that mysticism is always religious? No. No, it's not. It could be, well, firstly, it's not a religion.

It's a tendency within religion, we could say, but then I guess you could, no, what you can say is that the kind of experience that we think of as mystical, more often we associate with the experience of art, whatever that might be. So it could be anything. It could be, you know,

a wonderful view staring at the sea. Or it could be, you know, some moment that transports you. Or for someone like me, it tends to be music, you know. So, yes, no, it's not necessarily religious. And it becomes sort of less religious in the last couple of hundred years, I guess, for reasons that we could go into. Yeah, your book on mysticism, The Experience of Excessy, you talk a lot about music and how music is sort of a particular way in for you when it comes to mysticism, but clearly this is quite

attached to religious traditions. But at the same time, mystical traditions within religions and mystics who have these sort of either visionary or experiential moments are often condemned by mainstream religious traditions as heretical or doing something that's a little bit dangerous. And so there's this kind of seeming like intrinsic connection between mysticism and religion, and that most mystics are religious in some sense. And also you describe mysticism as like the fiery hub of religion. It's like the fiery core of what religion is all about. And yet on the surface level, there's this like historical tension between the two,

to the extent that mystics are condemned or put to death or whatever. So if mysticism is the fiery core of religion, how do you account for that historical friction? You, one of the purposes of religious institutions like churches is to control that fiery core. You want to have it limited to the fiery core that is taught in within that religious order and you don't want this sort of spinning out of control. So, you know, you could have, you know, within mainstream Christianity, it's, you know, God becomes human in the, in the incarnation. But you don't

want people wandering around claiming that they're divine or that they're Jesus. That would be crazy behavior. So there's always this tension in in religion between the kind of, um, the fire that ignites, that really sets people aflame and, um, and then how that is to be controlled and the history of what we call mysticism, and we could get into that because it's a, it's a, it's an unstable and, you know, it's a fallacious category, you know, but we could just say the people that we think, think of as mystics, who think of themselves as religious or spiritual or contemplatives, leading a contemplative life,

they are often, the reason why they're remembered is because they attracted attention. They got significant audiences. And that's a danger for the church, let's say the Catholic Church, what do you do when someone like St. Francis shows up this kind of itinerant former sort of playboy who winds up as an itinerant preacher and draws huge numbers of people to him preaching the poverty of Christ and the abolition of private property. What do you do with that? And it takes the Catholic Church, you know, 60, 70 years to figure out.

out how to incorporate the Franciscans who are a sort of populist, you know, a wildly populist religious movement, how to incorporate them into the Catholic Church. So, so you can look at the history of what we call mysticism, again, with some qualifications, you know, we could get into that, but there are two tendencies. Once people who've got this, this fiery message, they've got this, they've got these things to say. show up and they draw an audience to them, the existing institution of the church can either incorporate them or exclude them. The main wish of most churches is to include them because,

frankly, they're good for business. You get someone like, you know, you get some, you know, young person who's drawing big crowds to Christianity. you want to keep them in the church, keep them in the fold, unless things go too far, unless they become seen as subversives or they challenge the authority of the existing church. So to summarize, I mean, very crudely, you could say that within southern Europe, say in Italy and in Spain, this happens a bit later with people at Theresa Ravala, John the Cross. there are a lot of struggles there, but they're eventually incorporated into the Catholic

Church. The Franciscans are incorporated into the Catholic Church, whereas in Northern Europe, those movements tend to be more excluded. So there's a case that I talk about in the book of Marguerite Porett, who is burnt at the stake in 1310 in Paris for refusing to recant her views on love, which are expressed in her book. And, um, And, you know, there's inquisition and the whole thing. But so I think it's really, you know, what the people we call mystics have got in their hands is something, you know, is something combustible and extremely, uh, potentially dangerous. And it's a threat to the church and the church wants to just contain it if it can. Mm-hmm.

And there's a whole different story about what happens to that in the, after the Protestant Reformation as well. separate story. Yeah, and one really important thing to point out, I think, is that at least medieval mystics, the kind of mystics you're talking about there, weren't going around calling themselves mystics. They didn't see themselves as like sat outside of mainstream tradition doing something special. In fact, Julian of Norwich, who you describe as the heroine of your book, I'm one of the most famous mystics of all time, the earliest recorded English language written text by a woman, famous for all kinds of reasons. She's quite insistent that she believes everything that she witnesses and experiences in her revelations of divine love to be in keeping with the doctrines of the Catholic Church, of which she was a member. She's quite explicit about considering herself to be within the fold of the church.

