‘Materializing’ Self-Transcendence

Abstract

“Religious experience” and “religious self-transcendence” are key concepts in the philosophical theology of Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904–1984). In the last 30 years, however, both the empirical sources of Lonergan’s universalist view of religion and the category of “religion” itself have been subjected to searching postcolonial critiques. As a partial response to such critiques, I offer in this essay a creative redescription of Lonergan’s heuristic of religious experience in dialogue with the critical theory of Judith Butler. The resulting account emphasizes the reality of religious experience as a form of embodied performance, draws attention to the paradoxical, elusive and relational character of religious subjectivity, and recognizes the limits imposed by such relational bonds as a necessary condition of self-transcendence. By this thought experiment, the essay thus attempts both to trouble Lonergan’s account of religious self-transcendence and to offer an alternative interpretation that reaffirms it on a revised basis.