Concept

Mysticism

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Mysticism

Not a religion but a tendency inside one — what Simon Critchley calls the fiery core of a faith rather than the faith itself. Following Evelyn Underhill, whose 1905 book Mysticism remains the standard entry point, it names ‘experience in its most intense form’: the felt presence of God, or unification with the divine.

The category is younger than the thing. Le mystique enters French in the seventeenth century, gains currency only in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and it is at that point that mysticism begins to look like a department separate from religion. The experience itself is older, and it is monastic in origin — a discipline of enclosed communities before it spilled into the world.

Mysticism is easily confused with religious experience as such. The distinction Critchley draws is one of intensity and of claim: the mystic does not merely believe in God or feel moved by God but asserts proximity to, or union with, God — a claim an institution must then do something about.

Where it came from: the Beguines and the textile towns

The spilling-out happened in the low countries — modern Belgium and the southern Netherlands — in the same towns and the same decades that produced textile manufacturing, the origins of what became the industrial revolution, and an emerging bourgeoisie. There a group arose called the Beguines: semi-enclosed nuns, women not sealed inside a convent but able to move through the towns of Flanders and Brabant. Some of them attracted great attention. Mysticism’s history as a public phenomenon starts there, in a commercial society, not in the desert.

The institutional problem: incorporation or exclusion

A church has to control its own fire. A figure who sets people alight draws a following, and a following is simultaneously good for business and a threat to authority. Critchley traces two resolutions.

Incorporation. The Franciscans formed around Francis’s itinerant preaching of poverty and were absorbed into the Catholic Church across sixty or seventy years — the intensity domesticated into an order.

Exclusion. Marguerite Porete wandered northern France and Flanders with her book on refined love and was burnt at the stake in Paris in 1310 for refusing to recant it. The teaching survived her: the book reached Meister Eckhart.

The pattern is geographical. Southern Europe tended to incorporate; northern Europe tended to exclude.

Two models of unification

The claim to union hides an ambiguity, and the two readings are not variants of one idea but rival metaphysics.

Union of two substances. William James’s classic account presupposes a soul and a God — two things that come together and attain unity. Something is joined to something.

Unity without distinction. The more radical tradition denies the premise. Here the self does not merge with God; it decreates or annihilates itself, and God as a defined substance falls away too. Eckhart’s line is the compression of it: ‘I pray to God to rid me of God.’ What remains when both substances go is what he calls the godhead.

The paradox of self-erasure

Mystics who push the self aside most rigorously become famous for doing so. Simone Weil, Porete, and the young Flannery O’Connor — ‘I do not know you, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside’ — are known precisely for the erasure. There are now operas about Weil’s life. Critchley calls this an economy of attention: the attempt to disappear is what makes the self visible.

Why the record is largely women’s

Christian mysticism’s written tradition is dominated by women, from Hadewijch of Antwerp and Julian of Norwich to Teresa of Ávila. The mechanism is institutional rather than temperamental: the universities were closed to women, but devotional autobiography was not, and that form carried the material. Porete’s book reached Eckhart on those terms.

Femininity recurs even among the men. Richard Rolle wrote in an explicitly feminised, erotic register; Henry Suso’s visions were recorded by his follower Elsbeth Stagel; Julian imagines Christ as a nurturing mother whose wound feeds the believer, drawing on a long medieval iconography. Critchley’s conclusion is that nothing about Christianity is intrinsically macho — the incarnation runs through Mary’s maternal body.

Two strategies against the limits of language

If the object exceeds description, language must be turned against itself. Two techniques do it from opposite directions.

Apophasis, or negative theology, strips predicates away — God is not this, not that — and runs from Pseudo-Dionysius through Thomas Aquinas to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Exaggeration piles up self-contradiction instead: Dionysius’s ‘dazzling obscurity’.

Both are erotic movements of love rather than intellectual display. Aquinas stopped writing the Summa Theologica near the end of his life, saying that everything he had written was like straw compared with what he had seen.

The boundary case: Pascal

Blaise Pascal had a mystical experience and was not a mystic — which is what makes him useful for fixing the concept’s edge. His Jansenism, rooted in Augustine and shaped by the Reformation’s aftermath, holds grace to be wholly inscrutable: nothing a person does can bring about union or deification. That tragic vision of an absent, unreachable God is structurally opposed to the mystical claim of achievable proximity, however much his night of fire reads on the surface like a conversion.

Beyond Christianity

Critchley’s own corpus is Christian, but the phenomenon is not. The tenth-century Islamic mystic Al-Hallaj was executed for declaring ‘I am the truth’ — exclusion again, on the same logic. Eastern Orthodoxy, by contrast, treats theosis, deification through the ascetic life, far more permissively than the medieval Catholic Church treated its own claimants.

David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian, supplies the mechanism behind that permissiveness — and it turns out to bear directly on the incorporation-or-exclusion problem above. The West, he argues, set grace against nature: ‘grace was treated as antithetical to nature. Grace was a principle over against nature. It was therefore given according to a purely predilective, predestining will of God.’ The East never adopted the opposition. ‘Grace was just a word for the way God deals with creatures, and it was seen as more continuous with nature: that we’re always already naturally oriented to union with God, and that it’s an unnatural impediment that separates us from God rather than a failure to receive a super-elevating grace.’

If union with God is what human nature is for, a claim to have attained it is not an extraordinary irruption an institution must adjudicate — it is nature working. That is why there is less to police. On Hart’s account deification sits ‘at the heart of Christian thought’ rather than at its dangerous edge, and the image he reaches for is cosmic rather than individual: ‘the whole universe is like a burning bush shining with the glory of God, but not consumed.’ The medieval Catholic Church had to decide what to do with a mystic because its own theology made union exceptional; Orthodoxy inherited no such exception to manage. See David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought.

Where mainstream views differ

The modern default reduces religion to experience. Do you believe in God or not; have you had the experience or not — and there the matter ends. Critchley’s objection is that this is a reduction, and that it makes the mystics unreadable. For the writers he studies there is experience and theology: conceptual work that has to be done, with the two going together. Julian of Norwich has extreme experiences while dying, receives the showings, and is then driven to a complete theological reframing of Christianity — because what she saw did not fit what she had been taught. On the experience-only account, the showings are the whole story and the reframing is invisible.

The internal contest matters too. If James is right that union joins two substances, the Eckhart tradition is not a stronger version of the same claim but a rejection of it, since it dissolves both terms the union was supposed to relate.

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