For much of the last century, "experience" has been a central category in the philosophy of religion. Rather than treating religious beliefs as attitudes toward propositions ("God created the world in seven days, yes of no"), experientialist approaches understand religion as an articulation of extraordinary feeling or happenings that, in one way or another, disrupt our everyday existence. Charles Taylor’s enormous new book opens with a report by the Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths. Griffiths recalls:
"A lark rose suddenly from the ground behind the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as through it was but a veil before the face of God."
The advantages of a religious phenomenology are obvious. As Taylor argues, it provides a pretty compelling rebuttal to the argument that religion has been exposed or refuted by modern natural science. Transcendent experience can be negated by a reductionist account of causation. But they’re very difficult to deny as such: literature provides ample proof that many people have had, and continue to have such experiences. The problems, however, are equally clear. If experience is prior to articulation, what is the relation between "faith" and doctrine? Is experience historically variable? Is it available, at least in principle, to everyone?
Questions like these have been lately giving some me trouble in my own work, which is not in the philosophy of religion, but rather the history of political thought. Although it’s easy enough to report what others have said, I’ve found certain arguments difficult of access because I’ve never had anything comparable to the epiphany described above. Neither has anybody I’ve talked to here in godless Cambridge—or at least they haven’t admitted it to me.
So I thought I’d solicit some information from the readers and contributors to this blog. To quote Jimi Hendrix: are you experienced? How does felt transcendence relate to your sectarian/institutional religious commitments? The bigger issue, of course, is whether reliance on an experiential warrant undermines traditional claims that religious teachings are true . Although there’s surely more to faith than propositional attitudes, it was not without reason that radical critics of religion in the 17th and 18th centuries directed their attack against the external, physical claims of revelation rather than the subjective grounds on which they are maintained.
