Join Julie Jancius on Angels and Awakening for a profound conversation with philosopher Simon Critchley, author of Mysticism. Dive into the radical world of medieval mystics like Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart, who challenged the Church with visions of divine love, gender-fluid theology, and a God beyond sin. Discover how mysticism lives on in music, why angels matter, and what modern spirituality can learn from heretics and saints.

00:00 Introduction to Angels and Awakening Podcast
02:00 Simon Critchley Introduces His Book Mysticism
03:00 Defining Mysticism: Philosophy, Music, and Ecstasy
06:00 Mysticism Across Religions and Female Mystics
10:00 Julian of Norwich: First Female Author in English
17:00 Julian’s Visions and Radical Theology of Divine Love
22:00 Mystical Challenges to Church Authority
28:00 Mysticism vs. Modern Secularism
34:00 Angels as Messengers and Divine Presence
38:00 Meister Eckhart’s Teachings and Heresy
44:00 Gender Fluidity in Mysticism: Jesus as Mother
50:00 Closing Remarks and Simon’s Resources
51:00 Julie’s Final Promotions and Membership Offer

📖 Key Topics:

• Julian of Norwich’s visions and her mantra “All shall be well”
• Meister Eckhart’s teachings on detachment and heresy
• Jesus as a nurturing mother in medieval mysticism
• How mysticism thrives in music, art, and everyday ecstasy
• The untold role of women in reshaping spirituality

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• Join the Angels and Awakening Membership for live teachings: theangelmedium.com
• Train in Angel Reiki (online or in-person): Explore healing, mediumship, and divine guidance!

📚 Simon Critchley’s Book: Mysticism – Available now!
👉 Follow Simon: simoncritchley.com

💬 Comment Below: What mystical experience has transformed your life?

#Mysticism #Angels #Spirituality #DivineFeminine #MedievalHistory

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Day 31 of 31 Miracles: Your soul is already perfect, just as it is. Today, your Spirit Team invites you to see yourself through the eyes of the divine—whole, complete, and worthy of love. Release the need to strive for perfection and embrace the beauty of who you are in this moment. You are a unique expression of divine love, and the world is better because you’re in it.

TRANSCRIPT:

Julie: [00:00:00] Hello, beautiful souls. I’m thrilled you’re here to connect with the divine guidance of your angels. Imagine feeling the gentle, loving whispers of your angels guiding you every step of your life. If you’re ready to experience that profound connection, book a personal reading@theangelmedium.com. By clicking the readings tab for those eager to work daily with their angels.

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For you. Your journey with the Angels begins. Now, let’s see what messages they have for you in today’s show. Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the Angels and Awakening Podcast. I’m your host and author, Julie Janis and Friends. Today I’m here with Simon Critchley. He’s the author of the new book [00:02:00] Mysticism.

Welcome Simon.

Simon: Thank you very much, Julie. Nice to be here.

Julie: Oh, I’m so excited to have you. So, I don’t know exactly how to describe you because you described philosophy, uh, as, as kind of different throughout the times, but I wonder if we could kind of start here. Mm-hmm. Um, I, I’m a person who’s been deeply religious in my early years.

Now. I consider myself spiritual, but. And I know your entire book is about this. Is there a way for us to give people a basis for this conversation by kind of basically defining mysticism, theology? Mm-hmm. Traditional current philosophy and spirituality. The difference between

Simon: all. That’s a lot.

Julie: Sorry. No, no, it’s fine.

Simon: It’s fine. And, uh, I mean, I, I, I teach philosophy as a, as a day job. That’s, that’s [00:03:00] my, that’s my day job. I teach at the, um, the new School for social research in New York. But I, um, I have a lot of other interests and I, you know, I had a misspent youth and, uh, went to college. Late and, um, you know, and I, I played in bands for many years, all of which failed.

I was like kind of a dirty punk in England in the late seventies. And, uh, the book ends with discussion of music and in particular kind of post-punk music and, and especially German music in the early seventies. So a lot of it is about. So, I mean, one, you know, to go back to front, you could say that mystical experience lives on, for me, in the experience of music and music.

And so I, I, I say something in the book like, it’s impossible [00:04:00] to be an atheist when you’re listening to the music that you love. So whatever that music happens to be, uh, just sort of insert whichever you want, whichever artist or track you want at that point. But when you’re listening to that, when you are communing with that, it feels as if the.

You know, the, the cosmos is alive, things are speaking to you, and so on and so forth. So there, there’s a kind of, there is a kind of mystical rapture in the experience of music and you can see that in all sorts of different phenomena. So that’s a very everyday easy way to. Access it. You know, put your favorite track on and what you are feeling.

Then that feeling of kind of being outside yourself, of having or push yourself aside and to be open to that experience of something that you love, that means the world to you, is, you know, a modern version of [00:05:00] mystical experience. I could say that. And then, um, the other stuff, gosh, where to begin mysticism is, uh, there’s a very short definition by, um, a woman who was very famous in the early 20th century’s, kinda been forgotten, called Evelyn Underhill.

