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The Varieties of Mystical Experience
Simon Critchley seeks to say the unsayable – Elvia Wilk
He thankfully refrains from a ham-fisted thesis about how the Covid era was akin to the apocalyptic plagues of yore and turned us all into visionaries—what he’s saying is that world-shaking catastrophes send (the surviving) people to the edge of the cliff of existence, seeking the more-than-human, the bigger than ourselves, the terrifyingly, ecstatically incomprehensible. To begin to grasp this alterity, all you have to do is accept what you see at face value: Christ’s wound is depicted in many a premodern manuscript like a hovering vulva; nuns are pictured harvesting large penises from trees; Jesus is referred to as a father and a mother and a hard stone. It seems to me that belief in an actually existing God is only necessary to take mysticism seriously if you understand the divine in that very particular way—as opposed to believing in a more expansive interpretation that might include the feeling of earthly love, immersion in nature, dancing all night, doing drugs, or, like Critchley, having a sacred experience with art.
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