That Shape Am I

Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even realise it rhymes.

I picked up Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism because I wanted to read it. A survey of historical mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests? Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.

No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who are alive. Its hallmarks seem to be: 1) incontinent metaphors – rats under the floorboards of being, God as both our tailor and our benevolent banker; 2) paragraphs made up of words that are all the same length, inducing a kind of highway hypnosis; 3) a general feeling that Alain de Botton is somewhere, wearing a Dan Flashes shirt. Everything is like a riddle that an enormous snail poses before allowing you to cross a bridge. On one page, the appearance of rigour, on the next, statements like this: ‘It is impossible to be an atheist when listening to the music that one loves.’ Or: ‘To write is to try to set yourself on fire.’ Part of this is my own essential biliousness – the things other people consider fun, I experience as a threat to life. ‘The pact that I would like to make with the reader of this book is to see if we can transform our misery, woe and doubt with a wealth of words and sounds that might permit us to push back against the violent pressure of reality and allow a richness of life and a possible transfiguration of self and world.’ I will never make that pact. Still, as the inquiry wore on I began to experience a hysterical sympathy: there was such a rhythm of anxious restatement, so much of Critchley telling you what he was about to do and then not doing it, such endless throat-clearing and adjectival gooeyness and such a tendency for his mind to explode whenever he encountered a juxtaposition like ‘the ravishing far-near’.

It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised. This is all down to Meister Eckhart. The German theologian’s project of negation has held an irresistible allure for him, Critchley explains, ever since he was mock-excommunicated as a second-year undergraduate during a discussion of Eckhart’s sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin … This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ After such an experience you must turn to more serious questions. In Eckhart’s own words:

A man had a dream, a daydream: it seemed to him that he was big with nothingness as a woman with a child. In this nothingness God was born. He was the fruit of nothingness. God was born in nothingness. This is why he says: ‘He rose from the ground and with open eyes he saw nothing. He saw God where all creatures are nothing. He saw all creatures as a nothingness, for God has all creatures in himself. He is a being that has in itself all being.’

Or, as a friend recently asked of her fat cat with no mind: ‘Is it possible for Nothing to be surrounded by Everything?’

You can see what Critchley is doing, or trying to do: attempting to speak the lingua franca, the language of his subjects. If mystics can do so much with repetition and the word and, then why can’t we? William James speaks of that ‘vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism’. Some people can do cartwheels and other people have to do that thing where they put down their hands and then kind of hop off the ground. This feels more like the latter. When reading the accounts of the mystics, we are in their ands and their contradictions and yes, their negations, but we are also in their bodies. They begin, Last night I saw … and we are there, in their privations, crawling with the lice that they loved. We see them in brown cloth, with ropes tied at the waist, pricked by the little points of crystals; we know what is in their stomachs, and how moist everything is, and at what point past midnight their limbs begin to fall away. They deal in abstraction, yes, nullification, yes, but they are also nailed to the clock. The scene on stage where Critchley is being excommunicated is one of the few physical entry points the book provides. He seems embarrassed to show himself – more on this later – but not to say things like ‘a listening which is a lusting’. I believe that his language, even as it stands, is his longing. But this longing is not just entered through the mind.

‘No, God is to be erotically enjoyed,’ Critchley writes. Now, this sentiment has lent an animating spirit to several worthwhile works quite beyond the Song of Songs: Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe and Ron Hansen’s lavish and subtractive Mariette in Ecstasy and Anthony Oliveira’s recent Dayspring. You also just cannot say things like that at the breakfast table. ‘Christ is a sensuous being with a sensuous mother and a super-sensuous father.’ I understand that sometimes people write stuff like this accidentally. ‘In effing the ineffable, language fails, has to fail, should fail, and should go on failing, loquaciously failing.’ That, however, was on purpose. Say it with Julian of Norwich:

After this I felt as if the upper part of my body were beginning to die. My hands dropped down on either side of me, and I also felt so weak that my head lolled to one side. The greatest pain that I felt was my shortness of breath and the ebbing of my life. And then I truly believed that I was at the point of death.

