## 1. The phenomenology of religious experience



Commentators on religious experience disagree on the significance of
phenomenological considerations. Is there a phenomenology that is
distinctive of religious experience? And if there is, do we have a
reliable vocabulary to describe it? Is there a phenomenology of
mystical experience which crosses faith boundaries? Or are such
experiences saturated with tradition-specific doctrinal assumptions?
Are reports of religious experiences in central cases best read as
doctrine-inspired interpretations of the subjective character of the
experience, rather than as accounts of their phenomenology? And does
the affective phenomenology of religious experience do any epistemic
work? Let's consider some of these issues.


### 1.1 Religious experience as encounter with God



William Alston (1991, Chapter 1) has noted that we don't have a
well-developed vocabulary for the description of the phenomenal qualia
of "mystical" experience. (Compare William James's
suggestion that "mystical" experiences are
"ineffable": 1902, p. 380.) If someone takes God's
goodness to be displayed in, say, a mountain landscape, then the
phenomenology of their experience can perhaps be set down easily
enough, at least in some central respects; but what about the case
where an experience is said to be more directly of God (the case that
Alston intends to pick out by the expression "mystical
perception")? Alston suggests that our inability to describe the
elements of such experiences from a phenomenological point of view
does not imply that they lack a distinctive phenomenology, or that
they fail to be directed at some mind-independent reality, in rather
the way that sense experiences are.



We lack a relevant vocabulary, he argues, because we cannot construct
any simple correlation between a range of "stimulus
conditions" for mystical perception and the kinds of experience
that are likely to arise under those conditions. And therefore we
cannot refine a vocabulary for the description of mystical experience
by replication of relevant conditions and renewed attention to the
phenomenology of the experiences that occur under those conditions. By
contrast, there is in general no difficulty in specifying the
phenomenology of an experience of, say, turning one's face into
a breeze, because it is easy to recreate the stimulus conditions for
such an experience, and we can therefore attend repeatedly to the
character of the experience. And since others can also do this, we can
establish a public language for the description of such
experiences.



This difficulty in identifying the stimulus conditions for mystical
perception in no way impugns its epistemic worth, Alston thinks,
because God is said to be a personal reality, and an experience of
God's presence cannot be brought about, therefore, in some
relatively mechanical way, simply by creating an appropriate set of
sensory or other conditions. (Compare O'Hear 1984, Chapter 2.)
So given what we mean by "God," it is only to be expected
that mystical perception will fail to yield a vocabulary that will
allow us to specify at all precisely a correlative phenomenology. In
other words, even if (perhaps especially if) mystical perception is
veridical, we should not expect to have such a vocabulary.
Accordingly, the absence of the vocabulary cannot be thought to
constitute an objection to the good epistemic standing of such
experiences.



Notwithstanding these considerations, Alston and other commentators
have noted that in the Christian mystical tradition anyway there is,
in fact, quite a well developed vocabulary for describing the
subjective quality of such experiences. This vocabulary is modelled on
that of ordinary sense perception. So there are "spiritual
sensations" of touch, sight, taste, smell and hearing that are
taken to be in some way analogous to their counterparts in ordinary
sense perception. As Nelson Pike (1992) notes, this tradition has
commonly distinguished three varieties of experience of God: those
associated with the "prayer of quiet," the "prayer
of union," and "rapture," in order of increasing
intimacy of acquaintance with God. And each of these phases of the
spiritual life, it has been said, is to be associated with its own
distinctive phenomenology.



For example, speaking of the "prayer of quiet," Pike
comments that in such experiences



> 
> phenomenologically, God is located in that place within the body where
> one normally experiences oneself to be. ... the spiritual
> sensations involved are akin to ordinary auditory and olfactory
> perceptions as well as to ordinary perceptions of heat. They do not
> include sensations akin to those associated with inside or outside
> touch or to those connected with taste. (1992, p. 159)
> 



Of course, even this vocabulary can only carry a person so far towards
an understanding of the phenomenology of the experiences that are here
being described, because the vocabulary is, after all, only patterned
on that which applies in ordinary sense experience. So to ascertain
more exactly the nature of these "spiritual sensations" it
would be necessary to experience them firsthand (Pike 1992, p. 161).
Nonetheless, the convergence of mystical testimony upon some such set
of descriptions gives us a reason to think that these experiences,
like ordinary sense experiences, can be ordered in ways that admit of
a degree of inter-personal confirmation -- and that there is a
kind of correlation between the "angle of view" one takes
up in relation to the purported object of the experience
(corresponding to one's progression through the spiritual life,
and one's degree of closeness to God) and the phenomenology of
the associated experience. (For further discussion of the
"spiritual senses" tradition, see Gavrilyuk and Coakley
2012, and Aquino and Gavrilyuk 2022.)



These observations suggest another response to the objection that
mystical perception is epistemically defective because we lack a
reliable vocabulary for the description of the phenomenology of such
experiences. On the contrary, it may be said, there is such a
vocabulary, albeit that it is not as developed or its full meaning as
generally accessible as the vocabulary that we use for the description
of the phenomenology of ordinary sensory experience.



Some commentators have sought to distinguish between the component of
a report of a religious experience that is a record of its
phenomenology and the component that involves an interpretation of the
experience according to some favoured doctrinal scheme (Stace 1961).
As Pike notes, it is possible in principle that whole traditions of
mystical experience have been more concerned to communicate the
doctrinal implications of such experience rather than its
phenomenological content (1992, p. 174), and that they have adopted a
vocabulary for talking about the experiences that will suit this
purpose. But in light of the language of "spiritual
sensations" we may (with Pike) doubt that this is the right way
to understand the Christian mystical tradition. At least some strands
of this tradition seem to display a keen interest in recording the
phenomenology of various experiences. (See Turner 1995 for a
contrasting, non-experientialist reading of Christian mystical
writing.)



And there is a ready "spiritual" explanation of why there
should be such an interest: so that the believer can track their
progress through the spiritual life. Where the "ordinary
believer" is concerned, such progress is not likely to involve
some abstractly intellectual kind of achievement, and on some
approaches anyway, it is not likely to involve some new proximity to
God that can be specified independently of changes in the
phenomenology of one's experience. So in these cases, the
phenomenology serves to reassure the believer of their growing
closeness to God.



Such an approach can admit of corruptions, as when the believer seeks
out certain exalted experiences, and takes pride in them because they
are thought to signify intimacy with God, or perhaps takes pleasure in
them simply because of their thrilling or in other ways pleasing
phenomenological feel. David Pugmire (1998) speaks of
"dramaturgical" and "narcissistic" cases of
emotional experience where, respectively, the emotion is taken to
signify one's superior status in some respect, or where it is
valued because of its pleasant phenomenological feel. And we might
think of some religious experiences in similar terms. However, these
cases are presumably corruptions, and the tradition that has evolved
the language of "spiritual sensations" need not as such
have any tendency to value religious experience for these reasons.



