ESPERIENZA RELIGIOSA. – It is a certain “contact” that human consciousness may have with God and, in a derived sense, the awareness of God’s action in the soul, as well as of the soul’s aspiration and movements toward attaining union with God.
CONTENTS:
I. Notion
II. Historical development
III. Protestant and Modernist subjectivism
IV. Existence and nature of religious experience according to Catholic doctrine.I. NOTION
While the religion of the philosophers can at times be exhausted in pure rationality and theoretical speculation (Spinoza, Hegel), this is not so with historical and universal religions, which are concerned with safeguarding the concrete values of individual and collective existence and life: in them, religious experience takes various forms as both the point of departure and the point of arrival. As “experience,” religious experience constitutes a direct apprehension; that is, it belongs to “lived experience” (Erlebnis) and is not dependent upon discursive and demonstrative thought. As “universal,” it belongs to the ordinary human being and presupposes nothing beyond the normal exercise of consciousness, which opens itself to the world and bends back upon itself. As “historical,” it follows, in its manifestations, the vicissitudes of peoples and individuals in the conditions within which they move and make decisions with respect to the First Principle. Thus, together with the moral consciousness to which it is closely linked, religious experience constitutes the deepest orientation of human consciousness both in knowing and in acting; even more than moral consciousness, religious experience tends to embrace the totality of consciousness, insofar as the religious person is precisely conceived as one who thinks and does everything in relation to the Absolute, which is God. It is therefore clear that, in speaking of religious experience, one does not mean to indicate merely one particular experience, nor to confine it to the affective and emotional (irrational) sphere, as romanticism and positivism have claimed; rather, it is considered a “general situation” of the higher activities of consciousness, taken both individually and in their mutual relations and influences. If religiosity constitutes, as it seems to, an inseparable property of human nature, religious experience forms its most evident concrete reality and actualizes its history from the highest point of view.Now, there seem to be three fundamental directions of religious experience: the world and cosmic energies; the subject itself and reason; and, finally, a reality that transcends them both. Only in the last case does religious experience attain its true content and value. Nevertheless, even in the first two cases consciousness obtains a religious experience—not with regard to the object, but with regard to the manner in which it turns toward it—that is, insofar as it turns toward it with a movement of purification, and also in order to achieve there an active and concrete insertion into the Absolute, whatever that may be. This is stated without prejudice to the question of the possibility of an atheistic religion or mysticism.
II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
In classical pre-Socratic antiquity, the official State religion was exhausted in public worship and did not touch the conscience of individuals. From the earliest times, however, there was also something more serious, which may be called (although the expression is improper) private or conscientious religion, whose best-known realization is the practice and initiation of the mysteries. Almost entirely unknown in the Homeric poems, the mysteries appear linked to the worship of Dionysus (the divinity of intoxication and suffering) and would reach their fullest development in the Hellenistic period through their syncretism, dominated especially by Eastern religiosity (Mithra, Cybele...). In the “mystery,” the initiate falls prey to a sacred furor, a mania or divine intoxication (ἐφραγικία); it is a possession (ἐν-θουσιασμός) inflicted upon the mystic by the divinity, thus a form of religious delirium in which he experiences his complete “alienation” from himself (ἐν-στινός) in order to unite and identify himself with the god: in this state of alienation, divination took place. Plato already recalls four forms of “divine mania,” each with its particular worship: divination with Apollo, the mystery rite (τελεσταλ) with Dionysus, the active form with the Muses, and the erotic form with Eros and Aphrodite (Phaedr., 265 B). Whoever attained such a state lost his reason and became one thing with the god (ἐνθεος), as Plato again says (Isis., 534 B); Aristotle too regards the mystery ἐκστασία as authentic possession of the name that suppresses the habitual movements (οἰκαστὶ κινήσεις) of the soul (De divin., 464 a 25). Socrates does not substantially depart from this religiosity, except in the sense that his δαψόνων is already present within him and, instead of making him “go out,” invites him to return into himself, in order to make him hear its voice (Phaedr.). In Socrates, moreover, the δαψόνων is not the divinity itself, but acts as an intermediary (μεταξί: Sympos., 205 A), and this gives religious experience a more evident character of humanity and concreteness: the δαψόνων can speak to Socrates as “reason” (ὡς λόγος πρὸς λόγον: Plutarch, De genio Socratis, 22, 592; cf. also G. Soury, La dimanologie de Plutarque, Paris 1942, p. 125). Another type of religious experience may be the one indicated by Aristotle at the culmination of his Metaphysica, when he affirms that God moves everything as “object of love” (ὡς ἐρώμενον: Met. XII, 7, 1072, b 3), and when he says that the supreme union of intellect and intelligible takes place through a kind of “contact” (ἐν-γένων: loc. cit., 1072, b 21), as also when, in the Ethica ad Eud., he affirms that the first movement of our will does not arise by chance, but comes, as though through a secret instinct, from God himself (Eth. Eud., VII, 14, 1248 a 20-29). It is to this latter text that St. Thomas expressly refers in order to demonstrate that God is the first principle of the actualization of our will (Sum. Theol., 1°-2°c, q. 9, a. 4).Plotinus follows the same path of pure spiritual union, but with more explicit aims, provided that the whole of life consists in a progressive divesting of attachment to every finite thing, in order to achieve, in ecstasy, the mystical union of love with the Absolute, “beyond” every language, every expression, and consciousness itself: the passage from images to the Archetype, the ψυχή μόνον πρὸς μόνον (Eum., VI, IX, 11). And Porphyry has left it written that the master attained supreme union on several occasions.
With Christianity, religious experience is transferred onto a completely new plane in every respect, to the point of breaking through all immanence. God is the subsistent Absolute (One and Triune), and therefore unattainable and incommensurable in relation to every created power. God is the free creator of the universe and of man, and is therefore immanent in them, and not vice versa, as the classical world held. God is the Savior of man from sin (Incarnation), and therefore salvation is real and is the work of gratuitous mercy, not of cathartic technique, whether mysterious or intellectual. God is Person and lives his life in personal relationships (Father, Son, and Spirit), which he has shared with man, so that God offers himself as the I and the Thou, for the dialogue in which religious experience moves. The spiritual currents of the patristic period and the Middle Ages remain faithful to this new theological situation; consequently, religious experience does not constitute an exception there, but belongs to normal religious life and has its firm foundation in the truths of faith and its stimulus in the contemplation of the divine mysteries of which man is made a participant. Religious experience may assume various forms and degrees in Christianity: from revelations and ecstasies granted to a few privileged persons, to forms of recollection, peace, and tranquillity of spirit accessible to every ordinary believer. But it must also immediately be noted that, in Christianity, religious experience does not coincide with religious reality, since the supernatural life in itself does not fall under consciousness: religious experience is a phenomenon, a contingent result of that life, and not an absolute and univocal criterion. Its objective value can arise only when it conforms to the data of faith and is recognized as such by the authority of the Church. Distinguished documents of Christian religious experience are, in the patristic period, the Confessions of St. Augustine; in the Middle Ages, the rich mystical literature, Dionysian illuminism, especially among the Victorines, Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa, the Eventmystik of St. Bernard, the Jesutmystik, especially the Franciscan..., and the antischolastic reaction of the “spirituals,” whose spokesman was the Imitation of Christ (“...opto maga sentire compunctionem quam scito eius definitionem”: I, 1,3); and in modern times, to cite representatives of the most disparate situations, B. Pascal, S. Kierkegaard, and J. H. Newman, not to mention Protestant Pietism.
