Some varieties of religious experience

The epistemology of religious experience has been one of the central themes of recent analytic philosophy of religion. Religious experience in this context is standardly construed as experience which seems to be focally of God or some other supernatural reality. Richard Swinburne's drawing of the boundaries of the concept is representative of the wider literature on this point. He writes:

The same sort of emphasis is evident in the work of other philosophers. For example, William Alston's book on the theme of religious experience bears the title, Perceiving God, and his discussion concerns ‘experiences in which the subject takes him/herself to be directly aware of God, with particular emphasis on that subclass in which experience is non-sensory’.Footnote ² Similarly, Nelson's Pike's book on Mystic Union examines experiences which the subject takes to be directly of God – together with a further kind of experience, where the believer takes herself to be absorbed experientially in God in a way which implies the dissolving of any subject–object structure.Footnote ³ In his review article on ‘Mysticism and religious experience’, Jerome Gellman picks out these same cases, which he labels respectively ‘numinous’ and ‘mystical’ experience. The first gives ‘acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense perception, somato-sensory modalities, or standard introspection’.Footnote ⁴ And the second involves ‘super-sense-perceptual’ and ‘sub-sense-perceptual’ experience – where the latter kind of experience is ‘either devoid of phenomenological content altogether, or nearly so …, or consists of phenomenological content appropriate to sense perception, but lacking in the conceptualization typical of attentive sense perception’.Footnote ⁵ So here again, religious experience is taken to be focally of God, or to lack a subject–object structure, and both types of experience are thought to be distinct from sensory kinds of experience by virtue of their phenomenology or lack thereof.Footnote ⁶

As Swinburne acknowledges, given the ‘fuzziness’ of the concept of religion, it will not be difficult to identify other kinds of experience as ‘religious’, in addition to those which are of central concern in this literature. In this paper, I want to focus in particular upon experiences which in the first instance are not of some supernatural entity, or devoid of a subject–object structure, but are instead of a material context – of some built or natural environment which is taken to carry a religious meaning in some respect. If we attend to experiences of this kind, then we should also expect to find a closer connection between the phenomenology of a religious experience and the phenomenology of correlative sense experience.

Attending to religious experiences of this kind is likely to be worthwhile for at least two reasons. First of all, the standard discussion has often been interested in relatively exotic phenomena – of which mystical experience is the most obvious example. But we might well expect religious experience in many cases anyway to have as its focus some material context – rather than having no subject–object structure, or being directly targeted at God considered as a supernatural or non-material entity. This expectation is borne out, I suggest, by the literature in phenomenology of religion which I consider below. So there are broadly sociological reasons for extending the range of the standard discussion: many believers anyway will find that their religious experience usually, and perhaps invariably, has as its focus some discovery of the meaning which is borne by their physical environment.

Secondly, concentrating on the case where God is taken to be the focal object of an experience may well seem to be theologically partisan: such an approach tends to be aligned with those theologies which represent God as a particular individual (as a ‘supernatural thing’), rather than thinking of God as a kind of context or ultimate frame of reference in light of which we can make sense of individual things. This latter perspective, although not much discussed in recent philosophy of religion, is well represented in the theological literature. Rowan Williams comments, for example, that talk of God ‘is structurally more like talking about some “grid” for the understanding of particular objects than talking about particular objects in themselves’.Footnote ⁷ So in the interests of theological as well as sociological inclusiveness, we may well wish to attend more closely to forms of religious experience which are directed in the first instance to some material context and the question of the religious meaning that is presented by that context.Footnote ⁸

Of course, the standard approaches do allow that material context can figure in some fashion in some religious experiences. Swinburne's typology, for example, involves five varieties of religious experience – including the case where the experience is of a ‘very unusual’ public object, and three cases where the experience is not of a public object. These types of religious experience are clearly distinct from the kind of experience that will be the focus of my discussion. But his remaining category concerns the case where someone ‘seems to perceive the supernatural object in perceiving a perfectly ordinary non-religious object’.Footnote ⁹ This case is closer to the kind of experience that I am proposing to examine, but here too there are differences. The reference to God as a ‘supernatural object’, and the suggestion that this object is one we ‘perceive’, reveals that religious experience is being construed here, once more, as an encounter with a transcendent individual.

