Religious Experience Flashcards
St Augustine classified visions into 3 categories, what were these 3 categories?
- Corporeal
- Imaginative
- Intellectual
What is a corporeal vision?
Visions that come through the physical sense of sight making them empirical experiences and often supernatural experiences
What is an example of a corporeal vision?
Bernadette of Lourdes’ 18 vision of the Immaculate Conception
What is an imaginative vision?
Visions that are seen through the ‘minds eye’ often in the medium of a dream
What is an example of an imaginative vision?
Joseph’s dream in which he was told that Mary was pregnant through the Holy Spirit and that he had to marry her
What is an intellectual vision?
Visions that have no real imagery and rather illuminate/expand/enlighten the soul of the person who underwent the experience
What is an example of an intellectual experience?
Teresa of Avila was a mystic and had many of these visions
What is a quote from Teresa of Avila?
‘I saw Christ close by me…I saw nothing with the eyes of the body, nothing with the eyes of the soul’
(The Life of St Teresa of Jesus of the Jesus of The Order of Our Lady of Carmel)
What are numinous experiences and it’s key thinker?
Numinous experiences are experiences of the ‘wholly other’ with the main thinker being Rudolf Otto
What is a quote from Isaiah 6;3?
‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory’
Why does Otto see Isaiah 6:3 as an example of a numinous experience?
- It is an experience that is the basis of genuine religion
- It is a non rational and unique form of experience outside of everyday experience
- It is a sense of the wholly other
- Emphasis is on God’s transcendence
- It refers to a presence and reality that cannot be understood with our current senses or intellect
What is Otto’s book called?
The Idea of the Holy
What does the word holy mean?
‘other than’/’separate from’; expressing the absolute distinctness of God from the universe
What is Otto’s main idea is his book ‘The Idea of the Holy’?
Otto is attempting to describe the sense some people have of a reality totally outside and beyond their experience of themselves and the world
What is the Latin term to describe the complex nature of Numinous Experiences?
Mysterium, Tremendum et Fascinans’
What is mysterium?
- Refers to something far removed from humanity that can be experience but not understood
- It elicits the response of awe and wonder
What is tremendum?
- Refers to the fearsome experience of God’s overwhelming majesty and energy
- Creates a sense of human nothingness and a reminder of our dependence on God
What is fascinans?
- The compulsive and attractive nature of the experience evoking our want for a relationship with his being despite fear
- Creates the awareness for the need of salvation
What is a mystical experience?
a subjective experience that is interpretated in a religious framework
(another way to say religious experience)
What were some key beliefs of William James?
- Wasn’t a member of any religion but was sympathetic to religion
- Applied insights of science to his research (esp. psychology)
- Saw organised religion arising out of people comparing their religious experiences
- True purpose of humanity is a union with a higher significance
What were William James’ 4 criteria for assessing the genuine nature of mystical experiences?
Passivity
Ineffability
Noetic Quality
Transiency
What does James mean by the experience have an element of passivity?
The mystic who is experiencing the experience cannot have any will over what happens in the experience. This could lead to unusual activity such as Teresa of Avila levitating but the mystic must be completely passive and in submission to the higher power controlling the experience
What does James mean by the experience have an element of ineffability?
The experience must be private and really only make sense to other mystics. The experience cannot truly be put into words or explained
What does James mean by the experience have an element of noetic quality?
The experience must give a genuine insight into truths and consist of non ration and intuitive knowledge rather than intellectual knowledge
What does James mean by the experience have an element of transiency?
The experience must be short and hard to reproduce in memory but must hold high value to the individual such as potentially changing their lives
What were some of Walter Stace’s key beliefs?
- Saw no real point in attempting rational proofs of God’s existence as God is either a mystery or nothing at all
- He saw the goal of all religious experiences as a union with God
- Mysticism has nothing to do with occult, parapsychology, vision or auditory experiences
What were the two mystical experiences that Stace identified?
- Introvertive Mystical Experiences
- Extrovertive Mystical Experiences
What are the common features of both of Stace’s experiences?
- Sense of reality
- Sense of absolute peave
- Sense of the holy
- Experience of paradox
- An ineffable experience
What are the two different features of an introvertive and extortive experience?
Introvertive: pure consciousness and non-spatial and non-temporal
Extrovertive: all things are one and there is a sense of the one as inner subjectivity
What are key characteristics of introvertive mystical experiences?
- Ultimate mystical experience
- Sense experience is completely suppressed
- No awareness of the world
- No intellectual function
- Ordinary human consciousness is replaced with mystical consciousness in which the ‘I’ is absent
What are key characteristics of extrovertive mystical experiences?