Phrases such as ‘creaturely life-practices’ fall in the category of the venial, but flourishes like ‘We do not coincide with ourselves. Only psychopaths coincide with themselves’ are mortal. ‘The self becomes entrapped and entangled in the centripetal movement of its own turbulence. This is what it means to be in hell.’ I propose another definition.

The book is necessarily in conversation with both Evelyn Underhill (a somewhat forgotten figure, as Critchley says, whose 1911 opus was also called Mysticism) and James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Critchley claims to fall more on the Underhill side, though he disclaims that ‘I am fond – indeed, very fond – of William James.’ Who isn’t? ‘As James says in the preface, in words that should be imprinted on the soul or tattooed on the arm of everyone who attempts to think theoretically: “A large acquaintance with particulars makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep.”’ Step into my cell, Simon. I will give you that tattoo.

Actually, I am passionately in love with James. I would contemplate his figure on the wall for all time, and desire to remove suffering from him. To read The Varieties of Religious Experience is to believe not only that God might exist but that men might be good – and more, that they may be taken at their word. He simply (it is so radical) presents us with their paragraphs. It is in every way the opposite of those pretensions we gather to ourselves as protection against irony. It is not in wordplay, in hazelnuts and hazelnots, though theology has tangled itself so much in those things. The wound of experience is presented, open; it does not need to be probed, it is believed.

James never disappears into the Latin ether, but speaks to us from the world of fresh groceries: words such as spark and pert and racy. If we trust him for his pragmatism, we love him for his verve. In James there is a sense of many doors opening on dimensions; he goes between them with his lively and solemn gift, his curiosity. And what I think of as his characteristic nouns: lustre and reality. The corrugated rays coming off the first, and the second almost seeming to have human eyes. Can you imagine sitting in the audience at one of the Gifford Lectures? A string of white agates around your neck, perhaps (like the ones that Luther, pig-of-the-world, claimed he would eat if only God would bring about the Day of Judgment tomorrow). Edinburgh, 1901, three hundred silent auditors, and you’re telling me no one in those seats had the second sight? That no one’s soul left their body listening to him, that his figure did not suddenly stand in stark relief against the stage, begin to stream? It is also true that nothing we say about James will ever be as good as the picture of him dressed as a cowboy in Brazil, which is graciously reproduced in Critchley’s book. That is the vision itself, the vision that Sister Patricia could contemplate for all time.

Fragments risk standing in poor relation to their wholes. We’re up against monuments here, not just of mysticism but its interpreters and translators. We’re stacking ourselves against The Cloud of Unknowing and The Interior Castle and even the Jesus prayer. Oh, he’s not as fine a lecturer as William James? Go cry about it, you big baby. Still, one wishes for both less and more. Anne Carson, whose essay ‘Decreation’ centres on Marguerite Porete, Simone Weil and Sappho, is picked up and then dropped almost violently, like the hot potato that she is. (As a child, Carson tried to eat The Lives of the Saints.) Annie Dillard, breathing pure nitrous instead of air, is given a little more room, for she pertains more to Critchley’s mystic, having given the plane-crash protagonist of her book Holy the Firm the name Julie Norwich. T.S. Eliot is shoehorned in later on, because of Four Quartets and all shall be well, but despite being a beige fox in the desert of acedia, he is hardly incorporated at all; he sits like a whiskery six among sevens. At one point Critchley seems ready to embark on a promising excursus about Krautrock – and I was ready for it! Krautrock was a mortification, an atonement for one nation’s sins! Krautrocksampler IS a great book! I was ready – but then he scampers away from us like Jesus towards the temple, to preach.

