In my article last week, I introduced the subject of religious and spiritual experience. This week I will write about the conditions that need to come together in order to trigger such an experience – triggers that can come out of the blue when you are least expecting them.
The most likely way of experiencing the numinous is through some external trigger factor, for example music or a religious service. As I mentioned previously, Marianne 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.
Of particular interest to me is the way in which mystical states or religious experiences can be 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, such as in prayer. 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. a part of a setting of a mass, for example, Bach’s setting of the Passion According to St. John (1724). In addition, a period of silence in music can have a significant effect, as Rudolf Otto wrote
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’.[ii]
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.
John 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 Ballads 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’.[iii]
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 statement, of course, accords not only with the ‘awe-fulness’ component of Otto’s numinous but also with the idea of the sublime where there is a sense of fear or awe as created by the giganticness of that which is being observed. This enormity may be represented by the Gothic – perhaps the awe-inspiring architecture of one of our great cathedrals – maybe the spire at Salisbury. And, of course, one can encounter the sublime in Nature as for example in the contemplation of some natural features of landscape inducing a sense of the transcendent, for example Aysgarth Falls in Wensleydale, Yorkshire.
It is but 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. 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.[iv] It is also noted that the twentieth century painter Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) refers to painting and religious experience as being the same thing. Many of you will have heard our vicar Marcus referring to Aidan Hart, the icon painter, praying his icons into existence. To describe the exact qualities in a work of art that give rise to the evocation of the numinous is not that easy, suffice to say that the suggestion of darkness, perhaps emphasised by the showing of the last vestige of light as in the last moments of a sunset.
Another feature in a work of art possibly inducing a mystical experience and to which Otto draws particular 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’.
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. 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.
A source of material relating to experiences which are outside the norm is housed by Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) at the Lampeter Campus of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. This centre was originally set up (in Oxford) by Sir Alister Hardy when he retired from his post as Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford. He had had a life-long interest in spirituality, having had such experiences in his youth. As mentioned last week Hardy describes religious experience 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’. For the details of the history of the archive and the development of the Centre, the reader is referred to books by Rankin, Hay and Franklin.[v] In essence, the archive of accounts of religious experience has been established (now numbering over 6000 accounts) and is continuing to develop as a result of answers to the 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?’ These experiences are very wide ranging – from near death experiences, out of body experiences through to sensations of ecstasy brought about perhaps by a place of mystic quality. This archive has recently been digitised (and is anonymised) and is available on-line to members of the Alister Hardy Trust. And of course, if any readers of this article have had a mystical experience of any sort, we should be delighted to add it to the archive – just send it to me to the e-mail address below. As mentioned, any account of such an experience would be treated as confidential and anonymised on the accessible database.
Dr David Greenwood June 2020 d.greenwood@uwtsd.ac.uk
[i] Rankin, M. An Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience London Continuum 2008
[ii] Otto, R. The Idea of the Holy 1958 (1923). OUP
[iii] Macquarrie, Two Worlds are One London SCM Press 2004 p. 216-7
[iv] Rankin, M. quoting Alister Hardy, quoting Rothenstein. p. 87.
[v] Rankin M. An Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience London Continuum 2008.
Hay, D. God’s Biologist A life of Alister Hardy London Darton Longman Todd 2011.
Franklin, J. Exploration into Spirit (The History of the AHRERC) Lampeter Alister Hardy Society 2006.
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