She wrote a book called Mysticism, came out in 1911, and she describes mysticism as experience in its most intense form. Experience in its most intense form. So that’s a, that’s a neat way of thinking about it. Um, so an intensity and aliveness, uh, uh, an ecstasy, a sense of being outside yourself, held somewhere else.

Mm-hmm. And then, and then we can complicate that in tons of different ways. The, uh, mysticism is not, is not a religion, you know. It is, is it’s a tendency within. All religions that I’m aware of. Um, yeah, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and [00:06:00] so on and so forth. And, um, it’s a tendency, um, within those religions usually something rather special.

Uh, you know, maybe the, the peak experiences that those, uh, those religions can offer. And, um, and it’s a kind of, uh, itinerary. Is often described, a path is described often with a number of steps mm-hmm. That you follow in order to get from where you are to. Union with the Divine or some kind of, almost a, also a kind of a deification, a sense of yourself becoming defiant di divine in some of the mistakes.

And it’s, uh, an itinerary that, um, is about an experience of personal transformation. Mm-hmm. So there’s that, that, that’s, and it’s, and, and, you know, and it, for as long as there have been. Beings living [00:07:00] in social groups. We go back to. Hominids living in neolithic times. There was something like religion there, there was religion as a social, uh, a social practice.

Some of that people did. And there was somebody, there was something that was, um, a special part of that religion, uh, which we can think of as mystical. And that’s, you know, you know, a, it seems to be a permanent feature of the human condition apart from perhaps, you know. Aspects of modern, secular Western life.

So that’s sort of interesting.

Julie: It is,

Simon: yeah.

Julie: Growing up as a Catholic, they would talk about the Great Saints, the mystics. Yeah. Um, what is that? You know, like who were the Great Saints, the mystics.

Simon: They were, I mean, there’s the early saints, you know, the, you know, being thrown into the, thrown into the Colosseum in, uh, in Rome by various Roman [00:08:00] emperors.

Uh, and the lives of the saints were written much later and stories were told that the kind of figures that, um, idea within the book, a lot of medieval. Medieval characters. So you know, we’re talking about the high Middle Ages, the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th century, and an awful lot of women. So another pe Really interesting and striking thing about the mystical tradition is it a tradition which has been largely, um, dominated by, by female authors.

And some examples of that would be Theresa of Avalor. Uh, in, you know, in Spain in the 16th century and, uh, Angela of Fello in Italy in the, uh, a couple of centuries earlier. And then Julian of Norwich, who’s kind of the hero of the book. And these are people [00:09:00] who, uh, and one more dimension is a woman called Marguerite Paulette, P-O-R-E-T-E.

She is. Burnt at the stake as a heretic in 1310 in Paris because she refused to retract her book. She wrote a book on refined love that was called The Mirror of Simple and Annihilated Souls. So, so if you look at those characters, um, those are characters, uh, Marguerite Pert. Was seen as a threat to the church, the Catholic church.

And, uh, she refused to back down and she paid the price for that. And there are figures like Theresa Avalor, who is part of a movement of what were called the illuminated ones, the ados in, in Spain. And the church, uh, persecuted them and her friend John the cross. Um. Eventually that was incorporated into the church.

Uh, you’ve got people say like St. Francis, [00:10:00] who was really, you know, uh, properly a, a heretic. You know, he was, you know, replicating in his body. The, the stigma of, of Christ, and also saying very radical things about the poverty of Christ and trying to get rid of private property and all of that. This was a huge threat to the Catholic church.

The Catholic Church eventually incorporated the Franciscans into the church. So what, so when mystics appear, they, um, often appear because they get an audience, you know, a decision to take, which is, you know, a. On the one hand, mystics are good for business. They’re, uh, they’re, uh, they’re attracting crowds.

On the other hand, uh, they often refuse to accept the authority of the church, and therefore a trouble. So either the mystics get incorporated in the church, or their followers do, or they get expelled. They become declared heretics and pushed out. And Margaret, correct.

Julie: I don’t like that kind of trouble. [00:11:00] Oh, yeah, that,

Simon: yeah, that trouble.

And then, and then it gets, and then later on it gets even worse because, I mean, it’s. Or Yeah, worse, that the, I mean, what we think of as mystical experience, uh, was, was, was a, was a feature of, uh, the lives of, uh, monks and nuns in, in convents and monasteries all across, all across Europe and. Uh, there was an institutional framework for that when, when the reformation kicks in, um, in, in the 16th century with Luther, the whole attitude towards the mystics changes, uh, things become very anti mystical and those kinds of phenomena, uh, having visions, uh.