Critchley’s definition and valuation of mysticism differs from James’s: ‘The only test or warrant for the authenticity and authority of a particular mystic’s account is whether that transformation was transformative for others.’ Of its authority perhaps – and not to wade in full cosplay into the Empiricism Wars – but surely whether other people believe it cannot be the true measure of an account’s authenticity? ‘The purpose of such rhetoric is to persuade an audience. These are literary forms of exhortation and persuasion.’ I don’t quite see that either. Critchley himself is working in the tradition of text as performance. Not everyone does: many of these accounts were written at the urging, even the order, of spiritual mentors. Teresa (who tried to hide her humiliating levitations, rather than revelling in their display) wrote under the direction of her confessor. Little Flower’s manuscript, as her sister Céline attested, was written at the behest of Mother Agnes: ‘She had no ulterior motive when she began … She wrote simply through obedience, trying above all to relate incidents specific to each member of the family in order to please all through the account of the memories of her youth.’

They are persuasions to Critchley because he is persuaded. I think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise and compulsive devotion to routine, which was particularly acute during the Covid-19 pandemic’. Even though some of us are doing these things constantly, they can have no involvement with our spirit. When faced with the ‘wildly self-destructive antics of female medieval mystics’, ‘we find such behaviour and its metaphysical demands too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has become a juice detox and flagellation has become our relation to a bad selfie posted on social media.’ I’m not certain this last clause even makes sense. ‘Body holism is a new ideological discourse, which is refuted every time we get sick or sit in the dentist’s chair, or, even better (or actually worse), are plagued by hypochondriac symptoms, conversion disorders of the type that have become remarkably widespread: a pandemic of genuinely felt illusion.’ I need a citation like St Anthony needed beast repellent. Who can read such a sweeping diagnosis and not feel immediate distrust? Is this anything more than a romantic swoon towards the past, while fallaciously rejecting the living present? This idea that nothing real can happen to a person who is on Instagram: nonsense! If it has not happened yet, one day it will.

I prayed to James for the strength not to mention Critchley’s neck scarf. ‘The wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the morrow,’ he told me. Perhaps I am just reacting to personality, which on the page goes by the name of style. Critchley’s project, after all, is not my project, and this is the fact that offends; what God loves in us, our one-in-the-worldness, is often the thing we cannot abide in one another. Take the Little Flower in her glorious Story of a Soul: ‘There is in the Community a Sister who has the faculty of displeasing me in everything, in her ways, her words, her character, everything seems very disagreeable to me.’ Comforting, somehow: to exist at all is to be someone’s bitch-eating-crackers.

Frequently, when I was at recreation (I mean during the work periods) and had occasion to work with this Sister, I used to run away like a deserter whenever my struggles became too violent. As she was absolutely unaware of my feelings for her, never did she suspect the motives for my conduct and she remained convinced that her character was very pleasing to me. One day at recreation she asked in almost these words: ‘Would you tell me, Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus, what attracts you so much towards me; every time you look at me, I see you smile?’ Ah! what attracted me was Jesus hidden in the depths of her soul; Jesus who makes sweet what is most bitter. I answered that I was smiling because I was happy to see her (it is understood that I did not add that this was from a spiritual standpoint).

I die at this parenthesis every time. Swelled huge in her infinite littleness, brat sexuality for Jesus. In this, of course, she was the dear little mirror of her Child, who in his more human moments was a bit of a brat himself.

It was due​ to the Little Flower that I quite seriously considered joining the Carmelites in my teens. Hence I do want to see a nun on the ground, and to read the firsthand accounts of God’s various worm-wives, and we are here for condensation, comprehension and anecdote, all readily available in one place. Critchley’s reading is deep and the project does have its aesthetic attractions. There are some very nice pictures of illuminated carrot men and peasants with white napkins on their heads and an image of St Antony in a bubble with the Holy Spirit pointing the shocker at him. He taught me the term ‘soteriology’. His taste is highly developed and he is very good, at times, on his personal mystic. He returns again and again to Dame Jelyan of Norwich, ‘thirty winters old’, and her behovely shewings. ‘Revelations shown to someone who could not read 1373 AD’: is there a more beautiful line in literature? Her ‘Short Text’ of Revelations of Divine Love is only 33 pages, though she elaborated on her experience later in the ‘Long Text’. We know, though we know so little about her otherwise, that she once met Margery Kempe. We know the probable size of her anchor-hold. We know she is often pictured with a cat because ‘The Ancrene Wisse advises that an anchoress may have a cat but not a cow.’ We know that in her swoon unto death she wished ardently to relive the Passion and for bodily sickness and for three wounds: of true contrition, kind compassion and purposeful longing for God. Her blessed declensions: I may, I can, I will and I shall; and you shall see for yourself. The corner we occupy in devotion is small, very small. ‘It seemed to me that this little thing that is made might have disintegrated into nothing because of its smallness.’ But the hazelnut that Julian of Norwich saw ‘lasts, and always will, because God loves it’.

