Mark R. Wynn - Renewing The Senses - A Study of The Philosophy and Theology of The Spiritual Life-Oxford University Press (2013)

RENEWING THE SENSES
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Renewing the
Senses
A Study of the Philosophy and Theology
of the Spiritual Life
MARK R. WYNN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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# Mark R. Wynn 2013
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For John and Margaret, with thanks for Kate
Preface
This discussion has its origins in a familiar truth. Sitting upstairs in

Georgina’s coffee shop in the early morning, drinking in caffeine, and
gazing at the passers-by below, the things in my environment seem to
fall into place, and to resonate gently with my sense of myself. I am
being driven to a cross-country race, and we are approaching a
junction, when I become aware that our driver has not seen the
vehicle ahead, and that we will hit it in seconds, and at that point
the world becomes for me suddenly very vivid, and time itself seems
to slow down. I am in an unfamiliar social situation, and unsure of
what role I am expected to assume, and I find that I do not fully hear
what people are saying, and that I move about clumsily, and I feel my
disorientation in bodily terms. I hear a creature squeal, its cries
intensify, and now there is nothing but animal pain. The teacher
replays the tape of the last two minutes, and we realize how much that
was audible we failed to hear. Someone explains to me the difference
between a swift and a swallow and a martin, and thereafter my
experience of these swooping forms is newly focused and newly
informed. And so on. These experiences point to a familiar truth:
depending upon our bodily and emotional condition, our repertoire
of concepts, and our conception of our circumstances, one and the
same sensory scene can appear to us in very different ways. In this
discussion I am going to explore the idea that religious commitment
can make a difference to a person’s bodily and emotional condition,
their repertoire of concepts, and their conception of their circum-
stances. And if that is so, then a further question comes immediately
into view: perhaps the world’s appearance can sometimes bear the
stamp of specifically religious concerns or ideals or practices? It is this
possibility which provides the focus for the present enquiry.
I was first struck by the thought that it should be possible to
undertake some such exercise many years ago. At the time, I was an
undergraduate, and I would visit in turn the various religious houses
in Oxford. Sometimes, I would be at Blackfriars for lunch or tea, or
some social event, sometimes at the Jesuit house, Campion Hall, or
the Benedictine house, St Benet’s, and sometimes I visited the Fran-
ciscan house, Greyfriars. In each of these places I found myself
Preface vii
encountering a particular and, as it seemed to me, quite distinctive
embodiment of the Christian ideal of life. And in each case this
embodiment was not just a matter of certain theological commit-
ments being laid alongside a certain style of dining and conversation,
which in turn was laid alongside a certain aesthetic sense, as evident
in the construction of the building or the choice of artworks to hang
therein, which in turn could be set alongside a particular set of ethical
and political convictions. Rather, in an unreflective sort of way, I felt
that these dimensions of the lives of the inhabitants of these various
houses flowed into one another. In each house, various shared creedal
commitments were embedded, I felt, in a particular sensibility—that
is, in a particular way of taking hold of the sensory world, and not just
in various ways of thinking about specifically religious questions. This
book is intended as a study of religious sensibility in this sense.
I would like some day to examine more concretely the ways of life
exhibited by these orders. But here my concerns are of a preliminary
kind: I have tried to sketch out how such a sensibility might be
possible, and to consider in brief some of the forms which it might
take. Of course, it is not only religious orders which exhibit sensibility
in this sense: all forms of religious commitment do so. Each Jewish or
Muslim or Hindu or Christian family, for example, incarnates its
religious ideals in a very particular way, in a style of living which is
in some degree unique to the family.1 Or so it seems to me. If that is
so, then it is of considerable philosophical interest to take ‘sensibility’
understood in these terms, rather than simply religious ‘belief ’, as a
focus for enquiry, and to ask how such a religiously informed con-
strual of the sensory world might be possible. In these pages, my aim
is to make some headway with a study of this kind.2
1
I am grateful to Siobhán Garrigan for suggesting to me this extension in the idea
of a religious sensibility, from the context of the religious orders to that of the family.
2
Here I have stated in biographical terms the source of my interest in these
questions. In the introduction I shall try to demonstrate their significance by reference
to the established literature in philosophy and theology. These two approaches are not
in competition: the established literature provides a further perspective on the ques-
tion of why the notion of ‘sensibility’ should be of interest for an account of religious
life.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to many friends and colleagues without whom I would

never have come to think these thoughts, nor found time to record
them as I have done here. This book was completed before my move
to the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at the
University of Leeds, and I would like to thank my colleagues and also
my students in the Department of Theology and Religion at the
University of Exeter for their many years of support and their con-
tinued interest in my work. I am indebted in particular to Siobhán
Garrigan and Tim Gorringe, both of whom have nudged me and, at
times, goaded me in my thinking on these questions. I am also most
grateful to my fellow workers in the philosophy of religion, and
especially to John Cottingham, Chris Hamilton, Douglas Hedley,
Dave Leal, and Tim Mawson. I am fortunate to have the opportunity
to meet with these friends on a regular basis, and a number of the
ideas I develop here were first presented and then newly shaped in
conversation with them. In these enquiries they have been my imme-
diate intellectual community. I have also derived immense benefit
from the discussion of papers I have presented on these themes, and
I would like to thank Sarah Coakley, Christopher Cook, Victoria
Harrison, Brian Leftow, and Matthew Ratcliffe for the opportunity
to rehearse some of the ideas that I present here in Cambridge,
Durham (twice), Glasgow, and Oxford. I am grateful too for the
guidance and encouragement provided by three anonymous readers
for Oxford University Press, who were kind enough to read and
comment on the whole manuscript. I would also like to give thanks
to my first helpers in the philosophy of religion, Peter Byrne, Brian
Davies, and Richard Swinburne, whose approach to the subject, they
may be surprised to hear, continues to inform my sense of sound
intellectual practice! Lastly, I would like to extend my thanks to my
family. This book is a study of the notion of ‘sensibility’, and my own
sensibility, including my interest in the question of sensibility, is
firmly rooted in my family context. So my thanks to Kate and
Rowan, Mum and Dad, Rob and Sarah, Geggsy and Vania, and
Mark and Sue for giving me what I have and who I am. The book is
dedicated to my wife’s Australian parents, John and Margaret, who
Acknowledgements ix
have allowed me to keep Kate in the land of grey skies for the last ten
years and more. I offer it to them with thanks for their continuing
love and support, and in the knowledge that, as a radiologist, John has
long been exercised by Plato’s parable of the cave!
Contents
1. The World of Sunlight and the World of Shadows 1

2. Emotional Feelings and the Appearance of the
Sensory World 15
3. Concept Application and the Appearance of
the Sensory World 42
4. The Spiritual Life and the Justification of Religious Belief 81
5. World-Directed Spiritual Experience and the
Revelation of Value 129
6. Doctrine, Darkness, and the Spiritual Life 166
7. The Human Form of Life and the Experience of Value 194
References 199
Index 205
There is an universal tendency amongst mankind to conceive all
beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those
qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of
which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in
the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if
not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and
good will to everything that hurts or pleases us. Hence the
frequency and beauty of the prosopopœia in poetry, where
trees, mountains, and streams are personified, and the inani-
mate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, Section III3
Grant that I may so

Thy steps track here below,
That in these masques and shadows I may see
Thy sacred way
And by those hid ascents climb to that day
Which breaks from thee
Who art in all things, though invisibly . . .
Henry Vaughan, ‘I Walk’d the Other Day’
There is in the saint ‘a conviction, not merely intellectual,

but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power’.
William James, ‘Saintliness’, The Varieties of Religious Experience
He was always with Jesus:

Jesus in his heart,
Jesus in his mouth,
Jesus in his ears,
Jesus in his eyes,
Jesus in his hands,
He bore Jesus always in his whole body.
Thomas of Celano, The Life of Saint Francis, The Second Book
3
I am grateful to Robin LePoidevin for this quotation, which he used in his
presidential address to the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, September
2011.
1
The World of Sunlight and the

World of Shadows
In the western intellectual tradition, Plato’s story of the cave, as

presented in the Republic, can lay claim to a certain pre-eminence,
as the single best known account of the nature of the spiritual life.
This story is of course a tale of ‘enlightenment’, as the prisoner learns
to train his gaze away from the shadows whose flickering forms play
across the surfaces of the cave, and towards, first of all, the firelight
which stands behind him and projects those shadows, and then
towards the sun, in the upper realm outside the cave. Given the larger
concerns of the dialogue, it is of course integral to the story that the
seer who has made it to the outer world, and set eyes on the sun,
should be willing to return to the cave, since the vocation of the
philosopher king is the exercise of political judgement—and to that
end, he or she must lay aside the fulfilments of unimpeded and
uninterrupted intellectual vision, and return to the realm of the
senses. Although Plato does not dwell on the question, it is clear
that the returning seer will experience conditions in the cave differ-
ently from his fellows who have remained there all along. Plato
suggests that this is a matter of the returning adept experiencing
disorientation, as his eyes learn to adjust to the darkness of the
lower realm.1 But we might also suppose that, even when his eyes
1
In W. H. D. Rouse’s translation, Socrates asks: ‘ . . . if such a one [as has left the
cave and seen the sun] should go down again and sit on his old seat, would he not get
his eyes full of darkness coming in suddenly out of the sun?’ And he continues: ‘And if
he should have to compete with those who had been always prisoners, by laying down
the law about those shadows while he was blinking before his eyes settled down—and
it would take a good long time to get used to things—would not they all laugh at him
and say he had spoiled his eyesight by going up there . . . ? And would they not kill
2 Renewing the Senses
have adjusted, the seer’s experience of the realm of shadows will
remain different—and that it is for this reason that his judgement
in the practical sphere, in the realm of the shadows, proves to be
superior to that of his fellows.
The text does not force this reading upon us: it is possible that with
time, once his eyes have adjusted, the phenomenology of the enlight-
ened person’s experience of the shadowy realm will be no different
from that of his fellows, but that, even so, he will draw different
conclusions about what do to on the basis of this shared experience.2
But given Plato’s openness within the terms of the story to the
possibility that enlightenment will change the phenomenology of
the seer’s experience of the shadows, he supplies, at least, an invitation
to consider whether the seer might be enduringly distinguished from
his fellows not only by his practical and political judgements, but also
experientially, even when his experience is of the realm of shadows.
And we might suppose that some such difference is only to be
expected, given that he experiences the shadows as shadows, and
not as though they were themselves the sum or the bedrock of reality.
In any case, it will be a contention of this book that we ought to read
Plato’s story in this way—given what we know about the interaction
between the phenomenology of a person’s experience and their
beliefs, desires, and emotional feelings. If we do take this stance,
then the pattern of spiritual development which we find sketched
paradigmatically in the story of the cave is to be read as a tale of how,
following enlightenment, the appearance of the sensory world may be
transformed, and not simply as a story of some transformation in the
seer’s practical judgement or capacity to attend to another, non-
sensory realm. On the view I shall be exploring here, we should see
anyone who tried to release them and take them up . . . ?’ See The Republic, Book VII,
in Great Dialogues of Plato: Revised Edition, tr. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: New
American Library, 1961), p. 375. It is, of course, natural to take this last allusion as a
reference to Socrates, and the fate he suffered at the hands of the Athenian state. See,
for example, Nicholas Pappas, Plato and the Republic (London: Routledge, 1995),
pp. 118–9.
2
As the passage I have quoted now makes clear, the story treats the disorientation
which the seer experiences on return to the cave as temporary: it is a matter of his
‘blinking before his eyes settled down’, although the text also acknowledges that on
return to the cave ‘it would take a long time to get used to things’. I am suggesting that
even when the seer is ‘used to things’, there is reason to suppose that his experience of
the shadowy realm will be, in phenomenological terms, different from that of his
fellows.
The World of Sunlight and the World of Shadows 3
these three developments as connected: the ‘enlightenment’ which is
achieved in the intellectual realm effects a shift in the experience of
sensory things, and thereby it enables the seer to make a new set of
practical discriminations. This way of putting the matter still privil-
eges the intellectual realm, by seeing changes in our apprehension of
this realm as the source of changes in experience and practice; but in
fact, so I shall argue, the relationship between these three realms
might better be seen as one of multi-stranded reciprocal influence.
So this is one context for the present enquiry. Given that our
understanding of the spiritual life is to be patterned, at least roughly,
on the story that Plato presents in the Republic, how should we
represent the connection between the intellectual transformation
which he describes and the seer’s experience of the sensory and
practical realm upon his return to the cave? Plato leaves open the
possibility that the seer’s experience of the cave undergoes an endur-
ing shift in phenomenological terms, and we should pick up that
possibility, I am going to argue, and see the spiritual life as realized, in
important part, in a changed perceptual relationship to the sensory
world.3 So a central theme of our discussion will be the idea that
concepts, including religious concepts, or concepts concerning what
is ultimately real and what is simply ‘shadowy’, can enter into, or
shape the phenomenology of, our everyday experience of the sensory
3
Although I have introduced these themes by reference to the Republic, the same
sort of point might be made through a reading of scriptural sources. See for example
Sarah Coakley’s instructive discussion of the scriptural warrant for the idea that
recognising the risen Christ calls for a kind of ‘seeing’ which is still bodily and yet
infused by moral insight: ‘The Resurrection and the “Spiritual Senses”: on Wittgen-
stein, Epistemology and the Risen Christ’, in Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions:
Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), Chapter 8. See too her
suggestion that the ‘spiritual senses’ tradition, as it was developed by various Platon-
ically inclined patristic authors, might be applied to these questions. For further
discussion, see Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, eds, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving
God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). In
Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2006), Susan Ashbrook Harvey presents a fascin-
ating review of patristic attitudes to the role of the senses, and especially of smell, in
the life of faith. Commenting on a passage from Ephrem concerning the significance
of the eucharist, she writes: ‘as the divine was “mingled with the senses”, the senses
could then perceive the divine in the world they experienced’ (p. 62). See too Margaret
Miles’s description of Augustine’s account of the role of the bodily eyes in the
experience of God in the resurrection world: ‘Vision: The Eye of the Body and the
Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions’, The Journal of
Religion 63 (1983), especially 141–2.
world. If that is so, then, so I shall argue, sensory experience can
partake in insights which we might also record more abstractly in
discursive or creedal terms. And in that case, such experience cannot
be irredeemably corrupt, because it can itself be structured, at least in
principle, according to a proper account of the ultimate nature of
things.
This understanding of the capacity of the phenomena of sensory
experience to share in creedal or metaphysical insights, and to take on
a commensurate importance in the spiritual life, seems to be contrary
to the drift of Plato’s perspective in certain dialogues. In the Sympo-
sium he famously sketches another version of the spiritual ascent.
Here, the seeker begins with experience of beauty in the sensory
realm, and specifically the experience of the bodily beauty of a
particular human being, before training his gaze away from this
particular beautiful body towards bodily beauty in general, and
from there towards moral beauty or beauty of character. And the
summit of this progression is, of course, the state of contemplating
not now the Form of the Good, as in the Republic, but the Form of
Beauty. On this account, the sensory world has some importance for
the spiritual life, insofar as it sets the novice on the path towards
spiritual progress, by awakening in him a love for beauty which will
find its fulfilment only when he has become absorbed in the beauty of
a non-sensory realm.4 So in this dialogue, the sensory world seems to
be accorded a larger role in spiritual terms than in the Republic, to the
extent that here the spiritual life does not have its beginnings in a
turning away from, or shunning of, the realm of the senses, as when
one turns one’s back on the shadows in the cave, but instead in a
willingness to appreciate, and indeed to love, particular examples of
sensory beauty.
But from another point of view, the tale of the Symposium gives a
less exalted role to the realm of the senses. After all, in the Republic,
the seer returns to the cave—and in so doing he signifies that the
4
Michael McGhee discusses the importance of the Republic and the Symposium
for a conception of the spiritual life, and provides an insightful account of the role of
the body in these matters, in his Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual
Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Chapter 11. See especially
his development of the idea of a ‘dhyanic body’ (p. 172). Douglas Hedley’s work
constitutes a rich and sustained examination of the contribution which might be made
by a Platonic scheme to a contemporary understanding of the spiritual life. See
especially his Living Forms of the Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2008).
realm of the senses has an enduring importance. And as we have seen,
in this work, Plato seems at least to leave open the possibility that
when the seer directs his vision once again to the realm of the senses,
that realm will be differently experienced, because his experience will
now partake in the enlightenment that was won in the upper, intel-
lectual realm. By contrast, in the Symposium, we learn that the lover
who has focused his vision on the Form of Beauty will come to think
of the sensory world, from the vantage point of his newly acquired
spiritual insight, as a ‘mass of perishable rubbish’.5 The account we
are given in the Republic at least allows for the possibility of a more
affirmative conception of the contribution of the realm of the senses
to the spiritual life post-enlightenment. Again, this is most funda-
mentally because the Republic acknowledges that the sensory realm
can take on a new appearance post-enlightenment, and this suggests
not simply that it might no longer deceive the seer because the seer
now knows what construal to place on the sensory appearances, but
also that in the seer’s experience, these appearances may in them-
selves cease to have any tendency to deceive, because they are now
inhabited or structured by a true conception of the nature of things.
So part of the context for the present investigation is given by the
vision of the spiritual journey that is set down in Plato’s work, and by
the long tradition of enquiry that has been shaped by that vision.
A further, related context derives from debate about the nature of the
spiritual life in modern literature. In this literature, Christian and
other religious conceptions of the spiritual life are sometimes criti-
cized on the grounds that they do not take sufficiently seriously our
experiences and choices in the present, sensory world, since they take
such experiences to be at best a preparation for some further realm in
which our true fulfilment is to be found. Of course, so far as this
tendency is present in Christian thinking about the spiritual life, we
might suppose that this shows the influence of, or at least a conver-
gence with, the account of the spiritual life that we find in, for
example, the Symposium. On that account too, the sensory realm so
far as it figures positively in the spiritual life has at best a transitional
role, not simply in the sense that the human person’s final destiny
lies in another, post-mortem domain, but also in the sense that even
in the course of this present life, the spiritual adept should learn
5
Plato, The Symposium, tr. W. Hamilton (London: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 95.
to keep his gaze fixed upon a non-material world and free from the
distractions or, worse, the corruptions that are inherent in experience
of the sensory world.
There is no doubt that there are strands of the Christian tradition
which can be read in these terms. Take for example these words of
Gregory of Nyssa:
How can the soul which is riveted to the pleasures of the flesh and
busied with merely human longings turn a disengaged eye upon its
kindred intellectual light? . . . The eyes of swine, turning naturally
downwards, have no glimpse of the wonders of the sky; no more can
the soul whose body drags it down look anymore upon the beauty
above; it must pore perforce upon things which though natural are
low and animal. To look with a free gaze upon heavenly delights, the
soul . . . will transfer all its power of affection from material objects to
the intellectual contemplation of immaterial beauty.6
Here we find the same ocular and spatial metaphors that structure the
account of the Republic. And crucially, here, rather as in the Sympo-
sium on the reading I have just offered, the relationship between
sensory experience and experience of the upper realm seems to be
conceived competitively: in its later phases anyway, the spiritual life
requires the soul to ‘transfer all its power of affection from material
objects to the intellectual contemplation of immaterial beauty’. Un-
surprisingly, such an account invites the objection that it fails to
reckon properly with the worth of things that, surely, we know to
be worthwhile, because it evacuates this world of all significance, and
instead sees everything that might be finally important in a human
life as belonging exclusively or competitively in a higher, non-
sensory, non-material realm. As Martha Nussbaum expresses the
point, commenting on Saint Augustine in particular, on this sort of
Christian perspective, we should say that ‘Death is irrelevant, real
suffering in this world is irrelevant, all that is relevant is coming into
6
Gregory of Nyssa, ‘On Virginity’, in Gregory of Nyssa, Select Works, Nicene and
Post-Nicene, Series 2, Vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1979), p. 343, cited in Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Love and Attention’, reproduced in
Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), Chapter 1, p. 16. As we shall see in Chapter 6,
Gregory’s understanding of the metaphysics of the incarnation invites a rather
different assessment of the significance of the sensory realm.
God’s presence.’7 Whatever its merits may be in abstractly intellectual
terms, such a position is, I take it, ethically and existentially insup-
portable.
This sort of point could be developed in the terms proposed by
William James when he suggests that a philosophy of life needs to
satisfy not only various theoretical desiderata, but also certain prac-
tical requirements if it is to serve a fitting terminus of enquiry. James
comments:
A philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two
defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its ultimate
principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our
dearest desires and our most cherished powers. A pessimistic philoso-
phy like Schopenhauer’s . . . will perpetually call forth essays at other
philosophies. . . . But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than
that of contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object
whatever to press against. A philosophy whose principle is so incom-
mensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy
in universal affairs . . . will be more unpopular than pessimism. Better
face the enemy than the eternal void!8
A philosophy of life of the kind that is implied in Gregory of Nyssa’s
pronouncements may not be so pessimistic as Schopenhauer’s, inso-
far as Gregory allows that the human person may be fulfilled in
relationship to God, and may enjoy such fulfilment even in the course
of this life, in the way he describes here. But there is, we might say,
still a kind of pessimism in this view, to the extent that those ‘desires
and powers’ of the person which have as their object the sensory
world seem bound to be ‘baffled and disappointed’ on this picture.
After all, the relationship between those desires and the desires and
powers whose cultivation is required for the later stages of the
spiritual life is conceived in competitive terms: the role of desires
and powers which have as their object the sensory world is therefore
simply to be placed in abeyance, or perhaps to be eradicated, and to
this extent these powers are ‘contradicted’ or set at nought for the
purposes of the spiritual life. This way of putting the matter suggests
that a Christian philosophy of life, of the kind we are considering, will
7
Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 552.
8
William James, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’, in William James, Essays in
Pragmatism (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), p. 17.
also fail the second of James’ tests—since it postulates a ‘principle’—
namely God—or the spiritual life conceived as fulfilment in relation-
ship to God, which is ‘incommensurate’ with our sensory powers,
insofar as the exercise of these powers cannot contribute anything
positively towards the success of a human life understood in these
terms.
Of course, there is a tradition of Christian apology which would
find the expression of dissatisfaction with the Christian worldview on
these grounds wearisomely predictable: the unreformed person will of
course find the Christian conception of life practically insupportable;
but this only goes to show that the ‘natural man’ must be converted,
so that his desires run true. Here we touch upon a central question in
theological anthropology, which I shall not try to adjudicate right
here. But I take it that a central motivation for this view is the thought
that if the person or ‘the soul’ is to be properly directed to God, then
this requires that their attention be trained away from the sensory
world. The central thesis of the present discussion is simply that
various doctrinal claims, or in general a Christian conception of the
person and of their fulfilment in relation to God, can be inscribed in,
or can ‘colour’, sensory experience, so that the sensory realm itself
becomes a medium for reckoning with those claims and allowing
oneself to be shaped by them. If that is so, then there is no need to
adopt the competitive construal of the relationship between attention
to the sensory world and attention to the heavenly realm that defines
the position which Gregory enunciates in the passage above. And in
that case, at least one central support for the claim that the spiritual
life requires disengagement from the sensory realm will have been
overturned.9
The objection that the Christian conception of the spiritual life, or
in general theistic or Platonizing accounts of the spiritual life, imply
9
As we shall see in Chapter 6, when we consider the work of St John of the Cross,
this point might also be developed in chronological terms: while there may be spiritual
reasons for disengaging from the sensory world for a time, these reasons may also
suggest that, as the person matures, it will be appropriate for them to re-engage with
sensory objects and concerns. David Brown’s work provides a richly textured account
of the idea that the divine can be encountered under sensory forms. And my discus-
sion here could be read as a phenomenological rendering of some of the central
themes of his book God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See, for instance, his allusion to ‘the possi-
bility that a divine structure is already implicit in certain forms of experience of the
natural world’: p. 22.
‘doing the dirt’ on our own humanity, looms large, of course, in a
range of spiritually motivated critiques of Christian theology. Such a
view is developed famously and at length in the work of Friedrich
Nietzsche.10 But it is also very much apparent in modern objections
to received religious conceptions of the spiritual life. Grace Jantzen,
for example, protests that (Christian) philosophy of religion is ‘necro-
philic’ because it locates all genuine value in another, non-sensory
realm, and sees death as a condition of full admission to that realm.
On her account, as on Nussbaum’s, the failing of such a conception of
human life is fundamentally ethical: if we think in these terms, and
suppose that what matters at bottom is our condition in some further,
non-sensory world, then what will become of our resolve to challenge
this-worldly structures which sit on the side of oppression? For
Jantzen, the remedy for this deficiency in traditional theological
thought is to erase any distinction between God and world, and to
admit the possibility of human divinization: at a stroke, theological
language will then cease to have the consequence of sucking value
from the sensory world, and projecting it onto another, divine realm,
and will instead provide a conceptual resource for investing import-
ance in the sensory world, once it comes to be represented as divine.
So on this view, the human calling is not to lay aside our concern with
the realm of sensory affairs in the name of obedience to a God who
inhabits some other realm; on the contrary, we are called to become
divine ourselves, in the midst of this-worldly experience, by
deepening our commitment to various this-worldly concerns, and
especially our identification with our fellow human beings insofar as
they are vulnerable and afflicted. In this vein, Jantzen comments:
From a feminist perspective, becoming divine is inseparable from
solidarity with human suffering: a symbolic of the divine is a symbolic
of outrage, imagination, and desire, and compassionate action, not the
detached and objective intellectual stance which traditional philoso-
phers of religion assume and which they take to be characteristic of
God.11
10
See for example his reference to God as ‘the enemy of life’, in Twilight of the Idols
or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce
Homo, Twilight of the Idols, ed. A. Ridley and J. Norman, tr. J. Norman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 174.
11
Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 263.
Here again we find a competitive rendering of certain relationships:
between ‘imagination and desire’, on the one side, and on the other
side, an ‘objective intellectual stance’, where the first is associated with
human activity in this world and the second with the divine mode of
life (on a supposedly traditional rendering of the nature of that life)
which belongs more properly to another, non-sensory realm. On this
view, the human person stands suspended between these two condi-
tions, but is required (according to theological tradition, as repre-
sented here) to surrender this-worldly imagination and desire for the
life of intellectual contemplation, as a condition of drawing closer to
God. Jantzen’s account of the import of the philosophy of religion
and Christian theology more broadly amounts to a re-presentation of
the picture we find in the Republic, to the extent that in this dialogue
too we find a distinction (on a conventional reading) between the life
of the mind, which is targeted at a non-sensory realm, and the life of
the senses and associated desires and modes of thought. If Jantzen is
right to suppose that traditional theology confronts us with such a
choice between the divine and sensory realms, and presents the
second as entirely devoid of value, then she is surely also right to
suppose that the traditional scheme should be thrown out—or else it
is our humanity which will have to be thrown out.
Jantzen’s response to these difficulties in theological tradition is to
keep the language of ‘the divine’, but to redefine it, so that it becomes
clearly aligned with a valuing of this-worldly possibilities. Other
contemporary commentators are more inclined, of course, to give
up on the language of religion, and to work simply with secular
or atheistic categories. This is the stance taken by André Comte-
Sponville in his ‘argument for spirituality without God’. Like Jantzen,
Comte-Sponville is exercised by the idea that Christian forms of
thought inevitably disparage the material world, by requiring the
believer to disengage from the sensory realm, either by directing her
attention ‘upwards’ to another, higher realm, or by directing her
attention inwards, as a condition in each case of encountering God
understood as the true locus of value. He writes:
To put it very simply, we can say that there are two basic ways of
conceiving of religious spirituality—as an interiority (such is the spirit
of Romanesque churches) or a verticality (such is the spirit of the
Gothic cathedrals) . . . I have grown wary not only of loftiness, which
crushes everything, but also of interiority, introspection . . . I find it
easier to believe in spiritualities that open on to the world, on to other
people, on to everything.12
Here again we find an antithetical rendering of, first, a concern for
God, which implies an ‘upward’ or perhaps an ‘inward’ focus, and in
the second place, a concern for ‘the world’ and ‘other people’, which
implies what we might call an ‘outward’ focus.
As well as taking up the invitation, which I have suggested is
implicit in the Republic, to consider how the phenomenology of our
experience of the sensory world might be shaped by ‘enlightenment’,
a second central aim of the present discussion is to respond to these
various objections—Nietzschean, feminist (of a certain kind), and
contemporary atheistic, among others—to a broadly Christian con-
ception of the spiritual life. These objections have in common
a tendency to find in Christian (and Platonic) forms of thought a
disposition to draw a sharp distinction between this world—that is,
the sensory world—and another world—the divine world—and to
associate all value with the second. So this kind of objection to
Christian ideals of the spiritual life turns on the thought that those
ideals postulate an unwholesome ‘dualism’ between God and human
beings (and in turn between soul and body, intellect and emotion,
reason and imagination, male and female, and so on—where in each
case the first is valued at the expense of the second). One irony of this
stance, as standardly rehearsed, is that it accepts the terms of the
dualism: we are indeed faced with a choice between God, if under-
stood in the traditional style, and the sensory world. Only these
authors want, of course, to invert the value scheme implied in the
traditional picture, and to choose the world rather than God, or (to
take up Jantzen’s approach) the world understood in distinction from
God as traditionally represented, and now redescribed as divine.
A central concern of the present discussion is to show that we are
not required to make any such choice, and that the dualism with
which we are presented here is a fiction constructed by the ‘oppon-
ents’ of dualistic thinking. To cast the point in terms of Comte-
Sponville’s spatial metaphors, the movement upwards and inwards
can also be a movement outwards. Indeed, there is a certain kind of
12
André Comte-Sponville, The Book of Atheist Spirituality: An Elegant Argument
for Spirituality Without God, tr. Nancy Huston (London: Transworld Publishers,
2008), p. 197.
movement outwards, I shall argue—a certain kind of embrace of the
world—which is possible only on condition that we have accom-
plished the relevant movement upwards. Or to speak in the terms
that I shall use, certain doctrinal claims (here we are concerned with
the movement upwards) can enter into our sensory experience (this is
to speak of the movement outwards, of course) in such a way as to
enrich that experience, and to bring us thereby to a new and deepened
appreciation of the realm of sensory forms.
Much of the recent philosophy of religion literature has been
occupied with various apologetic concerns. Is belief in God justified
evidentially? Might religious belief be properly basic? Would it be
warranted if true? Is the problem of evil significant counter-evidence
to theistic belief? And so on. But ‘on the street’ there is, I suggest, a
different, more existentially focused kind of objection to religious
belief which looms much larger than these epistemological kinds of
concern. It is the objection framed by Comte-Sponville and others—
namely, the objection that religion requires us to adopt a set of
evaluations that betray our human form of life, because they require
us to sink our attention in a realm other than this sensory world, and
thereby to neglect the claim on our time and care and energy which is
rightly made by other human beings, and by the material cosmos
more broadly defined. The present work is an apologetic work of a
kind, but one which differs from the usual sort of discussion insofar as
it is intended as a response to this more existential kind of disquiet
about the import of religious belief.
Some believers who have been sensitive to what I am calling the
existential critique of religious commitment have thought that the
solution lies in challenging the idea of God as a transcendent ‘indi-
vidual’. Grace Jantzen’s approach represents one example of such a
response. Her account is at root an ethically motivated protest against
traditional forms of religious thought, and it is explicitly revisionary.
Other commentators have argued that if only we pay closer attention
to the way in which traditional forms of religious thought work, then
we will see that they do not in fact involve any conception of God as a
transcendent individual, resident in some non-material realm, even if
the ‘surface grammar’ of such thought might suggest such a concep-
tion. If this sort of proposal can be sustained, then we will have,
potentially, another solution to the existential problem: we can keep
traditional religious language without having to suppose that this
language presents us with a choice between ‘this world’ and ‘another
world’. Gareth Moore’s writings provide an illuminating example of
how such an approach might be formulated. We misconstrue the
word ‘God’, he argues, if we suppose that it picks out a particular
individual. Instead, we should recognize that the word functions in
much the same way as the expression ‘the equator’. In each case, to
determine the sense of the term, we should consider the use which
people make of it, rather than supposing that it must refer to a special
sort of entity.
God is not something extra, any more than the equator is. And it is a
symptom of our misunderstanding of our assertion of the existence of
the invisible God if, in response to a denial of the existence of God, we
reaffirm our belief and offer what we claim to be evidence in support of
it . . . What we have to do, rather, is to explain, describe, the use of the
word ‘God’, to show the part it plays in our language and our lives.13
On this view, some standard accounts of religious belief are caught in
a tangle of confusions, and the knot at the centre of this tangle is the
idea that the word ‘God’ serves to pick out a particular individual.
Since this individual cannot be located in this world—since God is,
manifestly, not a sensory object—we must therefore, so the argument
goes, represent God as a special, non-material kind of object; and
since he cannot be observed, we will need to cite evidence to establish
his existence; and so on. This way of taking religious language leads us
directly into the two-worlds conception of the import of religious
belief. But such a procedure is no more to be adopted here, Moore
urges, than it is in the case of the expression ‘the equator’. That
expression also fails to pick out a material thing (a line which we
can see when standing at the mid-point of the earth), but it would be a
mistake to suppose that the term must therefore refer to a special kind
of line, different from ordinary lines because it is invisible.
This approach shares with the account that I shall be developing a
concern to think about how the term ‘God’, and related expressions,
might shape our experience of the sensory world—and how it might
enable us, thereby, to do things we might not otherwise be able to do.
In the same way, the expression ‘the equator’ can shape, I take it, our
experience of the world—or at least it can guide our construal of such
experience—and can thereby play a practical role in our engagement
13
Gareth Moore, O.P., Believing in God: A Philosophical Essay (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1988), pp. 38–9.
with the realm of sensory objects. However, I am going to argue that
we can grant that God-language and equator-language are alike to
this extent, without having to adopt Moore’s metaphysically minim-
alist reading of the import of religious language. So the approach
I shall be developing agrees with Moore on some of the desiderata of
an account of religious language: we agree that such an account
should show how religious concepts can enter into our experience
of the sensory world—or, at least, how they can have an action-
guiding application in relation to such experience. But I shall be
arguing that we can allow for all of this while retaining a more
traditional, more metaphysically engaged reading of such language
than is suggested by Moore’s ‘equator’ analogy. In brief, I shall be
arguing that a more metaphysically committed reading of the basic
drift of various beliefs and practices provides the best way of making
sense of the kind of transformation in experience of the sensory world
which is the focus of our enquiry.14
In sum, these are the objectives of the present study: to take up the
invitation, which I suggest we can find in Plato’s Republic, to consider
the relationship between spiritual development and the phenomen-
ology of our experience of the sensory world; and to address, thereby, a
familiar objection to Christian (and Platonic) accounts of the spiritual
life—according to which these approaches are wedded to a two-worlds
picture of reality and, accordingly, bound to endorse a conception of
human life which is, so far as it concerns this-worldly forms of experi-
ence and practice, ethically and spiritually ruinous. As a first step
towards developing such an account, I shall consider, in relatively
theoretical terms, the relationship between the intellectual and emo-
tional dimensions of religious commitment and experience of the
sensory world. As a second step, I shall examine a number of substan-
tive conceptions of the sensory phenomenology of the spiritual life. Let
us see if we can take these steps in turn.
14
For a clear and sensitive examination of how a metaphysically realist construal
of religious commitment may be combined with an acknowledgement of the practical
dimension of the life of faith, see John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion,
Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
Chapter 1, and Why Believe? (London: Continuum, 2009), Chapter 7. A lively appre-
ciation of the relationship between religious belief and a person’s practical and
affective commitments is also, of course, a mark of feminist writing in the philosophy
of religion. For a helpful review of these matters, see Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist
Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); for example, Part II.
2
Emotional Feelings and the Appearance

of the Sensory World
If religious thoughts and feelings and practices can structure or

otherwise contribute to the character of the sensory field, then we
have a basis for supposing that attending to matters of religious
substance and a focus upon the sensory world need not after all be
opposed to one another. The two realms—the religious and the
sensory—will on this account become one, to the extent that religious
attitudes and concerns can be inscribed in our experience of the
sensory world, and can therefore remain an enduring object of
contemplation even as we engage with sensory things. In general
outline, this is the thesis that I am proposing to explore in the
remainder of this discussion. If it holds good, then we can tell a
version of Plato’s story of the cave in which the condition of enlight-
enment need not be held apart from the condition of experiencing the
shadows in the cave. Instead, the first condition can enter into the
second, so that for the seer, the experience of the shadowy realm is
shot through with the very insights which are characteristic of en-
lightenment. In that case, the shadows, as they feature in the seer’s
experience, will be truth-bearing in religious terms, and they can
therefore serve as a proper focus for the spiritual life. And if that is
so, then one standard objection to the Christian (or Platonic) con-
ception of the spiritual life will have been removed: a focus upon the
divine world need not after all imply any neglect in our relationship to
the world of sensory forms; and it may even be that it is in our
encounter with the realm of sensory forms that certain religious
insights are presented to us most vividly.
THE CASE OF CONVERSION EXPERIENCE
This general thesis, concerning the relationship between a person’s

religious conviction or orientation and the quality of their experience
of the sensory world, derives some initial support from what we know
of conversion experience. Conversion appears to be a particularly
good test case for our thesis, because here we find a fundamental and
in principle dateable shift in religious outlook, and we can ask
whether this shift in perspective is correlated with a change in the
phenomenology of the convert’s experience of the sensory world.
William James’ discussion of conversion experience in his Varieties
of Religious Experience suggests that, on occasions, such a connection
does obtain. James notes that for a certain kind of person, the person
who suffers from what he calls ‘religious melancholy’, the world may
appear, before their conversion, to be lacking in reality, or to be in
some way flat and devoid of salience. He cites as an example the case
of Leo Tolstoy:
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments
of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not ‘how to live’, or
what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the
excitement and interest which our functions naturally begin had ceased.
Life had been enchanting, it was now flat sober, more than sober, dead.
Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been self-evident.
The questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What next?’ began to beset him more and
more frequently.1
Tolstoy’s condition as it is described here has a number of dimen-
sions. His predicament consists in part in an emotional change: his
‘excitement and interest’ in the world have drained away. His condi-
tion also has a practical and intellectual dimension: he is seized by
moments of ‘perplexity’, when he does not know what to do. And
alongside these changes, he is beset by a kind of religious or existential
concern: things which once seemed meaningful have now ceased to
be so. To talk about the condition in these terms is to focus upon
Tolstoy himself, by considering what has happened to him in regard
to his emotions, his capacity to orient himself in the world practically,
1
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), p. 152.
Emotional Feelings and the Appearance of the Sensory World 17
and his sense of the meaningfulness of things. But the passage also
invites us to associate these changes in Tolstoy with a change in the
world: the world, in Tolstoy’s experience, is now ‘flat sober’. Or as
James puts the point elsewhere, for Tolstoy: ‘The result [of this loss of
meaning] was a transformation in the whole expression of reality.’2 So
we seem to have here a condition which brings together a certain state
of mind and a certain appearance of the sensory world. And the state
of mind in question is one which is rich in religious resonance, insofar
as it has to do with a felt loss of existential meaning.
James cites various other examples of individuals whose existential
disorientation is correlated with the same sort of change in the ap-
pearance of the sensory world. For such individuals, he notes: ‘The
world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its colour is gone,
its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.’3
As one of his sources says: ‘I see everything through a cloud . . . things
are not as they were, and I am changed.’ Another remarks: ‘I
see, I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters
the hue and look of everything.’ And again: ‘Persons move like
shadows, and sounds seem to come from a distant world.’ Or: ‘There
is no longer any past for me; people appear so strange; it is as if I could
not see any reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors
and everything were scenery; I can no longer find myself; I walk,
but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no impression.’
And: ‘I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not
real things.’4
In these reports we find once again that a shift in the person’s
psychological condition (as when it is remarked ‘I am changed’)
is combined with a shift in the appearance of the sensory world
(as when this same person comments ‘I see everything through a
cloud . . . things are not as they were’). And again, this change in the
person, and the correlative change in the appearance of the world,
is sometimes recorded in religiously suggestive terms, especially inso-
far as it involves a changed sense of the reality of the material world.
As one subject comments: ‘The things I see are not real things’. Or
again: ‘It is as if I could not see any reality’. Strikingly, the condition
which is reported in these remarks seems to involve some sense of the
2
James, Varieties, p. 151.
3
Ibid.
4
These quotations all appear in James, Varieties, p. 152.
insubstantiality of the sensory world. One subject even remarks:
‘Persons move like shadows.’ But it is clear that this new assessment
of the realm of sensory objects is not experienced as a liberation. So
the story of the cave does not, in this respect, seem to fit the experi-
ence of these individuals: they do not take themselves to have been
released into a new and deeper understanding of the fundamental
nature of things, so that they can now appreciate, from that vantage
point, the shadowiness of the objects of everyday, sensory experience.
On the contrary, their sense of the shadowiness or insubstantiality of
the everyday world seems to be caught up in an experience of
profound practical disorientation, and a diminished sense of their
own reality. To this extent, their experience seems to bear out Jant-
zen’s charge: if we surrender our commitment to the reality of the
sensory world, by contrasting its reality with the supposedly richer,
fuller reality of another, non-sensory realm, then our capacity to
engage with the sensory world, in ethical and other terms, is likely
to be disrupted; and at the same time, we are liable to be left with an
impoverished sense of the significance of a human life and of human
choices.
There is one further feature of these reports which it is important
to mention for our purposes. It is clear that this transformation in the
appearance of sensory things is not localized: it is not as if there is
some clearly circumscribed set of objects which comes to appear
differently. Instead, life as a whole has lost its savour, and accordingly,
it is the sensory world as a whole which takes on a new appearance.
As James notes when summarizing the condition: ‘The world now
looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its colour is gone, its breath
is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.’ Here it is the
world, and not simply the objects belonging to a certain region of
experience, which has been transformed. The generality of this
change seems, in this case, to be bound up with a quasi-personal
representation of the world. Just as we can see in the movement of a
person’s arm, when our attention is fixed upon this particular body
part, a larger significance, which embraces the body of the person as a
whole, or the person themselves considered as psychosomatic unity,
so, it seems, we can experience the world as a whole as having a
certain character, in our experience of some part of it, when the world
is understood in quasi-personal terms. If we take James’ description of
this condition to be apt, then it seems that these people once experi-
enced the world in personal terms, but now find that it is devoid of
personal life: now ‘its breath is cold’, and ‘there is no speculation in
the eyes it glares with’. So here it is the loss of the possibility of a quasi-
personal construal of the world’s meaning which is felt; but in this
case too, parts of the world still speak of the character of the whole,
insofar as those parts no longer present the appearance of being
animated by a personal, world-embracing kind of life.
We have been considering the condition which James denotes as
religious melancholy, and the dense interconnectedness in such cases
of a particular emotional state (broadly, one of dejection), a particular
practical state (broadly, one of disorientation), a particular existential
state (a sense of life as having lost any significance), and a particular
phenomenal condition of the world as a whole (broadly, one of
diminished reality or flatness and loss of salience). The post-conver-
sion experience, on James’ account, involves this same dense inter-
connectedness of various psychological and perceptual states, but
here, of course, the valences have changed. The person’s emotional
state is now uplifted; they have recovered their sense of practical
orientation in the world; and the world is now invested with meaning,
and is once again contoured. As James puts the point, in cases of
conversion, ‘a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in
the subject is a transformation of the face of nature in his eyes’.5
As usual, James cites various first-hand accounts of the condition
he is describing. One man remarks of his conversion: ‘I think this was
in November 1823, but what day of the month I do not know.
I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the
fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world.’ And
another says: ‘It was like entering another world, a new state of
existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so
clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, the
woods were vocal with heavenly music . . . ’ And another: ‘Not for a
moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and glory seemed
to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed, and everything
became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody seemed
changed.’6 Once more, it is striking that the various experiences
which are reported here have a world-wide reach: each is described
as an experience of a renewal of the world, and not simply of some
localized field of experience. And once more, even the most everyday
5
6
These examples appear in James, Varieties, pp. 249–50.
things, such as fields, cattle, trees, and ‘horses and hogs’, take on a new
appearance. Only where the world had appeared flat and grey in the
experience of the religious melancholiac, here it is radiant and beau-
tiful. It is also striking that in these experiences of conversion, renewal
in the world is associated with personal renewal, just as in experiences
of melancholy, degeneration in the world is associated with personal
degeneration. As one convert comments: ‘I was like a new man in a
new world.’
It is clear from James’ discussion that the setting of each of these
experiences is explicitly religious. In the first case, the convert has
called to mind a biblical text, and in the latter two, she and he,
respectively, is present at a religious revival meeting. I shall, in due
course, come to the question of how we might understand the
relationship between such a transformation in the appearances and
a change in religious state. But from these examples it is clear, at any
rate, that a religious renewal or conversion can be associated with a
fundamental shift in the appearance of the sensory world; indeed, the
conversion experience in these cases seems at least in part to consist
in this shift in the sensory appearances. If that is so, then we have an
initial basis for supposing that by taking on certain religious beliefs, or
by assuming a religiously attuned state of mind, or by adopting
certain religiously suggestive practices, it is possible, at least in
principle, to experience a renewal of the senses—the sensory world
will now be charged with new significance, where this significance is
not just imposed upon it, from without, but infused into it, so that the
appearances themselves are changed.
On this perspective, religious renewal need not make for a down-
grading of the world of the senses, by comparison with a notionally
more real domain of religious objects. Instead, in or through the
conversion experience, the sensory world can be enlivened; and far
from appearing as a ‘mass of perishable rubbish’ from the vantage
point of this newly attained state of religious understanding (as when
the beauty of sensory things is laid alongside the beauty of the Form
of Beauty, in the Symposium), the world can instead acquire a new
beauty and radiance, which is not confined to certain special, reli-
giously significant objects, but instead extends to all things, insofar as
they are manifest to the senses. There are no grounds for supposing
that the ‘two worlds’ doctrine is being challenged in any of these
reports of conversion experience. James’ converts seem to presuppose
a broadly orthodox conception of Christian belief; and there is no
reason to doubt that they would subscribe to the thought that God is
the creator of the material order, and not a member of it or himself
material. And if that is right, then it seems that the two-worlds
doctrine need not after all issue in an impoverished conception of
the realm of the senses or an impoverishment in sensory experience
itself; on the contrary, in these cases, religious renewal, apparently
within the terms of the two-worlds scheme, gives rise to, or partly
consists in, a state of sensory renewal.
Of course, the experiences reported by James are of a somewhat
exotic variety. And from our own lives, many of us may find it hard
to think of even remote analogues to the experience of the religious
melancholiac, or the experience of these converts. Nonetheless, if
taken at face value, the reports which James cites do seem to
establish the possibility of a link between religious conviction, or
religious practice or feeling, and the appearance of the sensory
world. The link may take a rather extravagant form in these cases,
or at any rate may be manifest in a rather extravagant form. But if
such a link exists under the rather special conditions of the conver-
sion experience, as described here, then we might well wonder why it
should not exist in other cases which are more familiar from every-
day experience. This is the possibility that I shall investigate next.
For this purpose we will need to think further about the nature of the
connection between religious renewal and a renewal in the sensory
world. Once we have an account of this connection, we can ask
whether it is of a kind which can obtain only under the special
circumstances of radical conversion, or whether it might obtain
more generally, even if less spectacularly or less discernibly than in
the cases described by James.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE EMOTIONS

