religious experience

Introduction

      specific experiences such as wonder at the infinity of the cosmos, the sense of awe and mystery in the presence of the holy, feelings of dependence on a divine power or an unseen order, the sense of guilt and anxiety accompanying belief in a divine judgment, and the feeling of peace that follows faith in divine forgiveness. Some thinkers also point to a religious aspect to the purpose of life and with the destiny of the individual.

      In the first sense, religious experience means an encounter with the divine in a way analogous to encounters with other persons and things in the world. In the second case, reference is made not to an encounter with a divine being but rather to the apprehension of a quality of holiness or rightness in reality or to the fact that all experience can be viewed in relation to the ground from which it springs. In short, religious experience means both special experience of the divine or ultimate and the viewing of any experience as pointing to the divine or ultimate.

Study and evaluation

      “Religious experience” was not widely used as a technical term prior to the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by William James (James, William), an eminent U.S. psychologist and philosopher, but the interpretation of religious concepts and doctrines in terms of individual experience reaches back at least to 16th-century Spanish mystics and to the age of the Protestant Reformers. A special emphasis on the importance of experience in religion is found in the works of such thinkers as Jonathan Edwards (Edwards, Jonathan), Friedrich Schleiermacher (Schleiermacher, Friedrich), and Rudolf Otto (Otto, Rudolf). Basic to the experiential approach is the belief that it allows for a firsthand understanding of religion as an actual force in human life, in contrast with religion taken either as church membership or as belief in authoritative doctrines. The attempt to interpret such concepts as God, faith, conversion, sin, salvation, and worship through personal experience and its expressions opened up a wealth of material for the investigation of religion by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists as well as by theologians and philosophers. A focus on religious experience is especially important for Phenomenologists (Phenomenology) (thinkers who seek the basic structures of human consciousness) and Existentialist philosophers.

      A number of controversial issues have emerged from these studies, involving not only different conceptions of the nature and structure of religious experience but also different views of the manner in which it is to be evaluated and the sort of evaluation possible from the standpoint of a given discipline. Four such issues are basic: (1) whether religious experience points to special experiences of the divine or whether any experience may be regarded as religious by virtue of becoming related to the divine; (2) the kinds of differentia that can serve to distinguish religion or the religious from both secular life and other forms of spirituality, such as morality and art; (3) whether religious experience can be understood and properly evaluated in terms of its origins and its psychological or sociological conditions or is sui generis, calling for interpretation in its own terms; and (4) whether religious experience has cognitive status, involving encounter with a being, beings, or a power transcending human consciousness, or is merely subjective and composed entirely of ideas and feelings that have no reference beyond themselves. The last issue, transposed in accordance with either a Positivist (Positivism) outlook or some types of Empiricism, which restrict assertible reality to the realm of sense experience, would be resolved at once by the claim that the problem cannot be meaningfully discussed, since key terms, such as “God” and “power,” are strictly meaningless.

