Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The religious critique of feeling
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Religious experience and the perception of value
- 2 Love, repentance, and the moral life
- 3 Finding and making value in the world
- 4 Emotional feeling: philosophical, psychological, and neurological perspectives
- 5 Emotional feeling and religious understanding
- 6 Representation in art and religion
- 7 The religious critique of feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When all is said and done, the long line of saints and spiritual writers who insist on ‘experience’, who speak of sanctity in terms of ever-deepening ‘experience’, who maintain that to have none of it is to be spiritually dead, are absolutely right provided we understand ‘experience’ in the proper sense, not as a transient emotional impact but as living wisdom, living involvement. All the truths of faith there in our minds will be translated into practical terms, all we believe becoming principles of action. Thus spiritual ‘experience’ is as necessary a mark of a loving soul, of a holy person, as medical ‘experience’ is of a doctor. So often, however, what the less instructed seek is mere emotion. They are not concerned with the slow demanding generosity of genuine experience.
These are the words of Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun, and she stands, of course, within a larger tradition which has at times and for religious reasons taken a rather severe view of the value of emotional experience. In this chapter I want to consider some of the ways in which Burrows and others have thought that emotional experience may prove disruptive of religious understanding. This exercise will also provide an opportunity to formulate some of the central themes of this book with new nuance.
TWO OBJECTIONS TO THE EMOTIONS
In the passage above, Burrows identifies two kinds of difficulty for the emotions in the ‘spiritual life’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emotional Experience and Religious UnderstandingIntegrating Perception, Conception and Feeling, pp. 179 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005