RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. — It is a certain contact that human consciousness can have with God, and, in a derived sense, it is the awareness of God’s action in the soul as well as the soul’s aspiration and movement toward union with God.
**OUTLINE:**
I. Definition
II. Historical development
III. Protestant and Modernist subjectivism
IV. Existence and nature of religious experience according to Catholic doctrine.---
### I. Definition
While the religion of philosophers may at times be exhausted in pure rationality and theoreticism (Spinoza, Hegel), this is not the case with the Stoic and universal religions, which aim to preserve the concrete values of individual and collective life. In these, religious experience constitutes, in various ways, both the starting point and the goal. As an “experience,” religious experience is a direct apprehension; that is, it belongs to “lived experience” (*Erlebnis*) and is not a function of discursive and demonstrative thought. As “universal,” it pertains to the common person and does not presuppose anything beyond the normal exercise of consciousness, which opens to the world and reflects upon itself. As “historical,” it follows, in its manifestations, the vicissitudes of peoples and individuals in the conditions in which they find themselves in relation to the First Principle. Thus, together with moral consciousness—with which it is closely bound—religious experience constitutes the deepest orientation of human consciousness, both in knowing and in acting. More than moral consciousness, religious experience tends to embrace the totality of consciousness, since the religious person is precisely one who thinks and acts in relation to the Absolute, who is God.
It is clear, therefore, that when speaking of religious experience, one does not intend to refer to a particular experience reserved only for the affective and emotional sphere (the irrational), as romanticism and positivism have claimed. Rather, it is considered a “general situation” of the higher activities of consciousness, taken either individually or in their mutual relationships and influences. If religiosity constitutes, as it seems, an inseparable property of human nature, religious experience is its most evident concrete reality and, from the highest standpoint, its history.
Now, three seem to be the fundamental directions of religious experience: the world and cosmic energies, the subject itself and reason, and, finally, a reality that transcends both. Only in the last case does religious experience attain its true content and value. However, even in the first two cases, consciousness achieves a religious experience—not in regard to the object but in the manner of turning toward it, that is, by turning to it with a movement of purification and to achieve an active and concrete inscription in the Absolute, whatever it may be. This is said without prejudice to the question of the possibility of a religion or a mystical area.
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### II. Historical development
In pre-Christian classical antiquity, the official state religion was exhausted in public cult and did not touch the individual conscience. From the earliest times, however, there was also something more profound, which may be called—though the expression is improper—private or conscientious religion, the most well-known manifestation of which is the practice and initiation into the mystery cults. Almost entirely absent in the Homeric poems, the mysteries appear linked to the cult of Dionysus (the god of ecstasy and suffering) and reached their peak during the Hellenistic period through their syncretism, dominated especially by Eastern religiosity (Mithras, Cybele, etc.). In the “mystery,” the initiate falls prey to a sacred frenzy, a divine madness (*ἐπισύνανσις*); it is a form of possession (*ἐνθυσιασμός*) that the mystic undergoes from the divinity, a form of religious delirium in which he senses his complete “alienation” from himself (*ἐπισύνανσις*) in order to unite with the god. In this state of alienation, divination took place.
Plato already recalls four forms of “divine madness,” each with its particular cult: the prophetic with Apollo, the initiatory (*πλαστή*) with Dionysus, the poetic with the Muses, and the erotic with Eros and Aphrodite (*Phaedrus*, 265 B). Whoever reached this state lost reason and became one with the god (*ἐνθουσία*), as Plato also says (*Ion*, 534 B). Aristotle likewise considers the mystic *ἐπισύνασις* as an authentic possession by the deity that suppresses the habitual movements (*οἰκτικὴ νηστεία*) of the soul (*De divinatione*, 464 a 25).
From this religiosity Socrates does not substantially depart, except in the sense that his *δαιμόνιον* is already present for him and invites him to return to himself rather than to “go out” (*Phaedrus*). In Socrates, the *δαιμόνιον* is not the divinity itself but acts as an intermediary (*μεταξύ*: *Symposium*, 203 A), giving religious experience a more evident human and concrete character: the *δαιμόνιον* can speak to Socrates as “reason to reason” (*ὡς λόγος πρὸς λόγον*: Plutarch, *De genio Socratis*, 22, 592; cf. also G. Soury, *La démonologie de Plutarque*, Paris 1942, p. 125).