      Proponents of mysticism, such as Rudolf Otto, Rufus Jones (Jones, Rufus Matthew), and W.T. Stace (Stace, W T), have maintained the validity of immediate experience of the divine; theologians such as Emil Brunner (Brunner, Emil) have stressed the self-authenticating character of man's encounter with God; naturalistically oriented psychologists, such as Freud (Freud, Sigmund) and J.H. Leuba, have rejected such claims, explaining religion in psychological and genetic terms as a projection of human wishes and desires. Philosophers such as William James, Josiah Royce (Royce, Josiah), William E. Hocking, and Wilbur M. Urban have represented an idealist tradition in interpreting religion, stressing the concepts of purpose, value, and meaning as essential for understanding the nature of God. Naturalist philosophers, of whom John Dewey (Dewey, John) was typical, have focussed on the “religious” as a quality of experience and an attitude toward life that is more expressive of the human spirit than of any supernatural reality. Theologians Douglas Clyde Macintosh and Henry N. Wieman sought to build an “empirical theology” on the basis of religious experience understood as involving a direct perception of God. Unlike Macintosh, Wieman held that such a perception is sensory in character. Personalist philosophers, such as Edgar S. Brightman (Brightman, Edgar Sheffield) and Peter Bertocci, have regarded the person as the basic category for understanding all experience and have interpreted religious experience as the medium through which God is apprehended as the cosmic person. Existential thinkers (Existentialism), such as Søren Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard, Søren), Gabriel Marcel (Marcel, Gabriel), and Paul Tillich (Tillich, Paul), have seen God manifested in experience in the form of a power that overcomes estrangement and enables man to fulfill himself as an integrated personality. Process philosophers (process philosophy), such as Alfred North Whitehead (Whitehead, Alfred North) and Charles Hartshorne (Hartshorne, Charles), have held that the idea of God emerges in religious experience but that the nature and reality of God are problems calling for logical argument (Logical Positivism) and metaphysical interpretation, in which emphasis falls on the relation between God and the world being realized in a temporal process. Logical Empiricists, of whom A.J. Ayer (Ayer, Sir A.J.) has been typical, have held that religious and theological expressions are without literal significance, because there is no way in which they can be either justified or falsified (refuted). On this view, religious experience is entirely emotive, lacking all cognitive value. Analytic philosophers following the lead of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein, Ludwig), an Austrian-British thinker, approach religious experience through the structure of religious language, attempting to discover exactly how this language functions within the community of believers who use it.

Religious experience and other experience

Views of experience in general

      Religious experience must be understood against the background of a general theory of experience as such. Experience as conceived from the standpoint of a British philosophical tradition stemming from John Locke and David Hume is essentially the reports of the world received through the senses. Experience, as a tissue of sensible content, was set in contrast to reason, understood as the domain of logic and mathematics. The mind was envisaged as a wax tablet on which the sensible world imprints itself; and the one who experiences is the passive recipient of what is given. It is possible to distinguish and compare these sensible items by means of understanding, but the data themselves are available only through experience—i.e., the sensation (sensory reception, human) of things and reflection upon thought and mental activities, feelings, and desires. According to this classical empiricist view, all ideas, beliefs, and theories expressed in conceptual form are to be traced back to their origin in sense if they are to be understood and justified.

      The above view of experience came under criticism from two sides. Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel), an 18th-century German philosopher, who still retained some of the assumptions of the position he criticized, nevertheless declared that experience is not identical with passively received sensible material but must be construed as the joint product of such material and its being grasped by an understanding that thinks in accordance with certain necessary categories not derived from the senses. Kant opened the way for a new understanding of the element of interpretation in all experience, and his successors in the development of German Idealism, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegel, came to characterize experience as the many-sided reflection of man's multiple encounters with the world, other men, and himself.

      A second attack on the classical conception came from U.S. Pragmatist philosophers (Pragmatism), notably Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce, Charles Sanders), William James, and John Dewey, for whom experience was the medium for the disclosure of whatever there is to be encountered; it is far richer and more complex than a passive registry of sensible data. Experience was seen as a human activity related to the purposes and interests of the one who experiences, and it was understood as an interpreted product of multiple transactions between man and the environment. Moreover, stress was placed on the social and funded character of experience in place of the older conception of experience as a private content confined to the mind of an individual. On this view, experience is not confined to its content but includes modes or dimensions that represent frames of meaning—social, moral, aesthetic, political, religious—through which whatever is encountered can be interpreted. James went beyond his associates in developing the broadest theory of experience, known as radical empiricism, according to which the relations and connections between items of experience are given along with these items themselves.

      Critics of the classical view of experience, while not concerned exclusively with religious experience, saw, nevertheless, that if experience is confined to the domain of the senses it is then difficult to understand what could be meant by religious experience if the divine is not regarded as one sensible object among others. This consideration prompted attempts to understand experience in broader terms. Cutting across all theories of experience is the basic fact that experience demands expression in language and symbolic forms. To know what has been experienced and how it is to be understood requires the ability to identify things, persons, and events through naming, describing, and interpreting, which involve appropriate concepts and language. No experience can be the subject of analysis while it is being had or undergone; communication and critical inquiry require that experiences be cast into symbolic form that arrests them for further scrutiny. The various uses of language—political, scientific, moral, religious, aesthetic, and others—represent so many purposes through which experience is described and interpreted.

