Religious Experience

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. - It is a certain "contact" that the human conscience can have with God, and, in a derived sense, it is the awareness of God's action in the soul as well as of the soul's aspiration and movements to arrive at union with God.

I. NOTION

If the religion of the philosophers can at times be exhausted in pure rationality and theoreticity (Spinoza, Hegel), such is not the case with the historical and universal religions, which are concerned with saving the concrete values of the existence of individual and collective life: in them the religious experience forms in various ways both the starting point and the point of arrival. As "experience," religious experience constitutes a direct apprehension, that is, it belongs to "lived life" (Erlebnis) and is not a function of discursive and demonstrative thought; insofar as it is "universal," it belongs to the common man and presupposes nothing but the normal exercise of a consciousness that opens onto the world and bends back upon itself; insofar as it is "historical," it follows in its manifestations the vicissitudes of peoples and individuals in the conditions in which they move and decide with respect to the First Principle. Thus, together with the moral conscience to which it is closely bound, religious experience constitutes the deepest orientation of human consciousness in knowing as in acting: even more than the moral conscience, religious experience tends to embrace the totality of consciousness, insofar as the religious man is conceivable precisely as one who thinks and does everything in relation to the Absolute that is God. It is clear therefore that in speaking of religious experience, one does not intend to indicate a particular experience only, and to reserve it to the affective and emotional (irrational) part, as Romanticism and Positivism have claimed, but one considers it as a "general situation" of the higher activities of consciousness, taken both singly and in their mutual relations and influences. If religiosity constitutes, as it seems, an inseparable property of human nature, religious experience forms its most evident concrete reality and enacts its history from the highest point of view.

Now, three seem to be the fundamental directions of religious experience: the world and the 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. Nevertheless, even in the first two cases consciousness obtains a religious experience, not as regards the object but with respect to the manner of turning toward the same, that is, insofar as it turns toward it with a movement of purification and in order to obtain there too an active and concrete insertion into the Absolute, whatever it may be. This is said, setting aside the question of the possibility of an atheistic religion or mysticism.

II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

In classical pre-Christian antiquity the official state religion was exhausted in public worship and did not touch the conscience of individuals. From the most ancient times, however, there was also something more serious, which can be called (although the expression is improper) private or conscientious religion, whose best-known realization is the practice and the mystery initiation. Almost completely unknown in the Homeric poems, the mysteries appear linked to the cult of Dionysus (the divinity of intoxication and suffering) and would reach their greatest development in the Hellenistic period thanks to their syncretism dominated especially by Eastern religiosity (Myrrha, Cybele...). In the "mystery" the initiate falls prey to a sacred furor, to a divine mania or intoxication (ἐφραγικία); it is a possession (ἐν-θουσιασμός) that the mystic undergoes on the part of the divinity, a form therefore of religious delirium in which he perceives 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 own particular cult: divination with Apollo, the mystic (τελεσταλ) with Dionysus, the poetic with the Muses, and the erotic with Eros and Aphrodite (Phaedr., 265 B). Whoever reached such a state lost his reason and became one thing with the god (ἐνθεος) as Plato again says (Isis., 534 B); Aristotle too considers mystic ἐκστασία as an authentic possession of the mind that suppresses the habitual movements (οἰκαστὶ κινήσεις) of the soul (De divin., 464 a 25). From this religiosity Socrates does not substantially depart, except in the sense that his δαψόνων is already present in him and, in order to make him hear his voice instead of making him "go out," invites him to return into himself (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 character of more evident 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 that indicated by Aristotle at the culmination of his Metaphysica when he affirms that God moves all things as "object of love" (ὡς ἐρώμενον: Met. XII, 7, 1072, b 3), and when he says that the supreme union of the intellect and the 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 is not from chance, but comes, as by a secret instinct, from God himself (Eth. Eud., VII, 14, 1248 a 20-29). It is to this last text that St. Thomas expressly refers in order to demonstrate that God is the first principle of the actuation of our will (Sum. Theol., 1°-2°c, q. 9, a. 4).

