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

Simon Critchley

Thank you very much, Alex. Very nice to be here.

Simon Critchley

No, it's not. Well, firstly, it's not a religion. It's a tendency within religion, we could say. But then, I guess 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 a wonderful view, staring at the sea, or it could be some moment that transports you — for someone like me, it tends to be music. So, no, it's not necessarily religious, and it becomes less religious in the last couple of hundred years, I guess, for reasons that we could go into.

Simon Critchley

One of the purposes of religious institutions like churches is to control that fiery core. You want to have it limited to what is taught within that religious order, and you don't want it spinning out of control. So within mainstream Christianity, God becomes human 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 behaviour. So there's always this tension in religion between the fire that ignites, that really sets people aflame, and how that is to be controlled. And the history of what we call mysticism — it's an unstable, factitious category, but we could say that the people we think of as mystics, who think of themselves as religious or spiritual or contemplatives leading a contemplative life, are often remembered 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 itinerant former 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? It takes the Catholic Church sixty or seventy years to figure out how to incorporate the Franciscans, a wildly populist religious movement, into the Church.

So you can look at the history of what we call mysticism, with some qualifications, as two tendencies. People with this fiery message show up and draw an audience to them, and 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 some young person drawing big crowds to Christianity, you want to keep them in the fold, unless things go too far, unless they become seen as subversives who challenge the authority of the existing church. So, very crudely: in southern Europe, in Italy and Spain — this happens a bit later, with people like Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, there are a lot of struggles, but they're eventually incorporated into the Catholic Church, as the Franciscans are — whereas in northern Europe those movements tend to be more excluded. There's a case I talk about in the book of Marguerite Porete, who is burnt at the stake in 1310 in Paris for refusing to recant her views on love, expressed in her book. There's an inquisition, and the whole thing. So I think what the people we call mystics have in their hands is something combustible, potentially dangerous, a threat to the church — and the church wants to contain it if it can. And then there's a whole different story about what happens to that after the Protestant Reformation, but that's separate.

Simon Critchley

Yes. Holy Church, as she always calls it.

Simon Critchley

There's a very simple way of answering the question "what is mysticism?", which is to take a book by a woman called Evelyn Underhill, who's underrepresented, underknown, but very influential in her day. She writes a book in 1905, I think, called *Mysticism*, and she describes it as experience in its most intense form. So there's your one-sentence definition, and that intensity is an intensity of ecstasy.

The actual category of mysticism is much trickier. It basically appears in the seventeenth century in French, as *la mystique* — what we think of as the mystical, the idea of the mystical as some kind of experience of passivity towards a revelation. That's also the moment when you get a shift in the idea of experience, and the way in which experience might be verified — seventeenth-century Cartesian rationalism and so on, 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 eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth century, and then it begins to become almost like a separate category from religion — people talk about mysticism as if it's a thing.

If we go back to its source in medieval monastic traditions — or further back, to the church fathers, the desert fathers in Egypt — but if we just stay with the medieval monastic orders: here were institutions that had withdrawn from the world, the world was the storm of the Dark Ages, and people like St Benedict produced these little islands of knowledge where you could hang on to the few manuscripts that were available, and life was lived in a completely ritualised, ordered way, and monks were expected to do certain things every day. 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 — 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, it spills over out of that monastic space.

A really key element in the story of what we now call mysticism is what happens in the Low Countries, in what's now Belgium and the southern Netherlands, where you've got the origins of what will later become the Industrial Revolution — textile manufacturing, the emergence of a bourgeoisie — and then you get this development of a group of people called Beguines. Beguines were what were called semi-enclosed nuns: women who were not closed off from the world in their convents but could also move in the town, the textile manufacturing towns of Flanders and Brabant. Some of them attracted great attention to themselves, and so you begin to get this spilling-over of mystical practice into the world. As we go through the centuries, that continual act of spillover means we could now think of a kind of contradiction between mysticism and the institutional practice of religion — but that's a very modern idea. It begins within these very confined small institutions and then spills out. That's one way of thinking about it.

Simon Critchley

Yeah, we're talking about — an easy way of defining it is the feeling of the presence of God. And then in some mystics, the feeling, the awareness, of union with the divine, whether that's revealed through a person like Christ or through nature, in more 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 — Hinduism, Islam, and different forms of animism, the religions of indigenous peoples in the Americas, and so forth. There's some experience of proximity to the divine which is incredibly valued, and certain people have access to it — what we can call, loosely, shamans. So it's a constant feature of religion. Religion is a set of practices, beliefs, structures, society, and there hasn't really been a society without religion until, arguably, the modern period. All societies were structured around religion, and at the core of that religion was some special form of experience that certain people could have, or that certain people, if they were initiated into it, could feel a proximity to. To that extent it's everywhere, and it's incredibly vague. So what I try to do in the book is focus in particular on Christian mysticism, both because it interests me and also to bring out the real weirdness of Christianity, and how little we understand the Christian tradition, which is apparently 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, expressed and taught. The people we think of as mystics were people who drew people to them — we often know about them because they drew people to them — and this was always great business. It always worked. People have a deep metaphysical need, and mysticism is a really powerful way into it.

