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Agony and ecstasy: the lives of mystics
00:35:05
Simon Critchley explores the sainthood and suffering of mystics across the centuries – and what it can reveal about the human experience
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- [00:01]
Dave
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- [00:24]
Charlotte Hodgman
Blinds.com right now and get up to 45% off select styles plus a professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. From medieval mystic Julian of Norwich to countercultural figures of the 1960s, across history, various individuals have felt that they have access to spiritual forces beyond human understanding. But what drives these transcendent and often ecstatic sensations? And how are people with a deep connection to the divine regarded by wider society? In today's episode, philosopher and author Simon Critchley speaks to Charlotte Hodgman about his new book on mysticism, the Experience of Ecstasy.
- [01:23]
Simon Critchley
Perhaps just first of all, just to set the scene for listeners, how would you actually explain what mysticism is?
- [01:30]
A short definition given by a woman called Evelyn Underhill, who was very famous in the early 20th century. She wrote a book in 1911 called Mysticism, and she defines it as experience in its most intense form. So it's a kind of experiential intensity of being lifted up and outside yourself into an experience of ecstasy. There are much more sort of complex ways of defining it. But that's a neat short definition.
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And is it exclusively a religious experience?
- [02:04]
No, it is an experience which we can associate historically with religion. I think it's a tendency within religion. It's not a religion. Sometimes people think of mysticism as its own thing. Mysticism is a tendency within religion. And every, every religion that I'm aware of, that I can think of has a mystical tendency. And so to that extent, for as long as there have been humans, there's been religion and there's been something like mysticism. At the core of that, there are certain special people in a shorthand called shamans or priests or whoever it might be, who can mediate those special sets of experiences which are called mystical. And that's the fiery core of religious experience. But one of the things I try and argue in the book is that mysticism lives on in the experience of art and especially music, which we could get to if you like. But it begins in the religious context, that's where it makes a lot of sense.
- [03:06]
That's very helpful to have that definition to start with. We're going to get onto some of the stories around some of the well known and perhaps lesser well known mystics through history. But how far back do we find mystics?
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I mean, for as long as there's been religion, if we think back to the earliest traces we have of homo sapien activity or even hominid activity, this is true of Neanderthals and maybe other branches of the hominid family, there's been something like religious practice, broadly conceived, and at the center of that, some kind of activity which is special, which is secret, which is particularly revered. And we can pick that up, for example, in things like funerary practices, the fact that all hominids seem to have buried their dead with ceremony. And there seem to have been practices which are linked to things like, we speculate at this point, the cave paintings of Lascaux and elsewhere. There might have been some mystical dimension to the kinds of experiences that were had around them. So it goes all the way back, which makes it hard to pin down. My main focus is medieval Christian mysticism, but really, if you say mysticism now, then people know what you're talking about and they'll get their pack of tarot cards out. They'll say, well, my astrologer told me. So it's there. And it's something that, despite the best efforts of rationalism, just won't die, just won't go away. Because it's handling something really deep about human experience.
- [04:42]
And some of the characters that you look at in the book, Julian of Norwich, who I know is a particular favorite of yours, Hildegard of Bingen, people like that, were they what I would call like willing mystics? Are they trying to achieve this state of ecstasy? Or is it something that they are experiencing that's happening to them?
- [05:00]
It's often something that befalls them, you know, and it often befalls them later on. This is happening not exclusively to women, but to a lot of women. So this is another thing that interests me about the Christian mystical tradition is that it's really, it's dominated by women who did not have access to education in the sense in which they were not educated in Latin. Largely not true of all of them, not true of Hildegard, but largely they're working in the vernacular languages and often they were not. You know, we think of mystics as some 16 year old girl who has visions of the Virgin Mary. But often the mystics are people who had experiences in much later age. So Julian of Norwich has her showings, her revelations when she's 30 and a half. She gives very precise dating there, Margery Kemp, after having 14 children and then begging her husband to stop having more children at the age of 40, she then goes off on her itinerary. So it's often something that befools the people involved. And there's another wonderful story which is of Christina the Astonishing. And she is a kind of spiritual athlete and she. So the story goes, you know, and these are stories at her own funeral mass, she died. There's a lot of death in this tradition. She dies at the age of 21, and then her body suddenly floats into the air and levitates into the ceiling. So she can see her own funeral mass as it's happening. And then she goes through a series of adventures where she flees to the wilderness, lived from milk, from her own breasts, threw herself into burning hot ovens or into the icy cold River Meuse in what's now Belgium, and she even hanged herself from the gallows. So these were experiences that befell people often and they tried to make sense of. I mean, Julian is a wonderful example because. And this is something we find, you know, very hard to understand or get into that when she, at thirty and a half, she wishes to receive suffering, the suffering that would be like the suffering of Jesus. She wants to experience what Christ experienced on the cross and to die with her God. That's her wish. We find that maybe hard to understand, but that's what she does. And it's as she's dying, she gets her wish at 30 and a half. This is May 1373, time of terrible plague in the second most populous city in England, Norwich, at the time. And she is dying. She describes her body getting cold, her legs getting cold, her arms getting cold, and basically she's passing away. And at that point, a parson comes in to administer last rites. She describes a boy who's with the parson and the boy is holding a crucifix. And then as she's looking at the crucifix and as she's dying, she begins to see the crucifix bleed. And that goes on for about 12, 13 hours, all told in one long burst and a second shorter burst. And that's it. Those are all the visions she has. And then she spends the next, we don't know how long, but the next 30, 40 years of her rather long life trying to make sense of those showings, those revelations, those experiences. So there are noisier mystics than Julian. But what I like about Julian is the modesty and humility of her approach and also her persistence. She wants to make sense of what happened to her, and she does, in the first book written in English by a woman that we know of. So that's pretty important.
