Unjversity of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, ltd. london, England

Copyright © 1985 by The Regents of the Universi!y of California

Libruy of Congren Cataloging in Publication Data

Proudfoot, Wayne, 1939-Religious experience.

Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Experience (Religion) I. Ttt1e.

BL53.P819 1985 291.4'2 84-23928 ISBN 978-0-520-06128-6 (alk. paper) Printed in the United States of America

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viii CONTENTS

IV. Mysticism

The Search for a Mystical Core Ineffability Noetic Quality Anomaly and Authority

V. Explication

The "Sense" of James's Varieties Sensible Authority Religious Experience

VI. Explanation

The Problem Descriptive and Explanatory Reduction Protective Strategies Force Explaining Religious Experience

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

119

120 124 136 148

155

156 169 179

190

191 196 199 209 216

228

237

249

261

184 EXPLICATION

not on the subject matter or content of the experience, but on its noetic quality or its significance for the truth of religious beliefs. But now we must confront a difficulty we have ignored heretofore. Seldom do people actually describe or identify their experiences as religious. In fact , the possibility of doing so is very recent and is restricted for the most part to the ·modern West. People understand and identify their experiences in terms of the concepts and beliefs available to them. But religion is a term that is relatively recent in origin and belongs to the history of Western ideas.IJ Smith (1964) has argued persua­sively that this concept was not available to the adherents of most of the traditions we identify as religious. Attempts to translate similar terms from other cultures as "religion" often distort the meaning of those terms. The same is true of our use of mysticism. In the previous chapter we spoke of subjects identifying their experiences as mystical. In fact, however, even the possibility of identifying one's experience as mystical is only as recent as the availability of that term. Most indi­viduals whom we might want to call mystics did not identify their experiences as mystical.

In the modern West, at least since the eighteenth century, the concept of religious experience has been available, so people could identify and understand their experiences in this way. James's Varielies could only have been written in a culture in which there was some meaning to the concept of religious experience. Although most of James's examples come from Christian cultures, they often diverge from the orthodox tradi­tion, and he views them as exemplifying a kind of experience that has instances in many different traditions. The concept of a religious experience, as distinct from Christian conversion, Buddhist meditation, or Jewish study or prayer, is a recent one. Were we to explicate our concept of religious experience as an experience that the subject identifies as religious, we would be forced to admit that religious experiences have been

EXPLICA TlON 185

confined to the modern West. A good case could be made for this conclusion. The criteria that have been proposed by Schleiermacher, Otto, and others for the identification of the religious moment in experience are criteria that have a history and that employ concepts that are recent and culture specific. If only experiences that are apprehended by their subjects in those terms are to be counted as religious experiences, then the phenomenon is a very recent one. If, however, we want to accommodate in our explication of the concept its use to refer to experiences of persons to whom the term religious or its counterparts are not available, we must revise our account. The explication, to be useful, ought to capture some of our intuitions about the concept, and one of those is that it should be applicable to experiences outside the modern West.

We might just say that a religious experience is an expe­rience that the subject identifies as Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, etc. , where the elcffera stands for a list of traditions we consider religious. But, of course, these terms also vary in their origins and their availability to members of those tradi­tions. Perhaps most Christians have considered themselves Christians, but the parallel claim cannot be made for Hindus or for followers of Shinto. An experience must be specified under a description that can be ascribed to the subject, and it is the task of the historian of religions to identify the particular con­cepts and descriptions available to people in particular contexts and to disentangle them from our anachronistic tendency to ascribe our concepts to those people. This is what much of the study of religion is about. Careful textual study of the Pali scriptures, Tibetan commentaries, and Buddhism in East Asia can help us sort out the particular concepts and assumptions that were available to Buddhists at different points in that complex tradition, as well as cases in which scriptural author­ity and local traditions came into conflict. Much of the same kind of work has been done for Christianity and Judaism.