论宗教经验与宗教神秘主义--从约翰·希克的《第五维度》谈起

本文主要从约翰·希克的<第五维度>出发,谈宗教经验和宗教神秘主义.人总是有以超自然的方式来探求自然的内在倾向.人的本性中第五维度,即灵性的维度,它让每个人都有信仰的可能.我们的宇宙是一个含混的宇宙,包括我们认识宇宙的含混性,除了自然主义,宗教神秘主义也是从另一角度对宇宙的解释.但是,当我们以宗教的方法来解释宇宙的时候,我们就会发现,这种方法本身也具有含混性,于是约翰·希克提出宗教多元论假设成功地解决了这个矛盾.对于一些宣称体验到与终极实在本身完全合一的神秘主义,约翰·希克提出了反驳,认为对神圣者的体验只可能隐喻的统一,而不可能是字面完全的统一.     

Some methodological reflections on the study of Jewish mysticism

T.O. Beidelman Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots 1982 Indiana University Press Bloomington, xix+274 pp. $29.95 and $12.50 pbk

Ken Levi Violence and Religous Commitment: Implications of Jim Jone's People's Temple Movement 1982 Pennsylvania State University Press Pennsylvania and London

P. Karl J. Rivinius Die Anfänge des ‘Anthropos’. Briefe von P. Wilhelm Schmidt an Georg Freiherrn von Hertling aus den Jahren 1904–1908 und andere Dokumente SVD Veröffentlichungen des Missionspriesterseminars St Augustin bei Bonn. 32 1981 Steyler Verlag St. Augustin 230, DM 32.50     

A reappraisal of medieval mysticism & hysteria

This paper examines the historical association between medieval mysticism and asceticism and the psychopathological condition of hysteria. We first review the particular forms of medieval mysticism and asceticism that seem to have inspired modern psychiatrists and reductive historians to dismiss these phenomena as indubitably neurotic behaviours. Then we review the concept of hysteria as it evolved during the last two centuries for points of convergence with mysticism. Finally, we question the validity of value-laden diagnostic formulations in the domain of personality assessment. A few highly dramatic but culturally endorsed religious behaviours occuring in an otherwise well functioning individual does not constitute a basis for any psychiatric diagnosis, let alone a condemnatory characterological one such as hysteria. We propose a perspective for looking at medieval mystical states of mind and behaviours in context that moves beyond ahistoric assumptions that employ modern Western standards as the yardstick for medieval health and illness.     

Everyday mysticism: Spiritual development in later adulthood

Most cultures contain a belief that aging, with its long span of life experience, can lead to spiritual growth or development. Theories of spiritual development have focused primarily on stages of spiritual growth, with less attention to its relation to the cultural life course. This paper posits that contemplative, mystical experience is the primary psychological dynamic that enables the qualitative change in life perspective that we associate with spiritual growth. While theoretically possible at any adult age, this shift in perspective is correlated with physical and psychological aging, with the relaxation of social demands that typifies the life stages of later adulthood, and with the simple, close-to-home lives led by many individuals after age 75.     

Rival concepts of God and rival versions of mysticism

There is a well known debate between those who defend a traditional (or classical) concept of God and those who defend a process (or neoclassical) concept of God. Not as well known are the implications of these two rival concepts of God in the effort to understand religious experience. With the aid of the great pragmatist philosopher John Smith, I defend the process (or neoclassical) concept of God in its ability to better illuminate and render as intelligible as possible mystical experience.     

God and givenness: towards a phenomenology of mysticism

This essay addresses the questions of whether the givenness of God is something possible, intelligible—and, if so, what such givenness might involve. In the interest of situating these questions in historical context, I first summarize Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s respective accounts of the relationship between belief in God and philosophical knowledge. I then further situate critical philosophy’s appropriation of God by way of a discussion of how some of this appropriation’s fiercest critics—existentialists such as Sartre, Shestov, and Kierkegaard—object to its gambit of using God to serve moral and cultural goals even as it denies God’s actual existence. Though this objection is a salient one, it leaves something to be desired. For although the existentialists may demonstrate what is misguided about the philosophers’ God, they do not have anything especially compelling to say about whether or how God can be given experientially. I address this aporia by exploiting what I take to be a happy intersection between the phenomenological conception of the saturated phenomenon and two moods—agape love and ecstatic joy—the mystical tradition frequently attributes to the nature of divine givenness. I argue that, when mystical experience is situated within the framework of saturated phenomena rather than within the Kantian enclosures of phenomenality, two intriguing possibilities emerge. First, it seems plausible that the religious experience of the mystic can, in principle, involve the very givenness of God that Kant and his heirs denied to be possible. Second, though phenomenology has yet to provide a complete positive portrait of the religious life, the mystical tradition emerges as a legitimate, invaluable source with which such a phenomenological portrait might begin.