Plotinus travels the same itinerary of pure spiritual union but with more explicit intentions, provided that the whole life is nothing but a progressive stripping away of attachment to every finite thing in order to accomplish, 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 reached the supreme union several times.

With Christianity religious experience is transported onto a completely new plane in all respects, to the point of shattering every immanence. God is the subsistent Absolute (One and Three), and therefore unreachable and incommensurable with respect to every created power. God is the free creator of the universe and of man and therefore immanent in them and not vice versa as the classical world wanted. God is the Savior of man from sin (Incarnation), and therefore salvation is real and is the work of gratuitous mercy and not of cathartic technique, whether mystic or intellectual. God is Person and lives his life in personal relations (Father, Son and Spirit) which He has shared with man, so that God offers Himself as the I and the Thou, for the colloquy in which religious experience moves. To this new theological situation the spiritual currents of the patristic age and of the Middle Ages remain faithful, where therefore religious experience does not constitute an exception but belongs to normal religious life and has its firm basis in the truths of the faith and its stimulus in the contemplation of the divine mysteries in which man is made a participant. In Christianity religious experience can take on various forms and degrees: from the revelations and ecstasies granted to a few privileged souls, down to the forms of recollection, of peace and tranquility of spirit accessible to every ordinary believer. But it must also immediately be noted that religious experience in Christianity does not coincide with 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 come only when it is found to conform to the data of the faith and is recognized as such by the authority of the Church. Distinguished documents of Christian religious experience are, in the patristic age, the Confessions of St. Augustine; in the Middle Ages the rich mystical literature, the Dionysian illuminism especially of the Victorines, of Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, the Eventmystik of St. Bernard, the Jesutmystik especially Franciscan..., the anti-scholastic reaction of the "spirituals" of which the Imitation of Christ has made itself the spokesman ("...opto maga sentire compunctionem quam scito eius definitionem": I, 1,3); and in modern times, to cite the representatives of the most disparate situations, B. Pascal, S. Kierkegaard and J. H. Newman, not to speak of Protestant pietism.