Views of religious experience

      Specifically religious experience has been variously identified in the following ways: the awareness of the holy, which evokes awe and reverence; the feeling of absolute dependence that reveals man's status as a creature; the sense of being at one with the divine; the perception of an unseen order or of a quality of permanent rightness in the cosmic scheme; the direct perception of God; the encounter with a reality “wholly other”; the sense of a transforming power as a presence. Sometimes, as in the striking case of the Old Testament prophets, the experience of God has been seen as a critical judgment on man and as the disclosure of his separation from the holy. Those who identify religion as a dimension or aspect of experience point to man's attitude toward an overarching ideal, to a total reaction to life, to an ultimate concern for the meaning of one's being, or to a quest for a power that integrates human personality. In all these cases, it is the fact that the attitudes and concerns in question are directed to an ultimate object beyond man that justifies their being called religious. All interpreters are agreed that religious experience involves what is final in value for man and concerns belief in what is ultimate in reality.

      Because of their intimate relation to one another, the religious and the moral have often been confused. The problem has been intensified by many attempts—beginning with Kant's treatise on religion (1793)—to interpret religion as essentially morality or merely as an incentive for doing one's duty. Religion and morality are, however, usually taken to be distinguishable; religion concerns the being of a person, what he is and what he acknowledges as the worshipful reality, while morality concerns what the person does and the principles governing his relation to others. While it is generally acknowledged that religion must affect man's conduct in the world, some have maintained that there is no morality without religion, while others deny this claim on the ground that morality must remain autonomous and free of divine sanctions. Religious experience may be distinguished from the aesthetic (aesthetics) aspect of experience in that the former involves commitment and devotion to the divine, while the latter is focussed on the appreciation and enjoyment of qualities, forms, and patterns in themselves, whether as natural objects or works of art. Anthropological studies have shown that primitive religions gave birth to many forms of art (religious symbolism and iconography) that, in the course of development, won independence as secular forms of expression. The problem of the relation between religion and art is posed in a particularly acute way when reference is made to religious art as a special form of the aesthetic. Since it is concerned with the holy and the purpose of human life as a whole, most scholars would hold that religious experience should be related in an intelligible way to all other experience and forms of experience. The task of tracing out these relationships belongs to theology and the philosophy of religion.

The structure of religious experience

The self and the other

      All religious experience can be described in terms of three basic elements: first, the personal concerns, attitudes, feelings, and ideas (personality) of the individual who has the experience; second, the religious object disclosed in the experience or the reality to which it is said to refer; third, the social forms that arise from the fact that the experience in question can be shared. Although the first two elements can be distinguished for purposes of analysis, they are not separated within the integral experience itself. Religious experience is always found in connection with a personal concern and quest for the real self, oriented toward the power that makes life holy or a ground and a goal of all existence. A wide variety of individual experiences are thus involved, among which are attitudes of seriousness and solemnity in the face of the mystery of human destiny; feelings of awe and of being unclean evoked by the encounter with the holy; the sense of a power or a person who both loves and judges man; the experience of being converted or of having the course of life directed toward the divine; the feeling of relief stemming from the sense of divine forgiveness; the sense that there is an unseen order or power upon which the value of all life depends; the sense of being at one with the divine and of abandoning the egocentric self.

      In all these situations, the experience is realized in the life of an individual who at the same time has his attention focussed on an “other,” or divine reality, that is present or encountered. The determination of the nature of this other poses a problem of interpretation that requires the use of symbols, analogies, images, and concepts for expressing the reality that evokes religious experience in an understandable way. Four basic conceptions of the divine may be distinguished: the divine as an impersonal, sacred order (Logos, Tao, ṛta, Asha) governing the universe and man's destiny; the divine as power that is holy and must be approached with awe, proper preparation, or ritual cleansing; the divine as all-embracing One, the ultimate Unity and harmony of all finite realities and the goal of the mystical quest; and the divine as an individual or self transcending the world and man and yet standing in relation to both at the same time.