Swinburne's choice of analogy when expounding this category of experience brings further differences into view. He cites as an analogy: ‘the way in which someone may see a vapour trail in the sky as the trail of an aeroplane’.Footnote ¹⁰ So the suggestion is that God can be non-inferentially recognized in His effects. It will become apparent that two of the three kinds of experience that will form the focus of my discussion (those which appeal to the history and the representative character of a material context) are markedly different from this case. The final case I identify arises when a material context induces a response of, for example, reverential seriousness – and in this sense points towards God. As will become clear, this case too, as I develop it, remains different from the non-inferential recognition of an entity in its effects, for three reasons.

First, it is clearly tied to the activities of the body in a given environment – instead of being a matter of as it were standing back to observe God's effects, rather as when we observe a vapour trail. Secondly, it is also directly connected to the emotional responses that are elicited by a physical context. And lastly and most importantly, this sort of experience is not fundamentally one which seems (epistemically) to be of God as the efficient cause of certain events characterized in neutral or meaning-independent terms – rather, the sense of God is realized in some recognition of the existential meaning which attaches to a material context. And while this meaning is taken to point beyond itself, the recognition of this larger, religious significance is not dependent at all directly upon the thought that God is active here as an efficient cause. In brief then, the experience is focally of the meaning displayed by some material context, rather than being targeted at various neutrally characterized or ‘objective’ events or at God considered as the non-material efficient cause of such events.Footnote ¹¹

Determining the meaning of a material context: a secular example

I want to consider now some of the ways in which we might make existential sense of a material context – and I am going to begin with a non-religious case study. I shall then argue that the principles which apply here can be generalized to religious phenomena. Beginning with a secular example will help to show, I hope, that the kind of religious experience which we will be examining later in the paper is not ‘spooky’ or dependent very directly upon reference to the operation of efficient causes – it is, rather, bound up with the discernment of existential meanings, and comparable in this respect with familiar kinds of secular experience. Specifically, I am going to start with Wendell Berry's account of his experience of visiting a stretch of wilderness near his home in Kentucky. Berry's discussion has the merit of being phenomenologically acute, and not overburdened by systematization of the kind that might scuff over the phenomenological record.

In his essay ‘An entrance to the woods’, Berry describes how late afternoon one day, having driven from his home in Lexington, he set off along the trails of the Red River Gorge.Footnote ¹² Once he has established camp and had dinner, he finds that ‘a heavy feeling of melancholy and lonesomeness comes over me’.Footnote ¹³ Realizing that what he had thought might be the sound of human conversation is in fact the babble of water, and recalling that after all he has not come to this place in search of company, he adds: ‘I am inexplicably sad.’

He goes on to uncover some of the roots of his melancholy. First of all, there is the history of this region:

So his sadness is in part a visceral registering of the past of this place – and the difficulties experienced here by generations of settlers, and their ultimate failure to found an enduring home in these parts. He continues: ‘That sense of the past is probably one reason for the melancholy that I feel. But I know that there are other reasons.’ One further reason that he goes on to explore is his sense of bodily and mental dislocation, and disconnectedness from the rhythms of this place. He writes:

These are matters to which I shall return – but here it is enough to note that Berry finds that he has yet to feel settled in this place because his habits of thought are still those which befit his workplace, or driving a car at speed. Berry then examines a third source of his sadness: being away from his familiar environment, he finds he misses the reassuring references to himself which are all around him there. In normal circumstances, he notes:

The story of the remainder of his stay is largely a tale of how this sense of mental and bodily disconnection from this place, and the pained or disoriented recognition of his own insignificance here, can be overcome. And these are of course related developments: it is in coming to feel mentally attuned and physically at ease in this environment that he comes to find in it a kind of home – albeit not one that speaks to him very directly of his own importance in the wider scheme of things. And already he anticipates these changes: ‘Uneasy as this feeling is [of his own insignificance here], I know it will pass. Its passing will produce a deep pleasure in being here. And I have felt it often enough before that I have begun to understand something of what it means’.Footnote ¹⁷

It is clear, in fact, that the importance of this place for the author consists partly in its capacity to stand representatively for the nature of things more generally and the relative insignificance of human life within that context. He comments:

But while this place speaks representatively of the littleness of human beings within a larger natural and cosmological landscape, it also confers a meaning on human life that is not relative to success measured by the standards of, for instance, wealth or reputation. This is the meaning that is realized when our body's movements learn to adapt themselves to the natural environment, so revealing that we are after all fitted for it. Berry touches on this second kind of meaning when speaking of the second day of his trip:

There are, then, two truths conveyed by this place: human beings stand in an extended natural environment which accords no special significance to their activities (in this context, the raising of a hand counts for no more than the growing of a poplar), and yet it is also true that we can feel at home in ‘wild’ nature. So this particular recognition of the littleness of a human life need not engender a sense of unease – but can instead speak of our being at home within a larger cosmological context.