Yeah, Holy Church, as she always calls it. Yeah. And at some point, however, this concept of mysticism evolves as like a term and a label for a particular kind of set of practices and beliefs. And it begins to cause a bit of a, a bit of a schism. You said we could get into what mysticism is, but also in particular, it's like development of as a concept, given that it wasn't a term that was used to describe mystics by mystics. You know, where does that? this idea come from and what does it like? Well, I mean, two things to say. There's a very, there's a very simple way of answering the question, what is mysticism? Which is to take a book by one called Evelyn Underhill, who's underrepresented, underknown, very influential in her day, writes a book in 1905, I think, called Mysticism. And she describes it as experience in its most intense form experience in its most intense form. So there's your, there's your kind of one sentence definition and that intensity is an intensity of ecstasy. So that's, that's what's going on. The actual category of mysticism is, um, is much trickier. It basically appears in 17th century,

in French as Le Mystique and so what we'd think of as the mystical and so the idea of the mystical as some kind of experience of passivity

of passivity towards a revelation of a type also is that moment when you get a shift in the idea of experience and the way in which experience might be verified So 17th century you've got Carthesian rationalism and so on and so forth going on in the francophone context. And it's there that the term is first used, but it doesn't really get currency until the 18th, the particularly 19th century.

And then it begins to kind of, you know, almost become like a separate category from religion. You know, people will talk about miscism as if it's a thing. If we go back to its source in medieval monastic traditions, or we could take it even further back to the church, the desert fathers in Egypt and so and so forth, if we just say with the medieval monastic orders, here were institutions that had withdrawn from the world, essentially. the world was the shitstorm of the dark ages and all that stuff was going on.

And people like St. Benedict kind of produce these little islands of knowledge where you could hang on to the few manuscripts that were available. And life was lived in a completely ritualized, ordered way. And monks were expected to do a certain number of things every day. And it's in that context of work and study and prayer. and meditation, that some of those figures might have had mystical experiences. So mysticism, as this intense feeling of proximity,

revelation of the divine, is something which arose within those small institutional structures of monasteries. And then as it develops, you can say it more or less spills over, out of that monastic space. So a really key element in the story of what we now call mysticism is the development of what happens in the low countries, in what's now Belgium and Southern Netherlands,

where you've got the origins of what later become the Industrial Revolution, textile manufacturing, the emergence of a bourgeoisie, and then you got this development of a group of people that were called Beguines. And Begings were, they were called semi-enclosed nuns. So women who were not closed off from the world in their convents, but who could also move in the town, the textile manufacturing towns of Flanders and Brabant. And some of them attracted great attention to themselves.

and so then you begin to get this spilling over of mystical practice into the world. And sort of what happens if we go through the centuries is that continual act of spillover so that we could now think of a kind of contradiction between mysticism and the institutional practice of religion. but that's a very modern idea. So it begins within these very confined small institutions and then spills out one way of thinking about it. What is it, though? What is the thing that we're describing? What is the thread that pulls together mysticism?

When people think of mysticism, they're probably imagining, I mean, the subtitle of your book is the experience of ecstasy, right? And there are two important elements there. There's experience and there's ecstasy. It's something that is related to these moments of like direct revelation, visions of God, feelings of divine presence, but also this sort of overwhelming happiness or contentment, maybe awe and tremendous and all this kind of stuff. Yes. Is that essentially what we're talking about here when we see mysticism? Visit BetMDM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

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Yeah, we're talking about, I mean, an easy way of defining it is the the feeling of the presence of God. The feeling of the presence of God. And then in some mystics, the feeling, the awareness of the union with the divine, whether that's revealed through a person like Christ or whether it's revealed through nature, through, you know, in more kind of pantheistic ideas of religion. So it's that experience of proximity to or unification with the divine. And it takes on different forms in different religions.

You can say that every religion, Hinduism, Islam, we could go down the list. And then different forms of animism and what we know of the religions of, say, indigenous peoples in the Americas, so on so forth. There's some experience which is a proximity to the divine, which is incredibly valued, and certain people have access to it, you know, what we can call, you know, in a loose way, shamans. So there is that, there is that, it's a constant feature of religion. So religion is what, religion is a set of practices, beliefs, that structures, society, and there hasn't really been a society without religion until arguably, you know, the modern period.

All societies were structured around, you know, religion. And at the core of that religion was some special form of experience that certain people could have or certain people, if they were initiated into it, could feel a proximity to. And, you know, and then, so to that extent, it's incredibly, you know, It's everywhere and it's incredibly vague. So what I try and do in the book is focus in particular on Christian mysticism, both because it interests me and also because to bring out the real weirdness of Christianity and how really how little we understand the Christian tradition that is apparently the, you know,

the source doctrine for much of what Western culture is about, although people seem to understand very little about it. So, yeah, it's an experience of proximity or unification with the presence of God, and then how that is to be articulated and expressed and taught. The people that think of as mystics were people that drew, people to them. We often know about them because they drew people to them. And this was always, you know, this was always great business. It always, it always worked, you know. People want that, you know, people have a deep metaphysical need. What can you say? And mysticism is a really powerful way into it.

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And the book, you're careful to clarify that it doesn't always involve this. And when it does, there are different ways in which someone could become unified with divinity. But I think this is where mystics really begin to run into, like, heretical trouble. I think of the 10th century Islamic mystic Al-Halaj, who famously in this sort of fit of ecstasy, says, Anna Al-Hak, I am the truth, which is evocative of Jesus's saying in John's gospel, but also Al-Hak, the truth is one of the names of God in the Quran. And Al-Halaj is eventually indicted and killed for heresy in part because of this kind of stuff. Meister Eckhart, another hero of your text, featured extremely prominently another famous mystic, who was once sort of held the distinguished positions that,

I mean, he twice held some position at the University of Paris, like the sort of top of the top, which only... Master of theology, yeah, Aquinas and Eckinus. Yeah, he was not some kind of fringe, crazy guy. No. But he went on to deliver sermons, in which he said things like, you know, I have, I mean, you quote in your book, for in this breakthrough, it is bestowed upon me that I and God are one, which mystical language is very common,

you know, this unity with the divine, but to say that you are the same thing as God is exactly the kind of thing, like, you know, I and the father are one is something Jesus says, or anyone who has seen me has seen the father, which Jesus gets like stoned for, they try to stone him for it because of the alleged sort of blasphemy that he's committing. So I think it's quite a very, clear to see why this like begins to rub up against the doctrine to the church right but then it's a bit of a mystery to me yes yes and no yes and no it's it's a really it's a really delicate line this this issue about who gets to call himself god it's it's it's um you're right i mean it's um it was the case with so meister ecart the mizer err the master ercourt did this

without any visions. There's no claim to any visionary quality to what he does. So he does this. He was just an excellent you know, theologian and scholar of the Bible. He wrote many commentaries in Latin on

these texts, which were which are kind of a bit boring, but they're good. But then, but then, you know, he goes, he's told to go off to the German-speaking lands where he's from and to try kind of rain in some of the

problems that are arising in the Rhineland in Cologne in particular, Strasbourg and Cologne. And off he goes and he gives these sermons in German in the local language. And the first texts we have in German are Eckhart's sermons. And he says some very, very wild things, but they're very engaging things. And then he is,

after he's then, you know, the, I think it's the Bishop of Cologne says, you know, this guy is a heretic and he's taken down to Avignon because at that point the papacy is divided. You've got two popes, Roman Avignon, and he's imprisoned for a period of time and tried, and then he dies down there without being found guilty, but that he's posthumously condemned as a heretic a year after his death and a papal ball. And so, and so what they, what, at this point in the history of the Catholic Church, as other people have pointed out, like Tom Holland in that book, Dominion, really, I think it's, yeah, I think it's Dominion, where he talks about the rise of the medieval, the medieval Catholic Church. And it's obsession with reform, reformatio,

and trying to be clear about where the line is. between what you can say and what you can't say, and then having legal systems, canon law, and then universities which are meant to teach canon law, to basically adjudicate these decisions. So the Catholic Church really gets its act in order in the late medieval period, and then they're beginning to find heretics.

Now, the issue of deification is really, is really fascinating and tricky. So Jesus, you know, as you said, you could, you could interpret the text as him claiming divinity for himself, seems to be what he's saying, but is it just him? You know, is it just this, you know, first century troublemaker in occupied Palestine that gets to call himself God. And opinions really differ on that. And I've spent a lot of time in the last 10 years learning more about Orthodox Christianity, Eastern Church, particularly the Greek Orthodox tradition.