TO SENSORY EXPERIENCE
James himself provides one theoretical vantage point on the phenom-

ena he is describing when he allows that varying emotional states can
make for variations in the appearance of the sensory world. It is worth
quoting him at some length on this fundamental point. First of all, he
remarks:
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional com-
ments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in
different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there
is no rationally discernible connection between any outer fact and the
sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in
another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual
region of the subject’s being.7
From the accounts which James gives of religious conversion or of the
movement into melancholy, it is clear that emotional changes are
importantly involved in each case. And in this passage he notes that
the emotions have a degree of independence relative to the outer
world of ‘fact’, to the extent that the same set of material circum-
stances may engender in different people at a given time, or in the
same person at different times, quite different emotional responses.
Allowing that this is so (and surely James is right to this extent), then
changes in emotion appear as though they may have an important
part to play as the source of the other phenomena that arise in cases of
melancholy and conversion, insofar as these changes, as James de-
scribes them, do not evidently have their origins in some change in
the outer world. Tolstoy, for example, is emphatic that his outward
circumstances before his descent into this state of mental ‘arrest’ had
undergone no significant shift, and were indeed, by any normal
standard, as favourable as they had ever been. (He comments: ‘All
this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances
went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who
loved me and whom I loved; good children and a property which was
increasing with no pains taken on my part’, and so on.8) So if changes
in emotional condition can arise independently of any shift in mater-
ial context, and if such changes are integral to the change which is
characteristic of the movement into melancholy or conversion, then
we might hypothesize that in some cases it is the change in emotion
which comes first, and which brings in its train the various other
changes which are associated with melancholy and conversion—
rather than, for example, a change in outer circumstances bringing
about a change in the appearance of the world, and thereby a change
in emotional state. At any rate, a case such as Tolstoy’s seems to fit
this model.
7
8
Tolstoy, cited in James, Varieties, p. 153.
If this sort of account is to be sustained, then of course we will need
some understanding of how a change in emotion might drive a
change in the appearance of the sensory world. James thinks that
this connection is easily enough identified. He continues:
Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with
which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists,
purely by itself, without your favourable or unfavourable, hopeful or
apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize
such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the
universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole
collection of its things and series of its events would be without signifi-
cance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest,
or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus
pure gifts of the spectator’s mind. The passion of love is the most
familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it
does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms
the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont
Blanc from a corpse-like grey to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the
whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.
So with fear, indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there,
life changes.9
Because of the account of these matters that he presents in the
Principles of Psychology, James is often associated with the view that
the emotions are feelings of physiological changes.10 But in this later
passage it is clear that he is thinking of the emotions as forms of
attention which are not only, if at all, directed inwards towards states
of the body, but which are also directed outwards, at the world.
Moreover, emotional feelings on the view expounded in this passage
are not simply responses to what is perceived in the sensory world;
instead, they enter into the perceptual field, giving it colour and
structure. In brief, on this view, insofar as the world is subject to
my ‘favourable or unfavourable, hopeful or apprehensive comment’,
its appearance is thereby changed for me. And insofar as my relation-
ship to the world is invariably engaged, insofar as my interests and
concerns are always at stake in my dealings with the world, then its
9
10
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1950; first published 1890), Chapter 25. See also his paper ‘What is an Emo-
tion?’, Mind 9 (1884), 188–205.
appearance to me will be not just occasionally but invariably a
compound product—depending partly on its own inherent character
and partly on my state of mind, where the relative contribution of
these two cannot readily be disentangled, because there is, as James
intimates, no neutral point from which to view the world, from which
we might see it as it is ‘in itself ’.
Of course, James’ description of the condition of the melancholiac
suggests that the disengaged point of view is after all in a sense
possible for us—assuming that we are to think of the melancholiac’s
predicament as a matter of loss of engagement, rather than in terms of
some special, negatively toned kind of engagement. And what we find
in this case fits with James’ claims in this passage: for the melancho-
liac, the world does indeed appear colourless (‘its colour is gone, its
breath is cold’), and featureless (it is ‘flat sober’).
From this perspective it seems that we can provide a relatively
straightforward account of the relationship between religious conver-
sion and a shift in the appearance of the sensory world. The con-
versions that James describes appear to happen more or less
instantaneously. As one man says, ‘I think this was in November
1823, but what day of the month I do not know.’ Whatever the precise
day, it seems clear that he has in mind a change in mental condition
that is in principle precisely dateable, because it happened at a
particular moment. Moreover, the conversions that James describes
all seem to befall people, rather than being directly subject to volun-
tary control, albeit that in each of the three cases I have mentioned the
person is evidently (if we refer to the detail of James’ account) seeking
to submit themselves to God in one fashion or another.11 Changes in
emotional state, on James’ account of such states, fit the phenomena
of conversion in each of these respects. Such changes can happen
independently of any significant alteration in outer circumstances,
and it is partly for this reason that they can happen of a sudden.
Moreover, on James’ view, the emotions belong to the ‘animal and
spiritual region of the subject’s being’—that is, they are not readily
susceptible to rational manipulation, and to this extent the emotions
11
Following Starbuck, James distinguishes between ‘volitional’ and ‘self-surrender’
kinds of conversion, and notes that the latter can be instantaneous: James, Varieties,
pp. 206, 217. For a perceptive discussion of the voluntariness of emotions, see
Anastasia Scrutton, Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility (New
York: Continuum, 2011), Chapter 7.
are states of mind which we undergo, rather than being states whose
development we might shape directly. So changes in emotion map
onto the cases of conversion which James describes insofar as these
conversions have an emotional component, and insofar as they occur
suddenly and are not directly subject to the will of the convert.
Moreover, if James is right, then changes in emotion can engender
a change in the appearance of the sensory world, by lending it new
colour and structure. Putting these thoughts together, we might
conclude that conversion experiences, of the kind that figure in
James’ account, are at root changes in emotion, where these changes
occur suddenly and independently of rational control, and where they
effect a generalized shift in the appearance of the sensory world.
On this view, what is the link between religious belief, or religious
practice and feeling, and the appearance of the sensory world? In
brief, on this account, it seems that certain triggers which have a
religious character or context (James’ examples suggest that the
trigger may take the form of attending to a scriptural verse, or
participating in a revival meeting, or undergoing some physical
discipline in a religious context) are capable of generating a deep-
seated emotional change, independently of any fundamental change
in the outer world, and these new emotions can then be infused into
the convert’s experience of the sensory world, so that her elevated
emotional state finds an answering response in the transformed
appearance of the sensory world. We might want to describe this
whole bundle of changes as the conversion experience, or we might
prefer to speak of the shift in the convert’s emotional condition as the
core of the conversion experience, and of other changes, such as the
change in the appearance of the sensory world, as consequences of
that experience. But however we divide the phenomena in conceptual
terms, we have here one relatively straightforward account of the
relationship between religious commitment and the appearance of
the sensory world—and the key mediating term is, of course, emo-
tional experience. Religious commitment can generate, or in some
cases it may in part consist in, certain forms of emotional experience,
and those experiences can in turn elicit a change in the appearance of
the sensory world.
This understanding can be applied very readily to the two issues
with which we began. If we ask ‘How might the seer’s experience of
the realm of shadows be changed on her return to the cave?’, we could
answer, following this account, that insofar as her emotional engage-
ment with the world is now different, insofar, we might add, as it has
now been purged of certain egocentric kinds of attachment, then the
sensory world will take on, in the seer’s experience, a different
appearance. If that is so, then the sensory world, the realm of
shadows, far from being inherently corrupt, will now be inscribed,
in its appearance to the seer, with the very values which serve to
distinguish her from the unenlightened person. On such a view, the
realm of sensory appearances is not of its nature corrupt, but instead
presents to the seer a kind of mirror image of her own enlightened
condition. And we might add that insofar as the sensory realm is
corrupt, that is because its appearance has been structured according
to the concerns of a corrupt individual; it is not so much, then, that it
is inherently corrupt, as that it is corruptible, given some corruption
in the person.
And if we were to take up the charge of Jantzen, Comte-Sponville,
and others that religious conviction will bring in its train a neglect of,
or a demeaning attitude towards, or a failure to properly appreciate
the sensory world, then we might say that it all depends on the nature
of the conviction, and that a conviction which involves something like
the ‘two-worlds’ view—to the extent that it is not pantheistic, for
example—need not issue thereby in a lack of ethical or any other kind
of constructive engagement with the sensory world. On the contrary,
James’ examples suggest how the adoption of a religious worldview of
a somewhat traditional kind, or the deeper appropriation of such a
view in conversion experience may find expression in a new appreci-
ation of the sensory world—where that appreciation is not just a
matter of finding the sensory world to be good in new ways, but of
the sensory realm undergoing a change in appearance, so that it is
now invested with new beauty and radiance. And other people on this
account (as well as hogs and horses) can also take on a new and
luminous quality—and our interest in them and commitment to
them can be deepened and quickened accordingly. Again, what is
impressive about these cases is precisely that the commitment here is
not just intellectual: the new sense of the worth which attaches to
other people and the world is inscribed in the appearances. So this
sense of their worth has now become part of the fabric of the world, in
the experience of the convert.
TOWARDS AN ASSESSMENT OF J AMES’

ACCOUNT OF EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE
This understanding of conversion experience, and its relationship to a

transformation in the appearance of the sensory world, obviously
depends on a certain view of the emotions. What are we to make of
this view? It is striking that what James says on this point is very
much of a piece with recent philosophical theorizing about the
emotions. In the later years of the twentieth century, philosophers
were for the most part concerned with acknowledging the world-
directedness of the emotions. On this perspective, the emotions are
not to be confused with, for example, bodily twinges or felt churnings:
such states are not ‘about’ anything, but are simply the felt registering
of various changes in bodily condition. The alternative view,
according to which the emotions are to be assimilated to sensations,
was, as it happens, commonly associated with James.12 To preserve
the ‘aboutness’ or intentionality of emotional states, many philoso-
phers came to think of them as comprising both a thought compon-
ent and a feeling component, where the first is the cause of the
second. On this account we can take an emotion such as embarrass-
ment, for example, to consist in a certain thought—here, roughly, the
thought that I have done something or undergone something, or that
someone relevantly related to me has done something or undergone
something, that will cause my standing in the eyes of others to be
diminished—where this thought engenders a feeling of broadly nega-
tive hedonic tone. In this way we can differentiate between emotion
types by reference to the differing thoughts of which they are com-
prised (as when we distinguish, say, embarrassment and grief), or by
reference to the differing feelings which are produced by a given
thought (as when we distinguish, say, pity and Schadenfreude).13
Such an account preserves the intentionality of the emotions by
being clear that they are themselves forms of thought. But it is striking
that on this view, the aboutness of the emotions is to be attributed to
their thought component where this is understood in distinction
12
For the textual basis of this understanding of James, see again the works cited in
footnote 10 above.
13
For a good summary of this sort of approach, see Malcolm Budd, Music and the
Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985),
Chapter 1.
from their feeling component: feelings, on this view, do not of
themselves contribute to the world-directedness of the emotion, and
they are treated, then, as a kind of thought-induced sensation—that
is, as in themselves thought-less. Some recent commentary on the
emotions has challenged this account, by seeking to represent emo-
tional feelings as in themselves intentional—that is, as intentional in
their own right, rather than simply by virtue of their association with
some thought. Peter Goldie summarizes this sort of approach in these
terms, taking as his example the case of someone who has fallen on
ice, and who has, as a consequence, come to think of the dangerous-
ness of ice in a new, ‘emotionally relevant’ way:
Coming to think of it in this new way is not to be understood as
consisting of thinking of it in the old way, plus some added-on phe-
nomenal ingredient—feeling perhaps; rather, the whole way of experi-
encing, or being conscious of, the world is new . . . The difference
between thinking of X as Y without feeling and thinking of X as Y
with feeling will not just comprise a different attitude towards the same
content—a thinking which earlier was without feeling and now is with
feeling. The difference also lies in the content, although it might be that
this difference cannot be captured in words.14
Here Goldie rejects the ‘add-on’ view of emotional feelings, according
to which they are of their nature incapable of entering into the
intellectual content of the emotion. On the ‘add-on’ perspective,
emotional feelings have at most to do with a person’s attitude to a
particular intellectual content—where this attitude is, we might sup-
pose, determined by the hedonic tone of the feeling. Against this view,
Goldie suggests that once the person’s appreciation of the dangers of
ice is emotionally toned or informed by feeling, then ‘the whole way
of experiencing, or being conscious of, the world is new’. This is to
say, I take it, that while the person’s verbally articulated thoughts
about the hazards posed by ice may not have changed following their
fall (both before and after the fall, they may subscribe to the thought
that ice is dangerous, because it can be slippery, and so on), nonethe-
less, they have come to a deepened appreciation of the dangers
presented by ice—where this deepened appreciation may be lodged
not in anything they might articulate for themselves or others in
14
Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000), pp. 59–60, Goldie’s emphasis.
verbal terms, but in the way in which the world now appears to them
in phenomenal terms. As Goldie says, ‘the whole way of experiencing
the world is new.’ On this account, emotional feelings are themselves
world-directed: the person’s new, deeper appreciation of the dangers
posed by ice may be lodged in their new feeling of fear, where this
feeling is infused into the sensory appearances.
This account is evidently of the same type as the view which James
defends in the passage which I cited above. Goldie, like James, is
associating variations in emotion with variations in the way in which
the world presents itself to a person in phenomenal terms. But
perhaps rather more explicitly than James, he is supposing that
these changes in experiential presentation involve not just a new
attitude to the ‘same content’, but a change in understanding of the
world.
How might we understand the relationship between the change in
understanding that is realized in a given change in emotional feeling
and a new experiential presentation of the world? To take up Goldie’s
example, we might suppose most simply that the person who has
fallen on ice and come to a new appreciation of the dangers presented
by ice finds that ice has now assumed a new salience in her experience
of the world. When she surveys a relevant scene, she finds that ice
now ‘looms out’ at her as it did not before, while various other items
in the perceptual field are consigned to the periphery of her aware-
ness. Here the relevant difference in experiential presentation of the
world has to do with a difference in the patterning of the perceptual
field: ice in particular is now afforded a more prominent place in the
perceptual field. In this way the person registers, non-verbally but
feelingly, a judgement about the dangerousness of ice, by according it
a degree of attention which is commensurate with its importance for
the person’s wellbeing.
It is natural to suppose that in standard cases, feeling fearful of a
particular object in a given environment involves not only a focusing
of attention upon that object (where this focus is realized at least in
part in an appropriate structuring of the perceptual field), but also
other bodily changes, including most obviously the muscular changes
whereby the body makes itself ready to deal with the dangers which
the object is thought to present, together with the felt experience of
those muscular changes. These various constituents of the normal
fear response—focusing of attention, bodily readiness for action, and
felt awareness of this preparedness for action—typically constitute an
integrated state of mind, from the point of view of the percipient. It is
not as if I find myself focusing upon a particular object—say a patch
of ice—and at the same time become aware of certain muscular
movements as, for example, I steady myself in case I should slip, as
though these two developments were simply unfolding alongside one
another. Instead, the attention of the body as a whole is directed
towards the ice, where this directedness is realized both in a relevant
organization of the perceptual field and in the adoption of an appro-
priate bodily stance and in the felt recognition of this new stance. So
these changes in conscious awareness—both those which are directed
outwards to the ice and those which are directed inwards towards
changes in the body—while they could in principle unfold independ-
ently of each other, in the case of the standard fear response are
knitted together, as different dimensions of the body’s directedness
towards a particular object and the dangers which it presents.
In the normal case it seems natural to think of this integrated state
of mind, or form of mental-and-bodily directedness, as constituting
the response of fear. No doubt there are other ways in which we might
carve the phenomena conceptually. We might, for example, choose to
see the reorganization of the perceptual field that follows a fall on ice
as a causal consequence of the new fear for ice that the person now
feels. But Goldie is right, I think, to suppose that it is more natural to
see this reorganisation as itself a constituent of the fear response. This
is not least because of the tight and reciprocal connections which bind
the changes in muscular condition, for example, and the changes in
the structure of the perceptual field: it is not as if there is a change in
bodily stance, and this drives a change in the structure of the percep-
tual field, and that is the end of the matter. In that case we might
perhaps have some reason to hive off the change in the perceptual
field, and regard it as extrinsically related to the fear response. Rather,
phenomenologically, what seems to be involved is a mutual condi-
tioning of bodily response, as given in, for example, the tensing of
various muscles, and the evolving organization of the perceptual field,
as change in bodily response feeds into the change in the perceptual
field, which in turn invites further fine-tuning of the bodily response,
and so on. Given these feedback loops, which presumably have some
neurological basis, it seems natural to regard the whole set of re-
sponses as comprising, in the standard case, the condition of being
fearful of ice. No doubt we can allow that there are other varieties of
feeling fearful. But the extent to which we are willing to regard them
as genuine examples of the condition will depend upon the degree
to which they approximate to this standard case, though this is not to
say that our everyday concept of ‘fear’ will of itself settle how we are
to adjudicate these further cases.
It might be said: Surely the role of ‘feeling’ here, as you have
described it, is most fundamentally to track changes in bodily condi-
tion, such as those which are involved in the tensing of the muscles,
and should we not say, therefore, that to this extent ‘feeling’ is not
after all directed at the world? Perhaps an analogy will help here.
When I am reading a text, I am not always focally aware of the shape
of the letters on the page; instead, I am likely to be concentrating on
the meaning of the text—the ‘message’ rather than the ‘medium’.
Nonetheless, to apprehend the message I must in some measure, even
if not focally, be aware of the medium. Similarly, we might suppose,
changes in bodily condition, as the body makes itself ready to act in a
situation of perceived danger, may not themselves be the object of
focal awareness; and in normal circumstances they will presumably
not be the object of focal awareness, since what is most deserving of
attention in these cases is the thing which is taken to present a danger.
Even so, just as my awareness of a textual meaning will involve, even
if not focally, an awareness of the letters which constitute the text, so
my awareness of a particular source of danger, we might suppose, can
involve, even if not focally, an awareness, in feeling, of the responses
of the body. After all, the body’s responses are in this case a way
of taking stock of the world: these responses can genuinely record or
reckon with the nature of the danger, insofar as they are a way
of making ready to deal with it, and are proportionate to it. And
accordingly, we might suppose that an awareness of these responses
in bodily feeling can be caught up into an awareness of the state of
the world beyond the body, in rather the way that an awareness of the
shape of the letters on the page can be caught up into our reckoning
with the meaning of the text.
Here we could postulate two separate streams of consciousness: an
awareness of the shape of the letters, and an awareness of the meaning
of the text, where this second awareness supervenes in some way on
the first; and similarly, we could postulate an awareness in feeling of
the responses of the body, and supervening upon this, an awareness
of the dangers presented by the world. On this account it might be
natural to suppose that only the second form of awareness is directed
towards ‘meanings’ (textual or existential) ‘out there’ in the world.
But this picture does not ring true phenomenologically: what we find,
rather, in experience, in standard cases, is that our awareness of
textual meanings does not run alongside a separate stream of con-
sciousness which is directed towards the shape of the letters; instead,
the second kind of awareness is real but we might say tacit, as it is
folded into the awareness of worldly meanings.15 And the same might
be said of the relationship between felt awareness of bodily changes
and awareness of danger in the world. To mark this fact we could say
that bodily feelings in these cases are themselves world-directed, or at
least intimately caught up into a world-directed state of mind, rather
than sitting alongside such a state of mind as a phenomenologically
distinguishable stream of consciousness.16
We have been considering one dimension of William James’
account of the emotions—namely, the idea that changes in emotion
can be associated with changes in the appearance of the sensory world.
And we might conclude that James’ view can be set within a wider
picture of these matters, according to which the emotions involve, at
least on occasion, emotional feelings which are, in their own right,
world-directed, and which form part of a unitary state of mind-and-
body which typically includes a making ready of the body for action
and a structuring of the perceptual field—where this making ready
and structuring can be treated as judgements of the body concerning
what matters or is worth attending to in a situation of practical choice.
We have been concerned specifically with the emotional feeling of fear,
but we might suppose that something similar can be said for other
emotional feelings, insofar as they involve some reckoning with the
significance of an object within a given environment.
To this extent, therefore, we can endorse, and set within a larger
theoretical context, James’ claim that changes in emotion may make
for changes in the appearance of the sensory world. The account that
15
I am following here Michael Polanyi’s usage in The Tacit Dimension (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).
16
I am grateful to Robert Roberts for the analogy with reading a text, which he put
to me in conversation. For somewhat similar accounts of the significance of bodily
feelings to the one which I offer here, see Hanna Pickard, ‘Emotions and the Problem
of Other Minds’, and Robert Solomon, ‘Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is
a “Cognitive Theory” of the Emotions, and Does it Neglect Affectivity?’, both in
A. Hatzimoysis (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2003), pp. 87–103 and pp. 1–18 respectively. See also Matthew Ratcliffe,
Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp. 34–5.
we have been developing makes this connection between emotional
state and appearance of the world above all by appeal to the idea that
emotional feelings are realized in part in a particular structuring of
the perceptual field. My fear of a fast-advancing dog, for example,
consists in part in the dog’s assuming a degree of salience within my
perceptual field, while various other matters, such as the colour of the
linoleum floor on which I am standing, are consigned to the periph-
ery of my awareness. An understanding of emotional feelings as in
part constituted by patterns of salient viewing fits very directly with
James’ account of religious melancholy and conversion experience.
The first condition, in which there is a falling away of emotional
engagement with the world, involves, on his account, a marked lack of
salience—as James says with reference to Tolstoy, in such cases the
world can seem ‘flat’—while the second condition is, we might sup-
pose, a matter of sensory things coming into new and sharper relief
relative to one another, so that they are experienced more vividly.
EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE AND THE

PHENOMENAL FEEL OF OBJECTS
Along with these allusions to flatness or salience, there is a further

strand in James’ account of the emotions which is worth distinguish-
ing. The convert who was formerly in a condition of depressed affect
and whose world was ‘flat’ enjoys not only a restoration of salience in
their new-found experience of the sensory world, but also a restor-
ation of what James calls ‘colour’ or what we might also call a sense of
reality. As James says, for the melancholiac, the world’s ‘colour is
gone’. And his melancholic subjects report that ‘I see everything
through a cloud’ and ‘the things I see are not real things’. By contrast,
the converts cited by James comment that ‘natural objects were
glorified’, and that (to take another case) ‘floods of light and glory
seemed to pour through my soul’. This newness in the world’s
presentation to the convert is perhaps to be understood in part in
terms of the idea of a restoration of salience. But there seems to be
more to it than that. The world now seems brighter, and more fully
real—and not simply structured according to a new pattern of sali-
ence, or according to some pattern of salience where previously there
was none.
To take another example, suppose I discover that the meat I am
chewing in fact derives from Shuttlecock, the pet rabbit. In that case,
I may be focally aware of the meat to a degree that I was not before;
and to this extent, my perceptual field may be organized according to
some new pattern of salience. But this is not the only respect in which
the appearances change: the meat now comes to be experienced as
revolting; it is not just that I am now focally aware of it, but its
intrinsic phenomenal feel has changed. Similarly, we might suppose
that the change that James is describing is not just a matter of a new
pattern of salience being introduced into the perceptual field of the
convert (or of a structured perceptual field replacing a flat field), but
also of the objects of experience acquiring a new phenomenal feel, so
that they are experienced not (as with the rabbit) as revolting but as in
some way delightful and uplifting—or as James’ converts say, as filled
with ‘light’ and ‘glory’.17
A nice example of this sort of change, which fits with James’
account to the extent that the change is associated with a shift in
underlying bodily condition (as James might say, the source of the
change is ‘in the animal region of the subject’s being’), is provided by
David Abram when he writes:
My life and the world’s are deeply intertwined; when I wake up one
morning and find that a week-long illness has subsided and that my
strength has returned, the world, when I step outside, fairly sparkles
with energy and activity: swallows are swooping by in vivid flight; waves
of heat rise from the newly paved road smelling strongly of tar; the old
red barn across the field juts into the sky at an intense angle.18
The experience which Abram describes here can be understood partly
in terms of the idea of a restoration of salience. With his body’s
recovery, the smell of tar stands out in his olfactory field, and the
roof of the old red barn assumes new prominence in his visual field,
and so on. But as well as becoming newly salient, we might suppose
17
Compare Bruno Forte’s account of the contribution of claritas or splendour to
beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas: The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology
of Aesthetics, tr. D. Glenday and P. McPartlan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008),
pp. 18–19. See too Hans Urs von Balthasar on the relationship between beauty,
splendour and the ‘irruption’ of light: The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics,
Vol. I: Seeing the Form, tr. E. Leiva-Merikakis et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989),
p. 118.
18
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-
Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 33.
that these objects have in themselves assumed a new brilliance, so that
they ‘sparkle with energy and activity’. They have, in the terms used
by James’ melancholiacs and converts, become more ‘real’ or newly
‘glorified’, where this newness concerns the appearance of these
objects in themselves, and not simply their conspicuousness or sali-
ence relative to the remainder of the perceptual field.
Of course, while these two developments are conceptually distin-
guishable, they are in phenomenological terms hard to disentangle.
We can perhaps imagine how a particular object which was not
formerly a focus of attention might become a focus of attention
without the phenomenal feel of the object undergoing any change.
(Suppose, for example, that I invite you to look at some object which
in this context is relatively neutral for you, such as a book. The book
may then assume new prominence in your perceptual field without
assuming a new ‘colour’ or normative significance for you.) But where
the emotions are concerned this is not normally the case: emotional
changes standardly involve some new assessment of an object’s nor-
mative significance. And this new weighting of the object’s import-
ance is typically recorded both in the new salience of the object
(it now stands out in the perceptual field as deserving of attention
in a new way, in virtue of its new normative weight) and in the
object taking on a correlative phenomenal feel (not only does the object
stand out in relation to other objects, but it takes on in itself a certain
hue or feel, because of its significance as revolting or delightful, or
whatever it might be). So here salience and phenomenal feel are both
ways of registering in experience the one judgement, concerning
the importance of a thing, and changes in salience and in feel are
experienced therefore not so much as separate developments, but as
mutually supporting ways of acknowledging in experience one and
the same normative commitment.
So in emotional experience, the shared aetiology of salience and
phenomenal feel ensures that the phenomena are held together; and
again this aetiology is not just external (as when a particular neuro-
physiological change, say, gives rise to two distinct experiences) but
internal or intellectual: the new salience of the object and its new
phenomenal feel are both ways in which a certain judgement con-
cerning the significance of the object is registered. As well as having
this connection, the change in the object’s salience and in its hue are
also connected by virtue of what they involve phenomenologically.
For instance, if the phenomenal feel of a thing takes on a new hue
(if the thing comes to be experienced as revolting, for example), then
it is likely thereby to assume a new significance in the perceptual field.
It is not that its assuming of a new phenomenal feel is wholly or partly
identical with its assuming of a newly prominent place (or perhaps a
newly diminished place) in the perceptual field (it is possible after all
that surrounding objects might also take on, or might anyway have, a
phenomenal feel which ensures that they retain their salience relative
to the object). But in normal cases, a change in the phenomenal feel of
an object will ensure that the object becomes newly conspicuous, both
because of the change involved (assuming that there are not other,
compensating changes in the phenomenal field) and because the
change in phenomenal feel may well be a way of acknowledging the
new importance of the object (as when the meat from the rabbit
comes to be experienced as revolting), which in turn implies that the
object is now able to make a new claim on the attention of the
percipient. So we should see the experience of salience and phenom-
enal feel as tightly bound together in these various ways.
We have, therefore, several connected, but in principle distinguish-
able, accounts of the way in which emotional feelings are world-
directed: they participate in the world-directedness of the body
(rather as my awareness of the letters on the page participates in the
world-directedness of the text); they can be realized in a new pattern-
ing of the perceptual field; and finally, they can spread themselves
upon the world, so that my feeling of joy, for example, goes along
with, or finds expression in, an experience of joyousness, or of light
and glory, in the objects in my surroundings. In the last case, feeling is
not just a condition of me the percipient, but also of the world, insofar
as the world comes to be stained with the same quality of feeling that
I feel, so that my self, we might say, flows into the world and the world
into me. So in this further sense too, my feeling reaches beyond me
and into the world.
EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE AND THE

TRANSFORMATION OF THE SENSORY
WORLD AS A WHOLE
As well as fitting with these two dimensions of James’ account of the

emotions—namely, his association of emotional change with a
change in the world’s colour or ‘hue’ and in its patterns of salience—
Abram’s remarks are also of interest because they suggest once more
that a change in emotion may be associated with a change in the
appearance of the sensory world as a whole. The experiential change
he is describing here, although it concerns focally the swallows and
tar and barn, is clearly in principle extendable to all sensory objects. It
is not that there is some special quality in these particular objects
which means that they become newly salient or newly ‘real’ in his
experience. It is rather the change in Abram which ensures that these
objects are charged with a new kind of reality, and this change in him
is, in principle, as capable of revivifying other objects as it is of
revivifying these objects. Their only distinction is that they happen
to lie within his perceptual field at present.
This is one way of making sense of the claim of James’ converts to
have ‘entered another world’ so that (as another convert says) ‘every-
thing looked new to me’. The key idea here is that the newness of the
objects in the perceptual field reflects a newness in the person, so that
any object which falls within their perceptual field will equally catch
this newness in them. Quentin Smith’s account of emotional experi-
ence in interpersonal contexts provides another way of developing the
idea that for the convert it is the world as a whole which has been
transformed. Take, for example, this passage:
The soft binding-together flow of love is not felt as a binding-together
between the other person’s bodily surface and myself, but between the
other’s ego and myself. In such a case, although the feeling-tonality
appears to imbue the other’s bodily surface, it does not seem to arise
there, but from further within. What I intuitively feel is not that the
other’s eyes and face are lovingly-bound-together-with-me, but that the
other himself is, and that the loving-bindingness is merely flowing
through his eyes and face from the interior reality of his ego.19
Here again we find the idea that the surface of a sensory object can be
infused with feeling. (As Smith puts the point, ‘the feeling tonality
appears to imbue the other’s bodily surface’.) But while the feeling of
love may spread itself upon the beloved in this way, our sense of
connectedness here is not fundamentally to do with the relationship
between ourselves and the bodily surface that we encounter, but
19
Quentin Smith, The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling (West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1986), p. 59.
extends to the person themselves, where the person is more than
simply the bodily appearance that is presented to us now, and more,
indeed, than the sum of the actual or possible appearances of this
body. On Smith’s account this further sort of connectedness is regis-
tered phenomenologically in the sense that the feeling-tonality that
binds us to the other person somehow emanates from ‘within’ the
person, so that it ‘flows through’ their bodily surfaces, and perhaps
especially through their facial expressions. Whatever terminology we
choose to record this idea, Smith is describing, I take it, a familiar
datum of everyday experience. In our relations with other human
beings, the body serves as a kind of diaphanous surface which we
encounter (when our relation with others is in the interpersonal
mode) not simply as a body, but as the expression of another person’s
will and perspective on the world.20
This account allows us to formulate in a rather different way the
idea that from the convert’s perspective, it is the world as a whole
which is transformed. James, as we have seen, summarizes the condi-
tion of the melancholiac by saying that in their encounter with the
world they find that ‘there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with’.
Here, the world is being personified—and accordingly, in the mel-
ancholiac’s experience of some localized region of the world, there is
communicated a sense of the significance of the world as a whole, in
rather the way that our experience of some part of the body of another
human being can serve to reveal something about the person them-
selves, considered as a psychosomatic unity. Similarly, we might
suppose that in the experience of conversion, the convert senses
that it is the world as a whole that has been renewed, not only because
in their experience objects in general come to be stained with the
feeling of joy, or whatever it may be, which they now feel, but also
because they are treating the world in rather the way that we treat
persons, so that what they discover to be true of it here locally, they
take to be a revelation of its character as a whole.
In his discussion, Smith goes on to develop the idea that it is
possible to identify in feeling various ‘global importances’. So on his
view too, our felt experience of some localized region of the world can
20
Compare Eleonore Stump’s account of ‘second person’ experience, in
Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford
serve as a marker for the character of the world as a whole. Here is
one of his examples:
I am sitting on a veranda on a summer afternoon, watching the trees as
they sway gently in the sunlight. My awareness gradually broadens and
deepens, and soon a joy begins to arise in me, a rejoicing in the
fulfilment of the very world that is composed of myself, these swaying
trees, this blue sky, and the indistinctly manifest ‘everything else’ that
extends beyond all that I am perceiving . . . My perceptual surroundings
seem to be infused with an upwardly radiated feeling-flow of joy, a
joyous feeling-tonality that has its source, not in the garden, trees, and
sky, but in the fulfilled global interior that appears to be ‘far behind’ and
‘far within’ these perceptible phenomena.21
Here Smith has recourse, once more, to the idea that the relevant
‘feeling tonalities’ have their origin ‘within’ or ‘behind’ the bodily
surfaces that are the immediate object of perception. So here again,
although these feeling tonalities are encountered only insofar as they
stain the surfaces of the objects in our immediate environment, they
serve, even so, to reveal a larger meaning, or felt significance, which
extends to the world as a whole. It is clear from Smith’s example that
this relationship is not inferential: it is not as if the person reasons
that because the world in their immediate experience exudes a certain
joyousness or whatever it might be, therefore the world as a whole
must do so. Rather, the joyousness of the world as a whole is grasped
non-inferentially in the recognition of the joyousness of this particu-
lar region of the world. In this respect, the experience is, again, akin to
our experience of other persons: I do not infer from the particular cast
of the beloved’s facial features what their feelings or concerns might
be; instead, those feelings or concerns are presented to me directly,
without further reflection, in my apprehension of the significance of
these particular body surfaces.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this chapter we have been examining one way of explicating the

relationship between religious conversion and a transformation in the
21
Smith, The Felt Meanings, p. 151.
appearance of the sensory world as a whole. And we have seen how it
is possible to trace a connection between a change in the convert’s
emotional state and a change in the phenomenology of their experi-
ence of the world—above all, insofar as emotional changes can make
for a change in the patterns of salience which structure our experience
of the world, and for a change in the phenomenal feel of objects. We
have also taken note of some of the ways in which a change in the
appearance of the objects in their immediate environment may be
taken by the convert to signify a change in the character of the world
as a whole—so that in their experience, it comes to seem that it is the
world that has been renewed, and not simply the person themselves,
or their immediate surroundings.
So far, we have not been much concerned with the specifically
religious sources of such a shift in emotion. But as we have seen,
James’ examples already specify some plausible possibilities. The
convert’s change in emotional condition may derive from their re-
flections upon a sacred text, especially when these reflections lead
them to feel some new security in life or in their relationship to God.
For example, one of James’ converts, an illiterate man, recalls his
experience in these terms: ‘I said to the Lord: “Thou hast said, they
that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock
the door shall be opened . . . ” In an instant the Lord made me so
happy that I cannot express what I felt.’ Or again, the emotional
change may be induced by some change in underlying bodily condi-
tion, or by some bodily strain, where this further account need not of
course compete with the first. For example, one of James’ converts
talks of how an ‘unseen hand was felt on my throat and my breath
squeezed off ’. Social context can also be important of course: the
other convert whose experiences I cited above speaks of how at the
time of her conversion she was in the presence of ‘mother and
religious friends [who were] seeking and praying for my conver-
sion’.22 We shall turn in due course to a closer examination of the
relationship between religious context and the formation of the
emotions. But the findings of this chapter suggest that in general,
providing that the religions supply a set of teachings, bodily practices,
and a social context that are conducive to the shaping of a person’s
emotional life, then they will be capable, in principle, of securing a
22
These examples appear in James, Varieties, pp. 249–50.
corresponding shift in the person’s experience of the sensory world.
From what we have seen, there is no reason to think that this
development need take the form of radical conversion, rather than
some more incremental process of emotional and perceptual change.
If all of this is so, then we should suppose that the seer’s experience
of the sensory world may indeed be very different from that of the
person who has remained in the ‘cave’, since the world in the seer’s
experience will be characterized by a distinctive pattern of salience
and phenomenal feel. So far from being a realm of illusion, the
sensory world may be, from the seer’s perspective, shot through
with the very normative insights that help to constitute the condition
of enlightenment. Moreover, the example of James’ converts suggests
that this transformation in the appearance of the sensory world will
lead to, if anything, a deepened engagement with the realm of the
senses, as it comes to be experienced as more beautiful and, even, as
more real than it had seemed to be prior to conversion. If that is so,
then the objection that a Christian (or Platonic) understanding of the
spiritual life must be committed, because of its ‘two-worlds’ character,
to a demeaning conception of the sensory world, and must therefore
sap our resolve to address the ethical and other challenges that are
posed by that world, is not evidently on target. On the view we have
been exploring, this is fundamentally because a transformation in the
person, as they approach the condition of enlightenment, or as they
develop spiritually, will make for a reciprocal transformation in the
appearance of the sensory world—and accordingly, far from being
simply a movement ‘upwards’ or ‘inwards’, ‘enlightenment’ or spirit-
ual awakening can also be an opportunity for, and will be partly
constituted by, a movement ‘outwards’ and into the realm of the
senses.
3
Concept Application and the Appearance

of the Sensory World
We have been exploring some of the ways in which a transformation

in emotional state may make for a transformation in the appearance
of the sensory world—or we might prefer to say that the transform-
ation in emotional state may in part consist in a transformation in the
sensory appearances. If we think of this relationship in terms of the
idea that a new emotion may lead to, or may involve, the introduction
of a new pattern of salience into the perceptual field, then it is natural
to adopt a two-stage account of our sensory experience. On this
account, the sensory field is first of all divided into a set of objects—
and the emotions then get to work on these objects, so that they come
to exhibit varying degrees of salience within the perceptual field,
depending upon which emotion or emotions are predominant. Of
course, this is not how we normally experience the world: we do not
normally experience first of all a neutral scene, entirely unstructured
by any kind of emotional engagement, or any kind of interest, and
then lay over the top of that a set of emotionally informed engage-
ments which ensures that the perceptual field is structured according
to a correlative pattern of salience. Rather, the perceptual field is from
the outset shot through with patterns of salience which reflect, object
by object, the nature of our interest in the contents of our environ-
ment. Nonetheless, allowing for this phenomenological truth, the
Jamesian account of the emotions, as I have presented it, might lead
us to suppose that at least for theoretical purposes, we should draw a
distinction between on the one side the objects which are ‘out there’
and which are picked out by a particular conceptual scheme, and on
the other side our emotional investment in those objects which in
turn generates a correlative pattern of salience in the perceptual field.
Concept Application and the Appearance of the Sensory World 43
In fact, James himself suggests that this two-stage picture is over-
simple. As he says, ‘the practically real world for each one of us, the
effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical
facts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination.’1 If the
‘physical facts’ and ‘emotional values’ do indeed exist in ‘indistin-
guishable combination’, then, we might conclude, the two-stage ac-
count will not be of much use even for theoretical purposes. On this
Jamesian perspective it will make no sense to suppose that we might,
even in principle, strip away the varnish, or patterns of salience,
supplied by our emotional engagement with the world in order to
arrive at some set of objects which we can hold to be simply there, and
whose character we might discern, independently of our emotional
involvement with them. To make the same point in another way, this
is fundamentally because our concepts are themselves subject to the
shaping influence of emotional engagement with the world. How we
carve up the perceptual field, which objects we take it to comprise,
and accordingly the nature of the concepts which we apply when
dividing it up into objects, will from the beginning reflect the oper-
ation of emotional interests. It is not just that an object will only
assume a high degree of salience in the perceptual field if I have
enough interest in it; it is also that it will only emerge as an object,
will only enjoy the kind of salience which goes along with being
picked out as a distinct thing at all, providing that I have enough
interest in it. So in any assignment of objects to the perceptual
field, there is already implicit a correlative set of emotional interests,
which specifies that this rather than some other way is how it is best
divided up.
At the same time, of course, it will not do to say that the emotions
are utterly fundamental to this scheme, in the sense that objects are
simply the shadows cast by our emotional engagement with the
world. After all, the emotions could not secure a foothold in the
world if it were presented to us simply as a featureless blur: the
perceptual field must already be marked by certain distinctions if
the emotions are to hook on to it differentially, so that some parts of it
attract more of an interest in emotional terms than do others. Fortu-
nately, for our purposes there is no need to develop a general account
of the relationship between emotions and concepts in the shaping of
1
the perceptual field. It is enough to note that relative to a given set of
concepts, which will themselves bear the mark of an already estab-
lished set of emotional commitments, the field will come to be divided
into a correlative set of objects or regions of interest; and that way of
carving up the field, and the particular ‘colour’ or phenomenal feel
that attaches to regions of the field on this basis, can then undergo
change as our emotional commitments unfold. Allowing that this is
so, we can then make a working distinction between the contribution
of concepts to the organization and hue of the perceptual field
(allowing that these concepts are not emotionally uninformed) and
the contribution of the emotions as our interests develop in relation
to the perceptual field so defined.
So far, we have been concerned with the contribution of the
emotions to the appearance of the sensory world; but as these brief
remarks indicate, we also need to think about how the introduction of
a new set of concepts might shape or structure the world’s appear-
ance. For our purposes it will be of particular interest, of course, to
consider how concepts with some religious content might contribute
to the appearance of the sensory world.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