Another type of religious experience is indicated by Aristotle at the summit of his *Metaphysics*, where he affirms that God moves all things as an “object of desire” (*ὡς ἐρώμενον*: *Metaphysics* XII, 7, 1072 b 3), and where he says that the supreme union of intellect and intelligible occurs through a kind of “contact” (*ἐνήγησις*: loc. cit., 1072 b 21). Similarly, in the *Eudemian Ethics*, he states that the first movement of our will does not come from chance but, as if by a secret ordinance, from God Himself (*Eudemian Ethics* VII, 14, 1248 a 20-29). St. Thomas explicitly refers to this last text to demonstrate that God is the first principle of the actuation of our will (*Summa Theologiae*, I-II, q. 9, a. 4).
Plotinus follows the same path of pure spiritual union, though with more explicit aims, provided that the entire life is a progressive stripping away of attachment to all finite things in order to achieve, in ecstasy, the mystical union of love with the Absolute, “beyond” all language, all expression, and even consciousness itself: the passage from images to the Archetype, the *φυγή μόνον πρὸς μόνον* (*Enneads* VI, IX, 11). Porphyry records that his master sometimes attained the supreme union.
With Christianity, religious experience is elevated to a completely new plane in every respect, so much so that it shatters every immanence. God is the subsistent Absolute (One and Triune), and thus unreachable and incommensurable with respect to every created power. God is the free Creator of the universe and of man, and thus immanent within them, and not vice versa, as the classical world believed. God is the Savior of man from sin (the Incarnation), and thus salvation is real and is the work of gratuitous mercy, not of a technical catharsis, whether mystical or intellectual.
Actual. God is a Person and lives His life in personal relationships (Father, Son and Spirit) which He has shared with man, so that God presents Himself as the I and the Thou in the dialogue in which religious experience moves. The spiritual currents of patristic and medieval thought remain faithful to this new theological situation, where therefore religious experience is not an exception but belongs to moral 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 partaker. Religious experience can assume in Christianity various forms and degrees: from revelations and ecstasies granted to a few privileged souls, to the forms of recollection, peace and ascetic tranquillity accessible to every ordinary believer. But it must be immediately noted that in Christianity religious experience does not coincide with the religious reality, so that 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 only be recognized when it is in conformity with the data of faith and acknowledged as such by the authority of the Church. Outstanding documents of Christian religious experience in patristic times are the Confessions of St. Augustine; in the Middle Ages, the rich mystical literature, the illuminism of John of the Cross, the Rerum Novarum of Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, the Brahminschi of St. Bernard, the Jesumystik especially French, and the anti-scholastic reaction of the “spirituals,” of which the Imitation of Christ is the spokesman (“... opto magis sentire compunctionem quam scire definitionem”: I, 1, 3); and in modern times, to cite representatives of the most diverse 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 faith alone and the “testimonium Spiritus Sancti,” which was in fact individual sentiment, Luther made religious experience, understood as pure subjective sentiment, the sole criterion and even the sole object of Christian life. A victim of such a dissociation of consciousness from the objective content of faith and from the directive function of the Church was also Quietism, and likewise, though for apparently opposite reasons, Jansenism with similar tendencies. In the theoretical field, the elevation of religious experience to an absolute criterion independent of objective thought was already present in Kant, with the separation of theoretical reason from practical reason, and was carried to completion in J. H. Jacobi, F. D. E. Schleiermacher and J. F. Fries, who made sentiment the sole criterion of truth. Faith, as fundamental religious experience, is immediate sentiment. “As the bodily sense,” affirms Jacobi, “reaches bodily realities, so we reach spiritual reality with the ‘spiritual sense’ (auf Geiste-Gefühl), and what we know through this spiritual sense constitutes belief” (Jacobi, Werke, II, Leipzig 1816; preface, p. 60). “Religious sentiment,” says Schleiermacher, “is the representation of the transcendent Principle... as the universal feeling of dependence within us and outside us” (Dialektik, ed. R. Odebrecht, Leipzig 1942, § 215, especially pp. 289 ff.). For Fries and his school religious experience is realized not so much as a specific sentiment but as a “presentiment” (Ahung). In these irrationalist conceptions, religious experience came to replace both the work of reason and Revelation and Faith: to these tendencies belong in the Protestant field the school of A. Ritschl, and in Catholic countries Modernism, condemned by the encyclical Pascendi (Denz.