Mysticism, or the Ego Death of Eros

A Review of Simon Critchley’s "Mysticism"

Empty yourself out. Empty it of everything: all passions and all notions. Now rid yourself of your faculty of reasoning, along with its illusory pretense that it can understand truth. Put a cloud of forgetting between yourself and all creatures and aim your focus up to a cloud of unknowing. Pierce it with your love, not with your mind. Love only God. Now empty yourself of God, for that too is too much. It is your vanity reflected. Empty yourself out even of that Nothing that is left. You are made of nothing that is made. The soul who is most untouched is the most like to God. Take your free will, and break it; will nothing, not even nothingness. Hack at yourself until your soul is nothing but an empty vibration of love for God, which is itself God. God said to the soul: I desired you before the world began. And where the desires of two come together, there love is perfected. Love will not be idle, it is working some good evermore. Pray that God rid you of God, because you, as nothingness, stand higher than God. But now you are one with God: you have immolated yourself and by the light of that fire have illumined the supernatural darkness that is God, and have finally entered into God, consummated your love with God, with the infinite overflowing spring of ecstatic love that is God, that always was but which you could not see, blinded as you were by your Self…

This is what it is like to read any of the dozens of mystics that philosopher and New School professor Simon Critchley, whom I studied under in graduate school, references in his new book Mysticism (NYRB, 2024). Indeed, half of that paragraph is a medley of many wonderful lines from figures like Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Meister Eckhart, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Marguerite Porete, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Much of it sounds like the inner voice or call of conscience that many may have heard in the slow, isolated days of the COVID pandemic; Critchley taught a Zoom course during it called “Pandemic Mysticism.”

Why is an academic from a secular philosophy department grounded in critical theory writing about mysticism? Aren’t we typically told by such scholars, the Jay Bernsteins of the world who come out of the Frankfurt School tradition, to beware of the “mystifying” tendencies of ideology? Well, Critchley tells us mysticism is not a mystification at all. Far from obscuring the truth, mystic texts provide a great clearing in which we can finally see and feel and touch what is most important.

This is because mysticism does not pass along any articles of belief. It does not wish to form partisans—it is not a “doctrine” at all. As an existential practice rather than a theoretical disputation, it simply promises to enable us to stand outside ourselves, an ex-stasis, letting us get around our cumbersome theories and apprehend the world in fresh, celebratory awe.

Orthodox philosophers, the big recognizable names that decorate most university course catalogs, believe truth is best reached through descending propositions, where we make modest claims about what we can know and derive implications from those claims. Mystics, on the other hand, believe truth is best reached through ascending negations, a process by which we strip ourselves of evermore layers of certainty and prejudice.

Freeing his readers from a pernicious and narrow sense of intellectual activity seems to be Critchley’s chief aim, a service he believes is necessary due to the relatively recent errors of his own practice. In his reading, as well as Niklaus Largier’s, since roughly the time of Kant philosophy as a discipline has elected itself the task of stamping out fun, speculative thinking and sidelining it into the heretical category of Schwärmerei, “enthusiasm” or “fanaticism.” Mysticism inevitably fell in with this. As Critchley stresses, the term “mysticism” itself is a misnomer, a category of derision created intentionally by moderns to reign in these holy fools—just as the Church had often done before them.

But these fools were often better philosophers, if we take Philosophy seriously when, at its outset, it declared itself to be the love of wisdom and named as its enemy the fraud of sophistry: wisdom quantified and available for a price. Mysticism insists that all commodified, societal knowledge must be stripped away until we have been rendered as new as Adam, until we have peeled off the layers of inauthentic slime that had accumulated on our skin from so much idle talk and fearful doubting. This slime, they contend, has been preventing us from hearing and speaking with the ears and mouth of heavenly love.

Two misconceptions inevitably arise when a modern person approaches any theoretical subject. One is that we think we have to go track down the main figures and read their collected works, like Aquinas or Kant. But the works of the mystics were distributed in what Critchley calls “mixtape” fashion: anthologies, passed around in the Middle Ages, released in drips, fragments, quoted passages.

Secondly, we believe the subject needs to be systematically worked out in order to be “understood.” Instead, by offering itself as a practice rather than a system, a thing that needs to be performed, mysticism actively combats this sedentary version of knowledge. These texts only help us do it ourselves.

