Religious Experience: Key Information

Question 1

Corporeal Visions

Answer 1

Empirical, involving sense experience, particularly vision and hearing. The eye sees a supernatural vision that is really present, and the experiencer can interact with what is seen and heard, for example the vision of Bernadette Soubirous of the ‘Immaculate conception’ at Lourdes, and the visions of Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years War.

Question 2

Imaginative Visions

Answer 2

Seen by the eye of the mind rather than by direct sight, usually in dreams, and are beyond the control of the experiencer. Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41 and the dream of Joseph in Matthew 2 are both cases where the effects of the vision are dramatic.

Question 3

Intellectual Visions

Answer 3

No image, yet what is experienced is ‘seen as it really is’, for example Teresa of Avila, who claimed to see Jesus as he really was - not as an image but as a presence. The ‘light’ of an intellectual vision is through the illumination of the soul.

Question 4

Otto and the idea of the Holy

Answer 4

• Religious experiences are encounters with the Holy, as in the call experiences of Moses and Isaiah.
• Encounters with the Holy are numinous, which Otto claims is common to all religious experiences, regardless of religion or culture.
• The numinous is God or the wholly other, and God is inherently different from anything and everything else. God is beyond the natural world, and beyond apprehension or comprehension.
• Numinous feelings are not just more intense versions of our normal feelings. They are Sui Generis - ‘unique or in a class of their own’. They are a special faculty in our minds - a faculty that recognises the Holy and responds to it.
• Numinous feelings are non-rational - they are a mysterium tremendum et fascinans - ‘A tremendous and fascinating mystery.’ Before this mystery, we as finite creatures feel our ‘nothingness’ when faced with the utter transcendence of God.
• The ‘tremendous’ power can chill and numb. It inspires feelings of awe, majesty and dread, fear and terror, stupor, blank wonder, dumb astonishment, inadequacy, humility and creatureliness. The ‘mystery’ is ‘fascinating’, and the experiencer is caught up in it, so that It can evoke rapture and love.

Question 5

William James: Mystical Experience

Answer 5

For William James, the object of mystical experiences is union with God. Therefore James’ account of mystical experiences is radically different from that of Rudolf Otto. For James, religious experiences are primary, and organised religion is secondary. God exists factually, but is probably finite and may even exist as a collection of God-like selves.

Experience teaches us:

1) That this world draws its chief significant from a more spiritual universe (the realm of God)
2) The true end of humanity is union with that higher realm
3) Prayer/spiritual communion with that higher realm has positive effects in this world, such as energetic zest for life and an assurance of safety, peace and loving affection.

This kind of personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness. There are four criteria that form of common core to mystical experiences: they are ineffable, noetic, transient and passive. Moreover, they range from experiences with little religious significance (such as the effects of music or poetry or the experience of deja vu), to cosmic consciousness and union with the divine . The point of mystical religious experiences is that God/The Divine meets each individual on the basis of their personal concerns, be they ‘sick souls’ or ‘healthy-minded’. God’s existence is the guarantee that there is an ideal order that will be permanently preserved.