The Nature of Religious Experience

Overview

Recall questions on defining religious experience, theistic and monistic accounts, James's four marks of mysticism, Otto's numinous, conversion, prayer and meditation, propositional and non-propositional revelation, and physiological, naturalistic, objectivist and subjectivist interpretations.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What counts as a religious experience, and why is a single definition hard to agree?

   Model answer

   Broadly, an encounter which the subject takes to involve God, the transcendent or ultimate reality, and which they do not think reducible to ordinary perception. The difficulty is that traditions describe the object very differently: theists speak of meeting a personal God who remains other than the self, while monistic accounts in Hindu and some Buddhist traditions describe the falling away of any distinction between self and reality. A definition wide enough to hold both risks being too wide to be useful.

2. 2

   Distinguish theistic and monistic accounts of such experience.

   Model answer

   In theistic accounts the experience is relational: someone encounters a God who stays distinct from them, and the vocabulary is of presence, address, love and awe. In monistic accounts the goal is union, or the recognition that there never was a separation, and the vocabulary is of absorption. The difference matters for the argument from experience, because two traditions cannot both be reporting accurately if one says it met another and the other says there is no other to meet.

3. 3

   Describe the four marks James gave of mystical experience.

   Model answer

   Ineffability: the subject insists it cannot be put into words and must be undergone rather than described. Noetic quality: it is not mere feeling but arrives with a sense of insight into truth, and it carries authority for the person afterwards. Transiency: it does not last long, though its effects may last a lifetime. Passivity: the subject feels held or acted upon rather than doing something.

4. 4

   How did James think religious experiences should be judged?

   Model answer

   By what they produce rather than by where they come from. He deliberately set aside the subject's psychological or medical condition, which he called the roots, and asked instead about the fruits: whether the person becomes more loving, more courageous, more unified. He treated experience as the living source of religion, with institutions and doctrines as later growths, and concluded that such experiences are authoritative for the one who has them without binding anybody else.

5. 5

   Explain what Otto meant by the numinous.

   Model answer

   Otto argued that the heart of religion is an encounter with the holy which cannot be reduced to morality or to reason. Faced with it the subject feels their own nothingness, what he called creature-feeling. What is met is a mystery that terrifies and overwhelmingly attracts at the same time. Otto held this response draws on a capacity of the human mind rather than being learned, and that ordinary descriptive language cannot capture it.

6. 6

   Compare the approaches of James and Otto.

   Model answer

   James works as a psychologist, collecting many reported cases and generalising about their features and their effects; his interest is in what the experiences do for the people who have them, and he is careful about claims regarding the object. Otto works as a theologian and phenomenologist, trying to characterise what is encountered and insisting that the holy is a category in its own right, not a form of something else. James is comparative and cautious; Otto is more confident that the numinous is genuinely met.

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