RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE AND BIOGRAPHY

Abstract

Summary One of the crucial problems of a psychology of religion is: how to do justice to the specific character of a concrete religion, at the same time maintaining scientific neutrality. Moving outside the context of a concrete specific religion, psychology is in danger of getting entangled in too general speculations about vague phenomena, of which the religious coefficient remains undeterminate; operating within the intention of a religion, it might abdicate its objectivity. With respect to religious experience, the problem narrows down to the question, how a psychology of religion might take into due consideration the transcendent reality, which occupies such a central position within certain varieties of religion, as for instance in the case of Christianity. If religious experience might have the character of a transcending process, how could this process be described and interpreted in psychological terms? There is an additional aggravating complication, however, at the moment “transcendence” has to be redefined in the concrete terms of for instance the christian tradition. One evades the foregoing questions, if the psychological study of religion is based on an analysis of the psychic “apparatus” and religious experience is interpreted as an “altered state of consciousness”. In such a perspective “religious meanings” are left out of consideration. “Meaning” however constitutes an central issue of religion, specifically when one takes into account religion as a socio-cultural system, apart of which there is no referent of any psychological process or experience, which might be defined as religious. In addition, one could point to the danger of reducing religion to a set of psychological techniques, which bring about modification in states of consciousness. In order to do justice to the complex phenomenon of religion, in which subjective meanings and a socio-cultural religious system of meanings interact, a more promising approach would be to subsume religious experience under the category of symbolic experiences, because they precisely represent dynamic interrelationships between meanings. In an attempt to interpret symbolic experience psychologically, a distinction is made between symbolic and metaphoric experiences. Metaphoric experiences, because operating in the medium of language, with its nearly unlimited mobility in transfering one meaning into an other, literal meanings into figurative ones,—extend into other dimensions of reality, which are not reached by every-day-experiences, neither by symbolic experiences. The latter are “tied” (“liées” (Ricoeur)), limited by realities, phenomena (cosmic, psychic), which are the restricted medium in which symbols need to express themselves. In order to develop the idea of religious experience as a metaphoric process, Ricoeur's analysis of the New Testament parables is presented. The parables exhibit a specific metaphoric, narrative structure, which is an intensification of the general characteristic of all metaphoric language; an intensification, apparently characteristic of religious language, achieved by the dramatic extravagance of the narrated plot; an extravagance which as a linguistic strategy might be compared with hyperbole and paradox. Ricoeurs thesis relates this narrative strategy and a psychic process evoked by it. The parable by its structure induces a double psychic movement, a “two way” experience; one of “désaisissement”, alienation, subversion—, one of transgression. A question, however, raised by the foregoing argument, might be directed against a too abstract and elitist interpretation of religious experience, alien to the real, concrete religious experience of the “common” believer. Therefore a biographical model of religious experience, as proposed by Vergote, is presented. According to this model religious experience is conceived as an interaction between a psychic system of meanings, composed of the sedimentation of experiences in the course of a biography, and the socio-cultural, objectived system of religious meanings, as presented in a concrete religious tradition. The concrete biographical experiences are on the one hand transfered into the religious symbolic system (transfer, Übertragung, metaphor), on the other hand challenged, and transformed by the cultural system of religious meanings. In this way Vergote does not exclude the symbolic and metaphoric aspects of religious experience, but does include them in a biographical process. At the same time, stressing the significance of the socio-cultural religious system, due attention is given to the specificity of a concrete religion.