What should we make of this account of how a human being may find an existential meaning in a particular material context? I suggest that there are three kinds of meaning recognition in play here. First, the meaning of the place is given partly in its history: insofar as this history is one of human affliction and frustration (compare Berry's reference to ‘the burden of human history’), then a correlative affective response and assessment of its significance is implied. This connection between place and story is not just a matter of Berry's visit to the place providing him with further information about its past, or an occasion to recall that past. There is also a normative dimension to consider here: it matters that these stories have unfolded here, and that is why it is especially appropriate to recall them here, and to be moved by them here.

The appropriateness of acknowledging the storied identity of a site is familiar from many other contexts – as when we place flowers at the scene of a roadside accident, or when we debate the question of what sort of building for what sort of purpose it would be appropriate to erect at the site of, say, a natural disaster or a humanly contrived incident which has resulted in large-scale loss of life. Objects as well as places can carry this sort of significance. A wedding ring, for example, especially when it has been worn for many years, stores up the meaning of its past – and if lost, it is little consolation to be told that it is possible to produce a perfect replica. The significance of such a ring is given partly in its history, and an empirically indistinguishable ring which lacks this history will also lack this particular significance. In the same way, the place that Berry is describing has a significance which is relative to its history, and not just to its current sensory appearance, which it could in principle share with another, qualitiatively indistinguishable place. And that significance invites, and from a moral point of view perhaps it requires, some sort of acknowledgement in the present – in the form minimally of a willingness to recollect and reckon with the meaning of the lives of those who have inhabited this place.

But of course the sensory properties of a place are also important – and Berry's story is partly an account of how he comes to find his bodily responses attuned to the sensory and sensuous qualities of this environment. The sensory qualities of the place are a focus of his discussion throughout, but what is perhaps most striking is the role that Berry accords to bodily movement, and the pace of bodily movement, in allowing the senses free expression so that they can discover their affinity with this place. As Berry puts the point: ‘Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds; and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt.’Footnote ²⁰ It is for this reason that the slowing of the body to a walking pace is required, if the senses are to be properly engaged. And when that is done, mind and body together can feel attuned to such a place – and at this juncture, Berry is able to comment: ‘I no longer feel the strangeness and uneasiness of the evening before. The sounds of the creek move through my mind as they move through the valley, unimpeded and clear.’

So the meaning of this place is given both in its past and in the possibilities for enacted, bodily appropriation which it extends in the present. The place also carries significance insofar as its character stands microcosmically for a larger truth about human beings and their predicament. As Berry notes, this place shows us the character of other areas of wilderness – and the sort of relationship to the natural world that is enacted here could in principle be enacted at these other places. The fundamental truth borne by this place is then that we human beings are not strangers, not just here but in the world at large, because we are fitted for life in this world, if only we can learn to live with the requisite simplicity – as Berry does when he leaves behind the gadgetry and consumer satisfactions of his ordinary life to walk into the woods. It is this observation of course that gives support to the environmental ethical strand of Berry's reflections.

Berry's discussion of the meaning that he finds in this particular place is not intended as an exercise in theory – he does not isolate the three kinds of meaning that I have just distinguished. Neither is his approach intended to have any very direct religious reference, but there are I think clear religious resonances in what he says, especially insofar as he finds the natural world adapted to meet human beings' spiritual as much as their material needs. Some Christian commentators have thought some such perspective to be implied in the doctrine of creation. Nicholas Wolterstorff, for example, remarks that this world:

Wolterstorff's comments invite us to think that the doctrine of creation denotes the possibility, and from a Christian point of view the desirability, of a certain phenomenology of everyday experience – one which involves taking delight in the world in its materiality. And Berry's description of the woods gives one example of how such a phenomenology might be realized.