Indeed, in so far as spiritual sensations are prized for these reasons
-- because of their phenomenological feel or as a way of
underwriting a person's sense of their own importance --
then they will be religiously defective (given the religious
importance of the virtue of humility for example); and they are also
likely to be epistemically defective, because of the suspicion that
the believer, whether consciously or not, is engineering the
production of such experiences for the advantages that they confer in
these respects. It is in part for these reasons that there exists a
very broadly based tradition of testing religious experiences by their
fruits in practice. An experience that fails to issue in a livelier
regard for the interests of one's neighbour, for example, is to
that extent disconfirmed on religious grounds (Alston 1991, pp.
250-254).



It is worth noting, with Pike, that even if a description of a
religious experience employs a relatively theoretical or
metaphysically loaded vocabulary, rather than simply using the
language of sensation, it does not follow that this is an
interpretation of the experience rather than an attempt to communicate
its phenomenological content: it may be, for example, that one's
experience is as of being appeared to by a very powerful spiritual
being, rather than simply a matter of certain sensations of heat,
touch or whatever being undergone, which are then interpreted on the
basis of some doctrinal scheme.



Some commentators have argued on the contrary that the theistic
meaning of an experience cannot be given directly in its
phenomenology, since "it's God" or "it's
omnipotent" can never be part of the phenomenology of an
experience but must involve some interpretation of the phenomenology
(Forgie 1984 and Zangwill 2004). Whatever stance one takes here, it
will be necessary to acknowledge that in ordinary sense experience we
commonly recognise someone without reliance upon inference, rather
than starting from some set of minimally interpreted sensations
(patches of colour and so on) and inferring that the presence of this
person in particular would best explain these phenomena.



Some scholars have sought to apply the distinction between experience
and interpretation to theistic mysticism in particular, arguing that
theistic mystical experiences have the same content as non-theistic
mystical experiences, and are just differently interpreted and
reported, because in all cases mystical experience is experience of
"undifferentiated unity" (Stace 1961, p. 236). (The
thought is that mystics who are orthodox theists have had to reckon
with the teaching that there is an ineradicable ontological
distinction between creature and creator, and this requirement has
shaped their reports.) And some have wondered whether
"introvertive" mystical experiences in all traditions (as
distinct from "extrovertive" mystical experiences, where
material objects are experienced as one) are devoid of any
phenomenological content, in so far as "what emerges is a state
of pure consciousness: 'pure' in the sense that it is not
the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except
itself" (Stace, p. 86). It is tempting to represent such
experiences in these terms in part, no doubt, because any attribution
of a phenomenological content to an experience is likely to imply a
subject-object structure (to imply some account of how something
seemed to the subject of the experience), so contradicting the
purported, non-dualistic content of an introvertive mystical
experience. (Compare Plotinus on union with the One in
*Enneads* VI.9.11.)



Other commentators have rejected the idea that mystics across
traditions have experiences that are subjectively the same, but just
differently reported. On the contrary, they say, the categories of a
faith tradition will make a difference not simply to the ways in which
experiences are reported, but to the character of the experience
itself (Katz 1978).



John Hick's (1989) study is a particularly influential
application of this Kantian sort of perspective within the domain of
religious experience. Hick argues that religious experiences are
structured according to tradition-specific sets of religious concepts.
On this view, all the major faiths offer a way of encountering one and
the same ultimate religious reality -- but Christians encounter
this reality, in their religious experience, in Trinitarian mode,
while Hindus encounter it as Brahman, and so on.



Hick is clear that this is not a matter of the advocates of the
various faiths having an experience whose phenomenological content is
much the same across the traditions, but just differently interpreted
and differently reported; rather, tradition-specific concepts (such as
those of the Trinity and Brahman) enter into the content of the
experience. Analogously, we might say that there is a sense in which a
newborn infant and I have the same experience when we look out upon a
room of tables and chairs, in so far as the same image is imprinted on
our retinas; but we would presumably wish to say that the
phenomenology of these experiences remains quite different even so,
and that only I have an experience that seems to be of tables and
chairs, and in which my visual field is organised accordingly (so that
regions of colour are sorted into table- and chair-like
configurations).



This account of religious experience and the contribution of doctrine
in shaping its phenomenology sits very well with Hick's
pluralistic reading of the major faiths. On this view, these
traditions are all valid in so far as all provide a vehicle for the
experience of ultimate religious reality or what Hick terms "the
Real" (an expression that is intended to be neutral between the
various designations for this reality that are favoured by the
different traditions). And the traditions are indeed all equally valid
in so far as there can be no question of the doctrinal content of any
one tradition's experience of the Real corresponding more
closely to the character of the Real "in itself"; rather,
the doctrinal content of such experiences derives in every case from
the side of culture or a person's religious formation, rather
than mapping the character of the Real in itself. Identifying the
intrinsic character of the Real is beyond the scope of any human
enquiry. Instead, we have to make do with appearances of the Real,
where these appearances vary with the culturally constituted ways of
being religious that are made available in the various faiths.



Of course, this picture invites the objection that a culturally
reductionist account of religious experience is surely then to be
preferred: if the phenomenological content of religious experience is
fixed in all its detail by a person's socio-religious context,
then why not think of such experience as simply a cultural product,
rather than as having some culture-transcendent reference (Stoeber
1992)? To shore up the claim of religious experience to connect the
believer to a mind-independent reality we require, rather, some sort
of convergence across traditions concerning the nature of the reality
that is revealed in such experiences -- instead of Hick's
rigorously agnostic (and therefore tradition-neutral) affirmation that
the Real in itself eludes all our categories, and so cannot be
considered as personal or impersonal, one or many, or even good or
evil. (Compare Byrne 1995.)



Hick's approach might also seem to be in trouble for more
straightforwardly religious reasons: as he notes, most believers
privilege the picture of the sacred that is favoured in their own
tradition (rather than thinking of that picture as simply another way
of representing an appearance of the Real). And perhaps this is
religiously necessary. If believers thought that their religious
symbols, and in turn the content of their religious experience, lacked
any ultimate reference (since these symbols are concerned simply with
the realm of appearances), then it may be doubted whether they would
be adequately motivated to live religiously: if religious symbols are
interpreted in this agnostic way, and if the phenomenology of
religious experience fails therefore to track in any respect the
character of the Real in itself, then how is the Real to be
intelligibly the object of a response of, say, love and faith, rather
than simply of bafflement or perhaps indifference?



So philosophical treatments of the phenomenology of religious
experience draw quite diverse conclusions: religious experience (in at
least some central cases) is said variously to have no
phenomenological content (not to be like anything), or to have a
content that at any rate cannot be communicated readily in verbal
terms, or to have a phenomenological content that can be described
because it is analogous to the "sensational" quality of
ordinary sensory experience, where this content can then be
interpreted in doctrinal terms, or to have a phenomenological content
that is given in the doctrinal scheme of the relevant faith tradition,
where this scheme functions rather like a lens through which religious
reality is viewed, or to have a phenomenological content that never
comes clearly into view in public discourse, since reports of such
experiences typically focus upon the implied doctrinal meaning of the
experience which is, on this account, to be sharply distinguished from
its phenomenological content.



