Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience
328
Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience
328Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253221810 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2009 |
| Series: | Philosophy of Religion |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Sales rank: | 279,876 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Phenomenology and Mysticism
The Verticality of Religious Experience
By Anthony J. Steinbock
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2007 Anthony J. SteinbockAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34934-7
CHAPTER 1
The Religious and Mystical Shape of Experience
The Indeterminacy of Religious Experience
I operate with a specific sense of religious experience described and clarified by the mystics of the Abrahamic tradition. But before going straightaway to this clarification of religious experience through the mystics, let me acknowledge that it is possible to speak meaningfully about religious experience in a general manner.
Rudolf Otto understands religious experience as the experience of being before "an overpowering, absolute might of some kind," the experience of the presence of that "Something" that Otto calls the "numinous" and that is experienced as mysterium tremendum in awe: "It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of — whom or what?" What we gain from such a description is that most generally religious experience can be entirely indeterminate. Human beings can have a religious stirring outside of any established religious tradition; a religious sense may arise out of a striking existential situation; it may come upon one as a vague feeling of "ultimate reality."
Notice that in this respect religious experience can be understood as an indistinct extra-ordinary experience of "sacredness" that can range from the experience of nature as divine, to the daemonic, to, in monotheism, the living, Personal God. However, and this is important, the numinous is not necessarily qualified in any personal way in all religious experiences, since in any religious experience this "who or what" may still remain undetermined, latent, unexplored in an individual life, or unexpressed in cult. The "Sacred," the "Holy," moreover, might well be experienced in all things in a unique set of experiences, but without any Personal quality.
This "something," furthermore, is given in a religious context with an experience of dependency. The feeling of dependency that arises through a religious experience is occasioned first and foremost by the "positive" presence of a superior being or superior beings, and not from a negative appraisal of, say, my weakness or out of "ressentiment." A sense of inadequacy, religiously speaking, can only arise from the positive experience of the supremacy of the deity or deities in relation to which I then see myself as dependent or as a "creature." The experience of dependency and creaturehood is a response to the self-givenness of an absolute kind, that is, to the "Generative Source," to "Spirit," to the "Almighty," to "the Holy"; other responses to such a givenness include ritual prayer or offerings, and they may be undertaken in cult without such self-evidence, or they may be expressed in the unique order of acts such as awe, giving thanks, worship, supplication, homage, repentance, veneration, acceptance, and obedience.
But where religious experience is concerned, the experience of myself as "dependent" or even "insignificant" is not restricted to myself alone. Such an "individual" experience implicitly and simultaneously includes me as part of the entire collective realm of finitude and creaturehood. The insight of the self-inclusion of human beings in the sphere of the finite is peculiar to nearly all creation accounts. In the Popol Vul, for example, after failing in their first three attempts to create human beings, the gods succeed only too well — making humans with perfect vision (i.e., knowledge); the divine beings therefore cloud human vision with a fog, making them lower than the gods and in this respect on a par with all other created beings.
Whatever the content within this range, the religious sphere is determined by its own irreducible self-evidence and is not derived from any other sphere of evidence; it is not motivated by extra-religious or nonreligious acts but is stirred by the religious event itself, whatever that may be. In short, as we will see, the evidence peculiar to the religious sphere cannot be produced from outside of the religious dimension itself. Religious experiences and their norms, therefore, neither arise from nor are reducible to cultural, ethical, biological, or aesthetic experiences and norms or any combination of them. It has own structure, its own integrity. This is what is meant, in part, by saying that religious experiences have a style, order, "lawful regularity," normativity, or kind of givenness, as well as modalizations all their own. In fact, viewed from the position of organic reality merely, religious acts of any kind are unfounded, unwarranted, and generally pointless. Bergson's dynamic religion — contrary to what he would want to maintain — cannot be seen as emergent from the life-force to solve paradoxes or ally fears posed by life. Instead, dynamic religion, which is epitomized by the individuals' experience of the divine as in mystical experiences, becomes the foundation for open morality, for "religion," as well as for static myth-making functions.
