The Heretics Who Got Too Close to God - What is Mysticism?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Simon Crochley, welcome to the show.

[00:00:02]>> Thank you very much, Alex. Very nice to be here.

[00:00:05]>> Do you think that mysticism is always religious?

[00:00:10]>> No.

[00:00:12]No, it's not. It It could be um Well, firstly, it's not a religion. It's a tendency within religion, we could say.

[00:00:22]But then I guess you could no what you can say is that the kind of experience that we think of as mystical more often we associate with the experience of of art whatever that might be. So it's it could be anything. It could be it could be, you know, a wonderful view staring at the sea. Um or it could be um you know, some some moment that transports you or for someone like me, it tends to be music, you know. So, so yes, no, it's not it's not necessarily religious and it becomes sort of less religious in the last couple hundred years, I guess, >> for reasons that we could go into.

[00:01:08]>> Yeah. your your book on mysticism, the experience of ecstasy. Um, you talk a lot about music and and how music is sort of a particular weigh-in for you when it comes to mysticism, but clearly this is quite attached to religious traditions, but at the same time, mystical traditions within religions and mystics who have these sort of either visionary or experiential moments are often condemned by mainstream religious traditions as heretical or doing something that's a little bit dangerous.

[00:01:40]And so there's this kind of seeming like intrinsic connection between mysticism and religion in that most mystics are religious in some sense. And also you you describe >> mysticism as like the the the fiery hub of religion. It's like the the fiery core of what religion is all about. And yet on the surface level there's this like historical tension between the two to the extent that mystics are condemned or put to death or whatever. So >> Mhm.

[00:02:07]>> If mysticism is the fiery core of religion, how do you account for that historical, you know, u friction?

[00:02:13]>> You the one of the purposes of religious institutions like churches is to control that fiery core. You want to have it, you know, limited to the fiery core that is taught in in within that religious order. and you don't want this sort of spinning out of control. So, you know, you could have, you know, within within mainstream Christianity, it's, you know, God becomes human um in the in the 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 behavior. So there's always this tension uh in in religion between the kind of um the fire that ignites that that really sets people a flame and um and then how that is to be controlled and the history of what we call mysticism. And we could get into that because it's a it's a it's an unstable and you know it's a facious category you know but we could just say the people that we think think of as mystics who think of themselves as religious or spiritual or contemplatives leading a contemplative life. Um they are often the reason why they're remembered um is because they attracted attention.

[00:03:51]They got significant audiences and um and that's a danger for the church.

[00:04:00]Let's say the Catholic Church. What do you do when someone like St. Francis shows up? this kind of itinerant former sort of playboy who winds up as an itinerant preacher and draws huge numbers of people to him preaching uh the poverty of Christ and uh the abolition of private property. What do you do with that? And it takes the the Catholic Church, you know, 60 70 years to figure out how to incorporate the Franciscans who are a sort of populist, you know, a wildly populist religious movement, how to incorporate them into the Catholic Church. So, so you can look at the history of what we call mysticism again with some qualifications, you know, we could get into that, but there are two tendencies.

[00:04:51]Once people who've got this this fiery message, they've got this they've got these things to say, uh show up and they draw an audience to them.

[00:05:03]Uh 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 someone like, you know, you get some, you know, young person who's who's drawing big crowds to Christianity, you want to keep them in the in the church, keep them in the fold unless things go too far, unless they uh become seen as subversives or they they they challenge the authority of the existing church. So in so to to summarize I mean very crudely you could say that within southern Europe say in Italy and in Spain this happens a bit later with people like Theresa Rabbala John the cross there are a lot of struggles there but they're eventually incorporated into the Catholic church the Franciscans are incorporated into the Catholic church whereas in Northern Europe um those movements tend to be more excluded so there's a case that I talk about in the book of Margarite Poret who is burnt at the stake in 1310 in Paris for refusing to recount her views on love which are expressed in her book and um and you there's inquisition and the whole thing but so I think it's it's really you know the what what the people we call mystics have got in their hands is something you know is something combustible and uh extremely uh potentially dangerous and that it's a threat to the church and the church wants to just contain it if it can.

[00:06:50]>> Mhm.

[00:06:51]>> And then there's a whole different story about what happens to that in the after the Protestant Reformation as well, but that's a separate story.

[00:06:57]>> Yeah. And and one really important thing to point out, I think, is that at least medieval mystics, the kind of mystics you're talking about there, weren't going around calling themselves mystics.

[00:07:07]They didn't see themselves as like >> sat outside of mainstream tradition doing something special. In fact, Julian of Norwich, who you describe as the the heroine of of your book.

[00:07:19]>> Mhm.

[00:07:20]>> Uh and one of the most famous mystics of all time, the the earliest recorded English language written texts by a woman famous for all kinds of reasons.

[00:07:30]She's quite insistent that she believes everything that she witnesses and experiences in her revelations of divine love >> to be in keeping with the doctrines of the Catholic Church of which she was a member. She's quite explicit about considering herself to be within the fold of of >> holy church. Yeah. Holy church as she always calls it. Yeah. Mhm.

[00:07:52]>> Yeah. And at some point however this concept of mysticism evolves as like a term and a label for a particular kind of set of practices and beliefs and it begins to cause a bit of a a bit of a schism. Um you said we could get into what mysticism is but also >> in particular it's like development of a as a as a concept given that it wasn't a term that was used to describe mystics by mystics. You know where where does this idea come from and what does it mean? Well, I mean, two things to say.

[00:08:24]There's a very there's a very simple way of answering the question, what is mysticism? Which is to take a book by woman called Evelyn Underhill, who's under underrepresented, underknown, very influential in her day.

[00:08:41]Writes a book in 1905, I think, called Mysticism. And she describes it as experience in its most intense form.

