Struck by a divine vision in boring Bromley, Mark Vernon thinks of Dante and Bowie – and the pathways they took towards the light. Plus – catch Mark at the Idler Festival (see below)

The best ecstasies are the humdrum raptures. No need for psychedelics. No effortful breathwork. No scaling mountain peaks. Rather, the everyday glimpse that perfects reality almost without comment. Here’s one. I’m walking down a hill in “boring Bromley”, to quote David Bowie, who brooded during his teenage years on these unsophisticated, outer London streets. Cars purr by on family business. The pavement ahead is stained with the marks of scooped-up dog poo. Then suddenly, elation leaps from the edge of a brick wall erected to defend a front garden.

The sun is blazing close to the horizon, the air limpid and my mind idling, when it suddenly cuts across my path. Its low-angled beam turns ambient shadow into shining light, prompting an experience of communion with a world beyond this suburban backwater. In this moment, I detect a parallel dimension, a supernatural radiance.

Anyone could have seen this beam of light – but, thanks to where I was at the time, I saw it differently. I knew what Dante meant when, in The Divine Comedy, he describes being received into paradise, led by his guide, Beatrice: “We seemed to be enveloped by a cloud / as brilliant, hard, and polished as a diamond / struck by a ray of sunlight.”

I felt as if I’d had an experience across time with the German philosopher and master shoemaker Jakob Böhme. Illumination came to him one day in 1600. While he was dreamily cutting and stitching leather, Böhme caught sight of a pewter dish, something he must have seen a thousand times before. But in this moment, the burnished surface reflected a shaft of sunlight that brought him a vision “of the principles and deepest foundations of things” – how the outermost reaches of space connected to the innermost workings of his mind. The answer to life, the universe and everything. What a chink can let through!

Dante and Böhme made much of their mystical moments. Back on the pavement in Bromley, I started as a stressed-out mother and her young child hastened by, before carrying on my walk to Shortlands railway station. But still, the humdrum ecstasy stayed with me, even now, as I muse on the more usual flatland of modern existence.

My sense is that most people are both very glad of the conveniences and safety of late capitalist culture yet also excited when the equanimity is disturbed by seemingly divine interventions such as these. The bursts are proxies for lost ecstasy, of the sort experienced by saints and visionaries in the past.

At the personal end of the scale, consider the popularity of pornography and the erotic, be that tawdry scenes on screens or Tracey Emin’s meditations in bronze on cunnilingus, currently on show at her A Second Life exhibition at Tate Britain. Sex promises a euphoric alternative to indifferent consumer pleasures, like food or shopping. The loss of one’s self in another invites momentary release.

Dante knew that, which is why his journey to Heaven began in his youth, on the streets of Florence, with a sighting of the radiant Beatrice. But even then, a part of him knew that the infatuation was more than sexual. “Now your beatitude has appeared to you,” he later wrote. He realised that while his blood had been stirred, his soul had been shaken as well.

Eros can ignite the intellectual and spiritual parts of us, alongside the physical. With all three aspects charged comes awareness of the divine lover: God. That supreme energy was the fuller ecstasy to Dante, but is almost completely lost today.

Hence the modern art of the erotic tends to turn in on itself. Work such as Emin’s might harness power – but as an expression of isolated yearnings or past trauma, not a numinous gateway to God. When Dante sings of Beatrice’s eyes and rhapsodises about her mouth, his gaze simultaneously turns out, upward, to behold “a second beauty” – an eternity that welcomes and lavishly transcends the erotic.

What of the political sphere of our shared existence? A broader effect of that loss of transcendence is present here, too, I suspect. Consider the extremists on both left and right being currently indulged by the excitable entertainment that calls itself 24-hour news. Not that the disturbance isn’t real – it’s all too present on the streets of Bromley. Driving through Addington and over Biggin Hill, I see roadside streetlamps adorned with the flags of St George and the Union Jack stretching on for miles. These ramshackle banners, fixed in place by plastic tags, are tangible signs of widespread frustration.

Little wonder activists are excited, urging us to believe there is currently a once-in-a-century political realignment taking place right before our eyes, while the panicked centre tries to reassure its voters to stay put. But what is being fought over? The cost-of-living crisis.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Material goods matter. A wait in a hospital corridor can kill, as can feeling any hopes for the future have departed, never to return. As recently reported by mental health charity MIND, one in five UK adults are now living with mental health problems, a problem that affects those living in the most deprived areas of the country significantly more than those in affluent surrounds. But what is distressing is the implicit message in contemporary politics about what it means to be human. Political parties new and old fight over little more than the rights of citizens to continue as active consumers and as cogs in the economic machine, products of directionless evolution speeding through a meaningless cosmos.

Aristotle pointed out that politics without ethics is tyrannical, be it called democracy or autocracy. He didn’t mean an ethics that consists of well-argued debating points on the current key issues, but ethics as an integrated vision of divine humanity: “a soul flourishing with excellence”. Which is to say that material betterment doesn’t satisfy when it only promises indefinite increases in living standards and status. That is part of our trouble, too.

Buddhism offered a spiritual vision to the young David Bowie. From Shortlands, he took the train to Victoria and attended the Buddhist Society, near the mainline railway station. He later related his first visit and an encounter with a Tibetan lama at the door. The maroon-clad sage looked up and said: “You’re looking for me.” Bowie was dumbstruck.

He later found out that the lama had poor English and had meant to ask, “Who are you looking for?” But the experience of humdrum ecstasy stuck. Bowie found a path not so much out of Bromley, which would be just another reactionary protest, but into a wider life.

This article is from Idler #110.

MARK VERNON AT THE IDLER FESTIVAL 2026

Join Mark Vernon for his Philosophy Walk on Saturday 11 July, and catch his Philosophy Slam with Robert Rowland Smith on Sunday 12 July – both at the Idler Festival. 

The Idler Festival runs from Friday 10 to Sunday 12 July at Fenton House and Gardens in Hampstead, London NW3.

See who else is performing and buy tickets with our Festival poster here. Click on the performer’s name for details.

See you there!

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