STEVEN POOLE

Shoot first, ask questions later

What does a 14th-century visionary female hermit have to do with videogames? Julian of Norwich Illustration konsume.mewas an anchoress: she lived in a stone cell attached to a church and devoted her entire life to elaborating upon a series of religious visions she experienced at the age of 30. “For all our life consists of three,” she writes at one point, drawing a parallel to the Trinity rather than to the number of lives often given to the player in early arcade games. Indeed, it would seem that the ultramodern sensual hedonism of videogames is something like the opposite of the intellectual asceticism of the Christian hermit.

The question nonetheless arises while reading the philosopher Simon Critchley’s enjoyably idiosyncratic and fascinating new book, On Mysticism. It is a history of famous mystics, such as Julian, and the wonderfully named Christina the Astonishing, while it also emphasises that mysticism itself is a retrospectively invented tradition: none of his subjects saw themselves as mystics, but rather pious seekers after God. Critchley also inquires as to whether mystical experience can still be available to the person living in our jaded postmodernity, where one can all too often feel “tragically riveted to oneself”. Perhaps, he suggests, such feelings can indeed be found in aesthetic experience, “in the world of enchantment opened in art, poetry and – especially – music”.