      The two most important concepts that have been developed by theologians and philosophers for the interpretation of the divine are transcendence and immanence; each is meant to express the relation between the divine and finite realities. Transcendence means going beyond a limit or surpassing a boundary; immanence means remaining within or existing within the confines of a limit. The divine is said to transcend man and the world when it is viewed as distinct from both and not wholly identical with either; the divine is said to be immanent when it is viewed as wholly or partially identical with some reality within the world, such as man or the cosmic order. The conception of the divine as an impersonal, sacred order represents the extreme of immanence since that order is regarded as entirely within the world and not as imposing itself from without. The conception of the divine as an individual or self represents the extreme of transcendence, since God is taken as not wholly identical with either the world or any finite reality within it. Some thinkers have described the divine as wholly transcendent of or “wholly other” than finite reality, some have maintained the total immanence of the divine, and still others claim that both concepts can be applied and therefore that the two characteristics do not exclude each other.

Social forms or expressions

      Most enduring, historical religious traditions find their roots in the religious experience and insight of charismatic individuals who have served as founders; the sharing of their experience among disciples and followers leads to the establishment of a religious community. Thus, the social dimension of religion is a primary fact, but it need not be seen as opposed to religious experience taken as a wholly individual affair. There has been some difference of opinion on the point; Whitehead, for example, put emphasis on the “solitariness” of religious experience precisely in order to deny the claim of those who, like Émile Durkheim (Durkheim, Émile), a French sociologist, characterized religion as essentially a social fact. The social expression of religious experience results in the formation of specifically religious groups distinct from such natural groups as the family, the local society, and the state. Religious communities, including brotherhoods, mystery cults, synagogues, churches, sects, and monastic and missionary orders, serve initially to preserve and interpret their traditions or the body of doctrine, practices, and liturgical forms through which religious experience comes to be expressed. Such communities play a significant role in the shaping of religious experience and in determining its meaning for the individual through the structure of worship and liturgy and the establishment of a sacred calendar. Communities differ in the extent to which they stress the importance of individual experience of the divine, as distinct from adherence to a creed expressing the basic beliefs of the community. The tension between social and individual factors becomes apparent at times when the individual experience of the prophet or reformer conflicts with the norm of experience and interpretation established by the community. Therefore, although the religious community aims at maintaining its historic faith as a framework within which to interpret experience of the divine, every such community must find ways of recognizing both novel experience and fresh insight resulting from individual reflection and contemplation.

Objective “intention,” or reference

      Religious experience is always understood by those who have it as pointing beyond itself to some reality regarded as divine. For the believer, religious experience discloses something other than itself; this referent is sometimes described as the “intentional” object that is meant or aimed at by the experiencing person. Analysis of religious experience, interpretations placed upon it, and the beliefs to which it gives rise may result in the denial that there is any such reality to be encountered or that the assertion of it is justified by the experience in question. This conclusion, however, does not change the fact that all religious experience, whether that of the mystic who strives for unity with God or of the naturalist who points to a religious quality in life, purports to be experience “of” something other than itself. The question of the cognitive (cognition) import or the objective validity of religious experience is one of the most difficult problems encountered in the philosophy of religion. In confronting the question, it is necessary to distinguish between various ways of describing the phenomena under consideration and the critical appraisal of truth claims concerning the reality of the divine made on the basis of these phenomena. Even if describing and appraising are not utterly distinct and involve one another, it is generally admitted that the question of validity cannot be settled on the basis of historical or descriptive accounts alone. Validity and cognitive import are matters calling for logical, semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical criteria—of the principles of rational order and coherence, meaning, knowledge, and reality—and this means that the appraisal of religious experience is ultimately a philosophical and theological problem. The anthropologist will seek to identify and describe the religious experience of primitive peoples as part of a general history and theory of man; the sociologist (sociology) will concentrate on the social expression of religious experience and seek to determine the nature of specifically religious groupings in relation to other groups—associations and organizations that constitute a given society; the psychologist (psychology) will seek to identify religious experience within the life of the person and attempt to show its relation to the total structure of the self, its behaviour, attitudes, and purposes. In all these cases attention is directed to religious experience as a phenomenon to be described as a factor that performs certain functions in human life and society. As William Warde Fowler, a British historian, showed in his classic Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911), the task of elucidating the role of religion in Roman society can be accomplished without settling the question of the validity or cognitive import of the religious feelings, ideas, and beliefs in question. The empirical investigator, as such, has no special access to the critical question of the validity of religious experience.