And in that tradition, the idea of what they call theosis or deification is, you know, it's fine. It's something that if you are a good person, if you are a worthy person, if you lead the life of a good monk on Mount Athos or whatever, you could aspire towards deification. And so it's a really long and complex story. And obviously within Islam, there's a whole tradition of that, particularly in the Sufi tradition, not so much in Judaism. it's much trickier, but certainly within many religious traditions, the idea of somebody declaring themselves divine. Then if we fast forward, we go, we spin forward through the Reformation and to the United States of America, which is a hotbed for religious, you know, exuberance

in the 18th, 17th, 80s, the 19th centuries. You've got all sorts of people wandering around claiming that they're divine. And some of them die out. Some of them fade out because they disagree, they take a vow of chastity like the shakers. And some of them do incredibly well, like the Mormons. So Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, basically claims divinity for himself and for anyone who is like him. So to become an elder in the Mormon church is to become Godlike. So I think it's a fault line in the history of Christianity, whether you're not a fault line in the history of Christianity, You can legitimately call yourself God. Is that love?

Who thought we'd be talking about this on today? But yes, it's on a Monday morning. But that unity with the divine, oh, so you come about something else you were saying. So William James, who everybody likes, or they should do, because he was a really interesting person. And I think the ideal of what a philosopher should be,

someone with an open, engaged mind who did lots of research and thinking and wasn't constrained by prejudice and the narrow guardrails of academic propriety. So three cheers for William James. James defines mysticism as a union with the divine. And that makes perfect sense. But the only kind of qualification I want to introduce into that is that that union with the divine, presupposes that there's something like a soul and something like God, and those two things unify. So two substances attain a unity. And there was this other tradition, really prominent tradition within Christianity and elsewhere, where the issue is not one of the soul unifying with the divine,

but the soul trying as much as it is much as is possible, to decreates itself, to de-substantialize itself, to, in the words of Marguerite Perret, to annihilate itself. And that self-annihilation is a way of opening the soul to the presence of God. So there's another, it's an idea of what I call in the book, Unity Without Distinction. So in a sense, it's a kind of, so we can think about mysticism in a more, in a more radical way as an attempt to get rid of the soul, to get rid of the self as much as possible in order to be open to this experience, and then concomitantly on the other side, that God itself releases its substantial quality towards me. So to summarize that bit in a great quote

from Meister Eckhart, he says something, I'm putting together a couple of quotes. here, but I pray to God to rid me of God. And what he means by that is that the idea of God kind of gets in the way of the experience that he's trying to evoke. And for Eckhart, it's a question of God ceasing to be God, namely a substance that's opposed to a self, and for the soul to cease to be a soul and for those two entities, those two presences, as it were, to meet in a third ground that is what Eckhart calls the Godhead, which is this kind of slightly mysterious concept that also gets him into trouble. What he means by the Godhead is some space between me and the divine where things

occur, where detachment, releasement and life can be. life can be lived in a different way. And you could say people have said, this gets very close to aspects of Zen Buddhism, this gets very close to the more esoteric teachings of Hinduism, so and so forth. And maybe it does. But it's very interesting.

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of the foundation of reality, with no context, you might think that we were talking about like the Indian tradition. Yeah. Because those ideas sort of resonate a lot more there. But within the mystical tradition in the West, you get these sort of similar ideas sort of coming up, like the concept of the self. I mean, you write in your book about how the genre of autobiography kind of begins with mystical writings. People sort of writing about themselves, but they define themselves, this concept of I, like in relation to it being separate from divinity. That's sort of what gives you this idea of I. Of course, Eastern traditions have been talking about this for a long time. The self is an illusion.

What really exists is Brahman and ultimate reality. And the only sense in which I exist as an individual is in the way that I am sort of separated from Brahman. But that separation is kind of a bad thing. And what I really want is a reunification. You kind of are getting the same kind of ideas. I mean, you open part two of your book with a quote from Flannery O'Connor. That's right. About sort of comparing God to being.

like the full moon and saying that she's looking at a, that you might be looking at a full moon that's obscured. You see the crescent because there's this great big shadow of the earth. Yeah. And O'Connor writes, The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am, should see or could see. But what I am afraid of, dear God,

is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon so that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside. This concept of the self, and so she's saying that the shadow being cast on the moon there is comparable to the shadow that the self casts on this experience with God. So you end up with a bit of a paradox here, which is this desire that I should push my self to the side in order to get to divinity.