[00:08:49]>> Experience in its most intense form. So there's your there's your kind of one sentence definition and that intensity is an intensity of ecstasy. So that's that's what's going on. The actual category of mysticism is um is much trickier. It basically appears in 17th century in French as lumistic.

[00:09:17]And so what we think of as the the mystical. And so the the the idea of the mystical as some kind of experience of passivity of passivity towards a revelation of a type. Um also is that moment when you get a shift in the idea of experience and the way in which experience might be might be verified. So 17th century you've got calcesian rationalism and so on and so forth going on in the franophhone context and it's there that the term is first used but it doesn't really get currency until the um 18th and particularly 19th century and then it begins to kind of you know almost become like a separate category from religion. You know people will talk about mystism as if it's as if it's a thing. If we go back to its to its source uh in um in medieval monastic traditions or we could take it even further back to the church the the desert fathers in Egypt and so on and so forth. But if we just stay with say with the medieval monastic orders uh here were institutions that had uh withdrawn from the world essentially the world was the storm of the dark ages and all that stuff was going on and people like St. Benedict kind of produced these little islands of knowledge where you could hang on to the few manuscripts that were available and life was lived in an a completely ritualized ordered way and monks were expected to do a certain number of things every day. And it's in that context of uh of work and study and prayer and meditation uh that some of those figures might have had mystical experiences. So mysticism as this you know intense feeling of proximity revelation of the divine uh is something which arose within those small institutional structures of monasteries and then as it develops um it you could say it more or less spills over out of them that monastic space. So a really key element in the story of what we now call mysticism is the development of uh what happens in the in in the low countries in um in what's now Belgium and southern Netherlands where you've got the um you know the origins of what will later become the industrial revolution textile manufacturing uh the emergence of a bourgeoisi and then you've got this development of a of of a group of people that were called beggines. And beggings were they were called semi-encclosed nuns. So women who were not closed off from the world in their convents, but who could also move in the town, the textile manufacturing towns of Fllanders and Brabbant. And um some of them attracted great attention to themselves.

[00:12:38]Um and so then you begin to get this spilling over of mystical practice into into the world and you know and and sort of what happens if if we go through the centuries is that continual act of spillover so that the um we could now think of we could now think of a kind of you know contradiction between mysticism and the institutional practice of religion. Um but that's a that's a very modern idea. So it begins within these very confined small institutions and then spills out >> one way of thinking about it.

[00:13:18]>> What what is it though? What is the thing that we're describing? What is the the thread that pulls together mysticism? When people think of mysticism, >> they're probably imagining I mean the subtitle of your book is the experience of ecstasy, right? And there are two important elements there. There's experience and there's ecstasy. It's something that is related to these moments of like direct revelation, visions of God, feelings of of divine presence, but also this >> sort of overwhelming happiness or contentment, maybe awe and and tremendum and all this kind of stuff.

[00:13:51]>> Yes.

[00:13:52]>> Uh is that essentially what we're talking about here when we say mysticism? Yeah, we're we're talking about um I mean an easy way of defining it is the the feeling of uh the presence of God.

[00:14:10]>> Mhm. the feeling of the presence of God and >> and then in some mystics the feeling the awareness uh of the union with the divine whether that's revealed through a person like Christ or whether it's revealed through through nature through um you know in more kind of um pantheistic ideas of of of religion. So it's that experience of proximity to or unification with the divine and um and it takes on different forms in different different religions you could say that every every religion Hinduism, Islam, uh we could go down the list and then different forms of you know animism and what we know of the religions of say indigenous peoples in the Americas so on so forth. there's some experience which is a proximity to the divine which is incredibly valued and certain people have access to it uh >> you know what we can call you know >> uh you know in a loose way shamans so there is that there is that it's a constant feature of religion so religion is what religion is a set of practices beliefs structures society and there hasn't really been a society without religion until arguably you know the modern period. Uh all societies were structured around, you know, religion and at the core of that religion was some special form of experience that certain people could have or certain people if they were initiated into it could feel a proximity to and you know and then so to to that extent it's incredibly you it's everywhere and it's incredibly vague. So what I try and do in the in in the book is focus in particular on Christian mysticism both because it interests me and also because to bring out the the real weirdness of Christianity and how really how little we understand the Christian tradition that is apparently the you know the the source doctrine for much of what western culture is about.

[00:16:34]although people seem to understand very little about it. So that the so uh yeah it's it's an experience of proximity or unification uh with the the presence of God and and then how that is to be articulated and expressed and taught that the people that think of as mystics were people that drew people to them. we often know about them because they drew people to them and um this always this was always you know this this was always great business. It always it always worked. You know people want that you know people have a deep metaphysical need. What can you say? And mysticism is a really powerful way into it. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first mystical experience is great. Spiritual food is amazing, but spiritual food on its own is not going to give you your essential vitamins and minerals. And that's where today's sponsor, Hule, comes to the rescue.

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[00:18:26]These are convenient, they're cheap, and they come in all kinds of flavors. This is the chocolate variety, but you can also get it in the classic vanilla flavor. You can get chocolate peanut butter. You can even get it in iced latte, which is also caffeinated if you need a bit of a pickme up. But whatever you choose, it will give you complete nutrition while saving your time and your money. Just go to hule.com/alexoc okconor. And if you use the code alexoconor at checkout, then as a new customer, you'll also get 15% off. And with that said, back to the show. I think it's that concept of unity, unification with the divine that mysticism is most famous for. In the book, you're careful to clarify that it doesn't always involve this. And when it does, there are different ways in which someone could become unified with divinity. But I think this is where mystics really begin to run into like heretical trouble. I think of the the 10th century Islamic mystic Al-Halaj who famously in this sort of fit of ecstasy says Anna al-Hak I am the truth which is evocative of Jesus's uh you know saying >> in John's gospel but also al-Hak the truth is one of the names of God in the Quran and and Alhalage is eventually indicted and and killed for for heresy in part because of this kind of stuff.

