Belief and Religious Experience

Faith is a difficult subject to write about or even think about. Is it rational to have certitude/assurance about what you do not understand or is beyond comprehension? Add to that my own predilection for Perennialism/Traditionalism and you multiply the conflict between different faiths or might it be that the conflict goes away. Such paralogism tempt me to title this post ‘Faith and Begorrah’ but I will resist that quip.

Seeing Fr. M.C. D’Arcy’s book The Nature of Belief second hand for all of ein euro bitte I though it a good place to start. I was right. There’s none of your ould Jesuitical wibbly wobbly about Martin Cyril. He will quote Dean Inge when the Dean is right but the oecumenical tide is somewhat less than Spring. There is an analytical contents, a device which is extremely useful when the topic is complex. First published in 1931, my edition is the 1945 second impression with his 1944 preface.

How belief in the philosophical sense shades into religious faith is delineated in the early chapters which include close analysis of Newman’s The Grammar of Assent. Chapter 8 is on Belief and Religious Experience which could be read as a free standing essay. He is of the opinion that empiricism is the cause of the elevation of such experience. How it differs from true mystical experience is a concern for him.

Owing to the decadence of metaphysics philosophy tended to pass over into the hands of its successful rival, physical science, which therewith appropriated to itself the name of the philosophy of nature.......The present tendency, therefore, is to make two divisions of truth, knowledge by experience and knowledge by reason. The latter is the concern of science and is restricted to what is qualitative and numerable. The former covers quality and value, and has, therefore, for its domain the moral, the aesthetic and the religious. Beliefs which are dependent on experience are not necessarily less true than those which are attained by reason; they are different and that is all that can be said about their relation.

From the foregoing it can be seen that the importance attached to religious experience is due to a partition made in the past between religion and reason. There is no reason why this assumption should be accepted, and in fact the Catholic Church has never accepted it.

‘We had the experience but missed the meaning’ could be construed as a manifestation of the error of thinking that the experience is a type of verification as in ‘the meaning of a statement eg. God exists, is the method of its verification. Dead wrong of course but D’Arcy does not dash it with cold water, quite.

But this is not to say that faith is dependent on realisation or verification for its certainty. There is a growing intensity heightened by love. The love does not change the nature of the act of belief; it adds fuel to a fire already existing.

He deprecates the view that not having a ‘religious sense’

“has been used by many as an excuse for taking no interest in religion. These latter are apt to say with a shrug that they have no religious sense, and they consider that this is a good reason for neglecting to worship God. They forget - and they have been encouraged to forget by those who should know better - that sense and feeling are not the criteria of what is duty, and it is in “an act of duty not of experience that religion first consists."

That alone is a good euro’s worth.