And then draw attention to myself. Yeah, so what's going on there? Tricky. I mean, it's a great quote. I do not know you, God, because I'm in the way. Please help me to push myself aside. So on that view, which is indeed the case, I mean, the last thing that Fran Rea O'Connor was interested in was herself. She was interested in, you know, the thing. that she was trying to write about to evoke in this this early prayer journal which she wrote when she was a

college and um and so the got a number of things to say um the attempt to push oneself aside inevitably draws attention to the self so you know the people the the mystics that I'm talking about, I'm talking about had absolutely no interest in themselves and therefore we're interested in them. So in a sense, this is a brilliant kind of publicity strategy. Simone Vei had no interest in Simone Vei. She was trying to decreates Simone Vei in

in order to make the way for the God that she was awaiting. And now there are operas about the life of Simone Valle, or there are plays about Simone Valle, the same thing with Marguerite, Porett and the rest. So there's a paradox there by pushing oneself, pushing the self away and pushing those people that push the self away most rigorously, draw attention to themselves. There's a kind of an economy of attention there,

which is quite interesting. The first thing you said about the Indian tradition is indeed true. And I'm thinking about that very specifically today or this week because I'm doing an event this week with Claire Carlisle. There's someone I'm not met before, but I've read her work over a number of years, and this is her book called Transcendency. for beginners, the Gifford lectures.

And she's basically lacing together Spinoza and Hinduism, basically, amongst other thing. And she's trying to make, I mean, the really interesting side of it, not that that's not interesting, but the other interesting side of it is the way she's bringing, the way she's foregrounding George Elliott as a philosophical as a philosopher and a philosophical thinker of a quite specific type and and Kierkegaard now

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 and it's you know it's it's rather So 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 book on Wittgenstein. and books like that. And you realize that actually, you know,

whatever Wittgenstein was about, this was a life. This was a kind of 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 what it might mean to do philosophy from life in the way that an artist will draw from life what is what's going on with that and 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 of women who were contemplative's mystics. So 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... 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 20, 26, whatever we are, 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? Have 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 interests 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. And this leads her to a complete theological reframing of Christianity. because the 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, the fall of Adam and

it's fascinating. So it's experience and theology working together. So I'm, I think that the yeah, that's good, but I think the relationship of these the relationship that you know, someone like Claire Carlisle makes between life-rising

you know, Brahman traditions, Hindu traditions and and stuff that's going on in the West, I think is fascinating. And Spinoza is kind of the conduit for all of that. Sure. There's 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 Teresa of Avala and we're hearing about even Flannery O'Connor. A novelist who you quote, you know, this sort of conspicuous presence of women. 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 femininity of the self, even for males. I just wonder, like, you know, looking at this from the outside, it might just strike you as this slightly sort of peculiar fact about the mystical tradition. And I just wondered if you had any thoughts on white. No, it's a most queer tradition. It's a most queer, but within Christianity, it's most strange that the first thing is that you get the, you get the appearance of women writers from, let's say, the 11th, 12th century onwards,

people like Hardivich 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 the, but what is it, that women have, access to writing. They have access, and that's kind of what, you know, 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, you know, 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?

but 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 clerics and they weren't fully paid up masters of theology at the University of Paris. But they were there. And someone like Marguerite Porette, 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, like Hinton and Richard Rohl, who are writing in this incredibly evocative, very sexual way, but in a very vulnerable, you know, feminized manner about the experience of divine. And then there's someone that I talk about briefly in the book who, let's see if I can find, it's Henry Suzzo. And Henry Souso writes this book called The Clock of Wisdom, The Life of the Servant, and it's, these are the most popular books in the,

in the German language, in the medieval period, until the early modern period, second only to Thomas A Kempas' imitation of Christ. And in those texts, Suzo, firstly, Suzo, who is a man, his experiences are written down by a woman. So it's not just a man writing down, yes, you've got the classic mystical views, you've got, you know, crazy, unstable young woman experiencing the divine, and some monk following around writing things down. He got the inversion of that. But 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, he's experiencing Christ as a woman. And not only that, it gets weird. at the center of Julian of Norwich's showings, and this is something which goes back into the Hebrew Bible and early Christian, so 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, you know, 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 that side wound was often depicted in medieval iconography was in a state that looks in a shape is very similar to female sexual organs. And that was done for very clear reasons. So 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, you know, which is what, this is where I would make a distinction between.

you know, 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. And so insofar as Christ is matter, and Christ has to be matter within Christianity, Christ is female. So I think the whole Marian side of this is really important. And that's, 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.

