Nonfiction
10.18.24
Mysticism Brian Dillon

Simon Critchley examines the relationship between storied mystical traditions and the transformative properties of artistic practice.

Mysticism, by Simon Critchley,
New York Review Books, 325 pages, $18.95

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I feel so extraordinary / Something’s got a hold on me. All the while I was reading the English philosopher Simon Critchley’s playful and profound new study of mysticism, I happened to have set myself an exulting (or exalting) playlist regime of vintage New Order and early-modern English choral music. The holy drug high of “True Faith” (1987), the massed rhapsody of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium (ca. 1570): neither one expresses my own habits, beliefs, or aspirations—and yet. Toward the end of Mysticism, Critchley writes: “The only proof of animism I know is music. When we listen, it is as if the world were influenced by a natural magic. In music, the cosmos feels alive, divinely infused.” This is an observation that risks sounding awfully soppy from the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Not to mention absurdly generalized: Will today’s musical transports really be repeated with tomorrow’s diet of Chappell Roan and Motörhead? (Yes, obviously.) But Critchley’s concluding point is a larger one: the “idiot glee” of modern aesthetic enjoyment directly inherits (without God) the practice and experience of mystical tradition.

Among other things, Mysticism is a generous, animated introduction to that lineage, at least insofar as it developed in Christianity. (Critchley does not stray much outside the texts, thought, and history he knows best, which makes for some lapses—no Kabbalah, no Gershom Scholem, thus no Walter Benjamin—but which also means he avoids potentially shaky assertions about other faiths and cultures.) Early in the book, he outlines the “brief lives of sixteen mystics,” some of which will be elaborated later, all of which are instructive about how much biographical adventure, theological argument, and more or less morbid veneration the label “mystic” may cover. There is Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), who was said to have been suckled by an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and who composed eighty-six sermons on the biblical Song of Songs: a key work of mystical eroticism. Also, Christina the Astonishing (1150–1224), who woke up at her own funeral and rose into the air, later ate only garbage, and threw herself in the freezing River Meuse. (“She was astonishing,” Critchley deadpans.) And Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), who believed herself pierced by God’s golden spear—her open-mouthed ecstasy is the subject of Bernini’s famous sculpture.

Such saintly antics may be what first comes to mind when we think, if we think at all, about the Christian mystics. But they are not in fact essential, any more than a tendency to florid visions, which, in the case of Critchley’s favored mystic, Julian of Norwich, only occupied several hours in a life of tireless thought and teaching. Julian was born around 1342 and is the first English woman who we can say with much certainty wrote a book in her own language. Aged thirty, she called on God to make her so sick she would feel what Christ felt on the cross—the Lord obliged. Nearing death, she suddenly—a word that recurs; mystical experience is nothing if not precipitate—saw a bleeding crucifix, and for the next twelve hours Julian was subject to luridly colored visions: the face of Jesus both brutalized and beatific, a shining child levitating out of the filth of the earth. What matters about Julian was not only that she was thus seized by her “showings” but that she spent the rest of her long life studying what she had seen, turning it into a language at once ordinary (her writing is full of rain and mud and herrings and hazelnuts) and transformative—to be a mystic means becoming otherwise, in a way that is inseparable from the act of writing.

Who says so? I first encountered Critchley, in the early 1990s, as a scholar of Emmanuel Levinas and himself a key figure in the “ethical turn” among anglophone adepts of deconstruction. In 1997 he published Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: on death and philosophy in the likes of Adorno, Beckett, and Wallace Stevens. And in 2002 a short book about humor, in which maybe for the first time as a reader I had a sense of the vulnerable and mischievous writer behind the professor. Later works include a meditation on suicide, a short book about memory, another about football, and a collection of essays, Bald, adorned with a drawing of the philosopher’s own sparse pate. In other words, Critchley is more present on the page than most academic philosophers; but his idea of writing is that it’s an act of self-consumption. One consequence of which is that he devotes a lot of the book to speaking on behalf of like-minded others: there are chapters on Anne Carson’s notion of “decreation,” T. S. Eliot’s impersonality in his Four Quartets, Annie Dillard’s combusting prose. Critchley: “The choice is one of fire or fire: to set oneself alight in love, or try, or die trying.” As he acknowledges, this is potentially embarrassing stuff for an academic philosopher to admit. As a vision of art, or how to speak about art, it’s not much like our current plague of takes, positions, opinions.

Critchley’s notion of mysticism as ecstatic-rigorous dissolution of self is also much unlike the Instagram iteration of pop spirituality. There’s a lot to be suspicious of in the contemporary enthusiasm for the Christian martyrs, saints, and mystics—precisely because it’s not a mere social-media confection. Seemingly feminist celebration of weird or warrior-like female saints (Joan, Bridget, Lucy, et al.) can slide a touch too easily into conventional devotion. Ironic (or is it pretend-ironic?) nu-Catholic piety is in the end inseparable from the real neofascist, Opus Dei–lurking, or Project 25–sponsoring deal. Talk about the very definition of dangerous metaphysical and ideological ground. Critchley would say that none of this is truly mystical in the first place—though at times, especially at the end of the book, he is frustratingly vague about where exactly, how close to actual Christian belief, his interest in the subject has brought him. No matter: Mysticism is a lucid, genial guide to a body of writing that describes states of being, and intuitions, that belong and don’t belong to the tradition in which its author finds himself.

Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence (on education) and Gone to Earth (on Kate Bush).

Simon Critchley examines the relationship between storied mystical traditions and the transformative properties of artistic practice.
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