Numinous Experience and Religious Language

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon Schlamm
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
Numinous Experience ◽  
Rational Understanding ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this article is to evaluate Rudolf Otto's account of the relationship between numinous experience and religious language in The Idea of the Holy, and this will inevitably also involve some more general discussion of the relationship between all religious experience and discursive reason. In The Idea of the Holy Otto makes a number of controversial claims about the nature of numinous experience and the problems which it creates for anyone wishing to speak about it. Numinous experience, Otto asserts, is qualitatively quite unlike any other experience. It is a religious feeling providing a unique form of religious knowledge inaccessible to our ordinary rational understanding. It is frequently spoken of as ineffable. Moreover because it resists literal description, it must be approached, if at all, then indirectly through analogy. At the heart of this collection of claims about numinous experience is an epistemological assumption about the distance separating religious language and experience. Otto believes that the parameters of numinous experience extend beyond the parameters of religious language, and consequently that it is possible to compare religious experience with language about it in a straightforward way. Indeed, much of The Idea of the Holy is devoted to the struggle of religious experience to cast off what Otto sees as its imprisonment by inadequate religious language.

Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description

1994 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Philip Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Numinous Experience ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

In a recent study entitled ‘Numinous Experience and Religious Language’, Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much discussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious language, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices in the continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aim of this paper, in response to Schlamm, is to question the plausibility of Otto's account in The Idea of the Holy of the nature of religious knowledge and his closely related understanding of the relationship between religious experience (or as he prefers, numinous experience) and religious language. By implication, this also calls into question Schlamm's use of Otto's position in his criticism of those writers on mysticism that he takes issue with, chiefly Steven Katz and those who propose an essentially Kantian interpretation of mysticism. However, for the most part I shall leave the contemporary debate on mysticism unaddressed, though my comments do have a bearing on it. If there is a wider target, it is chiefly those interpreters of religion, like Schlamm, who conceive of the relationship of religious experience (or the religious object itself) and religious language in essentially the same way as Otto. One thinks immediately here of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Otto admired greatly, and who stands in the same Liberal Protestant tradition. Also Karl Barth, who ironically, for all his strictures of Liberal Protestantism, actually propounded a view of the meaning and nature of religious language which is remarkably similar to the views of both Schleiermacher and Otto; at least at the beginning of his theological career, in his famous commentary on Romans: all that talk of God as ‘the inexpressible’ and ‘the Wholly Other’. In addition one could mention those classical texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, which like many contemporary writers on mysticism (e.g. the late Deirdre Green), conceive of mystical experience and the truth which it reveals as ‘beyond the scope of discursive thought, language and empirical activity’.

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Relationship

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions brings together thirteen scholars of late-antique, medieval, and renaissance traditions who discuss magic, religious experience, ritual, and witch-beliefs with the aim of reflecting on the relationship between man and the supernatural. The content of the volume is intriguingly diverse and includes late antique traditions covering erotic love magic, Hellenistic-Egyptian astrology, apotropaic rituals, early Christian amulets, and astrological amulets; medieval traditions focusing on the relationships between magic and disbelief, pagan magic and Christian culture, as well as witchcraft and magic in Britain, Scandinavian sympathetic graphophagy, superstition in sermon literature; and finally Renaissance traditions revolving around Agrippan magic, witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and a Biblical toponym related to the Friulan Benandanti’s visionary experiences. These varied topics reflect the multifaceted ways through which men aimed to establish relationships with the supernatural in diverse cultural traditions, and for different purposes, between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance. These ways eventually contributed to shaping the civilizations of the supernatural or those peculiar patterns which helped men look at themselves through the mirror of their own amazement of being in this world.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
William James
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Asking Questions ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Urgent Necessity

‘By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is William James’s classic survey of religious belief in its most personal, and often its most heterodox, aspects. Asking questions such as how we define evil to ourselves, the difference between a healthy and a divided mind, the value of saintly behaviour, and what animates and characterizes the mental landscape of sudden conversion, James’s masterpiece stands at a unique moment in the relationship between belief and culture. Faith in institutional religion and dogmatic theology was fading away, and the search for an authentic religion rooted in personality and subjectivity was a project conducted as an urgent necessity. With psychological insight, philosophical rigour, and a determination not to jump to the conclusion that in tracing religion’s mental causes we necessarily diminish its truth or value, in the Varieties James wrote a truly foundational text for modern belief. Matthew Bradley’s wide-ranging new edition examines the ideas that continue to fuel modern debates on atheism and faith.

scholarly journals Metaphor, Religious Language, and Religious Experience

Sophia ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria S. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Language

Continuity and Peculiarities in Proto-Kazakh and Ancient Indian Early Religious Beliefs

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (121) ◽  
pp. 185-195
Author(s):  
Zatov Zatov
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Common Features ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

A comparative study of the mythological picture of the world, early forms of religion allows us to identify common features characteristic of the worldview and spiritual guidelines of mankind as a whole. These features can be traced in archaic ideas about the structure of the universe, in understanding their spiritual and bodily essence, the infinity of God and the eternity of the soul, the relationship and interdependence of life forms in the world. This allows us to assert the thesis of the unity of mankind in its spiritual origins, despite racial and ethnic diversity. In the process of a comparative analysis of mythology, early forms of religion, the concept of God, the pantheon and the function of the gods, similar moments and ethnological specifics of understanding the essence of the soul and reincarnation in totemistic beliefs, in cosmological and theogonistic concepts are revealed.The author also analyzes the role and significance of the cult of ancestors, traces the evolution of the idea of proto-monotism (the creative function of Tengri and Brahma, the intention of henotheistic faith) and its place in religious knowledge.

