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The Natural Roots of Religious Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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This paper is devoted to the task of exploring just what there is in man's nature which makes it possible for him to be open to religious experience, to be positively disposed to receive it. By ‘natural’ here I mean only that which all men are in fact endowed with when they enter this present world of human history before they enter into any particular religious context. Hence I am not going to get involved in the difficult theological controversy as to whether this initial endowment includes only what is due to human nature as a created nature or also some supernatural extra gift of God as orienting man in a special way towards himself in this existential historical order, which could have been otherwise. What he begins life with in the present historical order I shall call natural, whatever its origin.What I mean by ‘religious experience’ must be left somewhat vague, so as to include its many varieties. Let us describe it roughly as any direct existential awareness of the presence or activity of an ultimate, absolute, transcendent dimension of reality, especially the more intense forms of unitive awareness of this Transcendent which have traditionally been called ‘mystical experience’. Before beginning our exploration, let me stress that my purpose here is not to establish or validate that there is such a thing as authentic religious experience. I presuppose that as known or accepted from elsewhere, at least as a hypothesis for discussion.
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References
page 512 note 1 For a philosophical exposition of this doctrine of the drive of the spirit toward the infinite, the principal exponent of which is the Transcendental Thomist School, see the account of this school (Maréchal, Rahner, Lotz, Coreth, Lonergan, etc.) by Otto Muck, S.J., The Transcendental Method (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968).Google Scholar See also the fine popular exposition of Rahner's position by Joseph Donceel, S. J. ‘Rahner's Argument for God’, America cxxiii (31 10. 1970), 340–2.Google Scholar See also the older works: O'Connor, W. R., The Eternal Quest (London: Longmans Green, 1949)Google Scholar; O'Mahony, J., The Desire of God (Dublin: Cork University Press, 1929)Google Scholar, and my own book, The Philosophical Approach to God: A Neothomist erspective (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Publications, 1980, Ch. 1.Google Scholar
For an exposition of the same basic analysis in Hindu thought, see Chethimattam, J. B., Consciousness and Reality: An Indian Approach to Metaphysics (Bangalore: Dharmaram College, 1967Google Scholar, reprinted by Chapman, , London, 1971Google Scholar), part II, chap. IV: ‘In Search of the One from Consciousness’, pp. 147–52.Google Scholar
page 514 note 1 Note that even Jean–Paul Sartre, with his atheistic existentialism of the absurd, admits the same drive toward the infinite: ‘To be man means to reach toward being G. Or, if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God’ (Being and Nothingness, New York, Philosophical Library, 1956, p. 566).Google Scholar But because Sartre does not believe that God exists, there is no term for this drive, and man thus becomes ‘a useless passion’. Nietzsche also says somewhere: ‘Every desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity.’
page 514 note 2 Cf. Kaufman, Gordon, ‘On the Meaning of “God”: Transcendence without Mythology’, Harvard Theological Review, LIX (1966), 125Google Scholar: ‘The self's awareness of being restricted on all sides, rendering problematic the very meaning of existence, gives rise to the question: “What is it that in this way hems us in? How is this ultimate Limit to be conceived?” This is the most powerful experience we have of transcendence of the given on the finite level, the awareness of genuine activity and reality beyond and behind what is directly open to our view.’
page 517 note 1 After writing this part of my paper, I was delighted to find it admirably summed up by Lehmann, Karl in his article ‘Transcendence’ in the new encyclopedia of theology, Sacramentum Mundi (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), VI, 278Google Scholar: ‘The possibility of attaining insight into the unknowability and ineffability of the primordial transcendence, which is not directly accessible, is based on the latent, image-like presence of transcendence in man prior to all reflection… This mysterious centre and depth in the nature of man is what arouses him to his transcendent movement.’
page 517 note 2 Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy (London, 1924).Google Scholar
page 520 note 1 Cf. Otto, Rudolf, Mysticism East and West (New York: Meridian Books, 1957)Google Scholar, and Marcus, John, ‘East and West: Phenomenologies of the Self’, International Philosophical Quarterly xi (1971), 5–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 521 note 1 Cf. the long monograph by Romeyer, B., ‘St. Thomas et notre connaissance de l'esprit humain’, Archives de philosophie, xi (1932)Google Scholar; and Pruche, B., ‘La conscience de soi’, Etudes et recherches (Ottawa), viii (1952), 137–52.Google Scholar
page 523 note 1 For a profound metaphysical-psychological analysis of the soul's awareness of the presence of God to it as the causal Source of its being, see Joseph Maréchal, S.J., Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics (Eng. translation reprinted; Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1966).Google Scholar