-U., 2074-75). French Protestantism had its most brilliant theorist of religious experience in A. Sabatier (q.v.), whose influence in favor of “a primacy of life and art” over both scientific experience and speculation was such that the theology of 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 in our day religious experience as an “a priori category” of religiosity. It consists in an “irrational” apprehension, in a sentiment of the “sacred” which is at once a creaturely sentiment: in the first moment we feel the numen (as tremendum, fascinans, portentosum...), and then we feel our dependence on it (R. Otto, Das Heilige, Italian trans., Bologna 1926, pp. 10 ff.). In the same atmosphere moves the celebrated essay of W. James: The Varieties of Religious Experience (London 1902), according to which religion reduces to “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, in so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what they may consider the divine” (p. 31). On the other hand, inspired by the rigid theology of Calvin, the Swiss theologian K. Barth (b. 1886), though reacting against the new Cartesian theological trends of G. Wobbermin, K. Holl and H. Scholz, admits a religious experience of the Word of God: an experience of reflection, dependent on the Word of God already received, and is therefore a “determination that comes from God Himself” (eine Bestimmung durch Gott; cf. Dogmatik, 5th ed., I, 1, Zurich 1947, p. 208). In agreement with Barth are the other representatives of dialectical theology (J. Brunner, F. Gogarten, P. Tillich...), rightly concerned to safeguard the transcendence of the Word of God from the invasion of rationalist or sentimentalist theological immanentism. Yet the refusal of an objective ecclesiastical regula fidei, deriving from the authority of the Church, deprives Barth’s protest of any consistency, all the more so as he has expressly aligned his position with that of Schleiermacher (loc. cit., p. 207).IV. EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE ACCORDING TO CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
The existence of religious experience can therefore hardly be doubted or denied by a Christian theologian. In Thomist theology the highest judgment of divine things is that “per modum inclinationis,” and therefore of experience, which is proper to the gift of wisdom, and which the Angelic Doctor recalls from the very beginning of the Summa by quoting the Pseudo-Dionysius: “Hicoteus doctus est non solum discens sed et patiens divina” (I, q. 1, a. 6, ad 9; cf. Ps. Dion., De Div. Nom., 1, 5, 9: PG 3, 648). By creation and conservation God is present to all things, and therefore, indeed in a special way, to the human spirit: thus our aspiration to the unlimited Good is ultimately, as St. Thomas recognizes with St. Augustine, a (natural) desire for God. By Redemption man obtains a new relationship to God, first of all through Faith, which offers him the knowledge of salvation and the means to attain it; and then especially through Grace, which procures for him the indwelling of the divine Persons, whose saving operations in the soul would be completely fruitless if they never came to consciousness. Hence the invitation, “Gustate et videte quoniam suavis est Dominus” (Ps. 33:9), and St. Paul assures us that the Holy Spirit “bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16). Moreover, the very fundamental acts of religion, such as prayer, conversion (q.v.), abandonment and conformity to the divine will, and the like, would have no meaning if they did not involve an explicit awareness on the part of the subject according to their specific content and intentionality. Finally, the Church has always recognized the reality of mystical phenomena, and Pius X, in praising St. Teresa of Jesus as one who in her mystical movements “not only carefully distinguished between what is human and what is divine...,” proposes her as a teacher of “mystical psychology” (Epist. ad Praep. O. C. Exc., in AAS, 6 [1944], pp. 143 ff.).Some phenomena of religious experience (e. r.) are normal, others supernormal: concerning the latter (inspirations, revelations, apparitions, ecstasies) the Church has always maintained the utmost reserve, but even the former must always be approached with caution, and the experience of spiritual life teaches that the individual believer possesses no universally valid criterion in this field. Against rationalism, the reality of e. r. must be admitted, that is, the existence of well-known states of consciousness (adoration, understanding, a sense of personal unworthiness, aspiration to holiness, desire for martyrdom, etc.) that cannot be reduced to discursive reason. But against sentimentalism, it must be proclaimed that such states do not provide knowledge of God and His attributes, but presuppose them and are like the soul’s interior response to them.
The intimate nature of e. r. is not easily explained. It is evidently not a direct sensory experience, nor a form of self-awareness, because the essence of e. r. is to refer the subject to the transcendent Divinity in an attitude of complete submission. Its principal characteristics appear to be the following: a) it is an experience of convergence, as it were the resultant of the overall disposition of our spirit in its relation to the Absolute (normal e. r.) or when the Absolute deigns to communicate Itself directly to man (supernormal e. r.); b) it is intrinsically dialectical, for God makes Himself felt to the soul not only through consolation and peace, but also through reproaches, scruples, and ardors, and in ecstasy He conceals Himself in darkness; c) it is therefore intrinsically ambivalent, so that a negative phenomenon may well have positive value and vice versa (false mysticism is far more widespread than true), and thus by itself cannot constitute an absolute criterion.