These disputes sometimes have a relatively conceptual character, and
sometimes are rooted more clearly in questions about how to read
various bodies of documentary evidence. As we have seen, a
person's stance on these matters may well make a difference to
their approach to other issues: including the question of whether
religious experience is discredited by the difficulties in describing
its phenomenological content, and the questions of whether we should
favour a pluralist account of the faiths or a reductionist reading of
religious experience.


### 1.2 Religious experience and relationship to material context



So far we have been concentrating upon religious experience understood
as experience of God or the sacred otherwise understood. Some
commentators have argued that the philosophy of religion literature
has paid insufficient attention to the fact that, in the first
instance, religious experience is commonly experience of a material
context, a building or landscape for example. And the phenomenology of
the experience is therefore given, at least in significant part, in
our experience of a set of physical objects (Brown 2004).



On this sort of approach, religious experience is sometimes conceived
not so much as an encounter with God considered as a particular item
of experience, but more as a matter of seeing "in depth"
the religious significance of a material context. If we take up this
suggestion, then a new range of possibilities for developing a
phenomenology of religion comes into view.



Some scholars have argued that spaces reserved for religious activity
have a distinctive character, which sets them apart from merely
profane spaces (Eliade 1958). For instance, an approach to a sacred
space may require the believer to cross various thresholds, and
perhaps to undertake a relatively arduous journey on account of the
topography of the place, as when it is set on a mountain or
island.



Expounding this tradition of thought, Thomas Barrie notes that:



> 
> To reach the threshold and sacred place, often there is a path and
> entry sequence. The path that leads to the place can take many forms
> ... and typically involves a series of spaces or events, each
> becoming increasingly more sacred. This sequence acts as a marker of
> the sacred ground, as protection for the uninitiated, and as a trial
> to be endured for those seeking the divine. (1996, p. 59)
> 



Similarly Barrie writes of how: "The pilgrim's route along
the path underlines the gravity of the journey being undertaken and
gives opportunities for the initiate to turn back" (p. 60).
Implied in this sort of structuring of sacred space is a correlative
phenomenology: one that requires of the devotee an appropriate
seriousness and focussed attention, if they are to grasp aright the
sacred reality that is to be encountered in the sanctuary. (Compare
Jones 2000 on the various strategies of "ritual-architectural
allurement.")



Some Christian commentators have taken exception to this sort of
picture, arguing that what makes a place religiously special for a
Christian is simply the presence there of a Christian community,
engaged in a life of other-regarding love (White 1995). Acknowledging
this difference of view, Harold Turner (1979) distinguishes between
the domus dei and domus ecclesiae approaches to sacred architecture.
On the first perspective, a holy building is conceived as a house of
God, and it should therefore be a suitably imposing space, displaying
superior craftsmanship and adorned with the finest materials --
all of which will imply a correlative phenomenology, whereby the mind
is lifted up towards God. (Compare Abbot Suger's account of the
abbey of Saint Denis.) By contrast, on the domus ecclesiae
perspective, the church building functions primarily as a meeting
place, and its construction should therefore serve the needs of the
community which gathers there, and facilitate their interaction and
fellowship.



Turner gives as an example of the domus dei approach the meditation
room at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. This space
features a block of iron ore illuminated by a shaft of natural light
that descends from a skylight. Accordingly, the place speaks of a
meeting of heaven and earth, of light and dark, and of the ambiguous
history of human beings in their relationship to the earth, in so far
as iron ore has been used for the making both of weapons and of
ploughshares. And by virtue of the conditions of stillness and dimmed
light that obtain here, the room invites a response of quiet,
reverential seriousness. In all of these respects there is implied,
once more, a correlative phenomenology.



In fact, the relationship between the conception of sacred
architecture that Barrie describes and Turner's domus ecclesiae
tradition need not be flatly antithetical. For Turner acknowledges
that even within a Christian context it will be appropriate to make
some use of "temple" elements, not least for those members
of the community who have not yet fully assimilated a Christian
understanding of these matters. And more importantly, even a building
that adheres uncompromisingly to domus ecclesiae principles will over
time take on some of the characteristics of the domus dei ideal
-- because even when it is not in use for worship, the fact that
it has been organically caught up in the life of the Christian
community will quite properly condition our sense of its significance,
and the sort of use to which it can be put.



Here Turner notes the experience of a young Quaker who contrary to his
professed principles admits to feeling that he ought not to smoke
within the meeting house when he is taking his turn on the cleaning
rota. This response is fitting, Turner notes, in so far as the history
of the building as a site of Christian gathering rightly shapes our
sense of its meaning in the present (pp. 327-328). And this
sense of the building's significance will imply a correlative
phenomenology: the space will be experienced as inviting a respectful
or dignified kind of appropriation.



On the other side, Barrie notes that while the sacred place is set
apart as a zone where the gods may be encountered, this is not to say
that such places have no part to play in the life of a community. On
the contrary, sacred spaces will typically serve as an important focus
for a community's profession of the values that bind it together
(1996, p. 52).



Some Christian commentators have sought to identify a similar middle
ground by acknowledging that Christian categories, and the Christian
liturgy, are likely to be experienced as strange or even alien by many
in modern western societies. The evangelisation of such people may
well depend then, in the first instance, not so much upon exposure to
specifically Christian concepts as upon experiences of transcendence
mediated through encounters with the beauty or majesty of the natural
world, or of church or other buildings. These experiences serve then
as a propaedeutic for Christian teaching. (Compare Brown 2004, pp.
407-408.)



It is reasonable to suppose, for example, that the religious
significance of the great cathedrals of the medieval period was not
just a matter of the Christian stories with which they were
associated, in so far as they were connected with, say, the deeds of
particular holy figures or their relics. Their meaning is also given
in their sheer sensory impact: through their monumental scale and
controlled use of light, and through the interplay between the
solidity of stone and the diaphanous qualities of glass, these
structures can speak of the sacred by inducing a response of hushed
wonderment. A further perspective on the phenomenology of liturgy is
provided in the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, who is interested in
the connection between the formation of the person through liturgical
practice and the development of new ways of engaging with the everyday
world in perceptual and other terms. See for instance his comment
that:



> 
> 
> The man formed by the Liturgy is the man who is awake in the highest
> sense of the word. He is not only inwardly open to hearing the voice
> of God. He is not only aware of the ultimate Truth, but he also looks
> on all earthly goods in their true light. Far removed from all
> bluntness, "indifference," stoic insensibility and impassiveness, his
> awakened eye is open to every created thing in its mystery of the
> height and its divine meaning. Let us recall again the precious and
> noble character of created things, such as water, for instance, as
> disclosed in the blessing of the baptismal water. (1943, pp.
> 136-7)
> 
> 
> 



Of course natural spaces are also able, of themselves, to evoke a
sense of the sacred. And Erazim Kohak has argued that some of
the key concepts of western philosophical theology have their original
life setting in experiences of nature. On this basis he offers a kind
of phenomenological rendering of the cosmological and design
arguments.