Yeah, but then also at the same time, the language is quite imprecise. 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 imagery will stick. But this context 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, you have to say God is not this. It's not that God is powerful and God is loving. It's that God is unlimited. God is, you know, groundless, God is time less. God is, you're taking things that you do know and you're negating them. And this kind of way of talking about, about God called apophatic language, which is saying what God is not, originates in the sort of

pseudonymous writings of someone claiming to be Dionysus, one of the... Someone claiming to be Diocese. Yeah, it was a kind of elaborate, yeah, hoax. 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 preface. and conclusions and rational thinking, even in that context, 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, 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. And 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. And so it's a kind of fiction that was developed in later centuries, like a literary fiction. But in these texts by Dionysius, all the pseudonidas of the Ariapagitica, which was the hill of area of area. where law courts where trials for murder were adjudicated in Athens. He says and I'll just quote this because it's

might be helpful. This is Dionysius. It's necessary to praise this negative method of abstraction differently from the positive method of affirmation. For 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 Teneasius. So we have the positive method of affirmation, let's say the method that Aquinas adopts in the summer broadly.

And then we have the negative method. And rather than the, and this, I try to summarize this in terms of the 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. So that's the basic idea. That's the basic idea, is that it's that the only path to the divine is through negation on the one hand and then through exaggeration. The exaggeration part is fascinating because you've got indignant. Inesius, in that bit I just quoted, super essential darkness.

I mean, what does that even mean? It's either essential darkness or inessential dark, but super essential darkness. And he'll talk about the dazzling obscurity. How can obscurity be dazzling? It's obscurity is obscurity. How can that dazzle? Or radiant, I think it, radiant stillness or, yeah, I can't talk to us. 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 and that's the that's the basic line and i i track that through um you know these ancient sources cloud denisius cloud of unknowing eckart sermon and then right the way forward into someone like t s elliott in four quartets where d s elliott is trying to he's 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.

And it's a kind of, and that idea of language kind of undoing itself, I find, I find kind of fascinating. And it's also, 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 can 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 that it's a negativity which is at the service of, yeah, an erotic sort of the divine, something like that. Yeah, and it's interesting how that concept does translate into Aquinas, into his, even like in a philosophical context, a strictly, 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 treaties and explicitly says that it will have to be done with this apathetic 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 would write no more because everything he's written is, quote, like straw. Like straw, exactly. 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. 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 Dephilius. 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 like anathema.

to the church. You're literally out of step with their teachings. And 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 think. So 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 of. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, because they've set up this, you know, 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's, no, it's, and it sits in a very odd relationship. Just think about the pairing of Aquinas with Eckhart. It's a very odd pairing, yet they were, you know, near

contemporaries and perhaps doing very similar things. or have very similar commitments finally. Pascal is interesting. We used to talk about Pascal because Pascal is always been very important to me in the sense in which the, you know, the emphasis upon reason of which he was an expert as a geometer and a, you know, city planner. and all the kind of practical things that Pascal could do. But then the idea that, you know,

there's nothing more consistent with reason than the limitation of reason and the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. And then that bit you quoted, the Night of Fire, that conversion text that was sewn into his doublet or whatever, that's the god, not the god of scholars and philosophy.

us but that god God of Isaiah who's he mentioned Abraham Joseph yeah 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

as happened after Luther's done his, done his work. And then the version of the reformation that we wind up with in France is Jansenism and Pascal as the primary sort of exhibit A of Jansenism. And they've got this very, and the way in which this works in the history of theology, it seems to me, turns around Augustine. that Augustine'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 is 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 Lucy and Goldman used to call many years ago the tragic vision of Pascal and Rassin is a distance with God, a God who is a God who is absconded,

the deus absconditus and that's a powerful a powerful tradition and on some days I'm more drawn to that than the kind of messy material

of mysticism, but, you know. 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. Tell us about your, it looks like it might be on the back wall.

