Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience

CHAPTER 5: Matters of Evidence in Religious Experience

115 CHAPTER 5 Matters of Evidence in Religious Experience My orientation from the outset has been that the matters described by the mystics of the Abrahamic tradition in terms of prayer, ecstasy, and unveiling are lived through human experience. As such they can be approached philosophically—specifically, in the style of phenomenology —no matter how difficult these kinds of experience are to deal with, no matter to what extent they seem to exceed the bounds of what we take for granted as experience, no matter how they rub against our own philosophical prejudices. To do this, however, this vertical dimension of experience has to be taken on its own terms and not subordinated to how objects are given to us in perception, or evaluated according to philosophical narrow-mindedness, or accepted or rejected according to presuppositions of religious belief. A religious experience can only be confirmed or treated as deceptive within the context of religious experience itself (a moral experience within the moral, etc.), in its own “language,” as it were. This is certainly the case with the mystics I examine here. On the one hand, this means that we cannot appeal to standards outside of the lived religious sphere to measure the authenticity of a religious experience . On the other hand, as lived, as experienced, it thereby opens itself for us to phenomenological description and investigation according to its philosophical significance. For a particular type of experience that falls generally under the rubric of “the religious,” I have turned to the mystics rather than, say, to theological investigations into the religious. The mystics are personal witnesses to a radical kind of experiencing, what I have termed “vertical ” experiencing. I have called the type of vertical experience peculiar to this religious domain “epiphany.” By examining three mystics (St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and Ruzbihan Baqli), who for my purposes are exemplary of these Abrahamic traditions, I have attempted to depict how the Holy is given in these radically personal forms. It is these constitutive features that make up what we understand by “religious” and qualify the religious sphere as such. Having been attentive to these unique personal forms of experience, I am now in a position to describe the mode and Phenomenology and Mysticism 116 the structure of epiphanic givenness and its kind of evidence. In subsequent chapters I examine the implications of epiphany in relation to withdrawal and the fundamentally related issues of “individuation,” and then expound upon the nature of idolatry. Religious experiencing constitutes its own sphere of evidence; it has its own modes of givenness that are distinct from presentation but no less genuine. This sphere of experience has its “truth” that cannot be governed by or adjudicated from outside of this, its own, domain of experience . Furthermore, it has its own problems and types of deception, modalization, negation, corroboration, and so forth. So for example, as we will see, self-doubt and pride are qualitatively distinct from, say, the kind of doubt we find in perception; the corroboration of a religious experience in historical efficacy has its own integrity and is not a simple modi- fication of an epistemic object as it unfolds concordantly in time. To be sure, if experience is confined to what we call presentation, then anything taking place beyond that sphere could be deemed as merely arbitrary; it is simply “madness,” personal quirkiness, something not to be trusted. But for the mystics, these experiences are anything but arbitrary. They have an internal coherence all their own, and there is a lived rigor intrinsic to them. In this chapter I take up the matter of evidence as it is an issue for these mystics. I do this to discern what qualifies “givenness” in the sphere of religious experience, how it is distinctive, and how deception, illusion, and the like play their role in such a dimension of experience. These are the kinds of issues I address when following the ways in which these three mystics, in their own ways, grapple with and characterize the problem of evidence. Crucible of Prayer Mystical experiences have their own evidential character. In the following treatment of vertical experience, as suggested by the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, I discuss three elements of this evidence peculiar to epiphanic givenness: (1) the evidential force of epiphanic givenness, (2) the question of deception and self-deception (i.e., modalizations of evidence ), and (3) confirmation and corroboration of evidence. 1...