III. PROTESTANT AND MODERNIST SUBJECTIVISM
Protestantism broke the balance of the traditional position. By appealing to the subjectivity of «sola fides» and of the «testimonium Spiritus Sancti», which was ultimately individual sentiment, Luther made religious experience, understood as pure subjective feeling, the sole criterion and also the sole object of Christian life. A victim of such a dissociation of consciousness from the objective content of faith and from the Church’s directive function was also quietism, and likewise, though for apparently opposite reasons, Jansenism with its analogous tendencies. In the theoretical sphere, the elevation of religious experience as a criterion absolute and independent of objective thought is already present in Kant, with the separation of theoretical reason from practical reason, and is carried through in J. H. Jacobi, F. D. E. Schleiermacher, and J. F. Fries, who make feeling the sole criterion of truth. Faith, as fundamental religious experience, is immediate feeling. «Just as bodily sense», Jacobi affirms, «reaches bodily realities, so we reach spiritual reality with the “spiritual sense” (auf Geistes-Gefühl), and what we know with this spiritual sense constitutes belief» (Jacobi, Werke, II, Leipzig 1816; preface, p. 50). «Religious feeling», says Schleiermacher, «is the representation of the transcendent Principle... insofar as it is the universal feeling of dependence in us and outside us» (Dialektik, ed. R. Oldbrecht, Leipzig 1942, § 215, especially p. 289 ff.). For Fries and his school, religious experience is realized not so much as a specific feeling but as «presentiment» (Almung). In these conceptions, with their irrationalist background, religious experience came to replace both the work of reason and Revelation and Faith: in the Protestant sphere, the school of A. Ritschl derives from them, and in Catholic countries, modernism, condemned by the Pascandi (Denz-U, 2074-75). French Protestantism had its most brilliant theoretician of religious experience in A. SABATIER, PAUL (v.), whose influence in favor of «a primacy of life and of religious experience over both scientific experience and speculation» was such that evangelical theology during the last hundred years has been a «theology of experience» (cf. F. Ménégaz, Réflexions sur le problème de Dieu, Paris 1931, p. 31). Following the line of Fries and Schleiermacher, R. Otto has interpreted religious experience in our own day as the «a priori category» of religiosity. It consists in an «irrational» apprehension, in a feeling of the «sacred» which is at the same time a creaturely feeling: at the first moment we apprehend the numen (as tremendum, fascinusum, partentosum...), and then we feel our dependence upon it (R. Otto, Das Heilige, Italian trans., Bologna 1920, pp. 10 ff.). In the same atmosphere moves W. James’s celebrated essay, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London 1902), according to which religion is reduced to «the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, insofar as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine» (p. 31). Inspired instead by Calvin’s rigorous theology, the Swiss theologian K. Barth (born in 1886) is decidedly opposed to admitting the primacy of religious experience; while reacting against the new theological Cartesianism of G. Webbermin, K. Holl, and H. Scholz, he nevertheless admits an experience of the word of God: an experience by reflection, that is, dependent upon the word of God already received, and therefore a «determination that comes from God himself» (eine Bestimmung durch Gott; cf. Dogmatik, 2nd ed., I, 1, Zurich 1947, p. 208). The other representatives of dialectical theology (J. Brunner, F. Gogarten, P. Tillich...) agree with Barth, rightly concerned to preserve the transcendence of the word of God from the invasion of rationalist or sentimental theological immanentism. However, the rejection of an objective ecclesiastical regalia fidei, grounded in the authority of the Church, deprives Barth’s protest of all consistency; he has, moreover, expressly brought his position close to that of Schleiermacher (loc. cit., p. 207).IV. EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE ACCORDING TO CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
The existence of a religious experience can therefore scarcely be called into doubt or denied by a Christian theologian. In Thomistic theology, the highest judgment concerning divine things is that «per modum inclinationis», and hence of experience, which is proper to the gift of wisdom and which the Angelic Doctor recalls at the very beginning of the Summa, citing Pseudo-Dionysius: «Hicoretus doctus est non solum discens sed et patiens divina» (1a, q. 1, a. 6, ad 9; cf. Ps. Dion., De Dio. Nom., 1, 5, 9; PG 3, 648). Through creation and preservation God is present to all things and therefore, indeed in a special way, to the human spirit: thus our aspiration toward the limitless Good is ultimately, as St. Augustine recognizes together with St. Thomas, a (natural) desire for God. Through the Redemption, man obtains a new relationship with God, first of all through Faith, which offers him knowledge of salvation and of the means of attaining it; and then especially through Grace, which brings about in him the indwelling of the divine Persons, whose mysterious operations in the soul would risk being rendered completely fruitless if they never surfaced in consciousness. Hence the invitation «Gustate et videte quoniam suavis est Dominus» (Ps. 33, 9); and Paul assures us that the Holy Spirit «testimonium reddit spiritui nostro