He writes for example that:



> 
> We are, though only by a hair. We could easily not be. The stark white
> glow of the January moon, pressing down on the frozen forest, sears
> away the illusion of necessity. (1984, p. 188)
> 



Here, Kohak is giving a phenomenological counterpart for the
concept of contingency. Of course, he does not think that what results
is a newly cogent form of the cosmological argument: he is not giving
an argument at all. What he is doing, we might say, is to bring out
the religious resonance of the concept of contingency: the role of the
concept is not simply to signify the possibility of not-being but,
when appropriated in the way he describes, to draw us into a life of
"thanksgiving". As he says, solitude, and being free from
the feeling of technological mastery that is characteristic of urban
life, "teaches thanks" (p. 188).



Similarly Kohak comments that



> 
> The natural world, abandoned by a human dweller, does not disintegrate
> into a meaningless aggregate. It may seem that way as the ridge of the
> abandoned barn sags and caves in... That, though, is only the
> human order of passing. ... The nature abandoned by humans is yet
> not abandoned. It is not simply that it is lawlike in performance,
> manifesting observed regularities. Its order is far more intimate than
> that. It is the order of a sphere of mineness. (1984, p. 189)
> 



Standard versions of the argument from design, when they appeal to the
world's lawlikeness, do not require any reference to the
phenomenology of human experience. But, here, Kohak is giving a
phenomenological rendering of the concept of order, and seeking to
root our sense of the divine presence in this more
"intimate," phenomenologically informed understanding of
the world's regularity.



Again, as with the concept of contingency, his concern is to bring out
the existential import of the concept of order. When grounded in the
kind of experience he describes here, order does not just signify
lawlikeness, a notion that has no particular phenomenological content,
but a realm of belonging, a place that has been set in order by
someone, so that it can be inhabited and constitute a home. This way
of developing the concept points once more to its relevance for
religious life: to experience order in these terms is to experience
God as present in the world, and as caring for it.



So we could take Kohak to be providing a phenomenological
rendering of the concept of divine presence. He offers this
comparison:



> 
> The house belongs: on entering it, we sense its order not simply as an
> order, but specifically as the order of a Lebenswelt, of an inhabited
> context ordered by a caring presence. Trying to cook in a strange
> kitchen brings it home: things have their places, unknown to us, but
> not arbitrary. The house is a sphere of someone's mineness. (p.
> 189)
> 



It might be said: the content of the concept of divine presence is
really given, surely, in standard philosophical and theological
analyses of it. To say that God is omnipresent, for example, is to say
that God is directly active in all places, or that God has unmediated
knowledge of, and power over, everything that happens wherever it
happens. (See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a. 8. 3 and Swinburne 1993.)
On this view, Kohak's observations constitute a kind of
psychological gloss on the concept: we human beings sometimes register
the divine presence in such experiences of "mineness," but
these experiences form no part of the concept.



It is implied in Kohak's discussion that the experience
of mineness enters more deeply into our understanding of divine
presence than this account would suggest. Analogously we might say
that if we are to have a full understanding of what it is for
something to be blue, then we require firsthand experience of
blueness, since someone who has not had this experience will not know
this truth about blue: that it is manifest in human experience in this
way. (Compare the example of Mary, developed in Jackson 1982.)



Kohak is suggesting, I think, that our understanding of divine
presence, or equally of contingency and order, also has some
phenomenological content: to see in full what it is for God to be
present, one needs to have some experiential knowledge of the contexts
in which the concept of divine presence originates. Or to put the
matter otherwise, he is saying that to see in full the religious
import of the concepts of order, contingency and divine presence, to
see what role they might play in a religious life, it is necessary to
have some appreciation of the relevant phenomenology. (This sort of
point is often made in the phenomenological literature by saying that
"empathy" is required if we are to understand the defining
concepts of a faith tradition: see Dupre 1998, pp. 36-37.)



There are parallels here with discussion in ethics, where some
commentators have supposed, likewise, that a full appreciation of
certain cardinal moral concepts depends upon being able to grasp,
through first hand experience, the relevant phenomenology. Raimond
Gaita, for example, argues that our concept of the individuality of
other persons (in the sense that is relevant when we speak of them as
being from a moral point of view irreplaceable) is not fully
expressible independently of reference to the phenomenology of our
moral experience. The sense of this concept is given in, for instance,
the experience of being haunted by the victim of your wrong-doing,
where it this particular individual who haunts you, rather than some
representative of humanity in general, or someone whose individuality
can be adequately specified simply by reference to, for example, their
distinguishing empirical properties (of hair colour, height, or
whatever it may be) (1991, p. 51).



In the same sort of way, Kohak is taking the notion of divine
presence, when it functions in religiously resonant ways, to be rooted
in certain experiences of the world, so that someone who lacks those
experiences will not have the same idea of divine presence. This
thought might seem to offend against the public character of our
concepts. But it is perhaps more a matter of the public meaning of
certain concepts being open to deepening relative to experience. Iris
Murdoch remarks similarly on how a person's concept of courage
at the age of twenty is not the same as their concept of courage at
the age of forty: life experience contributes to a deepening of the
concept (1985, p. 29).



We have been considering various understandings of the phenomenology
of religious experience, where religious experience may be construed
as an encounter with God as a particular entity, or as, in the first
instance, an encounter with a material context, given by our built or
natural environment or some combination of these. In this latter case,
it may be that God is manifest not so much as a particular item in the
perceptual field, but by way of the significance that attaches to a
material context, rather as, on Kohak's view, our sense
of the divine presence is grounded in a recognition of the
significance that attaches to the forest as a realm of
"mineness." In this way, different emphases in the
phenomenology of religion are likely to correlate with different
conceptions of God: not only in so far as a given conception of God
has a distinctive phenomenal content, but also in so far as different
phenomenologies are likely to be associated with different conceptions
of the sense in which God may be regarded as
"individual."


## 2. Emotions and religious experience



Many commentators have thought that the phenomenology of religious
experience depends in significant part on its affective tone. When God
is made known in the experience of guilt, as someone to whom we are
accountable and who summons us to newness of life, or when God is
revealed in the feeling of wonderment at the vastness or beauty of the
cosmos, or when God is manifest in the experience of encountering some
thrilling and awe-inspiring "other," or in many other
cases too, the religious import of the experience is given in large
part in our affective responses. It is noteworthy too how often the
language of "spiritual sensations" involves reference to
states of feeling. And perhaps this is a conceptual requirement: what
sense would there be in the idea of a religiously authentic encounter
with God, the supreme good and maker of all, which left the subject of
the experience unmoved?


### 2.1 Emotional feelings and encounter with God



I say "emotional feelings" in the heading here to
distinguish this case from various other uses of feeling language: as
for example when we say that we felt something was missing, a usage
that may imply no particular phenomenology but only some intuitive
registering of an absence, or when we say that we felt a stab of pain,
which will imply some sort of phenomenology but need not suggest the
kind of directedness that is typical of emotional feelings, as I shall
suggest shortly. (Compare Ryle 1971.)



As with the question of its phenomenology more generally, so there is
controversy surrounding the contribution of emotional feelings, in
particular, to the character of religious experience. William Alston
has asked: if the phenomenological content of a religious experience
were to be purely affective, would that be a reason for doubting that
it is directed at anything? In that case, he notes, we might well
suspect that the experience consists in a felt response to a believed
presence (1991, pp. 49-50), rather than in some presentation of
God to the believer.