Simon Critchley

Master of theology.

Simon Critchley

No.

Simon Critchley

Yes and no. It's a really delicate line, this issue about who gets to call himself God. It was the case with Meister Eckhart that he did this without any visions — there's no claim to any visionary quality in what he does. He was just an excellent theologian and scholar of the Bible. He wrote many commentaries in Latin on these texts, which are a bit boring but good. Then he's told to go off to the German-speaking lands he's from, to try to rein in some of the problems arising in the Rhineland, in Cologne in particular, and off he goes, and he gives these sermons in German, in the local language — some of the first texts we have in German are Eckhart's sermons — and he says some very wild things, but very engaging things. And then the Bishop of Cologne says 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, Rome and Avignon — and he's imprisoned for a period, and tried, and then he dies down there without being found guilty, but he's posthumously condemned as a heretic a year after his death, in a papal bull.

At this point in the history of the Catholic Church — as Tom Holland points out in *Dominion*, I think, when he talks about the rise of the medieval Catholic Church and its 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 — you get legal systems, canon law, and then universities meant to teach canon law, to adjudicate these decisions. So the Catholic Church really gets its act in order in the late medieval period, and then they begin to find heretics.

Now, the issue of deification is really fascinating and tricky. Jesus, as you said, you could interpret the text as him claiming divinity for himself — that seems to be what he's saying. But is it just him, this first-century troublemaker in occupied Palestine, who gets to call himself God? Opinions really differ on that. I've spent a lot of time in the last ten years learning more about Orthodox Christianity, the Eastern Church, particularly the Greek Orthodox tradition, and in that tradition the idea of what they call theosis, or deification, is fine — it's something that if you are a good person, a worthy person, if you lead the life of a good monk on Mount Athos or whatever, you could aspire towards deification. It's a really long and complex story, and within Islam there's a whole tradition of that too, particularly in the Sufi tradition — not so much in Judaism, that's much trickier. But certainly within many religious traditions there's the idea of somebody declaring themselves divine.

If we fast-forward through the Reformation to the United States of America, which is a hotbed of religious exuberance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you've got all sorts of people wandering around claiming they're divine — some fade out, like the Shakers, who took a vow of chastity, and some do incredibly well, like the Mormons. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, basically claims divinity for himself, and for anyone who is like him — 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 can legitimately call yourself God.

Simon Critchley

But yes. That unity with the divine — something else you were saying — William James, who everybody likes, or 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 or the narrow guardrails of academic propriety. So, three cheers for William James. James defines mysticism as union with the divine, and that makes perfect sense. But the only qualification I want to introduce is that union with the divine presupposes that there's something like a soul and something like God, and those two things unify — two substances attain a unity. There's another, 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 possible, to decreate itself, to desubstantialise itself — in the words of Marguerite Porete, to annihilate itself — and that self-annihilation is a way of opening the soul to the presence of God. So there's another idea, what I call in the book "unity without distinction". In a sense, we can think about mysticism in a more radical way, as an attempt to get rid of the soul, the self, as much as possible, in order to be open to this experience, and then, concomitantly on the other side, the god itself releases its substantial quality towards me.

To summarise, in a great quote from Meister Eckhart — I'm putting together a couple of quotations here — he says, "I pray to God to rid me of God." What he means is that the idea of God gets in the way of the experience he's trying to evoke. For Eckhart, it's a question of God ceasing to be God, namely a substance, as opposed to a self, and of the soul ceasing to be a soul, and for those two entities, those two presences, to meet in a third ground — that is what Eckhart calls the Godhead, this slightly mysterious concept that also gets him into trouble. What he means by the Godhead is some space between me and the divine where detachment, releasement and life can be lived in a different way — and you could say people have said this gets very close to aspects of Zen Buddhism, to the more esoteric teachings of Hinduism, and so on. Maybe it does. It's very interesting.