You know, and, you know, young, young women having visions of, of, of the divine or being possessed, are treated not with, uh, curiosity and interest, but are treated with increasing hostility. And that’s when you begin to get things like witch trials in the late [00:12:00] 16th, early 17th century. And that washes up in, in the early period in the, in the United States, in New England, Salem, which trials famously.

So there’s a, there’s a modern. Modern reformed Christianity. Modern Protestant Christianity often has a problem with mysticism, which it, uh, is like, struggles with it. It doesn’t, it, it’s suspicious of it. Love that Catholicism bit too as well. Well,

Julie: I love that kind of trouble. So, uh, one of my earliest memories was being in Catholic school and they would ask us, you know, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

It was like a project we were working on Uhhuh, and I said, I, you know, I wanna be a priest. And the the nun I remember said, well, you can’t be a priest. You know, you’re a woman. And I said, okay, well then I’ll be a nun. And she said, you know, just so you know, you’re not gonna be able to have a family and you’re not gonna be able to have kids.

And I don’t believe that women have to get married or have kids, but I just knew that I wanted to have children one day. Mm-hmm. [00:13:00] And so I thought, okay, well then I must not have good intuition because I just wanna work for God. And they’re telling me I can’t. And I see right now in society, I think back, like in the future, when historians look back, they’re gonna look at this period in time right now and say the church, the church is the Christian and the Catholic church did not make any room whatsoever for female leadership.

Mm-hmm. Even in the Christian churches, it’s still. Different articles coming up each year. The Baptist Church doesn’t want female leaders. Is the spiritualist movement today born out of there not being any room for female leadership within religion? True female reli uh, leadership.

Simon: There, there needs to be female leadership in, uh, in religion because, uh.

Women would almost certainly do a [00:14:00] better job. There’s a question about that, and of course there is, you know, Episcopalianism, which they have no problem with, you know, female priests in the Episcopal church, bishops and so on and so forth. So there are, there are strands of Christianity in the United States, which are open to women and where women can lead.

Uh, Catholicism has got. Problems with that, let’s just say, and I think it’s, um, I, I, I find that, you know, really, really unfortunate. I mean, the, the, the nuns, you know, you wanted to be a nun as a, as a young girl. Well, yeah. You get married, you get married to Christ. Yeah. You get to marry God. That’s pretty good and he’s not gonna leave you.

So a lot of what we think of as, I mean, nuns, were very serious about the, you know, the marriage to, to Christ and the, the sense of Christ as being, uh, not just a matter of belief, [00:15:00] but a matter of actual sensual presence. And there is wonderful stories of, uh, of medieval nuns who had, um, uh, very physical, very, very.

Oral relationships to God. There’s a, there’s one mystic who says, um, Madam Guion, uh, French Mystic, who says, who says God is all mouth, God is all mouth. That the relationship to God is primarily through, uh, through the Eucharist, through the drinking of the wine and the eating of the, the body of Christ.

And nuns also had, uh, there’s a, there’s a lot of cradles in, in medieval European. Uh, churches and monies and places called be where, where there were these, there’s maybe could back up for a bit. There were these, there, there were the traditional nuns, and then in the early middle Ages there were these figures called Beins.

And Beins were says [00:16:00] B-E-G-U-I-N-E. And they appeared in. Uh, in places like Flanders in, in modern Belgium and in Germany, and they were semi enclosed nuns, so they were, they were nuns, but they were allowed to kinda move in the world and, uh, and, and do social and. Even political stuff in the world. And they would, uh, they were also married to, to, uh, to Christ, uh, and they would have things like dolls.

You know, there are, there are, there’s lots of examples of, uh, of Jesus dolls and Jesus cradles and, um, they’re very touching actually, these things. So,

Julie: yeah,

Simon: maybe not physical children, but children of a kind. And then you’ve got your, your followers. So a lot of the. Figures we think of as mystics, like Hildegard of Bingham.

Their children were the, the congregation, the, the, the fellow nuns that they, they had, uh, their, their community around them. Was, was, was family.

Julie: Talk to us about Julia of Norridge, [00:17:00] who’s one of the her. Oh yes. Yeah.

Simon: Julian of Norwich was a woman, uh, in the. Born, we don’t know for sure. Mid 14th century. She’s the first woman to write a book in English.

Julie: Hmm.

Simon: Of which we’re certain and that’s it itself. Extraordinary. So people that are interested in say the history of the English language or, or English literature, uh, and they read perhaps and text like that, they should also be reading Julia Norwich. This is the oldest text by a woman in English. She, uh, she, her story is very interesting, so lemme tell you her story.

So she is, um. We dunno her name, her her name. Julian is taken from the church where she was anes. I’ll, I can get into that in a, in a little while what Anes, [00:18:00] uh, meant. So we dunno her name. She gives very few biographical details in her book. There are two versions of her book, uh, what’s called a short text and the long text.