I wonder how often these things involve nuts. One of my first memories is of an experience that I would call mystical. Rolling an acorn downhill, the leap of tree above it, and knowing I had somehow grown it, that I had been present at the beginning of its time and its fulfilment. It was the span of my life. I saw the hole in the snow the acorn made, where I had not previously been. There was a practical explanation, I think. During the move to a new rectory, my pinkie finger had been slammed in a door and split to the bone, and the anaesthesia I was given had set off an odd chain reaction; I have vivid memories of full-body hives and standing at the open refrigerator unable to breathe. If that is what first triggered it, it stayed with me. Light seemed to reveal things it did not reveal to other people. At times there was a near uncomfortable voluptuousness in objects, a plumpness almost of envelopes which I associated with the ‘fullness in heaven’. I was subject to intense déjà vu, jamais vu, déjà rêvé; hilltop ecstasies and discordances. All of these states chime against the mystical one. If you have seen fortification spectra sparkling just as they did in Hildegard of Bingen’s day, it is hard not to assign them part of the profound tradition.

Certainly this must be the most ridiculous appeal to authority that has ever appeared in these pages. Do you only write about these things if you have seen, in pure euphoria, cloves being driven into the apple of the Lord? For one who has experienced fortification spectra and rainbow auras, and seen souls rising from people’s heads, and fixed words begin to stream meaning, the uneasy question is this: what if it is merely neurological? What to make of the mystic loose from any system of thought or framework, who nevertheless has a seizure every time she passes through the same doorway? How easily it may be triggered, or even inherited. I cannot even look at a bevel, my mother has told me hauntedly. Lewis Carroll saw a pack of playing cards, but he might have seen the Supreme Face. What happens when the phenomenon has a name, an explanation? If the state can be entered through the physical: through repetition, the fondling of beads, looking at a bevel, what does that say for the revelations received there? What does that mean for the meaning?

Our gaucho has us here, never fear. Who else would it happen to? James asks, eminently reasonable. This is why we have insane people in the first place, and people who don’t eat, and who drink too much, and talk to cats and live in caves. To strange eyes is revealed the strange sight. It is so moving, and somehow seems, by washing, to remove the stigma from the sufferer’s hands. It is the opposite of statements like, ‘Only psychopaths coincide with themselves.’ ‘St Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow,’ James writes,

and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance St Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.

This is an almost unbelievably wide view. How is it possible for James to hold it? And yet it also happens to more people than we might guess. Again, his radical endeavour was to ask and to have sympathy, for he himself had experienced the morbid state:

Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse grey undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him … It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.

That shape am I. There is a great deal of sameness, even monotony, to these accounts, as James says. Bare prison cells on the one hand, the munching of white agates and the sinking to black depths; on the other, ecstasies between raindrops, swellings of the human string section, pencils of sweet light and God awaking you so that you may enjoy him. The same words recur: ravishing, sweetness, abundance, delight. They sit in the ribcage of literature like flaming hearts. In these people we consider the specific and the universal; we plumb human capacity, travelling outwards and outwards, breaking to be as big as what it must hold. The nothing and the all! No hands, we’re doing it!

