The Phenomenology of Religious Experience

Alessandro Salice (University College Cork), Danny Forde

This presentation adopts a realist-phenomenological framework to describe religious experience. We first introduce a core tenet of realist phenomenology: the principle of intelligibility. On this view, every entity is in principle knowable, and knowledge is a primitive relation between an entity and a non-propositional intuitive state; being in such a state is for its subject to know entity x. We then consider religious experience and its impact on self-knowledge. We describe religious—and, in particular, mystical—experiences as putative states of knowledge, distinguished by their revelatory mode: in them, the divine discloses itself and thereby transforms the subject. Drawing on Scheler’s notion of ordo amoris—the affective structure of deep-seated preferences and concerns that shapes value-perception—we argue that religious experience reorders one’s hierarchy of love, decentring egoic concerns and reorienting the self toward selfless participation in being. This self-transformation involves affective reversal, the relativisation of worldly values, and a new attunement to the sacred. Cross-cultural cases reveal a shared structure: mystical knowing requires self-abandonment, or “forgetting” of the ego, yielding a transformed, non-possessive mode of existence suffused with universal love.