TO THE APPEARANCE OF THE SENSORY WORLD
Let us begin with a particular example of how a religious concept may

enter into the appearance of the sensory field. In the following
passage, Roger Scruton is considering how the appearance of a Gothic
church may be structured in conceptual terms. He writes:
. . . it is clear from Abbot Suger’s account of the building of St Denis
. . . that the architects of the Gothic churches were motivated by a
perceived relationship between the finished church and the Heavenly
City of Christian speculation. Sir John Summerson has further sug-
gested that the Gothic style aims at a certain effect of accumulation.
Each great church can be considered as a concatenation of smaller
structures, of aedicules, fitted together as arches, chapels, windows,
and spires, and so can be seen as an assembled city, rather than as a
single entity minutely subdivided . . . But the ‘interpretation’ here is not
a ‘thought’ that is separable from the experience—it is there in the
experience, as when I see the dots of a puzzle picture as a face, or the
man in the moon.2
Here we are invited to distinguish between two ways of thinking
about a Gothic church: we can represent such structures as wholes,
divided into parts, or we can regard them as collections of parts,
assembled into wholes. This distinction in description has, Scruton is
suggesting, a phenomenological counterpart. It is not just that these
buildings can be differently described in these two ways; they can also
be differently experienced, and a different perceptual gestalt will
obtain depending on whether we treat a given church as a ‘single
entity minutely subdivided’ or as an ‘assembled entity’.
It is not too difficult, I think, to see the force of this phenomeno-
logical distinction. But if this case should be found unclear, it is easy
enough to produce other examples. Take for instance the well-known
line drawing which may be construed either as a young woman
turning her head away or as an old, shawled woman looking down
her nose. If our construal of the lines in this picture is governed by the
thought ‘young woman turning her head away’, we get one perceptual
gestalt; and if it is governed by the alternative thought, then we get
another. It is important to see that these thoughts do not serve simply
as commentaries on the appearance of the line drawing: it is not as if
we have a particular way of viewing the drawing, and then expound
how—relative to that way of viewing it—the drawing may be con-
sidered as a representation of the young woman, or of the old woman.
Rather, these differing construals of the drawing enter into its appear-
ance. As Scruton puts the point, ‘the “interpretation” here is not a
“thought” that is separable from the experience—it is there in the
experience, as when I see the dots of a puzzle picture as a face, or the
man in the moon.’ In the discussion which follows I shall mark this
point by speaking variously of how concepts may inhabit or structure
or inform the appearance of sensory things.
The perceptual gestalts to which Scruton is referring are not obvi-
ously distinguished by phenomenal feel. Whether we view the church
as a single entity divided or as an assembled entity is a question of
how in our experience we organize the lines of the building; it is not a
question of what ‘colour’ we experience the building as having, even if
2
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1979), pp. 74–5.
in some cases a difference of gestalt may be associated with a differ-
ence in colour, because of the differing emotional associations of
differing gestalts. This difference of gestalt will involve a difference
in salience: if you experience the church as a single entity which has
been subdivided, then presumably it is the overarching features of the
building which will loom larger in your experience, and which will
then frame the smaller scale features, so that the second are experi-
enced as relative to the first rather than vice versa. Insofar as this sort
of account captures all that is at stake in a distinction between gestalts,
then we may suppose that the concept of salience will suffice for an
explication of the concept of gestalt. However, we might wish to
admit the possibility that there can be a difference of gestalt without
a difference in salience. (The converse seems harder to imagine.) For
example, perhaps the various lines in a simple drawing can be
assigned equal prominence in two visual construals of them, but in
such a way that a difference in gestalt emerges even so. On this view, a
line can retain its prominence (and in that sense its salience) across
construals while playing a different role in these construals. In that
case, the notion of a gestalt will not be fully explicable by reference to
the notion of salience. But for practical purposes it is clear that the
notion of a gestalt is closely related to the notion of a particular
pattern of salient viewing, and we do not need to adjudicate the
issue further here.
Scruton’s example also helps to bring out the usefulness in practice
of a distinction between ways of ordering the perceptual field that are
relative to differences in concept and ways that are relative to differ-
ences in emotion, allowing once again that the distinction between
concept application and emotionally informed construal is not a hard
and fast one, insofar as the shape of our concepts reflects the oper-
ation of such construals. Suppose that I am introduced to the idea that
Gothic churches were made to image the heavenly city, and suppose
that, as a result, I cease to view a particular church as a single thing
subdivided, and instead experience it as a compound entity. So my
experience of the building is now ordered according to a new percep-
tual gestalt. But this change in the organization of the perceptual field
need not be associated with any emotional change. Rather, it seems
that the change in this case can be attributed fairly straightforwardly
to the introduction of a new concept, as distinct from any shift in my
emotional commitments.
There is another striking feature of Scruton’s example. Once our
experience of the Gothic church is organized according to the concept
of the heavenly city, once the concept of the heavenly city comes to
inhabit the appearance of the building, then the building is capable of
functioning as an image of the heavenly city. This result is of some
importance for our purposes. It suggests that we can reflect upon and
be moved by the idea of the heavenly city not only insofar as we
reckon with that idea in abstractly conceptual terms, but also insofar
as we encounter the idea in sensory form, as embedded in the sensory
appearances. In short, if the appearances can image the heavenly city,
once they are inhabited by a relevant thought, then we should allow
that we can think about the heavenly city not only in discursive terms,
but also by engaging with the sensory appearances, when those
appearances conform to an appropriate gestalt. This result suggests
that intellectualist accounts of the spiritual life—according to which
the spiritual person ought to be concerned, fundamentally, with the
exploration of various ideas of religious or spiritual significance—
need not give up on the sensory world, or suppose that the spiritual
adept ought to fix their gaze on a realm of ideas understood in
distinction from the sensory realm. Instead, we can allow that ideas
can be encountered, and can be assimilated and more deeply under-
stood, in our experience of the sensory world, insofar as the sensory
appearances have been penetrated by those ideas. To return to the
case in hand, there is good reason to suppose that a person’s idea of
the heavenly city may be deepened, and made devotionally more
accessible, through their engagement with the relevantly structured
appearance of a Gothic church. And if Scruton and his sources are
right, it was partly for this reason that such churches were first made.
Appealing to the example of the Gothic church to support the
claim that sensory experience can provide a way of reckoning with
religiously important thoughts might appear to be cheating a little.
After all, Gothic churches were constructed (on the view we are
considering) precisely for the purpose of imaging the heavenly city.
But for the most part, our sensory environment is not comprised of
religious artefacts, and even religious artefacts are only occasionally
designed to present an image of some religious reality. So if this case
holds at all, it surely holds only in relation to a rather special class of
sensory object; it is not, then, of any general significance.
The reader will not be surprised to learn that in my judgement the
case does after all have wider relevance. Consider, for example,
Jonathan Edwards’ account of his conversion experience, or the
aftermath of that experience.
After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became
more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The
appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a
calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything.
God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in
everything; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature . . .3
Here Edwards associates his conversion experience with a transform-
ation in the appearance of the sensory world: like James’ converts, he
speaks not just of a localized shift in the appearances, but of the
appearance of ‘everything’ being changed. It is notable that, by con-
trast with some of the other sources we have examined, Edwards
seems to imply that this transformation was incremental: he says that
his ‘sense of divine things gradually increased’; and we might hy-
pothesize that this gradual change in his awareness of divine things
unfolded in step with a gradual transformation in the appearance of
the sensory world.
Some of the reports of conversion experience which we have
considered understand this shift in the sensory appearances in
terms of the idea that sensory things are newly ‘glorified’, as one of
James’ sources remarks. An implication of this idea is, presumably,
that these things now serve to image God in some measure—since
their glory is in some fashion an echo of the divine glory. This same
thought is present explicitly, and is more fully articulated, in Edwards’
remarks. As he says: ‘God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and
love, seemed to appear in everything; in the grass, flowers, and trees;
in the water and all nature . . . ’ This may well strike the reader as a
puzzling idea. But Edwards is, of course, a philosophical theologian of
renown, and his writings are distinguished by their careful, analytical
style of argumentation; and here, as elsewhere, he expresses himself
precisely. So there is good reason to take his report seriously, and not
to treat it as merely a rather loose allusion to the phenomenological
content of his experience.
Edwards’ proposal seems to be that following his conversion, the
natural world—the grass, the flowers and trees, and so on—came to
image the divine nature, and specifically God’s wisdom, purity, and
3
The passage is cited in James, Varieties, pp. 248–9.
love. One account of how this imaging relation is possible is provided
by the idea that in conversion, or post-conversion, the sensory world
can take on a hue or phenomenal feel which matches the predomin-
ant feeling of the convert: if the convert now feels joy, then in her
experience, the world may come to be imbued with joyousness; and
perhaps in this respect, the world could be taken to image the divine
joy. This rendering of the idea that the world can image the divine
nature appeals to the role of the emotions in colouring the phenom-
enal field. But drawing on the passage we have taken from Scruton,
we might suppose that this idea can also be expounded by reference to
the role of concepts in structuring the sensory appearances. Scruton is
interested in the case where the idea of the heavenly city comes to
inhabit the appearance of a Gothic church, with the result that the
church, as it appears, serves to image the heavenly city. And we might
try to understand Edwards’ experience similarly: perhaps this sort of
experience can arise when the idea of the divine nature enters into the
appearance of the sensory world, with the result that the sensory
appearances now present an image of the divine nature.
If we are to apply Scruton’s example to Edwards’ report, then we
will need to suppose that post-conversion, Edwards’ experience of the
sensory world conforms to a new perceptual gestalt. Of course, Ed-
wards does not put the point in these terms, nor does he even imply
that this is what was involved. But we can at least speculate about the
sort of gestalt that would be required if the world is to present an
image of the divine nature. Let us approach this issue by turning first
of all to an analogous case. In the following passage, Fritjof Capra is
talking about how certain theoretical concepts in physics came to be
written into his experience of the world. He writes:
I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the
waves rolling in and feeling the deep rhythm of my breathing, when
I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in
a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rocks,
water, and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms,
and that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another
by creating and destroying other particles. I knew also that the Earth’s
atmosphere was continually bombarded by showers of ‘cosmic rays’,
particles of high energy undergoing multiple collisions as they pene-
trated the air. All this was familiar to me from my research in high-
energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through
graphs, diagrams, and mathematical theories. As I sat on the beach my
former experiences came to life; I ‘saw’ cascades of energy coming down
from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in
rhythmic pulses; I ‘saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my
body participating in the cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and
I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of
Shiva.4
When Capra speaks of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ the world in these
respects, the force of the quotation marks is, evidently, to allude to
the fact that he cannot literally see molecules and atoms or cosmic
rays. Nonetheless, he clearly takes these entities to be presented to
him experientially in some sense: that is why he has stuck with these
perceptual terms. Two considerations seem to be in play here. First of
all, as a physicist, Capra is able to grasp in theoretical terms the causal
connection between the behaviour of these fundamental particles and
the behaviour of the macroscopic entities he observes in the scene
before him; and what he is reporting here, I suggest, is that he has
come to apprehend that relationship directly, in perceptual terms,
rather than inferentially. In this sense, he ‘sees’ the particles at work in
the phenomena around him. Similarly, I might report ‘seeing’ an
aeroplane when I cannot in fact see it, but I can see a vapour trail,
and I non-inferentially recognize the aeroplane as present as the
source of the vapour trail.
Secondly, it is notable that Capra takes the trouble to specify how
these theoretical entities behave in their relations to one another—
namely, by way of creation, destruction, and collision. And the scene
before him, and most obviously perhaps the movement of the waves,
is also one of creation, destruction, and collision, as one wave suc-
ceeds another. So here is a further kind of connection between the
behaviour of these theoretical entities and the behaviour of the
macroscopic entities which he can see around him. Given only this
second kind of connection, it might be most natural to speak of the
relationship between the movements of the sea and the movements of
the fundamental particles as simply one of resemblance: the first, we
might say, images the second. But if we also take into consideration
the first sort of connection, and Capra’s ability to grasp directly or
non-inferentially the presence of various fundamental particles in the
4
Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern
Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 3rd edition (London: Flamingo, 1992), p. 11, Capra’s
emphasis.
behaviour of the observable phenomena, then we can say that he ‘sees’
these particles, both in the sense in which I might ‘see’ an aeroplane
(when all that I see strictly speaking is its vapour trail) and also in the
sense that the character of these entities is represented for him in
perceptual terms in the movements of the sea. The term ‘seeing’ here
has a point for both these reasons.
Again, we can develop this idea by reference to Scruton’s example.
We might say: Capra uses the concept of a fundamental particle to
guide his construal of the ocean scene before him, just as in Scruton’s
example we can use the concept of the heavenly city to guide our
construal of a Gothic church. Drawing out this thought, we might say
that Capra allows his knowledge of the behaviour of fundamental
particles (insofar as that behaviour involves creation and destruction,
for example) to shape his experience of the movements of the
waves—so that it is episodes of creation and destruction which are
salient in his experience of the waves. In this way, the concept of a
fundamental particle is able to inhabit the appearance of the waves,
rather than simply standing as an external commentary upon that
appearance; and the waves as they appear are therefore able to image
fundamental particles, by presenting to the observer a relevant per-
ceptual gestalt.
Let us return now to Edwards’ experience. Here again we are
dealing with a non-observational entity—not now atoms and mol-
ecules, but the divine nature. And we might suppose that in this case
too, this non-observable entity is related to the observable phenom-
ena in two ways. First of all there is a causal connection, insofar as
God, or the divine nature, sustains the observable phenomena in
existence. And secondly, there is an imaging relation: as Edwards
says, God’s nature ‘seemed to appear in everything’. Like Capra,
Edwards specifies, I think, what it is in the phenomena which allows
him to make this claim: he is able to speak in these terms because of
the calmness, sweetness, and appearance of glory in the sensory
appearances, since these same qualities can be found in the divine
nature.
Here there is a complication which is not present in Capra’s
example. In that example, fundamental particles really do interact
with one another by way of creation and destruction; and these same
relations really do obtain in the observable world in, for example, the
motion of waves. By contrast, we might wonder whether nature in its
appearance to Edwards is really ‘sweet’, and whether God can really
be said to be ‘calm’. Nonetheless, we might fairly say that these
epithets do point to certain features which God and nature have in
common. God and nature can both be said to be sweet in the sense
that both can be found to be attractive; and if we follow Edwards’
understanding of the divine nature, then God can be said to be ‘calm’
in the sense of being unchanging, and the natural world can be ‘calm’
in some broadly related sense insofar as it is tranquil, or insofar as its
course appears orderly in some relevant respect (we might see this as
a kind of second-order calmness). So in using the terms ‘sweetness’
and ‘calmness’ in these two contexts, we are not just punning: there is,
we might suppose, some real continuity of meaning which spans the
divine and creaturely cases.
So to return to our original question: what kind of perceptual
gestalt would allow us to say, intelligibly, that the world is capable
of imaging the divine nature? Granted that the divine nature and the
sensory world can be compared to the extent that both may be found
to be ‘calm’ and ‘sweet’, for example, we can allow that it is possible
for the concept of the divine nature to enter into the appearance of the
sensory world insofar as it is these features of the world (its calmness
and sweetness) which are salient in our experience of it. Similarly, the
concept of a theoretical particle can enter into Capra’s experience of
the ocean scene because certain features of the behaviour of such
particles can be used to pattern his experience of the waves. With
Edwards’ experience as with Capra’s, it is the presence of a resem-
blance relation (the fact that the world in certain respects resembles
the divine nature, or the fact that the motion of waves in some
respects resembles the behaviour of fundamental particles) which
allows us to suppose that the concept of some entity which is itself
non-observable can structure our experience of the observable world.
And if we also allow for the presence here of a causal relationship (for
the fact that fundamental particles and the divine nature both explain
the observable phenomena, albeit in rather different ways), then we
can say: not only does the world as it appears to Edwards image the
divine nature, but in addition he can be said to ‘see’ the divine nature
in the phenomena. So, following our discussion of Capra, we might
say that there is indeed a sense in which the divine nature can be said
to appear to Edwards in the phenomena; or equally, we might say that
he can ‘see’ this nature in the sensory appearances, albeit that it is
itself unobservable.
There is one further complication here which sets apart Edwards’
experience from Capra’s. Capra is dealing with phenomena (of cre-
ation, destruction, and collision) which are evident to the senses
independently of any theory about the microstructure of the material
world, and which arguably are present pervasively in our experience
of the sensory world. What happens in his experience is, I suggest,
that a particular theory of the microstructure of the material world
leads him to experience these features of the perceptual world, which
are anyway everywhere present in his experience, even if not always
explicitly adverted to, with new salience. Edwards is also dealing with
phenomena which can be manifest to a person independently of any
theory about God or the divine nature. Independently of any such
theory, it is possible to find the world, or certain aspects of it, ‘calm’
and ‘sweet’, where calmness and sweetness function not just as terms
of appraisal, but also record a certain phenomenological content.
(When Edwards says that the world is newly sweet and calm, post-
conversion, he does not mean simply that while the phenomena have
remained the same, he has now taken up a newly positive attitude
towards them: he is clear that the appearances have also changed.)
However, it may be that Edwards’ capacity to find sweetness in all
things, post-conversion, is partly down to his belief that there is a God
with a particular nature. By contrast, one can arguably find creation
and destruction in all things independently of any view about the
microstructure of nature.
For example, when elaborating on the nature of his conversion,
Edwards remarks: ‘Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with
thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm
rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.’5 This change in his
experience of thunder is, it seems, a product of his new-found trust in
God, which has in turn engendered a new-found trust in the creation,
even in its formerly more terrifying aspects, insofar as it derives from
God; and it is this which enables him to find ‘calmness’ and ‘sweet-
ness’ even in such events. (I take it that before conversion he was
incapable of finding ‘sweetness’ and ‘calmness’ of any sort in the
experience of thunder.) So on this point there is perhaps a difference
between Capra’s experience and Edwards’: Edwards not only ‘sees’
the divine nature in creation, insofar as it is experienced as calm and
5
Cited in James, Varieties, p. 249.
sweet, but his capacity to find these qualities present in nature
universally perhaps derives from his beliefs concerning the divine
nature. It is not just that he assigns these qualities, which are anyway
universally present in his experience of nature, a new salience
following conversion, but also that the qualities only come to be
present in some regions of the natural world, in his experience, by
virtue of his new-found, post-conversion understanding of God.
We were drawn into this discussion of Edwards’ experience and,
then, Capra’s experience by a question about whether Scruton’s
example of the Gothic church is generalizable. To put the objection
another way, the critic might say: the Gothic church example is a very
special case, because here we use the idea of one spatially extended
item (the heavenly city) to structure our experience of another
spatially extended item (the Gothic church). And in general, there is
no great difficulty in supposing that the idea of one spatially extended
thing can inform or inhabit our experience of another spatially
extended thing. (For instance, I can look up at the clouds and allow
my experience of them to be patterned according to the idea of a bird
in flight. As any parent who has had to entertain small children will
know, this sort of thought-infused seeing is certainly possible and
admits of almost endless variation.) But, the critic might continue,
this case provides little help in thinking about how religious ideas
might inform our experience of the sensory world, since those ideas
are not typically of spatially extended things; on the contrary, they are
more usually of non-physical things, which lack any spatial dimen-
sions. So should we not conclude that Scruton’s example is not of any
very general interest if our concern is (as his was not) with the
question of how religious ideas might be rendered in experience, so
that their content is imaged in experience?
I have been arguing against this charge by considering the possibil-
ity that the concepts of non-observables (such as the theoretical
entities of physics, or the divine nature) can structure our experience
of the sensory world, especially insofar as these non-observables have
certain qualities in common with sensory things. And in that case, the
sensory appearances will be able to image the nature of these non-
observables, in rather the way that the appearance of a Gothic church
can image the heavenly city, when it is inhabited by the thought of the
heavenly city. Interestingly, although his concerns are not ours,
Scruton provides another example of thought-infused seeing which
is directly relevant to this same objection. Consider the following
passage:
. . . one might think of a Romanesque cloister in terms of the industri-
ous piety of its former inhabitants: in terms of an historical identity, a
way of life, with which this habit of building was associated. But were a
man to present this as his reason for looking favourably on some
particular cloister, say that of S. Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome . . . then
the onus lies on him to show exactly how such an idea finds confirm-
ation in an experience of the building. Perhaps he could go on to refer to
the variety of forms employed in the columns, to their fine industrious
detailing, and to the way in which none of this abundance of observa-
tion disturbs the restful harmony of the design. He might trace the
rhythm of the arcade, and describe the Cosmatesque mosaic, with its
bright and childlike inventiveness that never transgresses the bounds of
sensible ornamentation. In all this, he might say, we see how energetic
observation and monastic piety may be successfully combined.
A certain idea of monasticism becomes a visible reality: the idea is not
merely a personal association occasioned by some anecdotal or histor-
ical reminiscence: we see it in the details of the building.6
Scruton is concerned here, once again, with an appreciation of the
world’s look or appearance in sensory terms. But there is an import-
ant difference between this example and the example of the Gothic
church, because in this case, the idea which enters into the sensory
appearances is not the idea of a spatially extended entity. On the
contrary, it is ‘a certain idea of monasticism’. Such an idea can
become ‘visible’, Scruton is suggesting, once it is inscribed in the
appearances. So if we follow Scruton on this point, then we should
allow that the sensory appearances are capable of imaging not only a
spatially extended item, but also a relatively abstract idea, concerning
the ideal of life of a particular monastic community.
There is, of course, a causal connection between the way of life of
the monks who constructed the cloister and the appearance of this
structure. A less industrious order might not have taken the trouble to
observe the world in such detail, or might not have taken the trouble
to carve the columns in such detail. But the connection between the
order and its way of life and the appearance of the cloister is not just
external or causal, Scruton is saying—for our conception of that way
6
Scruton, Aesthetics of Architecture, p. 109.
of life can enter into the cloister’s appearance, so as to generate a
particular perceptual gestalt.
How is it possible for such an idea to enter into our experience of
the cloister? There seem to be two key features of the cloister which
enable its appearance to be structured by a certain ideal of the
monastic life. First of all, there is the wealth of representational detail
which is evident in, for example, the carving of the columns; and then
there is the ‘restful harmony’ of the overall design. Our experience of
the building can be guided by, or informed by, the compound idea of
‘energetic observation’ and ‘monastic piety’ insofar as these two
features of the building, respectively, are held in an appropriate
tension perceptually: we need to be aware of the fine detail of the
building, and at the same time to locate this detail, experientially,
within an appreciation of the building’s overall structure and the
harmony of its lines. So the experience Scruton is describing is,
once more, an experience of salient viewing. But it is a relatively
complex example of such viewing to the extent that we have to
adopt a dual focus, allowing both the detail and the large-scale
structure of the building to assume appropriate prominence in our
experience of the building.
Following our discussion of Capra’s experience, we might add that
it is possible to ‘see’ a certain ideal of life in the building, even though
this ideal is not, of course, an observable entity. Although it is not a
material item, the order’s ideal of life is in a sense the cause of the
building’s character. It is because these monks are energetic that they
have observed the world in such detail, and taken the trouble to
represent it in such detail, and so on. And it is because they are
committed to tranquillity as an ideal of life that they have sought to
ensure that the building does not simply overwhelm the senses with
the sheer exuberance of its observations of nature, but at the same
time permits the mind to be stilled, because of the restful design plan
of the structure as a whole. So there is a causal relation between the
order’s ideal of life and the building’s character: that ideal enters into
the causal explanation of the building’s character in these respects.
For the reasons we have discussed, there is also an imaging relation:
when the thought of ‘energetic observation and monastic piety’ is
inscribed in the appearance of the cloister, then the thought of that
ideal of life will be imaged in the building’s appearance. Allowing that
both relations obtain, we have grounds, of the kind that we noted in
our discussion of the experiences of Edwards and Capra, for saying
that it is possible to ‘see’ the order’s ideal of life in the building, once
the appearance of the building has been structured so as to conform
to the requisite perceptual gestalt. It is noteworthy that this further
example can be understood in terms of the same analytical scheme
that we developed in our discussion of Capra and Edwards. This
suggests that that scheme is reasonably robust, though no doubt it
would need refinement if we were to expand the range of our
examples significantly.
FURTHER REFLECTION ON THE ROLE OF

CONCEPTS IN STRUCTURING THE
PERCEPTUAL FIELD
We have been considering the idea that concepts, including religious

concepts and the concepts of non-observables, can be inscribed in the
sensory appearances, so that the appearances then image the content
of those concepts. To conclude this chapter I shall take note of two
further ways in which we might try to develop the idea that concepts,
including concepts with religious content, can shape the appearance
of the sensory world.
In our discussion so far we have been interested to see how the
appearance of the sensory world at a given time may be relative to a
person’s emotional commitments at that time, and relative to the
concepts which they ‘read into’ their experience at that time. This way
of putting the matter suggests that our focus has been upon the
relationship between a person’s assessment of their context here
and now and the appearance of that context. However, we have also
noted how a person’s expectations concerning the future course of
events may enter into their experience of the sensory world in the
present. For example, we noted how the fear of falling on ice (that is,
fear concerning a prospective event) could shape the ordering of, and
the phenomenal feel of, the perceptual field in the present. Let us
consider this idea a little more closely.
It is striking that James’ melancholiacs speak of the sensory world
as being not only ‘flat’ or ‘colourless’, but also as lacking in reality.
Now it may be that we should associate these things, and suppose that
when they speak of the lack of reality, or shadowiness, that they find
in sensory things, this is just their way of recording the fact that these
things are found to be devoid of salience and the livelier kind of
phenomenal hue that the rest us associate with sensory objects most
of the time. But we can also give another, rather different account of
the experience of lack of reality.
Some commentators have suggested that objects can come to seem
unreal when we lose our grip on the practical potentialities which
they afford. Matthew Ratcliffe develops this proposal in these terms:
‘Consider experiencing a table without co-included possibilities like
seeing it from another angle, moving it, or sitting on a chair in front
of it. Without the possibilities of its being accessed from different
perspectives, or acted upon, it would appear strangely distant, intan-
gible, and incomplete.’7 This account might seem to fit the experience
of some of James’ sources. Notably, Tolstoy’s pre-conversion condi-
tion seems to involve a profound sense of practical disorientation. He
asks insistently: ‘What will be the outcome of what I do to-day? Of
what I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life?
Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any
purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo
and destroy?’8 Here Tolstoy seems to be reporting a condition that
sounds rather like a generalized form of Ratcliffe’s example of the
table: it is the world in its entirety which seems to elude his grip,
because he has lost any sense of it as a theatre of practically meaning-
ful activity. The loss of practical potentiality takes a rather different
form in the two cases. In Ratcliffe’s example, it is the fact that we are
unable to assume a certain perceptual vantage point on the table or
unable to interact with it in practical terms in certain ways, which
leads us to find that the table is somehow ‘intangible and incomplete’.
By contrast, Tolstoy is able to engage with material objects in the
usual way, in bodily and perceptual terms, but this engagement will
have no enduring significance, he seems to think, because of his
mortality. Here it is not so much that the physical world sets restric-
tions in the short term on what we can do with it; it is, rather, that
there are long-term restrictions on our capacity to engage with it at
all. So we could read Tolstoy’s comments as an account of how his
recognition of the constraints on his possibilities for action over the
long term has somehow leaked into a felt acknowledgement of the
7
Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being, p. 156.
8
diminished practical significance, and in turn the diminished reality,
of physical objects here and now.
We can understand this sort of condition from three related
perspectives. Earlier I noted how the experience of fear includes, in
normal cases, the felt recognition of the body’s tensing as it makes
ready for action. Here we are dealing with kinaesthetic awareness of
the world—that is, with an awareness of bodily disposition which is
caught up into an awareness of the surrounding space within which
the body is operative. The experience of loss of reality, as described by
Ratcliffe and Tolstoy, will be realized at least in part, it seems plausible
to say, in some such kinaesthetic awareness: the body has lost its grip
on how to orient itself appropriately in a given space, and this
condition can be registered in some measure in bodily feeling. The
experience of loss of reality can also go along with, or be realized in, a
loss of salience, or loss of phenomenal ‘colouring’, in the objects of
experience—or some further phenomenal change over and above
these which suggests a loss of reality in a particular object or in the
world more generally. Lastly, the experience of loss of reality can also
go along with, or be induced by, a particular conceptualization of the
world, such as the thought that a given object fails to extend certain
opportunities for experience (to return to Ratcliffe’s example), or the
thought of one’s life as finite (following Tolstoy). Here, kinaesthetic
experience, conceptual representation of the world’s future, and the
phenomenal appearance of the world together constitute an inte-
grated state of mind—and each provides a way of registering the
same judgement, concerning the world’s loss of practical significance
in some respect.
These reflections on the relationship between expectation and
present experience provide a further way of understanding how
concepts can shape the appearance of the sensory world. Here it is
not so much that we have the concept of one thing (for example, the
heavenly city, a fundamental particle, or the divine nature) which is
then used to guide our experience of another thing (respectively, a
Gothic church, an ocean scene, or the natural world), so that the
appearance of the second thing is structured accordingly. It is rather
that our concept of one thing (here, the table or the sensory world as a
whole) guides our experience of that same thing; and in the case we
have been examining, it is our concept of the future potentialities of
the thing, or of its lack of such potentialities, that guides our experi-
ence of it, and enters into its appearance in the present. This is not to
say that in every case it is expectations concerning the future which
give rise to an associated set of sensory appearances and kinaesthetic
feelings, rather than vice versa; but this can sometimes be the
ordering of things.
Viewed from this perspective, Tolstoy’s example may be of some
importance for the question of how in conversion experience, or
following conversion experience, it is possible for the sensory world
as a whole to be differently experienced. For his observations suggest
that the quality of our experience of the world as a whole, and our
sense of it as real or unreal, flat or structured, may be relative to some
generalized assessment of its future, of precisely the kind that the
religions offer. In particular, on Tolstoy’s account of the matter, it
seems that an experience of diminishment in the reality of the world
can arise from the sense that there is for human beings no further life
beyond this life.
This possibility bears interestingly upon our question of whether a
‘two-worlds’ conception of reality, in its Christian form for example,
is liable to issue in a loss of interest in, or a lack of proper engagement
with, this-worldly concerns. If we take Tolstoy’s account at face value,
it seems that it is in fact his loss of belief in the possibility of a life
beyond this life, and beyond this sensory world, which leads him to
find the things of this world as lacking in reality, or as failing to
engage his interest fully. I can remember having a similar experience
when I was five years old or so. A neighbour across the road had been
admitted to hospital following a heart attack. (I am pleased to report
that he outlived this event, and so far as I know continues to be in
good health.) While I already had some grasp of the general truth that
all human beings will one day die, this experiential exemplification of
the idea—with respect to a person in my immediate community—left
me in a state of profound shock and practical disorientation; and this
condition extended over some days. And I can very well remember
putting to myself much the same questions which Tolstoy poses here:
in bewilderment, I wondered why anyone should carry on, should
commit themselves to any project, under these circumstances, when
everything was bound, eventually, to come to nothing, in death.
So here is another way in which concepts may, potentially, inform
our experience of the sensory world—by providing a representation
of the future course of events. And here is another way in which
religious concepts in particular may in fact enliven our experience of
the sensory world, even when those concepts concern precisely the
‘two-worlds’ conception of reality or something like it.
It is worth recalling here that theologians commonly associate the
special significance of human beings with their supernatural vocation:
it is the fact that the person is called to a life with God, to a life which
extends beyond this present life, that marks them out as having a kind
of irrevocable value.9 Similarly, recent discussion in eco-theology has
sometimes sought to relate varying conceptions of the future of the
material cosmos to varying assessments of its value here and now. So
rather as Tolstoy treats the post-mortem existence of the individual
person as a condition of their life having significance in the present,
so some theologians have taken the post-eschatological reality of the
material cosmos—its being taken up and transformed into some new
order of things, rather than simply being discarded—as integral to its
significance in the present.10 These are further ways in which a ‘two-
worlds’ view, of some sort, may lead to a deepened affirmation of the
importance of the sensory world, and of other human beings, here
and now. And given the themes which we have been exploring, it
seems at least possible that these ways of representing in conceptual
terms the future of human beings, and of the wider cosmos, may enter
into the sensory appearances in the present. For example, to take
what is perhaps the most straightforward case, a given representation
of the world’s future may shape our feelings for the world in the
present, and thereby it may give rise to an associated phenomenal feel
and pattern of salient viewing, and a correlative set of kinaesthetic
feelings, as we make ready to engage in practical terms with the world
so understood. So here is another way in which a change in thought
may lead to a generalized shift in the sensory appearances—where the
change in thought concerns in this case a new assessment of the
future of the world or of the human person.
THE CASE OF ‘EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS’
We have been considering some of the ways in which feelings of the

body may be caught up into a particular experiential presentation of
9
See for example John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (London: Catholic Truth
Society, 1995), Section 37.
10
See for example Anthony Monti, Natural Theology of the Arts (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003), Chapter 6.
the world, especially insofar as those feelings register the body’s
readiness to act in a situation of practical choice. Matthew Ratcliffe
has recently proposed that there is another variety of bodily feeling
which is of some importance in this context. Existential feelings, as he
calls them, also consist in a felt awareness of bodily condition, but in
this case the feeling is said to be prior (in the order of explanation,
rather than chronologically) to any particular practical or emotional
engagement with the world—and prior therefore to the body’s
adopting of a particular stance in a given context of choice.
Ratcliffe introduces the category of existential feeling in these
terms: ‘First of all, they are not directed at specific objects or situ-
ations but are background orientations through which experience as a
whole is structured. Second, they are bodily feelings.’11 Let me take an
example from my own experience. As I write these words I am
recovering from an episode of jet lag. The jet lag, considered as an
experiential state, is, I take it, fundamentally a feeling of bodily
condition. Such a feeling may not lead me to form any new beliefs
about the objects in my immediate surroundings; but in the normal
case these objects will now be differently experienced, and there will
be a correlative change in the kinds of emotional and practical
engagement which they can elicit in me. Moreover, the feeling of jet
lag can condition my experience of the sensory world in these various
ways pervasively: when I am jet lagged, any object which is presented
to me is liable to appear differently, because of the shift in my
receptivity to the world that is bound up with, or which partly
constitutes, this shift in bodily condition. Accordingly, existential
feelings can shape not only my sense of the character of the objects
which are in my immediate environment, but my sense of the world.
As Ratcliffe comments:
For all of us, there are times when the world can feel unfamiliar, unreal,
unusually real, homely, distant, or close. It can be something that one
feels apart from or at one with. One can feel like a participant in the
world or like a detached, estranged observer, staring at objects that do
not seem to be quite there. All experiences have, as a background, a
changeable sense of one’s relationship with the world.12
11
Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being, p. 38, Ratcliffe’s emphasis.
12
Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being, p. 7. Again, the emphasis is the author’s.
This description of the sense of the world that is vouchsafed in
existential feelings (especially the idea that the world may be experi-
enced as unfamiliar or unreal) is, of course, immediately reminiscent
of James’ account of the condition of the religious melancholiac, and
Ratcliffe himself notes the connection.13 From this theoretical per-
spective we might understand Tolstoy’s experience not so much in
terms of certain beliefs (for example, the belief that there is no
afterlife) giving rise to a correlative experiential presentation of the
world, and associated kinaesthetic feelings—we might suppose,
rather, that Tolstoy has fallen into a particular ‘existential feeling’,
and it is for this reason that he finds that the various objects which
once held his attention, and which formerly elicited in him some
practical response, are no longer capable of doing so, since they now
seem somehow ‘unreal’ or ‘distant’.
So here is another account of how feelings of the body may shape,
in a more or less pervasive way, the appearance of the sensory world.
In the previous section we were concerned with the case where it is
concepts which come first, and which then drive various other
changes: for example, we might suppose that it is Tolstoy’s loss of
belief in the afterlife which comes first, and which in turn gives rise to
a sense of the practical pointlessness of his projects, both long- and
short-term, where this sense of pointlessness is in turn realized in a
particular feeling of bodily condition, and a correlative flattened
appearance of the sensory world. If we follow Ratcliffe’s discussion
of existential feelings, then we may be more inclined to begin with the
feeling of bodily condition, and work outwards from there. It is clear
that James himself has a tendency to side with the view that it is
feelings, including feelings of bodily condition, which are to be given
priority in such cases. As he remarks in The Varieties:
I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart
from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and
mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious
philosophies such as we now possess . . . These speculations must, it
seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by
the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the
hint.14
13
Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being, p. 228.
14
It is perhaps not too difficult to see how ‘inner unhappiness’ and the
felt ‘need of deliverance’ might be treated as existential feelings in
Ratcliffe’s sense. Certainly, ‘inner unhappiness’ could be taken to refer
to a feeling of bodily condition, which of itself does not involve any
representation of the world in conceptual terms. Perhaps in some
cases anyway, it is some such feeling of bodily condition that draws
people into religious questions. Perhaps someone in the grip of such a
condition will find that whenever a sensory object is presented to
them, it is wrapped in this same feeling of unsatisfactoriness. And
perhaps such a person may be moved to deal with this predicament
by constructing some ‘speculation’ (as James puts it) about the
existence of a further, non-material reality, so as to provide a vantage
point from which the difficulties in their immediate experience may
be rendered bearable. (This is not to say that the person need be
conscious of the compensatory role which is played by the idea of a
further reality.) This sounds, of course, rather like the ‘two-worlds’
picture as Jantzen and others present it. The interest in ‘another
world’ draws its point from, and thrives upon, a disparaging assess-
ment of the conditions of life in this world, she suggests. But again,
this need not be the end of the story: once the reality of the other
world has been acknowledged, it may be that the realm of sensory
objects will be differently experienced; and it may well be that human
beings will then be led into newly constructive forms of practical
engagement with the sensory world, and that these forms of engage-
ment would not have been possible otherwise.
On the general picture that we have been considering here, this
conjunction, which associates a new conception of the ‘other world’
with a renewal of the sensory world, is not just a speculative possibil-
ity, but to some extent to be expected. For on the view we have been
developing, any felt deficiency in this-worldly experience, if it is
pervasive in character, is likely to owe its origins, at least in part, to
a condition of the subject, rather than being simply a product of the
intrinsic character of the sensory world. If we were to say that the
sensory world is ‘in itself ’ such that human beings cannot find
fulfilment in it, then it would presumably follow that the unsatisfac-
toriness in our experience of this world is inescapable, no matter what
thoughts we might entertain about a further world. However, in the
present discussion, we have been exploring, with a measure of empir-
ical support, the idea that the attainment of ‘enlightenment’ or spirit-
ual awakening may engender, and may in part consist in, a renewal in
the appearance of the sensory world. And if that possibility holds,
then it is to be expected that insofar as the adoption of a ‘two-worlds’
picture succeeds in shaping the emotional tenor of a person’s life, or
in extending the range of concepts which they routinely apply in their
experience, or in some other way relevantly shaping their condition as
a subject of experience, then it will also succeed in enlivening the
appearance of the sensory world, and in creating thereby the possibil-
ity of new forms of this-worldly practical engagement.
So we can allow both that a feeling of bodily condition, of the kind
that Ratcliffe identifies in his notion of ‘existential feeling’, may have a
tendency to generate certain ways of thinking religiously, and also
that certain ways of thinking may have a tendency to generate new
forms of this-worldly experience and practical engagement, and as-
sociated changes in kinaesthetic experience. Insofar as these changes
in kinaesthetic experience are caught up in a pervasive shift in the
appearance of the sensory realm, it is natural to think of them as at
least akin to, if not simply identical with, existential feelings. So we
have here, potentially, a two-way relationship, running from existen-
tial feelings to religious conceptualizations (this is the case to which
James alludes in the passage I cited above), and also in the reverse
direction. Or rather, we should speak no doubt of a kind of ongoing
interchange: it is not so much that a given existential feeling will
generate a given religious conceptualization without any further
repercussions, or that a given religious conceptualization will lead
to a given existential feeling (or to some state akin to an existential
feeling) without any further consequences, but rather that the first
sort of change will naturally lead on to the second, and the second will
in turn lead on to the first, and so on, until eventually the relationship
between religious conceptualization and existential feeling hits upon,
if we are fortunate, a state of equilibrium.
The notion of existential feeling is of interest for our purposes for a
further reason. I have noted that some critics of traditional forms of
religious thought (or of traditional thought construed in a certain
way) have objected to the idea of God as a transcendent individual,
on the grounds that such a view is liable to encourage a focus on
other-worldly forms of fulfilment, at the expense of our involvement
in this-worldly concerns. Against this view, I have been arguing that
‘this-worldly’ and ‘other-worldly’ concerns need not stand in compe-
tition with one another, and I have made this case on phenomeno-
logical grounds, rather than on, say, purely ethical grounds. However,
there is a tradition of religious thought which is metaphysically com-
mitted in its reading of the notion of divine ‘creation’, and kindred
notions, and which is different in this respect from authors such
as Grace Jantzen and Gareth Moore, but which is at the same time
sceptical of the idea that God is best conceived as a transcendent
individual. In the Christian context, proponents of this view have
often been influenced by Aquinas’s teaching that God is not a member
of a genus.15 On Thomas’s account, God is not so much a particular
existent as subsistent existence, or the pure, unrestricted act of exist-
ence, or ipsum esse subsistens.16 I remember that Herbert McCabe
would make this point in lectures by saying that ‘God and the world
do not make two’. This perspective finds an echo in the writings of
contemporary theologians such as Rowan Williams. Williams is ad-
vancing a cognate claim, I take it, when he remarks that God-talk ‘is
structurally more like talking about some “grid” for the understanding
of particular objects than talking about particular objects them-
selves’.17 That is to say, we should not think of talk about God as
fundamentally talk about a special kind of individual, but rather as, in
part, a way of talking about the world, and the configuration of objects
in the world.
Aquinas’s doctrine, and the kind of construal of its import that is
evident in Williams’ remarks, fits suggestively with some of the
themes that we have been examining. An ‘existential feeling’, as
Ratcliffe develops the notion, is clearly bound up with some general-
ized sense of the nature of reality. As he says, in such feelings, ‘the
world can feel unfamiliar, unreal, unusually real, homely, distant, or
close’. Although Ratcliffe’s concern is with the appearance of ‘the
world’ or with the realm of material objects in general, there is
nothing in his account which would prohibit a generalizing of the
idea of existential feeling, so that such feelings are taken to involve not
simply some disclosure of the nature of the sensory world as a whole,
but a sense of the nature of reality as such. After all, we are concerned
here with the question of whether ‘the world’ is felt to be ‘homely’ or
‘distant’, receptive to human projects or liable to frustrate them, and
so on. And this sort of assessment of the human context is not of its
15
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a. 3. 5.
16
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a. 4. 2.
17
Rowan Williams, ‘ “Religious Realism”: On Not Quite Agreeing with Don
Cupitt’, Modern Theology I (1984), 15.
nature restricted to the sensory world: we can equally well raise the
question of whether reality as a whole, including here whatever reality
there may be that transcends the sensory order, is receptive or hostile
or indifferent to human projects, or ‘homely’ or ‘distant’. Moreover,
given that existential feelings are of their nature not conceptually
articulated—given that they consist fundamentally in a feeling of
bodily condition, and an associated experiential presentation of the
world, rather than in some more discursive appreciation of the nature
of things—then it seems that such feelings cannot of themselves be
concerned with the sensory world understood in distinction from any
other kind of reality. Rather, they appear to open out towards some
reckoning with the nature of reality as such, however that might be
understood.
It seems, then, that the notion of existential feeling is capable of
being extended so that it involves not simply some intimation of the
nature of the sensory world, but an intimation of the nature of reality
as such—and it seems indeed that the notion calls for such an
extension, given that existential feelings are not conceptually articu-
lated, and are incapable, therefore, of tracking the boundary between
the sensory world and any further world. If we do read existential
feelings in this way, as comprising some generalized sense of the
nature of reality, in terms of its existential import for the human
person, and if we are committed to a broadly Thomistic understand-
ing of what it is for God to exist, then it seems natural to count
existential feelings as forms of religious experience. After all, Thomas
thinks of God not so much as a particular individual, but as the
unrestricted act of existence. So given a Thomistic metaphysics, if
we ask ‘what is the fundamental nature of reality as such, rather than
the nature simply of this individual existent or that individual exist-
ent?’, then we are asking about the nature of God. And existential
feelings, when they are understood in the expanded sense which we
have just been considering, can be read as an answer to this same
question.
Of course, existential feelings do not of themselves involve any
conceptually articulated religious claim. They certainly do not of
themselves involve a claim such as ‘there is an all-perfect God’. But
then there are other ways of speaking of the divine nature, as for
example when we are concerned more directly with the existential
import of that nature from the point of view of the human person’s
experience. In this context, we might say, for example, that God is
love. (Aquinas notes that it is fitting to use this form of words, rather
than saying simply that God is ‘loving’, as a way of marking the non-
individual character of the divine existence.18) And if an existential
feeling can vouchsafe a sense of reality as homely or distant, for
example, then it might also, I take it, vouchsafe a sense of reality as
good, or receptive to human projects, or indeed as love. So we might
take talk of God as love (and not simply as loving) as a way of
rendering in words what is disclosed primordially in existential feel-
ing.
But equally, we should be open to the possibility that certain
cultural and religious traditions, through their doctrines and prac-
tices, and through their art, can contribute to the formation of a
correlative existential feeling. Understood in these terms, existential
feelings are not simply brute feelings of bodily condition, but are
instead enmeshed with certain ways of talking and acting. Indeed, we
might prefer to speak of a state of mind which is a kind of amalgam of
thought and feeling, and which derives from a range of sources—
including existential feelings and various forms of thought and prac-
tice—in such a way that the respective contributions of these sources
cannot be readily disentangled. At any given time, this unitary state of
mind will bring together a certain organization of the perceptual field
and a particular expressive posture of the body, along with a register-
ing of that posture in feeling, in such a way that these forms of world
responsiveness are not experienced as separate ways of taking stock of
the nature of things, but rather as folded into one another.19
Of course, existential feelings on Ratcliffe’s account do not have a
simple subject–object structure. They provide, rather, the conditions
under which such a structure can emerge. It is against the background
of a certain construal of ‘the world’ as homely or distant or whatever it
might be that particular objects come into relief as potentially the
focus of my engagement in emotional and practical and other terms.
In the same way, we might suppose that religious experience, insofar
as it consists in, or comprises as a central component, an existential
feeling will not have a subject–object structure. Such experience will
not be a matter of encountering a particular individual, namely God,
18
As he says, the use of abstract names provides a way of acknowledging God’s
simplicity: Summa Theologiae, 1a. 3. 3 ad 1.
19
This is a possibility which we considered in Chapter 2, when discussing the
nature of the feeling of fear.
understood as the object of the experience, but will rather be a way of
apprehending the nature of ‘the world’ or reality as such. Some such
understanding of religious experience is evident in the work of
Friedrich Schleiermacher. Take, for example, the following celebrated
passage:
The first mysterious moment that occurs in every sensory perception,
before intuition and feeling have separated, where sense and its objects
have, as it were, flowed into one another and become one, before both
turn back to their original position—I know how indescribable it is and
how quickly it passes away . . . It is as fleeting and transparent as the first
scent with which the dew gently caresses the waking flowers, as modest
and delicate as a maiden’s kiss, as holy and fruitful as a nuptial embrace;
indeed, not like these but is itself all of these. A manifestation, an event
develops quickly and magically into an image of the universe . . . This is
the natal hour of everything living in religion.20
The experience which Schleiermacher introduces here is reminiscent
of existential feelings in several respects. First of all, the experience
lacks any clear subject–object structure: as he says, ‘sense and its
objects have as it were flowed into one another’. Moreover, the state
is clearly one of ‘feeling’ in some sense (allowing for the fact that
Schleiermacher’s usage of the term Gefühl is notoriously difficult to
pin down): ‘feeling’ and what Schleiermacher here calls ‘intuition’ are
fused together. Perhaps most strikingly, the experience in some way
communicates an ‘image of the universe’; that is, it is not simply, if at
all, directed at particular objects in the immediate sensory environ-
ment, but somehow discloses the nature of the sensory world as a
whole. The experience is also, by implication, lacking in conceptual
articulation: it is, as Schleiermacher says, ‘indescribable’. And this is
presumably to be expected if the experience is not of various objects
understood in distinction from the subject of the experience. Lastly,
Schleiermacher clearly thinks of this experience as fundamental for
the emergence of the various practices and forms of thought that we
associate with religion: it is, as he puts it, ‘the natal hour of everything
living in religion’. In all of these respects, it seems that the experience
which Schleiermacher records here can reasonably be classified as an
instance of existential feeling, and his reading of the significance of
20
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, tr.
Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976; first published
1799), pp. 31–2, Schleiermacher’s emphasis.
this experience provides further support for the idea that existential
feelings can be religiously important.21
The sort of experience which Schleiermacher describes, and the
sort of experience which we were discussing just now when consider-
ing how God understood Thomistically might be experienced, is not
straightforwardly ‘of ’ anything. Since it lacks any subject–object
structure, such an experience will not represent itself as being ‘of ’
God understood in Thomistic or other terms. But we can still take it
to be ‘of ’ God in an extended sense insofar as it truthfully discloses
the nature of reality or of ‘being’ as, let us say, receptive to human
projects, or as love, and to the extent that God is the (ultimate) source
of this experience (as perhaps of every experience). Once again, there
is particular reason to take an interest in such experiences if we are
working with a broadly Thomistic conception of God. On this per-
spective, it will not make much sense to suppose that God may be
presented to the person as a particular object of experience (leaving
aside the special circumstances of the incarnation). The notion of
existential feeling, or some kindred notion, provides a helpful remedy
for this difficulty in conceiving of the possibility of religious experi-
ence within a Thomistic scheme—by showing how the divine nature
might be disclosed in experience in non-objectual terms.
It is worth noting that on this account the divine nature is in some
respects to be defined by reference to human experience. Is ‘the world’
or reality defined more broadly ‘homely’, and in that sense receptive
to human projects? Well, in this case as more generally, a space can
only be counted as a home, or as homely, insofar as it is experienced
as ‘homely’ (which is not to say that it needs to be represented in
conceptual terms as a ‘home’). As we have seen, if we do wish to say
that reality is homely, then we have reason to say that God, under-
stood in broadly Thomistic terms, is ‘homely’; or to put the point
somewhat more conventionally, we might say that human beings can
find a home in God, and that God is in this sense ‘homely’. Clearly,
the truth conditions of this claim concerning God depend not only on
the divine nature, but also on human nature and human experience.
To put the point otherwise, the quality of ‘homeliness’, as it arises
21
For a fuller discussion of how the notion of existential feeling might inform our
reading of Schleiermacher, see Gorazd Andrejč, ‘Bridging the gap between social and
existential-mystical interpretations of Schleiermacher’s “feeling” ’, Religious Studies 48
(2012), 377–402.
here, is a relational quality, which concerns how reality as such, or
God, is registered in human experience. This result does not reflect
any peculiarity in the existential feeling of homeliness. Rather, exist-
ential feelings are of their nature concerned with relational qualities,
since they are a way of registering, in experiential, pre-objectual
terms, how the world impinges upon the body. Ratcliffe’s list of
such feelings includes the cases where the world appears ‘unfamiliar,
unreal, unusually real, homely, distant, or close’; and in these cases
too, we are dealing with the ways in which the world is manifest to the
person in bodily feeling as an indistinctly defined realm of possibil-
ities. So a religious experience which has at its core an existential
feeling is bound to generate a picture in which the divine nature is
defined in relational terms. Or to put the point another way, such
experience will yield a picture of the existential import of reality, or of
God, which is relative to our particular bodily sensibility.
We have been considering how the idea of existential feelings may
be incorporated within an account of religious experience which
conforms to a broadly Thomistic conception of the divine nature.
Rowan Williams’ Thomistic-sounding reflections on the nature of
religious language may be read in similar terms. As we have seen, he
remarks that talk of God is more akin to talk of a ‘grid’ for under-
standing particular things, than it is to talk of particular things
themselves. The grid metaphor suggests that theistic language is
concerned with the overarching structure of the world: the grid here
is evidently not itself a particular sensory item, but presumably serves
in some fashion as a template for the understanding or assessment of
such things. Again, the notion of existential feeling can be grafted on
to this theoretical scheme without too much difficulty, on the under-
standing that such feelings reveal the nature of ‘the world’, rather than
being targeted at particular sensory items. The ‘grid’ metaphor may
also encourage the thought that talk of God is in some way about a
scheme of values, in the light of which we can order sensory things,
according to their relative importance. If the metaphor is pressed in
this direction, then we might suppose that belief in God should find
expression in, or perhaps in part it will consist in, a relevant pattern of
salient viewing, so that those things which are most important are
assigned a commensurate weighting within the believer’s perceptual
field. If our reading of ‘grid’ language is developed in this way, then
Williams’ construal of the import of religious thought will fit very
readily with our earlier exploration of the relationship between reli-
gious conviction and salient perception.
We have been trying to understand how conversion experience
might be associated with, or might partly be realized in, a transform-
ation in the appearance of the sensory world. At the heart of the
account we have been developing is the idea that a change in the
condition of the subject (for example, a shift in their emotional
condition or in the concepts which they deploy) can make for a
generalized change in the appearance of the sensory world. The idea
of existential feelings can help to explain the closeness of this relation
between the condition of the subject and the quality of the sensory
appearances, because that idea invites us to suppose that there is, at
the root of human experience, a primal state of consciousness
(though not in the normal case one which exists in strict separation
from other forms of consciousness) in which subject and object ‘flow
into one another’, as Schleiermacher puts the point. And if that is so,
then we can get some theoretical purchase on the idea that even in
more articulated forms of experience, there remains a deep seated
affinity between the condition of the subject and the condition of the
object as this is manifest in experience. We could put the point by
saying that this affinity has an ontological ground, insofar as primor-
dially subject and object are bound together in existential feeling—
and insofar as further states of consciousness, which involve some
differentiation of subject from object, arise out of, and have woven
into them, this condition of primal unity.
The idea of existential feelings may also help us to address the
theoretical conundrum which I touched upon but did not attempt to
resolve when we discussed the relationship between emotions and
concepts: namely, the question of how emotions can get some pur-
chase upon the world if it is not yet divided up conceptually, and how
concepts can be established if the world is not already illuminated and
structured by our differentiated emotional engagement with it. The
concept of existential feeling suggests that the world can be assigned
some generalized significance in our experience (as homely, or dis-
tant, or whatever it might be) before we have begun to carve it up into
particular regions or objects, according to a given conceptual scheme
or a set of object-specific emotional responses. If that is so, then we
might think of existential feelings as the condition of possibility of
this carving up of the world according to particular conceptual and
emotional interests—insofar as those interests emerge out of the pre-
established, pre-objectual sense of the world and its significance
which is given in existential feeling.
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
It seems clear from neuroscientific and phenomenological studies that a