This sort of scepticism about the contribution of the emotions to the
intentionality or God-directedness of religious experience reflects a
certain model of their structure, according to which they are
comprised of a thought component and a feeling component, where the
first gives rise to the second (as the thought of God's presence
is said, in this case, to cause a certain feeling). For example,
embarrassment on this account will involve the thought (which may be
simply entertained rather than asserted) that I have done something
that will lower the regard in which I am held by others -- where
this thought gives rise to a feeling of a broadly negative nature,
involving some sort of pain, discomfort or distress (and depending on
the model, the particular character of this feeling may be taken to be
relative to embarrassment or kindred emotions, or understood in more
generic terms) (see Budd 1985, Chapter 1).



So on this standard account, emotion types can be differentiated by
reference to the thoughts of which they are comprised. Or where two
emotions have the same thought content, they can be differentiated by
reference to the state of feeling that is engendered by the thought,
as when we treat pity and schadenfreude as distinct emotion types,
since they involve different felt responses to the thought of someone
else's misfortune.



This account of the emotions allows that they are directed at the
world. So they are not, on this view, to be assimilated to mere
stomach churnings or twinges or throbbings: they have some sort of
intellectual content, and they involve more, therefore, than simply a
registering in feeling of some physiological disturbance. (Compare
again the case of embarrassment: this is not just a matter of feeling
flushed, and so on.) On this point then, this account locates
emotional experience more firmly within our intellectual life than did
the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century account,
associated with William James and others, which treated the emotions
simply as ways of recording changes in physiological condition (James
1884). However, it remains true on this perspective that the
directedness of the emotions is a function of their thought content,
which is understood in distinction from their feeling content.



Some more recent theories have wanted to challenge this distinction,
and to regard emotional feelings as themselves forms of thought, or as
having in their own right an intellectual content. This much is often
implied in our description of such feelings, as, for example, when we
characterise schadenfreude as a matter of taking pleasure in
someone's misfortune. This is to represent the pleasure that
arises here as directed at some state of affairs of which it is
cognisant, rather than supposing simply that the thought of
someone's misfortune gives rise to a feeling of pleasure.



If we allow that emotional feelings can have some intellectual content
in their own right, then we have a powerful tool for understanding how
the affective phenomenology of religious experience may turn out to be
integral to its God-directedness. For example, returning to
Alston's concerns regarding the contribution of emotional
feelings to the phenomenal content of religious experience, if we take
emotional feelings to be intrinsically contentful, then we may wish to
say that the phenomenology of a religious experience could be purely
affective without this posing any difficulty for the thought that the
experience is directed at some mind-independent reality -- rather
than being simply a sensation-like feeling that is caused by the
thought that God is present.



The idea that emotional feelings may constitute a mode of perception
is a familiar theme in recent work in moral philosophy, in the
writings of John McDowell (1981) and others. It has also been defended
by various philosophers of emotion. For example, John Deigh (1994)
writes of how our perception of certain qualities may be realised in
our felt response to them: I may register the scariness of something
in my feeling of being scared, rather than say in an affect-neutral
perception of the thing as scary, which then engenders a felt
response. And analogously we might suppose that on occasions anyway,
God is made manifest in certain felt responses, rather than being
known in some other fashion, which then gives rise to a correlative
feeling (as on the thought-plus-feeling model of emotion).



At least some elements of Rudolf Otto's *The Idea of the
Holy* (1959) lend themselves to an interpretation of this kind.
Here, Otto speaks of how God is made known primordially as the
mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as a reality that is at once
attractive but also inspires a kind of fear or dread. This sort of
dread, Otto insists, is sui generis: it is a distinctively religious
kind of fear that befits our relation to God, and while it is akin to
the fear we associate with the "weird," it is not to be
simply conflated with this or any other kind of non-religious
fear.



Otto distinguishes this approach from Schleiermacher's
discussion of the "feeling of absolute dependence." He
writes:



> 
> According to him the religious emotion would be directly and
> primordially a sort of *self-*consciousness, a feeling
> concerning oneself in a special, determined relation, viz.,
> one's dependence. Thus, according to Schleiermacher, I can only
> come upon the very fact of God as the result of an inference, that is,
> by reasoning to a cause beyond myself to account for my 'feeling
> of dependence'. (Chapter III, p. 10)
> 



So on Schleiermacher's account, as read by Otto, the divine
reality is not disclosed directly in feeling, but is instead inferred
from feeling. By contrast, Otto gives this view of the matter:
"Rather, the 'creature-feeling' is itself a first
subjective concomitant and effect of another feeling-element, which
casts it like a shadow, but which in itself indubitably has immediate
and primary reference to an object outside the self" (p. 10).
Here, Otto commits himself to the thought that the divine reality is
disclosed directly in states of feeling, where those states can in
turn give rise to other states of feeling, including the feeling of
dependence.



Of course, there is a further question about how exactly
"Gefuhl" is to be read in this context, but at least
some of the "feelings" that, according to Otto,
non-inferentially disclose the divine reality seem to be affectively
charged. For instance, when discussing the "awefulness"
that belongs to the "tremendum" dimension of the
experience, Otto notes the connection between this feeling and
"shuddering" or "feeling horror in the real sense of
the word," and he adds that "'shuddering' is
something more than 'natural', ordinary fear"
(Chapter IV, p. 15). Moreover, he begins this chapter by remarking that
"the nature of the numinous can only be suggested by means of
the special way in which it is reflected in the mind in terms of
feeling" (p. 13). In these respects, there is at least some
basis for the idea that, in Otto's judgement, God is presented,
directly and non-inferentially, in our affective responses. And these
responses, we might suppose, can play this sort of role because of
their distinctive phenomenological character, which marks them out
from the kinds of feeling that arise in other domains of life.
(Contrast the dialectical model of the relationship between perception
and feeling that is envisaged in Alvin Plantinga's discussion of
Jonathan Edwards: Plantinga 2000, pp. 301-303.)



Otto extends this account to provide a theory of religious language
-- doctrinal claims are, he thinks, an attempt to convey in
rational, conceptually articulate terms the content of a
"numinous" experience that is itself conceptually
inarticulate. So here, far from thought generating a correlative
feeling, it is feeling and its implicit reckoning with the nature of
some transcendent reality that comes first, and discursive thought
that follows on behind, trying to stammer out what is known in full
only in the relevant experience. One implication of this account is,
clearly, that the idea of God has some phenomenological content. (See
Schlamm 1992 for a defence of Otto's stance on this point, in
response to the criticisms of Katz and others. Murphy 2022 seeks to
combine Otto's approach and the perspective of "perfect
being theology".)


### 2.2 Emotional feelings and relationship to material context



This understanding of emotional feelings can also be brought into
fruitful dialogue with the second of our models of religious
experience, according to which religious experience is not so much a
matter of encountering God directly, but is rather concerned with
finding a relevant meaning or significance in the ordering of a
material context.