[00:19:47]Meister Eckhart, another hero of your of your text, features extremely prominently, another famous mystic who was once sort of held the distinguished positions that >> I mean he he twice held some position at the University of Paris like the the sort of top of the top which only >> master of theology. Yeah. A coin theology.

[00:20:07]>> Yeah.

[00:20:07]>> Yeah. He was he was not some kind of fringe crazy guy.

[00:20:12]>> No. Um but he went on to deliver sermons in which he said things like you know I have re I mean you quote in your book uh for in this breakthrough it is bestowed upon me that I and God are one which in mystical language is very common you know this unity with the divine but to say that you are the same thing as God is exactly the kind of thing like you know I and the father are one is something Jesus says or anyone who's seen me has seen the father >> which Jesus gets like stoned for they try to stone him for it because of the the alleged sort of blasphemy that he's committing. So, I think it's quite clear to see why this like begins to rub up against the doctrine of the church, right? But then it's it's a bit of a mystery to me.

[00:20:55]>> Yes and no. Yes and no. It's it's it's a really it's a really delicate line this this issue about who gets to call himself God.

[00:21:06]>> It's it's it's um you're right. I mean it's um uh was the case with Meister Ehart the Meister Ehart did this without any visions. There's no claim to any visionary quality to what he does. So he does this he was just an excellent you know theologian and scholar of um of the Bible. He wrote many commentaries in Latin um on these texts which were which are kind of a bit boring but they're good. Then but then you know he goes he's he's told to go off to the Germanspeaking lands where he's from and to try and kind of rein in some of the uh some of the problems that are arising in in the rhy land in in Cologne in particular and Cologne and off he goes and he gives these sermons in German in the local language and the some of the first texts we have in German are Echart's sermons and you know he says some very very wild things but they're very very engaging things and then he is after he he's then you know the the the I think it's the bishop of Cologne says you know this guy is a heretic and he's taken down to Abinong because at that point the papacy is divided you got two popes Rome and Abinong and he's imprisoned for a period of time and tried and then he dies down there without being found guilty, but then he's postumously condemned as a heresic a year after his death >> and a paper ball. And so and so what they what at this point in the history of the Catholic Church uh as as other people have pointed out like um Tom Holland in that book uh Dominion really I think it's yeah I think it's Dominion where he talks about the the rise of the the medieval the medieval Catholic church and its obsession with reform reformatio and um and trying to be clear about where the line is between what you can say and what you can't say and then having legal systems cannon law and then universities which are meant to teach canon law to basically adjudicate these uh these decisions. So these the Catholic Church really gets its it gets its act in order in the late the late medieval period and then they begin to find heretics. Now the the issue of deification is really uh is really fascinating and and and tricky. So Jesus, you know, as as you said, you could you could you could interpret the text as him claiming divinity for himself seems to be what he's saying.

[00:24:02]But is it just him, you know, is it just this, you know, first century troublemaker in occupied Palestine that gets to call himself God? And opinions really differ on that. Um, and I've spent um, a lot of time in the last 10 years learning more about uh, Orthodox Christianity, Eastern the Eastern Church, uh, particularly the Greek Greek Orthodox tradition. And in that tradition, the idea of what they call theosis or deification is, you know, it's fine. It's it's something that if you are a good person, if you are a worthy person, if you if you lead the life of a good monk on Mount Aos or whatever, you could you could aspire towards deification.

[00:24:58]And so it's it's a really long and complex story. And obviously within Islam, there's a whole tradition of that. Uh when we're particular with in the Sufi tradition, >> u not so much in Judaism. uh it's much trickier but certainly within many religious traditions the idea of somebody declaring themselves divine then if we fast forward we go we spin forward through the reformation and to the United States of America which is a hotbed for religious you know exuberance in the 18th 17th 180s and 19th centuries you've got all sorts of people wandering around claiming that they're they're divine and some of them die out, some of them fade out because they disagree that they take a vow of chastity like the Shakers and some of them do incredibly well like the Mormons. So, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, basically claims divinity for himself and for anyone who is like him. So, to become an elder in the Mormon church is to become godlike.

[00:26:04]So I think it's it's u it's a fault line in the history of Christianity whether you can legitimately call yourself God.

[00:26:15]I love who thought we'd be talking about this on a >> today. But yes, it's on a mon on a Monday morning. But that unity with the divine I was comment something else you were saying the so William James who everybody likes or they should do uh because he was a really interesting person and I think the the the kind 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 and uh the narrow guard rails of academic propriety. So, three shears for William James. James defines mysticism as a union with the divine. And that's that makes perfect sense. But the uh the only kind of qualification I want to introduce into that is that that union with the divine presupposes that there's something like a soul and something like God and those two things unify. So, two substances uh attain a unity.

[00:27:21]And there is this other tradition uh 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 it is much as is possible uh to decreate itself to desubstantialize itself to in the words of Margaret Pereet to to annihilate itself and that self annihilation is a way of opening the soul to the presence of God. So there's another uh it's an idea what I call in the book unity without distinction. So in a sense it's a kind of um so we can think about mysticism in a in a more in a more radical way as an attempt to get rid of the soul uh to get rid of the the self as much as possible in order to be open to this experience and then conccommatantly on the other side the god itself uh releases its substantial quality towards me. So to summarize that bit in a great quote from Ma Echart, he says um something I'm I'm putting together a couple of quotations here, but I pray to God to rid me of God. And um and what he means by that is that the idea of God kind of gets in the way of the experience that he's trying to evoke. And for for Echar, it's a question of uh of God ceasing to be God, namely a substance as opposed to a self.

