Mystic union: an essay in the phenomenology of mysticism (review)

Reviews 171 and acted out questions of history, class, gender, family, and religion' (p. 424). Individualism is shown to be a powerful liberating force in a society where identity is unduly restricted, and thus Chaucer, no less than Ovid, Marlowe, or so many writers of moments of change, can be seen to stand 'between two worlds', to think individually about the specific, the particular, the local, and the contingent. History must be viewed ironically since it produces so many impossible stresses for individuality. Patterson has produced a milestone book, one of the shrewdest and most wide-ranging analyses of late medieval society, a text which is all the more immediate for its careful grounding in post modernist angsts and in the desperate searches for the moral validity of autonomous, self-detennining lifestyles. J. S. Ryan Department of English University of N e w England Pike, Nelson, Mystic union: an essay in the phenomenology of mysticism, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xiv, 224; R.R.P. US$34.95. A preliminary step in Professor Pike's argument is a detailed study of a number ofmedieval and Renaissance mystics, particularly Bernard of Clairvaux, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Angela of Foligno and Teresa of Avila. His primary interest is the phenomenological content of their mystical experience. Their accounts describe a wide range of experiential elements, varying according to the degree of closeness to God experienced by the soul. Spiritual sensations of warmth and smelting God's fragrance are reported as the soul is drawn close to God in the Prayer of Quiet, then feelings of both interior and exterior touch and burning, together with spiritual perceptions of God, in Full union, climaxing, in the experience of Rapture, with out-of-body perceptions of being engulfed by God, where self-awareness is completely lost One of the important achievements of the Middle Ages was the gradual development of the individual's consciousness of itself as separate from its surroundings. While not yet the Cartesian ego, the individual was increasingly perceived as a unified, multi-faceted composite, whose operations were more and more an object of attention. Pike abstracts from the background to the developing spiritual consciousness of the age. This leads to a degree of oversimplification in his distinction of the soul as 'domain' from the soul as 'awareness of self. The term 'substance of the soul', for example, is more a metaphysical concept, in line with God conceived as infinite substance, than a term indicating an incipient awareness of a Cartesian self, which itself only ever indirectly emerges from the texts. Also, as Pikerightlynotes, the loss of self-awareness in Rapture was not 172 Reviews experienced by Christian mystics as an actual metaphysical identity, but rather was perceived by them only as the 'appearance' of such: given the background psychological development. This, I think, is better explained as an identity of 'operation' with God, who, by then, was perceived more in Aristotelian terms. These details, however, are not the main point of Pike's argument, and do not detract from it. They are presented as a tentative framework to allow a proper characterization of the mystics' perceptions of their own experience. His aim is to argue for an approach to such texts that is not reductive of then experiential content. Walter Stace, William Forgie, Ninian Smart, and others, have argued that there is no specifically theistic mystical experience, but only a common, experientially contentless, experience of Self, an introvertive state, upon which theistic interpretations of various kinds supervene. Ecclesiastic pressure is often the reason given to explain the Christian 'dualistic' account, rather than a more 'natural', monistic picture. Their thesis, Pike argues, fails to do justice to the texts, being similar to reducing all 'aches' to one particular kind. In fact, he concludes, it is misleading to say that their contentless state 'is even one among the various states that constitute the extension of this class' (p. 115). This is an important book. Pike's analysis is not concerned with the epistemological status of the texts. His purpose is rather to defend the possibility of perception and identification as immediately presented discernible givens of medieval Christian mysticism. In conclusion, he endorses...