Religious Experiences

Corporeal Visions

• a form of empirical religious experiences
• through our senses
• e.g. Bernadette
  • had 18 visions of the Virgin Mary
  • visions were also auditory
• e.g. Joan of Arc
  • experienced visions of Saints and angels from the age of 12
  • visions were accompanied by voices telling her to bring renewal to the French nation
  • said her visions were as real to her as seeing a real person with her 'bodily eyes'

Imaginative Visions

• Occur most frequently in dreams
• Seen with the 'eye of the mind'
• The experiencer hasno power to direct the experience
• e.g. the Pharoah's Dream
  • Genesis 41
  • had a dream experience
  • aware it was no ordinary dream
  • knew it needed to be interpreted

Intellectual Visions

• They have no image; they are formless
• Highest level of mystical union
• e.g. St Teresa of Avila
  • had an experience of Jesus Christ
  • 'I had a most distinct feeling of his near presence' - saw Jesus not as an image but as a 'presence'
  • 'I saw nothing with the eyes of my body' - vision was not corporeal

Transiency

• The experience only lasts for a short time but the effects are life changing
• e.g. Somerset Maugham
  • 'I felt as though if I lasted a moment longer I should die'

Noetic Quality

• Provides insights into unobtainable knowledge
• New knowledge is grasped through intuition and perception
• e.g. Julian of Norwich
  • shown God loves even the smallest things
  • looked at something as small as a hazelnut in the palm of her hand

Passivity

• The experiencer loses power to a more powerful being, namely God
• Can sometimes cause individual to assume entirely different personalities
  • e.g. speaking in a different voice or language
• e.g. St John of Cross
  • 'I abandoned and forgot myself'

Ineffability

• Awareness of something to be described but no way of doing so
• e.g. Alfred Tennyson
  • 'I am ashamed of my feeble description'

Extrovertive experience

• An ordinary object transforms in some way and the person has a mystical experience through the object
• e.g. looking at nature and it transforms in some way to make you feel united with the divine
• Not true mystical experience as involves the senses

Introvertive Experience

• Use of senses is completely ended
• Lose sense of self
• True mystical experience as senses cease to exist and you lose your sense of self