And the long text is longer than the short text, but the, in the short text she talks about, uh. The fact that she talks about being 30 and a half years old. Very interesting kind of dating that 30 and a half. And, you know, this period, this is 30, this is, we know it is May, 1373. We know that, that that’s, that’s in the text that May, 1373, 30 and a half years old, which in, in that period puts her in, in kind of, you know, middle age, you know, ’cause people were dying at 50 or so.

So she’s, you know, she’s not a spring chicken. And she wishes for, uh, she wishes to suffer. Uh, indeed. She wants to, she wants to die. Uh, like, um, like her Lord who died [00:19:00] for her. So she wishes for the, uh, she wishes for the same suffering that Christ suffered on the cross, which we might find a strange wish, but that was her wish and her wish becomes true.

She, she, uh, she begins to. She begins to die, and she describes herself, uh, as losing the, the feeling in her legs. Her legs going cold, her arms getting going cold. And they call in, um, a Parson. Uh, and the Parson, uh, administer last rights to her as she’s, as she’s dying. As alongside the Paron is someone that’s described as a boy, and the boy is holding a crucifix.

And as she’s dying, she then begins to look at the crucifix, and the crucifix begins to ooze blood. Blood begins to pour from the crucifix. So she has, and then she has this series of what she calls, she calls them showings, uh, or revelations. And they continue [00:20:00] for about 12 or 13 hours. So not an awful long time.

12 or 13 hours. And those, those visions, uh. Continue. And then she, they end, she wonders if she was crazy, you know, she asks, she asks her, uh, priest, you know, was I raving? She said, was I, was I mad? And the priest says, no, you were not raving. And then she begins to write down those experiences. Then she begins to try and understand the meaning of those experiences, and then she spends the next 30 years of her life trying to work out the meaning of those experiences and the meaning of those experiences, it turns out, is love.

And um, and she, yeah, so she produces this extraordinary. Text and um, and she becomes, oh, an anchors. So at some later point, not exactly sure when she decides to. [00:21:00] Become an anchors. Now, an anchors was someone that lived, or an anchor, right? Was someone that lived in a, in a of a side room in a church, so attached to a church, but in a little, little tiny room, and they were, you know.

To, to get, to become an anchor as you basically had to go through again last, right. You died to the world. And, uh, and in that little anchor hold there was a, a window where you could see the ulcer of the church and participate in the services at a certain distance. And basically you stayed in that anchor hold until, until you died.

And these. Figures like Julian became, um, sort of counselors. They’d, they’d have somebody that was helping them, helping them out, bring them food. Mm-hmm. Take away trash or whatever, and they would, uh, they’d receive, uh, they’d receive people who wanted their. Their counsel, their [00:22:00] advice. And so Julian did that because we, the second woman who wrote a book in English, a woman called Marjorie Kemp, and the book of Marjorie Kemp, uh, refers to her meeting Julian Dame Julian, as she calls her.

She’s an extraordinary vivid. A figure who basically, amongst other things, entirely rewrites Christianity.

Julie: How does she rewrite Christianity? If you are searching for community where you can share your beliefs openly, connect with kindred spirits and feel truly supported, you’re exactly where you need to be.

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Simon: She says over and over again, I did not see sin. She then has to try and make sense of sin because she knows that holy [00:25:00] church, as she calls it, teaches that we are in a condition of sin, but she did not see that, so it doesn’t really make sense to her.

She then has to try and. Reconcile that with this conception of love. So instead of the, the Garden of Eden and Temptation, the serpent and Eve and Eve tempting Adam, and then they both fall and get kicked outta paradise and then we’re sinned until. You know, we’re condemned to original sin. We are in conditions of, you know, we are.

We are contaminated by original sin. Julian has this little story of what she calls the Lord and the servant. And the Lord is described as someone who’s a Lord God. And the servant is a servant who does the bidding of the Lord and loves the Lord very much and loves the Lord so much that he goes off looking for something for the Lord, maybe some food for the Lord, and falls into a ditch, falls down into a ditch, and.

Then she continues the, the, the parable of the Lord, the servant to say that then God [00:26:00] takes on, uh, human form and then retrieves that servant from the ditch and picks him back up. The full wasn’t because of a sin. The full was because we love God so much. We were trying to do his bidding so much that we, we stumbled and, and fell and we needed to be picked up.

So it, it’s, it’s a, it’s a conception of Christianity without sin, without original sin, and without any idea of hell. She, you know, her, her sort of mantra, if you like, the, the, the fridge magnet version of Julian is the all shall be well. All shall be well, an all manner of thing shall be well. And so that’s what she insists on.

The all shall be well, all can be well, and she was living in. A context of, um, uh, the Black Death bubonic plague. People were dying, uh, around her. It’s possible that it’s possible. [00:27:00] It’s probable that she was married and had children and they died in the plague, and she somehow escaped from that. So the idea that she was, you know, in some kind of cloud cuckoo land is ridiculous.