      The most radical form of the denial that religious experience has cognitive import is advanced by the Logical Positivists, who hold that all assertions or forms of expression involving a term such as “God” are meaningless because there is no way in which they can be verified or falsified.

      Others who hold that religious utterance based on experience is without cognitive import regard it either as the expression of emotions or an indication that the person using religious language has certain feelings that are associated with religion. Those who follow the lead of Wittgenstein regard religious utterances as noncognitive but attempt to determine the way in which religious language is actually used within a circle of believers. Some psychologists have denied cognitive status to religious experience on the ground that it represents nothing more than man's projection of his own insecurity in the face of problems posed by life in the world and therefore has no referent beyond itself.

Immediacy and mediation

Revelational (revelation) and mystical immediacy (mysticism)

      Among defenders of the validity and cognitive import of religious experience, it is necessary to distinguish those who take such experience to be an immediate and self-authenticating encounter with the divine and those who claim that apprehension of the divine is the result of inference from, or interpretation of, religious experience. Two forms of immediacy may be distinguished: the revelational and the mystical. Christian theologians, such as Emil Brunner (Brunner, Emil) and H.H. Farmer, speak of a “divine-human encounter,” and Martin Buber (Buber, Martin), a Jewish religious philosopher, describes religious experience as an “I Thou” relationship; for all three, religious experience means an immediate encounter between persons. The second form of the immediate is the explicitly mystical sort of experience in which the aim is to pass beyond every form of articulation and to attain unity with the divine.

Mediation through analysis and critical interpretation

      A number of thinkers have insisted on the validity of religious experience but have denied that it can be understood as wholly immediate and self-supporting, since it stands in need of analysis and critical interpretation. Some, like Paul Tillich (Tillich, Paul), hold that there are certain “boundary experiences,” such as having an ultimate concern or experiencing the unconditional character of moral obligation, that become intelligible only when understood as the presence of the holy in experience. Others, such as H.D. Lewis and Charles Hartshorne, find the divine ingredient in the experience of the transcendent and supremely worshipful reality but demand that this experience be coherently articulated and, in the case of Hartshorne, supplemented by rational argument for the reality of the divine. Dewey (Dewey, John) envisaged a religious quality in experience pointing to God as an ideal that stands in active and creative tension with the actual course of events. Whitehead (Whitehead, Alfred North) identified the presence of the divine with an apprehension of a “permanent rightness” in the scheme of things and based the validity of the experience on the claim that an adequate cosmology requires God as a principle of selection aiming at the realization of the good in the world process. James (James, William) found the justification of religious experience in its consequences for the life of the individual: valid experience is distinguished by its philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness. Finally, some have sought to combine experience and interpretation by taking the traditional proofs of God's existence and pointing to their roots in the experience of perfection, of the contingency of one's own existence, and of the reality of purpose in human life. On this view, the arguments for the reality of God are not wholly formal demonstrations but rather the tracing out of intelligible patterns in experience.

