Simon Critchley on Mysticism, Unification with the Divine, and the Limits of Language

Philosopher Simon Critchley argues that mysticism is not a religion but the ‘fiery core’ within one — an intense experience of proximity to, or unification with, the divine that religious institutions have spent centuries trying to control, and that pulls language itself apart in the attempt to describe it.

Key ideas

1. Mysticism is a tendency within religion, not a religion itself. Critchley defines it, following Evelyn Underhill’s 1905 book Mysticism, as ‘experience in its most intense form’ — the feeling of the presence of God, or unification with the divine. The word itself is comparatively recent: it enters French as le mystique in the seventeenth century but does not gain wide currency until the eighteenth and nineteenth, when it starts to be treated as a category separate from religion. The experience it names is older and originates in the discipline of medieval monasteries, before spilling out into the wider world through groups such as the Beguines of Flanders.

2. The church’s problem is controlling its own fire. Institutions exist partly to contain the intensity that mystics generate, because a figure who draws a large following is both good for business and a threat to authority. Critchley traces two outcomes: incorporation, as when the Franciscans — built around Francis’s itinerant preaching of poverty — were absorbed into the Catholic Church over sixty or seventy years, and exclusion, as when Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 for refusing to recant the views in her book on love. Southern Europe tended toward incorporation; northern Europe, toward exclusion.

3. There are two distinct models of unification with the divine. William James’s classic account treats the soul and God as two substances that attain unity — a real ‘union’ presupposes something like a soul and something like God that come together. Critchley sets alongside it a more radical tradition of ‘unity without distinction’, in which the self tries to decreate or annihilate itself rather than merge with anything. Meister Eckhart’s line — ‘I pray to God to rid me of God’ — captures the idea: both God as a defined substance and the self as a substance have to fall away for the two to meet in what Eckhart calls the godhead.

4. Self-erasure is a paradox that draws attention to the self. Mystics who most rigorously try to push themselves aside — Simone Weil, Marguerite Porete, the young Flannery O’Connor, who wrote ‘I do not know you, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside’ — become famous for doing so; there are now operas about Weil’s life. Critchley calls this an ‘economy of attention’: the attempt to erase the self is itself what makes the self visible.

5. Christian mysticism’s written record is dominated by women, and femininity recurs even in male mystics. From Hadewijch of Antwerp and Julian of Norwich to Teresa of Ávila, women had access to a form — devotional autobiography — that the male-run universities largely denied them, and Marguerite Porete’s book reached Eckhart directly. Male mystics such as Richard Rolle wrote in an explicitly feminised, erotic register, and Henry Suso’s visions were recorded by his female follower Elsbeth Stagel. In Julian of Norwich, Christ is imagined as a nurturing mother whose wound feeds the believer — an identification with a long medieval iconographic tradition. For Critchley, the case shows there is nothing intrinsically ‘macho’ about Christianity: the incarnation happens through Mary’s maternal body.

6. Two literary strategies try, and fail, to name the divine. Apophatic or ‘negative’ theology — traced by Critchley from the pseudonymous writer Pseudo-Dionysius through Thomas Aquinas to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — proceeds by stripping away every predicate (‘God is not this, not that’) rather than affirming any, because language cannot contain its object. Exaggeration works the opposite way, piling up self-contradictory phrases such as Dionysius’s ‘dazzling obscurity’. Both, Critchley argues, turn language against itself to gesture at what exceeds it, and both are bound up with an erotic movement of love, not merely intellectual display. Aquinas himself, near the end of his life, stopped writing the Summa Theologica, saying everything he had written was ‘like straw’ compared to what he had seen.

7. Blaise Pascal had a mystical experience but was not, on Critchley’s account, a mystic. Pascal’s Jansenism — rooted in Augustine and shaped by the aftermath of the Reformation — holds that grace is entirely inscrutable: nothing a person does can bring about union or deification with God. That ‘tragic vision’ of an absent, unreachable God is structurally opposed to the mystical claim of achievable proximity or unity, even though Pascal’s own ‘night of fire’ reads, on the surface, like a mystical conversion.

Context

Critchley’s approach is continental rather than analytic — a register largely absent from the wiki’s other philosophy-of-mind and philosophy-of-religion coverage, which runs through analytic figures such as Keith Frankish, Galen Strawson, and John Lennox. He is explicit about the contrast: his philosophical training was ‘ferociously secular’, suspicious of religious material and biography alike, and he describes his interest in mysticism as part of a ‘lifelong insurgency against professional philosophy’ — a preference for suspending disbelief and reading strange, counterintuitive material on its own terms over the discipline’s default posture of critique.

Although the conversation concentrates on the Christian tradition — the corpus of Critchley’s book Mysticism — he places it within a wider comparative frame: the tenth-century Islamic mystic Al-Hallaj, executed for declaring ‘I am the truth’; the Sufi tradition generally; and the Eastern Orthodox concept of theosis, or deification through the ascetic life, which treats a claim to closeness with God far more permissively than the medieval Catholic Church did.

Related

• Simon Critchley — speaker; philosopher of mysticism, existentialism, and continental philosophy
• Alex O'Connor — host; Within Reason / CosmicSkeptic
• Mysticism — concept; the definition, the institutional mechanism, and the two models of union set out here
• Science and Religion — the adjacent debate, fought over evidence and authority rather than intensity and union
• John Lennox on Suffering, the Problem of Evil, and Why God Allows It — sibling Within Reason episode engaging Christian doctrine from an analytic, apologetic angle Critchley’s mystical-continental treatment contrasts with
• Galen Strawson on Panpsychism, Physicalism, and Why Consciousness Is Foundational — sibling episode probing the boundary between mind, matter, and the foundational — approached through analytic philosophy of mind rather than mystical theology