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Towards a broadening of the concept of religious experience: some phenomenological considerations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

MARK WYNN
MARK WYNN
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, ExeterEX4 4RJ e-mail: m.r.wynn@exeter.ac.uk
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Abstract

The recent philosophical literature on religious experience has mostly been concerned with experiences which are taken by the subject of the experience to be directly of God or some other supernatural entity, or to involve some suspension of the subject–object structure of conventional experience. In this paper I consider a further kind of experience, where the sense of God is mediated by way of an appreciation of the existential meanings which are presented by a material context. In this way the paper aims to extend the standard philosophical concept of religious experience so as to take account of phenomenological treatments of sacred place, and to give more prominence to the materially mediated or sacramental character of much religious experience.

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Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 147 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1. Richard Swinburne The Existence of God, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 295.

2. William Alston Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 67.

3. He sums up his interpretation of the experience of union in these terms: ‘Let us think of the paradigm union experience as one that unfolds through a dualistic stage into a state in which the distinction between subject and object is lost. In the dualistic stage the mystic perceives an Other via a set of sensory-like perceptions referred to in the tradition as ‘spiritual sensations’. … In the final stage, the mystic's perceptions of the Other cease. Here the experience peaks in a moment vacant of sensory as well as sensory-like content'; Nelson Pike Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 159. Alston notes that his own enquiry is restricted to the case where there is a ‘distinguishable object of awareness that can be taken to be God’; Perceiving God, 24.

4. Jerome I. Gellman ‘Mysticism and religious experience’, in William J. Wainwright (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 141. Although I do not have space to consider the matter here, a broadly similar emphasis is apparent in Keith Yandell's book The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) – where he distinguishes monotheistic, nirvanic, kevalic, and moksha experiences, together with nature mysticism (25–32).

5. Gellman ‘Mysticism and religious experience’, 139.

6. One might wonder why the philosophy of religion literature has chosen to focus upon these kinds of experience. Part of the answer, I suggest, is that this literature has been largely interested in the epistemology of religious experience – and has concentrated therefore on those experiences which seem most likely to resist naturalistic explanation, because of their non-sensory character. The experiences I describe are concerned with bodily responses and it might seem then that they can be more readily explained in naturalistic terms – but as my reflections on the epistemology of place indicate, these experiences do involve some genuine reckoning with the character of the world, in ways that are germane to the truth of a religious world-view.

7. Williams, Rowan ‘“Religious realism”: on not quite agreeing with Don Cupitt’, Modern Theology, 1 (1984), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this remark, he is expounding a comment of Wittgenstein.

8. William Alston notes the objection that God should not be considered as ‘a particular “object” of experience’ (Perceiving God, 30) and seeks to accommodate it. But his reassurance is unlikely, I think, to meet all of the concerns that are implied in the objection. He comments for example that: ‘I am not suggesting that God is simply “one being alongside others”(He is quite a special being) … ’ (31). This last formulation leaves intact the thought that God is ‘a being’, albeit a special one.

9. Swinburne The Existence of God, 299.

10. Ibid., 299. This analogy is also cited by Alston – who refers to this case as one of ‘indirect perceptual recognition’ as distinct from ‘indirect perception’ (an example of the latter would be seeing someone on television); Perceiving God, 21.

11. Caroline Franks Davis's typology of religious experience also includes the case where ordinary sense experience is assigned a religious meaning (she terms such experiences ‘interpretive’). But her account too, both here and at other points, does not bring the features I have just mentioned into sharp relief: The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 33.

12. Wendell Berry ‘An entrance to the woods’, in idem Recollected Essays, 1965–1980 (San Francisco CA: North Point Press, 1981), 230–244.

13. Ibid., 232.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 233–234.

16. Ibid., 235.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 236–237.

19. Ibid., 243–244.

20. Ibid., 234.

21. Nicholas Wolterstorff Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 69, variation in capitalization in the original.

22. Thomas Barrie Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual, and Meaning in Architecture (Boston MA: Shambhala, 1996), 56.

23. Ibid., 59. Joseph Campbell's remarks are taken from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), 43.

24. Barrie Sacred Place, 60.

25. Ibid., 61.

26. This case is noted in ibid., 64. Barrie also notes here how a sacred site may be taken to represent a heavenly city – so here the site sums up the significance of things by pointing to their eschatological consummation. The connection between the themes of the imago mundi and the axis mundi in the writings of Mircea Eliade in particular is noted by Lindsay Jones in his The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, II, Hermeneutical Calisthenics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 35–37.

27. The full reference is given above.

28. Berry ‘An entrance to the woods’, 237. The analogy with death suggests a parallel with the experience of the desert fathers, who also left behind familial and material sources of identity for a life of simplicity. See for example Belden Lane The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 6.

29. Gerardus Van der Leeuw Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, tr. J. E. Turner (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 680.

30. Erazim Kohák The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press, 1984), 198.

31. Ibid., 198.

32. Ibid., 189.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 218.

35. Ibid., 197.

36. See Robert Solomon ‘Emotions, thoughts and feelings: what is a “cognitive theory” of the emotions, and does it neglect affectivity?’, in A. Hatzimoysis (ed.) Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–18, and Hanna Pickard ‘Emotions and the problem of other minds’, in Ibid., 87–103.

37. See James, William, ‘What is an emotion?’, Mind, 9 (1884) 188–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. Compare Peter Goldie's comments on how someone who has fallen on ice for the first time may come to feel a new fear for ice, and thereby experience the world differently: ‘Coming to think of it [ice] in this new way is not to be understood as consisting of thinking of it in the old way, plus some added-on phenomenal ingredient – feeling perhaps; rather, the whole way of experiencing, or being conscious of, the world is new … ’; Peter Goldie The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 59–60.

39. Berry ‘An entrance to the woods’, 232–233.

40. For a plea for a broadening of the concept of religious experience in this direction, and an ample range of examples which illustrate the possibility, see David Brown God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). It is worth noting that Brown does not himself develop a typology of such experiences.

41. I would like to thank the Editor and an anonymous referee for the journal for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also grateful to the British Academy for providing a grant which enabled me to do so some reading towards this paper in Oxford, 6–10 August 2007.