The allure of American mysticism Modern life has lost its sense of ecstasy

You do not have to share Douthat’s fervent Catholicism to consider that the call of the weird expresses deep-seated dissatisfactions with modern life. In a thoroughly disapproving essay on post-liberal thought, the centrist historian Mark Lilla reflected on why so many of the university students he meets are embracing pungently reactionary kinds of Catholicism. These converts have correctly sensed the “malaise — call it cultural, call it spiritual, call it psychological” — into which our rule-bound and incredibly online Western societies have fallen. Like the questers of the Sixties, they are rebelling against the “air-conditioned nightmare” of modern life, which tends to depression and suicide.

The appeal of rewilding religion is evident in two new books from writers of very different temperaments. The weaker of them is a lurid but strangely enjoyable manifesto by the journalist Rod Dreher, a professional controversialist whose flight from the secularised United States has taken him to Viktor Orbán’s Budapest. Dreher, an old friend of Vance who witnessed his reception into the Church, has grumbled about the attempts of Democrats to label him as weird. Yet in Living by Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, he argues that religion can only save us from our modern ailments by unleashing its stranger side. The problem with modern societies is that they are not weird, but WEIRD societies, a social sciences acronym for “white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic”. The rise of print culture, the Reformation and market capitalism combined to turn their citizens into anxious strivers who value only money and refuse to accept realities that cannot be described in the language of scientific and instrumental rationality.

Technology has worsened our detachment from all that is tangible and corporeal. Dreher, an over-sharer who likes to present himself as the worst of sinners, checks his phone first and last thing at night. Growing up in steamy Louisiana, he admits that he’s never liked going out into nature much, preferring to live mentally online. He worries that internet addiction is turning us all into Gnostics, early Christian heretics who maintained it was possible to detach the soul from the body. Our selves crumble into competing distractions. By fostering a bodiless selfhood, the internet encourages “transgenderism”. He claims that Chat GPT girlfriends have persuaded people to break up with their wives or launch assassination attempts on the late Queen Elizabeth II. We are what we watch: when Lil Nas X films himself twerking with devils, he tempts us to go over to Satan.

Despite these silly claims, Dreher does evoke powerfully enough the spiritless detachment that has infected even convinced members of mainstream churches in the United States. In a previous book, Dreher called on Christians to embrace the “Benedict option” and withdraw from the godless society around them. But it seems as if the lure of technology has been too strong: even the devout feel locked out from spiritual realities, cut off from a “sustained felt connection to the living God”. Bathed in the light of their screens, they have lost what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa has called “resonance”, a connection with an unpredictable and so revivifying natural world.

How then can Westerners touch grass? Dreher’s answer is simple: surrender the critical faculties that bar our access to wonder and believe what people tell us about encounters with other worlds. These experiences are not always comforting. Many of Dreher’s stories concern demonic possession. Take Emma in Manhattan, whose marriage with Nathan is on the rocks because she has been possessed by an evil spirit. Dreher watches her snarl at a Catholic priest who drops by for a consultation with her, armed with a fragment of the True Cross. Dreher even has his own tangles with demons to report: when he is in Rome for the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI, a chair he was sitting on mysteriously topples and breaks in half.

In Dreher’s mind, the future lies with “strong religions” that enlist us in this constant battle between good and evil. One of the reasons why Dreher — who is that most American of figures, the serial converter — dropped Roman Catholicism for Eastern Orthodoxy was his conviction that its rites retain the mystical but also the very bodily link between the physical and supernatural realms. It is one he thinks that other churches abandoned in the rush to experiment with Zoom services during Covid lockdowns.

His case for strong churches rests on the fact that the rise and consolidation of Christianity often owed less to rational argument than to stunning displays of power by apostles and saints, which pay no heed to modern distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, the probable and the impossible. Yet he builds his argument on the weird present as well as the Christian past, suggesting that faith can profit from counter knowledge and altered states. Encounters with UFOs stir him just as they do Ross Douthat. He respects thinkers who have fused Ufology with theology, by suggesting that the Church’s miracle stories obscurely record past visits from advanced intelligences. Though he scoffs at “hippies”, Dreher coyly lets on that taking LSD as a college student revived his sense of the world’s beauty and so revived his faith in God.