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I mean, from the examples that you've looked at, do you get a sense from any of them that this is kind of just a way for them to get the focus on them in a very patriarchal society, these women who perhaps don't have a voice otherwise? Or do you get a feeling that these are genuine experiences that people are recording?
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These are genuine experiences. I mean, I'm not a skeptic. I believe what the mystics believed. It's just the case that in different contexts, particularly in Western Europe, in Italy, Germany, what's now Holland, Belgium, France, informal forms of religion begin to appear. There are these characters called beguines. And beguines are what are usually referred to as semi enclosed nuns. So they're nuns leading a religious life, but they're not closed off from the world. They can kind of wander in the world and then go back to their beguinage. And some of these places still exist in Belgium, for example. And these characters, the most famous of which is someone like Marguerite Poret, who writes an astonishing book called the Mirror of Simple and Annihilated Souls. So she is kind of living a religious life, but she's also out there as a kind of popular figure who finds an audience and a big audience. And we know it's a big audience because it got the attention of the Church, who had to figure out what to do with characters like her. She was burnt at the stake in 1310 in Paris, so that's what happened to her. But these were not feminists. They saw themselves as people who were trying to be true to the teaching of holy Church. And they opposed what they saw as the, you know, the corruption and the watering down of religion in the Christianity of their day. So they were kind of, you know, reformist religious people who didn't see themselves as heretics. They saw themselves as contemplatives, largely. But there's a relationship between contemplation and action. And these figures like Marguerite Perrette, you know, formed political movements that got the attention of the Church and the Church felt they had to deal with it. So they were trouble.
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On the one hand you have people being burned at the stake as heretics, but then on the other hand you have, like Julian, people Coming to visit her, to see her, almost like a pilgrimage type thing. What dictated how these people were received?
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Well, it depended on the context. So, I mean, someone like Marguerite Perrette was clearly. I mean, she had her book, and it was known as a book on refined love, which was lost. The book was lost. There was talk of it, there's lots of sources that refer to it, but it was not discovered as a text until 1945 by an Italian philologist. So the book was known of, but lost for 600 years. So they were received with delight by the people that wanted to listen to that message, and with a mixture of, I think, suspicion and doubt by the church authorities. When something like this arises, this populist approach to religion, where you have this woman who is claiming to give you the path by which you can become divine without the mediation of the Church, this is the key thing, and this is what prefigures what happens later in the Reformation. If you listen to Marguerite Poret, she could show you how to become like God. So she was received with, I think, some alarm. Julian of Norwich is very cautious. I mean, she is an anchoress. So an anchoress is someone who chose to live a secluded life attached to a church. So she lived in an anchorhold that was attached to the Church of St Julian in Norwich, which you can still visit. And to become an anchoress was to also to go through last rites. Again, in her case, she dies to the world, and she dies to the world. And she goes into her anchorhold and she meditates, she contemplates, she reads. She can participate in services through a little window where she would have seen the altar of the church. And she received guests. She was a kind of, you know, counselor, a kind of therapist. And so one of the people that we know turned up to see her was Margery Kemp in 1415, who wanted counsel of Dame Julian, as she called her. So they're received in different ways, and the church faced a choice whether to incorporate this mystical, dynamic energy into the church or to brand it as heresy and to expel it. So it's always been an issue for political authority, ecclesiastical authority, what to do with mysticism, whether to incorporate it or to expel it. And that continues to this day. You know, if someone showed up in your street claiming to have visions of the Virgin Mary or claiming to have achieved union with Christ, are you going to listen to that person carefully, maybe follow them as a teacher, or are you going to call the medical services and try and get a counselor involved at this point? Probably the latter. So we've tended to, in the modern period to medicalize these kinds of phenomena. And that says more about us than it does about them, I think the fact that we're unsettled by these kinds of experiences.
