On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy review – in the presence of a higher power

I sometimes think of mysticism – the name we give to ecstatic, transformative experiences of absorption into absolute reality or, if you will, into God – as the subject that fascinates where all others merely interest. And yet it denotes something singularly hard to talk or write about, indeed virtually defined by its ineffability. On Mysticism, the philosopher Simon Critchley’s stab at effing the ineffable, feels oddly timely. As he notes: “There is an awful lot of mysticism about. More than ever in recent years.” He doesn’t speculate, but the widespread interest may point to that metaphysical restlessness that wells up during periods of acute cultural change – the return of the transcendental to a reality system no longer adequate for the times.

Among the more widely read and prolific of modern academic philosophers, Critchley has written books on topics as disparate as football, suicide and David Bowie. In a faintly defensive account of his interest in his current subject, he rightly points out that mysticism has been relegated and ignored within modern philosophy (with rare exceptions such as Nietzsche and Georges Bataille), whose rationalist bias favours critique, sobriety, laboriousness and rigour. He sees his book as a bid to push back against this epochal neglect.

An Englishman with a love of TS Eliot’s poetic evocations of the country and for medieval (mostly female) mystics – he knows his Hadewijch of Antwerp from his Mechthild of Magdeburg – Critchley sticks to the religious tradition he knows best: his study should more accurately be titled On Christian Mysticism. The riches of the Hindu-Buddhist east don’t get a look-in. Nor do Sufism, Kabbalah, or the philosophically subversive field of psychedelic experience – a post-monotheist bleeding edge of mystical consciousness. This narrowness notwithstanding, On Mysticism is a welcome, sometimes fascinating, perhaps inevitably frustrating book.

Most of the historical figures we think of as mystics did not see themselves as such: they were, rather, religious people whose devotion inspired experiences that revitalised, and in some cases, threatened the religious traditions they lived within (Marguerite Porete, a French Catholic mystic, was burned as a heretic in 1310). Critchley delves into the often fragmentary writings of various medieval Christian mystics – with particular focus on Julian of Norwich, notable for being the first female autobiographer in English, and Meister Eckhart, a cryptic German mystical theologian (and another heretic) who would influence Martin Heidegger.

Critchley prefers to talk of mystical consciousness rather than mystical experience. More than a matter of intense sensations, mysticism comprises “new ways of knowing and loving” that flower from elevated awareness. Following the theologian Bernard McGinn, he sees “mysticism as a practice that melds together experience and theology… Mystical experience without theology is blind. Mystical theology without experience is empty.” Critchley highlights the interplay between reading and contemplation: studying texts can trigger ecstatic transport, which in turn leads to a deeper “layering of concepts with experience”.

He runs us through various distinctions within the tradition of mystical theology. Cue plenty of exotic words: kenosis, kataphasis, soteriology, theosis. He’s particularly drawn towards apophatic or negative theology: the tradition of moving ever closer to the divine by naming everything that God is not.

Post-Enlightenment philosophy, Critchley notes, writes off mysticism as delusion, charlatanism or nonsense – and yet I wondered if he remains too much within academic orthodoxy to effectively spike his discipline with the mystical virus. (His admission to stridently professing a less than robust atheism to fit in with “fiercely secular” colleagues doesn’t allay such suspicions.) Mystical vision naturally calls for conceptualisation – Julian of Norwich had a single divine experience lasting a few hours, then spent decades working out what it meant – but Critchley’s compulsive parsing of mystical utterance into ever finer abstractions comes between his fascination with mysticism and the blood-red heart of the thing itself. His vivisections of Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart work against the mystics’ promise of immediacy, transfiguration, “experience in its most intense form”. We’re left wistfully eyeing mystical transport in a shop window: “I admire mystics who luxuriate in God and I luxuriate in their luxuriations.”

But perhaps this is splitting hairs on my part, towards a writer professionally committed to hair-splitting: it’s a stretch to expect a book about mysticism to deliver mystical experience. Critchley is largely content to serve as a tour guide to other people’s transports (he unambitiously claims he will consider his project a success if it persuades a few readers to check out the biblical Song of Songs). The best sections depart from the medievals to broaden our sense of who and what the mystical tradition includes: a bravura series of chapters traces a line from Julian of Norwich through the wondrous American nature writer Annie Dillard – in particular her short, crazily metaphysical book Holy the Firm, which features a little girl named Julie Norwich – to the incantatory mysteries of Eliot’s late, great Four Quartets… which, looping back around in a mystical spiral, quotes Julian (“And all shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well”). While Eliot was himself no mystic (bar “a few flashes during my life”), Critchley’s reading paints the quartets as a kind of poetic mysticism – a work that approaches, and ultimately vanishes into, that which is beyond poetry.

Reflecting on how the monastically incubated mysticism of old has diffused through modernity as aesthetic experience, Critchley veers close to banality in suggesting that by listening to the music we love (and Critchley not very illuminatingly tells us about music he loves), we’re enjoying mystical consciousness. Better to think of music – or drugs – as the gateway drug that turns people on to mystical promise in the first place. Critchley can undermine his own credibility – I like Jarvis Cocker as much as the next guy, but calling him “a poet of the first magnitude” does no one any favours. Fortunately, though, he’s sceptical enough to see that the channelling of religious intensity into aesthetic bliss entails a domestication of the ecstatic. A corollary might be that we think of mystical yearning under capitalism as a kind of underground resistance – the glimpses that break through, despite everything, of a mysterious splendour invulnerable to economic, technological or political encroachment.

• On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy by Simon Critchley is published by Profile (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply