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Orthodoxy and Religious Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Aelred Graham O.S.B
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Extract

It may be as well to begin, in the approved scholastic manner, by defining one's terms; or at least by delimiting the field of discussion-a very necessary step surely with a paper so ambiguously worded as this one! Orthodoxy, my Lord'. said Bishop Warburton, is my doxy-heterodoxy is another man's doxy'. No doubt we could improve on that and together hit upon a less question-begging statement of what we mean by ‘orthodoxy'. All the same, I must try not to confuse the issue by taking too much for granted. And what are we to understand by that indeterminate phrase ‘religious experience'? At the beginning of the century William James devoted a series of Gifford Lectures to The Varieties of Religious Experience-a work still being reprinted even in these days of paper shortage. James was, professedly an empiricist, with but a limited gift for philosophical generalisation, so that his collected data have both the interest and the tediousness of a case book'; but they serve to show how varied are the phenomena which have been placed-whether legitimately or not is another question!—in the category of ‘religious experience’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 2 , Issue 21 , March 1948 , pp. 398 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © 1948 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Being a paper read before the Oxford University Aquinas Society, 3rd December 1947.

2 The Varieties of Religious Experience,p. 370. (Longman, 1944 cd.)

3 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (en catholiques Stuntmorind, Psychologie mystiques orthodoxes, (Paris, 1920), p. 17.

4 Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, ed. 1888, Vol. II, pp. 413-4, 417; quoted by P. von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion,Vol. II, p. 351.

5 Saint Thomas Aquinas:Annual Lecture on a Master Mind (Henrietta Hertz Trust of the British Academy), 1935, p. 13.

6 See St Thomas's discussion of 1 Cor. 12; I-II, 111. 4, 5.

7 Italice mine.

8 Mystical Theology, here used in its earliest sense as being, not of theological science but the equivalent of the more modern ‘mystical experience'.

9 Redeeming the Time,p. 233.

10 Bergson, yp. cit.,pp. 195-6.

11 Perfetion chritienne et Contemplation,Vol. II, p. 546.

12 Ascent of Mount Carmel,Bk II, c. 27.

13 Comm. In Joannen,cap. 6, lect. 3, v. 7. (Parma Edit,, p. 409).

14 John of St Thomas, Cursus Theologicus, VI. 70. 18.

15 See I. Il. St Thoma less summary exposition of this doctrine is attempted in my book The Love of God, pp. 99-102, 231 68.

16 Sent.14. 2. 2 ad 3.

17 Spiritual Canticle, 12: Professor Allison Peers's translation of The Works of Saint John of the Cross, Vol. II, p. 246-7.

18 F. von Högel, The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. I, p. 59.