Critchley confesses​ his own conversion experience in a paragraph and a half towards the end of the book. He writes of visiting Canterbury Cathedral and ‘standing in the nave … looking east towards the quire and feeling somehow both filled and voided at once by an ecstatic vibrancy which had a kind of enveloping warmth and sweetness which was not simply physical’. He seems rather embarrassed to tell of it further, but we want to know. We do not want him to be ashamed. It is particularity, after all, which allows us to imagine ourselves into the mystics. No, the real thing isn’t in language, but it is more illuminating to see the hem of Julian of Norwich’s spelling – alle thynge – than a thousand paragraphs seemingly composed of the words God and self. Jeannie, the Eucharistic mystic in the long drab skirt, once produced for me a cherry stem she had tied into a knot with her tongue. I touched that knot, still warm. I considered it. Who taught her, on what hilltop, in what night? The Lord.

Julian is his mystic, so read her:

Then a member of a religious order came to me and asked me how I was getting on. And I said that I had been raving that day, and he laughed loudly and heartily. And I said: ‘The cross that stood at the foot of my bed – it was bleeding hard.’ And at these words the person to whom I was speaking was amazed and became very serious. And at once I felt very ashamed at my carelessness and I thought: ‘This man takes seriously the least word that I say, and says nothing in reply.’ And when I saw that he took it so seriously and so very reverently, I became very greatly ashamed, and wanted to have been confessed; but I could not tell any priest about it, because I thought: ‘How could a priest believe me? I did not believe our Lord God.’ I believed this truly during the time that I was seeing him, and it was then my will and my intention to do so forever, without end, but like a fool I let it pass from my mind. Look what a wretch I was! This was a great sin and great ingratitude that I – through stupidity, because of feeling a little bodily pain – so foolishly lost for the time being the comfort of all this blessed revelation of our Lord God.

We wish to take it seriously, and reverently. We wish to believe the least word he says. But Julian’s carelessness was with the priceless carat of her experience; she fumbled and almost dropped it, until she heard the serious silence with which another met its glow. The cross was bleeding hard, she said, and if we have learned one thing from these accounts, it is that crosses will bleed, statues will weep, and above all the firmament must stream. But doubt is the dimension of the religious experience that brings it into reality, gives it that voluptuousness which corresponds with our flesh. In the state that defines them the mystics are stripped bare, breastless, all orifice, the dust stirred so full of longing that it leaps, and that thing mid-air is the soul. We do want to see that nakedness. We want to enter and leave another little body, to show us how to be in and leave our own. Critchley exists in the tradition of the mystics when he says that he did not believe his own revelation: that he could do it, maybe, now, right now.

Or I could speak of the strange flaring I once saw while looking at a history book – the word America suddenly opening out like a trumpet or a throat, the most beautiful name of the most beautiful flower. Afterwards I always sought for this to recur, looking long and steadily at that ‘e’. It never did, and I cannot imagine that it now will again. ‘That deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one,’ writes James, who declares himself shut out from mystical enjoyment almost entirely. That almost opens out. Don’t quite take him at his word.

Critchley sees such a flaring of the word now, which for that moment in the nave contains the whole question of his being. Benjamin Paul Blood: ‘The real secret would be the formula by which the “now” keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating?’ Possibly these states do have the most reality, for they continue to happen in history. They take place in the ongoing present which is said to be God’s time. The white mouse and the black mouse continue to gnaw the branch to which Tolstoy clings. You can enter Julian’s swoon unto death any time you open to that page. The normal passage of events does something: deliquesces. Thirst goes on in its own dimension: once the throat is opened, it cannot be slaked.

Writing may be ridiculed, quibbled with, even dismissed. But the real search cannot be. Far more embarrassing to have written a book, any book, than to confess to a vision of angels in Canterbury Cathedral. A man stands in the nave: now might be the moment, for ‘God is in one person quite as much as another.’ ‘Yet how believe as the common people believe,’ James asks, ‘steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible – but yet their life! Their life! It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question!’