III. PROTESTANT AND MODERNIST SUBJECTIVISM

Protestantism broke the balance of the traditional position. Appealing to the subjectivity of "sola fides" and of the "testimonium Spiritus Sancti," which was in fact individual feeling, Luther made religious experience, understood as pure subjective feeling, the sole criterion and also the sole object of the Christian life. Victims of a similar dissociation of consciousness from the objective content of faith and from the directing function of the Church were also Quietism and, equally, though for apparently opposite reasons, Jansenism with its similar tendencies. In the theoretical field, the elevation of religious experience to an absolute criterion independent of objective thought is already present in Kant, with the separation of theoretical reason from practical reason, and is completed 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. "As the bodily sense," affirms Jacobi, "reaches bodily realities, so we reach spiritual reality with the 'spiritual sense' (auf Geistes-Gefühl), and what we know by this spiritual sense constitutes believing" (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 a "presentiment" (Ahnung). In these conceptions, with their irrationalist background, religious experience came to replace both the work of reason and Revelation and Faith: in the Protestant field the school of A. Ritschl traces back to them, and in Catholic countries Modernism, condemned by Pascendi (Denz-U, 2074-75). French Protestantism had its most brilliant theorist of religious experience in A. Sabatier (v.), whose influence in favor of "a primacy of life and of religious experience with respect both to scientific experience and to speculation" was such that the evangelical 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). Along the lines of Fries and Schleiermacher, R. Otto has in our own day interpreted religious experience as an "a priori category" of religiosity. It consists in an "irrational" apprehension, in a feeling of the "sacred" that is at the same time a creaturely feeling: in the first moment we perceive the numen (as tremendum, fascinosum, partentosum...), and then we feel our dependence on it (R. Otto, Das Heilige, Ital. trans., Bologna 1920, p. 10 ff.). In the same atmosphere moves the celebrated essay of W. James: 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, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (p. 31). Inspired instead by the rigid theology of Calvin, the Swiss theologian K. Barth (b. 1886) is decidedly opposed to admitting the primacy of religious experience; yet, while reacting against the new theological Cartesianism of G. Webbermin, K. Holl and H. Scholz, he does admit an experience of the word of God: an experience by reflection, that is, in dependence on the word of God already received, and is therefore a "determination that comes from God himself" (eine Bestimmung durch Gott; cf. Dogmatik, 2nd 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 save the transcendence of the word of God from the invasion of rationalist or sentimental theological immanentism. Were it not that the rejection of an objective regalia fidei ecclesiastica, deriving from the authority of the Church, causes Barth's protest to lose all consistency; and he, moreover, has 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 hardly be called into doubt 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, 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). God, by creation and conservation, is present to all things and therefore, indeed in a special way, to the human spirit: thus our aspiration to the limitless Good is at bottom, as St. Thomas recognizes together with St. Augustine, a (natural) desire for God. Through the Redemption man obtains a new relationship to God, first of all through Faith, which offers him the knowledge of salvation and of the means to attain it; and then especially through Grace, which procures for him the indwelling of the divine Persons, whose hidden operations in the soul would risk proving completely fruitless if they never surfaced to 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). On the other hand, the fundamental acts of religion themselves, 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 according to their content and specific intentionality. Finally, the Church has always recognized the reality of mystical phenomena, and Pius X, in praising St. Teresa of Ávila as one who "in motibus animi mysticis, non modo accurate distinguit inter id quod humanum et quod divinum est...," proposes her as a teacher of "mystical psychology" (Epist. ad Praep. O. C. Exc., in AAS, 6 [1914], p. 143 ff.).

Of the phenomena of religious experience, some are normal, others supernormal: regarding these latter (inspirations, revelations, apparitions, ecstasies) the Church always remains extremely reserved, but the former too must always be considered with caution, and the experience of the spiritual life teaches that the individual believer is not in possession of any 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 feeling 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 the knowledge of God and of his attributes, but presuppose it and are, as it were, the soul's interior response to it. The intimate nature of religious experience is not easy to explain. It is evidently not a question of a direct experience of the sensory type, nor even of a form of self-consciousness, because the essence of religious experience is to refer the subject to the transcendent Divinity in an attitude of complete subjection. Its principal characteristics seem to be the following: a) that it is an experience of convergence, as a resultant of the global situation of our spirit in its relating itself to the Absolute (normal religious experience) or when the Absolute deigns to communicate itself to man directly (supernormal religious experience); b) that it is intrinsically dialectical; thus God makes himself felt to 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 can well have positive value and vice versa (false mysticism is much more widespread than true mysticism), so that by itself it cannot constitute a criterion of absolute value.

Catholic thought therefore leaves open the possibility of an authentic religious experience, but precisely in order better to secure it, it clarifies its true meaning and determines its different forms and various degrees. First of all, any religious experience cannot be severed from a form of knowledge that corresponds to it and whose task it is to provide the object toward which the subject's experience itself is directed.

The possibility of religious experience flows from the very spirituality of man, but it can be said that it moves with the exercise of his rational activity, yet experience — 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 already holds on the plane of man's natural order: but if we ask ourselves how the divine makes itself "present," how that intuition is actualized and what it entails, the answers can be many and it is perhaps not possible to gather them into a single theory. Father Maréchal holds that the religious experience of the great mystics comes to rend the veil of faith, as is believed to have happened to Moses and to St. Paul, but it is commonly held that mystical experience moves within the light of faith. Certainly one cannot reduce religious experience to the reflective experience of one's own acts alone or of a subjectively created personal situation, that is, without its referring back to its object: religious experience is an authentic known situation which therefore cannot be actualized without a founded 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 thoroughly: but — and this is the paradox in this whole field — they may not be sufficient, nor can they always be required, since God's action is not of itself subordinate to the conditions of the subject. And so one can at the same time admit that, as with the other properties of the spirit, so too in the domain of religiosity men are differently endowed, and moreover that just as one who does not exercise an aptitude which he nonetheless possesses can also radically obliterate it, so too religiosity, which has not been properly set in motion or sustained, can weaken to the point of almost complete indifference, and religious experience can be absent. In this is shown the proper character of religious experience 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, supreme happiness.

