Introduction: The Religious Structure of Phenomena—A Phenomenological Investigation

Abstract

The essays presented in this issue focus on the phenomenological investigation of religious phenomena. Scholars belonging to different phenomenological traditions address the following groups of questions in order to describe the structure that makes a phenomenon religious.First, is it actually possible to talk about religious experience? In this issue we decided not to give a final answer but, rather, to refer to religious experience as the religious structure of phenomena. In fact, the main question that informs our current contributions is: Could there be a phenomenology of religious experience?Second, we would like to ponder what different forms of phenomenological investigations can add to the description of the religious structure of phenomena. In this case we refer to the philosophical and psychological reflections of Dewey, Husserl, Heidegger, Ricoeur, James, and so forth, in order to shed light on religious phenomena.Third, we would like to address the question that gives the title to this issue: Do these phenomena present themselves as religious, or is it their structure as it interacts with our sense of self, our beliefs, our sense of the sacred, and our transcendental attitude that attributes phenomena a religious color? Can a religious sentiment be grounded in a perceptual and experiential quality? Or does our way of relating to neutral matter color it with a theological and axiological quality?The ways in which the authors address these questions are different. In “Guilt, Confession, and Forgiveness: From Methodology to Religious Experiencing in Paul Ricœur's Phenomenology,” Anna Jani approaches religious experience through a twofold phenomenological investigation aimed at discovering (1) how religious experiences reflect on reality and (2) how the methodology of phenomenology leads to the wider ontology of theology. These two divergent approaches to religious experiences find their source in the phenomenological reflection on reality, and this reality, in view of the substantially nonreal experience of religiosity, urged the creation of a new ontology in the gift of revelation. Ricoeur's phenomenological approach is used to inquire into this layer of reality.Drawing on Husserl's egology, Marc Applebaum's contribution, “Remembrance: A Husserlian Phenomenology of Sufi Practice,” discusses the traditional Sufi practice of “remembrance of God” (dhikr), which can be understood as “the primary meditative practice” within Islam (Elias 2013, 199). The aim is to describe dhikr as a religious phenomenon consisting in turning from a condition of heedlessness and duality to a unitive experience of remembering God and being remembered by God. Remembrance is framed not as a metaphysical doctrine but as a lived experience situated in the practice of classical Sufism, traditionally understood as a lifelong sapiential path. Husserlian phenomenological analysis is well suited to the study of religious experience for the following reasons: First, it allows for the open examination of lived experience unburdened by dogmatic presuppositions, be they theological or philosophical, by means of the epoché, a methodical bracketing of theoretical assumptions. Held within the epoché, the “general thesis of belief in factual existence characteristic of the natural attitude” is suspended (Spiegelberg 1965, 724). Second, the late Husserl's synthesis of static and genetic phenomenology aims to explore both reflective and pre-reflective consciousness and thereby shed light upon the personal, pre-personal, and primordial layers of conscious life—an approach that is invaluable in investigating a meditative path that can be read as a lived inquiry into precisely these dimensions of consciousness. Third, as Bruzina notes, “at the heart of phenomenology … understanding is not tied primarily or exclusively to sheer conceptuality but has living sense in the linkage of the conceptual to the experiential” (2004, 380). Phenomenological findings are always explicitly or implicitly experiential; therefore, it is a fitting approach to classical Sufi practice as a path of lived verification and gnosis (ma'rifah) realized in sapiential rather than conceptual knowing.In “Sacred Addictions: On the Phenomenology of Religious Experience,” John Panteleimon Manoussakis raises the questions “What is religion?” and “What makes an experience ‘religious,’ or, rather, what makes us append this characterization to any particular experience?” To paraphrase one famous passage from Augustine: “We know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of [religion] and understand just as well when we hear someone else refer to it. What, then, is [religion]? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know” (Confessions 295). The problem of defining what religion is arose at the same time as the first works that tried to examine religion by adopting a scientific perspective (be it psychological, anthropological, or sociological), attempting to establish a science of religion: a threskeiology. Yet such a science of religion has little—or rather, absolutely nothing—to do with the experience one calls “religion.” Phenomenology's exhortation for a return “to the things themselves” serves here as a reminder that we have no other recourse to the world than experience—and, in some exceptional cases, nonexperience—and, therefore, we cannot justifiably talk of religion as if religion constitutes, or, rather, is constituted by, a predetermined set of phenomena other than that single experience through which we are in-the-world. One could allow for a distinction among disciplines, fields of study, and so on; it would be much harder, however, if not impossible, to legitimize a similar departmentalization of experience. We cannot speak of multiple experiences, even if experience is always manifold. Experience as such cannot be more than one thing. Surely, one may object, we have experience of more than one thing. Yes, but whether one experiences the most trivial and mundane thing or the mysterium tremendum, experience is experience. Therefore, to speak of a “phenomenology of religion” would be an error, for this determination could make sense only if we knew what religion is, which concept, object, moment, or event can qualify as belonging to religion, as properly classified under the description of a “phenomenology of religion.” But we are unable to make such an a priori decision.In “The Passionate Self and the Religiosity of Phenomena,” Felix Ó Murchadha starts from the assumption that there are no religious phenomena, only religious interpretations of phenomena. According to the author, religious experience and its concretization in the reality of a phenomenon is the result of an interpretation. Yet, while the religious interpretation of phenomena refers to a particular form of human activity, this activity responds paradoxically to the imposition of a fundamental curb on any possible activity, to the extent to which the religious hermeneutic imposes itself in the very appearing of phenomenon, in the event of the appearance itself. Religiosity is a question not of a specific type of experience or an object of experience but, rather, concerns that in the appearing of the phenomenon that displaces the movement of interpretation from the perceiving self to the thing appearing, thus fundamentally challenging the self's capacity in relation to knowing, acting, and possessing.