quod sumus filii Dei» (Rom. 8, 16). Moreover, the very fundamental acts of religion, such as prayer, conversion (v.), abandonment and conformity to the divine will, and the like, would have no meaning if they lacked an explicit awareness on the part of the subject corresponding to their content and specific intentionality. Finally, the Church has always recognized the reality of mystical phenomena, and Pius X, in praising s. Teresa di Cesà as one who «in motibus animi mysticis, non modo accurate distinguit inter id quod humanum et quod divinum est...», presents her as a teacher of «mystical psychology» (Epist. ad Praep. O. C. Exc., in AAS, 6 [1914], pp. 143 ff.).Of the phenomena of religious experience, some are normal and others supernormal: regarding the latter (inspirations, revelations, apparitions, ecstasies), the Church always maintains an extremely reserved attitude, but the former too must always be considered with caution, and the experience of the spiritual life teaches that the individual believer possesses no universally valid criterion in this field. Against rationalism, one must admit the reality of religious experience, that is, the existence of well-known states of consciousness (adoration, understanding, a sense of personal unworthiness, aspiration to holiness, desire for martyrdom, etc.) irreducible to discursive reason. But against sentimentalism, one must proclaim that such states do not precede knowledge of God and his attributes; rather, they presuppose it and are, as it were, the soul’s interior response to II. The intimate nature of religious experience is not easy to explain. It is evidently neither a direct experience of the sensory type nor a form of self-consciousness, because the essence of religious experience consists in referring the subject to the transcendent Divinity in an attitude of complete submission. Its principal characteristics seem to be the following: a) that it is an experience of convergence, like the resultant of the global situation of our spirit in its relationship to the Absolute (normal religious experience), or when the Absolute deigns to communicate itself directly to man (supernormal religious experience); b) that it is intrinsically dialectical; thus God makes himself felt by the soul not only through consolations and peace, but also through reproaches, scruples, aridity, and in ecstasy he hides himself in darkness; c) that it is therefore intrinsically ambivalent, so that the negative phenomenon may well possess positive value and vice versa (false mysticism is much more widespread than true mysticism), with the result that it cannot by itself constitute a criterion of absolute value.
Catholic thought therefore leaves open the possibility of an authentic religious experience, but precisely in order to safeguard it more effectively, clarifies its true meaning and determines its various forms and degrees. First of all, no religious experience can be detached from a corresponding form of knowledge, whose function it is to provide the object toward which the very existence of the subject relates.
The possibility of religious experience derives from man’s very spirituality, but one may say that it develops through the exercise of his rational activity; experience, however, whatever its degree, unfolds in an intuitive moment in which the human spirit perceives the presence of the «sacred» and the «divine» in itself or in the world. This is already true on the level of man’s natural order; but if we ask how the divine becomes «present», how that intuition is realized, and what it entails, the answers may be many, and it may perhaps be impossible to gather them into a theory. Fr. Maréchal holds that the religious experience of the great mystics reaches the point of breaking through the veil of faith, as is held to have occurred with Moses and s. Paolo, but it is commonly held that mystical experience moves within the light of faith. Certainly religious experience cannot be reduced to the reflective experience of one’s own acts alone, or of a subjectively created personal situation, without referring, that is, to its object: religious experience is an authentic known situation which therefore cannot be realized without a grounded reference to its object («intentionality»); and if the object is not given by God or by aspects and attributes of the divinity, it is no longer experience but irrational emotion and illusion. On the other hand, one must admit that religious experience usually involves particular subjective dispositions, with which the essence and Christian mysticism deal at length; but—and this is the paradox throughout this entire field—they may not be sufficient, nor can they always be required, since God’s action is not in itself subordinated to the subject’s conditions. Thus one may at once admit that, just as men are differently endowed with the other properties of the spirit, so too they are differently endowed in the sphere of religiosity; and moreover, just as someone who does not exercise an aptitude that he nevertheless possesses may radically obliterate it, so religiosity, if it has not been suitably initiated and supported, may weaken to the point of almost complete indifference, and religious experience may be absent. Here the proper character of religious experience is shown as a «secondary experience», that is, not functioning through special organs or faculties, but through the global situation of the person and his concrete orientation toward the Absolute, considered not in mere attraction, but in the direct relationship of Creator, Father, Savior, Judge, and supreme happiness.