I noted above that one can speak meaningfully of religious experience in an indeterminate and general manner. Yet religious experience can also be understood in a more determined manner, for example, as the experience of living in the presence of the Holy. While religious experience may be given in many different ways, there are certain religious experiences that focus on what I consider to be the most profound character of this givenness. These are called "mystical experiences." My attempt at further qualifying religious experience depends upon clarifying it inter-Personally. I appeal to mystical experiences to clarify the interpersonal nature of religious experience by drawing on selected mystics, not because they exhaust the realm and range of inter-Personal experiences, but because their experiences exemplify them. An explication of mystical experiences, while necessary, cannot alone give specificity to the religious dimension (chapters 2–4); a deeper philosophical clarification of this dimension of experience can be acquired by working through its matters of evidence and by qualifying the nature of epiphany, explicating the tenor of individuation, and treating idolatry (chapters 5–8).
The Specificity of the Religious Sphere through Mystical Experience
I am aware that the application of the "mystical" to special experiences of the Holy is a relatively late development. Bouyer notes, for instance, that the term mustikos was originally used in connection with the mystery religions and concerned the secrecies of ritual practices. From Philo of Alexandria through Clement and Origen to Pseudo-Dionysius, the expression was applied to difficult (mysterious) exegetical problems, which in Christianity concerned scriptural exegesis rooted in a profound and ineffable knowledge of God that was mediated by the sacraments. Other earlier uses of the term that bore, synonymously, on sacred or spiritual reality were still in play through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but then began to name the "hidden" or the "essential," and to refer to the silent inner secrets of experience vouchsafed through a predominately contemplative manner of knowing. It is only at this juncture that we see a transition from the adjectival and adverbial uses of mystery to the substantive use as a noun, and hence eventually to "mysticism" and to the "mystics." The so-called "mystical tradition" as we refer to it today develops by retroactively appropriating it as a tradition about this time. But rather than let the history of the term strictly define the meaning of such an experience (since it is possible for a subsequent expression to reactivate previous or even latent meanings), I use the expression for a special genre of inter-Personal experiences operative within the religious sphere.
Mystical experience is a discrimination of experience within religious experience. It is characterized by special intimacies of the presence of the Holy. These special intimacies are not restricted to, but can include intimacies more commonly associated with, experiences like "union." I draw on mystical experience to clarify religious experience (and thus the structure of epiphany) because mystical experience refines the evidence already given in the religious sphere. Mystical experience can do this because it lives the immediate Person-to-person movement that may only be (but not need be) implicit in religious experiencing as such. In this way, the mystics can become exemplary of religious experience by highlighting the "evidence" of epiphany, the "Personal" evidence, as a distinctive vertical mode of givenness. Accordingly, as paradigmatic of religious experience, mystical experiences are always religious experiences, but not all religious experiences are mystical ones. By epiphany being clarified through mystical experience, we can say that religious experiences are so many ways of living out the inter-Personal sphere. Religious experience can be clarified as inter-Personal through lived experiences and practices of various mystics. Admittedly, this makes religious experience less "general" in the sense that it does not pretend to cover every "spiritual" tradition, West or East; but by the same token, it makes it all the more distinctive.
Having sketched by way of introduction the operative meaning of mystical experience, I turn now to the meaning of mystical experience. Why call it mystical "experience"? In contrast to McGinn, who prefers to use the term "consciousness" as "a more precise and fruitful category," I privilege the term "experience" for a number of reasons. The language of consciousness too easily restricts matters of experience, whatever they may be, to epistemic objects, suggesting in turn that transformations pertaining to the individual person are merely changes in awareness or knowledge. This would quickly reduce mysticism to psychologism or to altered mental states, whereas the real issue here is living the self-givenness of a presence, a Personal presence. Accordingly, a change or revolution of the "heart," where the Holy is lived dynamically, is not a ratio-cognitive event. On the other hand, experiences that concern the self-givenness of Person do not merely impact the "mind," but get played out spiritually and somatically, for example, in terms of a change in our ways of loving, in terms of tears, ecstasies, pains, and so forth.
