The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceThis incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of allmysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport,but for no one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles theknowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptualthought. Thought, with its remoteness and abstractness, hasoften enough in the history of philosophy been contrasted unfavorablywith sensation.It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God’s knowledge cannotbe discursive but must be intuitive, that is, must be constructedmore after the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate feeling,than after that of proposition and judgment. But our immediatefeelings have no content but what the five senses supply; and wehave seen and shall see again that mystics may emphatically denythat the senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledgewhich their transports yield.In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Althoughmany of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gainedfavor in the eyes of the authorities. The experiences of these havebeen treated as precedents, and a codified system of mystical theologyhas been based upon them, in which everything legitimate findsits place.248 The basis of the system is “orison” or meditation, themethodical elevation of the soul towards God. Through the practiceof orison the higher levels of mystical experience may be attained.It is odd that Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism,should seemingly have abandoned everything methodicalin this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mysticalexperience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. Ithas been left to our mind- curers to reintroduce methodical meditationinto our religious life.The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind’s detachmentfrom outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration uponideal things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises recommendthe disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of248 Gorres’s Christliche Mystik gives a full account of the facts. So doesRibet’s Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890. A still more methodicalmodern work is the Mystica Theologia of Vallgornera, 2 vols., Turin, 1890.362