person’s conceptualization of the world can have an impact upon their
colour experience. For instance, it seems that when subjects are given
the opportunity to manipulate the image of a banana, so as to vary its
colour, they report that it appears yellowish when in fact it is grey (that
is, achromatic), and grey when in fact it is bluish (since they are influ-
enced by their knowledge that bananas are standardly yellow).22 In this
case, it seems that the expectation of the object’s being yellow ensures
that in some measure it appears yellow. In this chapter we have not been
concerned with quite such a direct connection between thought and
appearance, though perhaps some such connection can also obtain
when we are concerned with religious thoughts. We have concentrated
instead on the idea that a given thought can guide our construal of the
sensory world, so as to produce a perceptual gestalt which images the
content of the thought. We have also noted how thoughts about the
future course of experience can interact with bodily feelings, including
kinaesthetic and existential feelings, and contribute thereby to varying
appearances of the sensory world.
The overarching concern of the present study is the question of
how variations in religious conviction or commitment may issue not
simply in varying interpretations of sensory experience, but in vari-
ations in the appearance of the sensory world. On this perspective, the
senses can participate directly in the spiritual life: it is not that the
spiritual life is concerned simply with what a person thinks (for
example, creedally) or what they do (for example, ethically); it also
concerns how the world is presented to them experientially, since
doctrine, practice, and the appearance of the sensory world are, on
this account, mutually defining. If that is so, then the sensory appear-
ances take on a new significance: they become, potentially, the bearers
of religious insights, and they provide, potentially, a way of reckoning
with, and coming to a deeper understanding of, those insights. And if
that is so, then the sensory world is not most obviously conceived,
from a religious vantage point, as a ‘mass of perishable rubbish’;
22
T. Hansen et al., ‘Memory Modulates Color Appearance’, Nature Neuroscience 9
(2006), 1367–8. The example is cited in Tim Bayne, ‘Perception and the Reach of
Phenomenal Content’, The Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2009), 393.
instead, the sensory appearances can share in the enlightened condi-
tion of the seer, or in the convert’s newly awakened appreciation of
the import of a human life.
Of course, it is possible for a person to be religious in the sense of
simply subscribing to various creedal affirmations, or in the sense of
simply participating in bodily terms in various religious observances,
or through some combination of these things. But in general the
religions are interested in a deeper transformation of the person
than this. They aim not simply, if at all, at doctrinal conformity,
and outward conformity of the body to various religious practices.
They also aim at engendering in the person a new sensibility, where
this sensibility does not, in the normal case, float free from doctrinal
affirmations or bodily practices, but nonetheless transcends them
insofar as it is a condition of the whole person, and extends not
simply to what they do and what they, in all sincerity, say, but to
what they feel and, crucially, to how the sensory world is presented to
them in perceptual terms. Such a person, we might say, does not just
speak religiously or act religiously; rather, they live religiously, so that
their religious convictions are not confined to some compartment of
their lives, be it practical or theoretical, but are instead written into
the sensory appearances, so that they become, for them, part of the
fabric of reality. It is a commonplace of writing on the spiritual life
that religious formation aims to shape a person doctrinally, practic-
ally, and morally—but here we are concerned with the further idea
that this process also has as its object the formation of the person in
perceptual terms. The idea that perception can play a part in mediat-
ing or constituting ethical insights is, of course, familiar from the
literature in moral philosophy.23 The proposal we are developing is
that it is also possible to form in the person a distinctively theological
mode of perception, so that religious insights can be presented in
perceptual terms.
If all of this is so, then we would expect to find, within the major
faiths, traditions of spiritual formation which serve to inculcate a
religious ‘sensibility’ of this kind. In concluding this chapter, let us
look just briefly at one religious practice which might be interpreted
in broadly these terms. By examining this practice, we will be able to
23
For a discussion of the relationship between moral insight and sensory percep-
tion, see, for example, Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
test the fruitfulness for an understanding of the spiritual life of the
various theoretical constructions that we have been exploring in our
discussion so far.
In every major faith there have been movements which have
upheld the special significance of certain places. It is also true that
the idea of ‘sacred place’ has been contested in all of the major faiths.
But even when place-focused practices have been proscribed for a
period, they have typically re-emerged at a later time;24 and the
cultivation of relationship to particular places is close to being,
I would suggest, a religious universal. Let us see if we can understand
this practice in terms of the theoretical apparatus that we have been
developing in the course of the previous two chapters.
It is striking that the physical structure of sacred places is broadly
the same regardless of cultural context. Such places tend to be rela-
tively inaccessible, as when they are set on a mountain or island, for
example. Moreover, they are often surrounded by various thresholds,
such as a curtain wall, which pose a degree of physical challenge, and
which the believer needs to traverse if she is to penetrate to the core of
the sacred site. And the place itself is often disorienting in sensory
terms, whether on account of its imposing scale, or because of the use
of diffuse or dim or, indeed, intense light. And so on. How might we
understand a religious practice which has as its focus a place of
broadly this kind?
It is clear that such places are not available for casual inspection:
the believer will not come upon them simply in the course of pursuing
her everyday life; and given their remoteness and the various physical
thresholds which need to be navigated as they are approached, reach-
ing such a site requires a certain seriousness of purpose. All of this
suggests that the sacred place is designed to be apprehended by those
who have demonstrated, before arriving at the site, that they are in the
right emotional condition: broadly speaking, the condition of serious-
ness about the site and what it might signify. And on arrival at the
site, the believer is addressed in bodily terms, and not only, if at all, in
more abstractly intellectual terms. The devotee’s need to stoop or to
24
As David Brown notes, even when the founding figure of a given tradition, for
instance the Buddha or Guru Nanak, was critical of pilgrimage, place-based forms of
religious observance have still appeared as the tradition has evolved. See David Brown,
God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford
adopt other forms of self-protective posture as she negotiates the
various thresholds surrounding the site, and the brute impact upon
her senses of the scale or lighting of the shrine itself, together ensure
that she is attuned to the revelatory import of the site in bodily terms.
And we might suppose that, in standard cases, these bodily responses
involve some felt recognition of the believer’s physical vulnerability in
this space: this is a space which imposes a degree of strain on the
senses, and which challenges the body’s capacity to orient itself
appropriately, and these truths are acknowledged in bodily feeling.
This is only the barest outline of the nature of the sacred site.25 But
even this sketch is enough to indicate, I hope, that the categories
which we have been developing over the last two chapters can be
applied illuminatingly to a spiritual practice of this kind. It seems
clear enough that the sacred site, understood in these terms, is
designed to shape the believer’s emotional state, or at least to ensure
that the believer is in broadly speaking the right emotional condition
on arrival at the site. Such places also seem to be designed to elicit a
certain kind of bodily and kinaesthetic response. And the recurrence
of certain physical features at such sites, across cultural traditions,
suggests that the physical structure of the sacred space operates to
some extent in theory-independent terms; that is, the meaning of
these structures is apprehended to some extent directly in the re-
sponses of the body, rather than being dependent upon the applica-
tion of an interpretive scheme provided by the relevant theology.
Indeed, the very practice of visiting such a place, rather than simply
rehearsing various thoughts from the safety of one’s home or one’s
accustomed domain, suggests that the disposition of the body, and
not simply of the mind understood as a receptacle for various place-
independent thoughts, is important for the spiritual life. And insofar
as a particular set of light conditions (perhaps the scene is flooded
with light, or perhaps it is on the contrary very dark, or perhaps there
is some combination of these things) or some other set of physical
conditions has a relatively brute impact on the body, then we might
25
For a fuller account of the shared features of sacred spaces across religious
traditions, see for example Thomas Barrie, Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual and Meaning in
Architecture (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1996), and Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of
Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, especially Vol. II: Her-
meneutical Calisthenics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). See too
Mark Wynn, Faith and Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
suppose that the site is designed to elicit a certain existential feeling:
that is, it is designed to shape the underlying condition of the body in
rather the way that jet lag might—not on account of the impact of
various ideas, but by means simply of the pressure exerted upon the
body by a certain physical environment or regime.
So we might suppose that such sites work in spiritual terms by
engaging the believer’s emotions, bodily posture, and kinaesthetic and
existential feelings. Given the importance of the physical structure of
these sites in mediating their meaning, these responses appear to be
not accidental to the believer’s engagement with the site, but integral
to her capacity to construe its meaning aright. To this extent, place-
based religious practices confirm the drift of our discussion so far: for
the formation of the person in spiritual terms, it is not enough to
ensure her adherence to various creedal formulae, or to inculcate in
her a disposition to engage in various other-regarding forms of
behaviour; it is also necessary to shape the sensibility of the person,
so that her doctrinal affirmations and her habits of behaviour are
bound together with a particular experiential presentation of the
sensory world.
It is notable that sacred sites are not obviously spaces for doctrinal
instruction. Rather, they presuppose that the believer is already ac-
quainted with the basic creedal claims of her tradition. The role of the
sacred place is, then, to provide a space within which the fundamental
import of these teachings can be more deeply apprehended. On the
view we have been expounding, the sacred site can play this role by
creating an environment in which the basic claims of a tradition can
be encountered in sensory terms. To put the matter otherwise, the
believer whose bodily and emotional and kinaesthetic state has been
shaped in the requisite way can find in the sacred space a direct,
experiential confirmation of her tradition’s teachings. The burden of
the last two chapters has been to consider how this is possible—to put
the point briefly, it is possible insofar as the appearance of the sacred
space comes to be organized according to relevant concepts, and
invested with the right kind of phenomenal feel.
John Henry Newman’s work provides another perspective on the
thought that the proper apprehension of certain creedal claims, in
religious terms, depends on relevant first-hand experience. Famously,
Newman distinguished between having a ‘notion’ of God as judge and
having a ‘real image’ of God as judge. To have a notion of God as
judge, it is enough to be familiar with the relevant dictionary
definitions of ‘God’ and ‘judge’. But to have a real image of God as
judge it is necessary in addition to have had relevant first-hand
experience of God as judge. And for Newman this encounter takes
place above all, of course, in our experience of the ‘voice’ of con-
science.26 As it stands, Newman’s account does not invite the thought
that the person who uses the concept of God, or of God’s voice, to
interpret their moral experience will find that the phenomenology of
their moral experience is thereby changed, as it comes to be struc-
tured by this concept. His discussion is governed, rather, by an
analogy with our knowledge of the meaning of, for example, colour
concepts, or the concept of romantic love. For instance, it might be
said that someone can only really or fully know the meaning of the
term ‘red’ if they have had relevant (that is, under the right light
conditions, and so on) first-hand experience of the colour red. But the
experience of red which matters for these purposes is not evidently
conceptually structured: the person who has some ‘notion’ of red
(even if this is an impoverished idea, which falls short of being a ‘real
image’ of the colour) before their first experience of a red object need
not experience the colour any differently from the person who has not
already acquired the notion; or at least, from Newman’s account, one
would have no reason to think otherwise. In this respect, Newman’s
discussion has a rather different focus from ours, although both
accounts are concerned with the role which experience may play in
deepening our understanding of religious concepts.
The difference here is partly this. Newman’s discussion seems to
involve the idea that God can be presented as a particular item of
experience, just as a patch of red, for example, can be presented as a
particular item of experience, albeit that God’s presence is registered
in our moral rather than our sensory experience. By contrast, the
account which we have been exploring has been more concerned with
the thought that certain religious ideas, including ideas about the
divine nature, can be inscribed in our experience of the sensory world.
So on this account, while there is some sense in the thought that we
can ‘see’ God’s nature, the focus is much more on the way in which
relevant concepts, along with associated emotions and bodily feelings,
can shape the sensory field, rather than on the thought that God
might be presented as a particular item of non-sensory experience.
26
John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 99–108.
It might be objected that any experiential transformation which the
believer undergoes at the sacred site is likely to be short-lived: the
conditions of experience at the sacred site are, after all, rather un-
usual; and it is partly for this reason, of course, that the believer
considers the journey to the site worth the effort. If that is so, the
objector might continue, then place-relative religious practices
cannot be of fundamental importance for an understanding, in the-
oretical terms, of the nature of the spiritual life. In response to this
objection, we might note that even if it were true that the change in
the believer’s experience is short-lived, the account which we have
been developing would still be of interest, if only as a description of
the way in which sacred sites function. But the role of the sacred site is
in fact, surely, to effect some enduring change in the believer; and we
might equally say that that is the point of taking the trouble to travel
to such a place. In turn, the objector might say that even if the change
effected by the site is enduring, this change may not involve any
lasting shift in the believer’s experience of the sensory world. Well, no
doubt it may not. But equally, James’ discussion suggests that the
experience of religious conversion can effect an enduring change in
the appearance of the sensory world. And if the believer who visits the
sacred site undergoes something like a conversion experience—that
is, a deep-seated, experientially grounded reidentification with her
tradition, which leads to an enduring shift in the structure of her
value commitments and her practices—then we should at least be
open to the possibility that here too the effects of the experience will
spill over into a lasting change in the phenomenology of the believer’s
experience of the sensory world.27
I have been suggesting that in her encounter with the sacred place,
the believer can enjoy a kind of experiential confirmation of the
creedal affirmations of her tradition. It is perhaps clear enough how
this association might work in purely psychological terms: the be-
liever who finds that various religious concepts can be inscribed in
her experience of the sacred place may come to a new sense of the fit
between those concepts and reality. Of course, the sceptic is likely to
say in reply that this ‘fit’ tells us more about the believer, and the
27
For a fuller account of these matters we should refer no doubt to the findings of
phenomenologists, social scientists, and others. I shall draw on some relevant phe-
nomenological work myself in Chapters 5 and 6.
concepts with which she is operating, than about reality. But might
such experiences give the believer a truth-directed reason to subscribe
to the relevant doctrinal claims? Or, alternatively, might they at least
provide her with a pragmatic reason for participating in the relevant
faith tradition? Let us consider these questions next.
4
The Spiritual Life and the Justification

of Religious Belief
A great deal of recent philosophy of religion has been concerned with

the question of the epistemic justification or warrant, variously con-
ceived, of religious belief. In this study I am, for the most part, trying
to keep clear of those matters. As I have already noted, there is some
reason to suppose that the ‘crisis’ in religious belief in the contem-
porary world, or the central challenge which religious belief needs to
address in the contemporary world, is better expressed in existential
rather than evidential or epistemic terms. From this vantage point,
the question which requires addressing is: what difference does reli-
gious belief make to a life, in existential terms?—rather than: how
might religious belief be properly grounded epistemically? The first
kind of question has a certain priority here, to the extent that the
second kind of question is only of interest in the context of life, rather
than in the context of an academic seminar, if religious belief involves
more than an abstract metaphysical commitment of some sort. If
religious belief were to be a purely creedal matter, concerned simply
with the existence of various putative metaphysical realities, then we
could set it aside for purposes of life, in rather the way that we can set
aside for purposes of life the question of whether the ultimate con-
stituents of the universe are ‘strings’, or the question of whether there
are multiple universes. These further matters are of course of theor-
etical interest, but the question of what we might say in these domains
does not occupy the attention of millions of people as the questions
posed by the religions do, and for good reason—because there is not a
sufficiently sensitive relationship between the stance a person might
take on such issues and their general demeanour in life. In short,
propositions concerning these matters are not, in the relevant sense,
of vital importance existentially. And accordingly the question of
their truth, and still less the question of how one might set about
justifying their claim to truth, quite properly makes no demand on
the attention of most people.
So for the most part in this text I shall be concerned with the
existential question, of what difference religious convictions might
make to a human life. And in general terms, the answer to that
question which we have been developing (I am not suggesting that it
is the only licit answer) is: such convictions do not provide simply
some purely theoretical perspective on the character of another world
(rather as the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, for
example, presents a purely theoretical perspective on the nature of
reality beyond the bounds of this universe); rather, the stance we take
on religious matters is intimately connected, potentially, to our experi-
ence of this world. Why? Because religious convictions can enter into,
and otherwise shape, the sensory appearances of things; and thereby
they can make a difference to our capacity to orient ourselves in
practical and emotional terms within the realm of everyday experience.
Allowing for the fact that the present discussion is not primarily
concerned with questions of justification, we might still wonder
whether the basic thesis that we are exploring here—that there is a
close relationship between religious conviction and the character of
the sensory appearances—might be relevant to such questions. In this
chapter I am going to suggest that the thesis can indeed be applied to
these questions. I shall develop this enquiry in two ways. First of all,
we might ask whether our thesis might be relevant to a ‘pragmatic’
justification of religious belief—that is, a justification which does not
seek to establish the truth of religious belief, but which maintains that
we have good practical reasons, rather than truth-directed reasons,
for ‘adopting’, in some appropriate sense, religious belief. Secondly,
I shall also consider whether the thesis we have been developing
might be relevant to the epistemic case for religious belief—that is,
to the case which seeks to establish that religious belief, of some
relevant type, is true. Let us take these questions in turn.
THE SENSORY APPEARANCES AND THE

PRAGMATIC CASE FOR RELIGIOUS BELIEF
In general terms, it is clear enough how the considerations which we

have been rehearsing might be relevant to the pragmatic case for
The Spiritual Life and the Justification of Religious Belief 83
religious belief. By way of response to the existential challenge to
religion that has been posed by authors such as Grace Jantzen, I have
been arguing that religious belief need not be concerned simply with
the character of some other world, and need not imply a disparaging
view of the material world, because religious convictions can shape
and indeed enliven the sensory appearances. Accordingly, someone
might say: in that case, we surely have some reason to adopt such
beliefs, at least to the extent of holding them in mind and using them
to structure our experience of the sensory world. Similarly, you might
advise someone to hold in mind the idea of the heavenly city, when
standing in a Gothic church, so as to enjoy the enriched perceptual
gestalt that can be realized when this idea is used to structure the
appearance of the building. Let us consider now in rather more detail
how a case of this kind might be developed. Some obvious difficulties
we will need to confront are the question of whether holding a
thought ‘in mind’ in this way can count as a case of ‘belief ’ in the
sense that is relevant when we speak of religious ‘belief ’, and the
question of whether the motivation of someone who adopts a reli-
gious belief for this reason is consistent with authentic ‘faith’.
At the core of any such case will be the idea that if we allow certain
thoughts to inhabit our experience of the sensory world, then the
sensory appearances can be not just changed, but enriched. It is the
prospect of enrichment in the appearances which is supposed to
provide the person with a reason for adopting, in some relevant
sense, the religious thought or belief. So let us begin by thinking a
little further about the idea of enrichment as it applies in this context.
ENRICHING THE APPEARANCES
The kind of enrichment with which we are concerned here is, evi-
dently, an enrichment in the look of things, or in their appearance.
And it is therefore the kind of enrichment that is relevant to the
appreciation of an object in aesthetic terms. Varying interpretations
of a particular work of art, for example, may be ranked, on aesthetic
grounds, according to their capacity to enter into the appearance of
the work, or to structure our experience of it, in such a way as to
enhance its look. We can turn again to Roger Scruton’s work for an
instructive example of how aesthetic judgement works in this regard.
In the following passage, Scruton is considering the question of
whether we should see the columns (rather than the walls) of a
Renaissance palazzo as weight-bearing. He comments:
. . . to see the column in this way is to open the possibility of a richness
of meaning that would otherwise be missed. The dialogue between wall
and column enables the aesthetic properties of the column—which it
derives precisely because we see it as standing free, holding itself and its
entablature unaidedly upright—to be spread across the wall. The wall
therefore partakes of the implications of the columnar Order, and the
subtleties of suggestion which the divisions of the Order imply . . . It is
not that Alberti [who took the contrary view] made a mistake at the
Palazzo Rucellai: but there are persuasive arguments against his way of
seeing the Roman prototypes, arguments which derive from the relative
value of competing experiences.1
This passage points towards a distinction between structural, histor-
ical, and aesthetic construals of a building or other artwork. If we
adopt the first perspective, in the context of this example, then we will
be concerned to establish whether it is in fact the walls or the columns
which sustain the weight of the building, or some combination of
these. If we take the second approach, we might ask whether from a
historical point of view the columns in such buildings were intro-
duced as decorative additions to the walls, rather than having a
weight-bearing function, or whether, on the contrary, the walls were
introduced as decorative supplements to the columns, as a kind of
screen running between them. The last kind of interest we might take
in the building—the aesthetic interest—will judge between interpret-
ations, concerning the respective contributions of columns and walls,
not on the basis of whether they are faithful to the distribution of
loads in this particular building, or truthful to the extent that they
reflect the development of such buildings historically, but on the
grounds of whether they are capable of inhabiting the appearance of
the building, so as to enhance its look. So, as with the other examples
we have drawn from Scruton, here we are concerned, once more, with
the question of how the interpretation of a material structure may
generate a correlative perceptual gestalt—only now the emphasis is
more clearly on the possibility of competing interpretations, each of
which will generate its own gestalt, and on the question of which of
1
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture, pp. 93–4.
these gestalts is to be preferred, on the grounds of excellence in
respect of its look. In brief, Scruton’s proposal is that interpretation-
infused gestalts can be ranked according to the ‘richness of meaning’
which they enable; and on this basis we can then rank the interpret-
ations which structure these gestalts, and determine which of them is
the most fitting in aesthetic terms.
In this passage, Scruton does not specify exactly which properties
make for ‘richness of meaning’ of the kind that is relevant for the
exercise of aesthetic judgement. And for our purposes there is no
need to be drawn into this question. The usual candidates include, of
course, such generic qualities as unity, harmony, intensity, clarity,
and so on, as well as more precise specifications of these qualities that
are relevant in particular contexts.2 What matters for our investi-
gation is that all of us evidently make such judgements. For example,
when we read a certain well-known line drawing either as the image
of an old woman looking down her nose or as the image of a young
woman turning away, we favour these readings over others because
they enable the various lines of the drawing to be subsumed satisfy-
ingly within an overarching gestalt. No doubt there are other inter-
pretations which we might adopt, which would generate a variety of
alternative gestalts. But when we are moved by aesthetic consider-
ations (rather than by, say, art historical or structural considerations),
these two readings stand out, because they do most to enhance the
look of the drawing, and to contribute to its excellence in that respect.
While there is famously disagreement between art critics, and also
between members of the public, and even more famously between
these two groups, on the question of which works of art are genuinely
excellent in aesthetic terms, the example of the line drawing suggests
that in many contexts anyway, we can expect to find some rough
convergence of view on which interpretation of a particular material
object is the most fitting in aesthetic terms.
Any pragmatic justification of a religious belief will turn on the
identification of a relevant good which attaches to the adoption of the
belief, where this good does not consist in, and does not depend on,
the truthfulness of the belief. The account which we have been
developing suggests that religious thoughts can inhabit and colour
2
See for example Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s discussion of the varieties of aesthetic
merit in his Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 163–8.
the sensory appearances. And if we think, for example, of the conver-
sion experiences which James reports, or of Scruton’s example of
experience of the Gothic church, or of the ways in which sacred
sites function, then we have good reason to say that on occasions
anyway, such thoughts can enter enrichingly into the sensory appear-
ances. So here potentially is a good which is relevant to the construc-
tion of a pragmatic case for religious belief: the good here concerns
the aesthetic excellence, or the excellence in respect of the appear-
ances, which can be achieved when we use religious thoughts to guide
our experience of the sensory world.
It might be objected that even if a person does adopt a religious
thought for the purpose of enhancing their experience of the sensory
world, this is a long way removed from the case of authentic religious
faith. This protest could be developed in a number of directions. First
of all, it might be said that while the person of faith need not take their
beliefs to be more probable than not, they must surely suppose that
those beliefs are at any rate not overwhelmingly improbable. By
contrast, it seems that a person can take a particular religious thought
to be obviously false and still use it to structure the appearance of the
sensory world for the sake of some aesthetic benefit. For instance, to
revert to Scruton’s example, I might be confident that the walls, rather
than the columns, of this particular Renaissance palazzo support the
building from a structural point of view, but still elect to construe the
columns as weight-bearing for the purposes of aesthetic experience.
But the person who adopts a religious belief for the sake of enhancing
their experience of the world, while taking that belief to be clearly
false, could not be said, surely, to hold this belief in the way that is
relevant to genuine religious faith—because faith requires of the
believer that they assign to the belief at least a minimum degree of
epistemic credit.
INCORPORATING WILLIAM ALSTON’S

CONDITIONS ON THE NATURE OF
GENUINE FAITH
William Alston has addressed these matters by supposing that for

