Simon Critchley

Mysticism is about existential ecstasy - an experience of heightening one's senses and self into a sheer feeling of aliveness. Mystical experiences offer us a practical way to open our thoughts and deepen the sense of our lives, whether through a mainstream connection to God or by taking part in mind-altering experiences.

Here, Simon Critchley explores the history and practice of mysticism, from its origins in Eastern and Western religion, through its association with esoteric and occult knowledge, and up to the ecstatic modernism of T.S. Eliot and others. Through a discussion of the lives of famous mystics, like Julian of Norwich and Jesus Christ, Critchley reveals how embracing the spectrum of mystical experience can refresh our thinking and help us live deeper and freer lives.

Philosophical and playful, analytical and inventive, On Mysticism is a definitive account of humanity's quest to understand the divine, and a call to thinkers everywhere to broaden our minds to life larger than our selves.

The Experience of Ecstasy

On Mysticism

Nathan Johnson

But there are areas of human experience that allow us to push outside the sticky self towards something larger, something vaster, something full of vibrancy and maybe a sheer, mad joy at the fact of life and the world. This pushing outside is what religious practice at its best does. It is what art at its noblest can open in us. It is what poetry can point us towards. It is also what can (if we are lucky) take place in our sexual lives and arguably what drives the desire for intoxication, of whatever kind. We can think of such experiences as forms of surrender. One gives up all desire for control, for dominion over oneself and others, and freely submits.

McGinn sees mysticism as a practice that melds together experience and theology. Where the former informs and passionately inflects the latter, and the latter deepens and extends the former. Mystical experience without theology is blind. Mystical theology without experience is empty. To understand mysticism, we must see experience and theology mutually as informing each other and encouraging ever-greater feats of conceptual imagination and affective depth.

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