Determining the religious meaning of a material context

Berry's account is religiously of interest for the further reason that the kinds of existential meaning which are implied in his account map very directly on to the kinds of meaning that are described in the phenomenology of religion literature on the experience of sacred space. Summing up some of the main themes of this literature, Thomas Barrie observes, for example, how sacred sites are commonly set apart – by the use of a boundary wall, or by their relative inaccessibility as when they are set on a mountain or island.Footnote ²² He notes too how the approach to a sacred place requires the devotee to pass various thresholds. Quoting Joseph Campbell, he writes: ‘The way is arduous and fraught with peril because it is, in fact, a rite for passing from the profane to the sacred.’ And he continues in his own words: ‘The path is rarely easy but is experienced as a trial, either physically or psychologically.’Footnote ²³ In all of these respects, the sacred meaning of a place seems to be relative to its meaning for the body: by requiring the body to undergo various trials, to slow down, to take stock of what it is doing rather than proceeding in a state of casual indifference, a sacred place, or the approach to a sacred place, helps to focus the attention of the believer, and to induce the right kind of emotional responsiveness – broadly one of reverential seriousness. Clearly, this account fits very directly with Berry's observations on how the meaning of the woods is given as his body adjusts to the space and learns to adapt to its rhythms.

Sacred places are of course ‘set apart’ not just physically but also on account of their history. As Barrie notes:

An obvious example of this connection between history and sacred significance is provided by sites of pilgrimage, since pilgrims are typically drawn to these places on account of their history, as the scene of a certain vision or divine revelation, or because of their association with the deeds of some saintly figure – or equally they may enjoy this sort of storied significance at one remove by housing a relic. Here, of course, we find a counterpart for Berry's comments on the history of Red River Gorge, and the role of that history in conditioning his sense of the significance of the place. Sites of pilgrimage also typically carry the first kind of meaning that we have identified – insofar as the believer is invited to undertake some relatively arduous journey in order to reach the site.

Lastly, Barrie notes how places may come to assume a special religious significance when they are taken to stand in some sense at the centre of things, and thereby to represent in compressed form the character of the cosmos as a whole. Here he writes: ‘The sacred place often symbolized the center of the world, the omphalos or navel of the world, the place where the primordial creation took place.’Footnote ²⁵ This sort of meaning is also evident in the case of sites which are thought to provide a kind of miniaturized replica of the cosmos or imago mundi.Footnote ²⁶ This account of the sacred significance of a place fits directly, of course, with Berry's description of the microcosmic meaning of the woods. Again, as with places of pilgrimage, so here a site can exhibit several of these kinds of meaning – for example, as Barrie implies, if a place is taken to be the site of primordial creation, then its history confers upon it a larger, representative significance, allowing its character to stand for the character of the creation as a whole.

While I have concentrated here on Barrie's account of the sources of sacred space, his discussion is a faithful record of the emphases of a wider literature. For example, we might compare our three models – which understand a site's significance in terms of (1) the possibilities which it affords for bodily appropriation, (2) its history, and (3) its microcosmic significance – to the perspectives set out in Lindsay Jones's work The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, and in particular to the role which he assigns, respectively, to ‘preparatory sanctifications of ritual context’ (see chapter 24), ‘memorializing mythical and miraculous episodes’ (chapter 18), and ‘microcosmic images of the universe’ (chapter 14). And these three cases in turn fall squarely within his three overarching categories of, respectively, ‘architecture as ritual context', ‘architecture as commemoration’, and ‘architecture as orientation’.Footnote ²⁷

The three models we have distinguished point to rather different ways in which religious meanings may be presented. The case where a site has religious significance because of its religiously meaningful history is perhaps the most straightforward: here religious meaning is taken to be displayed in some event or in someone's life story, and then conserved in some degree in a correlative place. So this is not so much an account of how religious meanings are established in the first place, but more a proposal about how they can be perpetuated in material form. Again, there are ready secular analogues for this phenomenon, given the significance which we find in items of ‘sentimental significance’, and so on.