Perhaps Dreher’s craving for high-octane experience has more to do with the vapid yet remorseless quality of life in North America, rather than modernity itself. Every time he leaves America, cheerfulness breaks through. The visionaries he meets in Irish villages, Budapest bars or in ravishing Italian towns manage to log off and find wonder with much less drama than the tormented seekers of the United States. Dreher’s own epiphany comes on a holiday in Jerusalem, one of the “thin” places where wonder seems closer than in humid Louisiana. Reeling from a divorce, he takes part in the Miracle of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, feeling an unbounded exhilaration as he moves his hand unhurt through the flames passed around by the Orthodox clergy. He keeps a photograph of his grinning face at that moment on his smartphone — it is tough to kick the habit.

While he may abhor capitalism, Dreher retains a thoroughly American trust in market forces. If the West’s spiritual consumers are not offered a religion of wonder, then they will load something even stronger and more occult into their carts. If not Christ, then Baphomet. It is curious to find that Pope Francis shares this zero-sum reading of the West’s exhausted secularism. At a recent general audience, he remarked — then being no less online than the rest of us, posted on X — “Our secularised world is teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritism, astrologers and satanic sects. If we kick the devil out the door, he tries to return through the window.”

The English philosopher Simon Critchley, who works at the New School in New York City, is a very different person to Dreher: agnostic and fastidiously precise rather than folksy and antic. But he shares his sense that modern life is rubbish, especially after the Covid lockdowns, and that the “weirdest and most dubious” forms of religious life might allow us to escape from it. He begins his book On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy with dark ruminations on the state we are in. “Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force…The world deafens us with its noise…we feel miserable, anxious, wretched, bored.” As a result, we crave “ecstasy”, which is “what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us”. This leads us to “mysticism”, which opens up “the possibility of ecstatic life”. To be a mystic is to decouple the conscious self to which you are “riveted” and re-enter the living flow of reality.

You do not need to be wildly religious to practice mysticism, but it helps. Although Critchley’s book is free from flying wine glasses, snapped chairs and demonic possession, he does spend a lot of time introducing us to the visions of the isolated, starved ascetics of the Middle Ages. In the late 14th century, Julian of Norwich, one of his heroines, hoped to die at the age of 30 and so emulate Christ’s agonies on the cross. However, she changed her mind at the sight of a bleeding crucifix, which provoked a 12-hour spell of further visions. She rose from her deathbed and spent the next decades writing in obsessive detail about this healing rapture.

Why admire — or even seek to emulate — such clearly pathological behaviour? Critchley’s answer is similar to the one offered more than a century ago by the American philosopher William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience. James knew that we could always give psychological or physiological explanations for the weird things “sick souls” such as Julian claimed to have seen or heard. But to medicalise such experiences does not exhaust their value: they can still bring information about reality that might be denied to better adjusted but limited minds. Critchley, who respects mystics not just as visionaries but as excellent writers, argues that they can show us sad moderns how to pass out of yourself and into some wider unity. Christians might think of this as union with God, but not everyone must. James called it letting in the “tremendous muchness” of reality. Critchley’s mystics get to that place by practising the subtle arts of negation and paradox. In the chase to find God, they end up losing him but also themselves — and so feel free.

The dark spaces of Julian and her mystic peers sound rather like Douthat’s place where “all the ladders start”. But Critchley doesn’t want to collapse these wrenching possibilities into merely religious experience. While the joy and release that arise from mysticism can come to suffuse everyday existence, he isn’t interested in extrapolating an organised religion from them, which could guide our moral lives or order our society. As most of us are not and will never be religious theists, our moments of sweet release must have other sources. Poetry and still more music — he likes Kraut Rock — seem the most promising of these to Critchley. It is slightly disappointing to find that his promise of joy peters out into such tasteful and private glimpses of transcendence as streaming the new Nick Cave or rereading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Then again, mystical literature has always been better at framing problems than offering easy answers. We cannot hope to swiftly or permanently escape the state many of us are in. The best we can do perhaps, before rushing to write off other people’s beliefs or experiences as weird, is to reflect on the social and psychic pressures that have generated them and bear down on us all. Maybe it is time to enlarge, rather than to celebrate, what we consider to be normal.

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Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion from Vancouver, British Columbia and the author of Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown (2021). He is currently writing a book about the Edwardians and the gods.

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