‘non-doxastic’ forms of religious faith (forms which do not involve
holding to the truth of various creedal claims) it may be enough to
‘accept’ some relevant hypothesis. He introduces the idea of accept-
ance by way of an example. Suppose a general has only limited
knowledge of the disposition of the opposing forces. We might say
that the general ‘accepts the hypothesis [concerning the location of
the enemy forces] that seems to him the most likely of the alterna-
tives, though he realizes that he is far from knowing that this or any
other such hypothesis is true’. Alston continues: ‘He uses this [hy-
pothesis] as a basis for disposing his forces in the way that seems most
likely to be effective, even though he is far from believing that this is
the case.’3 Alston suggests that we can suppose that non-doxastic
forms of religious faith are constituted by the ‘acceptance’ in this
sense of relevant creedal items providing that two conditions on the
notion of ‘acceptance’ are satisfied: the person who ‘accepts’ a given
creedal proposition p must hold ‘the truth or realization of p to be a
good thing’, and their acceptance of p ‘has to be less than ideally or
fully supported by reason, evidence, or experience, at least in [their]
view of the matter’.4
This account suggests that if my commitment to a ‘hypothesis’ is to
count as a case of religious faith, I do not need to suppose that the
hypothesis is more likely than not, but I do need to suppose that it is
more likely than any competing hypothesis, or at any rate (we might
add) I need at least to suppose that it is as likely as any competing
hypothesis. Alston seems to me to be broadly right about these
matters: even if we would be reluctant to suppose that a person
‘believes’ a certain hypothesis to be true, because they do not consider
it overall likely, we might still suppose that their commitment to the
hypothesis can meet the standards required for religious faith, pro-
viding that they judge the hypothesis to be the most likely of the
possibilities, or at least as likely as any other hypothesis. As well as
requiring that this condition of minimum epistemic credit be met, we
might suppose that religious faith also sets an upper limit on epi-
stemic credit: a hypothesis might be too strongly evidenced for a
3
William Alston, ‘Audi on Nondoxastic Faith’, in M. Timmons, J. Greco, and
A. Merle (eds), Rationality and the Good: Critical Essays on the Ethics and Epistemol-
ogy of Robert Audi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Chapter 11, p. 133. For
another instructive account of these matters, albeit one that is set in a different
theoretical context, see John Schellenberg, Prolegomena to Philosophy of Religion
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 143–7.
4
Alston, ‘Audi on Nondoxastic Faith’, p. 134.
person for them to hold it as a matter of faith (and this could be so
even if it is not strongly enough evidenced for them to ‘believe’ it).5
While the thoughts which constitute religious faith are subject to
epistemic constraints in these respects, it is clearly possible to adopt
a religious thought for the purpose of structuring one’s experience of
the sensory world regardless of what epistemic standing one takes the
thought to have: I might judge that thought (for instance the thought
that the walls of a palazzo really are weight bearing) to be certainly
true, or certainly false, and in each case I am still free to use the
thought to guide my construal of the sensory world.
These considerations do not pose a significant difficulty for the
pragmatic case for religious belief which we have started to build.
They just suggest that if such a case is to be relevant to religious faith,
then it will need to be addressed to someone who takes the ‘hypoth-
esis’ in question to be at least as likely as any rival hypothesis. We
might well wonder how we are to distinguish hypotheses for these
purposes: what is reckoned on one way of counting as a single
hypothesis might be considered on another way of counting as two
or more distinct hypotheses. And the question of whether a given
hypothesis is more likely than, or at least as likely as, any rival
hypothesis will depend, of course, on how we count these alternatives.
I take it that if the focal hypothesis is, let us say, the core or defining
creedal claims of the Christian faith, then each of the other major
faith traditions will account for a further, distinct hypothesis. (In
addition, we will need one or more hypotheses to cover the possibil-
ities corresponding to the various forms of secularism.) It will not be
appropriate to treat as an alternative hypothesis a single disjunctive
hypothesis of this form: either the core claims of Buddhism are true,
or those of Hinduism, and so on, for other major faiths. Why not?
Because in that case, intuitively, we would not be comparing hypoth-
eses of like scope, but would be comparing one possibility with
another which is (when compared to the first) an artificial compound
of possibilities. But this question of how to count hypotheses for these
purposes will arise for any account of religious faith, and does not
pose particular difficulties for the approach we are proposing to
follow, and I suggest that we do not consider it further here.
5
Alston notes this possibility in ‘Audi on Nondoxastic Faith’, p. 134.
So the possibility we are envisaging is this: someone might take the
‘hypothesis’ relevant to some form of religious faith to be more likely
than, or at least as likely as, any alternative hypothesis. This judge-
ment concerning the relative probability of the hypothesis is not, of
course, sufficient for faith. For faith, the person will also need, among
other things, to allow the hypothesis to govern their lives in certain
respects. Notably, they will need, as Alston suggests in his example of
the general, to take the hypothesis as a basis for action. ‘Acceptance’
of a hypothesis, in Alston’s sense, will involve more than simply
acting as if the hypothesis were true. (I could, after all, act as if a
hypothesis were true while supposing that it is overwhelmingly un-
likely.) But taking a hypothesis as a basis for action is clearly at least
part of what is involved in ‘acceptance’ for these purposes. Again, this
constraint on the notion of ‘acceptance’ makes good sense if we are
proposing to use the notion to understand the nature of religious
faith: we would be reluctant to consider someone a person of faith not
only if their commitment to relevant ‘hypotheses’ failed to satisfy
certain minimum (and maximum) epistemic requirements, but also if
this commitment were in no way action-guiding.
So the next question we need to ask is: if we take someone who
meets the epistemic standards required for faith, how might the fact
that relevant religious thoughts or ‘hypotheses’ can enter enrichingly
into our experience of the sensory world bear on the question of
whether that person has reason to act on those hypotheses? To put
the matter otherwise, if we follow Alston’s account of the epistemic
preconditions on religious faith, then we should allow that any
pragmatic justification of faith will need to be addressed to someone
who meets these preconditions. The core of the pragmatic case must
then be concerned with the question: what reason has such a person
to act on the ‘hypotheses’ relevant to faith, and to approach, in this
further respect, the condition of faith? And for present purposes, the
possibility we need to explore is that the experience-enriching powers
of religious thoughts can supply this person with such a reason.
A person might hold that a given theoretical claim—say the claim
that the universe is ultimately comprised of ‘strings’—is, so far as they
can tell, more likely than any one of the various alternatives, but not
in itself very likely. And they might well take this stance without being
moved to give any attention to the details of string theory. (I would
probably count myself as such a person.) Suppose now that someone
is in the same position with respect to a claim which has religious
content—say the claim that the world was created. Such a person
satisfies the epistemic requirements for faith with reference to that
particular claim. What might move them to do more than adopt this
epistemic stance, in this relatively disinterested sort of way, and in
addition allow the claim to play a part in their lives in practical terms?
For present purposes I shall just assume that our earlier discussion
has established that certain religious thoughts can enter more or less
pervasively into our experience of the sensory world so as to enrich
that experience. In that case we can intelligibly suppose that a person
in this position might well have good reason to take up certain
religious thoughts and inscribe them in their experience of the sens-
ory world. Why? Because their experience of the world will in that
case be enriched. The kind of practical rationality that is evident here
is at root no different from that which is relevant when we choose to
surround ourselves with objects which we find aesthetically pleasing.
In the religious case there is, of course, this difference: here we are
shaping the aesthetic quality of our experience not so much by
placing certain objects in our surroundings, but rather by changing
the categories which we bring to bear in experience, so that the
sensory appearances fall into a newly ordered and newly coloured,
and newly pleasing, perceptual gestalt.
Adopting a religious thought in this way is itself a kind of action;
and in so acting I will come to be contemplatively absorbed in the
thought’s content. But this is not yet to take this thought as a guide to
practical living. And an objector might therefore insist that such a
person cannot yet be counted as a person of faith, even allowing for
the fact that they satisfy the epistemic preconditions of faith, and that
they have infused relevant religious thoughts into their experience of
the sensory world. To put the point otherwise, the objector may say:
this person’s perceptual world may have changed, once they allow
their experience to be inhabited by relevant religious thoughts; but
this is just to say that they now have a new way of experiencing the
world, or that they have now taken up a new contemplative stance in
relation to the world, and it is not yet to say that their practical
relationship to the world has changed; but as Alston’s remarks
make clear, if someone is to count as a person of faith, then it is
necessary for them not simply to entertain various religious thoughts
with the requisite epistemic seriousness, but also to act on them.
This objection depends on drawing a fairly sharp distinction
between entering into a given perceptual gestalt and adopting a
particular practical stance in relation to the world. But as we have
seen, in standard cases, these two things are closely related. A change
in the organization and colouring of the perceptual field is liable to be
associated with a change in bodily stance and in kinaesthetic feeling.
This is, not least, because the perceptual field typically has embedded
within it a set of judgements about what is important or worth
attending to—and in standard cases, therefore, the organization of
the perceptual field orients a person towards certain forms of prac-
tical engagement with the world, so that perceptual field and practical
stance are mutually defining. This sort of association of perceptual
world and practical stance seems to hold even in situations where
there is no pressing need to make a practical choice. Scruton’s
example of the Gothic church is concerned at root with the visual
appreciation of this structure; but even here, if a person’s experience
of the building is informed by the thought of the heavenly city, then
her practical relationship to the church is likely to be changed. As she
moves about in the church, the further features of the building which
will come into view most readily, and the further paths of exploration
which will then seem most promising, are likely to evolve along with
changes in her perceptual field. And if we recall the case of James’
converts, it is striking that these are individuals whose relationship to
the world has changed not just experientially but practically: they are
now re-energised, and refocused, in their practical dealings with the
world.
So there is some reason to suppose that the person who has taken
on a new, religious-thought-infused perceptual gestalt is liable
thereby to find themselves in a different practical relationship to the
world. The religious thought therefore comes to structure not just
their perceptual but also their practical relationship to the world. To
put the point another way, in taking on a new perceptual gestalt, a
person is able, in standard cases, to make not only a new set of
perceptual but also a new set of practical discriminations.
TWO OBJECTIONS
I have been arguing that the pragmatic case for religious belief which
we have begun to assemble can meet Alston’s epistemic and practical
constraints on the nature of genuine faith. Allowing for all of this, it
could reasonably be said that the person we have described may still
not count as a person of faith, for at least two reasons. First of all, for
all we have said so far, this person might take up various religious
thoughts simply on an occasional basis. Furthermore, their reason for
adopting these thoughts could be, for all we have said so far, purely
self-interested. Indeed, is not this individual motivated simply by a
desire to enhance their appreciation of the sensory world, and is not a
motivation of that kind bound to be at root self-interested? But the
person of genuine faith would surely not engage with religious
thoughts episodically, or simply self-interestedly?
James’ examples of conversion experience suggest one response to
these difficulties. His converts seem to report a change in their
perceptual relationship to the world which is both pervasive and
enduring. Moreover, they do not seem to be absorbed in various
religious thoughts for self-interested reasons: the dominant motif in
their accounts seems to be, rather, their new-found wonderment in
God, and an associated wonderment in the sensory world, which they
take to be charged with the presence of God. So in the case of radical
conversion anyway, these charges—about the episodic nature of a
person’s engagement with religious thoughts, and the self-interested
character of their motivation for taking up such thoughts—do not
appear to have much substance. However, conversion experience of
the kind that James describes is, of course, rather different from the
case which we are currently considering, where someone adopts certain
religious thoughts as a matter of choice, for pragmatic reasons. James’
converts seem to be overwhelmed by their experience; and their trans-
figured experience of the world is not directly the outcome of any
choice. But what about the rather different case where a person chooses
to inhabit a transformed perceptual world, for aesthetic reasons?
Scruton’s example of the heavenly city suggests that in some
contexts it is possible to opt into a perceptual gestalt on the whim
of the moment, and with minimal instruction. In his example, a
person can exercise fairly directly a choice between experiencing the
church as a single entity minutely divided, and experiencing it as a
composite entity constructed from parts. Here we are concerned with
a particular concept (the idea of the heavenly city) applied to a
particular object of experience (a Gothic church). But we can also
think of cases where a person adopts not so much a single concept as
a complex of concepts, and where that complex of concepts is capable
of effecting a transformation in the appearance of the sensory order as
a whole. It is this further case which is most directly of interest when
we are considering the possibility of a pragmatic argument for opting
into an established religious tradition, rather than for adopting an
isolated religious thought within some narrowly delimited experien-
tial context. And in this further case, the relevant perceptual gestalt is
unlikely to be producible simply on a whim, and independently of
any extended process of instruction. Rather, taking on a particular
religious tradition’s thought-infused way of experiencing the world is
likely to require training, and an extended initiation into the relevant
skills of attention. To put the point briefly, I cannot opt into, for
example, a distinctively Christian way of experiencing the world
simply by running through a relevant list of creedal items and then
looking out at the world around me, in rather the way that I might
have the kind of experience that Scruton describes simply by enter-
taining the idea of a heavenly city and then gazing at a Gothic church.
So the choice which is relevant here is not, in the first instance,
directly a choice between two perceptual gestalts, one of which is
infused by the complex of concepts which define a given religious
tradition, and the other of which is structured otherwise. Rather, in
the first instance, a person’s exercise of choice will concern the
question of whether or not to opt into the process of initiation that
must be undertaken if they are to acquire the relevant skills of
attention. It is only once those perceptual skills have been acquired
and honed over time that the person will have the choice of opting
into the corresponding perceptual gestalt. Granted that this is the case
with which we are focally concerned (as distinct from the case of
Jamesian conversion, or the Scrutonian case where we can choose,
independently of any training, how to experience a particular sensory
item), then we can return to the two objections with which we began.
The case we are considering is rather like the case where someone
chooses to opt into a particular aesthetic tradition—say the tradition
of European portraiture. The person who makes this choice, on a
serious basis, is committed to undertaking a degree of training if they
are to gain the perceptual skills that are required for any nuanced
appreciation of the paintings that constitute this tradition. The mo-
tivation here is, by assumption, aesthetic: the person wants to come to
a deepened appreciation, in aesthetic terms, of paintings of this kind.
In the same sort of way, we can intelligibly suppose that someone
might choose, with good reason, to familiarize themselves with the
defining thoughts of a particular religious tradition, and to cultivate
the skills of attention that are characteristic of this tradition, as a
condition of entering into the perceptual world of the tradition. In
part, this could be a matter of wanting to appreciate more deeply, in
aesthetic terms, the artistic productions of the tradition; but if the case
which we have been making holds any weight, then such a person
might also hope, with good reason, to enjoy an enlivened perception
of the sensory world in general.
Consider the case of someone who has, for these reasons, come to
understand the defining thoughts of a religious tradition, and who has
acquired the necessary skills of attention. Would such a person take
on the relevant thoughts simply episodically? Well, they might. But
there is no necessity to suppose that they would do so. And there is
some reason to suppose that they would not do so. No doubt, it would
be hard for me, just in practical terms, to give my days to experiencing
a Gothic church, or Gothic churches in general, as an image of the
heavenly city. But if we are dealing not with an isolated concept such
as this, whose perceptual application is limited to a rather limited set
of objects, but with a complex of concepts, which can by assumption
inform our experience of the sensory world as a whole, then there is
no necessity to suppose that the relevant thoughts will be entertained
only episodically. (Edwards’ record of his conversion experience, to
mention just one example, suggests that a conception of the divine
nature can enter pervasively into experience.) Moreover, in the case
with which we are concerned, the person will have undertaken an
extended process of training, and the relevant forms of perception
will have become for them, therefore, in some measure habitual. So
such a person would have to some degree a predisposition to view the
world in these terms. We are all familiar with the operation of this
sort of tendency from our professional lives: when we have been
formed in a particular tradition of thought (be it sociology, or engin-
eering, or theology), we are predisposed to approach the world from
that analytical vantage point. Similarly, in this case, we are dealing
with someone who will be inclined to approach the world from a
certain perceptual vantage point.
Moreover, on the present account we are assuming that the rele-
vant religious categories will give the person access to an enhanced
perceptual world. This is the fundamental good which underpins this
pragmatic case for religious belief. And if this good is profound
enough—if the perceptual world which results when someone takes
on a set of religious categories for this purpose is rich enough—then
the person will have a good and perhaps an overriding reason for
opting into this way of experiencing the world not episodically, but
enduringly. And that is to say that this person will have a good and
perhaps an overriding reason to keep the defining thoughts of the
tradition before them enduringly, not necessarily in abstract form,
but as inscribed in the sensory appearances.
Here we have a response to the objection that the pragmatic case
which we have been building is not evidently a case for religious faith
because it leaves unresolved the question of why the person who is
moved by this case should take on the relevant religious thoughts
enduringly. What about the objection that the person who is swayed
by this case cannot be counted as a person of faith because they will be
acting self-interestedly? An objection of this general type needs to be
addressed by any pragmatic justification for religious belief: any such
case will hold out the prospect of a benefit which is said to be
associated with religious belief, and argue that a person has reason
to ‘adopt’, in some relevant sense, religious belief as a condition of
achieving that benefit. And an objector may reply: but surely, the
genuinely religious person should be moved in these matters by the
love of God, or something of that kind, and not by the prospect of
achieving any such ‘benefit’.
This sort of difficulty for a pragmatic justification of religious belief
will arise most acutely when the benefit lacks any evidently religious
content. For example, it might be said: belief in God involves the idea
that whatever happens serves some higher moral good, and that idea
can help a person to negotiate life disturbances with a degree of
equanimity that would not be possible otherwise. No doubt there
are various objections which might be put to such a proposal, but for
our purposes the key one is this: a person who adopts a religious belief
on this basis, in order to achieve a state of psychological composure,
surely fails to display authentic religious faith, because here relation-
ship to God, or belief in God, is treated simply as a means to some
good (the good of composure) which has no specifically religious
content, whereas authentic faith, surely, always conceives of God, or
of relationship to God, as an ultimate good, to which all other goods
are to be subordinated.
The pragmatic case which we have been considering has a ready
response to this kind of objection, because here the relevant benefit
has inherently a religious content: the good which the person achieves
is the good of enjoying certain religious thoughts as inscribed in the
sensory appearances. We may even wish to say, following our earlier
discussion, that the person whose experience of the sensory world is
informed by the thought of the divine nature can thereby come to
‘see’ the divine nature. If a person contemplates various religious
thoughts because they take pleasure in ‘seeing’ the divine nature, or
because they take pleasure in the experiential presentation of those
thoughts, then it can hardly be objected that they are motivated by a
good which has no religious content.
The related objection which maintains that this person must be
motivated by self-interest is also unpersuasive. What is it that motiv-
ates the person in this case? If we consider the phenomenology of
aesthetic experience in general, the good of which the person is focally
aware as the experience unfolds is presumably the good which is
given in the perceptual object itself. As Schopenhauer remarks of such
experience when it concerns the natural world: ‘we . . . let the whole of
our consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural
object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag,
a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object.’6
Bracketing the question of whether Schopenhauer is right to think
that this consciousness is always ‘calm’ or always so completely
absorbed, he is surely right to suppose that in such cases, the person
is fundamentally focused upon the good which is given in the percep-
tual object. Famously, Schopenhauer himself takes this form of con-
sciousness to be, for this reason, a liberation from the egotism, and
the means–end kind of thinking, that is characteristic of our usual
forms of engagement with the world. So here is one reason for
supposing that the pragmatic justification for religious belief which
we are considering is not vulnerable to the objection from self-
interest: the person in this case is focused not upon their own good,
but upon the good which they encounter in the perceptual object. If
an objector were to say that the person is still engaging in this activity
because of the pleasure or enjoyment they get from it, and that the
activity is for this reason self-interested, then we would have to
conclude that the person who enjoys God on account of the excel-
lence of the divine nature is even so acting self-interestedly, where the
notion of ‘self-interest’ is taken to imply censure. But on any standard
theistic picture of the happiness enjoyed by the saints, it is hard to see
how that judgement could be sustained.
6
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, tr.
E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 178.
INCORPORATING ALSTON’S REMAINING

CONDITIONS
To return to the main thread of our discussion, we have been trying to

develop a pragmatic case for religious belief which is consistent with
the conditions on non-doxastic religious faith identified by William
Alston. We have met his epistemic conditions by noting simply that
this case is to be addressed to the person who satisfies those condi-
tions. And we have sought to meet his practical condition (namely,
the requirement that the person of faith should act on the religious
‘hypotheses’ to which they subscribe) by recalling how the relevant
good in this pragmatic case has inherently an action-guiding signifi-
cance, because a given perceptual gestalt standardly involves a cor-
relative practical ‘take’ on the world. On this point, the approach we
have been following is not simply consistent with Alston’s require-
ments, but helps to explain them: if we allow for the close relationship
between perceptual gestalt and practical stance, then the connection
between faith and action can be explained, at least in part, once we
understand that taking up the stance of faith is typically a matter of
entering into a relevant perceptual gestalt.
Alston’s other conditions, which are to be satisfied if the ‘accept-
ance’ of various religious hypotheses is to count as a case of faith, are
these: the person must take the truth of these hypotheses to be ‘a good
thing’, and their acceptance of them must be ‘less than ideally sup-
ported by reason, evidence, or experience’. The approach we have
been following once again helps to explain, in some measure, the first
of these conditions. Insofar as it involves taking pleasure in a reli-
gious-thought-infused perceptual gestalt, the stance of faith naturally
involves a commitment to the idea that the realization of the relevant
thoughts would be good. For example, the person whose experience
of a Gothic church is informed by the idea of the heavenly city will
thereby come to experience the church as an image of the city; and if
they find in that image a source of aesthetic satisfaction, then to that
extent they will take the image to be good; and in turn therefore, they
will be committed to the thought that the realization of the thing
imaged, or the actual existence of the city, would also be good, at least
to the extent that the city would constitute an aesthetic good were it to
exist. This is presumably how Gothic churches, on Scruton’s account,
were meant to function: they were intended not simply to present an
aesthetically pleasing image of the heavenly city, but to encourage in
the believer the thought that the heavenly city must itself be a
profound aesthetic good.
This case is relatively straightforward because here the realization
of the relevant thought involves the existence of a spatially extended
object, and in such cases it seems particularly natural to suppose that
the aesthetic goodness of the image will carry over to the aesthetic
goodness of the thing imaged, on the grounds that the two must share
some significant isomorphism of structure, or some other aesthetic-
ally relevant feature, if the first is to succeed as an image of the second.
(Although this association will hold in standard cases, it is not diffi-
cult to think of counter-examples. A painting of some scene in the
real world may be beautiful even if the scene as it actually exists in the
real world is devoid of any aesthetic interest—but in such cases the
mismatch arises, presumably, only insofar as the ‘image’ fails to
function as an image.) The situation is perhaps rather more compli-
cated when we consider, say, the thought of the divine nature.
Suppose that this thought can enter into the sensory appearances,
so that the appearances then image the divine nature. In this case, if
we say that the image is good in aesthetic terms, are we committed to
saying that the divine nature would also be aesthetically good, were it
to exist? Let us take a particular example. Suppose that a particular
perceptual gestalt succeeds in imaging the divine nature precisely
insofar as the gestalt is aesthetically excellent. Suppose for example
(to follow Edwards’s discussion) that the gestalt succeeds in imaging
the divine nature insofar as it exemplifies aesthetically excellent
qualities such as ‘sweetness’ and ‘calmness’. In that case, we may
infer that these aesthetic excellences must also be present in the divine
nature, albeit perhaps in analogical form. And that suggests in turn
that the divine nature must be aesthetically excellent, at least to the
extent of sharing the aesthetic merits of the gestalt which images it.
So the case we have been making helps to explain why it should be
that faith involves a commitment to the thought that the truth of the
relevant hypotheses would be, as Alston puts it, ‘a good thing’. In
brief, if a person accepts these thoughts or hypotheses, in part,
because of their capacity to enter enrichingly into the sensory appear-
ances, then to that extent she is committed to the idea that the
relevant perceptual gestalt is aesthetically excellent; and insofar as
this gestalt images the thing or state of affairs that is picked out in the
thought, then to that extent she is also committed, for the reasons we
have been exploring, to the idea that this thing or state of affairs
would also constitute an aesthetic good were it to exist. Of course, this
case is concerned only with the aesthetic goodness of the image and
the thing imaged. And it is possible for the image of something to be
aesthetically pleasing, while the thing as realized would be, for
example, morally reprehensible; and in such a case, the aesthetic
goodness of the thing may not be sufficient to establish that it is
overall good. Nonetheless, the case which we have been assembling
does show that the person of faith has good grounds for supposing
that the realization of the relevant thoughts would result in an
aesthetic good, and to this extent this case helps to explain how the
conditions which lead to faith (insofar as they rest on the pragmatic
case which we have been considering) have a tendency to ensure that
the person of faith will take the realisation of the relevant ‘hypotheses’
to be ‘a good thing’. From this perspective, Alston’s requirement on
this point is not an ‘add-on’, but bound up with the underlying
conditions which enable the commitment of faith.
Alston’s last requirement is that the person of faith should take the
hypotheses in question to be under-evidenced, or lacking in rational
support in some way, in some degree. Of course, this condition is also
satisfied by the case we have been making. That case has, after all, a
pragmatic character: it starts out from the assumption that epistemic
considerations are not sufficient to establish that religious belief is
overall probable. However, we might wonder whether the pragmatic
case which we have been developing might nonetheless be relevant to
the construction of an epistemic case in support of religious belief.
I shall return to this possibility in the final section of this chapter.
In brief, the case we have been developing here is addressed to the
person who satisfies Alston’s epistemic conditions for faith, and it
holds out to that person the prospect of a significant good which can
be realized when she takes on the thoughts of a given religious
tradition, and uses those thoughts, once she has been properly
inducted into the tradition, to shape her experience of the sensory
world. The fundamental intuition here is that choosing to shape one’s
perceptual world in this way can be practically rational in rather the
way that it can be practically rational for a person to choose aesthetic-
ally agreeable furnishings for her house, or to choose to cultivate a
deep appreciation of a particular artistic tradition because of the
aesthetic fulfilments that she will be afforded thereby. But the choice
to enter into the perceptual world of a given religious tradition, and to
appreciate it in aesthetic terms, is not merely an act of aesthetic
commitment, I have been urging. The person who does this will be
drawn thereby into certain habitual modes of perceiving the sensory
world, and to that extent she will be predisposed to make certain
practical as well as perceptual discriminations. Moreover, by contem-
plating the defining thoughts of a religious tradition as rendered in
the sensory appearances, and by coming to a gradually deepened
appreciation of the aesthetic goodness of whatever is represented in
those thoughts, a person is also likely to be drawn towards a deepened
commitment to the idea that the realisation of those thoughts would
be ‘a good thing’. In these ways, the person who satisfies Alston’s
epistemic conditions on faith, and who adopts the thoughts of a
religious tradition for the sake of an aesthetically enlivened perceptual
world, is liable to be pulled away from the condition of simply toying
with the tradition’s categories for the sake of some purely aesthetic
satisfaction, and to be drawn instead towards the condition of au-
thentic religious faith.
For these reasons, I conclude that the central theme of this book,
concerning the relationship between religious thought and the sens-
ory appearances, can indeed be applied to the question of whether
human beings might have a sound pragmatic reason to take up the
life of religious faith. Let us consider next how this case might map on
to another, very widely discussed pragmatic argument for religious
faith.
William James’ essay ‘The Will to Believe’ is perhaps the most
celebrated example of a pragmatic case for religious belief. So it is of
some interest to ask whether the argument which we have been
developing resembles his in structural terms, even if it associates
with religious belief a rather different pragmatic ‘benefit’.
WILLIAM J AMES’ PRAGMATIC CASE FOR

RELIGIOUS BELIEF
The drift of James’ pragmatic argument for religious belief is helpfully

summarized in an example he gives at the close of ‘The Will to
Believe’. Here he considers the condition of a person who is stranded
on a mountainside in swirling mist. Suppose this person sees before
them various paths, and suppose that the evidence does not deter-
mine whether any of the paths will lead down the mountain to safety.
And suppose that each of these paths has, from this person’s perspec-
tive, an equal claim to be the best route. Under these circumstances,
James urges, it is rational to choose a path: to remain where you are,
in a state of suspended judgement, would have the consequence of
certain death. So it makes sound practical sense to choose one path or
other, and to stick with it, in the hope that it will lead to safety.7
In the course of his discussion, James introduces a vocabulary to
describe choices of this kind. First of all, such choices are ‘forced’.
James is particularly interested in choices which are ‘forced’ insofar as
doing nothing itself amounts to a kind of choice since it has practical
consequences. In the case of our mountainside example, the choice is
‘forced’ in James’ sense because suspending judgement, and taking
none of the paths, amounts to a choice of a kind, and a bad choice,
since it means forfeiting the good of reaching safety. Secondly, a
choice of this kind is ‘living’. That is to say, the various possibilities
between which the person is choosing are all genuinely open to them
in practical terms. In the case of James’ example, the person is able to
take any or none of the paths before them. And lastly, such choices
are ‘momentous’. That is to say, a lot turns on the choice; indeed, in
James’ example, the choice is a matter of life and death.8 In general,
the thesis which James defends in his essay is this: if a choice between
various ‘hypotheses’ is ‘living’, ‘momentous’, and ‘forced’, and if the
question of which hypothesis is correct is of its nature such that it
cannot be settled on intellectual grounds, then it is rationally permis-
sible to have recourse to the ‘will to believe’; that is, it is rationally
permissible to choose a hypothesis on the basis of its prospective
benefits, and to act on it, despite the lack of evidence in its support.
Applying this rule to James’ example, the person stranded on the
mountainside is rationally entitled to ‘believe’ that a given path will
lead down the mountain, by committing herself practically to
following that path.9
7
The example is taken from Fitz-James Stephen. See William James, ‘The Will to
Believe’, in William James, Essays in Pragmatism (New York: Hafner Press, 1948),
p. 109.
8
James, ‘Will to Believe’, pp. 89–90.
9
Ibid. ‘Will to Believe’, p. 95.
James is clearly right about the particular situation of practical
choice which he describes: under these conditions it is rationally
permissible to choose a path. (Indeed, under these conditions it
would surely be a failure of rationality not to choose a path.) And
the reason why this choice is rationally permissible is, I take it,
adequately captured for these purposes in the observation that we
are dealing here with an ‘option’ which is ‘living’, ‘momentous’, and
‘forced’, and which of its nature cannot be resolved by appeal to
epistemic considerations. It is James’ view, of course, that we face
the same kind of choice when we consider whether or not we should
‘believe’ the claims of religion.
James’ text was delivered as a lecture before it was published; and in
the text, he expresses the view that his educated North American
audience (along with James himself) are in a position of epistemic
parity with regard to the claims of religion: for this group, the
evidence does not favour either the stance of religion or that of
anti-religion. And he suggests that this truth reflects the more funda-
mental truth that questions of religion are of their nature such that
they cannot be settled by appeal to evidence. James also thinks that
for this group, the choice between religion and non-religion (which
will include agnosticism) is living, forced, and momentous. It is
‘living’ insofar as each of these life ‘paths’ is a practical possibility
for them. It is ‘forced’ since any attempt to suspend judgement, by
taking an agnostic stance, will deprive the person of the benefits of
religion. And this choice is also ‘momentous’, James affirms, because
these benefits are very significant. While James is committed to the
idea that religious believing confers weighty non-epistemic benefits,
in this essay he characterizes these benefits only in the most general of
terms. He says, for example, that in believing we feel ‘we are doing the
universe the deepest service we can’.10 And he notes that ‘religion’
affirms both that ‘the best things are the more eternal things’ and that
‘we are better off even now if we believe [this claim] to be true’.11 So a
question which remains at the close of James’ essay is this: what is the
nature of the benefit which attaches to religious believing, and why
should we suppose that this benefit is substantial enough to ensure
that the choice between religion and its alternative constitutes a
‘momentous’ option?
10
11
JAMES’ CASE AND THE ARGUMENT FROM

THE SENSORY APPEARANCES
The case which we have been developing, by appeal to the relation-

ship between religious thought and the sensory appearances, meets,
I think, James’ desiderata for pragmatic arguments. First of all, this
case shows in general terms why we should consider the choice
between religion and non-religion to be ‘forced’. (Or given the struc-
ture of our discussion, we might prefer to say that it shows why the
choice between one religion and another, or the choice between that
religion and various forms of secularism, is in each case forced.) This
is a real question for a Jamesian-style pragmatic justification of
religious belief. For on James’ account, the religious ‘hypothesis’ is
only as likely as its alternative. And if it is possible to ‘believe’ the
religious hypothesis when it has that sort of epistemic status, then
why should it not be possible to ‘believe’ at the same time its ‘alterna-
tive’, since that alternative will after all enjoy the same epistemic
status? As I have noted, James’ view seems to be that the ‘option’
involving religion and its alternative is ‘forced’ because the choice of
the alternative would in practice deprive the person of the benefits of
religion; and we might infer that to the extent that we can succeed in
choosing both religion and its alternative, then we would, in terms of
practical consequences, be choosing the alternative. But again because
of his failure in this essay to specify the nature of the benefits of
religion, this proposal remains somewhat schematic. The case which
we been considering provides one way of filling out James’ account on
this point.
In standard cases of aesthetic perception we face a choice. For
example, we cannot, at one and the same time, experience a Gothic
church both as a single entity minutely divided and also as a compos-
ite entity made from parts: although we can of course switch between
these gestalts, we cannot experience them simultaneously. I have been
arguing that the complex of concepts that defines a given religious
tradition can be inscribed in our experience of the sensory world, so
as to generate a distinctive perceptual world. And here again, we
might suppose, we face a choice: we cannot inhabit, at the same
time, both the perceptual world that is relative to, say, Christian
concepts, and the perceptual world which is enabled by the concepts
of another tradition. So might we understand the idea that the choice
between one tradition and another is ‘forced’ by reference to this
truth concerning the mutually exclusive nature of certain perceptual
gestalts?
It seems that the case cannot be quite that straightforward. Is it not
possible, after all, to switch between tradition-relative perceptual
gestalts over time, and to enjoy first one and then another, rather as
it is possible to switch between two traditions of art, each of which has
its own canons of aesthetic excellence and associated skills of percep-
tion? And would not this switching result in an experience that was
overall richer in aesthetic terms—when compared with the ‘monot-
ony’ of remaining within a single tradition-infused gestalt? And if that
is so, then why think that the pragmatic case which we have been
considering presents us with a choice that is ‘forced’?
In response to this objection we might note that while this alterna-
tion between gestalts is a possibility in principle, it may not be an
option in practice. It is easy enough to switch between seeing a Gothic
church as a single entity divided and seeing it as an assembled entity,
since no training is required for entry into these perceptual gestalts.
By contrast, as we have noted, it is plausible to suppose that it is only
possible to enter deeply into, say, the Christian perceptual gestalt on
the basis of extended training in the relevant skills of conceptualiza-
tion and attention. And there will therefore be limited opportunity to
achieve this sort of proficiency in relation to more than one tradition.
And even if it proves possible for a person to acquire the requisite
intellectual and perceptual skills in relation to two or more traditions,
the pragmatic case for ‘belief ’ will only apply (if we follow Alston) to
those traditions which satisfy the relevant epistemic criteria: so even if
I have the perceptual skills which are required for entry into the
perceptual gestalt that is relative to a particular tradition, this consid-
eration will not add up to a pragmatic case for ‘believing’ the claims of
that tradition, unless these claims are thought to be at least as
plausible, in epistemic terms, as those of rival traditions.
Moreover, even if it is possible for a given person to inhabit, with
appropriate sophistication, the perceptual world of two or more
traditions, and even if each of these traditions meets, for that person,
the epistemic conditions for faith, there is still a question about
whether they are equally satisfying aesthetically. If one tradition
outstrips the others aesthetically, then it is to that tradition that the
person will naturally give most of their energies, and it is that
tradition which they will prefer to inhabit in perceptual terms, even if
they make occasional forays into the perceptual world of other
traditions. And in turn, therefore, it is their commitment to this
tradition which will most evidently satisfy the requirements for
faith: it is by this tradition that they are most likely to be guided in
their practical discriminations, and they will be more inclined to
judge of this tradition that the truth of its doctrines would be ‘a
good thing’. Moreover, their habituation to this tradition relative to
others will presumably grow in time, and their tendency to prefer it in
these respects is likely, therefore, to become more pronounced with
time. So given these practical, epistemic, and aesthetic constraints, it
seems likely that the pragmatic case for religious belief which we have
been assembling will have a tendency to apply, for any given person,
to one tradition only. So this case seems likely to satisfy, to this extent,
James’ requirement that the relevant choice be ‘forced’. In other
words, the case is in practice unlikely to leave us in the position
where there are several tradition-infused ways of perceiving the
world which can be adopted jointly, in such a way that our commit-
ment to each amounts to a commitment of faith.
This account also throws James’ other requirements into new relief.
James notes that for a choice to be ‘living’ each of its constituent
hypotheses must be ‘live’. And he gives this account of what it is for a
hypothesis to be ‘live’: ‘A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real
possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the
Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature—it
refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all.’12 For a hypothesis to
be ‘live’ in this sense, it is not enough that it should be as likely, in
abstractly epistemic terms, as any of its alternatives: it has in some
way to ‘scintillate with credibility’. And for James, this seems to mean
that the hypothesis has in some way to represent a real practical
possibility: as he notes, ‘deadness and liveness in an hypothesis . . . are
measured by . . . willingness to act.’13 The case which we have been
expounding suggests a particular construal of what might be meant
by ‘scintillation’ and ‘willingness to act’ in this context. This case is
concerned with a choice between ‘hypotheses’ (or bundles of thoughts
and associated concepts) insofar as those hypotheses are capable of
entering into the sensory appearances. And insofar as a hypothesis
12
13
can be inscribed in the sensory appearances, or bodied forth in
sensory terms, then it can enable a new set of practical as well as
perceptual discriminations, and so has a direct hold on our imagin-
ation and our capacities for action. Of course, James’ notion of what it
is for a hypothesis to be ‘live’ does not have to be read in these terms.
But he does not himself specify exactly what psychological (rather
than epistemic) ‘oomph’ enables a hypothesis to take on this charac-
ter. And our account provides a response to this question, by showing
how a hypothesis may come to seem more ‘vivid’ than alternatives
which are indistinguishable from it epistemically, and how that hy-
pothesis may shape our practical judgements directly, in perceptual
terms, rather than just inferentially. The term ‘scintillation’ suggests
that James has in mind some phenomenological quality which at-
taches to certain ‘hypotheses’; and in this way, we can indicate, in
general terms, what that quality might be.
Lastly, James insists of course that this sort of choice must be
‘momentous’. Again, the pragmatic argument which we have been
expounding provides a way of developing his rather sketchy com-
ments on this point. For James, the choice will count as ‘momentous’
insofar as there is a significant good at stake. And on the account
which we have been following, that good is the potential renewal of
the person’s perceptual world.
In sum, the pragmatic justification for religious belief which we
have been developing meets, I suggest, the various desiderata which
James lays down for such arguments, and at the same time it enables
us to give further content to the theoretical concepts which structure
his discussion—namely, the concepts marked by the terms ‘living’,
‘momentous’, and ‘forced’. Given the status of James’ argument as,
I think, the single most widely discussed version of the pragmatic case
for religious belief, this result is of some interest, I hope. To put our
case very briefly, if the adoption of a set of religious categories can
enhance a person’s perceptual world, then that person has a sound
practical reason to do just that, and under the conditions we have
described, this choice will amount to a commitment of faith. So in this
way we can bring together our central concern in this book, namely,
the relationship between religious thought and a revivifying of the
sensory appearances, and the question of the pragmatic grounds for
religious faith.
So far, then, our concern has been with the pragmatic case for
religious faith. But the idea that religious concepts and practices can
help to constitute a perceptual world also has some bearing, I think,
on the epistemic case for religious belief. Let us consider this matter
next. The reader who is not so exercised by these questions can pass
directly to Chapter 5, where we shall resume the main thread of our
enquiry.
THE SENSORY APPEARANCES AND THE

EPISTEMIC CASE FOR RELIGIOUS BELIEF
Let me venture a speculation: many believers take their tradition to be

plausible, in epistemic terms, because they find that there is a ‘fit’
between the defining concepts of that tradition and the world as it is
presented to them in experiential terms. I am not suggesting that this
association is typically embedded in an argument. The believer does
not normally reason from the observation of this fit to the conclusion
that the fundamental claims of their tradition are true. But independ-
ently of any inference, the believer may well take that fit to be a reason
for supposing that these claims are true. A sceptic is likely to protest
that the believer has in that case run together the psychological and
epistemic domains, by confusing the experiential vividness of a set of
‘hypotheses’ with their claim to truth. This protest could be developed
using the theoretical perspective which we have been exploring in the
present discussion. It might be said: any such fit tells us more about
the believer, and the concepts with which they are operating, than it
does about what the world ‘out there’ is really like; in other words, the
fit results simply from a kind of projection on to the realm of experi-
ence of certain ways of thinking. In this section I shall argue just the
opposite: the case which we have been considering can lend a meas-
ure of support to the believer’s unreflective tendency to associate the
psychological vividness of certain categories with their claim to track
reality.
Let us return to Scruton’s example of the Gothic church. At the
heart of this example stands an historical claim: the designers of the
Gothic church intended these structures to image the heavenly city.
Now if that claim is true, then it leads on, reasonably, to a certain
expectation: if this was indeed the reason for the making of Gothic
churches, then we should be able to use the thought of the heavenly
city to guide our construal of these buildings, so as to produce a
perceptual gestalt which images a city—and in particular a heavenly
city, to the extent that such a city differs from other cities in ways that
are imageable in this sort of way. Moreover, this gestalt should
present a satisfying unity, for at least two reasons. First, the object
being imaged—the heavenly city—is a unity, and accordingly, what-
ever images that object, insofar as it functions successfully as an
image, must also be a unity. And secondly, if the designers of the
Gothic church were competent designers, then the relevant percep-
tual gestalt should be achievable without any great strain. Indeed, if
they were competent designers, then we should expect that all the key
elements of the building can be integrated satisfyingly into this
reading of the structure: none should be such as to resist assimilation
in these terms.
These two considerations might come apart in certain cases. Per-
haps an artefact is intended to present an image of something that is
fundamentally disordered, or lacking in unity. In that case, even if the
thought of this ‘something’ should be capable of structuring the
appearances so as to generate a relevant perceptual gestalt, we should
not expect this gestalt to constitute a unity, since the thing to be
imaged is, after all, not a unity. But we would still expect the gestalt to
constitute a unity in a further sense, insofar as all of its parts can be
subsumed without strain under this one interpretation: it will be a
unity to the extent that collectively its parts are subsumable under one
interpretation. But in the case of the Gothic church, evidently, these
two considerations work together: the relevant gestalt should be
unitary both insofar as the thing to be imaged is a unity, and insofar
as its various parts all conform to, or without strain fall under, a single
interpretation.
If all this is true, then the historical claim that it was the intention
of the designers of the Gothic church to present an image of the
heavenly city will admit, in some measure, of a phenomenological
test. If the elements of a Gothic church can be subsumed satisfyingly
within a perceptual gestalt which is informed by this interpretation,
and if they then form a unity of the kind that is fitting in a city, then to
that extent this hypothesis will be confirmed. And if they cannot be so
subsumed, or if they do not exhibit such a unity, then to that extent
the hypothesis will be disconfirmed. Why? Well, in brief, if the parts
of a Gothic church cannot be organized into a relevant perceptual
gestalt, then the church will not be very successful considered as an
image of the heavenly city. And if the church is not successful in this
respect, then that is a reason for supposing that its designers did not
intend it to serve as an image of the heavenly city. It follows, then, that
the phenomenological considerations to which Scruton points are
also relevant, potentially, to an assessment of the plausibility of an
historical claim.
APPLYING SCRUTON’S EXAMPLE TO THE

IDEA OF DIVINE DESIGN
We might wonder next whether something similar might be said

when we move away from the domain of human design, and concern
ourselves instead with the idea that the world is the product of a
divine design. This extension from the case of the Gothic church will
hold most straightforwardly if we suppose that God intended the
world to present an image of something or other. Of course, this is
precisely what many theists have supposed. We have seen one
example of this claim in Jonathan Edwards’ report that following
his conversion, the divine nature was revealed to him in the sensory
appearances. The same sort of idea is evident in Aquinas’s proposal
that the world, considered as an integrated whole, bears a likeness to
God.14 It is notable that this thought is not incidental to Aquinas’s
larger theological enterprise, since it is a direct corollary of his
teaching that God is subsistent existence. Insofar as the set of crea-
turely types which comprises the world is diverse, Aquinas reasons,
then to that extent the world will succeed in representing not simply
what it is to be a human being, or a scarab beetle, or a Russian civet, or
some other thing with a circumscribed, creaturely nature, but what it
is to be without restriction; and to that extent, it will succeed in
revealing, albeit imperfectly, the divine nature. For Aquinas, it was
for this reason that God elected to make a world comprising a diverse
set of creaturely types, rather than a universe consisting solely of, say,
intellectual creatures, despite the fact that being intellectual makes for
14
It is worth noting that Aquinas distinguishes between the terms ‘likeness’ and
‘image’ in this context: Summa Theologiae 1a. 93. 2 ad 3.
perfection in a creature.15 And in general, it is no surprise that theists
who have upheld the goodness of the world have also affirmed that
the world images the divine nature. After all, on any orthodox theistic
view, the divine nature is the ultimate standard of perfection; and
insofar as it is good, the world must, therefore, approximate to that
standard, so far as it can. And to the extent that it does approximate
to that standard, then it will succeed in imaging, or in some relevant
sense resembling, the divine nature.
If all of this is so, then might we not reason here as we reasoned in
relation to the design of the Gothic church, albeit that we are now
concerned with a metaphysical, rather than an historical, design
claim? I take it that if our focus is the particular claim that the
world was made so as to image the divine nature, then we should
be able to proceed in the same sort of way in each of these cases. In
brief, if the world is to serve as an image of the divine nature, then it
should be possible for human beings to enter into a relevant percep-
tual gestalt. And if that is so, then the claim that the world was made
so as to image the divine nature will admit, in some degree, of a
phenomenological test.
We have already considered the form which might be taken by such
an experience. Minimally, the relevant gestalt will need to be unitary,
both insofar as it succeeds in imaging something which is supremely
unitary (namely, the divine nature) and insofar as its various parts
can all be subsumed without strain under this one interpretation
(of imaging the divine nature). Equally, we might suppose that the
qualities of ‘calmness’ and ‘sweetness’ will be particularly salient in
some such experiences, and that the phenomenal feel of the world will
be one of joy. Or if we follow Aquinas’s account, then we might say
that the world as experienced can constitute an image of the divine
nature, whether or not we think of the experience in these terms, when
we perceive relevant swathes of the world as being both diverse in their
constitution and at the same time as unitary.
The tradition of landscape painting provides one example of how
we might be able to enter into a perceptual gestalt of this kind—since
such paintings attend both to the diversity of the natural world (it is,
15
See for example Summa Theologiae 1a. 47. 1. Of course, the thought that the
world in some sense reveals God’s nature is also evident famously in the first chapter
of Paul’s letter to the Romans. See especially v. 20. See too the idea that ‘the heavens
declare the glory of God’ (Ps. 19:1, the King James Version).
after all, whole landscapes that are represented, rather than simply
individual objects, or a strictly localised scene), while at the same time
showing how this diversity, in the colours of the sky, or the shapes
and hues of land and sea, can be experienced as a satisfying unity. Our
capacity to find aesthetic satisfaction in large-scale features of the
world, be it alpine or pastoral vistas, or sea scenes, or skyscapes, and
so on, is a remarkable feature both of the world and of ourselves as
perceivers of the world; and it is this feature which has made possible,
of course, the sustained interest in the natural world that is evident in
various traditions of art. On the approach we are considering here,
these truths about the world and ourselves can be read as confirm-
ations of the idea that the world was intended to present an image of
the divine nature. This is not to say, of course, that these consider-
ations of themselves establish that idea, in the sense of showing it to
be overall probable; but it is to say that these facts, or something like
these facts, concerning human beings’ aesthetic sensibilities, are what
we should expect if the world was made for the purpose of imaging
the divine nature; and to that extent, the facts confirm this conception
of its purpose.16
Let us pause briefly to consider these issues from another vantage
point. A ‘projectivist’ might urge that when a person experiences the
world as an image of the divine nature, this is just a case of thought
spreading itself on objects; it is analogous, as Hume might have said,
to finding ‘human faces in the moon [or] armies in the clouds’.17 On
this view, the divine image is not ‘really’ in nature, and our experience
of any such imaging relation is rather an invention than a discovery of
the imagination. But in general, a projectivist account of our experi-
ence of some property P will be hard to sustain if we come to believe
that the presence of P in the world would provide a good explanation
of the experience. For example, it might be said that our experience of
depth in the world is a projection, since the images which are formed
16
The tradition of ‘extrovertive’ mysticism provides another example of how the
unity of the sensory world may be grasped in perceptual or quasi-perceptual terms.
See Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 58–60. I shall examine some related forms of experience
in Chapter 5.
17
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (London: Adam
and Charles Black, 1956), Section III. I am grateful to Robin LePoidevin for drawing
my attention to this passage, in his presidential address to the British Society for the
Philosophy of Religion, delivered in Oxford in September 2011.
on the retina are after all two-dimensional.18 But this is not normally
how we would characterize such experience: we are more inclined to
say that depth really is a feature of the world, and that we really
experience that feature. And why do we take this view? In brief, we do
this because the postulation of depth in the world has a part to play in
explaining the experience of depth. Similarly, if the idea that the
world was designed so as to image the divine nature can help to
explain experiences of the world as, apparently, an image of the divine
nature, then to that extent we have reason to suppose that this
imaging relation is discovered in the world, rather than being simply
invented by the imagination. Here, our reason for rejecting projecti-
vist accounts of the experience of the world as an image of the divine
nature will be of the same type as our reason for rejecting projectivist
accounts of the human experience of depth.
Nonetheless, there may be differences between these two cases. It
may be, for example, that the design hypothesis but not the depth
hypothesis must contend with rival hypotheses which also have some
claim to explanatory power. (While the design hypothesis may pre-
dict the occurrence of the kinds of experience we have been consider-
ing with reasonable probability, this will not of itself suffice to show
that it is the best of the explanations available to us.) But insofar as the
experience of the world as an image of God’s nature is well explained
by reference to the idea that the world was made so as to present such
an image, then to that extent we have reason to treat these experiences
in realist rather than projectivist terms.19 And insofar as this experi-
ence is predicted by the idea that the world was made to image the
divine nature, then we have reason to suppose that that idea is
confirmed thereby, even if it is not rendered overall probable.
Before proceeding, let us pause to consider one question which
might be put to this account. It might be wondered whether the case
18
I am grateful to Robin LePoidevin for this example, which he developed in a
rather different way in the same address.
19
We could also apply these considerations to the question of whether the belief
that the world was made so as to image the divine nature has ‘warrant’, in Alvin
Plantinga’s sense of this term. If there is a God, and if God intended the world to
present an image of the divine nature, then it seems reasonable to suppose that, in
standard cases, experiences which lead to the belief that God’s nature is imaged in the
world were intended by God to produce that belief; and we might conclude that under
these conditions, this belief will have warrant. Compare Plantinga’s discussion in
Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 189.
I have been developing overinterprets Aquinas’s suggestion that the
world should comprise a diverse set of creaturely types if it is to
resemble the divine nature. After all, there is nothing in what Aquinas
says which requires us to suppose that the thought of unity-in-diver-
sity can enter into our experience of the world, so as to produce a
particular gestalt, which in turn constitutes an image of the divine
nature. For Aquinas’s account of the world’s resemblance to God to
hold good, is it not enough that the world should in fact comprise a
diverse set of creaturely types, and that it should in some relevant
sense exhibit unity (such as the unity that is involved in its conformity
to wide-ranging laws of nature)? And if we are to recognize this
resemblance, is it not enough that we should grasp these truths in
intellectual terms? Why think that our appreciation of the resem-
blance should also be realized in perceptual, and not only in abstractly
intellectual, terms?
In response to this concern, we might note that Aquinas is willing
to use the term ‘image’ (imago) in this connection, although only in
certain specialized contexts. This might give us reason to favour a
perceptual reading of his account.20 But bracketing the question of
how Aquinas in particular is to be read, the perceptual account of
these matters is surely to be upheld, for the ‘spiritual’ reasons which
we have touched upon, over and again, in this discussion. In standard
cases, when a doctrinal claim is inscribed in the sensory appearances,
so that its content is imaged by those appearances, then it can guide
our actions directly, in perceptual terms. Moreover, since we are
creatures of sense, it is fitting that we should recognize religious truths
in sensory and not only in abstractly intellectual terms. For insofar as
we do this, then it is the whole person—in their affective–
behavioural–intellectual integrity—who is engaged by these truths.
EXTENDING THE ACCOUNT: THE CASE