Simon Critchley

Tricky. 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 — the last thing that Flannery O'Connor was interested in was herself, she was interested in the thing she was trying to write about, to evoke, in this early prayer journal she wrote when she was at college — the attempt to push oneself aside inevitably draws attention to the self. The mystics I'm thinking about had absolutely no interest in themselves, and therefore were interesting to others. In a sense this is a brilliant kind of publicity strategy. Simone Weil had no interest in Simone Weil — she was trying to decreate Simone Weil in order to make way for the God she was awaiting — and now there are operas about the life of Simone Weil, plays about Simone Weil, and the same thing with Marguerite Porete and the rest. So there's a paradox: by pushing the self away, and pushing it away most rigorously, those people draw attention to themselves. There's a kind of 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 this week because I'm doing an event with Clare Carlisle, someone I've not met before but whose work I've read over a number of years — her book called, I think, *Transcendence for Beginners*, the Gifford Lectures. She's basically lacing together Spinoza and Hinduism, amongst other things, and the really interesting side of it is the way she's foregrounding George Eliot as a philosophical thinker of a quite specific type, and Kierkegaard — and what she's trying to do, which I'm just thinking about now, is to connect together philosophy with life-writing. When I taught philosophy, the last thing one was meant to be interested in, in either the analytic or the continental tradition, was biography — it was unseemly. That began to change really with the publication of a number of important biographies, I guess in the early nineties — Ray Monk's book on Wittgenstein, and books like that — and you realise that whatever Wittgenstein was about, this was a life, in a sense the life of a saint, with all its tortures and its sinfulness, but he was pointing away from what philosophy could do, towards a life that could be lived. So I think there's always been this tension in philosophy between philosophy and life-writing — what it might mean to do philosophy from life, in the way an artist will draw from life.

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 and languages — particularly the languages of northern Europe, early Dutch, Middle High German, English, medieval French — are the autobiographies of women who were contemplatives, mystics. Let's just take the example of Julian, because it's available in English and it's fascinating. She's using experiences from her life that didn't last very long — twelve 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 theological vision. So that's an important point to underline: for us, whatever we are, moderns, wherever we are in 2026, we've tended to take for granted the reduction of religion to experience — religion is "do you believe in God or not, have you experienced this or not, do you have an experience of faith or not" — and we tend to end matters there. Now, for the people I'm talking about, there's experience, but there's also theology — conceptual work that needs to be done — and the two things have to go together. Julian has these experiences, 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 Julian has — which is a fantastic problem to have — is that she saw all these things in her showings, but she did not see sin. "I did not see sin," as she puts it. She can't make sense of the category of sin, and so in the long version of her text she ends up retelling the story of the Fall of Adam. It's experience and theology working together. So I think the relationship that someone like Clare Carlisle makes, between life-writing, Hindu and Brahman traditions, and what's going on in the West, is fascinating — and Spinoza is kind of the conduit for all of that.

Simon Critchley

It's a most queer tradition. Within Christianity it's most strange. The first thing is that you get the appearance of women writers from, let's say, the eleventh or twelfth century onwards — people like Hadewijch, writing in Antwerp, and then others; Julian of Norwich, in that sense, is on the later side, writing in the late fourteenth, early fifteenth century. But what is it that women have access to — writing? They have access, and that's one of the things that was on my mind writing about this material, and before that teaching it: there have been these endless debates in philosophy about the nature of the canon, who gets to be in the canon and who doesn't, can we have more female philosophers in the canon, please. But if you shift focus, rotate the crystal a little bit — here's this tradition, mystical tradition, entirely dominated by women. They weren't clerics, they weren't fully paid-up masters of theology at the University of Paris, but they were there. And someone like Marguerite Porete, who is wandering around northern France and Flanders with her book on refined love, and is then burnt as a heretic in 1310, as I mentioned — 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 he had access to it. So it's a case where you have women writers and contemplatives influencing men, and then on the other hand you've got male writers, in the English tradition, like Hilton and Richard Rolle, who are writing in this incredibly evocative, very sexual way, but in a very vulnerable, feminised manner, about the experience of the divine.

Then there's someone I talk about briefly in the book, Henry Suso, who writes these books — *The Clock of Wisdom* and *The Life of the Servant* — among the most popular books in the German language in the medieval period, until the early modern period, second only to Thomas à Kempis's *Imitation of Christ*. In those texts, Suso — who is a man — his experiences are written down by a woman, so it's not just the classic mystical pattern, a crazy, unstable young woman experiencing the divine and some monk following her around writing things down; here you've got the inversion of that. His experiences are written down by his follower, a novice called Elsbeth Stagel, I think her name is, and in those experiences he describes his own feminisation — that, as he is experiencing Christ, he's experiencing Christ as a woman. And it gets weirder. At the centre of Julian of Norwich's showing — and this goes back into the Hebrew Bible and the early 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 an angry, bearded father in the sky. 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 breast of Christ. That's the important blood. And the way that side wound was often depicted in medieval iconography was in a shape 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. So Christ is a woman, and a man, and other things as well. The idea that there is something essentially macho about Christianity is really bizarre — it's a tradition where — and this is where I'd make a distinction between Christianity and the other Abrahamic faiths, and Hinduism on the other hand — for me the idea of incarnation is paradoxical and powerful and important: 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 you can find approximations of that in different religious traditions, but there's something about the extremity of it within Christianity that appeals to me — because it also offends people, which is good.

