Reflection.: An Introduction to Religious Experience
A number of readers will be aware that I have been associated with the Alister Hardy Trust for some twenty years. The trust which was founded in 1969 by retired professor of zoology, Sir Alister Hardy, exists to support academic research into religious and spiritual experiences. The subject came to general public attention with the publication in 1902 of William James’ book The Varieties of Religious Experience – detailing his research first given as the Gifford Lecture Series in 1901[i]. A subsequent series of the Gifford Lectures was given in 1963-4 by Sir Alister Hardy on the theme of the Spiritual Nature of Man which led to Sir Alister’s award of the Templeton Prize -awarded to a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, …. The monetary value of this award is set just above that of the Nobel Prize. This work in turn led to the foundation of the Religious Experience Research Unit established in Oxford in 1969 – subsequently to become part of the Alister Hardy Trust.
First of all, we need to establish what is religious experience. This was defined by Sir Alister as; ‘a deep awareness of a benevolent non-physical power which appears to be partly or wholly beyond, and far greater than, the individual self.’[ii] Sir Alister began his researches by posing what has become known as the Alister Question: ‘Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self.’[iii] The question was placed in a number of national and religious newspapers and answers formed the beginning of what has become a database of over 6,500 accounts of religious and spiritual experience held at the Lampeter Campus of The University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
Having established a definition of Religious Experience and the origin of the Religious Experience Research Unit we now need to think about what the great theologians of the past had to say on the subject. With many such as Tillich experience is a sense in which the reading of a text is mediated to the reader to enable further systematic analysis. Others, maybe best described as experiential theologians, such as von Hugel who was a great influence on Evelyn Underhill, took the line that that the lived experience of the mystics led to a knowledge of the spiritual realities. However, it was Schleiermacher who perhaps more than any other theologian of that period described religious experience in a way that would accord very well with the definitions given above. In turn Schleiermacher was a great influence on Rudolf Otto whose tremendous work on the non-rational approach to a description of God was published in Germany in1917 and in English in 1923 under the title of Idea of the Holy. Otto’s work has, to my knowledge, never been surpassed and the Idea of the holy remains in print to this day.[iv]
It is to these two theologians – Schleiermacher and Otto that I now want to concentrate. In discussing God there is a tendency to intuit or express in words the rational part of the Ultimate Reality; to discuss God in the terms of the ineffable or non-rational part is difficult. This is because we do not have the words or the language easily to write about that which is beyond – the non-rational. There have been over the years a number of attempts to prove the existence of God; they have all failed because the nature of God is indefinable in its totality. We can suggest definitions such as Ground of all Being (Tillich) or ‘something than which nothing greater can be conceived’ (Anselm 1033-1109) but they all fail in their endeavour to define or even prove the existence of God because of the use solely of rational argument without reference to the non-rational component of the Ultimate Reality.[v]
Otto endeavoured to overcome this limitation by acknowledging the role of ‘feeling’ in the perception of the Transcendent. This approach is fully developed in the aforementioned The Idea of the Holy where he introduces the word numinous to describe the holy (or sacred), ignoring the latter’s normal attributes of moral goodness and rationality. Schleiermacher emphasised that the peculiar feature of religion is ‘a mysterious experience; it is being moved by the world of the eternal’.[vi] This missing mysterious component in the idea of the holy or sacred is that which expresses the ‘living force’ or ‘unique original feeling-response which can be in itself ethically neutral and claims consideration in its own right’.[vii] Otto endeavoured to develop the thoughts of Schleiermacher and overcome the limitation of writing of the non-rational by acknowledging the role of ‘feeling’ in the discernment of the transcendent. Otto then speaks of the numinous as a category of value and as a state of mind found wherever the category is applied. Otto, in order to explain further, then writes
This mental state (the numinous) is … irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined. There is only one way to help another to an understanding of it. He (or she) must be guided and led on by discussion of the matter through the ways of his (or her) own mind, until he (or she) reaches the point at which the numinous in him (or her) perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness … In other words our X cannot strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes of the spirit must be awakened.[viii]
In a curious development, Otto then invites the reader who has not had a deeply felt religious experience to read no further as it is not easy to discuss religious psychology with those who cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings. This seems to me to be rather defeatist, inasmuch as this attitude seems to rule out the possibility of an academic or theoretical discussion of religious experience.[ix] (It would have been interesting to discuss with Otto the German Idealist’s conception of intellectual intuition and its relevance to the idea that the numinous cannot very meaningfully be discussed with one who has not had such an experience.) Notwithstanding this reservation, Otto attempts to describe (in the context of a religious service) religious experience as the ‘emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures’.[x] This sentence illustrates again the difficulty of describing God – because Otto is falling into the trap of speaking of an entity (compared with creatures) ‘supreme above all creatures’ or maybe he intended the meaning to be ‘above creatures per se’. Perhaps the sentence would read more accurately by just referring to that which is supreme above all.
