Reflection : Trigger Factors for Religious or Spiritual Experience
A fortnight ago I set out what we understand by the term religious experience – mentioning the work done by Schleiermacher in the 19th Century, Otto and Hardy in the 20th Century. The work of Hardy has resulted in the collection of over 6000 accounts of such experiences recorded and held on a database at the Lampeter Campus of the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. In my next reflection I will be looking at the work of the centre and give an example of an account of such an experience, but before then it is logical to examine exactly what might cause one to have such an experience; in other words what are the likely trigger factors to cause a religious or spiritual experience.
The most likely way of experiencing the numinous is through some external trigger factor, for example music or a religious service. Rankin in her Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience devotes some 40 pages to describing trigger factors dividing them into religious and non-religious categories. The religious factors would range from worship and prayer through contemplation and meditation to pilgrimages and the effects of sacred places.[i] The non-religious triggers range from medical conditions, for example depression to experiences encountered in the outdoors by particular scenery, by music, by the paintings or by sounds.[ii] It is on these latter factors that I will now concentrate.
Relevant to this category are mystical states or religious experiences which have been induced by external factors – music, literature or the visual arts or indeed directly by nature itself. These inducements form a totally different category of stimuli from those which are occasioned by deep involvement of one’s own psyche.
Considering first music, prior to the composing of programme music such as Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770-1827) Pastoral Symphony (1808), we had that which we might describe as pure and which complied with the rules of harmony. A typical work of this nature would be J.S.Bach’s (1685-1750) Well Tempered Clavier (1742) which consists of 48 Preludes and Fugues utilising all the major and minor keys.
These rules which usually led to any dissonance being resolved into consonance gave to music a form (for example the fugue or sonata form) which provided stimuli to the listener. Depending upon the susceptibility of the listener at that time, such music could have the effect of changing the mood of the listener or even inducing a mystical state. A multi-part setting of a Psalm may have this effect or more likely (but never to be guaranteed in accordance with the passivity criterion) a part of a setting of a mass or, for example, Bach’s setting of the Passion According to St. John (1724). A period of silence in music can have a significant effect, as Otto writes:
Even the most consummate Mass-music can only give utterance to the holiest, most numinous moment in the mass – the moment of transubstantiation – by sinking into stillness: no momentary pause, but an absolute cessation of sound long enough for us to ‘hear the silence’ itself; and no devotional moment in the whole Mass approximates in impressiveness to this ‘keeping silence before the Lord’.[iii]
If we now think of the music of the Romantic period, the situation is slightly different where, for example, one may be triggered into some form of transcendental state by thinking of the same place or activity that had inspired the composer to write the piece of music. Music such as Richard Strauss’ (1864-1949) Alpine Symphony (1915), Felix Mendelssohn’s (1809-1847) Overture Fingal’s Cave (1830) or Ralph Vaughan Williams’ (1872-1958) Symphony Antarctica (1952) might all be appropriate candidates.
Macquarrie highlights the Romantic period when feeling, imagination and personal experiences were beginning to have some priority over impersonal rationality, and when nature-mysticism began to be recognised. He quotes a defining moment when the Lyrical Ballards of Wordsworth and Coleridge were published in 1798 and when Wordsworth wrote Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (1798) ‘in which he traces the development from a youthful sympathy with nature to a more mature mystical sense of divine Presence’.[iv]
Macquarrie emphasises that this nature-mysticism is not some higher form of pantheism:
But in true mystical fashion (Wordsworth) is looking for a deeper reality in or behind or beyond these physical phenomena, and apparently finding that deeper reality, not so much perhaps in any particular natural phenomenon as in the way that all together they constitute a unity so harmonious that it strikes us with awe. This is what permits him to speak of a Presence in Nature.[v]
This statement, of course, accords not only with the ‘awe-fulness’ component of Otto’s numinous but also with the idea of the sublime involving either the very large or dangerous or sometimes both as discussed earlier. Indeed, Otto suggests that the sublime is the most effecting means of representing the numinous – quoting in particular the giant megaliths that have been erected in the past as well the more recent architectural possibilities of representing the sublime. Otto advocates furthermore that the numinous can be evoked especially by the Gothic – he cites the art historian Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) who in his work Probleme der Gothik (1930) shows that the impressiveness of the Gothic lies not only in its expression of the sublime but also in its suggestion of something beyond.[vi] Worringer uses the word magic which Otto rightly criticises as too low a word: ‘the tower of the Cathedral at Ulm is emphatically not ‘magical’, it is numinous’.[vii] I can understand that contemplation of the architecture in some of our great cathedrals could give rise to a moment of appreciation of the sublime but find it difficult to believe that the same feelings could be induced by contemplation of a megalith.[viii] Perhaps megalith was an ill chosen subject, because I can certainly understand the contemplation of some truly natural features of landscape inducing a sense of the sublime, for example Aysgarth Falls in Wensleydale, Yorkshire.
