Abstract I argue that Jean‐Louis Chrétien’s account of beauty and Bernard Lonergan’s account of art and aesthetic experience complement one another and, when taken together, offer an illuminating philosophical account of the ontological, ethical, intellectual, and transcendent aspects of art and aesthetic experience. Chrétien draws out with particular perspicacity the ontological dimension of...
By religious experiences I mean those human experiences characterised by a kind of intuitional seeming to the effect that a transcendent or all‐encompassing being—God—exists. After explaining two significant similarities between religious and perceptual experiences, I will argue that the doctrine of phenomenal dogmatism about perceptual experiences can be applied to religious experiences as...
This essay argues that a negative hermeneutics, i.e. , a hermeneutics that takes its starting point from the experience of gaps, failures, and limits, is a suitable lens for the study of mysticism. It uses the concept of travail of the negative, which focuses on the dynamics of a continuous ‘unsaying’ and ‘subverting’ of traditional expressions of faith and religious practice, to explore the...
This article is a semantic attempt to clarify the totality of Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) by describing his religious theory, characterised by such key terms as ‘the holy’ and ‘the numinous’. In his academic life, Otto had three ‘faces’, i. e. , a Christian theologian, a philosopher of religion, and a scholar of comparative religion, all of which were organically interrelated in his Christian...
This volume consists of a helpful preface, introduction, eight chapters, a conclusion, copious notes, a bibliography that contains Rudolf Otto's main works, including his posthumous publications, and references on Otto in English, German, and Japanese, plus a helpful index. In the last decade, research on the thought of Otto has mushroomed. An international conference on Otto's thought took...
Desolatione desolata est omnis terra Quia nullus est qui recogit corde Even traditionally minded critics have maintained that The Waste Land defies a coherent interpretation. ‘No critic,’ Helen Gardner wrote, ‘can provide them [i.e. readers] with a magic thread to take them through the labyrinth. Its connections are not connections of logic, but connections of feeling, often of violent...
The study of spirituality examines ‘lived religious experience’ in the cosmos. Drawing on Aquinas' Christology, the following article presents the cosmos as panentheistic and pan‐sacramental. Taking a cue from Thomas Merton's anthropology and Bede Griffiths' spirituality, various implications and challenges are examined.
In response to prevailing perceptions, I contend that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) conceives of the wholly otherness of God via his dialectical category of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine, initially through the self's consciousness of sin and ultimately through the self's acceptance of the gift of forgiveness. Therefore, I claim that while the common...
Pp. xii, 324 , Oxford , Oxford University Press , 2005 , £55.00. This study of mystical experience examines what are called ‘extrovertive mystical experiences’. These are ‘mystical’ experiences in the sense that they display certain features commonly associated with mysticism, especially the sense of unity, knowledge and contact with reality, and ‘extrovertive’ in that they are experiences of...
This paper explores the ambiguity in Rudolph Otto's discussion of the mysterium tremendum in order to address a broader set of difficulties in The Idea of the Holy (1917). In doing so, I outline two common criticisms of Otto's position. The first attacks Otto for not providing a secure transition from the numinous experience of terror to the holy experience of faith. The second attacks Otto for...