The model which appeals to the bodily meaning of a place trades on the fact that religious beliefs and practices are typically bound up with a kind of reverential seriousness. A place can acquire a religious meaning then by inducing an attitude of this kind. Clearly there are various ways in which this may be done. The monumental scale and focused lighting of a cathedral may evoke a response of hushed wonderment; the rigours of a protracted journey to some site of pilgrimage may require the believer to lay aside their normal familial and professional duties, and to adopt a slower and simpler mode of life, so stilling the mind and leaving them stripped of their normal social and other frameworks of reference, so that they can encounter the shrine in a spirit of vulnerability or openness, and a seriousness which is both expressed and engendered by the difficulties of the journey. Again, there are parallels here with Berry's description of the woods. As he notes:

So the kind of bodily immersion in a place which is characteristic of camping out in a realm of wilderness, one which requires then a certain simplicity of life and a surrendering of conventional sources of self-worth, opens the walker to the possibility of a newly defined identity – found in his sense of being fitted to life in this environment, not thanks to any artificial aid, but just because of his humanity.

Finally, the model which appeals to a place's microcosmic significance turns on the thought that religious meanings are all-encompassing. As Gerardus Van der Leeuw puts the point: ‘The religious significance of things … is that on which no wider nor deeper meaning can follow. It is the meaning of the whole’.Footnote ²⁹ So if a place communicates some encompassing truth about human beings and their predicament, it will for that reason carry a religious significance (even if this significance implies a disruption of conventional religious points of view). And as we have seen, Berry's remarks on the woods as representative of wilderness regions more generally can also be read in these terms – for example by reference to the doctrine of creation.

So these three models of sacred place can all be connected to secular analogues. Moreover, each has its own particular way of generating or perpetuating religious sense. And as we have seen, the three models can interact with one another – as when the storied significance of a place, for example, becomes the basis for its microcosmic meaning. For our purposes it is striking that in each case, it is not that God is encountered directly, or recognized as the cause of various neutrally characterized or ‘objective’ events, but rather that God is made known in apprehending the meaning which is borne by a particular place. It is worth reflecting a little further on how this can be so.

As we have seen, when the significance of a site is given in its history, the believers are able to encounter that history by their presence at the site. We can speak here of ‘encounter’ because this is not just a matter of the believer rehearsing this history in thought, or finding that she can elaborate upon it by being at the place. Rather, the history of the place is in a sense stored up there, so that it makes a practical claim on the believer when he is present at the site – requiring him to engage in forms of behaviour which show appropriate acknowledgement of the significance of the events which have unfolded here. In this sense then, we can speak of encounter or ‘experience’ – rather than supposing that the believer is simply recollecting some story in abstraction from her material context.

In the case where the meaning of a place is given in the possibilities for bodily appropriation which it affords (in its sensory qualities, rather than its history) then God can be made known in, for example, the experience of wonderment or awe that is induced by a material context – though to count as religious, we might suppose that this wonderment should reach beyond this localized context, rather than terminating in it. As I have noted, this case comes closest to Swinburne's category of ‘perceiving’ a ‘supernatural object’ in perceiving some material object. But again there are differences: God is not made known here simply on the basis of observation, but in the embodied, identity-shaping, affectively toned appropriation of the place, and the recognition of God's presence depends then upon apprehending in these terms the meaning that is borne by the material context. This suggests, in turn, that in these cases God is not encountered fundamentally as an individual entity, but rather as the wider meaning which pervades a material context – or in Williams's terms, as the ‘grid’ in light of which we can make sense of the entities that comprise this context.

Lastly, in the case where the meaning of a site is given in its microcosmic significance, God is revealed once again in the knowledge of the meaning of a material context: in knowing the microcosmic meaning of a particular place, the mind is directed to the meaning of the human experience as a whole, where that meaning, according to the monotheistic faiths, is God, or in Christian terms the Logos. It is noteworthy that literary representations of this sort of encompassing meaning are often accorded a sacred significance or even a kind of ontological affinity with the divine being – as when the Torah or Koran, for example, are taken to have a quasi-divine status.

So the three models all propose that God is made known in knowing the meaning borne by a material context. But they suggest rather different accounts of how God enters into human experience: on the first model, it is a divine meaning (concerning the significance of some religiously important event from the past) which is encountered; in the second, it is more exactly God who is encountered, but only by way of the practical and emotional meaning afforded by a material context; and in the third model, it is the divine meaning of the world which is encountered, where this encounter implies a kind of experience of God to the extent that a localized representation of this sort of meaning may constitute a place or a book as sacred and perhaps as sharing a kind of ontological affinity with God.

