Constituting Religious Belief in Experiencing Faith. A Husserlian Contribution to Revelation.

Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie

Revelation is central to the task of phenomenology in its “bringing to light” phenomena as they appear to us (Gschwandtner 2024). In a phenomenology of religious experience, divine revelation has opened beyond ‘doctrinal content’ toward multiple ways of thinking through experiences of the divine as ‘self-affective’ (Henry), ‘saturated’ (Marion), ‘dialogic’ and as ‘event’ (Horner 2022). 

Constitution deals with the presentation of ordinary objects in perception. It is a key, all-pervading conceptual device for Husserl in his seeking clarity to understand the world through phenomenological analyses (Sokolowski 1970). There is a deep methodological divide between revelation and constitution. One reason is because constitution cannot account for divine phenomena since they do not appear to us in ordinary perception.

A consequence has been to dismiss ‘phenomenologies of constitution’ in the religious context on two fronts. First, in its inability to describe divine phenomena, resulting in a widening and/or redefining of Husserlian concepts and method (Dika and Hackett 2016); and secondly, in prohibiting phenomenological method from analysing religious questions best left to theology (Janicaud 2000).

Elsewhere, I have argued that an intentional analysis of faith and doubt is possible if one’s regard is directed toward the noetic-noematic structures of believing: the object of belief is a belief as such, supervened within a community of believers. Drawing on the eidetic laws within Husserl’s series of belief modalities, I further analysed these movements of believing as faith formation through an interrelated frame of epistemic, imagistic and aesthetic-kinetic constitutions (Husserl 1983; McNeilly 2015).

In this paper, I propose that phenomenologies of constitution offer a robust and revelatory approach to religious experience. I argue that coming back to the constitution of an object that fully presents, illuminates rather than excludes an account of these experiences. Furthermore, I argue that God or divine entities, while appearing to be limits to phenomenological method, are no less elusive, or absent as objects in the mind than how they figure in rational, cataphatic, mystical, and apophatic arguments for existence. I will attempt to show how an intentional analysis of constitution reveals something missing in revelation, by way of a more stable object: the belief of a belief itself. Rather than seeing constitution as a rival approach to revelation, I ask: how can the limits of both bring out the richness of experience for the other?    

Overall, the paper aims to bring us back to Husserl in a phenomenology of religious experience, where phenomenologies of constitution have been downplayed if not outright dismissed at the peril of losing something profound in understanding one’s faith