Preparations for experience

      Mystics, prophets, and religious thinkers in many traditions, both East and West, have been at one in emphasizing the need for various forms of preparation as a preliminary for gaining religious insight. The basic idea is that ordinary ways of looking at the world, dictated by the demands of everyday life, stand in the way of the understanding of religious truth; man must pass beyond these limitations by the disciplining of his mind and body. Three classic forms of preparation may be distinguished: first, rational dialectic for training the mind to reach insight (this explains why many mystical thinkers from the Pythagoreans to Nicholas of Cusa and Benedict de Spinoza were deeply involved in mathematics); second, moral preparation aiming at purity of heart, which was sometimes conjoined with bodily discipline, as in the Indian Yoga exercises; third, the use of drugs to expand the range of consciousness beyond that required for ordinary life. It is significant that the great mystics invariably regarded such preparation as necessary, but not sufficient, for experience. The self may be prepared, but the vision may not come; being prepared, as it were, establishes no claim on the divine. The experience described by St. John of the Cross (John of the Cross, Saint), a 16th-century Spanish mystic, as “the dark night of the soul” points precisely to the experience of failure. The soul in this situation is convinced that God has abandoned it, cast it into darkness, perhaps forever. Mystics in the Taoist (Daoism) and Buddhist (Buddhism) traditions have often emphasized the spontaneity of insight and the need to seek it through an “effortless striving” that combines the need to search with the awareness that the insight cannot be compelled. Zen Buddhists are fond of pointing to insights that are already possessed but not recognized as such until their holder is shaken loose from ordinary patterns of thought.

Situational contexts and forms of expression

Cultic and devotional

      Religious experience receives its initial, practical expression in the forming of the cult that provides an orderly framework for the worship of the religious object. Worship includes expressions of praise, acknowledgments of the excellency of the divine, communion in the form of prayer, and the use of sacraments (sacrament) or visible objects that signify or represent the invisible sacred beyond them, feelings of joy and of peace expressed often in musical form, and sacrifice or the offering of gifts to the divine or in the name of the divine. Worship is ordered by means of liturgy directing the experience of the worshipper in patterns that combine the written word, the spoken word, and sacred music (liturgical music) in a unity aimed at bringing him or her into the presence of the divine.

Life crises and rites of passage (rite of passage)

      Religious experience has to do with the quality and purpose of life as a whole and with the ultimate destiny of the person. Certain special times and events in the course of life present themselves as occasions that are set apart and celebrated, because they direct man's thought to the divine and the sacred with peculiar forcefulness. These occasions, called life crises, are regarded as dangerous because they are transitional from one stage of life to another and open to view the relation of life as a whole to its sacred ground. Pregnancy and birth, the naming of a child, being initiated into the community—sometimes called “puberty rites”—the choice of a vocation, the celebration of marriage, and the time of death are experienced as special events distinct from the routine happenings of secular life. These events represent “crises”—i.e., turning points—when man's relation to the sacred becomes a matter of special concern. As Gerardus van der Leeuw (Leeuw, Gerardus van der), a Dutch phenomenologist and historian of religions, points out, these transitional times are occasions for celebration in every culture because they mark the death of one stage and the birth of another in a universal cycle of life.

Sacred and secular

      The marking off of these crisis occasions from the routine events of daily life points to the all-important distinction between the sacred and the secular. As directed toward the sacred, religious experience finds expression in the specifically religious form of the cult and in the cycle of sacred life. There is, however, a secular as well as a sacred life, and, since religious experience concerns the whole of life, the religious meaning must be related to all the dimensions of secular life—political, economic, moral, technological, and other. The relationship is twofold; on the one hand, there is the bearing of the conception of the divine on standards of behaviour, and, on the other, there is the influence that the religious meaning has upon one's general attitude toward life. The sacred, thus, makes its impact on the secular by providing principles that are to govern the relations between persons and by holding before men a vision of the divine that gives purpose to life as a whole. Although the sacred retains its dynamism by becoming related to secular life, there is the constant danger that it will lose itself in the secular, unless specifically religious forms of life are preserved. The existence in every society of secret and mystery cults, of sacred brotherhoods, of groups of disciples devoted to holy men, of monastic orders, and, on the broadest scale, of established churches and denominations, points to the need felt to retain the sacred as a special domain that can neither be merged into nor contained within secular society.

