Religious Experience - Key Terms Flashcards
Clairvoyance
The claimed ability to gain information about objects / persons by means beyond the normal methods of perception.
Corporeal Vision
Relating to a person’s body.
Comes through the physical sense of light.
Empirical
Those which are experienced by the senses of touch, taste, hearing, smell and sight.
Entheogen
‘Generating the divine from within’.
e.g. entheogenic drugs such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin that are know to generate religious experiences.
Extrovertive
In Stace’s definition, a kind of ‘halfway house’ to introvertive religious experience.
Sense experience is still achieved although objects are transformed by the ‘unity that shines through’.
Hallucinogenic
Causing hallucinations.
e.g. hallucinogenic drugs.
Illumination
To illuminate is to cast lights.
In religious terms, the doctrine of illumination holds that when the biblical writers wrote their books, the Holy Spirit illuminated their minds with the truth.
In intellectual visions, the vision illuminates the soul without any kind of visual image.
Imaginative Vision
A vision seen in the mind, usually through a dream experience.
Immaculate Conception
The Catholic Doctrine of the conception of the Virgin Mary in the womb of her mother, free from ‘original sin’ through the merits of her son Jesus Christ.
Ineffable
For William James.
An act of mystical religious experiences not describable in words, so cannot be imparted to others.
Intellectual Vision
A vision without any visual image, where the experience is an ‘illumination’ of the soul.
Introvertive
In Walter Stace’s definition, a religious experience in which sense is totally suppressed and the conscious ‘I’ is replaced by consciousness / the One / the Void.
Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans
‘A tremendous and fascinating mystery’ - part of Otto’s description of the numinous religious experiences.
Neuroscience
The scientific study of the structure and function of the nervous system.
Neurotheology
The attempt to explain religious experience and behaviour in neuroscientific terms.
Noetic
For William James.
An aspect of mystical religious experience.
Such experiences are states of knowledge as well as feelings but the knowledge is spiritual and non-transferable as well as authoritative.
Non-Intellectual
The ‘I’ of rational intellect is replaced by ‘pure consciousness’.
Non-Sensuous
Not involving the physical senses.
Numinous
Relating to the power or presence of a deity.
Original Sin
Refers to the first sin of Adam and Eve in disobeying God in the Garden of Eden.
St Augustine taught that original sin in inherited seminally (through sexual intercourse) by all their descendants.
Passivity
For William James.
An aspect of mystical religious experiences that the experiencer doesn’t control the experience but is controlled by it.
Precognition
Foreknowledge of an event through extra-sensory perception.
Sui Generis
Unique / one of a kind / in a class of its own.
Applies to numinous feeling.
Telekinesis
The ability to move object solely by the power of the mind.
Transcendent
The concept that God is above and beyond the space-time universe.
For Otto, part of his view that God is ‘wholly other’.
Transiency
For William James.
An aspect of mystical religious experiences.
They generally last no more than half an hour, perhaps 2 hours at the most, although the effects are long lasting, especially with recurrent experiences.