Christian theology has always maintained certain fundamental principles from which it is not permissible to depart: a) Man and every creature will have perfect union with God and therefore will experience his supreme joy directly and fully only in the beatific vision of eternity: then the soul, elevated by the « lumen gloriae », will see the divine essence directly, « visione intuitiva et etiam faciali, nulla mediante creatura in ratione obiecti visi se habente » (Denz-U, 550). b) The second degree of r. e. is that of souls in grace: since through it men have truly become adopted children of God, because they have been made participants in the divine nature (Seine, cæravæ, qææææ; II Pt. 1, 5), they also participate in its life. The taste of divine things (and the disgust for sinful things) belongs properly to the gift of wisdom, which judges divine things secundum quandam con naturalitatem, as the Angelic Doctor says, speaking in the strongest sense, because he adds that it concerns a « compassio... ad rea divinas » (Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, q. 45, a. 2). But it is clear that this experience can be common to all the infused virtues and especially to the theological ones, but above all it is proper to the gifts of the Spirit, insofar as through them « homo disponitur ad hoc quod sequetur instinctum divinum », by which God overcomes the final defects of nature (cf. Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 68, a. 2, e ad 3). c) Man in the natural order can experience the divine both in the spectacle of cosmic order as the first Cause and supreme Truth, supreme Beauty, etc., and in his conscience as present in the prick of remorse when he does evil and in the intimate relaxation of peace and joy when he does good: this is the lowest but also the fundamental r. e. The supreme forms of r. e., after the divine revelations of the prophets and the theophanies narrated in Sacred Scripture, are the ecstasies, raptures, and elevations of the mystical life which, notwithstanding the reservations of certain critics (Stolz), may be the object of direct study because they possess all the characteristics of experimental knowledge (Keilbach, Maréchal). Decisive documents for a psychology of r. e. are especially the works of s. Giovanni della Croce and s. Teresa di Avila (A. Mager, P. Crisogono).
It does not follow that phenomena of r. e. cannot also occur outside the true Church (G. van der Leeuw, L. Massignon), and this indicates the intimate belonging of r. e. to the development of the complete human consciousness; but the Catholic theologian cannot recognize their authentic character until such phenomena are related to, and nourished by, real attributes and truths of the divinity.
The definitive judgment on r. e. therefore remains reserved to theology and, ultimately, to the authority of the Church.
BBL.: A comprehensive but excessively fragmentary scholastic treatment by H. Pinaré, s. V. in DThC, V, cols. 1786–1868. For r. e. in antiquity, the following remains classical: E. Rohde, Psyche, Seelenbult und Unterblichheitsgalerie der Griechen, 9th–10th ed., Tubinga 1925. For modern conceptions: G. Mehla, Einführung in ein System der Religionsphilosophie, ibid. 1917, p. 55 ff.; M. Scheler, Vom Ewigen in Menschen, Lipsia 1923, especially I, II, p. 136 ff.; P. Hoffman, Des religiöse Erlebnis, Charlottenburg 1925; E. Praymann, Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie, in Handbuch der Philosophie, edited by A. Baeunder and M. Schröter, II, V. Monaco and Berlino 1927 (especially p. 37 ff.); I. De Guibert, Documenta ecclesiastica Christiane perfectionis studium spectantia, Roma 1931, pp. 52 ff.; W. Kollbach, Die Problematik der Religion, Paderborn 1936 (excellent for religious psychology: it contains a discussion with bibliography from the Catholic point of view: V. p. 30 ff.); I. Maréchal, Etudes sur la psychologie des mystiques, a vols., Lavenio 1937–38 (especially II, p. 321 ff.; p. 283 ff.; criticism of the psychological theory of W. James and J. H. Leube); P. De Menasco, L'expérience de l'esprit, in Erasme Jahrbuch, 1945, Zurigo 1946, pp. 355–81; E. S. Brightman, The philosophy of religion, Nuova York 1946, p. 411 ff.; L. Pelot, Le sentiment religieux et la religion, Parigi 1946; J. Hessert, Religionsphilosophie, Essex and Friburgo 1948, especially vol. II, vi, chap. 1; Die religiöse Erfahrung oder das religiöse Weiterlebniss, pp. 31–195; M. Pradince, Traité de psychologie, II, Parigi 1948, pp. 204–205; Les sentiments religieux; G. van der Leeuw, Phänomenologie der Religion, French translation, ibid. 1948, pp. 452 ff., pp. 482 ff.; G. Wunderle, Der religiöse Abt als seelische Problem, in Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Psychologie der Religion, new series, I, Würzburg 1948. But the monographs (about 50) forming the first series of this extremely important collection devoted to the study of problems of religious experience and philosophy should also be consulted. Cornelio Fabro