Religious and Non-Religious Sentiments

It's strange to be the only religious person in a religious theories class. This weeks reading of Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" proved particularly odd. Studying atheist after atheist eventually turns into good fun for we Christians immersed in the laicized community. In a way we are used to trying to strap on the consciousness of people whose ideologies and temperaments are fundamentally different from our own. We are the minority, and as such must adapt to the academic milieu. I think if one succeeds at true charity, he ends up being able to defend Freud's position better than Freud did. On my definition, charity not only thinks what they have thought and thinks beyond them, it feels what they have felt. Aristotle says that the mature mind can coherently manipulate ideas which are not its own. I think the same principle holds within the psychological realm. A mature psychology can feel sentiments which are not its own. A psychology which empathizes with the sentiments associated with atheism has succeeded not only in understanding atheistic propositions but the allure of those propositions. Everything else follows suit. The intuitions of the atheist, the creative relationship between fact and theory begin to have meaning. The positive or negative impressions toward religion--any religion--begin to have valence. When someone religious says something overtly religious, a Christian well versed in the sentiments of atheism can feel the anti-sentiments pique.

Whether this model demonstrates just how shaky my view of identity is, is another question--and one that needs answering. For now i'm curious about the blatant sentimental ignorance demonstrated to me during this week's class. Otto is explicitly clear: "The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no father; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feeling. " Otto goes on to give his famous account of the numinous. To my knowledge there is no greater account of it. Otto at times is so penetratingly accurate concerning it that i wonder how often he must have felt it. Much could be added and subtracted from his account, modified and what not, but it is an empirical/psychological observation unlike any other i've encountered. (I will not go into the details.)

What struck me in class, however, was the antagonism, the misunderstanding, the pure naivety concerning the subject. I sat dumbfounded at the inability of both the professor's and student's inability to access the content of the numinous. Some suggested that Otto didn't really think that the numinous was qualitatively different from normal sentimental experience. Some suggested that Otto did actually think that non-religious people could access the content of the numinous--why else would he write about it. Some simply threw their hands up in bewilderment.

In truth, it was only with the third type of person that i had any sympathy. It echoes Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak one must be silent." They at least recognized a category with which they had no familiarity nor possible access. It was like listening to a group of people talk about the experience of reading poetry who had never had the experience of reading poetry. They spoke of iambic pentameter and prosody where only reading a line of Thomas Hardy does the experiential knowledge justice. One does not explain Samuel Barber's Adagio for String with musical notes. You cannot abstract signifiers out of sounds. The only option is to press the play button or go to the concert hall. (Otto by the way uses the feeling of the sublime as one of his arguments from analogy. The experience of the Mysterium Tremendum is analogous to the experience of the sublime.)

It reminds me of Lewis' essay Transposition where "lower" feelings cannot attain to "higher" emotions. The meaning gets muddled. I do not doubt that there are atheistic sentiments with which i am unfamiliar. Likewise with agnostic. But it does not seem to me that they are qualitatively different from any other normal emotional state. They are accessible conceptually without actually having experienced the emotion itself. Additionally, they are, for me, easily experienced. "It's not" says Quentin from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Furry, "It's not when you realize that nothing can help you--religion, pride, anything--it's when you realize that you don't need any aid." All too true given naturalism; all too akin to Nietzsche's passive nihilistic attitude. And all very accurate to the sentiments i've felt myself acting as a quasi-atheist.

But where the essence of a certain feeling lies in its very inexplicability, where only arguments from analogy suffice, where ideograms are substituted for abstractions, the atheist and agnostic--without religious experience--simply have nothing to say. Otto and I may assume the phenomenological possibility of inter-subjectivity to do it (and who doesn't assume the possibility of inter-subjectivity?), but Christian camaraderie, heck, Christian and Buddhist camaraderie often derives from mutual experience of the numinous object--whatever it may be. It is curious that here, in the realm of phenomenological experience, that the religious category of "Spirit" attains the superior conceptual status.