Peter Goldie notes that when a person falls on ice for the first time,
they may come to a new understanding of the dangers presented by ice,
where this additional increment of understanding is in some way
embedded in their new fearfulness of ice, and may resist formulation
in linguistic terms. As he puts the point: "Coming to think of
it [ice] in this new way is not to be understood as consisting of
thinking of it in the old way, plus some added-on phenomenal
ingredient -- feeling perhaps; rather, the whole way of
experiencing, or being conscious of, the world is new..."
(Goldie 2000, pp. 59-60). We might suppose in particular that
what has changed is that ice has come to assume a new salience in the
person's experience of the world, with the result that their
perceptual field is differently structured when they are in the
presence of ice, so as to give particular prominence to ice.



Again, there are parallels here with the literature in ethics, which
has treated moral perception as not so much a matter of identifying
some new fact in a situation of moral choice, as of understanding the
relative importance of various facts, and grasping which in particular
deserve attention or call for some practical response. For example,
the virtuous person may not be able to list some further fact
concerning the circumstances of various people in a crowded railway
carriage, but the fact that a particular passenger is over-burdened by
their bags, and in some discomfort because they have to stand, may
weigh with this person. This fact may become salient in their
perception of the scene, and salience here may be a matter, at least
in part, of their felt response to the passenger and their
predicament. (Compare Blum 1994, pp. 31-33.)



In the same sort of way, we might suppose that the religious believer
who is approaching a sacred site of the kind that Barrie describes
will need to have their attention focussed appropriately. And we might
think that this is the role of the various thresholds and their
associated challenges for the body. It is because they engender and
give expression to the right kind of emotional responsiveness, broadly
one of reverential seriousness, that these preparatory behaviours
enable a proper appreciation of the sacred space itself. Here, then,
rather as with the train example, religious experience takes the form
of viewing some material context with appropriate salience. (Compare
Jonathan Z. Smith's (1987) proposal that it is the quality of
attention accorded to sacred objects, in a given context, rather than
something intrinsic to those objects, that marks them out from other
kinds of object.)



## 3. Doctrine and mundane experience



We have been exploring various ways in which the phenomenology of
religious experience may be construed, in affective and other terms.
It is reasonable to suppose, in addition, that the quality of the
believer's strictly mundane experience will be in some respects
conditioned by their religious commitments, or will need to show some
sort of consonance with those commitments.



For instance, the emotions may be religiously important even if they
are not bound up with an experience of God or a sacred space, because
of their role in signalling that certain matters are properly the
object of attention. Evolutionary accounts of emotional experience
commonly emphasise the significance of the emotions in constituting
patterns of salience. For instance, it is obviously of adaptive value
if a large, fast-approaching dog is afforded a certain salience in my
perceptual field, while the colour of the linoleum floor on which I am
standing is consigned to the periphery of my awareness. And in
standard cases, to feel fear of a dog is, in part, to view the
relevant scene with such salience. (Compare Oatley and Jenkins, 1996.)
Here, emotional responses help to frame rational thought, by
determining what it is appropriate to attend to and in turn to reason
about. And, arguably, similar connections hold in religious
contexts.



For instance, speaking of revelation, John Henry Newman comments:



> 
> That earnest desire of it, which religious minds cherish, leads the
> way to the expectation of it. Those who know nothing of the wounds of
> the soul, are not led to deal with the question, or to consider its
> circumstances; but when our attention is roused, then the more
> steadily we dwell upon it, the more probable does it seem that a
> revelation has been or will be given to us. (1979, p. 328)
> 



In this way, a person's emotional experience can mark out
certain matters as deserving of closer attention, and thereby this
experience can prepare the way for a deepening of religious
understanding. Here, the phenomenology of the experience has, once
again, a crucial part to play in constituting the relevant pattern of
salience. But in this case, the experience is not directly or
indirectly of God, but in the first instance of the condition of
one's soul. William James takes a similar line when he says of
"dogmatic or idealistic theology" that "these
speculations must ... be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out
performed by the intellect into directions of which feelings
originally supplied the hint," giving as an example of such
feelings "inner unhappiness and the need of deliverance"
(1902, p. 431). (For the importance of emotional responses in framing
rational thought, see also Damasio 1995, pp. 193-194.)



This example is a matter of moving from a way of experiencing the
world to a doctrinal commitment. We might suppose that it is also
possible to move in the other direction, since doctrinal commitments
may carry implications for how the world is to be experienced in
subjective terms. Nicholas Wolterstorff notes, for example, how this
world



> 
> represents a success on the part of God -- God who is love
> -- not a failure. In contemplation of what He had made God found
> delight. But also God knew that what He had made would serve well his
> human creatures. So God pronounced His 'Yes' upon it all,
> a 'Yes' of delight and of love. You and I must do no less.
> (1980, p. 69)
> 



Following this suggestion, we should suppose that the doctrine of
creation implies a correlative affectively toned phenomenology, one
which is open to taking delight in the world, in its materiality.



Reports of conversion experience provide a particularly striking
example of how religious commitments may be connected to experience of
the everyday world. It is notable that such reports commonly testify
not simply to the convert's new-found closeness to God, in
prayer for example, but to a generalized shift in the appearance of
the physical world. For instance, William James notes how:



> 
> When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious
> regeneration, we ... see that a not infrequent consequence of the
> change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of
> nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine on a new earth. (1902,
> p. 141)
> 



As one of James's sources remarks: "Natural objects were
glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in
every material object in the universe..." (1902, p. 250). Here,
following conversion, the natural world appears brighter or more
vivid, so that it seems to be newly transparent to the divine glory.
(For another account of how a whole domain of experience may take on a
particular subjective character and significance, see Cooper 2002 on
"existential" experience, p. 340.)



There are various ways of understanding the significance of this sort
of shift in the world's appearance. One potentially helpful
category is Matthew Ratcliffe's notion of "existential
feelings." Ratcliffe introduces the category in these terms:



> 
> First of all, they [existential feelings] are not directed at specific
> objects or situations but are background orientations through which
> experience as a whole is structured. Second, they are *bodily
> feelings*. (2008, p. 38, Ratcliffe's emphasis)
> 



As an analogy (or perhaps more than an analogy) we could take the case
of jet lag. When I am in a jet lagged state, the world in general can
appear differently to me, and this is in part, no doubt, because of
the associated change in my bodily condition. I may feel groggy (here
is the bodily feeling to which Ratcliffe refers), and at the same time
the world in general may take on a new appearance, so that it seems,
for instance, out of focus. And we might speculate that, similarly,
the convert has undergone a change in bodily condition, and that it is
this change that accounts both for their feelings of elation, and also
for the shift that they report in the world's appearance. It may
be that, in some cases, whether by design or not, this bodily change
is the product of a spiritual discipline. So here is another way in
which feelings, including feelings of bodily condition, may be caught
up into the phenomenology of the religious or spiritual life.