Critchley employs seven adverbs to help us understand this unorthodox way of thinking and being. Mysticism happens:

1. obliquely, because coming at God head-on as typical theology does gets us caught up in too many distracting propositions (although the mystics stress that mysticism is not incompatible with theology).

2. autobiographically, because it is highly personal (Critchley makes note that many of the first female “I” subjects in modern European languages occur in these mystic texts).

3. vernacularly (again, these texts were written in the modern European languages, from and for a populist intent, rather than the schooled Latin).

4. performatively (mysticism is wild and felt, rather than tame and ponderous).

5. practically (mysticism is to be practiced, repeatedly, and is a way of life, rather than a set of informational visions that randomly drop themselves on people).

6. erotically (Christianity, as a religion of love, in these intense stages melts pretty frequently into bizarre and alarming literary erotica for God, which emphasizes the unorthodox and sublime as well as the personal elements of this domain).

7. ascetically (from the Greek askesis, student; and like many students, these mystics lived in poverty and devoted themselves to their studies of God, which was also their art and their love life).

In the mystic experience, Eros experiences ego death. Loving no longer just himself or any object his faculties could constrain themselves to focus on, he is released and scattered to the near and accepting God.

The headrush is heightened when we read how the mystics employ these adverbs. One’s whole conception of “mysticism” is turned upside and around through a simple perusing of a book like The Cloude of Unknowyng (late 14^th century England; author unknown). The practical, immediate, phenomenological, quotidian character of the genre flies in the face of the esoteric or numerological trickery we might have been expecting.

The mystics were excellent poets too, with fiery intuitions that can make the painfully serious works of modern epistemologists appear wan by comparison. While the modern rationalist “police force” (a term Critchley cites from Heidegger who used it to refer to his profession without irony) may stem from a Bloomian anxiety of influence, Critchley detects among the mystics only an “ecstasy of influence,” a community of poets that have immolated their selves too completely for their egos to interfere with the free dissemination of techniques to portray the Godhead in all its shimmering glory. Poetry, and art more generally, is an essential component of Critchley’s argument.

Art makes up the last of the book’s three parts, and poetic works are quoted with abandon in the second. For Critchley, mysticism, understood as the “experience of the impossible,” lives on for us moderns in the aesthetic experience. “It is impossible to be an atheist when listening to the music that one loves,” he writes.

Traditional religion being replaced by aesthetic experience will not appease the traditionalist right. In one reading, Critchley falls short of the mark, unable to successfully argue for a third path between ontological dogma and epistemological skepticism. But in another reading, Critchley is an art critic, and is providing us with a new and intriguing basis for judging art works: whether they bring us to, or not. From a passage in Annie Dillard’s novel Holy the Firm, Critchley builds a notion that the artist must immolate their Selves to successfully reach the poetic sublime, just as the mystic must self-immolate to behold the majesty of God. He writes: “The writer’s life goes up in flames in the work. Or it does not. In which case, the work is a failure. When it succeeds, however, emanance and immanence are fused together into something holy and firm. Nothing else matters.”

Critchley, in my opinion, is at his best when he is writing about music. Music helps us lift ourselves out of ourselves and transcend into an ecstatic state of passionate feeling, giving way to powerful and fantastic revelations. This is as true for sad music as it is for joyous, for low art as for high, and so on. Critchley devotes a whole section to Krautrock, a favorite of mine, a term for a series of bands emerging in Germany in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s who wed psychedelic rock with the electronic avant-garde and pioneered many of the sounds we accept as common today. Some were avowedly mystical, too, with a band like Popol Vuh naming its records and tracks after Catholic, Hindu, and Mesoamerican prayers and combining baroque aria with tamboura.

His point in these sections is that we do not need to assent to religious tenets to know firsthand already what “mysticism” is. He says we are all mystics during many “key areas” of our lives—when we dream, as well as in “sex, drugs, and art”—and so in some sense we are still not at all “modern” in the Kantian sense.