She was in a context of, of suffering and contagion, and yet she can still say. All shall be well. And the meaning of the meaning of what she was shown is, is love, and she’s a remarkable, remarkable figure. It’s

Julie: so beautiful. Yeah.

Simon: Yeah.

Julie: Wow. Okay.

Simon: You know,

Julie: couple of questions. So it’s hard. Not to be a skeptic sometimes.

Yeah. And when she talks about passing away, away and blood coming outta of the cross, you know, St. Francis, you know, St. Francis, the, and the stigma, they’re not metaphors. They’re actually metaphor about, they’re cross about coming outta the cross. And there are reports on this happening not just with her or St.

Francis, but reports around the world. [00:28:00] What do you think about that in all of your studies?

Simon: I believe what they believe. I mean, I’m not, I teach philosophy as a day job, but I’m not, I’m not by profession, a skeptic. So if someone tells me sincerely that, that something happened, I, yeah, I tend to believe it.

So if you know William Blake, the great. London poet, when he was seven years old, saw angels on a tree in his house in Peckham, r in London. Do I disbelieve that? No. I think he saw angels and, and I think that Julian experienced blood, and I think that if we’ve lost that condition of belief, that’s, that’s our problem, not their problem.

Right. That we, we we’re, we are missing something that we could, um, we could perhaps do better to, uh, understand. I don’t doubt for a second what Julian says, you know, for example. I love that. Very beautiful. Love that, okay.

Julie: Yeah. That’s beautiful. Okay. And this has been, I know that you’re not a historian mm-hmm.

Per se, but [00:29:00] I wonder if you have any insights to this. ’cause it’s a question that’s been on my mind for a long time. So you have. Jesus’ time. Jesus didn’t write anything down. Yeah. But then you have Catholicism that kind of comes about. Everybody in Rome gets together, creates the religion. And then you have Martin Luther who comes along, who breaks apart from Catholicism, you have Christianity.

And so when I grew up Catholic as a young child, you don’t believe. That you have to believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior to go to heaven. You believe that you’re a good person, you do good works here on Earth. Mm-hmm. And that helps you get into heaven. But then when my parents divorce, getting into a mega church, Christians.

Mm-hmm. Believe that you have to believe in Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior to go to the other side. But when was that idea introduced into humanity? That you have to believe in Jesus. In order to get to heaven.

Simon: You [00:30:00] kind of your own personal Jesus, to quote Depeche Mo that Yeah, there’s a little bit, uh, it comes up more in the, I think in the, in the Baptist tradition, doesn’t it?

It’s the, the idea of, you know, walking alone with Jesus. That’s, that’s that strand of reformed Christianity that you find in, in the Baptist. That, that’s very intense. I mean, I mean, Jesus is, you know, is, is, is central. Uh, he. You know, his ministry only lasted for about three years. Um, and he was crucified and not, and we have to remember what crucifixion was.

It was the most humiliating, uh, and painful of, of deaths. He didn’t write anything down, but then St. Paul did, and then the whole. Apparatus of the church begins to take, take shape. And somehow, somehow the, the, the weirdest historical fact is that the most, you know, the most powerful empire in the world, in, in the world until the [00:31:00] modern era, the Roman Empire then decides in the full century to adopt Christianity as it’s, uh.

As its core, as its core faith, which is completely at odds of what the Romans used to believe. Anyway, that goes on.

Julie: You believe so How far was that after Jesus’s passing?

Simon: That was three. Uh, Constantine, the Emperor Constantine decides that Christianity will become the. Official religion of the Empire in about 3 25.

Okay. And then, and then they have to sort out what’s gonna be believed. Then they develop, there are various meetings. There’s the, the Council of naia. So if you’ve been to a Catholic church and or you’ve been to an Episcopal church, you will have recited the nice creed. That Nice Creed was formed at the Council of Nice Year in the late fourth century.

And that was, uh, and so that, that continues on, you know, very, very long and complex. Story, but the Catholic church had become, you know, pretty corrupt by the, the late middle Ages. The, you know, let’s, let’s say the, the [00:32:00] 14th, 15th century. So along comes. Someone like Martin Luther, um, a very, uh, vigorous and brilliant young academic monk and academic, and he, he’s looking at the Catholic church and there’s, you know, the Catholic church is in the business of selling indulgences and relics or, or pilgrimages, basically tourism in order to buy time.

Purgatory. He looks at the New Testament. There’s nothing about, there’s nothing in the New Testament about this. You know, this is all just made up. So he, he goes back to the text, and that’s what, that’s what, that’s the engine that drives the reformation, that really reform. Christians, Protestants are people that believe it’s only scripture, solo scripture.

That’s the way we, uh, that’s the way, that’s our access to God. The reading of the Bible and, uh, and, and our relationship to God is through faith and faith alone. I. Catholicism hangs on to all of these other, uh, deeper traditions, devotional traditions, and [00:33:00] uh, and I think that’s, that gives a, a richer, deeper picture.