Honoring the Divine as Virtue and Practice in Maimonides

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Seeman
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
Visible Sign ◽  
Human Ability ◽  
Religious Teaching ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Guide Of The Perplexed

AbstractHonoring the divine is central to Maimonides' ethical and religious phenomenology. It connotes the recognition of radical divine incommensurability and points to the hard limits of human ability to know God. Yet it also signals the importance of philosophical speculation within those limits, indicating the intellectual and ethical telos of human life. For Maimonides, to honor or show kavod to God is closely related to the meaning of the divine glory (also known as kavod) that Moses demands to see in Exodus 33. Moses' demand to see the kavod is usually interpreted as a quest for some visible sign of God's presence or, at least, for a created light whose existence could testify to the authenticity of Moses' prophecy. Maimonides is alone among early interpreters in treating Exodus 33 as a parable of the philosophical quest to apprehend divine uniqueness, which leads first to negative theology and then to imitatio Dei. This article argues that the theme of divine kavod links Maimonides' philosophical, literary, and even medical concerns with his practical religious teaching, and connects the Guide of the Perplexed with his other legal and interpretive works. Maimonides' consistent fascination with Exodus 33 helps to organize his reflections on human perfection, ethics, and the relationship between idolatry and everyday religious language, distinguishing him from dominant trends in both Judaeo-Arabic and later kabbalistic thought.

Islam et structures sociales chez les immigrés Soninké en France

1979 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constant Hames
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Country ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Social Category ◽  
French Society ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The One ◽  
Muslim Immigration ◽  
The Relationship

In spite of the fact that Islam represents the second largest religious community in France, as a result of the African Muslim immigration, we do not know anything about its dif ferent national components, nor about the reactions or the transformations it undergoes in a foreign country. This article presents a few elements of a survey devoted to the case of the Mauritanian Soninké. The author emphasizes the relationship which exists between religion and a certain social category, the moodi, i.e. those who are depositaries of religious knowledge. Religious action is seen under two aspects : Muslim teaching as it is provided by the moodi, on the one hand, and certain magic practices which claim to be attached more or less to Islam, on the other. While the latter practices enjoy the possibility of being spread through im migration, the teaching nevertheless continues to be given in the context of the homes that are provided for the immigrants. As a result, Islam seems to be advancing amidst the soninké immigration, except for the practices of ramadân. This is due not only to the permanent character of the soninké social structures which are reproduced during immigration — the moodi continue to play their role, but also to a shift in Muslim values, which tend to identify themselves with the sociological essence of the community which confronts a French society perceived as a danger for the soninké identity.

The Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-44
Author(s):  
Matthew Pettway
Keyword(s):  
African Descent ◽  
Cuban Literature ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Previous Scholarship

The introduction presents Manzano and Plácido to readers as Cuban authors of African descent that navigated conflicting bodies of religious knowledge and disparate aesthetic practices.This chapter defines key terms both critical and theoretical. And, briefly takes a look at how Plácido and Manzano have been studied as assimilationists in the formation of the Cuban literary tradition.The introduction provides a very brief review of scholarly approaches to Plácido and Manzano but suggests a radical departure from most previous scholarship on the authors.This chapter introduces African-inspired spirituality as a lens for articulating antislavery philosophy in black Cuban poetry and prose.This book explores new terrain because it explores what the relationship between aesthetics, religion, and black aspirations for emancipation might teach us about the origins of Cuban literature.

Before the Standing Stones: From Land Forms to Religious Attitudes and Monumentality

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce E. Salisbury
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Spiritual Beliefs ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Over Time

Any study of great prehistoric monuments from standing stones to pyramids involves exploring people’s spiritual beliefs. There had to be some strong sense of awe to motivate people to do the kind of extraordinary work to erect such monuments, and in the ancient world, religion served as the greatest motivator. There are many ways to study religion, and each academic discipline uses its own methods, which in turn shape its conclusions. Anthropologists compare different religions to see how different cultures express their beliefs; sociologists look at the functions religions serve to maintain a social cohesiveness. Psychologists of religion might look at the way religious feelings are manifest in individuals, and theologians try to explore deep truths about the nature of God. All these approaches reveal some truths about this complex phenomenon we call religion and the results often seem like those of the proverbial blind men describing parts of an elephant while missing the glory of the whole. I, too, will focus on one small part of the religious experience—the feeling that lies at the heart of those who have felt the spiritual, and while there have been many disciplines that have studied this religious experience, from psychology to philosophy to sociology, my approach is historical. I will try to explore the nature of people’s religious expression over time, as they change and as they stay the same. What is this religious feeling? As we might expect, there are many different interpretations and analyses of the nature of the religious experience. It may mean the capacity of feeling at one with something larger than oneself, which is the definition of ‘mysticism’. It maymean a belief in—a faith in—a supernatural being. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will simply accept the experience as a capacity humans have to feel awe and reverence (Bellah 2011). This enduring sense of awe—what has been famously called the idea of the holy (Otto 1950)—lies somewhere at the heart of all subsequent religious impulses.

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