Week 6

Portrait of Ninian Smart

Ninian Smart (d.2001) was a theorist, historian, and scholar of religion and one of the most important figures in the development of religious studies in the USA and the UK. In his Dimensions of the Sacred, Smart characterized various features of our concept of religion, one of which is the human experience of religion as a psychological phenomenon. This week we examine Smart's discussion of the "experiential and emotional" aspects of religion.

Lecture

Ninian Smart and his approach to the study of religion: emotions and experience

Smart, Ninian. 1996. Dimensions of the sacred: an anatomy of the world's beliefs. London, UK. HarperCollins Press.

Medieval Theology (Padua, Paris, Oxford/Cambridge), Modern Divinity (Harvard, Yale, Princeton), Post-WWII Religion (UF!), Contemporary Religious Studies (UCSB):

Phenomenology
- Artie the Alien: If an alien were to hover over our planet, would he “distinguish the Olympic stadium from the temple, or the hammer and sickle from the Islamic crescent, or the psychiatrist from the priest? Would he carve up the world the way we do in the modern West?”
- “moccasin-walking”: to understand the other
- epoche, suspension of belief and empathy
- “Dialectical phenomenology”: how various aspects of each dimension affect other aspects

Dimensions for religion, and ideologies more broadly (e.g. communism, liberalism, republicanism, etc.)

Doctrinal: Buddhism and transtheistic religion
Ritual: worship, prayer, song, hearing
Mythic: stories of special or sacred meaning; not untrue, but about “an invisible world beyond us,” e.g. the Fall; the contract between God and Israel; resurrection, etc.
Experiential: dramatic experience, when the believer feels immediately and strikingly the presence of God, as in conversion, being born again, mysticism, etc.
Ethical: the rules and precepts, e.g. 10 commandments
Social: an organization to perpetuate itself, includes those people who run the religion
Material: although the god(s) are invisible, they are expressed in material
Political effects: how do each of the above seven influence politics?

Reading

Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred

General Questions

Is religious experience possible?
Does it prove the existence of God?

If so, which one?
If not, then what is happening when a person claims to have had a transformative experience of “the Other”?

Even if religious experience isn’t the basis of religion (e.g. one needs other dimensions such as social, doctrinal, ritual, etc.), “it seems absurd to ignore it…inspirational experience helped to shape the careers of Isaiah, Paul, Arjuna, Muhammad, the Buddha and many others in the history of religions.” p.166

Smart’s “two main poles” of religious experience:

Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the numinous experience of the holy as “the Other.”
A contemplative or mystical experience which does not postulate an outside Other, wherein the subject-object or I-Thou relation disappears

Important distinctions – “the degree to which diversities of context themselves dictate real differences of experience.”

Perennial mystical experience shared by the major traditions
Experiences are very different from one tradition to the next because each tradition has its particular diversities

Against option #2:

All humans have physiological and psychological similarities, which “lead one to expect overlaps of religiosity.”
Similarities then become expressed in particular languages, context and cultures, thus they sound different, but they aren’t

One has to distinguish different types of religious language: “dazzling darkness” and “birth of Trinity in the soul”
E.g. Sex among Milwaukee sailors, Ghane newlyweds, tantrics, communists – root experience is the same, but perhaps interpreted differently

Relation with other dimensions:

Material – religions create elaborate temples, dress, music, etc. to bolster religious experience
Ritual and practice can foster experience, e.g. repeated recitation of a prayer or mantra

Features of religious experience:

As beyond time and space – “I saw eternity the other night”
As beyond words – What I saw and felt I cannot put into words
Experience of invisible entities or places or beings or objects or states
Yet experience happens in space and is of an entity that pervades space
Full of bliss or transcendental to ordinary pleasure

Discussion

What is Smart's concept of religious experience?