Josiah Royce and Catholic Religious Experience

Abstract“Religious experience” is an ambiguous theological term. American philosophers William James and John Dewey contribute to an understanding of religious experience as private and strictly affective, which reinforces belief in a denuminized communal sphere. Another American philosopher, Josiah Royce, accounts for religious experience in ways that resonate with Catholic experience and that counteract current American tendencies to privacy and insularity. Royce envisions an alternative to both William James' individualism and John Dewey's naturalism that illumines two typically Catholic experiences: encountering God sacramentally in the community called “church,” and discovering God's gracious power within human knowledge and freedom. His description of the sources of religious insight affirm the intellectual and actional elements of religious experience as well as its affective dimensions. His description of the act of interpretation explains how many selves can take part in a single experience, and thereby create a shared life together.