Speaker

Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley

British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at The New School in New York, working in the continental tradition on existentialism, ethics, and — in his most recent book — mysticism. He is the author of Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy, The Book of Dead Philosophers, and Faith of the Faithless, among other works.

Critchley describes his own philosophical training as ‘ferociously secular’ — a discipline in which religious material, and biography generally, was treated as unserious. His interest in mysticism runs against that training: he calls it part of a lifelong insurgency against professional philosophy, a preference for reading strange, counterintuitive material on its own terms — suspending disbelief — over the field’s default posture of critique. The interest began with unpublished work he called ‘mystical anarchism’ and grew into a course on mysticism co-taught at The New School with a colleague, largely built around guest speakers; he found the material ‘combustible’ in the classroom in a way standard philosophical texts were not.

Core positions

Critchley’s book focuses on Christian mysticism specifically, both because it interests him and because he thinks it exposes how little is generally understood about Christianity — the doctrinal source of much of Western culture. He treats mysticism not as a religion but as ‘the fiery core’ within religion: an intense experience of the presence of God, or unification with the divine, that religious institutions have historically tried to control rather than suppress outright, incorporating figures they could (the Franciscans) and excluding those they could not (Marguerite Porete, burned at the stake in 1310).

He distinguishes two structurally different accounts of union with the divine: William James’s model, in which the soul and God are two substances that attain unity, and a more radical apophatic tradition — running through Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart — of ‘unity without distinction’, in which the self tries to annihilate or decreate itself so that both self and a defined God can fall away into what Eckhart calls the godhead. He is drawn to the paradox this produces: mystics who most rigorously try to erase themselves — Simone Weil, Porete, the young Flannery O’Connor — become most memorable for having tried.

Critchley reads two literary strategies as constitutive of mystical writing about God: apophatic negation, which proceeds by stripping away predicates because language cannot contain its object, and exaggeration, which piles up self-contradicting superlatives. He traces the negative tradition from the pseudonymous Pseudo-Dionysius through Thomas Aquinas to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and links both strategies to an underlying movement of erotic love rather than pure intellectual display.

He is struck by the prominence of women in the Christian mystical record — Hadewijch, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, Marguerite Porete — and by the recurrence of feminised imagery even in male mystics, arguing this cuts against any idea that Christianity is intrinsically ‘macho’: the incarnation, on his reading, happens through Mary’s maternal body, and Christ appears in writers such as Julian of Norwich as a nurturing mother figure.

Critchley does not consider himself a mystic. He distinguishes his own temperamental pull toward mystical thinking from actually having mystical experience, and he draws a related distinction around Blaise Pascal: despite Pascal’s ‘night of fire’ conversion, Critchley classes him as a non-mystic, because Pascal’s Jansenism holds that grace is entirely inscrutable and that no human effort or state can bring about union with God — a ‘tragic vision’ opposed to the mystical claim of achievable proximity.

In the wiki