Christian theology has always maintained certain fundamental principles from which it is not permitted to depart: a) Man and every creature will have perfect union with God and therefore will experience directly and fully the supreme joy 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 religious experience is that of souls in grace: since through it men have truly become adopted sons of God because they have been made partakers of the divine nature (Seine, cæravæ, qææææ; II Pt. 1, 5), they also partake of its life. The taste for divine things (and the distaste for sinful ones) is proper to the gift of wisdom, which judges divine things secundum quandam con naturalitatem, as the Angelic Doctor says, who speaks in the strongest sense, because he adds that it is a matter of 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" with which God overcomes the last defects of nature (cf. Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 68, a. 2, and ad 3). c) Man in the natural order can experience the divine both in the spectacle of the cosmic order as first Cause and supreme True, supreme Beauty, etc., and in his conscience as present in the sting of remorse when he does evil and in the intimate relaxation of peace and joy when he does good: it is the lowest but also the most fundamental religious experience. The supreme forms of religious experience, 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, despite the reservations of some critics (Stolz), can be the object of direct study because they are endowed with all the characteristics of experimental knowledge (Keilbach, Maréchal). Decisive documents for a psychology of religious experience are especially the works of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila (A. Mager, P. Crisogono).

It is not said that phenomena of religious experience cannot also occur outside the true Church (G. van der Leeuw, L. Massignon), and this indicates the intimate belonging of religious experience to the development of complete human consciousness, but the Catholic theologian cannot recognize their authentic character as long as such phenomena do not refer to and are not nourished by real attributes and truths of the divinity.

The definitive judgment on religious experience therefore remains reserved to theology and in the last instance to the authority of the Church.

Menschen, Leipzig 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. Munich and Berlin 1927 (especially p. 37 sq.); I. De Guibert, Documenta ecclesiastica Christiane perfectionis studium spectantia, Rome 1931, pp. 52 sq.; W. Kollbach, Die Problematik der Religion, Paderborn 1936 (excellent for religious psychology: contains discussion with bibl. from the Catholic point of view: v. p. 30 sq.); I. Maréchal, Etudes sur la psychologie des mystiques, a voll., Lavenio 1937-38 (especially II, p. 321 sq.; p. 283 sq.; critique of the psychological theory of W. James and J. H. Leube); P. De Menasco, L'expérience de l'esprit, in Erasme Jahrbuch, 1945, Zurich 1946, pp. 355-81; E. S. Brightman, The philosophy of religion, New York 1946, p. 411 sq.; L. Pelot, Le sentiment religieux et la religion, Paris 1946; J. Hessert, Religionsphilosophie, Essex and Freiburg 1948, especially vol. II, vi, ch. 1; Die religiöse Erfahrung oder das religiöse Weiterlebniss, pp. 31-195; M. Pradince, Traité de psychologie, II, Paris 1948, pp. 204-205; Les sentiments religieux; G. van der Leeuw, Phänomenologie der Religion, French trans., ibid. 1948, pp. 452 sq., pp. 482 sq.; G. Wunderle, Der religiöse Abt als seelische Problem, in Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Psychologie der Religion, new series, I, Würzburg 1948. But the monographs (ca. 50) that form the first series of this very important collection dedicated to the study of the problems of religious experience and philosophy should also be consulted.

Cornelio Fabro