Another, a whole other thing to talk about is there’s a whole world of Christianity that wasn’t touched by this as whole, which is Orthodox Christianity, Eastern Christianity, Greece. Um. Ukraine, Russia, Syria, um, they were those, those, those are deep Eastern Christian traditions where there was no reformation.

And where mysticism was not treated with, uh, suspicion, uh, it was always central to, um, church activities. So for those people who. Dunno much about orthodoxy. Uh, that’s a, that’s a lot of fun to find out about. There might be an orthodox church in the neighborhood. Go and see what they’re up to. And they have some and they do.

And you know, Orthodox faith is very much about, about song, it’s about, uh, it’s about singing and uh, um. And incredibly intense and complex rituals. So we have this idea of, [00:34:00] uh, of being in church as something, you know, you know, prim and proper on one, and there’s a sermon and you know, you’re trying to be on your best behavior.

Whereas in the Orthodox Church, it’s, there’s no sermons, uh, there’s just, there’s just song and a whole complex, uh. Canvas of, of, uh, of rituals and practices. Uh, and, uh, it’s, it’s a lot of fun.

Julie: Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I had no idea that Orthodoxy kept more of that. Mysticism amazing.

Simon: Yes, he did. He did.

Yeah.

Julie: I wanna touch on Sir Eckhart, because you talk about him a lot in your book, and I think you tell some really great stories in here, um, and, and great readings from his work. But I wanna talk about angels first. So, um, you talked about, uh, you know, people and, and there being histories of people seeing angels physically, which I believe absolutely happens.

Um. Where does, do angels kind of fall within [00:35:00] your work and like what you’ve looked at historically and do you think that they’ve kind of gotten lost over the years?

Simon: Yeah, I think they’ve become a source of, um, probably embarrassment to many Christians. Right.

Julie: Why?

Simon: I think because it just seems, you know, it seems a little bit too.

Preposterous, but I don’t, I, I, that’s not my view. I think the angels are, you know, they, what, what’s an angel? An angel’s a messenger, right? Yeah. It’s a messenger. Uh, it’s some kind of adaptation of, um, the idea of Hermes, uh, in the Greek pantheon. Who’s the messenger? God who’s. Transmitting messages from the gods to humans.

So when Hermes turns up Mercury in, uh, in, in Lassen, we, uh, you know, we, we get a message and we should, we should listen to it. So the idea that there are messengers, I find in. That makes, that makes sense. And I guess the messenger that most interests me [00:36:00] is, you know, the messenger who, who brings the, the news of the, you know, annunciation to, to Mary.

And, and she’s surprised by that you, her case, you are going, you are pregnant with God. How am I gonna explain that to my husband? Um. But she doesn’t doubt that the angel, uh, has given a, a reliable message. So I think it’s, um, I think we could open our, open our eyes a bit, open our hearts a little bit to, um, things like angels.

Again, I’m not a skeptic, so I think it’s, if it means something to people, then I think it means something. It has to be and demands to be understood. Ooh.

Julie: I think that’s a great line. If it means something to people, then I think it means something.

Simon: Yeah, I think, I think so. Yeah. I think that people aren’t, uh, people are not, uh, people are not stupid.

They’re not gullible. They’re, um, they’re, and when it comes to their, their religious life, they, they, they [00:37:00] take things. They want joy and all the rest, but they take things pretty seriously. And, and, uh, I think what’s terrible is when that’s, um, looked down on. By people, people like me living in the, in the coastal elite cities of New York and such.

Like, and, and, uh, and I, I, I despise that, uh, that kind of secular elitism. ’cause it just, uh, closes, it closes off, it closes off all sorts of dimensions of experience, which, um, and also all sorts of dimensions of actual devotional practice, uh, that. Millions and millions of people are in, are involved with.

And uh, why would you do that? Why would you just not try to understand those things empathetically, rather than say, these people are crazy.

Julie: Yeah. I love that. Thank you. Okay, that’s good. Um, Simon, you talk about going to, um, you were in school, uh, university of Essex. Yes. Uh, [00:38:00] let’s see, Catholic Chaplaincy and all.

You’re going through this class and then you get tapped, you’re going kinda doing like a reenactment, right? And you get to tapped to place, sir Eckhart.

Simon: Right? So Meister Eckhart was a theologian in the late 13th, early 14th century. He dies in 13th 27. He is, uh, brilliant, a brilliant Dominican. Friar, the Dominicans were particularly smart.

Bunch of monks, Thomas Aquinas. The um, you know, the central theologian of the Catholic church was a Dominican. And, um, in fact, uh, so Eckhart was the only other person apart from Aquinas who became on two occasions was master of Theology at the University of Paris. Okay. So he writes all these texts in Latin.