[00:29:03]And for the the soul to cease to be a soul, and for those two entities, those two presences as it were, to meet in a third ground that is what Echart calls the godhead, which is this kind of slightly mysterious concept that also gets him into trouble. What he means by the godhead is some some space between me and the divine where things occur where where where where detachment, releasement and uh life can be life can be lived in a different way and um and you could say people have said this gets very close to uh aspects of Zen Buddhism. this gets very close to the more esoteric teachings of Hinduism so and so forth and maybe it does. Um but it's it's very interesting.

[00:29:57]>> Yeah, it's it's weird that the the concept of like self and unity and yeah sort of direct conscious experience of the foundation of reality with no context. you might think that we were talking about like the Indian tradition um because those ideas sort of resonate a lot more there >> but within the mystical tradition in the west you you get these sort of similar ideas sort of coming up like the the concept of the self I mean you you write in in your book about how >> the genre of autobiography kind of begins with mystical writings people people sort of writing about themselves but they define themselves this concept of I like in relation to it being separate from divinity. That's sort of what what gives you this idea of of I. Of course, eastern traditions have been talking about this for a long time. The self is an illusion. What really exists is Brahman and ultimate reality. And the only sense in which I exists as an individual is in the way that I'm sort of separated from from Brahman.

[00:31:06]>> But that separation is kind of a bad thing. And what I really want is a reunification. you kind of are getting the same kind of ideas. I mean, you open part two of your book with a quote from Flannry O' Connor.

[00:31:16]>> That's right.

[00:31:16]>> About sort of comparing um God to being like the the full moon and saying that she's looking at a uh that you might be looking at a a full moon that's obscured. You see the cresant because there's this great big shadow of the earth.

[00:31:33]>> Yeah. And Okconor writes, "The cresant is very beautiful and perhaps that is all that is all one like I am should see or could see."

[00:31:44]>> Mhm.

[00:31:44]>> But what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon so that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you, God, because I am in the way.

[00:31:57]Please help me to push myself aside.

[00:32:00]this concept of the self. And so she's saying that the the shadow being cast on the on the moon there um is comparable to the shadow that the self casts on this experience with God. So >> Mhm.

[00:32:13]>> you end up with a bit of a paradox here, which is this desire that I should push my self to the side in order to get to >> divinity. Um >> and then draw attention to myself.

[00:32:28]>> Yeah. So what like what's what's going on there?

[00:32:31]>> Tricky. I mean it's it's a great quote, you know, uh 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, I mean the last thing that Fenri Connor was interested in was was herself. she was interested in the thing that she's was trying to write about to evoke in this this early prayer journal which she was she wrote when she was at college and um and so the got a number of things to say um the attempt to push oneself aside inevitably draws attention to the self. So, you know, the people that the mystics that I I I'm thinking about I'm talking about had absolutely no interest in themselves um and therefore were interested in them. So, in a sense the you know the um this is a brilliant kind of publicity strategy. Simone Vy had no interest in Simone Vy. um she was trying to decreate Simon Vay in order to make the way for the god that she was awaiting and now there are operas about the life of Simon Vy or there are plays about Simon Bay and the same thing with Margarite Poret and and and the rest. So there's there's a there's a paradox there um that by pushing oneself pushing the self away and pushing those people that push the self away most rigorously draw attention to themselves. There's a kind of an economy of attention there which is quite interesting. Uh the first thing you said about the Indian tradition is indeed true and I'm I I'm thinking about that very specifically today or this week because I'm doing an event this week with uh Claire Carlilele who's someone I've not met before but I've read her work over a number of years and this is her book on called transcendence for beginners the gifford lectures. is and um and she's basically lacing together spinosa and Hinduism basically amongst other things >> and and she's trying to make I mean the really interesting side of it not that that's not interesting but the other interesting side of it is the way she's uh bringing the way she's foregrounding George Elliot as a philosophical as a philosopher and a philosophical thinker of a quite specific type and and Kagard now um and and what she's trying to do which which I'm just thinking about now is to how do we connect together philosophy with life writing and and what's going on in that um and it's you know it's it's rather so the when I taught philosophy. Um, you know, the last thing in in in either tradition, in the analytic tradition, the continental tradition, um, the last thing one was one was meant to be interested in was was biography. It was unsemly. And that began to change really with the publication of a number of important biographies in the I guess it was in the early '9s. uh like Ray Monk's book on Vickingstein and books like that and you realize that actually you know whatever Vickingstein was about uh this was this was a life this was a kind of um the life of a saint with all of its tortures and its um and its sinfulness all of that but he was in a sense pointing away from what philosophy could do towards a life that could be could be lived so I think there's always been this tension ion um or there there is a tension in philosophy between philosophy and and and life writing and what and what it might mean what it might mean to do philosophy from life in the way that an artist will draw from life. what is you know what's going on with that and I find that an interesting idea with regard to the mystics um it's just the case that the um uh the origins of autobiography in a whole number of traditions but particularly u whole number of languages but in particular the languages of northern Europe uh early Dutch uh middle high German, English, medieval French are the autobiographies of uh of women who were contemplatives, mystics. So in a sense there's the we just let's just take the example of Julian because it's it's available in English and it's um it's fascinating. She you know she she's using experiences from her life that didn't last for very long. 12 hours of visions and she is building those into a story which has an autobiographical uh feel to it but she's doing that at the service of a of a theology a theological vision. So I think that's the thing to to that's an important point to underline is that for for us uh whatever we are moderns wherever we are in 2026 whatever uh we are uh we've tended to take for granted the reduction of religion to experience.

