Academic philosopher, Simon Critchley explores why Mysticism is about existential ecstasy – an experience of heightening one’s senses and self into a sheer feeling of aliveness and provides a fascinating overview of Christianity’s great outliers. Mystical experiences offers us a practical way to open out thoughts and deepen the sense of our lives, whether through a mainstream connection to God or by taking part in mind-altering experiences.

Whether so-called “mystical” experiences are felt to be religious, spiritual aesthetic or something else, people have been trying to report, describe, and make sense of this strange kind of ecstasy for a thousand years. Mysticism is “experience” Critchley acknowledging devotional writer Evelyn Underhill’s stellar groundwork. He wonders what it might be to “get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can never be fully lost”.

Critchley’s survey starts with Dionysius (c500) and Traverses early medieval mystics- most of them elusive European females with names such as Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224) or Mechthild of Magdeburg (c1207-82) – via functional figures such as Hamlet  and obscure 1970s German punk rock bands. He focuses on three modern North Americans: Anne Carson, in Particular her 2005 book Decreation; Annie Dillard, particularly her metaphysical theodicy in Holy the Firm (1977), and TS Elliot and his “Four Quartets”. He says “ I still believe in the centrality of the problem of nihilism, How to find the meaning in an apparently meaningless cosmos”. 

Mysticism is essentially a manifesto of surrender, “existential and practical”; freeing ourselves from our “standard habits”, our “usual fancies and imaginings”, and in doing so, being newly receptive to wonder, whether spiritual transcendence, or sex, or Beethoven’s quartets, or “popular music that many of us care about most and understand least”.

On Mysticism is a meandering delight, as quietly soul-nourishing as it is brain -stretching.

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.

On Mysticism: The experience of Ecstasy by Simon Critchley, Profile £18.99, 336 pages.