- [14:32]
So you've briefly touched on some of the experiences of these mystics. And one thing that struck me is you would kind of assume that reaching this ecstasy would be like a joyous type experience. But actually there's a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, isn't there involved? Can you just go into. And perhaps some examples from figures you looked at.
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One would be Marguerite Perrette. A lot of the mystics are doing a kind of how to. How to become divine. And those how to approaches will often be around a series of steps and an itinerary. In Marguerite Perrette, there are seven steps on the itinerary. The last step happens after death. So we can perhaps put that to one side. But she itemizes the. The forms of discipline that are required in order to achieve union with God. But that's only step four. Step four is the feeling of union with the divine. And a lot of definitions of mysticism, if you look it up, you'll see mysticism is union with God. Okay? But for Marguerite Perrette, that's just step four. And that's a kind of drunken rapture where you are intoxicated with the divine. But then there's a fifth step where you then feel a kind of hangover after that rapture. And you feel an experience of suffering, dereliction and distance from God. And that's essential to mystical experience. It's not a kind of happy, clappy experience. This is a path of suffering and dereliction and distance and doubt. And maybe this vision that you had emanated from the devil rather than from God. And then the sixth stage in Marguerite Perrette is a stage whereby you can engage in. This is an extraordinary thought, I think, the annihilation of the soul that you can push. She has this wonderful phrase where she says, I must hack and hew away at myself. In order to make a space that's large enough for love to enter in. So the problem that the mystic faces very often is that what blocks access to a relationship to what they see as the divine is the self is them. They get in the way. And so, in a sense, in order to be open to these kinds of experiences. We have to push ourselves aside, get rid of ourselves insofar as we can. And this is true right the way through history we can think of different examples of this. I've got a nice quote from Flannery O'Connor, Southern Gothic writer, 20th century. Some people think she's one of the greatest American writers of the last hundred years. And when she's, I think, about 18 years old, she goes to college in Iowa, and she writes a prayer journal that only appeared years and years afterwards. And she says, this is quoting Flannery O'Connor. Dear God, I cannot love thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see, and myself is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful, and perhaps that is all one like I am could or should see. But what I'm afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you, God, because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside. So this idea of pushing yourself aside in order to be open to another realm of experience is a theme that punctuates the history of mysticism in really powerful ways. And going back to Julian, at the end of her long text, she comes to her conclusion. So what was it all about? What were those showings for? And she says they were for love. What was the meaning of them? Their meaning was love. And although it sounds, you know, a bit dumb in a way and a bit obvious, the love that these mystics are trying to articulate is very hard to do because we keep getting in the way, and language keeps getting in the way as well. So how can we use language in ways that that doesn't get in the way? And this means that mystics often use language in this incredibly negative way. They're constantly saying, not this, not that, not the other. And through a language of superlatives and exaggerations. These are very difficult texts, very often very intricate and elusive texts. They're full of references to biblical sources. They're not easy reads, best read in short fragments. But when I began to teach bits of it about 10 years ago, the students read them and then they made sense of them in very intimate, personal terms. And I thought that was unlike my usual experience of teaching, where you're trying to kind of push people into a certain vision of things. But they seized hold of the difficulty of it and then made it theirs in a way that was very powerful. So it's kind of dynamite, this material. I mean, it really is powerful, powerful stuff.
- [19:38]
Many of these individuals kind of go back to Looking at the medieval period, and that's probably how a lot of people would see mystics as being in that particular period, which is not necessarily true. I know obviously that was a time of plague. Do you think there is a link between these mystical experiences and the catastrophes that were happening to humanity?
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Yes, there is. There's a correlation between plague and mysticism. So the other side of how this book arose was in our recent plague experience, interesting things happened. Firstly, we retreated from the world. And that idea of retreat is an important aspect of mystical practice. It's called anachoresis withdrawal retreat. It's what monks used to do all the way back to St. Anthony in the desert. And in that withdrawal and that retreat, you then anxiously and perhaps in a slightly depressed state contemplate, and then perhaps something opens up. So I think during the pandemic, say we all became, or many of us became unwitting mystics. We were looking for some sort of experience that was not there obviously in the world and yearning for some connection to something that is outside own more than us. So in a sense, mysticism doesn't require a happy, cheerful world. It actually works better in a plague ridden and miserable world. Going back to Julian, I mean, Julian was living in Norwich. And Norwich, as I said, was the second most populous city in England at the time, or at least I think until 1600. And people would have been dying in huge numbers around her. And so she was an urban recluse attached to her church. She survived. So there is a correlation between plague, pain and suffering and these sets of experiences and that sense of fragility, the sense of frailty that I think is important to what it means to be human. We are the weakest reed in nature, as Pascal said, but our weakness is our strength, and in our wretchedness is our greatness.
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Moving away for a minute from the Christian tradition, what has mysticism looked like in other cultures and other religions through history?
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I'm not doing comparative religion because I just don't know enough. I've read a fair amount of early Islamic mysticism. There's a rich mystical tradition within Islam.
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Are there similarities between the two?
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There are, yeah. And often the same texts are involved. I mean, the key text for the Abrahamic traditions is the Song of Songs. For those people that have not read the Song of Songs, read the Song of Songs. It's three, three, four pages of the Bible. It somehow winds up there and it's an erotic nuptial poem. And it was the interpretation of that text in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Traditions, that really is the key motor of mysticism. And it's an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. Often in early Islamic mysticism, the same texts are being interpreted, the same texts are being used. And then there's a deep mystical strand in Judaism, which is really interesting. But because of the use of language, the fact that Hebrew was the language that was used in Jewish mysticism, and women were often not permitted to be educated in Hebrew, as far as I know, there are no Jewish female mystics. And it's the correlation between mysticism and female affective piety that really interests me. And that's why I pick out Christianity, because it's such a distinctive tradition. But you go anywhere, you go into Mahayana Buddhism or whatever it might be, and you're going to find mystical traditions everywhere. There's a lot of it about, and there's a lot of it about today. So with the decay or the decline in institutional religion. But I think a lot of that hunger that people have for a kind of a richer spiritual diet gets diverted off into New age spirituality, Tarot astrology and the rest. And even, you know, what goes on in. In yoga classes and things like that. And I'm not dismissive of that. I think people have a deep religious need, and this is a form in which they can articulate that.
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And what about the use of things like psychedelics to access these altered states of consciousness? Have you found evidence of that in your research?
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Yeah. So if we go way back, best example I can think of is the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were the most important rituals in ancient Greece, existed for a thousand years. It's really, really interesting. But the mysteries were kept secret, so we don't know about them. And people fasted for long periods of time. And then they arrived at the ritual site after eight days of different types of pilgrimage. And there was dancing, and they had a drink that was called cucuyon. And there's a lot of debate about what was in that drink. And some people have thought that there was some kind of psychoactive ingredient to that. So when they were involved in the essential rituals of the mysteries, they were kind of high. I think there's something to be said for the extremity of mystical states, the kind of violence of mystical states. There is something dangerous about them. There are kinds of forms of wild ecstasy, which I think we could do with a little bit more of as well, but. Yeah, but obviously the correlation between drugs and mystical states is deep.
- [25:12]
Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating topic. We're gonna have to kind of bring it to a bit of a close to finish the interview. If you could invite one mystic from history to the present day to talk to, who would it be and what would you like to ask them?
- [25:26]
I would like to sit down with Julian of Norwich. Yeah. What's interesting about her work is it's full of references to herring and fish and to ports and to rain and raindrops that I'd like to ask Julian, what happened before she was 30 and a half, because for a woman in 1373 who's 30 and a half, which is already into kind of middle age in that period, and she lives into her 70s, which is terrific, but, you know, I doubt she was free and single before then. So I think there's probably. There would have been a marriage, there would have been children. And this is also interesting that a lot of the female mystics are people who they left. They left their previous life behind. Why did you do that? What was the breakage? Yeah. So what happened in your life that led you to these revelations, these showings? I was in a monastery in Mount Athos in Northern Greece, which is itself is really fascinating because in Orthodox Christianity, unlike Latin Western Christianity, there was no reformation. And mysticism remains central to Christian practice. And the monastic life is central anyway. And I remember meeting this monk who, it turns out was from Florida, and he had had a. A weird life and somehow he found himself at an Orthodox church and then went to college and then for the last 35 years had been in a monastery on Mount Athos, the monastery of Xenophontos. And he said, the people that get here are people that have been smashed up by life. Smashed up by life. So we think of mystics as, I don't know, exemplary figures who've led wonderful lives and then they have these extra experiences. Now these are people that have been really broken by life and have been through significant ordeals, and then they decide to do something else. And that means also a complete shift of identity. You know, we don't know Julian's name. The name that she has is the name of the church that she was an anchoress in. I find that compelling because these are people for whom life really hasn't worked out. They've been, as it were, broken on the wheel of life. And then they find something else. And that makes me kind of love them even more, actually.
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Charlotte Hodgman
That was Simon Critchley, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. Simon's book on mysticism, the Experience of Ecstasy, is out now, published by Profile Books. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.