By experience, in general I mean the givenness of something (be it an object, a human person, or the Holy) as "it" is lived. As noted above, it is arbitrary to restrict what we count as experience only to the way objects are presented perceptually and epistemically. By mystical experience, I do not mean everything that is nonrational, weird, exotic, occult, or paranormal. I mean the self-givenness of the Holy qua Personal presence as this presence is lived. The self-givenness pertaining to the Holy is a vertical mode of givenness, namely, epiphany. Epiphany is the personal presence of the Holy, and mystical experience is precisely the personal givenness of the Holy as lived in an especially intimate manner. Epiphany is not rare, unusual, or exceptional in the sense that it is sometimes added on to mundane affairs. This is a secular interpretation that is rather new and certainly not anymore justified because it is more recent. For the mystics, the Holy runs through everything and everyone; in its everydayness, epiphany is nonetheless optimal, and not average. This is why there can be a sense of the "religious" in the more general indeterminate sense. It is the mystic who lives this optimal character in the everyday experience of the Holy as an inter-Personal gift. This is how the lives of the mystics become exemplary and how mystical experience becomes exemplary of religious experience.
To be sure, this is a delicate point. There are those who maintain that mystical experiences are everywhere; some even go so far as to assert "we are all mystics." Such a claim is understandable; it is based in the insight that epiphany, which qualifies an experience as religious, transpires in everyday experience and that these experiences are open to everyone. I agree that the religious dimension of experience is a fundamental component of human experience — that is my point. I also agree that mystical experience should not be limited to the "spiritual zenith of contemplation." Even if many of the mystics within the Abrahamic tradition, for example, could be called contemplatives, the mystical life is not to be equated with the contemplative life because what qualifies the mystics as such are their experiences, not the fact that they engage in contemplative practices. It is further clear that mystical elements can also be present in ordinary forms of experience, like the experience of nature. Mystical experiences take on various forms, and it would be premature on our part to assert in advance that they are just in the reach of a few privileged individuals. But this does not mean that everyone is a mystic. Rather, strictly speaking, it means that mystical experiences are not within anyone's reach because they are not correlative to our efforts in the first place, as would be the case in the field of presentation; they are experienced as "gifts." One can always strive to dispose oneself to the Holy, one can always engage in rigorous spiritual exercises and try to live a "religious" life in this way, but it is not a foregone conclusion that mystical experiences will come about.
I would further add that, as we will also see below, mystical experiences are in no way limited to experiences of union, and moreover, union is not even the point of the mystics' lives; rather, it consists in service to God, the redemption of the world, and the participation in establishing loving and justice.
We lose the distinctiveness of mystical experiences when we run all spiritualities, traditions, and religious experiences together; we fail to appreciate the radical nature of self-abandonment, the moral rigor required for spiritual and material nonattachment, the unique demands placed on a life oriented in this way (and not just occasionally) that affords little time for squander or pause — and all this without any guarantee that something will come of it.
Not everything is a mystical experience even if mystical experiences reveal what is most characteristic of a religious experience. It is well known that Mother Teresa experienced visions, locutions, and ecstasies for several months until she began her explicit mission to serve the poorest of the poor; yet she reports living out this mission for the rest of her life (50+ years) nourished only by these one-time religious experiences and her love of her fellow human beings, and indeed with the experience of being forsaken by God. This is perhaps an extreme example. I use it only to insist that mystical experiences are a special kind of religious experience and that there is a useful phenomenological distinction to be made between the experience of "awe" or "creaturehood" in relation to the "Creator" in a religious experience (e.g., Otto), and the uniquely personal nature of religious experience clarified in mystical experience with which I operate here.
Givenness in Mystical Experience and Phenomenology
My approach, as mentioned in the Introduction, is a phenomenological one. I take this approach because it is one that bears most directly on the matters as experienced, and does not take them merely as matters for speculation. Insofar as the Holy can be said to be experienced, these experiences are open to critical description, even if they do not conform to descriptions with which we seem to be most familiar, like the experiences of tables and chairs. This is why it is necessary to be open to a broader field of evidence. Such a task, as undertaken in this work, is philosophico-phenomenological, not theological.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Phenomenology and Mysticism by Anthony J. Steinbock. Copyright © 2007 Anthony J. Steinbock. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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