OF PRIMAL RELIGIONS
The idea that the world images God is evident not only in the various
monotheisms, and in philosophically sophisticated renderings of
20
I note Aquinas’s usage on this point in my essay ‘Thomas Aquinas: Reading the
Idea of Dominion in the Light of the Doctrine of Creation’, in D. Horrell et al., eds,
Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives, pp. 160–1.
monotheism such as that propounded by Aquinas, but also in folk
religious traditions. It is easy to read the stories of the gods in primal
religions as in effect personifications of whole regions of experience.
Think, for example, of how talk of Poseidon or Neptune in Greco-
Roman religion serves to epitomize human experience of the sea. If
this is the right way to interpret the drift of these stories, then we can
say that in these traditions the world serves to image the gods (here
the sea, for example, serves to image Poseidon). Or to put the point
otherwise, we can say that stories about the gods sum up in narrative
terms the nature of various regions of experience. Keith Ward notes
this tendency in Inuit religious thought. Here he is commenting on a
female figure who is known to the Inuit as Sedna:
Perhaps there may be those who take literally the story of the girl who
began to eat her giant parents and was cast by them beneath the sea—
the fundamentalists of Inuit religion. But just as it is clear [to the Ainu
of the northern Japanese islands] that spirits do not really eat the food
offered to them, so it is quite clear that there is no such person beneath
the waves who controls the movements of whales and seals . . . What is
here represented in an image is the character of the sea itself, as a power
for good and harm. What the shaman meets in the dream-quest is this
internalized image of the powers which bound Inuit life.21
Here the character of a whole region of experience—namely, experi-
ence of the sea—is captured in storied terms, through the figure of
Sedna. Personification represents another way in which the world’s
diversity may be held together with its unity. And such storied
representations of the world lend themselves very naturally to the
idea that there is an imaging relation between whole regions of the
world and the gods. As Ward puts the point here, Sedna serves as an
‘image’ of the ‘character of the sea itself ’. On this account, it is the god
or sacred figure who images the world. But if we were to be realists
about Sedna, rather than treating her simply as a dream image or
fictional character, then we might equally say that it is the world, and
the sea in particular, which images her. Examples such as that of
Sedna are common in the anthropological literature.22 And they
provide a further way (in addition to those envisaged by philosophical
21
Keith Ward, Religion and Revelation: A Theology of Revelation in the World’s
Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 65.
22
I explore a number of such examples in Mark Wynn, God and Goodness:
A Natural Theological Perspective (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 159–66.
theologians such as Aquinas and Edwards) of sustaining the idea that
whole regions of the world, rather than simply individual items, can
image the gods.
In Ward’s example it is striking that Sedna images the sea not
fundamentally by reproducing its physical qualities in the manner of,
say, a pictorial representation of a marine scene, but instead by
displaying its nature ‘as a power for good and harm’. In other
words, what Sedna images is the existential import of the sea for the
Inuit, as the giver and taker of life—as the source of the community’s
livelihood, but at the same time as dangerous and unpredictable. So
here the unity of the world, or at least of the sea, has to do with the
fact that it presents a unitary existential meaning: the sea is not devoid
of existential significance for the Inuit, nor is its existential signifi-
cance chaotic, or simply unfathomable; instead, the sea’s bearing on
the lives of the Inuit conforms to certain general patterns, and those
patterns can be reproduced in storied terms. It matters, of course, that
Sedna images the sea in particular. The sea is, after all, the fundamen-
tal environment for the Inuit—it is the environment in relation to
which this community must succeed if it is to survive, let alone thrive.
So a storied image of the sea is at the same time, for the Inuit, an
image of the basic conditions of existence. So in this respect, such an
image functions rather like an ‘existential feeling’ of the kind that we
discussed in the last chapter. In both cases, the basic conditions of our
existence are understood not abstractly, in the language of the sci-
ences, for example, but in terms of their existential import.
The Sedna stories are also of interest because they highlight once
again the close connection between religious language and the taking
up of a particular perceptual and practical stance in relation to the
world. These stories do not epitomize the sea from the point of view
of a neutral observer, but deal with those qualities of the sea with
which the Inuit must reckon in practical terms if they are to survive—
qualities such as its unpredictability and dangerousness. So if a person
has internalized the Sedna narrative, and has come to think of the sea
in the terms provided by that narrative, then it is these qualities in
particular that will be prominent in her experience of the sea; and it is
reasonable to suppose that these qualities will carry a certain affective
charge in her experience, in accordance with their significance within
the story. We might reasonably conclude, then, that the Sedna story
serves to induct the Inuit into a particular perceptual and practical
relationship to the sea—one that is defined by a certain pattern of
salient viewing and associated phenomenal feelings.
We have been considering the possibility that we can test in
phenomenological terms a metaphysical claim, namely, the claim
that the world was made so as to image the divine nature. And we
have noted several ways in which the world might in principle
function as an image of the divine nature, appealing to the work of
philosophical theologians such as Aquinas and Edwards, as well as to
the habits of thought of traditional or primal religions. Of course, this
is a relatively easy case: if the world is to function as an ‘image’ of the
divine nature, then it is natural to conclude that there must be a
particular perceptual gestalt (or perhaps several such gestalts) which
holds the key to this imaging relation. But what about other ways of
characterizing the world’s purpose? Or what about claims which
make no reference to purpose but which are nonetheless concerned
with the fundamental character of the sensory world from a religious
point of view? Might claims of these kinds also admit of some sort of
phenomenological test? Let us consider these cases next.
EXTENDING THE ACCOUNT: PURPOSES OTHER

THAN IMAGING THE DIVINE NATURE
So far we have been concerned with the idea that the world was made
for a rather particular purpose: to image the divine nature. It is worth
emphasizing once again that this claim has a special significance in
theistic thought, because for theists of an orthodox persuasion, the
divine nature is the ultimate standard of value, and accordingly to say
that the world was made to image the divine nature, or to resemble
the divine nature so far as it can, is to affirm that the world is
fundamentally good. And that affirmation is at the core of all the
major monotheisms. No doubt there are other ways of upholding the
world’s goodness from a theistic vantage point, other than by saying
that the world images or resembles God; but this one seems particu-
larly felicitous, if the divine nature is conceived as the basic reference
point for judgements of value. As we have seen, the idea that there is
an imaging relation between the nature of the ‘gods’ and whole
swathes of human experience is also fundamental to ‘folk’ or primal
religions, such as that of the Inuit. Here the imaging relation matters
because talk of the gods is not fundamentally a speculative act but,
rather, a way of orienting the person practically and emotionally in
relationship to their material context (where that context may be the
sea, the forest, the desert, or some other natural space). And talk of
the gods can only play this role if there is some relevant isomorphism
between the divine and sensory realms. In the case of the Sedna
stories, for example, Sedna’s hot and unpredictable temper serves to
represent the unpredictable and potentially violent changes in the
‘mood’ of the sea.
So although we have been dealing so far with a rather particular
case, the case which postulates an imaging relation between the world
and the realm of God or the gods, this case seems to be fundamental
to the thought world of many religious traditions. So it is of some
interest to consider how the central thesis of our discussion (that
religious thoughts can enter into the sensory appearances) might be
relevant to the confirmation of the idea that the sensory world images
the divine world. Again, the case we have been considering so far is
particularly straightforward insofar as it can be patterned on Scru-
ton’s example, and the idea that a historical design claim concerning
the origin of Gothic churches can be tested phenomenologically.
More speculatively, we might wonder whether a similar test might
be applied in other cases. Suppose we take the claim that the world
was made for a purpose other than that of imaging the divine nature.
Might such a claim admit of confirmation, in some degree, in phe-
nomenological terms? In general, if I say that a particular object
serves some purpose P, and if I say that the object is well designed
for this purpose, and if I say that P is the fundamental purpose for
which this object was made, then it seems that I am committed to
saying that the various parts of this object constitute a unity insofar as
they are all subordinated to the realization of P. Perhaps some parts of
this object serve purposes other than P—purposes which are not
directly instrumental to the realization of P or conditional upon the
realization of P. But if P is the fundamental purpose of the object, then
even these parts must be consistent with the realization of P, and to
this extent they will also be subordinated to the realization of P: that
is, their character will need to be attuned to the realization of P, to the
extent that they will have to be designed, so far as possible, to ensure
that they do not frustrate the realization of P. (This is a minimal
condition: in standard cases, we might expect even such parts to
contribute positively to the realization of P.) So if a particular object
serves a purpose P in this way, then it seems that it will, to this extent,
constitute a unity when considered from the vantage point of P.
Suppose, for example, that I am introduced to a bicycle for the first
time, and that I have no knowledge of its function. In that case,
I might be struck by its various features: the hollow discs at its front
and back, for example. Suppose now that the function of the bicycle is
explained to me, along with the role of its various parts (the wheels
and gears, the brakes, and so on) in realizing this function. At this
point I will come to a new understanding of how the various parts of
the bicycle form a unity, insofar as they are knitted together to serve
the overarching function of providing a means of conveyance, with
minimal expenditure of effort on the part of the rider. Perhaps there is
no necessity to suppose that this intellectual appreciation of the unity
of the bicycle’s parts, relative to this particular purpose, can define a
correlative perceptual gestalt; but to say no more, it would not be
surprising if this intellectual insight could guide my construal of the
relations between the bicycle’s parts, so that I can grasp this particular
‘take’ on the structure of the bicycle directly in perception, rather than
simply in terms of some discursive account of how each of the parts
contributes, in concert with the parts around it, to the realization of
the relevant purpose.
This case is rather different from the case where an object is made
to serve as an image. If one thing is to succeed in imaging, quite
literally, another thing, then it seems that the first thing must be
apprehended in perceptual terms in the relevant way; so here there is
a tight connection between the realization of the purpose of imaging,
and the possibility of perceiving the thing which serves as the image
according to a relevant gestalt. By contrast, a bicycle can fulfil its
purpose, of serving as a mode of conveyance, providing that the
pedals mesh with the chain appropriately, and the chain with the
gear wheels, and so on; and none of this depends upon the possibility
of perceiving the bicycle in any particular way. What matters is what
the rider does on the bicycle, in terms of the motion of her limbs, not
how she or anyone else perceives the bicycle. Nonetheless, granted
that the bicycle serves this purpose, and that its parts constitute a
unity relative to this purpose, there is some reason to expect that it
will be possible to apprehend this unity directly in perceptual terms,
according to a relevant gestalt.
Suppose we return now to the case where the world is supposed to
have been made for some purpose P, where P is a purpose other than
that of imaging the divine nature. Might this claim concerning the
world’s purpose be open a degree of testing in phenomenological
terms? Well, by comparison with the case of the bike, we might say
that if the various parts of the world are supposed to fit together so as
to serve this purpose, and if they therefore constitute a unity relative
to this purpose, then there is perhaps at least some reason to expect
that it will be possible to apprehend this unity not simply in discursive
terms, but directly in perception, via a relevant gestalt. Perhaps this
expectation will not be so strong as to license the conclusion that if it
is not possible to perceive the world according to such a gestalt, then
the claim that the world serves this purpose is to that extent discon-
firmed; but if, on the other hand, it does prove possible to perceive the
world according to some such gestalt, then we might suppose that, to
that extent, the claim that the world serves this purpose has been
confirmed.
Consider the analogous case where some archaeologists are debat-
ing the question of what purpose was served by an historical artefact.
Take a particular hypothesis which is currently in play; and suppose
that this hypothesis cannot be used to generate a gestalt in which the
unity of these parts relative to the postulated purpose can be grasped
directly in perception. This failure need not defeat the hypothesis; and
perhaps it need not even count as evidence against it. But suppose
now that a further conception of the object’s purpose can be used to
generate a gestalt in which the unity of the object’s parts relative to
this purpose can be apprehended directly in perception, so that the
parts fall together within the gestalt satisfyingly and without strain.
The archaeologist who can ‘see’ directly how the parts of the artefact
serve the postulated purpose may well be more inclined to suppose
that this is indeed the purpose for which the object was made. And
this inclination would be, from the archaeologist’s point of view, not
just a matter of some psychological impulse; rather, it would be a way
of registering appropriately the evidential force of the fact that the
thought of the postulated purpose can enter into the appearance of
the artefact in this way.
FORM AND FUNCTION
Why might the possibility of such a gestalt count as evidence in

favour of the hypothesis? Well, if such a gestalt is possible, then the
relationship between the parts of the thing and its purpose will be
aesthetically pleasing: once we organize our perception of these parts
in accordance with the thought of the thing’s purpose, then the
resulting gestalt will be aesthetically satisfying, assuming again that
the parts fall together pleasingly and without strain under this inter-
pretation. And a designer who is interested not simply in functional
outcomes, but also in the excellence of an artefact in respect of its
appearance, might well be moved to make an object not simply so
that it will fulfil certain practical goals, but also so that the fittingness
of the relationship between the structure of the object and its fulfil-
ment of those goals can be apprehended in perception, so that the
object can be deemed excellent not simply in functional but also in
aesthetic terms. We are all familiar with this sort of case from
everyday life, because we all have experience of appraising things
not simply in functional terms, but also by considering whether the
relationship between the structure of the thing and its function is
elegant, or aesthetically pleasing.
We might suppose that there are two purposes in play here. First,
there is the functional purpose: the thing must be such as to secure the
practical goals for which it was made. And then there is in addition an
aesthetic purpose: here we are concerned with the thing’s excellence
in respect of its look. But in the case we are considering, these are not
simply discrete purposes. The excellence in the look of the thing is, in
this case, relative to the fittingness of the relationship between the
parts of the thing and its function. We see directly in perception how
these parts are apt for the fulfilment of this purpose, and the aesthetic
pleasure we find in contemplating the thing is relative to our appre-
hension of this function-enabling relationship. We could put this
point by saying that the fulfilment of the aesthetic purpose supervenes
upon the fulfilment of the functional purpose.
But we can also say that the object’s success in purely functional
terms is, in some measure, conditional upon the fittingness of the
relationship between its parts and its practical purpose, where fitting-
ness here is an aesthetic relation. No doubt, we can conceive of two
objects which perform a given function equally well, where the parts
of one but not the other are elegantly or fittingly related to the
function. Perhaps two bridges both serve the purpose of spanning a
river, and perhaps they do this equally well, to the extent that each of
them can bear equally well the weight of the traffic which passes
across the bridge, and to the extent that each of them affords that
traffic the same ease of passage, and so on. Nonetheless, if one of these
designs is more elegant than the other, in the sense that the fittingness
of parts to function is particularly striking in the case of this design,
then it is tempting to suppose that there are at least possible circum-
stances in which this more elegant bridge will perform better in
functional terms. For if the fit between parts and function is particu-
larly apt or snug in the case of this bridge, then it looks as though that
relation is to that extent more secure, or in some respect less at risk of
breaking down.
The superiority in fitness here may consist in nothing more than
the fact that one bridge requires a lesser quantity of raw material for
its construction. Here the superior fitness of this bridge consists in the
fact that it uses materials more economically, so that in this sense it
constitutes a more elegant solution to the challenge of spanning this
particular river. In this case there is no property intrinsic to the
bridges as constructed which will ensure that one performs better
than the other in purely functional terms: both are, let us suppose,
equally durable, and so on. Nonetheless, there are circumstances in
which the more elegant bridge would win out in functional terms—
namely, in the case in which there is a shortage of resources, so that
only this bridge can be completed fully according to its specification.
In short, the relation of ‘fittingness’ of parts to function is relevant
not only to the aesthetic excellence of an artefact: it is itself, in
standard cases, a measure of excellence in respect of function. So in
general, a designer has good reason to make an artefact in which the
relationship between parts and function is fitting or elegant, both
because such an artefact has the potential to present a more pleasing
appearance (in the case where the fittingness of parts to function is
grasped perceptually), but also because an artefact which exhibits
such a relation is to that extent liable to be more successful as an
artefact intended for practical use. If all of this is so, then elegance of
fit between parts and function is to some degree to be expected in the
work of an excellent designer; and in the work of such a designer it is
to some degree to be expected that it will be possible to grasp the
elegance of this relation directly in perception. Accordingly, if we can
apprehend directly in perception, via a relevant gestalt, the elegance
of the relation between the parts of an artefact and its putative
purpose, then to that extent we will be able to confirm that this is
indeed the purpose for which the artefact was made. The ordering of
the space inside a church, for example, may be fittingly adjusted to the
requirements of a given mode of worship—and in participating in the
relevant liturgy, I may come to grasp practically and perceptually the
pleasing relation between the ordering of the church and its role as a
medium for worship. And insofar as I can do this, then the thought
that the church was indeed designed for this particular mode of
worship is to that extent confirmed.23
BACK TO THE CASE OF DIVINE DESIGN
Suppose we return to the case where God (or the gods) is said to have
made the world for some purpose P, where P is a purpose other than
that of imaging the divine nature. For the reasons we have been
considering, we may say of this case that if we are able to grasp in
perception, via a relevant gestalt, the fittingness of the connection
between various parts of the world and the fulfilment of P, then to
that extent the thought that the world was indeed made for purpose P
is confirmed. We might also wish to say that if we cannot see the
fittingness of this connection in such a way, then to that extent this
thought is disconfirmed. But that is a more ambitious claim. The
claim might be defended by arguing not simply that it is to some
degree to be expected that we will be able to see the fittingness of this
connection, if the world was made for purpose P, but that it is overall
probable that we will be able to do so. But I have not defended that
further thought here.
How might this general perspective be developed in relation to a
particular putative divine purpose? Let us work through an example.
The various monotheisms standardly claim that the world was made
so as to enable human persons to be drawn more deeply into rela-
tionship to God, where this deepening of relationship has a moral
dimension. As with the idea that the world serves to image the divine
nature, so this conception of the world’s purpose is not peripheral to
the wider picture of reality which these traditions typically purvey.
On the contrary, whether rightly or wrongly, the monotheisms
23
Compare Gordon Graham’s discussion of how St Paul’s is a particularly fitting
space for a certain style of worship, where the fittingness of the space in this regard is
revealed in the act of worship: The Re-Enchantment of the World: Art Versus Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 137.
usually represent the human person as the summit of creation, and
see the rest of the creation as ordered to her or his wellbeing. And of
course, from the monotheistic point of view, the most fundamental
constituent of a person’s wellbeing, even in this world, is relationship
to God. Given this general picture, we should expect the world to be
ordered so as to enable the human person to be properly related to
God. Might this account of the world’s purpose be susceptible to
verification in phenomenological terms, in some measure?
Well, this perspective suggests, among other things, that the world
should present human beings with ample opportunity for moral
development; for on this account, a person’s moral growth is integral
to her flourishing in relationship to God.24 On one standard view,
familiar from discussions in theodicy, the world does indeed function
in this way—above all because our physical and social context ensures
both that we are vulnerable to various reversals or afflictions, and also
that our assistance of one another can play a significant part in
mitigating these reversals, or preventing their occurrence. (In brief,
on this view, we need aid, and are capable of supplying it, and
accordingly moral agency has a clear rationale in human life.) It is
possible to develop this construal of the world as a ‘vale of soul-
making’ in discursive terms.25 But we can also register this conception
of human beings as profoundly vulnerable to hurt, and as capable of
rendering assistance to their fellows, directly in experience. Janet
Soskice presents a good example of this sort of sensitivity to the
world in her remarks on a mother’s care for her children. She writes:
The biological reciprocity between mother and child in early infancy is
continued in innumerable small acts of watchfulness, many almost as
involuntary as lactation: for instance, the scanning native to parents of
toddlers, of any new surroundings for steep steps, sharp, breakable, or
swallowable objects. Parents do not always think much about this, they
simply do it as a few years further along in the child’s life they will not.26
Soskice is concerned here with the habitual patterns of salient per-
ception that partly constitute the parent’s love for her child. And we
24
Compare the tendency in traditional teaching to hold together the ideals of love
of God and of neighbour, as evident in, for example, Mt 22: 36–40 and Lk 10: 27.
25
The theme is explored at length in John Hick’s classic Evil and the God of Love
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; first edition published in 1966), Part IV.
26
Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Love and Attention’, in The Kindness of God: Metaphor,
Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 31.
might suppose that in general our concern for another human being
will be realized in part in the disposition of the elements of the
perceptual field—so that we are focally aware of, for example, her
discomfort, or of the things in her environment that pose a threat to
her wellbeing. Clearly, there is no necessity for us to experience
the world in these ways. And measured by the standards which
Soskice sets out in this passage, many of us suffer from a kind of
‘attentional laziness’.27 But when the needs of others, and the risks
which are posed to their wellbeing, assume the requisite degree of
salience in our experience of the world, and are acknowledged feel-
ingly, then we can ‘see’ the vulnerability of others, and we can register
in perceptual terms our responsibility to relieve their suffering so far
as we can do so.
A person who routinely experiences the world in terms of this sort
of gestalt will grasp in perception the close connection between the
structure of the world and the vulnerability of human beings to hurt,
and their need for aid. And accordingly, such a person will be able to
confirm in phenomenological terms the claim that the world was
made to serve as a theatre for moral development. This is not to say
that the claim will then be, for that person, overall probable, but these
phenomenological considerations will at least count in its favour.
Suppose that the claim that the world was made in order to serve as
a ‘vale of soul-making’ could not be confirmed phenomenologically
in some such way. Would the claim be disconfirmed to that extent?
I take it that it would. If the world is to serve as a theatre of moral
formation, then there must be a sensitive relation between human
flourishing and our material and social context. And there is good
reason to suppose that if the world is to function in this way, then we
should be able to recognize the sensitivity of this relation directly in
perception. Why? Because the person who can ‘see’ the vulnerability
of others to their material and social circumstances will be more fully
attuned to their needs, and will to that extent be more likely to act
morally. So the person who can see this relation is to that extent more
likely to respond to other human beings in ways that will contribute,
through some process of habituation, to her own development as a
27
I have borrowed this expression from Lawrence Blum, who uses it in much the
same sense. See Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1994), p. 33.
moral agent. It is therefore not just the existence of a finely tuned
relationship between the structure of the world and human flourish-
ing that is to be expected if the world is to serve as a vale of soul-
making, but also our capacity to grasp that relationship in perception.
So here is a reason for supposing that we can test in phenomeno-
logical terms the claim that the world was made for a purpose other
than that of imaging the divine nature—namely, the purpose of
enabling human beings’ moral development, where this purpose
serves the further end of enabling a person’s flourishing in relation
to God.
We began this section by considering whether the claim that the
world was made in order to image the divine nature might be open to
confirmation in phenomenological terms. We have now examined
the further question of whether a phenomenological test may be
applied to the claim that the world was made for some purpose
other than that of imaging the divine nature—namely, the purpose
of enabling human beings’ moral development. Turning to another
example, it may be said that the world was made to serve as a theatre
for aesthetic, and not only for moral experience and development.
This thesis is open to a particularly straightforward phenomeno-
logical test, since it has directly a phenomenological content. Granted
the truth of this thesis, it should be possible to appreciate the world in
aesthetic terms in many respects and across many domains—where
each such experience will require the person to enter into a relevant
perceptual gestalt.28 I have been arguing that we would expect this
sort of case to work in other instances too, and not only in these
relatively simple cases, insofar as a designer has reason to make a
world whose parts are elegantly fitted to its purpose, and a world in
which this relationship can be grasped in perception.
28
F. R. Tennant has argued that this is exactly what we do find. He comments that
‘on the telescopic and on the microscopic scale, from the starry heaven to the siliceous
skeleton of the diatom, in her inward parts (if scientific imagination be veridical) as
well as on the surface, in flowers that “blush unseen” and gems that “unfathomed
caves of oceans bear”, Nature is sublime or beautiful . . . Nature elicits aesthetic
sentiment from men severally and collectively; and the more fastidious becomes this
taste, the more poignantly and lavishly does she gratify it’: F.R. Tennant, Philosophical
Theology, Vol. II, The World, The Soul and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1930), p. 91.
THE CASE OF NON-THEISTIC TRADITIONS
We can move further still from the idea that the world was made for
the specific purpose of imaging the divine nature by considering the
case of non-theistic religions. These religions do not think of the
world as having been made for any kind of purpose. But might
their conception of the world be testable in phenomenological
terms even so?
While non-thesistic traditions do not think of the world as having
been made by someone for a purpose, they are standardly committed
to claims which have some phenomenological content, or which
admit of a degree of phenomenological testing. For example, such
traditions may suppose that the sensory world is a realm of illusion
whose appearance cannot be penetrated by a true conception of the
nature of things. Clearly, it will not be possible to verify the stance of a
tradition of this kind by finding that its conception of the nature of
the world can be inscribed in the sensory appearances. The tradition
rules out any such possibility. However, even such a tradition may be
open to a degree of testing in phenomenological terms. After all, such
traditions are built upon a clearly defined claim concerning the
character of the sensory appearances—namely, the claim that those
appearances are illusory. And we might expect to be able verify that
claim, most obviously by adopting the reflective appreciation of the
content of the appearances that is characteristic of the ‘sage’.
Other traditions may take a more optimistic view of the possibility
that doctrinal truth can enter into the sensory appearances. It is the
exegetical and existential plausibility of this perspective which has
provided the raison d’être for the approach which we have been
following in this book. Some theistic as well as non-theistic traditions
may even be based quite explicitly on the claim that a certain kind of
transformation in the phenomenology of human experience is pos-
sible. Think, for example, of how some Christian traditions assign a
special importance to conversion experience as the mark of authentic
religious understanding, or proper relationship to God, while making
quite precise claims about the phenomenal content of this sort of
experience. It may be that these claims are not directly concerned
with the character of the sensory appearances; but in any case, such
traditions clearly invite some sort of testing in phenomenological
terms.29
Moreover, non-theistic traditions commonly hold out the condi-
tion of the sage or the enlightened person as an ideal of life to which
other human beings should aspire; and in standard cases, the sage is
to be distinguished not simply, if at all, by their commitment to
various doctrinal claims, but by the subjective quality of their experi-
ence. From the outset of this discussion, when we considered Plato’s
story of the cave, we have been interested in the idea that ‘enlighten-
ment’ is not simply a matter of knowing how the sensory appear-
ances, which are in themselves delusory, are to be read, or simply a
matter of being able to bracket out or set aside those appearances, to
the extent that they are delusory. Rather, in some cases, I have been
arguing, we should allow that in the enlightened person’s experience
of the sensory world, the appearances cease to be deceptive, because
they are now structured from within by a true conception of the
nature of things. If a tradition thinks of enlightenment in these terms,
then it will be committed to a very particular view of the possibilities
for human experience, and accordingly it will lend itself fairly readily,
at least in principle, to confirmation, or disconfirmation, in phenom-
enological terms.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
In the course of this chapter I have been building a case for the claim
that the experiential vividness of a tradition’s conception of reality, or
the capacity of that conception to enter into the sensory appearances,
can be taken, under appropriate circumstances, as an index of the
tradition’s plausibility. In these concluding remarks, I have been
suggesting that the way in which this case plays out in relation to a
given tradition will need to be sensitive, unsurprisingly, to the par-
ticular perspective on the world and human experience which is
29
For example, Jonathan Edwards maintains that the phenomenal qualia that
typify the saint’s experience of God are quite different from those which arise in
our experience of created things. See Jonathan Edwards, ‘Religious Affections’, in
C. H. Faust and T. H. Johnson (eds), Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), p. 239.
affirmed in that tradition. We have also noted some of the ways in
which a person might, quite properly, be moved to adopt a position of
faith for broadly pragmatic reasons, where the relevant ‘benefit’ is the
possibility of inhabiting an enriched perceptual world—namely, one
which is structured by the doctrinal claims of the relevant tradition.
Such a person is likely to be drawn, I have argued, into a gradually
deepened engagement with these doctrinal claims, by virtue of con-
templating them in sensory form, and accordingly their position is
not to be confused with that of the person who simply toys with the
categories of a religious tradition for the sake of some purely aesthetic
satisfaction.
The central focus of our discussion so far has been the idea that the
spiritual life is constituted, in important part, by a certain kind of
emotionally structured, thought-infused, and world-encompassing
perceptual gestalt. In the present chapter we have examined how
this idea may be relevant to some of the traditional concerns of the
philosophy of religion, and especially to the question of the justifica-
tion of religious belief in pragmatic and epistemic terms. In the next
two chapters I will return to the main thread of our discussion and
think further about the phenomenology of the unitary, value-suffused
experience of the sensory world whose nature we have been examin-
ing in relatively theoretical terms in our remarks so far.
5
World-Directed Spiritual Experience

and the Revelation of Value
So far, we have been considering relatively formally the possibility of a

certain kind of world-directed perceptual gestalt. We have been
concerned, in particular, with the capacity of religious thoughts and
religiously germane emotions, together with relevant kinaesthetic and
existential feelings, to shape the appearance of the sensory world. The
goal of the next two chapters is to examine how some of the theoret-
ical apparatus which we have been developing in earlier chapters
might contribute to the formulation of a substantive conception of
the nature of the spiritual life. For this purpose I am going to examine
a number of accounts of the sensory phenomenology of the spiritual
life, beginning with the work of the Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák,
and his conception of the spiritual significance of experience of
nature.
EXPERIENCING THE PRESENCE OF

GOD IN NATURE
At the close of his book The Embers and the Stars, Erazim Kohák
notes that his concern has been ‘not to argue but to see and to evoke a
vision’.1 We could put this point in the terms of our discussion by
saying that his aim in the book is to place at the cornerstone of the
1
Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral
Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 179.
spiritual life a certain kind of world-directed perceptual gestalt. Let us
think a little about Kohák’s description of this ‘vision’.
Kohák draws a distinction between the kind of gestalt which he
considers important for the spiritual life and a further kind of gestalt
which is typical, he says, of a scientific perspective on the world,
where the first, in his judgement, properly subsumes the second. He
develops the point in these terms:
In the literature of the physical sciences, there is little clear consensus as
to whether even a theoretical reduction of the organic and the animate
to the inorganic is possible at all. But let us assume, for the moment, that
it were so—that the entire functioning of the body of a human or
porcupine could be ‘explained’ in terms of elementary chemical inter-
actions. Such a reduction would still do nothing to help us understand
the living reality of a porcupine. A porcupine is a life, the reality of lived
subject experience. It includes the cautious grazing by the full moon, the
warmth of mating and the care of the young, the fear and the pain, the
comfort and the contentment, the familiarity of a home territory and
the ancestral burrow, the sorrow of aging and dying.2
So we are to distinguish between two ways in which a porcupine’s
mode of being might be reduced to the behaviour of its parts: a causal
reduction, which Kohák allows to be possible in principle, and a
conceptual reduction, whose possibility he denies. That is to say,
while from a purely causal point of view everything about an individ-
ual porcupine might be explicable by reference simply to the activity
of the inorganic elements from which its body is composed, nonethe-
less the concepts which are supplied by the fundamental sciences will
not suffice for a full description of the porcupine’s particular mode of
existence. This is because a description of this purely scientific variety
will fail to capture the porcupine’s perspective on the world—its
caution and care, and its experience of warmth and fear and content-
ment, for example. To put the same sort of point in a more traditional
idiom, we might say that there is a distinction to be drawn between a
description of the porcupine which is cast in terms of its material
cause and one which specifies its final cause. Although Kohák does
not press the point, we should also say that corresponding to these
two ways of describing the porcupine, there will be two perceptual
gestalts: it is one thing to experience the porcupine as a living subject,
2
Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, p. 199.
World-Directed Spiritual Experience & Revelation of Value 131
and another to experience it as simply a bundle of inorganic elements
in motion. In the first case but not the second, the porcupine itself will
emerge into view within the perceptual field, as a living subject, with
its own concerns and intentions, and in distinction from any mere
agglomeration of parts. And if we share Kohák’s evident sympathy for
these creatures, considered as subjects of a life, then we should
suppose that the phenomenal feel of the porcupine’s appearance
will also vary across these two cases.
So far, then, we have two kinds of perceptual gestalt—one kind
which is typical of a scientific mode of viewing, and a further kind
which allows us to bring into focus the higher-order property of being
the subject of a life, where the second gestalt subsumes the first. On
Kohák’s account, this second gestalt is itself to be subsumed within
another kind of ‘seeing’ which is still more religiously suggestive. In
the following passage, he introduces this further kind of gestalt. Here
he is speaking once more of his porcupine.
He is a life, as surely as he is also an aggregate of organized matter. He is,
though, something more—an epiphany of value. Still at the edge of a
moonlit clearing, he is a miracle of being standing out against the ever-
pressing sense of nothing . . . The grief humans experience over the
bloody remains of animals along our highways is not simply utilitarian.
Nor is it empty sentimentality . . . It is, rather, a recognition of the
transcendental dimension of all being—that in its perishing, something
absolutely valuable is laid waste. Nature, in addition to vitality, bears
within it also a dimension of eternity.3
On this account we should distinguish between three ways of seeing a
porcupine—we can experience this creature as ‘organised matter’, as
living, and as ‘an epiphany of value’. A hunter who is bent on
exterminating porcupines in the spirit of ridding the world of vermin
will presumably experience such creatures as alive, and perhaps as the
subject of a life; but he will not see them as valuable. So the perception
of a thing as valuable, in the sense which matters here, does seem to
point towards the possibility of a further kind of perceptual gestalt, in
addition to the gestalt which is relevant to seeing the thing as alive.
How might we characterize this further gestalt?
If we are to take Kohák’s account in this passage as our guide, then
we should say that three considerations are relevant. First of all, to
3
Ibid. pp. 199–200.
experience the porcupine as an ‘epiphany of value’ is to see it in the
light of the fact that it might not have been. Indeed, Kohák’s formu-
lation suggests something rather stronger: if we can experience a
porcupine through the lens of an ‘ever-pressing sense of nothing’,
then its existence will appear to be not simply a logical contingency,
but contrary to the basic drift of things, and even a kind of ‘miracle’.
So here is one way in which a religious or spiritual sensibility might be
grounded in a world-directed experience of value: to have the par-
ticular kind of value experience which Kohák is describing here is to
be profoundly aware of the fragility of things’ existence, and it is
therefore to be drawn into a kind of wondering at their being at all.
Secondly, Kohák speaks of how in our experience of the sensory
world we can register ‘a dimension of eternity’. By this he means,
I take it, that individual things such as the porcupine can be experi-
enced as valuable in and of themselves, and independently of their
contribution to some temporally ordered causal nexus. It seems that
this second kind of perspective can be related to the first to this extent:
to experience the porcupine in these terms is to see it in abstraction
from its location within a creaturely causal context; and accordingly,
it is to be sensitized once more to the ‘miracle’ of its existing at all.
Lastly, it is clear that the kind of value which is revealed in this sort of
experience is in some way fundamental. As Kohák says, we are
dealing here with something ‘absolutely valuable’; and it is for this
reason that it is appropriate to respond to the destruction of a
porcupine or another such creature not simply with disappointment
or regret, but with ‘grief ’. Although Kohák does not say as much, we
might suppose that this assessment of the significance of porcupines
is also capable of being registered in our perception of a living
porcupine, insofar as the creature is assigned the right kind of salience
and the right kind of phenomenal hue within the perceptual field.
These further dimensions of this sort of value experience are also
religiously or spiritually suggestive. To experience a thing as outside
of the nexus of creaturely causality is to experience it independently
from any question of its usefulness in furthering my practical pro-
jects; so this sort of perspective implies, potentially, a liberation from
any concern to bend the world to my will. Iris Murdoch makes the
same sort of point in this well-known passage:
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of
mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some
damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering
kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its
hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And
when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.4
In such experiences, we might say, we are lifted out of ourselves, and
freed for a time from the egocentric perspective, as our attention
comes to be fixed upon the independent reality of something in the
outer world. And if we follow Murdoch’s account, then we should say
that this sort of quality of attention can secure a lasting transform-
ation in our way of experiencing the world, so that when we return to
the self-regarding concern with which we were formerly occupied, the
matter no longer seems so pressing. So we are dealing here with a
world-directed experience of value, in which sensory things are no
longer ordered within the perceptual field according to the uses that
I might have for them, and no longer stained with the phenomenal
hue that is relative to that kind of emotional interest in them. There is,
of course, an extended intellectual tradition which has thought of
such experiences as spiritually important. As we have seen, the same
sort of point was made by Schopenhauer in his discussion of the
nature of aesthetic experience; and in his description of the spiritual
life in the Symposium and the Republic, Plato also seems to be
concerned with a mode of attention to the world which is vacant of
egocentric concern.
Lastly, Kohák supposes that in this sort of value experience we
encounter something ‘absolutely valuable’. This theme could also be
related to the idea that there is an ego-transcendent way of perceiving
the world. When we set aside the lens of egocentric concern, it might
be urged, then we can come to appreciate the world for itself, so that
its real value becomes apparent, rather than the value which it has
relative to our limited projects. Again, this is an idea with a larger
history. As Clive Bell remarks in his classic 1914 text Art:
If an object considered as an end in itself moves us more profoundly
. . . than the same object considered as a means to practical ends or a
thing related to human interests—and this is undoubtedly the case—we
can only suppose that when we consider anything as an end in itself we
become aware of that in it which is of greater moment than any qualities
it may have acquired from keeping company with human beings.
4
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), p. 84.
Instead of recognizing its accidental and conditioned importance, we
become aware of its essential reality, of the God in everything, of the
universal in the particular, of the all-pervading rhythm.5
On this view, to experience a thing not simply as instrumentally
valuable—not simply as valuable insofar as it serves my ends, for
instance—but as intrinsically valuable is to come to a deepened
appreciation of its significance; and it is perhaps to be open to the
discovery that there is something ‘absolutely valuable’ in the existence
of the thing (as Kohák puts it), or to become aware of the thing’s
‘essential reality’. The truth or otherwise of this claim is presumably
given, in part anyway, in the relevant phenomenology, and each of us
must consult their own experience on this point. But there is at any
rate a clear basis for the idea that if my engagement with a thing is
freed from egocentric concerns, then it may acquire a new and
deepened significance for me. After all, if I consider a particular
porcupine as valuable only insofar as it serves my projects, where
these projects are conceived in egocentric terms, then it is unlikely to
make much sense for me to respond to its death with ‘grief ’; for if
there are other porcupines around, with similar qualities, then I will
be able, in principle, to substitute one of them for this one, and in that
case, the death of this particular porcupine will result in no loss to me.
In sum, Kohák’s aim in this text is to delineate the phenomenology
of a certain kind of world-directed value experience which he takes to
be of basic importance for the spiritual life. And on his account, this
experience—the experience of an ‘epiphany’ of value—turns out to
have three related dimensions: in such experiences we are aware of
the radical contingency of things, of their intrinsic value, and of their
being in some sense ‘absolutely valuable’; and each of these qualities
has some claim to be important for the spiritual life, for the reasons
we have been considering. It is the first of these three dimensions of
the epiphanic experience—the experience of something as radically
contingent—which is perhaps the most puzzling, from the point of
view of how to characterize the relevant phenomenology. How, we
might wonder, is this assessment of a thing’s ontological status to be
5
The text is cited in Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Art and the Aesthetic: The Religious
Dimension’, in Peter Kivy, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005), p. 327. Wolterstorff ’s essay nicely locates this tendency of thought within a
larger historical narrative.
registered in the sensory appearances? Let us pause, briefly, to think a
little more closely about the nature of this sort of experience.
In the following passage, Kohák gives this further account of how
we are to envisage the experience of contingency, and how this
experience might serve to disclose the presence of God:
We are, though only by a hair. We could easily not be. The stark white
glow of the January moon, pressing down on the frozen forest, sears
away the illusion of necessity. Then again, perhaps when humans grow
immersed in the order of time, they can avoid the recognition of the
utter contingency of being by conceiving of the present as necessitated
by a preceding past, and so on, ad infinitum. When, however, eternity
intersects with time, presenting all time in the perspective of copresence,
the vacuity of regress becomes evident . . . All of us, humans together
with all creation, need not be . . . And yet, we are—and our being testifies
to its Creator. It is not an argument, and would fail if so presented.
Rather, it is a testimony, the presence of God made manifest.6
Here Kohák distinguishes, I take it, between two ways in which we
may experience the world as contingent, each with its own phenom-
enology. First, there is the case where I experience my environment as
potentially threatening to my existence. This possibility is illustrated
here by the experience of ‘the stark white glow of the January moon . . .’
To describe the light of the moon in these terms is to indicate that this
light has assumed a certain prominence in the perceptual field, as the
bearer of a particular significance: this is a clear night, and accordingly a
cold night, and in turn therefore a night which is potentially lethal for a
creature of my kind. So here is one way of understanding the experience
of contingency: in this sort of experience, I become aware of a particular
creaturely causal context, in such a way that those elements of that
context which pose a threat to my existence (or the existence of some
other creature) emerge into salience and assume a correlative phenom-
enal hue.
The second kind of experience to which Kohák alludes is rather
different: here we become aware of the ‘copresence’ of sensory things,
or of ‘eternity’ intersecting with time. And that is to say, I take it, that
we experience things in isolation from any creaturely causal context,
so undoing any impression that they are necessitated by the past. This
second sort of experience has, therefore, a different phenomenology:
6
Kohák, The Embers and the Stars, pp. 188–9.
it is a matter of becoming aware of things in themselves, apart from
causal context—whereas the first kind of experience is a matter,
rather, of becoming aware of the embeddedness of a thing within a
causal context, and of the fragility of its existence relative to that
context. And what is revealed in these two cases is also different: the
first kind of experience concerns simply the ‘contingency’, or the risk
of non-existence, of individual things. And even if we take every
individual thing to be contingent in this sense, this is not yet to say
that the cosmos as a whole is at risk of non-existence. (Perhaps the
cosmos persists through a process which involves the successive
extinction of individual things, where each of these things reliably
generates its successor before ceasing to exist? Students of the cosmo-
logical argument have long been exercised, of course, by the question
of whether this represents a genuine possibility.) By contrast, the
second kind of experience seems to concern the contingency of the
cosmos itself. If at a given moment I experience the things in my
perceptual field in isolation from any creaturely causal context, then
I will no longer experience them as members of a causal chain which
runs from earlier to later phases of the cosmos; and in that case, the
enduring of the cosmos itself, moment by moment, will cease to seem
supported.
Kohák affirms that experiences of this second kind ‘testify’ to the
‘presence of God’, and we might ask how they are supposed to do this.
It is clear that he is not proposing some version of the argument from
contingency: we are not being invited to suppose on the basis of such
an experience that things are contingent, and to infer from this that
they are sustained in being by a non-contingent, transcendent God.
One reading of Kohák’s position would be that he is treating the belief
that God is present as a ‘properly basic’ belief in the sense in which
reformed epistemologists have used that expression: that is, the belief
is grounded directly in the relevant experiences, rather than being
derived from ‘evidence’ of some sort. I think this reading is consistent
with what Kohák says. But another reading is also possible: at points,
his text seems to invite the thought that in this sort of spiritual
experience, it is not so much that we grasp that there is another
order of being standing behind the material cosmos (and sustaining
it in being, for example), but rather that we apprehend the creaturely
order itself in proper focus. His decision to describe the experience
with which he is concerned as fundamentally an ‘epiphany of value’ is
consistent with this sort of emphasis. It is not so much that we see a
value independent of creaturely things, rather as in the Symposium we
might come to see the Form of Beauty, in distinction from the ‘mass
of perishable rubbish’ which constitutes the material order; nor
perhaps is it the case that we come to form some belief about an
order of value which exists independently of the material world; it is
more that we see in creaturely things themselves something ‘abso-
lutely valuable’. This second reading of his text is not so open to
sceptical challenge, I take it: on this reading, Kohák is not so much
claiming that there is a further order of reality, as that there is a way of
properly registering the significance of the material world in the kinds
of experience whose phenomenology he is trying to elucidate.
We do not for our purposes need to press this exegetical question
further, and I do not think that Kohák himself would be too exercised
by the question of how we are to read him on this point. His
overriding concern is, clearly, to sketch the possibility of a certain
kind of experience, and to invite the reader to enter into such an
experience for themselves. Once they have done so, then they can be
guided thereafter by the experience: it is the experience or ‘vision’
itself which is, for Kohák, the proper locus of authority, rather than
anything that he or someone else might write about these matters,
even if what is written concerns how an experience of this kind is to
be interpreted. But given the larger themes of our own discussion, it is
worth pausing to emphasize that Kohák’s account of this perceptual
gestalt, within which the defining normative insight of the spiritual
life is realized, is absolutely committed to finding value in the world.
While his language may at times invite the thought that there is in
addition to the temporal world a further, non-temporal world, he
does not intend these two to be understood in oppositional terms. On
the contrary, he is clear that the ‘perfect is not simply the ideal, as a
perfect marriage is not simply a storybook meeting of souls. It is
rather the optimal incarnation of spirit, the point at which the
presence [of the ideal in the real] achieves maximal concreteness . . .’7
By this he means, at least, that the material realm does not involve
some falling away from the kind of perfection that belongs most
properly to an ‘ideal’ realm, but is itself a locus for the realization of
‘perfection’. So Kohák’s text provides a particular way of developing
the claim which I have made repeatedly in the course of this
7
Ibid. p. 192.
discussion: if we think of the spiritual life as constituted in important
part by a certain kind of thought-infused perception of the material
order, then we need not find ourselves in the predicament described
by Jantzen and others, where our resolve to engage with this-worldly
concerns is compromised, because our attention has been sunk in
another, antithetically conceived realm.
Let us consider one final example of how Kohák understands the
phenomenology of ‘epiphanic’ experience. Here he is talking about an
experience of the forest around his New Hampshire home.
The nature abandoned by humans is not yet abandoned. It is not simply
that it is lawlike in performance, manifesting observed regularities. Its
order is far more intimate than that. It is the order of a sphere of
mineness. That metaphor points to something more than the intricate
design which the Reverend Mr Paley noted in the watch he found on the
wind-swept heath of his example. It is also a sense of caring, of
mattering, the sense that each twig of the forest is precious. It is a
sense of a presence such as humans experience on entering a home in
the dweller’s absence . . . Trying to cook in a strange kitchen brings it
home: things have their places, unknown to us, but not arbitrary. The
house is a sphere of someone’s mineness.8
Here Kohák invites us to contrast, once more, the perspective on the
world which is typical of the sciences (a perspective which he here
associates with Paley) and the kind of value-infused perceptual gestalt
which he takes to be integral to the spiritual life. But this passage
differs from some others that we have considered, because here
Kohák connects epiphanic experience with the striking of a particular
practical stance. The order in a kitchen may become apparent only in
trying to cook there; and in the same way, he is suggesting, the order
in the forest may become apparent only to someone who moves about
in it. So this account stands as a complement to some of the other
passages we have examined, insofar as they invite the thought that
what matters for epiphanic experience is the achievement of a condi-
tion of contemplative absorption in things, where this state of mind is
taken to involve the suspension of any practical interest in the world.
As well as being practically engaged, the kind of experience which
Kohák is describing here is also focally of a context or ‘order’, rather
than simply of an individual item. If we press the example of the
8
Ibid. The Embers and the Stars, p. 189.
kitchen, then we should suppose that this order need not be funda-
mentally a causal order. Knives and forks and bowls, and so on, may
all be arranged in order in a kitchen without any one of these things
being causally subordinated to the others; rather, the order here
concerns the fact that, in spatial terms, each thing has its proper
place in relation to the others. Similarly, Kohák seems to be suggest-
ing that the forest dweller can encounter a spatial order within the
forest as she moves about in it. Presumably this sense of order will be
realized in the paced-out appreciation of the ‘preciousness’, in its
spatial context, of each twig or flower: the person who apprehends
the forest in these terms will move about in it with care, so as to avoid
brushing aside a branch rudely, or trampling down even a small
flower needlessly. The phenomenology of this sort of experience of
the forest will also include, then, the felt recognition of the relevant
kinaesthetic state. And while individual twigs, for example, may be
afforded a degree of salience within the perceptual field in such
experience, this is not to say that they will be experienced in isolation
from their context; rather, they will be encountered as integral parts
of a spatial order—one which we are required to accommodate in our
practical dealings with the place, so far as that is possible.
So Kohák’s text can be read as an attempt to specify the phenom-
enal content of a particular world-directed perceptual gestalt, one
which he takes to be foundational for the spiritual life. To generalize,
we might say that in ‘epiphanic’ experience of this kind, we are aware
of a value which shines through material things—as distinct from
some value which belongs to a reality which is wholly discrete from
the material world. We are also aware in such experience of the
‘giftedness’ of material things: that is, we recognize in perceptual
terms that there is no order in nature which necessitates their exist-
ence, and that insofar as material forms are embedded within a
creaturely causal nexus, their existence is to that extent fragile. The
epiphanic experience is also a way of acknowledging the existence of
something ‘absolutely valuable’ in material things, where this value is
recognized in our emotional responses, and also perceptually, and is
in no way a function of our human projects. At the same time, the
epiphanic experience is not so much of individual items, considered
in distinction from other such items, but of an order in things, where
the relationship between the elements of this order is to be defined
more in spatial terms than in terms of causal dependence. In sum, this
is the sort of perceptual gestalt to which Kohák’s account appears to
point.
Naturally, Kohák is interested not only in the phenomenology of
the epiphanic experience, but also in the question of how such
experiences are to be cultivated. How are we to prepare ourselves,
so far as we can, to appreciate the world in these terms? For Kohák,
the epiphanic experience is, I take it, a universal human possibility.9
And while it would be contrary to the spirit of his account to suppose
that such experiences might be wrested from nature by sheer force of
will, he is evidently of the view that a person can take up practices
which will make it at any rate more likely that she will be able to
experience the world epiphanically. For Kohák, the epiphanic experi-
ence is of course focally of an order in nature; and we might suppose,
therefore, that it is a minimal condition of such experience that a
person should at least engage practically with a relevant natural space.
Moreover, the particular space which features in Kohák’s examples—
the forest which he describes—is one which he knows well, since this
is the space in which he has made his home. So we might add that it is
important not simply to move about in natural spaces, but to get to
know a particular natural space intimately. Such an approach would
be in keeping with the general tenor of Kohák’s account to the extent
that it indicates a commitment to particular natural things, and
associated spaces, as individuals, rather than treating these things as
inter-substitutable without loss.
Along with this practical commitment to getting to know the
rhythms of a particular natural space, Kohák’s account suggests a
further way in which we can prepare ourselves for epiphanic kinds of
experience. We can also dispose ourselves for such experience, he
thinks, in conceptual terms—or better, by refraining from certain
kinds of conceptualization. He writes that
the question ‘Is there a god?’ only arises when humans interpose a
mental artifact, a ‘god-construct’, between themselves and the living
presence of God, effectively blocking it from view. Then the question no
longer has to do with the awareness of God’s presence. It has nothing to
do with God. All it asks about is the extensional reality of an object
described by the god-construct—and is truthfully answered in the
9
He comments, for example, that the sort of experience which he is describing has
been fundamental to the lived experience of ‘humankind throughout history’: The
Embers and the Stars, p. 182.
negative. Animals, I am convinced, know God because they do not
formulate constructs which would blind them to the reality of God’s
presence.10
The emphasis in our account to this point has mostly been upon the
enabling power of concepts, in phenomenological terms, or on the
capacity of thoughts (such as the thought of the heavenly city, to take
one well-worn example) to enter into and enliven the sensory appear-
ances, so that they bear new meaning. So it may be a little disconcert-
ing to find that in Kohák’s view, the deployment of a ‘god-construct’
may be an obstacle to the nature-focused perceptual gestalt which he
takes to be fundamental to the spiritual life. What are we to make of
his position on this point?
His stance can be brought into sharper relief I think once we
recognize that these remarks are targeted at a particular kind of
‘god-construct’. Some pages earlier he remarks that: ‘of God, more
than aught else, humans can speak truly only by indirection. God is
never present as an object, a being among beings.’11 The epiphanic
experiences which Kohák describes fit with this view. In these experi-
ences the awareness of God does not consist in some awareness of a
particular item of experience, ‘a being among beings’; instead, the
sense of God’s presence is realized in the organization and phenom-
enal hue of the elements of the sensory field. It is this fact which
generates the ambiguity I mentioned before: for some readers it may
not be clear whether by ‘God’ Kohák intends to refer to some reality
over and above the material order or, instead, simply to what is given,
without remainder, in a particular disposition of the elements within
that order. I take it that he is in fact committed to the first view, but of
itself his account of the phenomenology of religious experience seems
equally consistent with the second.
So when Kohák objects to the ‘interposition’ of a ‘god-construct’
between ourselves and the ‘living presence’ of God, he is affirming,
I take it, that our recognition of the presence of God is given in the
ordering and phenomenal hue of the usual constituents of our sens-
ory experience. There is no further phenomenology, over and above
the phenomenology which is relevant to the ordering of the sensory
field, which is involved in the apprehension of the presence of God.
10
11
Ibid. p. 183.
To put the matter otherwise, we could say that the concept of God, or
of the presence of God, has no distinctive phenomenal content: the
phenomenal content of these concepts turns out to be reducible
without remainder to the phenomenal content of concepts which
concern the ordering or hue of the sensory field. It is clear, then,
that Kohák would be opposed to those accounts of religious experi-
ence, familiar from recent discussion in analytic philosophy of reli-
gion, according to which God can be apprehended as a particular
item in some non-sensory intuition.12 So, in sum, perhaps Kohák’s
strictures on the role of God-concepts are really concerned with the
role of a particular kind of ‘god-construct’ (the construct which
represents God as a ‘being among beings’); and his main objective
here is, it seems, to articulate a certain conception of the phenomen-
ology of the experience of the presence of God.
The passage I have just cited raises a further issue which is relevant
to the question of the role of God concepts in religious experience.
Kohák says that ‘animals know God because they do not formulate
constructs which would blind them to the reality of God’s presence’.
It is tempting to suppose that even if their perceptual field can be
organized in exactly the way that Kohák describes in his discussion of
the epiphanic experience, animals will, even so, fail to apprehend God
as God. If we do take this view, then we might agree with Kohák that
in a sense, animals are not ‘blind’ to ‘the reality of God’s presence’,
insofar as they can experience what is in fact the presence of God,
albeit that they do not appreciate that it is God who is present to
them. (This is a familiar distinction: similarly, I may see Joanna
without recognizing her as Joanna.) But if we do take this view,
then there will, of course, be a sense in which animals are after all
‘blind’ to the presence of God, since they do not grasp that it is God
who is present to them in their experience. Alternatively, we might
suppose not only that animals are capable of epiphanic experience, to
the extent that their perceptual field can be appropriately organized,
but also that they can recognize that it is God who is present to them
in such experience. So there are two ways of reading Kohák’s claim
that animals are not ‘blind’ to the presence of God. Which of these
readings should we prefer?
12
See, for example, William Alston’s discussion in Perceiving God: The Epistemol-
ogy of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
This issue is connected with the question of what Kohák means by
the term ‘God’. If we allow that in his usage the term picks out some
reality that is not reducible to the material order—not even to higher-
order properties of that order—then it seems that we should suppose
that while animals may be capable of epiphanic experience, they will
not grasp that it is God who is revealed to them in such experience.
Why? Because while animals have some capacity to recognize trees as
trees, or at least to discriminate trees from other objects, and so on for
other sensory items, they cannot, presumably, formulate the thought,
or grasp directly in perceptual terms, that over and above these items
there is a further reality, a transcendent reality, upon which these
items depend for their existence;13 and anyone who cannot formulate
that thought, or who cannot recognize its truth directly in perception,
cannot experience God as God, and cannot in discursive terms
construe their experience of the world as an experience of the pres-
ence of God. If we take this view, then it seems that there is, after all, a
role for God-concepts in the spiritual life. These concepts, assuming
that they take the right form, may not have any distinctive phenom-
enal content, and they may not have a part to play in structuring the
perceptual gestalt that constitutes the epiphanic experience, but they
will enable us to recognize the true nature of what is revealed in such
experience. So if we do take this view, then we should enter a
qualification against Kohák’s criticisms of ‘god-constructs’: there is,
after all, an important role for such constructs to play in the spiritual
life of human beings.
Kohák’s comments elsewhere suggest that he would concur with
this judgement. In particular, he is clear that human beings have a
special role to play within the broader economy of creation, a role
which is denied to non-human animals, because we alone can grasp
the true nature of what is revealed in epiphanic experiences of value.
And it is plausible to suppose that we alone are capable of appre-
hending the full significance of the epiphanic experience because we
alone have the relevant God-concept. This conception of the human
calling is at least implied in the following passage, which I shall leave
13
E. D. Lowe notes that while non-human animals can reliably distinguish be-
tween different kinds of perceptual object, this is not at all to say that they are capable
of subsuming these objects under concepts: ‘Naturalism, Imagination, and the Scien-
tific Worldview’, in C. Taliaferro and J. Evans (eds), Turning Images in Philosophy,
Science and Religion: A New Book of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
pp. 105–6.
to stand without further comment, as a poetic summary of the drift of
Kohák’s account of the epiphanic experience.
The golden leaves line the river bottom, setting the water aglow in the
autumn sun. The forest dies and is renewed in the order of time; the
sparkling river bears away grief. In the pained cherishing of that transi-
ent world, the human, a dweller between the embers and the stars, can
raise it up to eternity. That is the task of the human.14
THE EXPERIENCE OF MYSTERY IN THE

