The Nature of Religious Experience (AQA A-Level Religious Studies): Revision Notes

The Nature of Religious Experience

Introduction

Religious experiences are profound encounters that can transform lives. Around 30-40% of people report having an experience they describe as religious, mystical, or spiritual. These experiences vary widely but can be categorised into distinct types for study purposes.

For A-Level AQA Religious Studies, you need to understand three main categories:

• Visions (corporeal, imaginative, and intellectual)
• Numinous experiences (Otto's concept)
• Mystical experiences (William James and Walter Stace)

Visions: corporeal, imaginative and intellectual

The classification of visions into three types originates from St Augustine of Hippo (354-430CE).

Corporeal visions

Definition: A corporeal vision comes through the physical sense of sight. The experiencer sees a supernatural vision of an object that is really present through their bodily eyes.

Key features:

• Empirical experience: Perceived through the five senses (touch, taste, hearing, smell, sight)
• Physical reality: Light from the object strikes the retina, just as with normal objects
• Supernatural element: The vision goes beyond normal natural forces
• Often accompanied by other sensory experiences (voices, light)

Imaginative visions

Definition: A vision seen in the mind, usually through a dream experience. Unlike corporeal visions, the experiencer has no power to direct the experience, which indicates it comes from God.

Key features:

• Not perceived through normal sight processes
• Often occur in dreams
• Seen with the "eye of the mind"
• Beyond the individual's control
• Require interpretation

Intellectual visions

Definition: A vision without any visual image, where the experiencer perceives things as they really are through an illumination of the soul rather than through sight or imagination.

Key features:

• No visual image - nothing seen with bodily eyes
• Nothing seen with the "eye of the mind" (not imaginative)
• A felt "presence" or spiritual illumination
• Difficult to describe using ordinary language
• Considered mystical visions
• Represent the highest level of mystical union with God

St Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) provided detailed accounts of intellectual visions in her autobiography.

Numinous experiences: Otto; an apprehension of the wholly other

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)

German Lutheran theologian whose most famous work, The Idea of the Holy, remains a foundational text on religious experience.

The idea of the Holy

Otto argued that religious experiences are encounters with the Holy (Qadosh in Hebrew, Sanctus in Latin) - the key-word of all religion. Another term for holy is "sacred."

Otto focused on "holy" not in the moral sense, but as meaning God is transcendent and numinous.

The numinous

Definition: Relating to the power or presence of a deity. From Latin numen (deity or spirit).

According to Otto, the numinous is common to all religious experience, regardless of religion or culture.

Lewis gave a literary example from The Wind in the Willows:

"Rat, are you afraid?" "Afraid? of Him? O, never, never. And yet - and yet - O Mole, I am afraid."

This illustrates the paradoxical nature of numinous feeling - simultaneous love and fear.

Sui generis nature of numinous feelings

Sui generis: Unique, of its own kind, in a class of its own.

Numinous feelings are non-rational

• Cannot reason our way to understanding them
• Beyond rational explanation
• Even more beyond description than ordinary feelings
• Left with a mysterium tremendum et fascinans - "a tremendous and fascinating mystery"

The mysterium tremendum et fascinans

Characteristics of the tremendous power:

• Can chill and numb
• Inspires feelings of awe and majesty
• Alongside dread, fear, and terror
• Energy like an overpowering rush of a tide
• Produces feelings of stupor, blank wonder, dumb astonishment
• Creates sense of inadequacy, humility, and "creatureliness"

Characteristics of the fascinating mystery:

• The experiencer is caught up in it
• Can evoke rapture and love
• Creates attraction so strong it leads to complete commitment
• Example: Rat's eyes "shining with unutterable love" despite fear

God as transcendent

The concept of mysterium tremendum et fascinans emphasises:

• God as transcendent: above and beyond space and time
• God so far removed from humanity that approach must be with numinous awe, dread, fear, and terror
• The creature overwhelmed by its own nothingness compared to the Holy

Mystical experiences: William James

William James (1842-1910)

American philosopher and psychologist. His work The Varieties of Religious Experience contains influential analysis of mystical experiences.

