religious experience

Mediation through analysis and critical interpretation

A number of thinkers have insisted on the validity of religious experience but have denied that it can be understood as wholly immediate and self-supporting, since it stands in need of analysis and critical interpretation. Some, like Paul Tillich, held that there are certain “boundary experiences,” such as having an ultimate concern or experiencing the unconditional character of moral obligation, that become intelligible only when understood as the presence of the holy in experience. Others, such as H.D. Lewis and Charles Hartshorne, found the divine ingredient in the experience of the transcendent and supremely worshipful reality but demand that this experience be coherently articulated and, in the case of Hartshorne, supplemented by rational argument for the reality of the divine. Dewey envisaged a religious quality in experience pointing to God as an ideal that stands in active and creative tension with the actual course of events. Whitehead identified the presence of the divine with an apprehension of a “permanent rightness” in the scheme of things and based the validity of the experience on the claim that an adequate cosmology requires God as a principle of selection aiming at the realization of the good in the world process. James found the justification of religious experience in its consequences for the life of the individual: valid experience is distinguished by its philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness. Finally, some have sought to combine experience and interpretation by taking the traditional proofs of God’s existence and pointing to their roots in the experience of perfection, of the contingency of one’s own existence, and of the reality of purpose in human life. On this view, the arguments for the reality of God are not wholly formal demonstrations but rather the tracing out of intelligible patterns in experience.

Preparations for experience

Mystics, prophets, and religious thinkers in many traditions, both Eastern and Western, have been at one in emphasizing the need for various forms of preparation as a preliminary for gaining religious insight. The basic idea is that ordinary ways of looking at the world, dictated by the demands of everyday life, stand in the way of the understanding of religious truth; a person must pass beyond these limitations by disciplining his mind and body. Three classic forms of preparation may be distinguished: first, rational dialectic for training the mind to reach insight (this explains why many mystical thinkers, from the Pythagoreans to Nicholas of Cusa and Benedict de Spinoza, were deeply involved in mathematics); second, moral preparation aiming at purity of heart, which was sometimes conjoined with bodily discipline, as in the Indian Yoga exercises; third, the use of drugs to expand the range of consciousness beyond that required for ordinary life. It is significant that the great mystics invariably regarded such preparation as necessary, but not sufficient, for experience. The self may be prepared, but the vision may not come; being prepared, as it were, establishes no claim on the divine. The experience described by St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic, as “the dark night of the soul” points precisely to the experience of failure. The soul in this situation is convinced that God has abandoned it, cast it into darkness, perhaps forever. Mystics in the Daoist and Buddhist traditions have often emphasized the spontaneity of insight and the need to seek it through an “effortless striving” that combines the need to search with the awareness that the insight cannot be compelled. Zen Buddhists are fond of pointing to insights that are already possessed but not recognized as such until their holder is shaken loose from ordinary patterns of thought.

Situational contexts and forms of expression