Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Shahid Abari.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the Arts and Ideas podcast, which is recorded with an audience before one of the concerts in this year's BBC proms.

This is the BBC.

What does it for you?

Religion, maybe. Love or sex, poetry or drugs, a narrow trail that opens out

all of a sudden onto some never-ending expanse of earth or sea or sky. Maybe, of course, it's music,

like Chikovsky's soaring violin concerto.

Whatever it is that takes you there, we talk about that place as ecstasy, being fully alive, free of ourselves, forgetful of ourselves.

But do these very different paths really lead to the same place? Are all ecstasies equal?

With me, to try to speak about the unspeakable, to F the ineffable, is the psychotherapist, Mark Vernon,

who often writes on philosophy and religion, and new generation thinker Heta House, who writes

about the religious ecstasies of women in the medieval era.

Ecstasy literally means to stand outside oneself. What does that mean, Mark? Well, I think it's changed

meaning, and my sense is that the more kind of rapturous, exceptional meaning, which you hinted at

there in the introduction, as if we got to try and find a path and then aren't quite sure

where the path is leading.

That's quite a modern take on the word.

I think that when you look back into the medieval period and certainly into antiquity and amongst the ancient Greeks,

it was just assumed that you would have a life that was porous to not only what was going on inside yourself,

...