Erazim Kohák on the religious meaning of material contexts

Erazim Kohák is a phenomenologist who has written of the materially mediated nature of religious experience with particular sensitivity. I would like to note next some of the connections between his discussion and the framework that we have been developing here. Like Berry, Kohák is concerned in particular with the phenomenology of what we might call sylvan experience – only he is describing the woods around his home in New Hampshire.

Kohák is also interested in the way in which a thing's history may condition its significance. He writes for example of a child's distress when a doll which it has cherished is damaged beyond repair:

Here the storied meaning of the doll is taken to invite a religious response not because its story contains some event which is directly of religious importance (an event concerning the deed of a saint, or something of that kind). Instead the history of the doll reveals that material things cannot be assigned a merely material or value-free significance, and equally cannot be assigned a merely instrumental significance, by reference to their usefulness in securing some future good or some future stream of experience (measured by this latter criterion of value, the doll and a replica might seem to be of equal worth). By these standards, the child's upset makes no sense. What is revealed in the example is then a value which requires acknowledgement in the present, but is grounded in the past, rather than carrying instrumental importance, and which is in this sense removed from the flow of time.

Kohák comments that religious language offers one way of acknowledging this sort of significance, but notes too that we may not often have recourse to such language: ‘Still, no practicing parent would think of what is perhaps the response adequate to the situation, “We will pray together to thank God for all the years that Dolly was with you”.’ And he adds an explanation of our unwillingness to think of the doll's significance in these terms: ‘any response which does not explain away eternity, the infinite preciousness of goodness and beauty, by a material or temporal reduction, also demands a willingness to bear an immense pain’.Footnote ³¹ Again, the language of eternity gets a foothold here because the value in question requires enduring acknowledgement – and yet its importance is not a function of any present or future development, such as our ability to conserve the object or create some replica of it. So here is another way of developing the idea that sites and things can carry religious meaning because of their history – only here the religious meaning is not simply preserved in the thing, but arises out of its accumulated significance in a human life.

When speaking of the religious meaning which he finds in his woods, Kohák appeals to their meaning for the body, more than to their history. Again he uses examples drawn from ordinary life to make his point. He speaks for instance of how:

And in the same sort of way, he suggests, the woods can be encountered as a sphere of mineness – only this ‘mineness’ is not that of human beings or of the creatures that inhabit the woods, but of God. Again, the kind of meaning that is identified here is not available to the observer, but is known in the act of embodied appropriation – just as the mineness of a house is revealed in the effort of trying to cook there, rather than simply observationally:

Alongside the tendency to understand religious experience in terms of an encounter whose focus is God, the philosophy of religion literature also commonly represents the world's order as religiously significant insofar as it can be taken up as evidence within, for example, an argument from design. And these tendencies are connected of course – in each case, what is overlooked is the possibility that religious experience may be focally of the meaning which is borne by some material context. Instead, in these cases, the material context is characterized neutrally (or in meaning-independent terms) and taken as the basis for an inference, or as a background which is presupposed in the non-inferential recognition of God's activity as efficient cause – or alternatively the material context is simply bypassed by supposing that God is presented to the believer in some supra-sensory experience.

By contrast, Kohák here treats the order of the world not simply in terms of its lawlikeness (which is to characterize it in neutral or meaning-independent terms) but as a realm of ‘mineness’ – which is to say that this order is seen to carry a meaning, because it is seen to signify that this place is cared for. Again, this sort of meaning is known not by inference, nor by some supra-sensory experience, but in the embodied appropriation of the place – which allows us to see that we can be at home here, by participating in an order of meaning that is not in the first instance relative to us or to the other dwellers in the forest. (Compare Berry's comments on the ‘insignificance’ of human beings in the cosmos – and how they may even so feel at home there.) So here the sense of God is inextricably tied, once again, to a recognition of the possibilities for embodied appropriation which are extended by the place.