And, um, uh, they, you know, he’s very well received. Then [00:39:00] they, the, um, there’s a sense of there being kind of trouble of things happening in the German speaking world. And he’s a German, uh, German speaker and he’s sent off to kind of do some missionary work in, uh. Cities like Cologne and, and, and Strasbourg, which is now in France, but at the time was, uh, in the German speaking, in the German speaking lands.

And he, uh, goes to speak to novices people. Uh. Men and women training to be monks or nuns, and then gets a bigger audience and, and gives these sermons in German. So the first text in German that we have in what’s called middle high German are texts by, written by Meister Eckhart. And these sermons are wild.

They are, he says all sorts of extraordinary things like, you know, I pray to God, to rid me of God, uh, and, you know, and things like that. And so his, his view is that. We have to, um, we [00:40:00] have to, uh, learn to push ourselves aside to to empty ourselves, empty ourselves in order to be open. So what we have to do is to pour ourselves out from ourselves into the experience of the divine and God also, which is what makes Christianity so interesting, has the poor.

Itself out into us. So it’s like it almost to do it in terms of, you know, images of liquid. We we’re a glass that’s poured out and God is a glass that’s poured out and where those two things meet and merge. Is what Eckhart calls the Godhead. And the Godhead is neither a God nor the human being, but something in the middle, some kind of third space, and that’s, that’s central to his teaching, trying to get to that and, and to get to that point, he has these concepts, two concepts of what he calls releasement and detachment so that we [00:41:00] have to be released from.

The, the will from, you know, from, you know, our, our consciousness, our, our sense of ourselves to b, to be open to, uh, an experience that is, that is beyond us. And if we can achieve that released state, we can become detached, detached from our, uh, our creaturely, uh, day-to-day concerns. And so he’s doing this in, uh, with ever bigger audiences and, uh, it’s a great success.

But of course. Other clerics are looking at this thinking, you know, this guy is too popular and. Dangerous. And I’m not sure if what he’s saying is heresy or not. So he then gets investigated by, uh, the pope. And this time, this time in the early 14th century, for about 60 years, actually, the, there are two popes.

There’s a pope in, in Rome, and a Pope in Avignon. In, in, in France. There’s a, the period of the dual papacy. So he goes to Avignon and he is investigated. Um, he’s, and then he [00:42:00] dies in Avignon. Uh, it’s not in, you know, dire straits. He’s kind of, he’s being. Looked after by fellow Dominicans, but he dies. He’s, he’s pretty old by this time.

And a year after he dies, uh, several articles from his texts are found to be heretical and a papal bull is issued in 1328, denouncing him as a heretics. So going back to that story, when I was a, a student, uh. In the Catholic Chaplaincy at the University of Essex, the, uh, our, the father there called Father Michael Butler.

I was, I was chosen to play the part of my direct car and, and, and he, um, he communicated me in Lassen. I. And that’s the kind of thing you

Julie: Well, and it’s so, you don’t forget that. Interesting. You know, in your book you talk about how, um, the Catholic church just didn’t understand his intellect at that time and Yeah.

Um, that seems to be a theme, you know, if they don’t understand a spiritual experience mm-hmm. They [00:43:00] write it off. And if they don’t understand, you know, somebody who’s. Smarter or, or interpreting things at a higher level, they write it off. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And um, and on page 1 0 5, you say, uh, you can’t give one of Eckert’s lines.

If I myself were not, God would, uh, if I myself were not, God would not be either right.

Simon: That

Julie: God is a. That God is God of this I am a cause. If I were not God, if I You read this? Yeah,

Simon: if, if I myself were not, God would not be either that God is God of this I am a cause. If I were not God would not be God.

And, and then he adds after that. Uh, there is, however, no need to understand this, that’s a typical Eckhart moment. He says, you know, he says this wild stuff. Yeah. You know, he is kind of free jazz at this point. And he says, but you don’t need to understand this. But the point is a deep point in the sense in which, um, God [00:44:00] is God for us, I think God is God for us.

And, um, if, if I were not. God would not be God. God would not have to have, you know, taken on incarnate human form to redeem fallen humanity and the standard Christian picture. So the relationship between the human being and God is a relationship of dependency, right. A, a de a relationship of familiarity, you know, and, and that’s what makes the Christian tradition, I think so.

Um. So fascinating, uh, because the Christian God is an incarnate God, a sensuous God, um, a human God. Um, and that’s not the case in Judaism. Still waiting for the Messiah in prophetic religions like Islam. You know, uh, there’s no idea. There’s no possibility that God could become, could become incarnate. And then the other really, I [00:45:00] wanna get this thing, ’cause this is really, this is really good stuff.

Is that, um. This takes us back to Julian, but it’s, uh, sort of in the air, is that the, uh, the gender of, uh, Christ is really up for grabs. So, uh, Julian has this idea of what she calls Jesus as our mother. Jesus is our mother. Oh, explain

Julie: this.