Simon Critchley

Yeah, it was a kind of elaborate hoax, but it finds its flourishing in Thomas Aquinas, the most important Christian metaphysician of all time, a man who was no stranger to premises 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.

Simon Critchley

It's important because we begin from the idea of God as incomprehensible, as you said — the incomprehensibility of God, together with the idea that we cannot contain the divine within a proposition. Any proposition is going to miss its target. That's where this tradition really kicks off. 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, philosophically clever populace of Athens. It's a kind of literary fiction developed in later centuries. But in these texts, by Dionysius, or the pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite — which takes its name from the Areopagus, the hill of Ares, where the law courts were, where trials for murder were adjudicated in Athens — he says, and I'll quote this because it might be helpful:

"It is 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, on the negative side, we ascend from the particular to the universal conceptions, abstracting all attributes, in order that, without veil, we may know that unknowing, that 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 flavour of Dionysius. So we have the positive method of affirmation — the method Aquinas adopts, broadly, in the *Summa* — and then we have the negative method, which I try to summarise in terms of a distinction between what I call descending affirmations and ascending negations. Descending affirmations would be "God is" — and we go down from creatures, 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 the only path to the divine is through negation on the one hand, and through exaggeration on the other. The exaggeration part is fascinating, because you've got, in that bit of Dionysius I just quoted, "super-essential darkness" — what does that even mean? It's either essential darkness or inessential darkness, but super-essential darkness. And he'll talk about "dazzling obscurity" — how can obscurity be dazzling, obscurity is obscurity, how can that dazzle — or "radiant stillness", "whispering stillness" — stillness is stillness, how can it whisper? So language is being turned against itself in order to open to something beyond language. That's the basic line, and I track it through these ancient sources — *The Cloud of Unknowing*, Eckhart's sermons — right the way forward into someone like T. S. Eliot in *Four Quartets*, where Eliot is 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 series of negations and undoings. That idea of language undoing itself, I find fascinating, and it's also effective — it's not just a clever intellectual enterprise, "look, I can speak in these negations, aren't you impressed" — it's also linked to an idea, a movement, of love. 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 gives you a picture of it — and the second element is love, a love that opens out. Somehow it's a negativity in the service of something like an erotic, divine — something like that.

Simon Critchley

Like straw. Exactly.

Simon Critchley

Oh yeah — because they'd set up these institutions to teach theology and canon law, the things that become the great European universities, specifically for this purpose. And indeed they're still around, and it sits in a very odd relationship. Just think about the pairing of Aquinas with Eckhart — a very odd pairing, yet they were near-contemporaries, and perhaps doing very similar things, or making very similar commitments.

Finally, Pascal is interesting — we can talk about Pascal, because Pascal has always been very important to me, in the sense that the emphasis upon reason, of which he was an expert, as a geometer, a city planner, and all the practical things Pascal could do — but then the idea that 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 *Memorial*, the night of fire, that conversion text sewn into his doublet — that's the God not of scholars and philosophers, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. That's the God. And the difference there would be — is Pascal a mystic? No. Because here's another thing to think about: after the Reformation has happened, after Luther has done his work, the version of the Reformation we wind up with in France is Jansenism, and Pascal is the primate, exhibit A, of Jansenism. And the way this works in the history of theology, it seems to me, turns around Augustine — central to what Luther's up to, and 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's 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 to enable grace to be bestowed. So there's a kind of — in the Pascalian vision, what Lucien Goldmann used to call, many years ago, the tragic vision of Pascal and Racine — a distance from God, a God who has absconded, the *Deus absconditus*. That's a powerful tradition, and on some days I'm more drawn to that than to the kind of messy materiality of mysticism.

Simon Critchley

Check.

Simon Critchley

Yeah, it's the one that gives extreme unction. It's something we picked up in Mexico.

Simon Critchley

Interested in it — am I? Well, I have a temperamental pull towards forms of mystical thinking, writing, being, and I always have. I'm not by nature a sceptic. So when William Blake says he saw angels on a tree in Putney, or whatever he said, I think, yeah, he did see those angels, and that explains a lot. So my interest in mysticism is partly explained by my 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.

