NEAR the start of this astute examination of Christian mysticism, Simon Critchley notes that the subject presents a substantial problem because the word “mysticism” is modern. Its invention marks a shift from what medieval mystics would have regarded as the core of their teaching. They sought to secure a sense of the presence of God in the midst of the everyday, whereas, today, mysticism typically refers to exceptional experiences or altered states of consciousness.
It can come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that Meister Eckhart never dwells on personal experiences, Mother Julian regards her brief showings as initiating a decades-long theological reflection, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing repeatedly warns against confusing experiences of any kind with the light of God.
These writers understood the word “mystical” in the older sense of hidden and so referring to insights and intuitions that remain obscure until the individual is remade by the grace of God. But that is not quite the right way to put it, either, because this remaking is a kind of unmaking: Critchley is fond of Simone Weil’s word “decreation”, which can be defined as an unravelling of all that is creaturely in us. Only then might be found the holy and firm, as Annie Dillard puts it, another writer whom Critchley much values.
Mystics deploy many strategies to indicate this way. Julian saw in her hand something as tiny and fragile as a hazelnut, so small that it could easily fall into non-existence, and was told it “is all that is made”. Her point is not ecological, but ontological: to take “delight in despising as nothing everything created, so as to love and have uncreated God”. Then can come a steady conviction that all shall be well.
Critchley is an academic philosopher, though not a professional sceptic. He doesn’t believe that his profession should hold all beliefs before “the tribunal of reason”, a practice that drains philosophy of life and probably lies behind the widespread conviction that it is of little use today. On the contrary, he believes that philosophy might revive if it became mystical again, thereby helping us attune to the silence in which God can be loved.
This reform would be challenging, because the practice also entails what mystics call self-annihilation: realising that you are nothing so as to “be oned with and like God in all things”, to quote Julian again. That gospel is not much heard in churches, I suspect, though some contemporary musicians and writers strive to be lost in their work for analogous reasons, as Critchley discusses. This is another way of saying that his book is a tremendous contribution to what could be a rediscovery of the mystical way in our times.
Dr Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist and writer.
On Mysticism: The experience of ecstasy
Simon Critchley
Profile Books £11.99
(978-1-80081-694-7)
Church Times Bookshop £10.79