Simon: Well, uh, Jesus has a super sensuous father and a sensuous mother Mary.

And there is this. Firstly, there’s this familiar tradition of God as a kind of paternal authority, as of Daddy in the, in the house, but there is this other, uh, tradition in particularly in Christianity of, of Christ as a kind of a Christ, as a, a nurturing, uh, a nurturing force who. Who gives from his own body.

Uh, and in particular when the, the body of Christ was depicted [00:46:00] in, in medieval Christianity, um, it was with the, the stick, with the, with the wounds. But the particular wound that was always emphasized was the side wound. The side wound is the, the wound that’s just underneath, underneath the heart where he gets stabbed with a, a spear by a Roman soldier, and that side wound becomes the main preoccupation, and the side wound is just below the breast.

Just below the nipple. So there’s this medieval preoccupation with the, the blood of Christ, which, which nourishes and redeems and the links between that and, and, and milk. Right? So in a sense that, that for the, in the medieval, in medieval physiology, the belief was that blood and milk came from the same source.

So Christ is our nurturing mother. In that tradition. And that’s the way, uh, that’s the way Julian emphasizes it. And, uh, and it’s even, it even gets compared, and this, this is fascinating to, uh, a pelican. [00:47:00] So pelicans were, uh, symbols that appear in, in medieval Christianity all over the place. Um, and the belief was, it’s, it’s wrong, but it’s, it’s a great belief that pelicans, uh, fed their young, from the, the blood, from their own blood.

The pelicans would peck. Peck at their, at their chests, make themselves bleed, and they’re young will be fed from that. And that becomes a, what medievals called a figuera an image for, uh, for Christ. But the outcome of all of that, the really wild outcome of all of that is the, uh, you know, Christ is female on that picture.

Christ is, Christ is a mother. And, uh, and a, a mother who has a particularly strong relationship with, with women. With, uh, people like Junior of Norwich. And so that, that really twists around the standard view of Christianity. It’s not just daddy in the sky, it’s it’s mommy down here on earth. And uh, that’s the important [00:48:00] stuff.

So Jesus as mother, how about that?

Julie: If we had accepted that and embraced that more

Simon: mm-hmm.

Julie: Would that have changed where we are today? Yeah.

Simon: The idea that, you know, the, it would’ve got rid of the idea that, you know, if, if, if Jesus is a, is a, is our, is our mother, uh, if Christ is, uh, in a sense both male and female, a kind of, uh, a much more gender fluid kind of God, then the idea that only men could have.

Can, could control access to the divine priests. And therefore, as you were saying before, female leadership, uh, in the, in, in the, in the Catholic church, uh, maybe that wouldn’t have been ruled outta bounds. And we did, we’d be in a very different place. And it, and it’s, um, it’s also interesting the, you know, the, the, the mystics that, um.

Julian and, uh, Marjorie [00:49:00] Kemp. Uh, I mean, Marjorie Kemp, for example, has 14 children. 14 children of whom I think six die. Um, you know, in very early years it was quite common infant mortality in that period. And at the age of 40, um, she. Ask her husband to stop having sex with her so she doesn’t have to have any more children.

And he agrees, and then she goes off on her pilgrimages. But the, the point is that the, these mystics were not, um, they weren’t kind of 18 year olds Right, who were having visions of the Virgin Mary. They were, uh, they were mature women who had lived and, uh, been married and had, and had children, and then decided to go off in another direction.

So. Um, you don’t have to be, you don’t have to be young. Be a mystic. You can be a, an older mystic too. So for those people out there who a certain age, there’s, you know, there are possibilities yet, you know, oh,

Julie: you are speaking our language. Simon, [00:50:00] you are speaking directly to us. Thank you so much for sharing a pleasure Your time and your energy with us.

Your new book is just amazing. Uh, mysticism by Simon Critchley. And, uh, where can everybody find you? Simon?

Simon: Uh oh, what do you mean? Like a

Julie: website?

Simon: Oh, website. Yes. Simon critchley.com. No, no, no. Is it simon critchley.org? Let me just check that. It’s Simon Critchley. Do something. You can see how I’m really, I’m really bang up to date.

It’s Oh yeah. It’s simon critchley.com.

Julie: We’ll put that in the show notes. Yeah. Um, the link to buy the book.

Simon: Great.

Julie: Perfect. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for the work that you’re doing in the world.

Simon: Thank you, Judy. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Julie: Of course. Have a beautiful blessed day.

Simon: Alright, you too. Good to meet you. Thank you. Alright, see you. Bye. You too. Bye

Julie: bye.

Simon: Bye.

Julie: Thank you for joining me today. I hope you’re feeling a renewed sense of clarity and a deep connection to the angelic guidance that surrounds you right here, right now. If [00:51:00] you need help hearing and working with your angels.

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