[00:38:36]Religion is do do you believe in God or not believe in God? Have you experienced this or not? Do you have an experience of faith or do you not have an experience of faith? And we tend to end matters there. Now, for the people that I'm talking about and that interests me and other people working in this field, there's experience, but there's also theology. There's conceptual work that needs to be done. and and the two things have to go together so that so that Julian um has these experiences which we could go into if we wish um which are which are extreme she's dying um and then she begins to receive the showings the revelations and this leads her to a complete theological reframing of Christianity because the problem that Julian has um which is a fantastic problem to have is that she saw all these things that she saw in her uh her showings but she did not see sin. I did not see sin. So she can't make sense of the category of sin.

[00:39:50]And therefore she ends up in the long version of her text uh retelling the story of the the fall of of Adam and um and it's it's fascinating. So it's experience and theology working together. So I'm I think that the um yeah that's but I think the the relationship of these um the relationship that you know someone like Cla Carlile makes between uh life writing um uh you know Brahman traditions Hindu traditions and and stuff that's going on in in the west I think is fascinating and spinosa is kind of the spininoza is kind of the conduit for all of that.

[00:40:38]>> Sure. Something else that's quite noticeable I think when engaging with the mystical tradition is the presence of so many women which is unusual especially when it comes to medieval Christianity uh let alone modern thought which itself is quite male-dominated and yet we're hearing about >> Julian of Norwich and Theresa of Aavaler and we're hearing about uh even Flannry O' Connor novelist you quote you know you >> this this sort of conspicuous presence of women. Um, and not only that, but amongst female and male mystics who write about their experiences, >> you often get this theme of femininity coming through, the femininity of Christ, the femininity of the self, even for males.

[00:41:29]I I just wonder like you know looking at this from the outside it might just strike you as this slightly sort of peculiar uh fact about the mystical tradition and I just wondered if you had any thoughts on on why >> no it's it it's a most queer tradition it's a most queer but within Christianity it's it's most strange that the um first thing is that um you get the um you get the appearance of uh women writers uh from let's say the 11th 12th century onwards people like Hardik writing in Antworp and then on through others Julian of Norwich in that sense is on the later side writing in the late 14th century early 15th century but the um but what is it that women have access to writing. They have access and that's kind of what you know one of the things that was on my mind in uh writing about this material and before that teaching it was that there have been these you know endless debates in philosophy about the nature of the cannon, who gets to be in the cannon and not in the cannon and can we have more female philosophers in the cannon please? Uh and but if you shift focus, you you you rotate the the crystal a little bit. Here's this tradition, mystical tradition, which is entirely dominated by by women. Um so they weren't um they weren't, you know, they weren't clerics and they weren't fully paid up masters of theology at the University of Paris, but they were they were there.

[00:43:22]And you know and and you know and someone like Margarite Poret who is wandering around northern France Flanders with her book on refined love and is then you know burn as a heretic in 1310 as I mentioned before but that book or the teaching in that book finds its way into the hands of Meister Ehart.

[00:43:43]Uh we know that for a fact. We know there's very good evidence to suggest that he had access to that. So it's a case where you have women risers and uh contemplatives influencing men and then also you've got uh on the other hand you've got uh male writers uh like uh English tradition like Hinton and Richard Ro um who are writing in this incredibly evocusive very sexual way but in a very vulnerable you feminized manner about uh the experience of the divine. And then there's someone that I talk about briefly in the book who um let's see if I can find it's Henry Suzo and Henry Suzo writes this uh book called the um the clock of wisdom the life of the servant and uh it's these are the most popular books in the in the German language in the in the medieval period until the early modern period. uh second only to Thomas Ampus' imitation of Christ and in those texts Souo firstly Souo who is a man his his experiences are written down by a woman so it's not just a man writing down yes you got the the classic mystical views you've got you know crazy unstable young woman experiencing the divine and some some monk following around writing writing things down here you've got the inversion of that that he his experiences are written down by his by his follower his novelist called Elbethagle I think her name is and in those experiences he describes his own feminization that in a sense he is as he is experiencing Christ he's experiencing Christ as a woman and not only that it gets weirder um Jul at the center of Julian Norwich's uh showing And this is something which is goes back into uh the Hebrew Bible and early Christian say the church fathers is the identification of Christ with a woman, Christ with a mother. Uh so we have an idea of uh Christ as a nurturing mother, not just as an angry, you know, sort of bearded father in the sky. So Christ for Julian is um a mother because he nurtures us with the with his blood and uh and the blood that's important is the blood that comes from the the side wound uh just beneath the uh you know the the the the nipple the the the the breast of Christ as it were. That's the important blood. And the way that that side wound was often depicted in medieval iconography was in a state that looks in a shape that's very similar to female sexual organs. And that was done for very clear reasons. So, so Jesus is is feeding us from his blood. And there was a deliberate confusion of blood and milk in this period. And so um so Christ is a Christ is a woman uh and a man and and other things as well. So the idea that the um the idea that there is something essentially kind of macho about Christianity is really bizarre. It's it's a tradition which in so far as you know which is what this is where I would make a distinction between you know um Christianity and the other Abrahamic faiths and with Hinduism on on the other the other hand for me the idea of incarnation is is is paradoxical and powerful and important.

[00:47:58]It's that God takes on human form. Um, and it takes on human form through the mediation of the maternal body through Mary.

[00:48:11]>> And so in so far as Christ is matter and Christ has to be masser within Christianity, Christ is female. So I think the whole um Marian side of this is is really important and that's you you can find approximations of that in different religious traditions but there's something about the extremity of that within Christianity that kind of appeals to me >> because it also offends people which is good.

[00:48:41]>> Yeah. But then also at the same time the language is quite imprecise, right? I mean like when when we're talking about mysticism and describing mystical experiences and listening or reading the accounts of you know listening to reading the accounts of of mystical writers.

[00:49:00]There are sort of two literary themes that you identify with mysticism.

