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Pike's Mystic Union and the Possibility of Theistic Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

J. William Forgie
J. William Forgie
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-3090
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Extract

In his long-awaited Mystic Union, Nelson Pike offers a phenomenology of mysticism. His account is based on the reports and descriptions of third parties, not on his own, first-person experience. So he calls his enterprise ‘phenomenography’, an attempt to describe the experiential content of conscious states by way of reports of them. Pike finds in the Christian mystical tradition three different kinds of experiences of mystic union, the ‘prayer of quiet’, the ‘prayer of union’ and ‘rapture’. These experiences differ phenomenologically, i.e. in experiential content. But they are all ‘theistic’ experiences; that is, they are all phenomenologically of God. By this Pike means: (a) whether these experiences are veridical or not, their object – what they are veridical or hallucinatory experiences of – is God; and (b) that they are of God is part of, or given in, the phenomenological content of the experiences themselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 231 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Pike, Nelson, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

2 Stace's views are stated at various places in Mysticism and Philosophy (Philadelphia and New York, 1960)Google Scholar, and in The Teaching of the Mystics (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Smart's in ‘Interpretation and Experience’, Religious Studies, 1, 1 (1965), 75–87;Google Scholar and mine in ‘Theistic Experience and the Doctrine of Unanimity’, International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, XV (1984), 13–30.Google Scholar

3 Both Stace and Smart hold versions of the Doctrine of Unanimity.

4 Zaehner, R. C., Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (Oxford, 1957)Google Scholar. An earlier proponent of the view that some mystical experiences are phenomenologically of God, Zaehner came under attack from both Stace and Smart. Although agreeing with Zaehner's view, Pike rejects his reasons for holding it. See his discussion of Zaehner on pp. 177–93.

5 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA., 1985), pp. 62–3.Google Scholar

6 Forgie, op. cit. p. 18.

7 James emphasizes this likeness. See op. cit. pp. 335–6.

8 Pike actually makes this point for visual perceptions, but I believe he would extend it to (and I would accept it for) perceptual experiences generally.

9 Provided the ‘kind’ isn't specified simply in terms of appearances, e.g. ‘something which appears the way trees do’.

10 Stace's example is given on p. 10 of The Teaching of the Mystics.

11 There is also the converse possibility in which an experience is phenomenologically of such and such but the perceiver does not immediately identify the object of his experience to be such and such.