Catholic thought therefore leaves open the possibility of authentic e. r., but precisely to safeguard it more securely, it clarifies its true meaning and determines its various forms and degrees. First, no e. r. can be divorced from a corresponding form of knowledge, which provides the object to which the subject’s e. r. is directed.
The possibility of e. r. stems from man’s very spirituality, yet it may be said to arise with the exercise of his rational activity; yet—whatever its degree—the experience unfolds in an intuitive moment when the human spirit perceives the presence of the “sacred” and the “divine” in itself and in the world. This holds already at the level of man’s natural order. But if we ask how the divine becomes “present,” how it is given to all, and what that intuition entails, the answers may be many and perhaps cannot be gathered into a single theory. Fr. Maréchal holds that the e. r. of great mystics reaches the point of breaking through the veil of faith, as is thought to have happened to Moses and St. Paul; yet it is commonly held that mystical experience unfolds within the light of faith. Certainly e. r. cannot be reduced to the reflexive experience of one’s own acts or to a subjectively created personal situation, without reference to its object: e. r. is an authentic known situation that cannot be realized without a founded reference to its object (and intentionality), and if the object is not God or aspects and attributes of divinity, it is no longer experience but irrational emotion and illusion.
It must moreover be admitted that e. r. usually involves particular subjective dispositions, which ascetical and mystical theology treat in depth; yet—and here lies the paradox of this entire field—they may not be sufficient, nor always required, since God’s action is not inherently conditioned by the subject’s state. Thus it may be conceded that, as with other properties of the spirit, so too in the realm of religiosity men are variously endowed; and further, just as one who does not exercise an ability may even radically obliterate it, so too religiosity that has not been properly cultivated and sustained may dwindle to near indifference, and e. r. may be absent. In this is revealed the proper character of e. r. as a “secondary experience,” that is, not dependent on special organs or faculties but on the overall disposition of the person and his concerted orientation toward the Absolute—not in mere abstraction, but in direct relation to Him as Creator, Father, Savior, Judge, supreme happiness.
Christian theology has always maintained certain fundamental principles from which it may not depart: a) Man and every creature will attain perfect union with God and thus directly and fully experience supreme joy only in the beatific vision of eternity: then the soul, elevated by the lumen gloriae, will see the divine essence directly “in intuitive and even face-to-face vision, having no creature as the medium of the object seen” (Deus-U, 53c). b) The second degree of e. r. is that of souls in grace: since they are truly adopted children of God, made partakers of the divine nature (κοινωνία φύσεως: 2 Pt 1:4), they share in His life. The relish for divine things (and disgust for sins) is proper to the gift of wisdom, which judges divine things “in a certain contemplation,” as the Angelic Doctor says in the strongest sense, for he adds that it is a “compassio… ad res divinas” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 45, art. 2). Yet it is clear that this experience may be common to all infused virtues and especially the theological virtues, but above all it belongs to the gifts of the Spirit, inasmuch as through them “man is disposed to follow the divine instinct” by which God overcomes the last defects of nature (cf. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 68, art. 2, ad 3). c) In the natural order, man may experience the divine both in the spectacle of the cosmic order—comprehending Cause and supreme Truth, supreme Beauty, etc.—and in his own conscience, as present in the sting of remorse when he does evil and in the inward peace and joy when he does good: this is the lowest but also the fundamental e. r. The highest forms of e. r., after the divine revelations to the prophets and the theophanies recorded in the lives of the mystics—which, despite the reservations of some critics (Stolz), may be the object of direct study because they possess all the characteristics of experimental knowledge (Keilbach, Maréchal)—are documented especially in the works of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila (A. Mager, P. Crisogono).
It is not said that phenomena of e. r. cannot occur outside the true Church (G. van der Leeuw, L. Massignon), and this indicates the inner appearance of e. r. for the development of complete human consciousness; yet the Catholic theologian cannot recognize their authentic character until such phenomena are referred to and nourished by the real attributes and truths of divinity.
The definitive judgment on e. r. therefore remains reserved to theology and, in the final instance, to the authority of the Church.