Verbal, conceptual, and symbolic

      In all of the world religions, religious experience receives its most enduring expression in the form of sacred scriptures (scripture) and the body of commentary through which they are interpreted. Mythological (myth) and symbolic forms of expression are older than conceptual forms and systems of doctrine. Myth takes the form of a story and represents the imaginative use of materials drawn from sensible experience in order to express a religious meaning surpassing the sensible world. Myths of creation (creation myth) in many religions give ample evidence of this imaginative function. The task of the theologian (theology) using conceptual tools is to elucidate the thought content of the myth and other primary forms of religious expression—legend, parable, confession, lamentation, prophetic vision—and thereby reduce the degree of dependence on the sensible and imaginative elements. It is important to distinguish devotional and liturgical expressions from the theological use of language. Creeds (creed), confessions, psalms and hymns of praise, litanies and scriptures containing a record of the lives and experiences of sacred persons, all give immediate expression to the primary experience upon which a religious tradition is founded. Systems of theology and religious philosophy make their appearance when it becomes necessary to conceptualize and express consistently the body of belief (doctrine and dogma) about the divine, the world, and man implied in this primary experience. Tension exists between religious experience and theological expression at two points: first, the pietistic and evangelical spirit in religion, as seen, for instance, in some forms of Protestant Christianity, and the bhakti devotional movement in Hinduism, seeks to preserve the primacy of experience at the expense of theology; and, second, those who acknowledge the indispensability of theology will also demand that its formulations remain in accord with the experience it is meant to express and interpret.

Types of religious experience and personality

      The personal character of religious experience makes it essential to understand its varieties as manifested in different types of personality and the functions they perform. The mystic, a reflective and contemplative type, shuts out the world and all distracting influences in order to reach true selfhood through purification and enlightenment. Although mysticism has social implications, the mystic is primarily an individualist, whereas the prophet, a person of intense but intermittent experience, sees himself called to be a spokesman for the divine to the community or all mankind, and regards his own experience as a message that enables him to interpret the past and the future in the light of the divine will. The priest (priesthood) is a mediator between man and the divine, and his main function is the proper ordering of worship through liturgical forms. By contrast with the prophet, whose insight is spontaneous, the priest attains the authority of his office through education and training; as guardian of the tradition, he must assume administrative responsibilities in addition to his role as spiritual adviser; thus he is both active and contemplative. The reformer is a figure who stands within a religious tradition and seeks to transform or revitalize it in the light of his own experience and insight. The reforms intended may be moral, intellectual, or ecclesiastical, depending on the particular genius of the individual. Common to all reformers is the conviction that some valid and essential feature of traditional faith has been ignored or distorted and that these deficiencies must be overcome if the religion is to be purified. It is characteristic of the reformer to be actively engaged in bringing about the reforms indicated by his renewing experience. The monk (monasticism) or member of a religious order is in search of a special or sacred place set apart from secular life within which a religious life can be lived and moral and religious demands fulfilled to a greater degree than is possible in the world. Different orders stress different aspects of experience: some emphasize ascetic practices and self-discipline; others are devoted to the preservation of learning and the development of theology; still others make missionary zeal uppermost, and the members are impelled by their own experience to seek to convert others. The forerunner of the monk, who lives in a community governed by rule, was the hermit or religious recluse, the type for whom solitary existence, preferably in deserts and barren places, is necessary for communion with the divine and self-purification. The saint is a figure venerated by the religious community as one who embodies perfection in some form. The saint may have been a martyr, exhibiting perfection in faith; a person possessed of intensified capacity for experience and communion with the divine; or one who achieves to a supreme degree the moral and spiritual ideals of the beatific life. The theologian has the task of expressing the historic faith of a community concerning the divine (theos) in rational or conceptual form (logos). The content of his thought, though handed on to him in its essentials by the tradition, will depend on his own experience and his insight into the special relevance of that tradition for his time. The theologian both interprets and reinterprets. The founder, as might be expected, surpasses all others in importance. The founder's experience forms the basis of his own authority and the substance of the religion he establishes. The intensity of his experience and the effect it has upon his personality are decisive factors determining the response of his initial followers and disciples. There is reason to believe that the founders of the great religions, such as Moses, Buddha, and Jesus (Jesus Christ), did not intend to fill this role; the founding of the religion in each case was the result of the impact of their personalities and of the profundity of their experience on those who gathered around them.