Lastly, although Kohák does not discuss the matter explicitly, it is everywhere implied in his discussion that the woods near his home are representative of the nature of the created order more generally. And he is able therefore to read his experience of this particular place as a revelation of the nature of ‘being’. This perspective is apparent in these comments which fall at the close of the body of the book, and set out its central concerns:

Here this particular place is taken to speak of a set of possibilities for human life which carry universal import – rather as Berry takes his wandering in Red River Gorge to provide a template for human possibilities in our relations with the wider cosmos. For Kohák the meaning of the sort of transfiguration of nature that he describes here (where transfiguration for him involves a deepened appreciation of nature in its ordinariness, rather than implying some displacement of its ordinary character) can again be best communicated in religious terms. What is revealed in such experiences is that: ‘The ultimate sense of being is the ingression of the Idea of the Good … into matter and time, becoming actual within them and bestowing meaning upon them.’Footnote ³⁵

As Kohák's appeal to ‘the Good’ makes clear, this perspective is of fundamental relevance to the question of whether the life of a human being can overall be reckoned a good. This is a question which philosophers of religion often debate, of course, in connection with ‘the problem of evil’ – but with relatively little attention to the phenomenology of our experiences of ordinary places such as this. On this point too, we might suppose that the concept of religious experience (or perhaps we should say: of experience which is religiously germane) invites broadening.

So the three models of the significance of place that we have derived from Berry's secular appreciation of a particular natural place can be developed quite fruitfully both in relation to the phenomenological literature on sacred sites and in relation to the work of Erazim Kohák and his theologically informed appreciation of the natural world. And in this way we can extend these models to provide three perspectives on the nature of materially mediated religious experience.

Emotional feelings and determining the meaning of material contexts

There is one further theme that I would like to touch on in order to round out this account of religious experience. It is striking that Berry's understanding of the significance of the Red River Gorge woods is realized first of all in his felt response to the place – and it takes him some while to unpack in discursive terms the cognitive content of what he registers first of all in feeling. Remember in particular how he feels ‘inexplicably sad’ on his first night in the gorge – and how he then unfolds the meaning of this sadness by reference to the storied history of the place and his bodily and mental disconnection from it. Emotional feelings are also central to the recognition of the kind of significance that Barrie describes. The fact that the approach to a sacred site is arduous, or the fact that a sacred building is constructed on a monumental scale: these are facts whose religious significance is registered in our emotional responses, insofar as we brought hereby to a state of reverential seriousness, or hushed wonderment, or some other such condition. And Kohák too gives the emotions a role in acknowledging the meanings which he is describing: the significance of the doll, for example, is registered (and partly constituted, we might suppose) in the child's distress at its destruction. That distress reveals and acts out the mattering of the doll.

The recent philosophical literature on emotions is nicely consonant with this sort of account of the role of emotional responses in alerting us to existential meanings. Here I want to mention just two related strands in this literature. As Robert Solomon, Hanna Pickard, and others have argued, emotional feelings can be taken to have some reference to the world, rather than just being construed as throbbings or twinges, or ways of registering some bodily disturbance, in part because they involve some recognition of the body's making ready to act in a given environment.Footnote ³⁶ The feeling of fear, for example, involves some awareness of the tensing of muscles and of other bodily responses which imply some genuine reckoning with the character of a given environment and a conception of what sort of practical response is fitting therein. This conception of emotional feelings reflects earlier accounts, such as that of William James, insofar as it takes emotional feelings to be ways of keeping track of bodily changes, but it also accords them a world-directedness insofar as these bodily changes themselves imply some taking stock of the meaning of an environment – and emotional feelings participate therefore in the body's intentionality.Footnote ³⁷

A second familiar theme in recent discussion of the emotions concerns the role of emotional feelings in constituting patterns of salience. If I feel fear of a fast-approaching dog, for example, then I accord this feature of my environment a certain salience, which allows other matters, such as the colour of the linoleum floor on which I am standing, to be consigned to the periphery of my awareness. In this way too, emotional feelings can be seen to be world-directed: such feelings, as distinct from mere sensations, imply a correlative ordering of the perceptual field, and therefore a judgement about what is worth attending to in a situation of practical choice.Footnote ³⁸

It is natural to see these two stories of the significance of emotional feelings as parts of a larger, unified narrative. Our judgement about what matters or what is worth attending to in a situation of practical choice is realized both in a correlative ordering of the perceptual field and in a correlative making ready of the body for action – and this intellectual content is registered in each case in emotional feelings, insofar as they involve a kinaesthetic awareness of the body and are folded into a given pattern of salient viewing. No doubt in some cases it will be possible to order these responses sequentially and causally – perhaps a certain pattern of salient viewing engenders a certain practical response of the body, or vice versa. But in any case, here we seem to have two ways of taking stock of the environment and its practical demands, and emotional feelings appear to partake in both kinds of insight.