We may wonder what phenomenological categories to use for the
description of this sort of experience, whereby the world in general
appears brighter and newly vivid. It may be that the category of
salience is, once again, of some help here. James notes how in the
experience of the depressed person, the world can appear
"flat." And this is what we should expect: in central
cases, the person who is depressed is suffering from a lack of
emotional engagement with the world, and in turn, therefore, from a
blunted sense of the differentiated significance of things, so that
the patterns of salience that normally inform the perceptual field are
flattened out. Hence James writes of Tolstoy's experience of a
period of existential crisis that: "Life had been enchanting. It
was now flat sober, more than sober, dead" (1902, p. 152). And
speaking more generally he comments that:



> 
> The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and
> quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now,
> for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the
> satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death
> and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness. The
> lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of
> possibilities it goes with. (1902, p. 141)
> 



Here again, we are concerned with a generalized shift in the
appearance of the world, but in this example, the change is evidently
induced not simply by a change in bodily condition, though that may be
part of the story, but by the person's new assessment of their
circumstances. This case too is religiously suggestive, since the
religions standardly offer, of course, far-reaching diagnoses of our
present circumstances and our prospects. So perhaps, in some cases,
conversion experience is a matter of the person coming to subscribe to
a new conception of their circumstances, of this far-reaching variety,
and acquiring thereby a new sense of their "background of
possibilities," with the result that their experience of the
everyday world is then renewed.



So salience is one category that is relevant to the description of the
change in the appearance of the everyday world that is commonly
associated with conversion. In brief, before conversion, the world may
appear relatively "flat," and after it may be that objects
are more clearly delineated relative to one another, so that they
stand out in the perceptual field, where this standing out records the
person's new appreciation of their significance in themselves
and relative to one another. It it notable that James's converts
seem to be talking not only about a deepening of patterns of salience
in the perceptual field, but also of the world appearing brighter or
more vivid, where this change seems to imply a change in the
"colouring," and not simply in the structure, of the
perceptual field. An example will help us to pin down this further
dimension of the change that converts seem to be describing.



Suppose that I am chewing some meat that, unknown to me, derives from
Shuttlecock, the pet rabbit. And suppose that I am now told that the
meat does indeed derive from Shuttlecock. In these circumstances
- granted standard assumptions - the meat will, of course,
become newly salient for me: I will now be focally aware of it. But
that is not all that will happen. The meat will also change in its
intrinsic phenomenal feel: it will now be experienced as disgusting.
We can call this second element of the change in the appearance of the
meat a change in "hue." Commonly, changes in salience and
in hue will arise together: if an object acquires a new hue, for
example, then it is natural to suppose that it will stand out relative
to other objects in a new way. But as the example of Shuttlecock
indicates, these changes are conceptually distinguishable. And we
might suppose, then, that James's converts are reporting not
only a change in salience, but also a change in hue: the perceptual
field is now more boldly contoured, and it is at the same time
brighter or more vivid than before conversion.



So far in this section, we have been interested in the correlation
between mundane experience and religious teaching, where this
correlation is "external": that is, it is a matter of the
doctrine upholding some idea about the nature of the world - for
instance, the idea that the world as created is good - and the
appearance of the world then conforming to that idea, by virtue of,
say, the patterns of salience that are inscribed in the perceptual
field, and the colouring or "hue" of the world as
experienced. And as we have seen, we can understand these shifts in
the appearance of the world as, fundamentally, the product of changes
in bodily condition, or as shaped by way of religious teaching about
human beings' "background of possibilities." But
another case is also possible: here, the religious teaching enters
into the appearance of the world. Something like this case is perhaps
implied in Jonathan Edwards' report of his religious conversion,
which is also recorded by William James. Edwards writes:



> 
> The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it
> were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost
> everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love,
> seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the
> clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water
> and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. (1902, pp.
> 248-9)
> 



In this report, it is not simply that things look different following,
or in the course of, conversion, but the divine nature is now somehow
made manifest in the appearance of the world. This sort of report at
least raises the possibility, however puzzling it may be, that
concepts of the divine can enter into our experience of the world, so
that the content of the concept comes to be embodied in the world as
it appears. A related case is reported by Roger Scruton when he
represents the intentions of the designers of the Gothic church in
these terms:



> 
> it is clear from Abbot Suger's account of the building of St
> Denis ... that the architects of the Gothic churches were motivated by
> a perceived relationship between the finished church and the Heavenly
> City of Christian speculation. Sir John Summerson has further
> suggested that the Gothic church aims at a certain effect of
> accumulation. Each great church can be considered as a concatenation
> of smaller structures, of aedicules, fitted together as arches,
> chapels, windows, and spires, and so can be seen as an assembled city,
> rather than as a single entity minutely subdivided... But the
> "interpretation" here is not a "thought" that
> is separable from the experience - it is there *in* the
> experience, as when I see the dots of a puzzle picture as a face, or
> the man in the moon. (1979, pp. 74-5)
> 



Here, the concept of the heavenly city has a phenomenal counterpart in
the appearance of the Gothic church, once the perceptual field has
been appropriately organised. We could put the point by saying that
the concept of the heavenly city can be inscribed in the perceptual
field, so that the Gothic church comes to present an image of that
city, by virtue of appearing as an "assembled" entity,
rather than as a single thing divided. As Scruton notes, this is not a
question of the idea of the heavenly city being used to interpret the
appearances; the connection is more integral than that: the
appearances themselves take on a certain character once they are
ordered according to that idea. Perhaps, similarly, it is possible for
a particular concept of God to be inscribed in the perceptual field,
so that the sensory world in some relevant respect comes to image God?
Something like this possibility seems to be implied in Edwards'
account of his conversion experience, where the world - the sun
and stars, trees and flowers - is said to body forth the various
divine attributes. Edwards' insistent use of the words
"appear" and "appearance" in his report
indicates that his intention is to communicate the phenomenology of
his experience, where that phenomenology is one of the divine nature
being manifest in the world.



Of course, the case of the Gothic church may seem relatively
straightforward, and rather unrepresentative of religious thought more
generally. For, here, we are dealing with the capacity of one
spatio-temporal entity (the Gothic church) to image another (the
heavenly city), and it is only to be expected that one such entity can
image another once its appearance is structured appropriately.
(Compare the capacity of small children to take clouds as images of
just about anything, once the relevant isomorphism has been
introduced.) But if a religious thought concerns, say, the divine
nature, then it is not of a spatio-temporal entity, and in this case,
therefore, it is harder to see how the appearance of the world might
present an image of the content of the thought. It may be that another
of Scruton's examples bears on this issue. In the following
passage, he is considering the capacity of a cloister to represent an
ideal of life. He writes:



> 
> one might think of a Romanesque cloister in terms of the industrious
> piety of its former inhabitants: in terms of an historical identity, a
> way of life, with which this habit of building was associated. But
> were a man to present this as his reason for looking favourably on
> some particular cloister, say that of S. Paolo Fuori Le Mura in Rome
> ... then the onus lies on him to show exactly how such an idea finds
> confirmation in an experience of the building. Perhaps he could go on
> to refer to the variety of forms employed in the columns, to their
> fine industrious detailing, and to the way in which none of this
> abundance of observation disturbs the restful harmony of the design.
> He might trace the rhythm of the arcade, and describe the Cosmatesque
> mosaic, with its bright and childlike inventiveness that never
> transgresses the bounds of sensible ornamentation. In all this, he
> might say, we see how energetic observation and monastic piety may be
> successfully combined. A certain idea of monasticism becomes a visible
> reality: the idea is not merely a personal association occasioned by
> some anecdotal or historical reminiscence: we *see* it in the
> details of the building. (1979, p. 109)
> 