John Edwin Smith

Additional Reading

The nature of religious experience

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), a classic philosophical and psychological study; Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, 9th ed. (1922; Eng. trans., The Idea of the Holy, 1923; 2nd ed., 1950), a study of the nonrational in religious experience; J.M. Moore, Theories of Religious Experience, with Special Reference to James, Otto and Bergson (1938); James A. Martin, Jr., Empirical Philosophies of Religion (1945); and C.C.J. Webb, Religious Experience (1945), contain valuable appraisals and a good bibliography; H.E. Brunner, Wahrheit als Begegnung (1937; Eng. trans., The Divine-Human Encounter, 1943); and Martin Buber, Ich und Du (1923; Eng. trans., I and Thou, 1937 and 1970), express the view that authentic religion is based on personal encounter between man and God; John Dewey, A Common Faith (1934), argues for the “religious” in experience; E.S. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion (1940), represents the Personalist view that personhood is the most basic quality of reality; W.E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912, reprinted 1963); and J.E. Smith, Experience and God (1968), emphasize the experiential basis of the question of God; and Alister Hardy, The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience (1979), a collection of 3,000 personal reports.

Religious experience and other experience

H.D. Lewis, Our Experience of God (1959); and J.E. Smith, Religion and Empiricism (1967), deal with the bearing of different conceptions of experience on religion; Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight (1912); W.G. de Burgh, From Morality to Religion (1938); and Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond (1963), treat the relation between religion and morality; Gerardus van der Leeuw, Vom Heiligen in der Kunst (1957; Eng. trans., Sacred and Profane Beauty, 1963), treats the relation between art and religion.

The structure of religious experience

John MacMurray, The Structure of Religious Experience (1936, reprinted 1971); J.B. Pratt, The Religious Consciousness (1920); Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (1957); and A.N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (1926), deal with psychological, theological, and metaphysical aspects; Joachim Wach, The Sociology of Religion (1944), is an indispensable study of the social expression of religious experience; William A. Christian, Meaning and Truth in Religion (1964); F. Ferre, Basic Modern Philosophy of Religion (1967); Ninian Smart, Philosophers and Religious Truth (1964); and J.E. Smith, Reason and God (1961), deal with the issue of the cognitive import of religious experience; J.H. Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (1925), argues against its cognitive import; W.E. Hocking, Science and the Idea of God (1944); W.T. Stace, Religion and the Modern Mind (1960); and H.N. Wieman, The Wrestle of Religion with Truth (1927), discuss the relation between religion and science; J. MacQuarrie, God-Talk (1967); I.T. Ramsey, Christian Discourse (1965), and Models and Mystery (1964), represent the linguistic approach to religious experience; Mircea Eliade, Le Mythe de l'éternel retour (1949; Eng. trans., Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, 1954; rev. ed., 1965) and The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959), interpret religious experience through myth, symbol, and ritual.

Situational contexts and forms of expression

Evelyn Underhill, Worship (1936, reprinted 1957), invaluable for the meaning of worship and its forms; P. Edwall et al. (eds.), Ways of Worship (1951), treats the liturgies of the major Christian communities; Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; Eng. trans., The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1915, paperback 1961), presents the “group theory” of religion; C.C.J. Webb, Group Theories of Religion and the Individual (1916), a critique of Durkheim; Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth (1958); Arnold van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (1909; Eng. trans. 1960); and Gerardus van der Leeuw, Phänomenologie der Religion (1933; Eng. trans., Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 1938), on initiation rites and the cycle of sacred life; Joachim Wach, The Sociology of Religion (1944), the best source for the relation between religious and nonreligious groupings.

Types of religious experience and personality

Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (op. cit.); and Joachim Wach, The Sociology of Religion (1944), and Types of Religious Experience (1951), invaluable for the analysis of religious roles and personalities; Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination Among the Hebrews and Other Semites (1938); Rudolf Otto, Religious Essays (1931); and John Skinner, Prophecy and Religion (1922; paperback ed., 1961), deal with the meaning of prophecy in the Semitic traditions.

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