- Stace saw the extrovertive experience as a halfway house to introvertive experiences
- Normal objects are seen with the physical sense but they are transfigured so that the non-sensuous unity of all things shines through them
What are some challenges from philosophy and theology about religious experience?
- We only have the word of the experient that the experience took place making them highly personal and subjective
- Inability to describe experiences suggests they are not real - James said there was a fine line between mysticism and insanity
- Religious experiences are so alien to the experiences of ordinary people it cannot be believed
- Mystical experience appear to be elitist
What are some responses to the challenges posed by philosophy and theology about religious experiences?
- William James pragmatic approach claimed that the transforming effect of such experiences on people’s lives was a testimony to their genuineness
- Group Experiences can provide wider and more potential evidence (Nebraska Church) (Miracle on the Hudson)
- Ineffability is a key characteristic of mystical exp but it doesn’t mean they are fake
- All walks of life have experience some kind of ‘religious’ experience
- According to Vatican II, mysticism is a gift open to all yet only a few are prepared to engage in the discipline and effort required
What did Freud say about visions?
Freud claimed visions were just illusions created by subconscious fears and desire. They are at best signs of immaturity and at worst symptoms of mental illness/disorder
How did Jung challenge Freud?
Jung argued that visions of sane people were not necessarily delusions as they often had beneficial results for the experient
How does neuroscience propose a challenge to religious experience?
Neurotheology can show that religious experiences can be stimulated through devices such as the God Helmet - stimulating the temporal lobes leading to experiences akin to those of religious.
-> Entheogens can also provide similar results to those induced by the God Helmet
What is a response to challenge proposed by neuroscience?
- Just we can stimulate or explain experiences, does not mean they aren’t real
- Maybe God chose to communicate with someone during their states even they were forced to experience God as he is the ultimate giver of mercy
- God’s communication with humanity has to processed by the brain, neuroscience cannot ultimately prove that religious experience are just a faction of the brain
- The mind can also generate such experiences and spiritual discipline may be what is needed to communicate with God linking back to Vatican II that mysticism is a gift open to all yet only a few are prepared to engage
What is a challenge to Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus?
Temporal Lobe epilepsy can explain Paul’s conversion experience. The description given in Acts 9:3-9 fit with the features of the condition
What is a response to the challenge made to Paul’s vision?
Perhaps God works through people’s conditions. The ‘thorn in the flesh’ that Paul said he suffered may also be explain in other ways showing there’s no definitive cause or explanation for Act 9:3-9
Who came up with the idea of credulity and testimony?
Richard Swinburne
What does Swinburne mean by credulity?
In the absence of special considerations, how things seem to person is how they actually are.
aka this is about the believability of the individual’s own personal and private experience
What does Swinburne mean by testimony?
In the absence of special considerations, we should believe what people tell us.
aka this is about the reliability of what others claim about their personal experiences
What was Swinburne’s four special considerations?
1) If the person claiming the experience has been know to tell lies
2) If the claims seems beyond the realms of possibility
3) It is very difficult to show that God was present
4) Other explanations to the experience
What are some rejections to the special considerations?
- Just because someone lied in the past, does not mean the person is lying now
- Just because one claim is false does not mean all other claims are false
- If God is everywhere and underpins all processes, how can we can say he wasn’t there or say there are pther explanations?
What are some criticism against Swinburne’s approach?
- It is a huge leap to go from saying that normal observable sense experiences are reliable to claim the same for metaphysical experiences.
- Others can confirm claim about ordinary sense experiences but religious experience are typically private and cannot be investigated in the same way
- Even if every experient was convinced God was present, it doesn’t mean God is actually the explanation
What are some supporting points to Swinburne’s approach?
- As William James argued, the transformation in lifestyle can prove the genuineness of religious experiences
- People who undergo similar experience typically have similar transformations giving further support
- The argument for the existence of God from religious experiences is a strong argument strengthened by inductive arguments
How can Abraham’s experience show the influence and value of religious experience for religious faith?
- lead to the foundation of faith/religious traditions in Judaism, Islam and Christianity
- inspiration and lead others to faith as Abraham was the epitome of loyalty and submission showing the benefits of following God and convinced his wife to trust God
- experience was life changing as he left Haran at God’s command
- places associated with his experience are pilgrimage sites
What is a quote from Abraham’s experience and it’s impact?
Abraham ‘believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness’ becoming the perfect example of submission to God by Jews, Muslims and Christians - showing the consequences of being obedient to God
Why do some only become certainty of God through a personal experience?
- William James claimed religious experiences come in a wealth of different forms
- our consciousness may be multilayered and religious experience may be in one of those deeper layers
- many people believe there is more to consciousness that what we experience in the everyday which science agrees with as modern science points to layers behind and beyond what we observe through our senses