This case is rather different from the example of the Gothic church.
Here, what we "see" in the building is not a
spatio-temporal entity (the heavenly city) but an ideal of life. Of
course, it is true that it was the monks' leading of that life
that accounts for the construction of the building; but Scruton is
clear that the association here, between the way of life and the
character of the building, is not just causal: when the cloister is
viewed in the right way, that way of life enters into its appearance.
In general terms, it seems clear enough how, on Scruton's
account, this is supposed to happen: what is required is that when we
view the building, we hold in tension the "energy" and
"abundant observation" of the columns, arcade and other
features of the structure, on the one side, and the impression of
"restfulness" and measure that is communicated by the
overall design of the cloister, on the other. When we allow these two
impressions of the building to coexist in our perception of it, then
the building can image the relevant ideal of life. Here again, what is
needed, presumably, is that we order the scene according to the
appropriate pattern of salience. But this is, it seems, a relatively
complex example of salient viewing, since it requires one set of
qualities, identified in one instance of salient viewing, to be laid
alongside another, identified in another instance of salient viewing,
within a single, cohesive act of perception.



This case is closer to the experience that Edwards reports than is the
example of the heavenly city, and it suggests one way of making sense
of his account. Perhaps just as the ideal of life, and the associated
virtues, of the monks can be imaged in the cloister, so the divine
character, and the divine "virtues," can be imaged in the
world, once it is viewed aright. If so, that would be a significant
truth: for in that case, we would be able to reckon with various
conceptions of the divine nature not only abstractly, but also in
sensory terms, in so far as those conceptions can be used to order the
appearance of the everyday world, so that the relevant understanding
of God comes to be imaged by the world as experienced. And if this is
so, then we have reason to think that the goods of the spiritual life
are not only behavioural, intellectual, emotional and attitudinal, as
widely supposed, but also perceptual. (For further discussion, see
Wynn 2013.) On this view, the way the sensory world appears can be
deemed more or less appropriate relative to various truths concerning
the divine nature; and accordingly, some ways in which the world
appears may turn out to realize significant spiritual goods.


## 4. Two contrasting emphases in the study of religion



We have been examining some of the ways in which the phenomenology of
human experience may be relevant to the content of religious belief
(e.g., to a religiously resonant understanding of divine presence) and
to its epistemic standing (e.g., to the intentionality of religious
experience). When such considerations are squeezed out of an account
of the religious or spiritual life, that is likely to be because of a
preference for doctrine or practice as the central category in terms
of which religion is to be understood. So we can think of two
correlative challenges for any approach that makes some appeal to
phenomenology: perhaps such an account fails to reckon with the
doctrinal content of religious belief, and perhaps it overlooks the
role of practice in defining religious traditions.



The first objection makes most sense if we are working with a
relatively simple distinction between doctrines (creedal items derived
from, say, the Bible or later theological reflection) and experience.
But as we have seen, doctrine and experience are likely to be mutually
informing, and it is reasonable to suppose that in some cases
religious understanding involves a kind of amalgam of doctrinal scheme
and body of experience, where these elements cannot in any simple way
be separated out.



Newman makes a related point when he distinguishes a
"notion" from a "real image" of God (1979, p.
108). A notion of God is an abstract conception of God, while a real
image of God, he tends to think, presupposes the notion, but deepens
it by way of affectively toned, first hand experience of God. So for
example, to have encountered God in the call of conscience, in the
experience of remorse, is thereby to have a new understanding of the
sense in which God is properly called judge, although the additional
increment of understanding may not be readily verbalisable. (Compare
Goldie on our knowledge of the dangerousness of ice.)



Other commentators have thought that phenomenological treatments of
religion risk overlooking the central role of practices in
constituting religious traditions. For example, in his study
*Beyond Phenomenology*, Gavin Flood remarks that: "It is
ritual structures and performed narratives which have primacy in the
transmission of traditions through the generations and not any
individual experience or state of consciousness" (1999, p. 107).
Again, as with doctrine, so here we might wish to avoid any overly
sharp disjunction of phenomenology and practice.



This point can be made particularly succinctly by considering again
the case of emotional feelings. Such feelings involve patterns of
salient viewing, we have seen; but they can also be connected to the
posture of the body. For example, in standard cases, to feel fear is
in part to register the tensing of the body, and in turn therefore its
taking stock of a particular environment, and its making ready to act
in that environment (Solomon 2003 and Pickard 2003). So the
intellectual content of an emotional feeling, concerning what is
deserving of attention in a given context of choice, is we might
suppose realised both in a correlative structuring of the perceptual
field, and in a kinaesthetic appreciation of the body's
readiness to act in that context.



Depending on the details of the case, we might want to see the
expressive posture of the body as coming first, and giving rise to a
certain ordering of the perceptual field, or vice versa. But, here, we
seem to have two ways of grasping a certain content; and these two
ways seem to be held together by the relevant emotional feeling, since
such feelings are realised both in a certain pattern of salient
viewing and in the feeling of a correlative posture of the body.



So here "practice," or the readiness of the body to act in
certain ways in the world, is not straightforwardly separable from
"doctrine" (a conceptually organised appreciation of the
world) or emotional feeling. Instead these three make up a unitary
state of mind. And similarly, we might suppose, certain religious
practices are reciprocally implicated in correlative ways of seeing,
and in turn in correlative doctrines, in ways that resist any easy
disaggregation or prioritisation. Max Scheler makes something like
this point when he suggests that different postures of the body in
prayer reciprocally define different conceptions of God (1960, p.
266); and, once again, we might suppose that similar connections are
displayed in the responses of the body on the approach to a sacred
site.



Taking another route into these questions, we might think that
progress in the spiritual life can be described in terms of different
vocabularies: sometimes, a religious tradition may use a relatively
experiential or phenomenological idiom to mark the distinction between
different phases of the spiritual life; sometimes, it may use a
behavioural idiom, by citing, for instance, the enacted example of the
saints; and sometimes it may use a more metaphysical idiom, by noting,
say, how the relationship between divine and human agency may take
different forms at different stages of the spiritual life.
Accordingly, to take just one example, we might suppose that the
change that concerns Thomas Aquinas when he speaks of how the infused
moral virtues extend the acquired moral virtues must in some way
correlate with the change that John of the Cross records when he
speaks of the descent into the "dark night," and of the
transition from there into a renewed appreciation of the everyday
sensory world. In this way, we can see phenomenological
characterisations of the religious or spiritual life as integrally
connected to characterisations that make use of a more behavioural or
metaphysical vocabulary (Wynn 2017).



In sum, then, rather than giving precedence to doctrine- or
practice-based accounts of religion, we might suppose that these
accounts will themselves come fully into focus only when they are
combined with an appreciation of the phenomenology of religion.