SPIRITUAL LIFE
Kohák’s discussion of the epiphanic experience is to be read, I think,

as a broadly Christian or at least monotheistic account of the nature
of the spiritual life. I am going to turn now to another description of
the sensory phenomenology of the spiritual life—one which is more
evidently indebted to eastern rather than western, and Buddhist
rather than Christian, sources.
In his work The Measure of Things, David Cooper proposes that
the spiritual life should be grounded in an acknowledgement of
‘mystery’. And he suggests that ‘mystery’ can be encountered in
certain world-directed experiences of value which have as their
focus not so much an individual item as an existentially resonant
context. So Cooper’s account, like Kohák’s, seems to be concerned
with the sort of experience whose nature we have been trying to
delineate in earlier chapters—that is, with a world-directed, value-
disclosing perceptual gestalt whose focus is not so much the character
of an individual item as of a context or region of experience. Let us
explore Cooper’s view in a little more detail.
Cooper’s case turns on the idea that two familiar conceptions of
reality fail: to characterize them very briefly and crudely, these are the
‘absolutist’ conception, according to which reality is in principle
describable as it is in itself, that is, independently of the particular
concerns and perspectives of human beings, and the ‘raw humanist’
perspective, according to which the only reality is humanly consti-
tuted reality, or reality as it appears to us in the light of our particular
14
interests and vantage point. Cooper’s reasons for ruling out these two
perspectives need not detain us here, but in brief he thinks that the
first view is intellectually unsustainable; and the second, he says, is
existentially insupportable, because we are ‘inveterately teleological
creatures’, and need to suppose, therefore, that our beliefs and prac-
tices can be assessed for adequacy against ‘something beyond the
human’.15 In short, we need, as the title of Cooper’s book indicates,
some human-independent ‘measure’ in human life. Evidently, these
two positions are contraries rather than contradictories, and Cooper
suggests that we can keep clear of both by supposing that there is a
way in which reality is independently of human concerns and inter-
ests, but that this way is not ‘discursible’, and constitutes therefore a
‘mystery’. Evidently, we need to have some understanding of this
‘mystery’ if it is to play a measure-setting role in human life; and if the
mystery is not describable, then we might wonder how this is pos-
sible. Cooper’s response to this issue is to maintain that while ‘mys-
tery’ may be ‘non-discursable’, it can even so be encountered in
experience. On this view, our appreciation of the nature of mystery
is, we might say, a matter of knowledge by acquaintance, rather than
by description.
Allowing that what is revealed in the experience of mystery is not
discursible, we might still wonder what form the relevant experience
might take. Suppose the experience were focally of a particular item;
and suppose we knew and were able to control the stimulus condi-
tions for the experience. In that case, we could presumably reproduce
the experience at will—and given that capacity, could we not devise a
vocabulary which is fitted for the description of the relevant item?
These reflections suggest that subject–object experience of the usual
kind is not the best starting point for an understanding of the experi-
ence of non-discursible mystery. Cooper takes the same view in these
remarks:
Mystery is not an entity accessed by some mystical analogue to visual
perception. To experience mystery is to experience the world in certain
ways—those gestured at by the rhetoric of emptiness. For analogues in
everyday experience, we do better to think of, say, a soldier’s experience
of the war or a student’s experience of university life—of, one might say,
15
David Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 332.
existential experience. When the student describes his or her experience
of the university, it may well include reports of sense-experiences, but
these will hardly exhaust it, and we would expect even these to be more
than ‘bare’ ones—to relate, for example, how the first sight of the ivy-
clad buildings impressed the student. An account of experience in this
richer, ‘existential’ sense narrates how someone’s world—the university,
the war theatre—figures for him, what it is like for him.16
So by the experience of mystery, Cooper does not understand an
experience which is focally of a particular thing, in isolation from any
context, or a concatenation of such experiences; instead, he is sup-
posing that the experience involves a certain way of apprehending
‘the world’—by comparison with ways of experiencing the world
which are relative to particular modes of life, such as those of the
student or the soldier. This commitment to ‘the world’-encompassing
nature of the experience of ‘mystery’ is reminiscent of William James’
suggestion that conversion experience consists in, or brings in its
train, a transformation in the sensory appearances in general. The
experience of ‘mystery’ is also evidently an emotionally engaged form
of experience: in such experience, we do not simply observe the things
around us; rather, we are in various ways ‘impressed’ by them. To the
extent that it is both emotionally informed and world-encompassing,
it is natural to suppose that the experience of mystery can be under-
stood in terms of the analytical framework of our earlier discussion.
And we might conclude that the experience will take the form of a
world-directed perceptual gestalt which is structured by relevant
concepts and emotional feelings, and which draws in associated
kinaesthetic and existential feelings.
Cooper goes on to specify in further detail the nature of the
existential context which provides the focus for the experience of
mystery. He notes that such experience
. . . is a way of experiencing remote from a focus on things as discrete
particulars contingently or ‘externally’ related to one another. It is, for
example, to appreciate the pool of water as what reflects the sky and
children are baptized in, what animals struggle to reach and sustains the
life of plants, and what men and women bathe in for pleasure or
purification—as what, in these and innumerable other ways, ‘points
to’ a world. It is to appreciate, as well, how a world, to be that world,
16
Ibid. p. 340.
‘gathers’ into the pool, for things, practices, and creatures that do not so
relate to water would not be the ones they are, not those that figure as
they do in ‘existential’ experience. Such experience of a pool, and hence
of the world as a whole, can only be gestured at, only spoken ‘about’. It
belongs to the experience of mystery and is something that theoretical
conceptions, with their predilections for the discrete and ‘atomic’,
occlude.17
So not only is the experience of mystery not focally of a particular
thing; it is equally not of a context understood simply as a collection
of such things, externally related to one another. Cooper’s stance on
this point recalls Kohák’s treatment of experience of the forest: while
there is an order to be encountered in the forest, the relationship
between the elements of this order is not to be understood funda-
mentally in simple cause–effect terms. To put the matter in Cooper’s
terms, we might say that the relevant connection is fundamentally
‘existential’ rather than causal—that is, it concerns the shared human
significance of various items of experience, rather as the order which
unites the utensils in a kitchen concerns the relationship which those
utensils bear to the overarching human project of the preparation and
consumption of food. Similarly, the significance of a pool of water, for
example, is given in the ways in which it meshes with the activities of
human beings and other creatures—as when it serves as a source of
refreshment or purification or recreation, or when it captures and
reorders the colours of the evening sky. And the significance of these
activities will in turn be conditioned by the fact that together they
have this common focus, insofar as they all concern the use of water.
On this perspective, any domain of experience—whether it concerns
water, or the forest, or some other theatre of human activity—will
typically acquire layer after layer of significance, where each layer is
relative to the character of a given project which is played out in
relation to that region of experience. And in the normal case, these
various significances will not exist in strict distinction from one
another; they will instead be mutually conditioning, and we might
even suppose that they will blend together, so as to produce a single,
overarching, unitary meaning. And in turn therefore, our experience
of the individual items which belong within that region of experience
will be shot through with our appreciation of this overarching
17
Ibid. p. 348.
significance; and accordingly, they will be experienced not simply as
discrete entities, but as members of a coherent existential context.
We are all of us capable of enumerating at least some of the
significances which a particular domain of experience bears for us,
whether that domain be water, fire, school, university, or family, or
the kind of forest that Kohák describes. Some of these significances
will be shared: for all of us, water has significance as a source of
refreshment and cleansing. Other significances will be relative to a
given tradition: for Christians, for example, water has a special
importance as a source of spiritual cleansing. And some significances
will be particular to the individual person: what water signifies for you
will depend in some respects on your life story and on, for example,
your experiences of water in childhood.
This way of understanding what Cooper calls ‘existential experi-
ence’ helps to explain why its content is appropriately considered a
mystery, even in the everyday case, and not simply in the special case
where the experience is somehow implicated in an experience of
‘enlightenment’. This point can be made in the terms of one of our
earlier examples. The significance of ice for a given person—let us call
her Kate—may change after she has fallen on ice. And it may be that
this change is not readily capturable in words: after her fall, Kate may
continue to describe ice as dangerous, slippery, and so on, much as
she did before. Rather than being communicable in words, her new
assessment of the significance of ice may be evident in (and may
fundamentally be realized in) a new ordering of her perceptual field.
Ice may now figure with new salience and a new hue in her perceptual
field; and her muscular responses to the presence of ice may now have
changed, and accordingly, she may undergo a different set of kinaes-
thetic experiences when in the vicinity of ice. So it may be that Kate’s
new sense of the significance of ice is lodged in these new forms of
experience of the world, rather than in anything she might say. Here
we are dealing with a relatively simple, unidimensional significance of
a certain region of experience: the significance of ice relative to the
experience of falling on ice. Typically, of course, ice or other focuses
of human experience have a many-stranded significance. But in these
more complex cases too, we might suppose that the relevant signifi-
cances will elude description in words—that is, they will not be fully
capturable in verbal terms, although standardly we will be able to
rehearse in discursive terms some of the experiences which have been
important in defining our sense of the significance of a given domain
of experience. So we may say that for a given person, ice, for example,
has a determinate and, in the standard case, multi-stranded signifi-
cance—but a significance which in large measure defies description,
and which is instead revealed by the ways in which ice figures in the
relevant phenomenal fields. In this sense, we can say that the signifi-
cance of ice for a given person is a ‘non-discursible’ ‘mystery’, albeit
that its significance is evident to her directly in experience.
I am reminded here of Pierre Hadot’s remark that
everything that touches the domain of the existential . . . for instance,
our feeling of existence, our impressions when faced by death, our
perception of nature, our sensations, and a fortiori the mystical experi-
ence, is not directly communicable. The phrases we use to describe
them are conventional and banal; we realize this when we try to console
someone over the loss of a loved one.18
It is of course true that the significance of a loved one cannot be
formulated in full in words. And we might suppose that this is not
least because a fine-grained account of this significance would need to
refer to the organization and feel of the relevant perceptual fields,
across a range of contexts. Or to put the matter otherwise, for such an
account, we would need to refer to the way in which our sense of the
significance of the person is blended together with the significance
which attaches to the various contexts (be it water or the forest, or
whatever) in which we have known them. And these matters cannot
be recorded in full in verbal terms, not even by the person who is the
subject of the relevant experiences.19
Naturally, the reader of Cooper’s text will want to know more
about the content of the particular kind of existential experience
which he takes to be foundational for the spiritual life. What is
revealed in this sort of experience, as in more everyday cases of
existential experience, is not going to be fully ‘discursible’; so it
would not be reasonable to ask for a complete account, in verbal
terms, of the content of such an experience. But might we be able in
18
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as A Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to
Foucault, ed. A. I. Davidson, tr. M. Chase (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995),
p. 285.
19
See too Hadot’s discussion of the idea that nature is mysterious in The Veil of
Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, tr. M. Chase (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
some way to delimit in some degree the sort of truth which is
supposed to be disclosed in these experiences?
It is notable that when he is talking about the experience of
mystery, Cooper, like Kohák in this respect, has recourse to the
term ‘epiphany’. And he even uses the language of ‘gift’ and of
‘grace’. He remarks, for example, that the experience of mystery is
of the world as one to which we, as ‘co-arisen’ with it, are essential, yet—
‘wondrously’—as present to us ‘just as it is’. For it is a world experienced
as a ‘gift’ of—something come ‘out of ’—an ineffable, inexplicable ‘pre-
sencing’ or ‘self-emptying’ that is nothing ‘hidden’ behind what is
present.20
Similarly, when he is expounding the fittingness of the language of
‘grace’ in this context, Cooper remarks that: ‘we ourselves, our sub-
jectivity, “co-originate” with the world . . . At a deep level, the world is
not shaped or structured by us: rather we-and-the-world “arise” or
are “given” together.’21 These are rather dark sayings—and perhaps
this is inevitable, given that we are dealing here with the experience of
‘mystery’. But the general drift of Cooper’s position is, I think, clear
enough. Epiphanic experience of the world is not simply an aware-
ness of individual items which is shot through with an appreciation of
their membership of some existential context; human experience in
general tends to have that character. Nor is it simply a more reflective
instance of such experience, where we recognize in experience that
the appearance of individual items is indeed structured by their
location within an existential context. It is, rather, a particular form
of this second kind of experience, where we apprehend in experience
both the embeddedness of individual things within a correlative
existential context which is defined in part by human concerns and,
at the same time, the ‘co-arising’ of ourselves, together with our
concerns, and of the world which is presented in the light of those
concerns. The first of these insights (concerning the relativity of the
appearances to existential context) is the sort of insight that is ac-
knowledged by ‘humanists’. But in the epiphanic experience, we
recognize not simply the humanly relative character of the world,
but also that we ourselves do not found the world, since we ‘co-arise’
with it. This second insight serves to distinguish this position from
20
Cooper, The Measure of Things, p. 350.
21
Ibid. p. 348.
mere or ‘raw’ humanism. And once we have grasped in this way that
the world is not fundamentally of our making, then we can speak of
‘grace’ and of the world as a kind of ‘gift’. Lastly, the language of
‘epiphany’ suggests, in addition, that the phenomenal quality of the
objects of sensory experience, and not only the world’s structure in
these respects, can on occasion evoke, quite properly, a response of
wonder.22
So on various points, Cooper’s account resembles Kohák’s. Each
author is concerned with the experience of individual items in con-
text; and they both consider this context to be ‘existential’, rather than
simply causal or of the kind that might be defined by the perspective
of the natural sciences. Moreover, both Cooper and Kohák acknow-
ledge the role of human subjectivity in disclosing the nature of the
real world: for Kohák, the world comes into clearest or fullest focus
not through the impersonal perspective of the sciences, but through
the paced-out, feeling-infused, normatively structured experience of
the forest-dweller; and for Cooper, individual items are rightly under-
stood by reference to their location within existential contexts whose
nature is defined by the whole spectrum of human projects, and not
only by those more austere kinds of enquiry which are the special
domain of the sciences. And for both authors, the world is properly
received in wonder, in experiences of ‘epiphany’; and for both of them
we can speak in this context of the world as a ‘gift’, which is to be
received in a spirit of gratitude. Lastly, for both of them, while the
world can rightly be experienced as a ‘gift’, it would be a mistake to
see it as somehow the product of some ‘entity’, which stands ‘behind’
the world. Cooper makes this point by saying that there ‘is nothing
hidden behind what is present’, and Kohák by saying that God is not
‘a being among beings’.
I am not suggesting that Cooper and Kohák are of precisely one
mind concerning what is revealed in these disclosures of value. Even
allowing for Kohák’s somewhat specialized usage of the term ‘God’,
I doubt whether the idea that there is a ‘God’ is consistent with the
sort of ontology which Cooper seems to embrace. But it may also be
22
See, for example, Cooper’s comment: ‘A pale, watery gleam in an otherwise
leaden sky is not the epiphany of the sun that a flame-red dawn is. Only the latter, for
most of us, is something to wonder at, and aptness to inspire wonder is required,
surely, for a phenomenon to invite the term “epiphany” ’: Cooper, The Measure of
Things, p. 328.
doubted whether the phenomenology of epiphanic forms of experi-
ence, as it is described by these authors, has any tendency to favour
Cooper’s ontology over Kohák’s or vice versa. As we have seen,
Kohák’s account of the phenomenology of epiphanic experience
seems to be ambiguous on the question of whether such experience
is of a reality ‘behind’ the sensory appearances, or whether it simply
consists in a certain evaluation of those appearances. And there is
nothing in Cooper’s account of the phenomenology of the experience
of mystery which would of itself rule out Kohák’s ontology, so far as
I can see. Moreover, each of these ontologies is adumbrated in rather
minimalist terms; and for this reason too it is hard to see how the
phenomena (when they are characterized simply in terms of salience,
phenomenal hue, relativity to existential context, and so on) might be
sufficient, of themselves, to adjudicate between them. In any case,
allowing for their differences, it is striking that both Cooper and
Kohák place at the foundation of the spiritual life a certain kind of
perceptual gestalt—one which is distinguished by the various features
which I listed in the last paragraph. And for both authors, the
phenomenal properties of this gestalt yield a particular insight into
the fundamental character of the world—an insight which cannot be
set down in full in discursive form, and which is not accessible
independently of the ‘epiphanic’ experience. In this sense, for both
of them, the spiritual life is built around an encounter with ‘mystery’.
Given that the ‘epiphany’ which Cooper is describing is, like the
experience which Kohák has described, an experience of the many-
layered, blended significance of a natural context, the content of this
experience is perhaps most readily conveyed by means of poetic
evocation, insofar as it can be communicated in verbal terms at all.
So I am going to close this discussion of Cooper’s approach to the
spiritual life by quoting, and leaving to stand without further com-
ment, a text from the poet Saigyo, which he cites with evident
approval:
Inviting the wind to carry
Salt waves of the sea
The pine tree of Shiogoshi
Trickles all night long
Shiny drops of moonlight.23
23
Cited in Cooper, The Measure of Things, p. 363.
EXPERIENCE OF UNITY IN THE SENSORY WORLD
Cooper and Kohák are both writing as philosophers, and each of

them shows in some measure his indebtedness to a particular reli-
gious tradition—namely, Buddhism and Christianity respectively.
I want to examine now an author whose intellectual formation has
taken a different form. Christopher Alexander is an architect by
training, and in his writings there is no evident allegiance to any
particular religious or philosophical tradition. So his account will
serve as a further, somewhat independent perspective on the issues
we have been exploring.
Alexander has practised for many years as an architect, and he has
also written extensively on architectural theory. From its beginnings,
his work has shown an interest in broadly spiritual questions. In an
early discussion he sets down in these terms the nature of the quality
which is for him the criterion of excellence in building:
The first place I think of, when I try to tell someone about this quality, is
a corner of an English country garden, where a peach tree grows against
a wall. The wall runs east to west; the peach tree grows flat against its
southern side. The sun shines on the tree, and as it warms the bricks
behind the tree, the warm bricks themselves warm the peaches on the
tree. It has a slightly dozy quality. The tree, carefully tied to grow flat
against the wall; warming the bricks; the peaches growing in the sun; the
wild grass growing around the roots of the tree, in the angle where the
earth and roots and wall all meet.24
This quality can be found, Alexander thinks, not only in places of
human construction but, in principle, anywhere. Its particular charac-
ter is always context-dependent. As he says: ‘In one place it is calm, in
another it is stormy; in one person it is tidy; in another it is careless
. . . in one room it is soft and quiet; in another it is yellow. In one family
it is a love of picnics; in another dancing.’25 And so on. The quality can
be identified ostensively in each of these contexts, but according to
Alexander it ‘cannot be named’.26 Alexander’s work is a sustained
attempt to fashion a vocabulary, and a set of theoretical perspectives,
24
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979), p. 25.
25
Ibid. p. 26.
26
Ibid. p. 28.
that will allow the nature of this sort of experience to come into clearer
focus, in conceptual terms; but in his later work he continues to affirm
that this quality cannot be communicated directly in discursive terms,
and in that sense it remains true for him that the quality cannot be
‘named’. Here again, as in the work of Kohák and Cooper, we are
concerned with a world-directed, value-disclosing perceptual gestalt,
which is said to be of fundamental importance for the ‘spiritual life’,
and whose precise content eludes description. For Alexander, this
experience provides the measure not only for excellence in building
and other spheres of practical and social endeavour, but for excellence
in the natural world.
Alexander’s example of the peach tree indicates that the experience
to which he is alluding is fundamentally an experience of unity. The
various elements in this scene—the tree and the wall, and the
peaches—are apprehended not as a bundle of distinct particulars,
but as members of a unitary context. In this case, the unity of the
context can be defined in broadly causal terms. It matters that the wall
runs from east to west, and that the peach tree is trained against its
southern face. This means, of course, that the tree is exposed to the
sun as it arcs through the sky; and because this face of the wall is also
exposed to the sun, the tree is warmed both by the sun and by the
radiant heat of the wall. Here, then, is one simple form of unity: tree
and wall are both warmed by the sun; and the warmth of the wall is in
turn communicated to the tree. It is this interconnectedness of these
things with one another, and with the wider cosmological context
which is given in the movements of the sun, which constitutes the
relevant unity. While this unity has to this extent a causal and
geometrical structure, it is not apprehended in the first instance in
abstractly causal or geometrical terms; rather, it is made manifest in
the sensory appearances, which reveal the mutually defining and
mutually supporting relationship of various individual items to one
another. Alexander takes a step in the direction of characterizing the
relevant phenomenology when he comments that the experience is
one of ‘doziness’. It is, we might say, an experience of the various
items in some context as falling together without strain, so that each is
just right where it is. In this respect, what Alexander is describing here
is, I suggest, rather like what Cooper is describing when he talks of the
existential context which is constituted by a pool of water: everything
is what it is, and is at ease where it is, by virtue of the relationship of
mutual definition or co-inherence which unites the various elements
of this context. To see the continuity in the perspective of the two
authors, it is also worth recalling that the quality to which Alexander
is alluding is apparent not only in the relationship of trees to walls,
but also in social contexts—it is evident, for example, in the life of the
family which likes to picnic or to dance.
Alexander’s account gives a further way of articulating the idea that
what we encounter in such experiences is properly termed ‘mystery’.
When he characterizes the unity that is revealed in these experiences
as a quality which ‘cannot be named’, Alexander is, I think, adverting
to the fact that no merely verbal account of a given scene will suffice
to establish whether the scene will be experienced as a unity. There is
an analogy here (or perhaps more than an analogy) with aesthetic
experience.27 From verbal description alone, I cannot know whether a
particular picture, or scene from nature, is going to count as beautiful.
It may be that I have regularly found paintings in which a streak of
yellow is juxtaposed with a streak of orange beautiful. But there is no
extrapolating from my experience in this respect to a general rule:
whenever a streak of yellow is juxtaposed with a streak of orange in a
painting, the result will be beautiful. Why? Because the aesthetic effect
of this combination of colours will always be context-dependent; it
will always depend on what else is going on in the painting. So even if
a given painting exhibits the relevant colour combination, to know
whether the painting is beautiful, I will also need to know the detail of
the painting in all other respects, and I will therefore need to see it (or
at least, to have a precise visual representation of it). In the same way,
Alexander is talking about an experience of unity which is context
dependent: that is why in one context the relevant unity-inducing
property may be a love of picnics, and in another a love of dancing.
There is in such cases no formula to which we can adhere which will
allow us to move from the observation that certain general qualities
are manifest in a scene or social context to the conclusion that the
scene or context exhibits unity in the relevant sense. Everything
depends on experiencing the particular context in all its specificity.
In that sense, judgement rests with perception.28
27
There is some reason to suppose that the experience to which Alexander is
alluding is not just like aesthetic experience in this respect, but is itself a form of
aesthetic experience. The experience of beauty, for example, commonly turns upon
the perception of unity in a given sensory manifold.
28
The same sort of point could be made in ethical contexts. Compare Aristotle’s
account in Nichomachean Ethics, II, ix. 8.
In his later work Alexander’s interest in the experience of unity
continues, but his description of this experience becomes gradually
more metaphysically committed and more religiously suggestive. In
fact, the fourth and final volume of his tetralogy The Nature of Order
bears the spiritually resonant title The Luminous Ground. Here he
speaks of the reality which is revealed in these experiences as ‘the
blazing one’, or ‘the I’, or the personal ‘ground’ of the material order.
In the passage I cite below, Alexander tries to give an account of what
an experience of ‘the I’ might amount to, in phenomenological terms,
by considering how a person might be drawn into such an experience
step by step, having started out from another, more familiar kind of
experience. Here he is considering the experience of a waterfall, but
the experience could in principle be of any natural object. Alexander
notes that what he wants to communicate to the reader in this passage
is the experience of ‘the I as being in these things, in the leaf, in the
raindrops, in the waterfall’. He comments:
In the mildest version of this experience, I look at the waterfall and say
I find it pleasing . . . In a second, also mild, version of this experience,
I enjoy the waterfall, and I feel a stirring of some relationship to it.
Virtually all of us, at one time or another, experience this feeling of a
mild relationship between ourselves and the waterfall . . . A further stage
of this experience occurs if I find the relationship strong. Then I may go
from saying that I experience some relatedness to the waterfall to saying
that I experience this relationship as somehow interior to me. The
relationship is touching to me. It matters . . . In a fourth version,
I may even feel that the waterfall . . . touches the core of me. This
happens, for instance, when as a lover, I feel profoundly stirred by . . .
the steady pounding of the waterfall. Being there, being filled with the
experience, I know that an essential core of me, the best part of me, is
stirred, touched by the ‘I’ which I perceive within the thing. In a
stronger version yet, I begin to feel some actual identification with the
waterfall . . . This does not mean that I actually feel my self to be present
in the waterfall. But I am aware that in some refreshing way, the
waterfall . . . nourishes me, releases me, refreshes me . . . There is a
stronger version yet of the experience which, according to the reports
of anthropologists, was common in preindustrial cultures. In these
primitive experiences the person experiences the waterfall . . . as a spirit,
that is, as an animate being of some kind . . . A still stronger form of
such identification also existed in primitive cultures when it had cur-
rency in ritual. [We could include here, I take it, totemic experiences.]
. . . There is an even stronger version of this experienced identity that
occasionally occurs in us when we recognize explicitly, and feel that our
own self exists in the beach, or in a wave, or in a bush. And a stronger
version still . . . is reached when we experience the relationship with the
waterfall so that it is not merely that I identify with the waterfall, but
that in some fashion I am the waterfall.29
I have quoted this text at some length because it helpfully distin-
guishes the phenomenology of each of a succession of experiences,
and allows the later experiences in this sequence to appear rather
more intelligible, or at least rather less eccentric, than they might
otherwise have seemed, had they been set down in isolation from
these more familiar kinds of experience from which they can be seen
to arise. What Alexander is describing here is evidently the progres-
sive blurring of any sense of distinction between the subject of the
experience and its object. This process has its origins in the percipi-
ent’s felt response to the object: she is gradually drawn into these
deepened forms of relationship to the object because she feels the
object to be attractive, or because it elicits in her, when she first
encounters it, the feeling of being pleased. And in the early phases
of this sequence, perhaps the subject’s interest in the object is
grounded in this feeling of pleasure: it is perhaps because she feels
such pleasure that she continues to contemplate the object. But in the
later phases of the process, as Alexander describes it, the subject’s
attention is so fully occupied by the object that she ceases to have any
clear sense of her own identity in distinction from it. And at this
point, it seems natural to say that her attention to the object arises not
so much from any wish to enjoy certain pleasurable feelings that she
associates with experience of the object, as from the compelling
attractiveness of the object itself. While pleasurable feelings may
persist, these feelings are now valued not fundamentally for their
intrinsic phenomenal feel as thrilling sensations or subjective tingles
or whatever it might be, but as modes of appreciation of the object.
Most of us have had experiences of broadly this kind, I suggest. To
give an example from my own life: as a teenager, I would sometimes
wander up to the field at the back of the house, and gaze at one of the
long strands of grass that grow out of the hedge there—fixing my
attention on a randomly chosen strand, and watching it bob about in
29
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Nature of Building
and the Nature of the Universe, Book 4, The Luminous Ground (Berkeley, CA: The
Center for Environmental Structure, 2004), pp. 68–9.
the breeze. And I would do this without providing for myself any
verbal comment on the scene. After some five minutes or so of this
sort of focused concentration, I would invariably find that my sense of
myself was redefined. My consciousness of the world would now be
filled to the brim with this strand of grass. And on returning to
consider other things, I would now view them from this vantage
point, rather than from, say, the vantage point afforded by my sense
of myself as a human being with a particular social role to fulfil. In
this case too, the experience of a natural object seems to perform an
identity-defining and identity-filling role. (Of course, this particular
example has a special resonance in an adolescent context!) Those
accounts of aesthetic experience which take it to be vacant of any
egocentric concern seem to be dealing with much the same phenom-
enon. Again, Iris Murdoch’s description of her experience of seeing a
kestrel provides a nice illustration of this sort of approach. The various
phases of the spiritual ascent which Plato maps out in the Symposium
might also be understood in these terms. Here, we begin with the
absorbed appreciation of the beauty of a particular thing; and this
experience awakens in the person a new consciousness of reality, and
perhaps a consciousness of a new reality, so that it draws them into a
new, ego-transcendent sense of themselves. Perhaps such experiences
are bound to seem to ‘us’—that is, modern, urban people—as rather
exceptional and even peculiar; but as Alexander notes, they are widely
reported in ‘primal’ cultures, and in those cultures they are commonly
assigned a fundamental, reality-disclosing role.
The experiences which Kohák and Cooper describe are not evi-
dently experiences of the dissolution or redefinition of our conven-
tional sense of self. But on closer examination their accounts seem to
broach very similar issues. Kohák is concerned with an experience in
which we register the intrinsic worth of the forest, or the intrinsic
worth of the porcupine and other inhabitants of the forest. And to
acknowledge the intrinsic worth of something in this sense is to
appreciate it for itself, and independently of whatever tendency it
may have to satisfy my egocentrically defined projects. So in such an
experience the ‘self ’ of the percipient is reconstituted to the extent
that it is no longer the world’s significance that is being defined by
reference to the concerns or projects of the self—it is, rather, if
anything, the self and its projects which are now being defined by
reference to the world, where this shift is reflected in a correlative
reordering of the phenomenal field. This is one way of understanding
Kohák’s account of his activities in the forest: when he moves about in
the forest, he is conscious of having to accommodate his movements
to an existential order that is not of his making, but is intrinsic to the
forest; and in this respect, therefore, his projects are now defined by
the world. (This order is existential rather simply causal: it is not just
that he has to divert around tree trunks because he is causally incap-
able of walking through them, for example.) Similarly, Cooper’s
description of the mutually defining relation between the significance
of a pool of water and the significance of the various human and
other-than-human activities that are played out in relation to the
water suggests that our activities depend for their identity upon an
existential context that is in some measure given to us, rather than
being simply of our making. From this perspective too, the signifi-
cance of the world enters into who I am, because it conditions the
meaning which attaches to my activities, whether or not I grasp this
relationship in reflective terms.
To put the same sort of point in other terms, my activities depend
for their possibility not only upon the causal structure of the world,
but also upon its existential structure. We all of us routinely acknow-
ledge this connection when we calibrate our movements to the place
in which we find ourselves, because we grasp that the meaning of a
given stretch of bodily movement, or the action that is constituted by
that movement, is relative to material context: it is one thing to wave
my arms in a football stadium, another to do so at a bus stop, and
another to do the same when being swept out to sea. Cooper’s point is
a radicalization of this proposal: the existential context which fixes the
sense of my activities can be explicated, he is saying, in the densely
textured way which is indicated in his discussion of the significance of
a pool of water. We might say that on his account, the whole world
‘gathers’ in the significance which is borne by a pool of water: the
activities of eating and drinking, of recreation, of being blessed, and
so on indefinitely, all contribute to the significance of the pool; and in
turn the existential sense of these activities, which helps to define the
existential sense of the pool, is conditioned by their location within
further contexts; and so on, indefinitely. Accordingly, we might speak
of the world as a whole as an existential context—a context which is
produced by the co-inherence of the identities of water and of the
other recurrent constituents of human experience. If all of this is so,
then we cannot define our identities as agents just by fiat: those
identities will be the product both of what we ‘do’ (where this doing
is conceived in context-independent terms) and of a context which is
for the most part simply given to us, but whose significance is also in
some measure defined by our doings. In this existential sense, we
might say, self and world flow into one another.
When we consider the later phases of Alexander’s description of
the waterfall experience, it is not just that my sense of self is redefined,
but that I encounter an ‘I’ in the world, and recognise this ‘I’ as none
other than my own ‘I’. From the passage, it is clear enough why
Alexander opts for this vocabulary: in these experiences, my sense
of self ceases to be lodged in certain thoughts ‘in my head’, and
instead becomes invested in the thing in the outer world which fills
my consciousness, as the object of my contemplative awareness.30 So
from a subjective point of view, my sense of myself as an ‘I’ is now
sunk in my sense of the object; and Alexander records this phenom-
enological condition by saying that in such experiences I encounter
an ‘I’, my own ‘I’, in the world. For Alexander, of course, this ‘I’ is
also, as it turns out, the ‘I’ of everything else.
While they may not use this vocabulary, Kohák and Cooper seem,
once again, to be exploring experiences with a somewhat similar
phenomenology. Kohák speaks of how the ‘presence of God’ can be
encountered in the sensory appearances. Since ‘God’ in his usage does
not refer to a particular entity, this experience of a personal presence
cannot have a conventional subject–object structure. Moreover, as
Kohák understands it, in this sort of experience the percipient is
required to surrender their conventional, ego-grounded sense of
self, as a condition of becoming attuned to the intrinsic value of
things in nature. Perhaps Kohák would be reluctant to say that in
this experience I encounter not just a personal presence, namely the
divine presence, and in that sense an ‘I’, but my own ‘I’. But if such
experiences lack a subject–object structure, and if they presuppose a
surrendering of the egocentric point of view, then it is not as if I am
encountering a personal presence which appears in clear distinction
from myself in subject–object terms; and it is not as if my conven-
tional, ego-referenced sense of self can be invoked to sustain some
sense of distinction between myself and the ‘I’ that I encounter in
such experiences. For these reasons, it seems that from Kohák’s
30
Compare again Schopenhauer’s language when he says that in aesthetic experi-
ence, ‘we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two
have become one’: The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, pp. 178–9.
perspective it is not too difficult to assign an intelligible sense to
Alexander’s suggestion that in such experiences I encounter my
own ‘I’ in the world. We could make this same sort of point in rather
different terms by supposing that my identity is ultimately given in
God. This is, of course, the traditional theistic view; and there are
various ways of developing the idea. We might say, most simply, that
God is my final cause—that is, the proper end-point of all my
projects—so that God is not related to me just ‘externally’, as my
efficient cause, but also ‘internally’, insofar as who I am, or the
significance of my projects, is ultimately to be specified in God-
centred terms. If we take up this thought, then there is a ready
sense in which in encountering the ‘presence of God’ in the world,
I am also encountering my true identity, or my own ‘I’, since who
I am is ultimately to be defined in God-referenced terms. And in that
case we will also have a reason to affirm this further claim to which
Alexander also subscribes: in encountering my own ‘I’ in the world,
I am encountering thereby the ‘I’ of everything else. It is, after all, not
just my identity that is to be specified in God-referenced terms, but
the identity of all things.
Cooper is less obviously concerned with the idea that the reality
which is encountered in epiphanic kinds of experience is ‘personal’.
But as we have seen, he supposes that the identity of the self is a
function of existential context. So on his view too, there is a sense in
which an epiphanic experience of the existential context which is the
world will also be an experience of the true identity of the self. And
perhaps we could put this point, without too much strain, by saying
that in such experiences we encounter our own ‘I’. Of course, this
formulation would need to be sensitive to the fact that Cooper will
deny that there is any substantive ‘self ’ thing ‘behind’ the world. But
then, on Kohák’s usage, God is not to be considered as a particular
‘thing’ standing behind the world. And Alexander too shows a reluc-
tance to conceive of the ‘I’ which is revealed in these experiences as
simply distinct from the world. Of such experiences he says: ‘This is
spirit made manifest’. And he clearly wishes to differentiate this
reading from two others, as he continues: ‘It is very hard to take
this literally. We are more often in a state of mind where we would
like to say one of two things, either, Everything is God . . . or, God lies
behind things, this is merely the outward material world.’31 Here we
31
Alexander, The Luminous Ground, p. 302.
find the same kind of conceptual knot that is evident in Kohák’s
rejection of ‘god-constructs’, and perhaps in Herbert McCabe’s
dictum that ‘God and the world do not make two’—which he did
not intend as an affirmation of pantheism. So while it would be crass
to simply identify the ontologies of our three focal authors, it is clear
that in their descriptions of the phenomenology of various experi-
ences they are circling around much the same questions; and it
appears that each of them would reject any account of the import of
these experiences which postulates some purely extrinsic relation
between the world and its ‘ground’.
In this book we have been concerned with the organization and
‘hue’ of the perceptual field, rather than with experience which is
focally of a particular object. Kohák and Cooper both share this
interest: Kohák’s text concerns experience of the forest considered
as a unitary domain or ‘order of mineness’, rather than as an aggre-
gate of discrete individuals; and Cooper addresses the experience of
existential contexts, which he distinguishes from an experience of
individual items which are ‘externally related to one another’. It might
seem that Alexander’s discussion has a rather different focus. In the
passage I cited above, he is, after all, describing the experience of a
particular waterfall. But while he is not always so explicit about the
matter, I take it that Alexander too is concerned with an experience
which is not focally of a particular object. The experience of the
‘quality without a name’ is clearly an experience of various objects
not as distinct individuals, but as members of a unitary context. And
the ‘I’ which is encountered in the waterfall is not itself a particular
thing, but a reality which in some sense infuses the whole of the
sensory world, even if certain objects reveal its character with par-
ticular clarity. So in these respects, Alexander too is concerned not so
much with experience of an individual item as with a ‘world disclo-
sive’ experience.
Moreover, when Alexander recounts the progressive break down of
any felt distinction between subject and object in his description of
the experience of the waterfall, he is alluding, I take it, to the way in
which certain feelings (the feeling of being pleased, for example)
which are at first attributed to the self considered in distinction
from the object can come gradually to infuse the appearance of the
object. As long as the subject experiences various feelings as being in
herself and as constituting her response to an object which is ‘out
there’, then she will be unable to experience the kind of felt identity
with the object that Alexander describes. But this condition can be
overcome when the object comes to be stained with the very joyous-
ness or wonderment, or whatever it is, that the subject of the experi-
ence feels. So Alexander seems to be describing a process whereby a
certain change in the condition of the subject comes to effect a
correlative change in the appearance of the sensory world. And to
the extent that this is the right way to read the experience of the
waterfall, then we have a further reason for supposing that it can be
assimilated very readily to the context-focused experiences which we
have been exploring in earlier chapters.
We have been considering the phenomenology of two kinds of
experience which Alexander takes to be spiritually significant (the
experience of the ‘quality without a name’, and the feeling of identifi-
cation with certain objects in nature). Let us conclude this discussion
of his work by looking briefly at his treatment of one further kind of
experience. Alexander thinks that in our encounter with certain
colour combinations, we can see what he calls ‘inner light’. Here is
how he develops this idea:
To understand the idea of subdued brilliance [or inner light] better, it is
very helpful to think about nature . . . In nature, even the colour of the
sky, which we think of as bright blue, is objectively an immensely pale
watery blue, compared with the ultramarine, cerulean blue, and cobalt
blue of the paint box. The rich green of a meadow is often—object-
ively—a greyish, brownish green, far yellower, browner, greyer, lighter,
and more subtle than the chromium or brilliant green in the tube. So
nature uses colors that are subdued, muted. Yet the brilliance of a field
of flowers on a spring day is legendary—and a thousand times more
brilliant than an advertisement which used red and yellow and blue . . .
The brilliance, and the intensity of colour, is not caused by the satur-
ation of hue, by the crude massive use of primaries. It is caused by the
interaction of the colours, by the way that many subtle colours interact
to become brilliant and to give off light.32
On this view, while inner light arises out of the relationship between
individual colours, it is not simply an additive or compound quality,
which is given in the mere juxtaposition of those colours. As Alexan-
der says, it ‘is a quality of meltedness in which elementary “parts” and
“structures” no longer exist. They give way to something more deeply
32
Ibid. pp. 165–9.
unified, a single paste.’33 Because it suffuses a natural scene, inner
light can hold together the scene’s parts; and as Alexander makes
plain here, it does this not by just ‘bolting together’ these parts, but by
transforming the scene’s constituent colours, so that they ‘melt’ into
one another. Inner light is, therefore, a property which belongs in the
first instance to a context rather than to the individual elements of
which it is comprised—and accordingly, when we behold inner light
we grasp directly the unity of a scene. Although Alexander identifies
various rules which are satisfied by the colour combinations which
produce inner light (he notes, for example, the ‘mutual embedding’
which arises when each region of colour within a fabric contains small
samples of the colours which predominate in surrounding regions), it
remains the case that judgement here rests, once again, with percep-
tion: that is, the only way in which we can be sure of which colour
combinations will in fact generate inner light is by experimentation,
and appeal to first-hand experience.34
Alexander understands the significance of the experience of inner
light in rather the way that he understands the significance of the
experience of the quality without a name, and the experience of a felt
identification with natural objects. Here again, we are dealing with an
experience of unity which engages the person emotionally and which
makes possible an encounter with the ‘I’. But the experience of ‘inner
light’ is worth distinguishing from these other kinds of experience,
because here, even more strikingly than in these other cases, we are
presented with a singular phenomenological claim, concerning our
apprehension of colour, which anyone can in principle test by refer-
ence to their own experience. And if that phenomenological claim
holds good, then we have a further way of articulating how it is that
unity can be encountered in the sensory appearances. Here we are
dealing not with the unity which is afforded by coherence of causal
context (as with the example of the peach tree and the wall), nor with
the unity which concerns the break down of any felt sense of distinc-
tion between subject and object (as with the example of the waterfall),
nor with the unity which arises from the interpenetration of the
existential import of various things (as with Cooper’s example of
the ‘world’ which gathers in a pool of water), nor with the unity
33
Ibid. p. 236.
34
Ibid. p. 192 (for a discussion of mutual embedding), and p. 172 (for the role of
experimentation).
which is apprehended when nature is experienced as a ‘sphere of
mineness’ (as when Kohák finds that the things in the forest belong to
an order which cannot be reduced to their causal relations to one
another). Instead, we are dealing with a unity which envelopes and
quite literally shines out from things. To use Alexander’s preferred
idiom, here we encounter, within the sensory appearances, the
Blazing One.35
35
It is notable that the idea of brilliance or light has played a large part in
traditional accounts of the nature of beauty. For example, Aquinas picks out claritas
or ‘brightness’ as a quality which makes for beauty. Thus he comments that ‘we call
things bright in colour beautiful’: Summa Theologiae 1a. 39. 8, in Summa Theologiae,
Vol. 7, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, tr. T.C. O’Brien (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode,
1975). Alexander’s account suggests one way of understanding the phenomenology
relevant to this claim.
6
Doctrine, Darkness, and the Spiritual Life
The reader may well have been struck by the fact that the examples of
world-directed spiritual experience which we have been considering
so far tend to be rather ‘light’ on doctrine. Cooper subscribes to a
conception of fundamental reality as non-discursible ‘mystery’; so
unsurprisingly, doctrinal or creedal commitments concerning the
nature of fundamental reality do not feature very conspicuously in
his account. He does allow that such claims can play a negative role:
false views about the nature of the world can occlude or otherwise
interfere with the experience of mystery; but this experience is not
obviously enabled, in his view, by the entertaining or affirming of any
doctrinal claim. Somewhat similarly, Alexander dubs the reality to
which he is alluding the ‘quality without a name’; and this suggests
immediately that here too there is not going to be much opportunity
for doctrinally rich articulations of the nature of reality to enter into
the relevant experience. Moreover, while Alexander is willing to
theorize about the conditions under which these experiences might
occur, and willing to speculate about what they might reveal about the
nature of things, it is clear from his discussion of colour experience,
and from his description of the experience of the waterfall, that for
him the relevant form of attention to the world is basically one
of openness to the sensory qualities of a thing, considered in and of
themselves, rather than in the light of any theoretical frame. Lastly,
while Kohák understands the experiences which he describes as
encounters with the ‘presence of God’, he is, even so, quite emphatic
that ‘god constructs’ are liable to obstruct or disrupt the relevant
phenomenology. And so far as I can see, he has no positive account
to give of how doctrinal claims might structure the sensory phenom-
enology of the spiritual life.
Doctrine, Darkness, and the Spiritual Life 167
DOCTRINE AND THE APPRECIATION OF