I'm not sure. I know a lot of people who have them. See, there'll be sort of behind you to your right. Yeah, it's the one that gives extreme unction. It's something we've picked up in Mexico. Yeah, because I'm the kind of person to have. I literally have in my living room. I 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 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. No, interested in it. Am I, no, I mean, I'm just interested. And I have a temperamental pull towards forms of mystical thinking, writing, being. And I always have.

I mean, I'm not by nature a skeptic. And so when, you know, 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 it's partly my interest in mysticism is partially explained by my kind of 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, I find that the form of philosophy that I was educated within and was it ferociously. a ferociously secular approach to philosophy. And if you were religious, you were seen as soft-headed or weak-minded or something like that. And, you know, and there were also, together with that, assumptions about the nature of, let's say, modernity, and, you know, modernity equalling 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. And 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 adoration of critique at all costs, in a sense that what we should be doing in teaching is teaching critical thinking, critical reasoning skills, whatever. These things are important. I'm not denying that,

but I find that the, 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, that things that cause irritation, things that don't chime with their sense of what's important and not important.

And 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 block things out. And that can be done. So again, I find this like where I am, you know, in teaching in New York, it's the last 10 years have been a kind of, you know, a culmination of the obsession with critique 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. So I think that's very important. So my interest in mysticism is part of that. It began, 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. But I had 30, 40 pages of material. And then a colleague of mine, a new colleague of mine at the time called Eugene Saka,

was interested in similar sorts of things. We began to think about a class on mysticism, and we began to teach it, largely with guest speakers who miraculously showed up. It was great. And then what happened, why I'm next, is that often when you're talking, teaching the kind of material that I teach, say, I don't know, hiding as being a 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 like, you know, it was, yeah, it was combustible. You know, 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, you know, which is, which is fascinating. So that was important, realizing that there's something about this material which really animates people in ways that can be, you know, can, you know, can lead down to some pretty strange alleys, right? You know, pretty soon you're in terror readings and theosophist sessions and whatever it might be.

But, you know, we still have to retain an open mind. 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 is used to like, you know, the more philosophical approach, 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,

book called The Presence of God, which is now in its seventh or eighth volume. But he did this, and that's a kind of, you know, what would you call it, a diacritical 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. Forgetting my socerian distinctions.

Anyway, 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 and you can dip your toe into, you know, two pages of Marguerite Porett. If you decide that's for you, then good. Or you read a little bit of Thomas Burton, you describe, 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.

If you want a more philosophical approach, then aside from my own humble, efforts in that regard, I'd recommend William James, who, you know, William James is varieties of religious experience, and the varieties of religious experience, Gifford lectures from 1901 or something like that, I'm not sure. Sounds right. He was, you know, for him, the center of things is mysticism, and it's about 80, 100 pages, depends which edition you've got, where he's, again, James, for me, is, you know, he's, the idea of what a philosopher should be, someone who's got questions, searching critical

questions, but who is open to new things and prepared to take them on their own terms. So the chapter on mysticism from the variety of risk experience and begins essential writings of Christian mysticism. Well, plenty to be getting on with. But of course, people should start with yours, which is... Of course, which is, you know, the best book on the topic, I think, ever written. No, it's a humble, a humble effort. And it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's imperfect.

But the bits that I, the bits that I'm proudest of are really, the bits, the discussion of T.S. Eliot, I'm very, that was, that was, that was, because that was like 30, 35 years of thinking, you know, I really, I really have to say something about the four quartets before I. before I die. And I was going to ask you, it seemed you sort of, 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 paintings. And there's bits from like sort of ballet. Yeah, Is this just a kind of general illustration to the sort of theme of the text? Did you just feel like it would sort of get us the right mindset to see a few mystical paintings? I just wonder what that was about. Oh yeah.

Rising books for me is always, I've been lucky in my career to have editors who become friends. And one of the editors has become a friend of mine is called Mark Ellingham, who's one of the people. who's one of the people, important people at profile books. And Mark is brilliant in many ways, in all sorts of ways, but he's particularly brilliant when it comes to doing picture research. So we did this, we did a book on football and a book on the Greeks. But mainly the book on football is we really played around with pitchers. And then 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 relationship 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, in the manner of a counterpoint rather than an illustration. And they're just interesting to look at. Yeah, I think so. 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. introduction to the history of Mrs. And 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 a, it was great fun. Thank you for your questions.