This numinous experience is capable of further analysis which suggests elements of Awe-fulness (compare facto the sublime), Mysteriousness or unapproachability (c. f. mysticism/devotional contemplation) to which can also be added a sense of Fascination –where, in spite of the fear of the awe-fulness and the unapproachability, one is nonetheless drawn almost inexorably towards something which is fascinating. This then leads into one of Otto’s most important statements:
The daunting and the fascinating now combine in a strange harmony of contrasts, and the resultant dual character of the numinous consciousness, to which the entire religious development bears witness, at any rate from the level of the ‘daemonic dread’ onwards, is at once the strangest and most noteworthy phenomenon in the whole history of religion… the ‘mystery is for him (or her) not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him (or her); and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he (or she) feels something that captivates and transports him (or her) with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-element in the numen.[xi]
If this language seems a little overblown for the twenty first century, Otto is describing what I would consider to be the ultimate in religious experience as seen today in such phenomena as the Toronto Blessing and in the twentieth century by a number of revivalist meetings where religious fervour has been achieved by the oratory of a gifted preacher. In addition Otto’s thoughts are quite close to those of Sir Alister Hardy (1896-1985) who as mentioned above described religious experience as ‘a deep awareness of a benevolent non-physical power which appears to be wholly or partly beyond, and far greater than the individual self’.[xii]
The above set out the theoretical background to the study of religious or spiritual experience from which we can now begin to look at the work undertaken by the Centre at Lampeter which is the subject of my next reflection.
Dr David Greenwood d.greenwood@wtsd.ac.uk September 2021
[i] James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience London. Fontana. Library of Theology and Philosophy 1971
[ii] Rankin Marianne An introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience Continuum. London 2008 p.5 (taken from Spiritual Nature of Man (1979) by Alister Hardy reprinted 1997 Religious Experience Research Centre, Lampeter, Ceredigion).
[iii] Ibid p.3
[iv] Otto, R. The Idea of the Holy. London. OUP. 1958. (Reprint of 1923)
[v] Tillich, P. Systematic Theology Volume I London SCM Press p. 156. This book was first published in 1951 by the University of Chicago. Davies, B. An introduction to the Philosophy of Religion Oxford Oxford University Press 1993 (2nd edition) pp. 55 and 239, quoting Anselm who writes in the Proslogion: aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.
[vi] Küng, H. Great Christian Thinkers London SCM Press 1994 (Translated by John Bowden from the German edition published by Piper GmbH in 1994) p. 166.
[vii] Otto, R. The Idea of the Holy Oxford Oxford University Press 1958 p.6.
[viii] Ibid. p. 7.
[ix] John Macquarrie has written an introduction to mysticism without admitting to ever having had a mystical experience and emphasises that he is not a mystic. See Two Worlds are One by Macquarrie, J. London SCM Press 2004.
[x] Ibid, p. 10.
[xi] Ibid. p. 31.
[xii] Rankin, M. quoting Hardy in An Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience London Continuum 2008 p. 5.
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