[00:49:06]One of them is negation. always talking in negative terms and one of them is exaggeration. Sort of really just like going overboard in our descriptions, >> throwing so much at the wall that hopefully some of the the imagery will will stick. But this concept of negation is particularly important because even outside of the mystical tradition, there is this idea that because God is incomprehensible, God is beyond all human concepts, God exceeds all human imagination.

[00:49:37]to talk about God, you cannot talk in the positive sense. You can't say God is this, God is that. Instead, you have to say God is not this. It's not that God is, you know, um is powerful and God is loving and it's that God is unlimited.

[00:49:53]God is, you know, groundless. God is timeless. God is you're taking things that you do know >> and you're negating them. And this kind of way of talking about God called apohatic language which is saying what God is not >> um originates in the sort of pseudom pseudonmous writings of um someone claiming to be Dianisis one of the >> someone claiming to be >> yeah it was a kind of elaborate yeah hoax but yeah >> it finds it sort of flourishing in Thomas Aquinus that the most important Christian metaphysician of all time and a man who was no stranger to premises and conclusions and rational thinking even in that context.

[00:50:37]>> The idea of talking about God in the positive sense was thought by Aquinus to be a bit of a useless project. So >> yeah, maybe you could just tell me about that story. Tell me about Dian Isis and tell us why negative language is so important in mysticism. Well, it's important because we begin from the idea of God as incomprehensible as you said.

[00:50:59]So the incomprehensibility of God and the incomprehensibility of God together with the idea that we cannot contain the divine within a proposition. So uh any proposition is going to miss its uh its object, its target. That's where this tradition really kicks off from. And um Dianius 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 populace of Athens. Stiff necked philosophically clever populace of Athens. And uh so it's a kind of a fiction that was developed in in later centuries a kind of literary literary fiction. But in these texts by Dianius or the pseudoinus pseudois of the arropitica which was the the hill of Aries where the where law courts were where where trials for murder were adjudicated in Athens. He says uh and I'll just quote this because it's might be helpful. This is this is Dianius. It's 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 in 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 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 flavor of tinus. So we have the we have the method of uh the positive method of affirmation that let's say the method that Aquinus adopts in the in the sum u broadly um and then we have the negative method that and rather than the and this is I I try to summarize this in terms of distinction between what do I call them uh descending affirmations and ascending negations. So >> yeah, >> descending affirmations would be God is or God or nature or whatever and we go down from creatures, angels, creatures, whatever. Um 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 uh that which cannot be articulated. So that's that's the basic that's the basic idea is that um it's that the only path to the divine is through negation on the one hand and then through exaggeration. The exaggeration part is is is fascinating because you've got um um in Denius in that that bit I just quoted super essential darkness. I mean what does that even mean? It's either essential darkness or inessential dark but super essential darkness. And he'll talk about the dazzling obscurity. How can obscurity be dazzling? It's obscurity is obscurity. How can that dazzle or radiant I forget radiant stillness or whi Oh yeah.

[00:54:52]Whispering stillness. Whispering stillness. Stillness is stillness. How can it whisper? So language is being turned against itself in order to open to something that's beyond language. And that's the that's the basic line and I I I track that through um you know these ancient sources cloud DIS cloud of unknowing air sermons and then right the way forward into someone like um TS Elliott in four quartets where TS Elliott is trying to he's 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 kind of series of negation.

[00:55:34]and undoings and and it's a kind of um and that that idea of language kind of undoing itself I find uh I find kind of fascinating and it's it's also and it's also effective. It's not that it's just a a clever intellectual enterprise.

[00:55:55]Look, I can speak in these negations and aren't you impressed? It's it's it's it's also linked to an idea uh and a movement of love.

[00:56:05]So the two the two things that have to be put together are um the apohatic tradition we have to proceed negatively when talking about the divine uh or through exaggeration which also misses the target but at least you kind of get a picture of it on the one hand. And the second element is is love and a love that kind of love that gives a love that opens out. And somehow that it's uh it's a negativity which is at the service of Yeah. an erotic sort of divine something like that.

[00:56:41]>> Yeah. And it's interesting how that concept does translate into Aquinas into his even even like in a philosophical context a strictly this isn't just a kind of mystical treaties that's trying to apprehend some vision. He's he's trying to lay out a a sort of systematized philosophical treaties and explicitly says that it will have to be done with with this apohatic or negating uh language. And of course then Aquinas himself has a religious experience near the end of his life.

[00:57:16]>> That's right. That's right.

[00:57:17]>> And then refuses to finish the Suma Theologica saying he can write no more because everything he's written is quote like straw compared >> like straw. exactly >> had seen which I think I I I've been saying for a long time there's this sort of common thread that it doesn't surprise me that philosophers are able to apprehend this this thing called God which has been at the center of religious traditions for the longest time but it seems to me that those who've had both those who who are geniuses in analytical thought and have also had the experience universally say that the experience is the thing that was real you know um blaze pascal is another example I talk about all the time as having his experience and writing down not the god of the philosophers, you know, the god of fire, >> the god of Abraham, the god of Jesus.

[00:58:03]>> And so I can also kind of understand why medieval Christianity being quite obsessed with scholasticism and philosophy and being influenced by the thought of Aristotle and proving God from first principles and all this kind of stuff. In fact, it's a dogma of the Catholic Church >> that God's existence can be known through reason alone.

[00:58:28]>> Like it's literally one of their like actual uh dogmas from >> Deilious um the same holy mother church holds and teaches that God the beginning and end of all things can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason from created things. So if you don't believe that God is apprehendable through reason, you are like anathema to the church. you're literally out of step with their teachings.

[00:58:53]>> Mhm.

[00:58:53]>> And yet you have people like Aquinus coming in and saying that basically the best version that we have of that is like straw compared to what I've seen.