James's key ideas about religious experience

3. Three beliefs involved in religious life:

• The visible world draws its chief significance from a more spiritual universe (the realm of God)
• The true end of humanity is union (or harmonious relation) with that higher universe
• Prayer or inner communion with God is efficacious (it works) - produces real psychological or material effects

4. Psychological benefits of spiritual communion:

• An energetic zest for life
• Can produce "lyrical enchantment"
• Can inspire heroic deeds
• Assurance of safety, peace, and loving affection

5. Personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness

Four criteria of mystical experience

James identified four criteria for judging mystical experiences. The first two are most significant:

a. Ineffability

Definition: The experience cannot be described in words.

Key points:

• Must be directly experienced
• Cannot be transferred or imparted to others
• Like a feeling - cannot be understood by someone who hasn't experienced it
• Example: No one can understand being in love unless they have been in love
• Similarly, no one can understand a mystical experience unless they have had one

b. Noetic quality

Definition: Mystical experiences give rise to knowledge - they are states of insight.

Key points:

• Though similar to states of feeling, they also provide knowledge
• Truths are intuitively realised or felt to be true
• Cannot be fully described
• Carry "a curious sense of authority"
• Affect the experiencer thereafter

c. Transiency

Definition: Mystical states cannot be sustained for long.

Key points:

• Except in rare cases, last at most half an hour to two hours
• Difficult to reproduce in memory over time
• However, repeated experiences can develop continuous richness and importance

d. Passivity

Definition: Once begun, the experience is beyond the person's control.

Key points:

• True even when invited through mental or physical preparation
• The will becomes passive
• The mystic does not control the experience - the experience controls the mystic

Range of mystical experiences

James identified a wide spectrum from less to more religious:

Less intense mystical experiences:

• The moving power of poetry or music (scalp tingling)
• Déjà vu - feeling of "already seen" taking you beyond normal perception
• Sense that everything has meaning if you could understand it
• Feeling surrounded by truths you cannot grasp

More intense mystical experiences:

• Sudden realisation of the immediate presence of God
• Example: Police officer experiencing "such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this Infinite Power" that "his feet could hardly keep to the pavement"

Cosmic consciousness:

• Experience that "the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is... a living Presence"

Purpose of mystical experiences

• God meets the individual "on the basis of his personal concerns"
• Reality is on the level of the personal and private, not the cosmic and general
• God is not found in one particular religion or set of dogmas
• Each individual perceives God uniquely and receives from God uniquely
• Different individuals have different needs
• Whatever is wrong can be dealt with by connecting with God
• "God's existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved"

Non-sensuous and non-intellectual union with the divine as presented by Walter Stace

Walter Terrence Stace (1886-1967)

British philosopher known for his work on mysticism. Published Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) and The Teachings of the Mystics (1960).

Stace's approach to mysticism

Like James, Stace saw little point in trying to prove God's existence through reason. He stated: "Either God is a mystery or He is nothing at all. To ask for a proof of the existence of God is on a par with asking for a proof of the existence of beauty."

He agreed with James and Teresa of Avila that the goal of religious experiences is mystical union with God.

Definition of mysticism

Stace's definition: Mysticism is "non-sensuous and non-intellectual" union with the divine.

Key terms:

• Non-sensuous: Not involving the physical senses
• Non-intellectual: The rational intellect (conscious "I") ceases to work, replaced by "pure consciousness"

Central characteristic: "The apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate. It entirely transcends our sensory-intellectual consciousness."

Two types of mystical experience

Extrovertive mysticism

Definition: A kind of "half-way house" to introvertive experience.

Characteristics:

• Still sees the world of normal objects (trees, tables) with physical senses
• BUT these objects are transfigured
• The non-sensuous unity "shines through" them

Introvertive mysticism

Definition: Total suppression of sense experience where awareness of the world is completely obliterated.

Characteristics:

• Ordinary consciousness replaced by entirely new kind - mystical consciousness
• Non-intellectual: normal intellect not functioning
• Replaced by mystical consciousness in which the "I" is absent

Characteristics of introvertive mystical experience

Stace identified seven common characteristics:

1. The Unitary Consciousness; the One; the Void; pure consciousness
2. Nonspatial, nontemporal
3. Sense of objectivity or reality
4. Blessedness, peace, etc.
5. Feeling of the holy, sacred, or divine
6. Paradoxicality (seeming self-contradictory)
7. Alleged by mystics to be ineffable

Characteristics of extrovertive mystical experience

Same as introvertive except for first two characteristics:

1. The Unifying Vision - all things are One
2. The more concrete apprehension of the One as an inner subjectivity, or life, in all things