And yet Critchley’s book is also a rescue mission to recuperate mysticism for our modern, skeptical self-consciousness. His core lesson, I think, and the one that makes the book relevant for our time, is the importance of materiality in mysticism. This is particularly true for the late medieval Christian mysticism he focuses on in the book. While we tend to think of religious practices and experiences as being spiritual, ghostly, altogether other-worldly, the mystics focused on how a material object, whether a relic or the eucharist or even some ordinary item, represents a paradoxical binding of God and matter. Christ Himself, as the Word made flesh, is the incarnated impossibility made possible. The blood, tears, and flesh of Christ, the wood of his cross and the robes of Mary, feature heavily in the words of their recorded visions.

For Aristotle, Form is male but Material is female. Critchley notes a few times that many of these mystics were women. Many of them were the first female writers in their languages, a history we are not often told. Mother Mary is what allows God to become flesh. As Critchley reminds us, this was the crucial aspect of Christianity for T.S. Eliot: the incarnation allows Time and Timelessness to intersect. The ultimate revelation can only occur in matter, in our world.

This is brought out by Julian of Norwich, whom Critchley calls the “hero” of the book, a quiet nameless anchoress (Julian was just the name of the church in which her cell was housed) who, in 14^th century England, received visions, or what she called “shewings,” of Christ bleeding like He was right in front of her.

In her Revelations of Divine Love, Julian mobilizes words like figures in frescos, graphically detailing how Christ and Mary appeared before her in colorful garments, the look of the teardrops of blood that streamed from His eyes, and the “hazelnut” that is creation. Whatever this mysticism is, it is not the same as that strand of religion that teaches us to despise and ignore worldly things. Rather it teaches us to wholeheartedly embrace the world, but only to lift it up into the love of God, which is so grand that we become detached from the things anyway. In Pope John Paul II’s words, summarizing the views of Saint Francis: “to use earthly goods well, in continual search for eternal goods.” God created the world to decreate it. Getting attached to worldly things—sin—is like passing clouds over eternal peace, the result of novice servants of God rushing headlong into the world and getting tripped up. “All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well,” Julian chants.

While it is very important for Critchley to minimize the Self, thematizing it as the source of all the woeful red herrings on our journey to the ecstatic experience of the clearing of being, I wonder if mysticism is too good at this annihilating effort. Certainly, we all need an ego check once in a while, and sometimes more than a check. But at the same time, I love people—characters that they are—and all the unique Selves that are required to make a world. Many of these extra-ordinary mystic authors are people that, through working themselves into fascinating shards of God, have fashioned a variety of jewels out of the species, which is more beneficial to the rest than if they had humbled themselves into meek silence.

Perhaps that is not what this book is about at all—Critchley underscores the importance of audiences for mysticism, and how we can never really write ourselves out of the picture. But the repeated trashing of the Self doesn’t sit right with me. I find the Self to be a necessary buoy to cling onto, a way to prevent the arrogant, charismatic confidence-men of our world, bad people, from tricking us into going along with their guru-like visions, exploiting our lack of self-security to extract power for themselves. Or, less dramatically, to prevent lames from bullying others into conforming with the status quo, getting society stuck under the thumb of tedious, boring scolds like Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins.

Unfortunately, the existence of these phenomena disrupts the happy communal “agape feast” often fantasized about in religious works. It is this very desire to be free from the capricious demands of ecclesiastical and “ethical” tyrants that drove the secularizing movement within the modern State in the first place, a movement decried in these pages. By disenchanting the world, we have legally unbound ourselves from the potential hostile influences of Other People… but now we find ourselves lonely and searching.

Mysticism, as a book and as a piece of the wider trend toward the mystical and privately religious, can be seen as this careful glancing into the lake of pre-modern imagination without falling in completely and losing sovereignty of our cherished selves.

Maybe all this is exactly Critchley’s point. Reading the mystics and cultivating a mystic consciousness, just like listening to our favorite music, allows us to transport ourselves into a realm of our own making, and gets us closer to a personal relationship with God. While Critchley criticizes his earlier work at the end of the book, I see a direct, diachronic line from his punk anarchistic beginnings to his mystic middle age. The authentic religious experience happens when we are alone; we are born alone and must go it alone; we can enjoy others, and have good craic at the pub watching soccer, but when it is time for the transcendent it is best we keep Them out there, even as we use Their albums and Their texts to light ourselves on fire.