This account of the epistemic significance of emotional feelings fits very directly with the sort of role that they appear to play in the accounts of Berry, Barrie, and Kohák. As Berry notes, the meaning which attaches to the stories associated with a place may be registered first in feeling, rather than being discursively articulated. And this can be in part a matter of how one's perceptual field is structured. He writes for example that: ‘If one has read of the prehistoric Indians whose flint arrowpoints and pottery and hominy holes and petroglyphs have been found here, then every rock shelter and clifty spring will suggest the presence of those dim people who have disappeared into the earth.’Footnote ³⁹

Here certain physical features – rock shelters and springs – stand out in the author's perceptual field because of their human meaning, when they are read in light of a knowledge of the storied history of the place. And it is natural to suppose that this standing out is folded into the author's emotional responses, which in turn are realized in, or contribute towards, the feeling of sadness that he mentions. It is also true of course that this passage is situated within Berry's description of his movement across this landscape – and this organization of his visual field will no doubt carry implications for the disposition of his body, as he pauses or inclines his steps in ways which give acknowledgement to these meanings.

Similarly Barrie's discussion points to the connection between the posture of the body, and its readiness to act in a given environment, and a certain emotional responsiveness, as the believer approaches a sacred site. The body needs perhaps to stoop, or to adjust to difficult light conditions, or in other ways to act self-protectively – and all of these bodily responses help to engender, and give expression to, the feeling of seriousness, or awe, or wonderment, that prepares the believer to appropriate the meaning of the sacred site aright. They will also imply naturally a correlative pattern of focused or salient viewing.

Lastly, these same connections seem to be displayed in Kohák's account of, for example, the experience of mineness. As we have seen, to register the mineness of the forest it is not enough to relate to it simply as an observer – one has to move about in it, rather as one learns about the mineness of a kitchen area by trying to cook there. And again this insight which is realized in an appropriate attitude of the body carries with it a correlative emotional feeling – to see the place as a domain of mineness implies a response of respect and care, and the mineness of a place is, we might suppose, typically recognized in such responses. And respect and care in turn imply a certain pattern of salient viewing – the kind of viewing that is entailed in, for example, a determination to avoid trampling down vegetation or needlessly disturbing the inhabitants of the forest.

Concluding remarks

I have been sketching an account of religious experience which is rather differently focused from most such accounts in recent analytic philosophy of religion. Specifically, we have been considering how religious experience may involve not so much a direct encounter with God, or some non-dualistic experience of God, as the recognition of the religious meaning of some material context. I have suggested that such experiences may be grouped into three general types, based upon the opportunities for bodily appropriation that are afforded by a place, the stories with which it is associated, and its microcosmic significance – where a given place may exemplify more than one of these kinds of meaning, and may display one kind of meaning because it exhibits another. I have also proposed that we can find ready counterparts for these varieties of meaning in ordinary ‘secular’ cases of meaning recognition. Lastly, I have taken note of the role of the affective phenomenology of our experience in registering such meanings – felt responses I have argued are not just thought-less sensations induced by some feeling-less reckoning with the meaning of a space but, often enough, are themselves ways in which we come to take stock of the religious and other meanings which attach to places.

This account will fit most readily of course with a theology which is broadly sacramental in character – which sees relationship to God as mediated in the normal case by relationship to material context, and by discernment of the meanings presented by those contexts, rather than by means of some more direct and perhaps supra-sensory encounter with God as a particular item of experience.Footnote ⁴⁰ Since this sacramental emphasis is common to many faith traditions, it is worth the effort to develop an account of religious experience which is consonant with it. Moreover, such an account, I have been arguing, will not be of merely psychological interest. It will also be germane to the epistemology of religious belief and the concept of God – since it will bear on, for example, the question of whether the phenomenology of human experience meshes constructively with the doctrine of creation, and the question of whether religious experience issues in a conception of God as an individual entity, or as a framework of ultimate meaning which is implied in our encounter with localized meanings (or it may be indeed that we should say both these things).Footnote ⁴¹