It is a short step from the natural world inducing a state of mystical feeling to such a response being induced by the representation of that world.[ix] Rankin quotes William Rothenstein (1872-1945) who writing in Men and Memories (1931-2) records ‘that one’s very being seems to be absorbed in the fields, trees and the walls one is striving to paint … At rare moments while painting, I have felt myself caught, as it were, in a kind of cosmic rhythm; but such experiences are usually all too brief’, an example of the mystical state being achieved whilst contemplating the natural world.[x] It is also noted that the twentieth century painter Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) refers to painting and religious experience as being the same thing.[xi]
The exact qualities in a work of art that give rise to the evocation of the numinous have been discussed before, suffice to say at this stage that Otto particularly suggests darkness, perhaps emphasised by the showing of the last vestige of light as in the last moments of a sunset:
The darkness must be such as is enhanced and made all the more perceptible by contrast with some last vestige of brightness, which is, as it were, on the point of extinguishing; hence the ‘mystical’ effect begins with semi-darkness … The semi-darkness that glimmers in vaulted halls, or beneath the branches of a lofty forest glade, strangely quickened and stirred by the mysterious play of half lights, has always spoken eloquently to the soul, and the builders of temples, mosques, and churches have made full use of it.[xii]
The other particular feature to which Otto draws attention is emptiness which he describes as horizontal sublimity and for which evidence he cites oriental art – ‘the wide stretching desert, the boundless uniformity of the steppe, have real sublimity (and) they set vibrating chords of the numinous’.[xiii]
The third of these non-religious trigger factors is sound or its counterpart silence. Rankin highlights the effect of shamanic drumming as used to induce a spiritual journey as well as citing the case of the effect of the sounds from large gongs which gradually built up to become louder and louder eventually causing the listener to have an experience which may eventually have led to a near-death experience.[xiv] However, most sounds are related to music and the relationship between the notes of the music and the spaces or silences between. Examples of music from the Classical and Romantic repertoire have been quoted above to which I could add music from the Modern period twelve-tone repertoire (originator Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and his acolyte Anton Webern (1885-1943)) where the silences between the notes are particularly significant, and the piece of music from the avant garde American composer John Cage (1912-1992) entitled four minutes thirty three (1948) which consists only of silence and is intended to emphasise the role of silence within music leaving only the sounds of the environment. I suggest that the location of the performance would be all important and that it would be the chosen environment that would be the deciding factor in the resulting experience – numinous or otherwise.
I have not said much about experiences being induced by religious occasions but the most well-known religious trigger factor would be that can occasionally occur during the exact moment of the eucharist when the elements are being consecrated but since the majority of the experiences housed in the Lampeter database are non-religious it is on these external trigger that I want to concentrate which leads me onto the database which will be the subject of my next reflection.
Dr David Greenwood d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk September 2021
[i] Rankin, M. pp. 53-77.
[ii] Ibid. pp. 78-92.
[iii] Otto, R. p.70.
[iv] Macquarrie, J. p. 216. See also the website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174796.
[v] Ibid. p. 217.
[vi] Otto, R. p. 67. For details on Worringer, see: Sorensen, Lee. “Worringer, Wilhelm.” Dictionary of Art Historians (website). www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/worringer.htm
[vii] Ibid, p. 68.
[viii] On looking around Stonehenge (in the days when one could freely wander around the monument) I could appreciate the amount of work that went into their erection and maybe think of druids and pagan worship, but, maybe because of my Judeo-Christian background, the experience could certainly not be described as appreciating the sublime, mystical or any way other- worldly.
[ix] I have previously referred to Kant’s appreciation of the beautiful in nature being indirectly compared with Schelling’s appreciation of the beautiful through contemplation of the representation of that beauty.
[x] Rankin, M. quoting Alister Hardy, quoting Rothenstein. p. 87.
[xi] Rankin, M. p. 87.
[xii] Otto, R. p. 68.
[xiii] Ibid. p. 69.
[xiv] Rankin, M. pp. 89-90.
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