I find that the form of philosophy I was educated within was 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 there were also, together with that, assumptions about the nature of modernity — modernity equalling secularism, equalling a whole series of other things — and I've always been suspicious of those easy periodisations, that we're in this time and therefore what these people thought back then, like Eckhart, is just irrelevant, an interesting historical curiosity. I don't believe in the way philosophers and other scholars break up history into neatly organised units. There's a kind of dogmatic rationalism in professional philosophy still — maybe less so now, but it's still there — and there's also a kind of dogmatic adoration of critique at all costs, 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 what's more important for me is trying to induce in students a willingness to read something extremely strange and counterintuitive, at least initially, and maybe for some time afterwards, to suspend disbelief and embrace a vision of things, an account of things, that doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Philosophers are very good at keeping things out — they're trained to keep out things that cause irritation, that don't chime with their sense of what's important. I've always rebelled against that. 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 it really helps to be taught — but I think it has to be done with open-mindedness, a generosity of spirit, a sympathy for the things we're talking about, rather than an attempt to blot things out.

So again, where I am, teaching in New York, the last ten years have been a kind of culmination of the obsession with critique at all costs, of everything, and that's no way to proceed. You've got to try to understand things, whatever they are — forms of life, books — in their own terms, in order to understand the people who are moved by them, swayed by them. So my interest in mysticism is part of that. It began — this is maybe interesting — with some interest in something I was calling "mystical anarchism", back in the day, in response to a whole series of things. I had thirty or forty pages of material, and then a colleague of mine, a new colleague at the time, called Eugene Thacker, was interested in similar sorts of things, and 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 is — often when you're teaching the kind of material I teach, say Heidegger's *Being and Time* or something like that, you're trying to explain a chapter of the book and persuade people of it, for them to find some resonance in it. But I found with these mystical texts, it was combustible — people found their way to this incredibly easily, and they were really turned on by it in ways I hadn't really seen before in teaching. So you realise there's a fire in this material, which is fascinating. That was important, realising there's something about this material which really animates people, in ways that can lead down some pretty strange alleys — pretty soon you're in tarot readings and theosophist sessions, whatever it might be — but we still have to retain an open mind.

Simon Critchley

Bernard McGinn, *The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism*. McGinn is a formidable scholar of the history of Christianity, still very much with us, I believe — he wrote a book called *The Presence of God*, now in its seventh or eighth volume, and that's a kind of diachronic, historical approach, beginning with the earliest Christian texts and going right the way through. But around 2010 or so he does this — what's the opposite of diachronic — a kind of synchronic approach, a window on mysticism, where he basically selects a number of key themes and then finds texts from the last two thousand years. The texts are quite short, sometimes a page or two, and you really get a sense of how the Christian mystical tradition functions, and you can dip your toe into two pages of Marguerite Porete — if you decide that's for you, then good — or read a little bit of Thomas Merton, decide that's for you, and go further. It's an incredibly engaging book, and it also works because mystical texts, in the medieval period and until much later, circulated as compendia of fragments, little shards of text that would be copied and recopied — often many of the texts we have, we don't have in the original language, because they were lost, we have them in translations, copies of copies of copies. There's something about that approach to mysticism you get in the McGinn book.

If you want a more philosophical approach, then, aside from my own humble efforts, I'd recommend William James, *The Varieties of Religious Experience* — the Gifford Lectures from 1901 or thereabouts, I'm not sure —

Simon Critchley

— for him, the centre of things is mysticism, and it's about eighty or a hundred pages, depending which edition you've got. James, for me, is the idea of what a philosopher should be — someone with 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 Varieties*, and McGinn's *Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism*.

Simon Critchley

Which is, of course — no, it's a humble effort, it's imperfect, but the bits I'm proudest of — the discussion of T. S. Eliot, I'm very — that was thirty, thirty-five years of thinking. I really felt I had to say something about *Four Quartets* before I die.

Simon Critchley

Oh, writing books for me is always — I've been lucky in my career to have editors who become friends, and one editor who's become a friend of mine is a guy called Mark Ellingham, one of the important people at Profile Books. Mark is brilliant in many ways, but particularly brilliant when it comes to picture research — we did a book on football, and a book on the Greeks, and on the football book especially we really played around with pictures. Then I was sitting at his place in London about three years ago, and he pulled together a whole series of images and began putting them in relation to the text. So they're meant to stand in relationship to the text as juxtapositions — they follow the line of the argument, but in the manner of a counterpoint rather than an illustration.

Simon Critchley

I think so. I think so.

Simon Critchley

Thank you very much, Alex. It was great fun. Thank you for your questions.