Íngrid Vendrell Ferran's article “Religious Emotion as a Form of Religious Experience” shows how any approach to the phenomenon of religious experience has two initial challenges to tackle. The first has to do with a widespread skeptical attitude typical of secularized societies with respect to experiences that might be called religious. While we accept as a matter of course the existence of aesthetic and moral experiences—such as the pleasure in contemplating a beautiful landscape or compassion for others—the reality of religious experiences has been rigorously questioned. There is a generalized mistrust of the real meaning of religious experiences—such as the experience of a transcendent being, of the immortality of the soul, or of an unearthly world. The second challenge is related to the ambiguity of the concept of religious experience. From seeing apparitions and hearing sounds of supernatural presences, with or without the use of our sense organs, to encountering ordinary objects with a religious significance, from the consciousness of an all-perfect Being to the feeling of being in the presence of something greater than us, religious experiences cover a wide range of phenomena with very little in common. In this light, it seems hard to avoid the sense that we are dealing with a fuzzy concept whose lack of clarity renders it extremely difficult to investigate. Is our investigation doomed to failure? Study of the emotions may help us shed light on other aspects of religious experience. Emotions are characterized by a qualitative dimension; they provide us with an answer to the question “What does it feel like?” But they also involve cognition, evaluations, and action tendencies, and they are existentially significant to those who experience them. By analyzing the emotions, we might also obtain a better understanding of other aspects of religious experience that are not emotional. Finally, considering that emotions have been a central object of research for at least a century now, we have at our disposal the necessary theoretical tools to approach the topic successfully. These factors provide a strong motivation to approach the topic of religious experience by focusing on emotions. The main argument of the essay is that religious emotions are variations of general emotions that we already know from our everyday life, which nevertheless exhibit specific features that enable us to think of them as forming a coherent subclass. In order to address these problems, Vendrell Ferran adopts the following strategy. To address the challenge of skepticism, the author invites the reader to engage in an exercise. Imagine that it was possible to call an experience “religious”: What would constitute its essential features? To deal with the impression of vagueness that emerges from the richness of such phenomena, the author centers the analysis around one of its specific types.In “Spirituality as Consummatory Experience: The Promises and Limitations of John Dewey's Phenomenology of the Religious,” Jonathan Weidenbaum employs Dewey's phenomenology of religious experience to explore what religion is and what makes an experience “religious.” Dewey's phenomenology seems to have an advantage with respect to these questions insofar as it resists the temptation to define religion—that is, to “grasp” it by means of some concept (Begriff). For it is precisely the desire to arrive at a definition that in previous attempts to study religious experience led many good scholars seeking what diverse manifestations of religion might have in common to overlook the fact that by abstracting all the particularities of religious experience, one is left with a definition bereft of any concrete content, which, as with every definition, corresponds to no particular religion. In other words, we may have obtained a definition of religion, but that which is so defined does not exist. The “study of religion” is, of course, not religion. What is more, it is not faith, prayer, or liturgy. This remains the opening gesture of phenomenology, when Husserl refused to distinguish between objects of eidetic intuition and individual intuition.Last, in “The Trinitarian Relationship of the World,” Susi Ferrarello examines how phenomenology can investigate experience in a way that appears meaningful to us from a spiritual and ethical point of view. By comparing Husserl's and Nishida's experiential analysis, the essay investigates the ethical experiencing of reality as a unicum detached from that validated by one's intersubjective community. Further, the article addresses the problem of how the meaning of this experience can be reactivated within an intersubjective community through a proper understanding of its layers, including time, being, and teleology. It seems in fact that the multilayered nature of time entails an organization of ethical and psychological reality that cannot be explained by an exclusively epistemological point of view: rather, a unique form of teleology is required that bridges epistemology and ontology. Moreover, the author clarifies how axiological experience—by which Husserl means a specifically ethical way of processing reality—has its source in a mode of spiritual belief that we might call religious. Finally, the author explains how this religious source reflects a teleological manner of experiencing time.Through these different phenomenological approaches we hope to offer readers a variety of perspectives to observe and describe religious phenomena and ponder whether these phenomena can actually exist and be experienced in one's life or whether the reality of their existence depends on the quality of our feelings in experiencing them. As emerges from the essays, if we use Husserl's phenomenological approach, the actual existence of religious experience relies on one of the layers of reality that constitute the immanent content of the lived experience; if we adopt Dewey's phenomenology, religion as a definite concept does not even exist (in terms of traditional existence) but is an open-ended experience that calls into itself different qualities; or we might use phenomenology to exercise imaginative variations in looking for the constituent parts of religious phenomena. In any case, the essays selected for this issue are purposely very different from each other, and each of them proposes a different phenomenological perspective on the same problem.