[00:59:02]So I'm beginning to get a picture here then of why it might be that particularly the medieval church which was quite scholastic is a bit suspicious to say the least of >> Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. because they've set up this, you know, they've set up this, you know, these institutions to teach theology and and canon law, these things that become the great the great European universities for specifically this purpose. And um and indeed they're still around and it's no it's rem and it's and it sits in a very odd relationship. It was just think about the pairing of Aquinus with Echart. It's a very odd odd pairing yet they were you know near contemporaries and perhaps doing very similar things uh or or very similar commitments. Finally, Pascal is interesting. We can talk about Pascal because Pascal is uh has always been very important to me in the sense in which the you know the the emphasis upon on on upon reason of which he was a an expert as a a geometer and a you know city planner and and all the kind of practical things that Pascal could do. But then the idea that you know um there's nothing more consistent with reason than the the limitation of reason and the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. And then that that bit you quoted the night of fire that that conversion text that was sewn into his his his his dublets or whatever.

[01:00:46]>> Um that that's the god not the god of scholars and philosophers but that god god of uh Isaiah who does he mention Abraham.

[01:00:58]Yeah. Yeah. That's the god. And it it's that now the difference there would be is Pascal a mystic? No. Pascal is um because here's another thing we can think about is that there is after the reformation has happened after Luther has done his done his work and um then the version of the reformation that we wind up with in the in France is is Jansenism u and Pascal is the the primate uh sort of exhibit A of Jansenism. And there you've got this very um and the way in which this works in the history of theology it seems to me turns around uh Augustine that um Augustine central to what Luther's up to and it's it deeply central to what uh the Jansenists are up to and in that Jansenist tradition uh God go God exists God is God is there um but we cannot we cannot talk of any union with God or any any deification or anything like that. That is that's scurilous and and heretical um because we cannot in any way um have any awareness of of grace, right? The grace of God is inscrutable. So the um the other side of Pascal which is so interesting is the yeah the inscraibility of of grace. One can hope for grace but one cannot do anything in order to uh uh enable grace to be bestowed. So there's a kind of in the in the Pascalian vision in what what Lucian Goldman used to call many years ago the tragic vision of Pascal and and Rasin is uh is a is a is a is a distance with God. a god who is um a god who is absconded the dear absconditus and um and that's that's that's a powerful a powerful tradition and and on some days I'm more drawn to that than the kind of messy materiality of mysticism but you know >> yeah maybe people are wondering actually about where where you stand here I kind of forget that I I know more about you than perhaps somebody who's just tuned in and this is their first introduction to you. They might hear you talking quite sort of implicitly critically about religious traditions um but with a lot of love for mysticism. It looks like you might have a crucifix on the wall behind you. I can't quite make it out.

[01:03:42]Um tell us about your Is that it looks like it might be in the on the back wall. I'm not sure.

[01:03:48]>> Check.

[01:03:49]>> I know a lot of people who have them. Uh see it would be sort of behind you to your right.

[01:03:54]>> Yeah, it's the one that gives um extreme uncction. It's uh something we picked up in Mexico.

[01:04:00]>> Yeah. So, because I'm the kind of person to have I I literally have in in my in my living room, I have a have like a a 16th century station of the cross or something on the wall just because I like the aesthetic. But people are probably wondering where where you um stand on this and what what your sort of relation to mysticism is, whether you consider yourself interested in mysticism, a mystic yourself, that kind of stuff.

[01:04:23]>> Interested in it? Um am I? No. I mean, I'm just interested um and I I have a temperamental pull towards um forms of mystical thinking, writing, being um and I always have. I mean, I'm not I'm not by nature a skeptic. Um and so when you know William Blake says that he saw angels on a tree in Putney or whatever he said I think yeah he did he did see those angels and that explains a lot. So it's partly exp my interest in mysticism is partially explained by my kind of lifelong insurgency against philosophy against professional philosophy uh 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 so I find that the um I find that um the form of philosophy that I was educated within um and uh was a ferociously a ferociously secular um approach to philosophy.

[01:05:52]And if you were religious, you were seen as soft-headed or weak-minded or something like that. and um and you know and there were also together with that uh assumptions about the nature of let's say modernity and you know modernity equaling secularism equaling a whole series of other things and I've always been suspicious of um those easy periodizations that we could say that we are in this time and therefore what these people thought back then like ekart is just irrelevant. It's you know an interesting historical curiosity. I don't believe in the way in which philosophers and other scholars break up history into neatly organized units. And I think that the there's a kind of um there's a dogmatic rationalism in in professional philosophy still maybe less so now but it's still there. And there's also a kind of a dogmatic um uh adoration of of of critique at all costs. Um that in a sense that what we should be doing in in teaching is teaching critical thinking, critical reasoning skills, whatever. Now, these things are important. Uh I'm not denying that. But I find that the uh what's more important for me is trying to induce in students a um a willingness to to read something that is extremely strange and counterintuitive.

[01:07:40]um at least initially and maybe for some time afterwards to to suspend disbelief and to embrace uh a vision of things or an account of things that doesn't seem to make any sense at all. And philosophers are very good at keeping things out and they're trained to keep things out that things that cause irritation, things that don't chime with their their sense of what what's important and not important. And I've always I've always rebelled against that. So I find that um I I want to hang on to uh 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 I think it really helps to be taught. But I think it has to be done with a an open-mindedness and a generosity of spirit and a sympathy for the things that we're talking about rather than an attempt to blot things out. And that can be done. So again I find this like where I am in you know in in teaching in in New York it's it's the last 10 years have been a kind of um you know a kind of culmination of the obsession with critique uh at all costs of everything and you that's no way to proceed. You've got to try to understand things whatever they are forms of life books um in their terms in order to um in order to understand the people that are moved by them that are swayed by them. So I think that's very important.

