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.

Sankara's Afterimage

The truths of religion delivered by the scripture can be known with greater certainty than those which we puzzle out by ourselves personally or hearken to. Such would have been the attitude of Sankara and it would seem an ostensible flouting of our rational nature until we scry the small print where he adds that scripture cannot establish fire to be cold or water not wet. Nor indeed can logical reasoning achieve truths which are in the province of religious faith. To react to Shankara as one cowed by the authority of scripture is a facile and false conclusion. Yet, as he experienced it, the great light of scripture was like an afterimage that burned out normal vision. This would cohere with his non-dualism of atman and Brahman. An individual consciousness was a limiting adjunct (upadhi) of pure unlimited consciousness.

Chalk Circle

Reading Helen De Cruz’s lucid post
mystical perception
(crossposted at Prosblogion:
mystical experience

I was reminded of the Caucasian Chalk Circle in Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men.

 I was deep in my work when suddenly I heard a desperate shriek. I jumped up, certain that an accident had happened to one of the children during their play. I ran and saw the following picture:
In the middle of a circle drawn on the ground stood one of the little boys, sobbing and making strange movements, and the others were standing at a certain distance laughing at him. I was puzzled and asked what it was all about.
I learned that the boy in the middle was a Yezidi, that the circle had been drawn round him and that he could not get out of it until it was rubbed away. The child was indeed trying with all his might to leave this magic circle, but he struggled in vain. I ran up to him and quickly rubbed out part of the circle, and immediately he dashed out and ran away as fast as he could.

Such is the case with De Cruz - a scruple of chalk is mighty powerful ju-ju. ‘Chalk’ here represents the secular academic world view in which the naturalistic criteria of what counts as data apply. This is readily seen in the comments on New Apps which would be her home planet. For them subjective reports even if consistent and community wide cannot be the basis of a rational assessment particularly when other communities with different practices and different fundamental beliefs also achieve states of gnosis. These are classic rejoinders from within the redoubt of scientism and induce what in the tales of the Fenians was called a ‘magic sleep’ (suan draíochta). On Planet Prosblogion, very very far from this one (sorry!) there is an attempt at rationalist engagement which is worthy but has to fail and not just because the judge is wearing a lab coat.

In the end someone has to rub out part of the chalk circle to release you.