[01:09:19]So the my interest in mysticism is part of that. It it began this is maybe maybe this is maybe this is interesting. It began with uh I had some interest in something that I was calling mystical anarchism back in the day in response to a a whole series of things. Uh but I had like you 30 40 pages of material and then um a colleague of mine a new colleague of mine at the time called Eugene Thacker was interested in similar sorts of things. We began to think about a class on mysticism and we began to teach it largely with guest speakers um who mira miraculously showed up. It was great. Um and then what happened what I'm next is that you often when you're teaching the kind of material that I teach say I don't know hiding as being a time or something like that you're trying to um persuade people uh explain explain a chapter of the book and to persuade them of it and for them to find some resonance in it. But I found with these mystical texts, this was like, you know, it was yeah, it was combustible. You know, people found their way to this incredibly easily and they were really turned on by this in ways that I hadn't really seen before in teaching. So you sort of realize there's, you know, there there's a fire in this material which is, you know, which is which is fascinating. So that that was important realizing that there's something about this this material which really animates people in ways that can be you know can lead down to some down some pretty strange alleys right you know pretty soon you're in tarot readings and theosophist sessions and whatever it might be but >> you know we still have to retain an open mind >> what would you recommend commend people I mean of course there's your book which is linked in the description that much is obvious but when it comes to primary sources somebody who >> particularly is used to like you know the more philosophical approaches to religion um >> where where would you point people like first like I just want to experience what this sort of mysticism stuff is all all about. I don't want it to be too difficult to comprehend. I kind of want to get a feel for it. You know where where should someone go? uh Bernard Mcinn the essential writings of Christian mysticism uh McInn is a formidable uh scholar of the history of Christianity is an still ongoing I believe he's still very much with us book called the presence of god which is now in its seventh or eighth volume but he did this and that's a kind of you know what would you call it a dioitical approach historical approach beginning with the early earliest this Christian text right the way through. But he in around 2010 or so he does this uh what we call this what's the opposite of diiocritical oh gosh um forgetting my seran distinctions anyway like a like a like a like a window on mysticism and he basically selects a number of themes which are the key themes and then finds texts from the last 2,000 years and the texts are quite short, sometimes a page, a couple of pages, and you really get a sense of how uh the mystical tradition, the Christian mystical tradition functions, and uh you can dip your toe into, you know, two pages of Margarite Poret. If you decide that's for you, then good. Or you read a little bit of Thomas Burton, you describe, decide that's for you, and you can go further. So it's an incredibly engaging book and also it works like mystical texts in the medieval period and until much later on circulated as compendia of fragments, little shards of text that would be copied and recopied. So often many of the texts that we have, we don't have them in the original language because they were lost. um we have them in translations and copies and copies and copies of copies. So there's something about that approach to mysticism that you get in the McGin book. If you want a more philosophical approach then um uh aside from my own humble efforts in that regard I' I'd recommend William James who you know he and William James's varieties of religious experience and the varieties of religious experience gifted lectures from 1901 or something like that I'm not sure um >> sounds right >> he was um you know for him the center of things is mysticism and it's about 80 100 pages depends which edition you've got where he's again James for me is the idea of what a philosopher should be someone who's got questions searching critical questions but who is open to um open to new things and prepared to take them on their own terms so the chapter on mysticism from the various experience and begins essential writings of Christian mysticism >> well plenty to be getting on with but of course people should start with with yours which is >> of course which is you know the the the the best book on the topic I think ever written like no it's it's it's a humble a humble effort and um it's uh yeah it's it's uh it's imperfect but the bits that I the bits that I'm proudest of really the bits the discussion of TS Elliot I'm very >> that was uh >> guess That was like 30 35 years of thinking, you know, I really I really have to say something about the four quartets before I >> before I die. And uh I was going to ask you, it seemed you sort of the at least the paperback edition I have is sort of interspersed with all kinds of images.

[01:15:44]And at first I thought that the images were kind of related to what was being said, but it seems like they're just these sort of >> mystical sort of thematic um >> paintings and there's it's from like sort of ballet and is this just >> a kind of general um illustration to the sort of theme of the text? Did you just feel like it would sort of >> get us the right mindset to see a few mystical paintings or or I I just wonder what that was about?

[01:16:13]>> Oh yeah. writing writing books for me is always uh I've been lucky in my career to have editors who become friends and uh one editor has become a friend of mine is guy called Mark Ellingham who's one of the people important people at profile books and Mark is uh brilliant in many ways in all sorts of ways but he's particularly brilliant when it comes to doing pitcher research so we did this we did a book on football uh and a book on the Greeks and but mainly the book on football is we we really played around with pictures and then um I was sitting at his place in London about 3 years ago and he pulled together a whole series of images and was beginning to sort of put them in relation to the text. So they're meant to stand in relationship to the text as kind of juxapositions. They follow the line of the argument but in a kind of um in the manner of a counterpoint rather than an illustration.

[01:17:15]>> Yeah. And quite >> they're just they're just interesting to look at.

[01:17:19]>> Yeah, I think so. I think so. And as is the book interesting to read. Well, Simon Critley, uh I recommend that people pick up the text. I hope they've enjoyed this brief introduction to the history of mysticism. There's so much more to say, of course, but thank you so much for your time. It's been fun.

[01:17:32]>> Thank you very much, Alex. It was it was great fun. Thank you for your questions.

[01:17:35]If you enjoyed that, then you should watch my previous episode with Graeme Tomlin on the life and philosophy of Bla1 Pascal. You can watch it by clicking the link that's on your screen.

[01:17:45]To support the show and get early adfree access to episodes, subscribe to my Substack at alexoconor.com.

[01:17:52]Thanks for watching.