SENSORY FORMS IN THEMSELVES
There is no necessary opposition between the stance taken by these

authors and the idea that doctrinal commitments can enter positively
into the sensory appearances. It is quite possible to favour, for
example, a two-stage approach, which begins with the sensory ap-
pearances taken somewhat independently of any theoretical commit-
ments, before moving on to the kind of gestalt which will arise when
the appearances are penetrated by a relevant doctrinal scheme.
Indeed, the fittingness of the first of these stages, where we appreciate
sensory things in themselves, by virtue simply of their impact on the
body, and so far as possible independently of theorization, is itself an
implication of certain doctrinal claims. For instance, if God in the
person of the Logos has not just inhabited the material order, but
become flesh, then we might well infer that material things have now
acquired a special kind of dignity, because of this intimate relation-
ship which they bear to the Logos; and we might conclude that on
account of this dignity, the appearances of material things deserve
appreciation, and even reverence, in themselves, and regardless of
whether they bear the stamp of any religious theorization of the
world.
A rather similar perspective on the significance of the sensory
appearances has been developed by John Drury in his reflections on
Christian art. He notes that ‘Christianity is a way of handling the
ordinary and secular in the spirit of its arch-doctrine of the incar-
nation of the divine, the unreserved presence of God in material
flesh . . .’1 And he argues that this incarnationally informed appreci-
ation of the significance of the sensory world is revealed in the work
of Christian artists.2 He takes as an example Velazquez’s painting The
Waterseller of Seville. Here an older man, the waterseller, is repre-
sented in the act of dispensing water from a large pitcher. Drury
comments:
1
John Drury, Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and their Meanings (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 176.
2
The same theme is developed instructively by Tim Gorringe in his remarks on
‘secular parables’ in his Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
The large bottle bulges out of the picture space to invite us into its
making on the wheel: the striations of the potter’s fingers and the
concavity caused by his lifting of the heavy, pliably wet, bottle from
the wheel to dry. This, the other two pots, and the cold water in the
goblet are rendered with an adroit sympathy for the work of their
makers—the way the potter dimpled the pitcher with pokes of his
fingers is palpable—which makes praise vapid. Solemn silence is in
order here . . . In his torn, chasuble-like leather poncho, the noble old
man has a priestly dignity as he serves (‘ministers’ is a better word) the
water to the intent, reflective boy . . . There is no speech or text to guess
at. The quasi-liturgical seriousness of it all is a temptation to pick out
elements of religious symbolism and inflate them, but that would be
almost a kind of sacrilege against the complete unity of it all.3
Velazquez’s incarnational faith is evident, Drury is suggesting, in his
handling of the everyday appearances, in their everydayness: his close,
patient attention to the surface of the bottle, for example, shows that
he considers the sensory appearances to be important in their own
right, and independently of their capacity to bear any allegorical
meaning. (I take it that there is no allegory which might obtain a
foothold in a detail such as the dimpling of the pitcher.) And Drury
declines even to speculate about whether the picture’s effect might be
secured, in some measure, by appeal to a set of religious symbols
which will provide the key to its interpretation. Why? Because to do
this, we might say, would be to subvert the thought that the sensory
appearances, in Velaquez’s incarnational vision, have their own dig-
nity, quite apart from their capacity to exemplify a religious message.
So it is not so much that a religious thought—the thought of the
incarnation—is illustrated by this picture; nor is our viewing of the
picture, if we follow Drury, to be structured by this thought; it is,
rather, that the thought of the incarnation implies a certain assess-
ment of the significance of the sensory appearances, and that this
same assessment is evident in the picture, insofar as its attitude
towards sensory things is one of close, patient, respectful attention,
which is free of any allegorizing intent, or any tendency to assign the
appearances a merely illustrative significance. In sum, here the sens-
ory appearances are appreciated for themselves, albeit that the
painter’s recognition of the appropriateness of this stance rests
upon the Christian dogma of incarnation.
3
Drury, Painting the Word, p. 180.
But while the idea of incarnation might imply that some such
assessment of the significance of the sensory appearances is fitting,
and even required, for Christians, this is not to say that doctrinally
infused and structured appreciations of those appearances are forbid-
den. On the contrary, to revert to a presiding theme of this discussion,
if we are sensory creatures then it is only proper that we should
encounter, and be shaped by, religious ideas in sensory form, for
such an encounter will engage the person in their affective–
intellectual–behavioural integrity. We are not confronted with a
choice here: we can appreciate sensory forms in a Velazquezian
mode, as well as in doctrinally structured modes. And the second of
these approaches can build upon and be enriched by the first.
AQUINAS AND THE DOCTRINE OF

‘CO-NATURALITY’
A perspective of broadly this kind is implied in Aquinas’s treatment

of the efficacy of the sacraments, and their capacity to serve as
instruments of grace. Thomas writes:
An instrument has two ways of acting: first precisely as an instrument,
and precisely as such it produces its effects not of its own power but in
the power of the principal agent. But it has another way of acting proper
to itself, one that belongs to it in virtue of its own form. For instance,
cutting is proper to an axe in virtue of the sharpness intrinsic to it,
whereas the function of making a bed belongs to it only inasmuch as it is
an instrument used in a craft. So too it is with the sacraments. They
touch the body and so produce upon it the sort of effects which are co-
natural to them as physical entities. But in the very act of doing so they
may also operate as instruments, producing effects upon the soul in the
power of God. For instance, the water of baptism, by the very fact of
washing the body of its own co-natural power, washes the soul too in
virtue of being an instrument of the divine power. For soul and body
together constitute a unity.4
4
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3a. 62. 1, ad 2, in Summa Theologiae, Vol.
56, The Sacraments, tr. D. Bourke (Blackfriars: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1975).
Aquinas might in principle have said that in baptism, and the other
sacraments, there are two discrete effects—one of which derives from
the agency of the created substance and the other of which derives
from divine agency, which is in no way mediated by the framework of
creaturely causality. So in the case of baptism, he might have said that
the water acts to cleanse the body, and alongside this operation, and
entirely distinguished from it, God acts to cleanse the soul. There is
nothing evidently logically offensive about such a teaching. But reli-
giously it will make no sense to someone who considers the body, or
the material order in general, to be spiritually important. So contrary
to this position, Aquinas here affirms that while the cleansing of the
soul in baptism is indeed to be attributed to God (who is the ‘principal
agent’), it is at the same time to be attributed to the water’s securing of
the effect which is co-natural to it—namely, the effect of bodily
cleansing. The cleansing of the soul, in other words, is effected by
way of the cleansing of the body: these are not two entirely separate
operations, since the second contributes to the first, rather as an axe’s
cutting through wood on account of its inherent sharpness can
contribute to the making of a bed. We might conclude, then, that
divine activity does not so much crowd out or displace creaturely
activity, as extend it. And applying an analogous principle, we may
say that a religiously infused appreciation of sensory things need not
crowd out or displace an appreciation of those things for themselves,
on account of the qualities that are co-natural to them. Rather, the
first form of experience can build upon and extend the second.
Aquinas’s handling of the other sacraments reveals this same
commitment to the causal integrity of the created order. It might be
thought that his understanding of the eucharist would pose some-
thing of a difficulty for this general approach. After all, here, fam-
ously, Thomas proposes that the substance of the created elements
ceases to exist! But the same kind of perspective is evident even here.
In this case, Aquinas appeals to what might seem to be a rather fine
distinction: the ‘substance’ of the bread and wine, he affirms, is not
strictly speaking ‘annihilated’, but is instead ‘changed into’ the body
and blood of Christ.5 Suppose we take the contrary view, and allow
that the substance of the material elements is ‘annihilated’, and that
5
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a. 75. 3, ad 1, in Summa Theologiae, Vol.
58, The Eucharistic Presence, tr. W. Barden O.P. (Blackfriars: Eyre & Spottiswoode,
1965).
the body and blood of Christ are then introduced in their place. On
this account, creaturely forms have no constructive part to play: they
are simply removed from the scene of God’s activity. But rather than
say this, Aquinas affirms that the substance of the bread and wine is in
fact caught up into the divine act, insofar as it is not, after all,
‘annihilated’ but is instead ‘changed into’ the body and blood of
Christ.
The same kind of sensibility is evident in Thomas’s treatment of
other themes. For instance, he distinguishes between the theological
virtues—which are ordered to a person’s wellbeing in relation to God,
and which are directly infused by God—and the moral virtues, which
are ordered to a person’s wellbeing in relation to other human beings,
and which, following Aristotle, he takes to be the product of a process
of habituation. Thomas could in principle have said that these two
sets of virtues operate entirely independently of one another—one set
being ordered to our relations with creatures and deriving from
creaturely agency (namely, the process of habituation), and the
other set being focused upon God and deriving from divine agency.
Here the Aristotelian and Augustinian perspectives, respectively,
would have been simply laid alongside one another, perfectly consist-
ently. But instead, Aquinas aims, again, at a deeper connectedness of
creaturely and divine forms of agency and directedness. In addition to
the acquired moral virtues, there are also, he maintains, infused moral
virtues—virtues which derive directly from the agency of God, but
which are ordered to our relations to creatures, though ‘as subordin-
ate to God’.6 On this perspective, the moral virtues are caught up into
the God-directedness of a person’s life, because the infused form of
these virtues concerns our relation to creatures ‘as subordinate to
God’. Moreover, the acquired moral virtues, which derive from ha-
bituation, are not thereby displaced or rendered redundant; rather,
the forms of activity which are ‘co-natural’, as we might put it, to
these virtues are set within the new context provided by the infused
form of the moral virtues, so that they fit the person for life in relation
to God, as well as in relation to creatures.7 In this way, creaturely
6
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a2ae. 63. 3, ad 2, in Summa Theologiae,
Vol. 23, Virtue, tr. W.P. Hughes, O.P. (Blackfriars: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968).
7
So a virtue such as temperance has acquired and infused forms—and while these
two are ordered to different ends, insofar as the first concerns the well-being of the
body and the second the person’s relation to God, they both have their place, and the
second builds on rather than cancels the first: see Summa Theologiae 1a2ae. 63. 4. For
forms of agency are caught up into divine forms of agency, and our
directedness towards creatures is caught up into our directedness
towards God.
The same sort of point could be developed in relation to Aquinas’s
discussion of a host of other issues.8 But in the present context it is
enough to take note of the general drift of what we might call
Aquinas’s ‘doctrine of co-naturality’ (though it is worth recalling
that there are other Thomistic teachings which might also go by this
name): on this view, the agency of creatures is not cancelled,
or bypassed, or displaced by the divine agency, but in some way
taken up into a new, God-directed teleology. As well as throwing
some light on the propriety of a Velazquezian appreciation of the
sensory appearances, this doctrine can also be applied to the central
question with which we have been occupied in this discussion—
namely, the question of how our experience of the sensory world
might be ordered in theological terms. Let us consider this question
next.
Following Aquinas, we might suppose that a substance such as
water will bear a new kind of significance once the powers which are
co-natural to it are caught up into a new, divinely ordered teleology.
To express the point in David Cooper’s terms, we might say that
various theological truths concerning the significance of water can
make for an extension in the ‘world’ which ‘gathers’ in a pool of water.
This new significance of water is not a matter of its acquiring an
additional co-natural property. It is, rather, a matter of the set of
properties which are co-natural to water, or of water considered as a
natural substance, being drawn into a larger, divinely focused tele-
ology. So these theological truths concerning the significance of water
will, then, make for a fundamental shift in the character of the ‘world’
which gathers in a pool of water. And as Cooper notes, such a shift
further discussion, see John Inglis, ‘Aquinas’s Replication of the Acquired Moral
Virtues: Rethinking the Standard Philosophical Interpretation of Moral Virtue in
Aquinas’, Journal of Religious Ethics 27 (1999), 3–27.
8
I explore some other examples in my paper ‘Charity and Human Flourishing:
Some Reflections Drawn from Thomas Aquinas’, in M. Higton, J. Law, and
C. Rowland (eds), Theology and Human Flourishing: Essays in Honor of Timothy
J. Gorringe (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), Chapter 16. In general, Aquinas
adheres to the principle that ‘grace does not abolish nature but brings it to perfection’:
Summa Theologiae, 1a. 1. 8 ad. 2, in B. Davies and B. Leftow (eds), Aquinas: Summa
Theologiae, Questions on God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
can in turn make for a shift in human beings’ ‘existential experience’
of water, or a change in the character of the sensory appearances in
this domain.
Somewhat similarly, we might suppose that a sacramentally
informed understanding of, say, water can condition our experience
of this substance in rather the way that our understanding that a
structure which has the appearance of being a table is indeed a table,
rather than, say, a balsa replica of a table, can make a difference to our
experience of that structure. Granted that the structure is indeed a
table, and not a replica, then it can figure in a relatively rich and
varied range of human projects. And for this reason, the person who
takes the structure to be a table, rather than a replica, is liable to
experience it differently in kinaesthetic terms (even if she is simply
observing the table, rather than actually using it for some purpose).
And in the experience of such a person, the table is liable to assume a
different salience, and a different phenomenal hue, within the per-
ceptual field. By contrast, if we take the structure to be simply a balsa-
wood replica, then it may well appear to have a diminished kind of
reality.9 And there is good reason for this, because in that case the
causal possibilities of the structure will be relatively restricted; and to
this extent it will indeed be less ‘real’, in the sense that it will be less
capable of contributing causally to the shaping of the material order.
Somewhat similarly, we might suppose that on a Thomistically in-
spired, sacramental account of natural substances such as water, the
causal powers of such substances will be newly extended, since they
will now be caught up into an expanded, divinely focused teleology.
And as a consequence, it will be possible for these substances to be
newly experienced, and experienced as newly ‘real’. A recurring
theme of this discussion has been the idea that a theological concep-
tion of the sensory appearances, even if it has a ‘two-worlds’ character
insofar as it is not pantheistic, need not issue in an impoverished or
degraded conception of the significance of material things. We can
now articulate that wider theme in the terms provided by Thomas’s
doctrine of co-naturality: in brief, the supposition that the causal
powers of sensory things can be stretched, rather than cancelled,
9
See again Matthew Ratcliffe’s comment, cited in Chapter 3, that a table may seem
‘strangely distant, intangible and incomplete’ if we suppose that it cannot be viewed
from another angle, or cannot be drawn in other ways into the normal range of our
practical interactions with tables: Feelings of Being, p. 156.
insofar as the effects which are co-natural to them are embedded
within a God-directed teleology, can make for an enrichment, rather
than any degradation, in the sensory appearances.
Aquinas’s ‘doctrine of co-naturality’, as I am calling it, has no
doubt various sources. At the close of the passage I cited above, he
suggests that his sacramental understanding of water is a corollary of
the idea that ‘soul and body together constitute a unity’. And we can
agree that a philosophical or theological anthropology can have a part
to play here: if we think of matters of the body as implicated in
matters of the soul, because ‘soul and body constitute a unity’, then
we should not be surprised if bodily things, such as water, should have
spiritual effects, by virtue of the powers to effect bodily change which
are co-natural to them. The co-naturality thesis might also be
grounded in Thomistic terms by recalling that for Aquinas, God is
not fundamentally one cause alongside other causes, or a being
among beings. On this view, we would not expect the divine agency
to be in competition with, or to displace or cancel, the agency of
creatures, in rather the way that the agency of one creature may cut
across the agency of another, as when, for example, in a game of
football, you and I, as forward and defender, are in competition to
decide whose boot will determine the direction of the ball. Instead,
God’s agency sustains the agency of creatures. So to the extent that it
involves an affirmation of the causal integrity of creatures, the doc-
trine of co-naturality can also be read as a corollary of the idea that
God is not a being among beings.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION AND THE

APPRECIATION OF THE SENSORY APPEARANCES
The co-naturality thesis also fits very naturally within the thought-
world of the doctrine of the incarnation. On the orthodox rendering
of that doctrine, the humanity of Christ is not in some fashion
displaced by the Word—as it would be on, say, an Apollinarian
view—but instead taken up in its integrity, so that it is oriented, in
a particularly intimate way, towards a new set of God-directed possi-
bilities. If that is the right way to read the doctrine, then we might
suppose that a similar pattern obtains in other spheres insofar as
there, too, the divine agency affirms the agency of creatures by
subsuming the effects which are co-natural to them within a wider
teleology. In this way, the idea of incarnation can be used to license
not only the patient attention to the sensory appearances for their
own sake which is evident in Velaquez’ treatment of the waterseller of
Seville, but also doctrinally infused forms of experience of the sensory
world, which locate the natural qualities of sensory objects within a
larger, divinely focused set of possibilities.
So here are two ways in which the doctrine of the incarnation can
shape an account of the significance of the sensory appearances. Let
me note briefly one further way in which the doctrine might be
brought to bear on this question. In our experience of other human
beings, we can distinguish, roughly, between three cases. First, there is
the case where their status as persons is somehow, whether practically
or theoretically, denied. On some accounts, pornographic experience
has this character: here, it is sometimes said, we experience the person
simply as a body, and not in personal terms. We could put this point
by saying that in this sort of experience it is the body of the person
which is presented in the sensory appearances, rather than the person
themselves as embodied.10 Such a presentation of the person will be
realized, of course, in an ordering of the perceptual field which
exhibits the requisite patterns of salience. Then there is the case
where the personhood of another human being is in some sense
acknowledged, but where the thought of their personhood fails to
infuse the sensory appearances. For example, if I am tired, or if my
usual sensitivities are blunted for some other reason, then while I may
not be actively committed in my experience to bracketing out, or
denying, the personhood of the other, I may nonetheless fail to
register their personhood in perceptual terms. And lastly, there is
the case where the thought of another human being’s personhood
does infuse their bodily appearance. As we all know, this case is quite
different phenomenologically, and morally, from the case where our
perception of another person is vacant of any such recognition. Here
the person themselves is presented in the sensory appearances.
We could understand the relationship between these various kinds
of appearance in terms of something like the doctrine of co-
10
As Roger Scruton comments, we can distinguish between ‘an interest in a
person’s body and an interest in a person as embodied’: Scruton, Beauty (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 47.
naturality. For example, in the experience of another human being as
a person, their identity as a sexual being need not be cancelled out or
displaced: instead, that identity can be set within a new and more fully
articulated account of their possibilities, so that it is differently experi-
enced. And by extension, we might suppose that just as the body of a
human being can be differently experienced when that body’s appear-
ance is infused by the thought of their personhood, so the ‘body’ of
the world can be differently experienced when its appearance is
infused by the thought of the world’s significance as a locus of divine
life, or by the thought of the world’s participation within a divinely
ordered teleology.
Let us turn now, very briefly, to one further line of reflection, which
will prove to have some relevance for the main thread of our discus-
sion. There is a long-established tradition of understanding the incar-
nation in the light of the judgement scene which is presented in
Chapter 25 of Matthew’s gospel. Here Jesus says to those who have
fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited prisoners, ‘as often as
you have done this to one of these my lowliest brothers and sisters,
you have done it to me’.11 Some commentators have wanted to take
this passage at its word, and to suppose that when we treat such
people decently, it is not just that we treat people who are in the
relevant respect like Jesus with decency, but that we treat him de-
cently. For example, when considering the case of the person who has
failed to extend such concern to another human being, Gregory of
Nyssa comments: ‘In condemning the sickness that preys upon the
body of this man, you fail to consider whether you might be, in the
process, condemning yourself and all nature. For you yourself belong
to the common nature of all. Treat all therefore as one common
reality.’12 On this account, human beings share a single nature in
such a fashion that when I treat one human being in a certain way,
I thereby treat all others who have this nature similarly. Obviously,
Gregory does not take this connection to hold in some narrowly
empirical sense: he knows well enough that if I pour water over
11
Matthew 25: 40. I have based this translation on the English rendering of the text
given in Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21–28: A Commentary, tr. J. E. Crouch (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 264.
12
Gregory of Nyssa, in Susan R. Holman, The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and
Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 201. The
text is taken from Gregory’s sermon ‘On the Saying, “Whoever Has Done It to One of
These Has Done It to Me” ’. I am grateful to Morwenna Ludlow for this reference.
you, I do not thereby cause all human beings to be wet. His point is
presumably moral: in behaving offensively towards you from a moral
point of view, I thereby insult your humanity, and in this sense
I insult all human beings. Gregory is at the same time affirming a
conception of human nature of metaphysical reach. Human nature
on this view enjoys a substantive mode of existence, over and above
the existence of individual human beings. And it is for this reason, he
thinks, that my moral relations to one human being will spill over
into my relations with all other members of the kind. Whatever we
make of his ontology of human nature, it is clear that Gregory’s stance
will license the stronger reading of Matthew’s text: on this reading,
when we treat the marginal person with decency, it is not just that we
treat someone like Jesus with decency; rather, in treating that person
decently, we treat Jesus himself decently.
It is not difficult to multiply examples of this stronger reading of
our text from across the Christian tradition, though no doubt it
remains a minority view.13 For the sake of argument anyway, let us
allow that this interpretation is warranted. Granted this reading, we
can suppose that it is God, in the person of Jesus, whom we encounter
in our relations with afflicted human beings; indeed, if we follow
Gregory, then it will be God whom we encounter in our relations with
any human being, insofar as all human beings share the one human
nature. Now, while as a matter of fact it may be God whom we
encounter in our relations with another human being, this is not to
say that the thought of divinity will infuse the appearance of that
human being. In the same way, to revert to our earlier line of thought,
while it is in fact a person whom I encounter in my experience of
another human being, this is not to say that the thought of that
individual’s personhood will infuse their bodily appearance. Suppose
that it is in fact God whom I encounter in my experience of another
human being. If the thought of God fails, even so, to infuse this
person’s appearance, this may be because I do not believe that there
is a God; or it may be that I do not even have the concept of God
13
A well-known medieval example can be found in the story of Martin of Tours.
Having given half his tunic to a beggar, Martin had a dream in which Christ said that
it was he who had received the tunic. See Luz, Matthew 21–28, p. 272. See too Sarah
Coakley’s discussion of Gregory of Nazianzus’s reading of this same passage from
Matthew: ‘The Identity of the Risen Jesus: Finding Jesus Christ in the Poor’, in Beverly
Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays (eds), Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 301–19.
(so that I neither believe nor disbelieve that there is a God); or perhaps
I do believe, and perhaps I even subscribe to the strong reading of
Matthew’s text, but it may be that my usual sensitivities are blunted in
some way; or it may be that I simply lack the requisite skills of
perception to enable the thought of God to infuse the appearance of
the other person. Whatever the source of this condition, we can
distinguish between this sort of case, where the thought of God fails
to infuse the appearance of the person, and the further case where the
appearance of the person is infused by the thought of God.
We might wonder how the appearances might be organized in such
a way as to enable the thought of God to be presented in them.
Following Cooper’s discussion, we could say that water’s appearance
can be infused with the thought of God when we recognize that the
effects which are co-natural to water participate in a God-directed
teleology. Here, water is no longer experienced simply as water, but as
infused by a God-directed significance. And by extension, we might
suppose that we can experience human beings similarly, when we
locate the various capacities and effects which are co-natural to them
as human within a wider, God-directed kind of teleology. And to the
extent that we can do this, then the thought of God, as the ultimate
object of that teleology, will be presented in the bodily appearance of
the person.
Or to take another route into our question, we might ask: what
does it take for the personhood of a human being to be presented in
their bodily appearance? What is required, I take it, is that this
appearance should bear the impress of a personal perspective on the
world, rather than the stamp of some ‘thing’. This is why it is in the
face of the person above all that a personal significance can be
inscribed: in the lineaments and movements of the face we can read
(and not simply infer) the thoughts and intentions of the person. But
the body of the person as a whole can also be read in these terms,
insofar as its demeanour and movements are caught up in some such
significance. When we ask similarly ‘what does it take for God to be
presented in the sensory appearances of a human being?’, we might
suppose that what is required is that those appearances should bear
the impress of the divine purpose. And that purpose can indeed
infuse the appearance of the body, we might suppose, insofar as the
body participates in a God-directed teleology, so that its phenomenal
hue, and salience, and our sense of its reality, can be shaped accord-
ingly. (Compare again the idea that a natural substance such as water
can appear more fully real when it is inserted within a sacramentally
informed teleology.)
If all of this is so, and if Gregory’s reading of Matthew’s text, or
some such reading, holds good, then we may suppose not simply that
it is in fact God whom we encounter in our relations with other
human beings, nor simply that the thought of God can be inscribed in
the bodily appearance of human beings, nor simply that we can non-
inferentially recognize God as present in the appearance of the
human form insofar as God is its sustaining cause, but also that
God can be presented in the sensory appearance of the human
person. Here, then, is a further reading of the import of the doctrine
of the incarnation. On this account, it is not just that this doctrine
invites us to appreciate the sensory appearances for their own sake, or
licenses the idea that we can register in perceptual terms the God-
directedness of things, insofar as the effects which are co-natural to
creatures are subsumed within a larger, divinely focused teleology. It
is also the case that God, and not simply some likeness or image of
God, can be presented, as God, in the sensory appearances. This is
evidently a particularly ‘high’ doctrine of the significance which can
be borne by the sensory appearances of things; indeed, it is hard to
think of a more elevated conception of the role which they might play
in the economy of human life.
DARKNESS AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
I began this chapter by noting that the approaches of Kohák, Cooper,

and Alexander may appear to be rather ‘light’ on doctrine. And as a
response to that thought, we have been considering how our reading
of the significance of the sensory appearances can be shaped in a
variety of ways by two doctrines: the doctrine of the incarnation and
the doctrine of ‘co-naturality’. The reader may feel that our trio of
authors is distinguished not only by the somewhat minimal role
which they assign to doctrine, but also by their rather sanguine
assessment of human possibilities. All three are sensitive to the
possibility that human beings may fail to enter into the kind of
perceptual gestalt which, in their differing ways, they take to be
fundamental for the spiritual life. But on their perspective, this failure
seems to be mostly a matter of some intellectual deficiency (as when
we use the wrong sort of god-concept), or else it is a matter of our
failing to attend fully to the sensory appearances, or to engage with
them practically in some respect. So it might be said that all three
authors lack an account of how human beings may be not simply
insufficiently attuned to the possibilities which constitute the spiritual
life, but radically in revolt against those possibilities, because of some
fundamental corruption in the will. And perhaps something similar
may be said of Aquinas, on my exposition of him here, insofar as the
emphasis in his doctrine of co-naturality seems to be on the fulfilment
or extension of the established tendencies of creatures, rather than on
any need for those tendencies to be overturned or reconstituted, so
that the person can be properly directed towards the true Good,
however that is conceived. In sum, it may seem that these authors
do not acknowledge, with sufficient seriousness, those large tracts of
human life which appear to be defined more by depravity and
dereliction than by fulfilment.
To see how this further perspective might be incorporated within
the account which we have been developing, we can turn to the
theologian par excellence of the experience of ‘darkness’ in the spirit-
ual life. In The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the
Soul, John of the Cross describes the various phases of the spiritual
life in closely observed phenomenological terms. His concern is in
part practical or pastoral: if a person is to know where they stand in
the spiritual life, then they, or their confessor, will need to be familiar
with the requisite phenomenological distinctions. For this reason,
John discusses, for example, how it is possible to distinguish phe-
nomenologically between depression or ‘melancholy’, on the one
hand, and the experience of a ‘purgation’ of the senses, on the
other, since only the latter belongs to the ‘dark night’. 14
On John’s view, progression through the various phases of ‘the
night’ signals, of course, that the person is drawing closer to God—or
better, so far as the later phases are concerned, that they are being
drawn closer to God—even if in psychological terms the experience is
one of deepened desolation. Although John does not say as much, it is
14
Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, in The Essential St. John of the
Cross: Ascent of Mount Carmel; Dark Night of the Soul; A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul
and the Bridegroom Christ; Twenty Poems by St. John of the Cross, tr. E. Allison Peers
(Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, LLC, 2008), Book I, Chapter IX. Further refer-
ences will be taken from this volume unless otherwise indicated.
important that the person undergoing the dark night should not find
satisfaction in their desolation (let alone try to cultivate it!) in the
spirit of supposing that such experience is the mark of a superior
religious condition. If John’s programme of ‘spiritual direction’ were
to admit that possibility, then his remarks might appear to be an
invitation to a kind of masochism. But his work avoids this implica-
tion, I suggest, both because of its emphasis on the idea that the later
phases of the spiritual life are the work not of the human subject but
of God, and because he is clear that the person who is enduring the
dark night is unable to find consolation in their condition: even if they
should be told by their director that their condition signifies a new
and deeper kind of intimacy with God, they will be unable to believe
this, such is their feeling of wretchedness, and of worthlessness before
God.15 Indeed, the desolation of the ‘night’ consists not least in the
sense that one has been abandoned by God; and it would make little
sense, therefore, to suppose that a person might cope with this
condition or derive some satisfaction from it, while continuing to
suffer from it, by construing it as a form of closeness to God.16
THE RELATIONSHIP OF JOHN OF THE CROSS

TO THOMAS AQUINAS
Given the phenomenological focus of our own study, it is tempting to

pause to consider in some detail what John has to say about the
phenomenological distinctions that mark out the ‘active’ and ‘passive’
phases of, first, the night of ‘sense’ and, then, the night of ‘the spirit’.
But in these works he is concerned, for the most part, with the
‘interior’ experiences which are characteristic of the spiritual life,
and his remarks are not directly of relevance, therefore, for our
reflections on the capacity of the sensory appearances to mediate a
religious meaning. Indeed, what might strike the reader, on first
15
See his comment: ‘For, although in many ways [the soul’s] director may show it
good reason for being comforted because of the blessings which are contained in these
afflictions, it cannot believe him’: Dark Night, Book II, Chapter VII, p. 423.
16
As John says, ‘the soul . . . believes God to be against it, and thinks that it has set
itself up against God. This causes it sore grief and pain, because it now believes that
God has cast it away’: Dark Night, Book II, Chapter V, p. 417.
inspection, is the stark contrast between the approach of a writer such
as John and that of Aquinas. Aquinas’s emphasis is broadly on the
idea of ‘grace perfecting nature’,17 or on the ways in which the
capacities which are ‘co-natural’ to creatures may be located within
a more encompassing, God-directed teleology; and accordingly, in the
ways we have been examining, Thomas’s approach lends itself to the
idea that the sensory appearances can be organized according to a
theological scheme. By contrast, John seems to conceive of the rela-
tion between creatures and God in antithetical terms: the Christian
can be oriented towards God, it seems, only insofar as she has turned
her back on creatures, by undergoing the rigours of the ‘dark night’ of
the senses. And when that is done, she has still to endure the purga-
tion of the ‘spirit’. On this account, even spiritual fulfilments—in-
cluding those which, by hypothesis, derive from the agency of God—
must be approached in a spirit of detachment.18 And all of this is
experienced as ‘darkness’.19 So while Thomas’s scheme can be applied
quite fruitfully to the question of how the sensory appearances may
mediate a religious meaning, we surely cannot say the same of John’s
thought? Does he not make an absolute disjunction between the
things of sense and the things of God? And does not his approach
conform, then, to the characterization of Christian theology which
I have associated with Grace Jantzen and others: being properly
related to God requires on his view, does it not, radical disengagement
from the world, and even contempt for the world?
That would be too simple a verdict. In fact, in some respects John’s
work can be read quite fruitfully, I think, as a kind of practical and
experiential rendering of certain themes in Aquinas. John was an
17
See Summa Theologiae 1a. 1. 8 ad 2.
18
See, for example, John’s comment on the spiritual refreshment that a person
may experience following the purgation of the senses: ‘So delicate is this refreshment
that ordinarily, if a man have desire or care to experience it he experiences it not . . . It
is like the air which, if one would close one’s hand upon it, escapes’: Dark Night, Book
I, Chapter IX, pp. 392–3. In other words, it is necessary to become detached even from
those forms of spiritual experience which are tokens of the person’s growing proxim-
ity to God.
19
John uses the notion of ‘darkness’ analogically. Sometimes it is the appetites
themselves, sometimes it is their effects, sometimes it is the effects of their removal,
and sometimes it is their objects, which are the focus of his attention; and he uses the
term ‘darkness’ in each of these cases. See The Ascent of Mount Carmel in John of the
Cross: Selected Writings, ed. K. Kavanaugh (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), Book I,
Chapters 3–4, pp. 64–6.
educated man, and studied theology at the University of Salamanca.
So certainly, he would have been familiar with Aquinas’s work. And
his own reflections bear the imprint of some characteristically Thom-
istic claims.20 To take one example, John would surely have known
Thomas’s words, which stand as the preface to his treatment of the
idea of divine simplicity: ‘. . . we cannot know what God is, but only
what he is not’.21 John’s account of the darkness which befalls the
understanding as it is brought closer to God could be read as an
experiential rendering of this same idea. If we do not know ‘what God
is’, and if there is no humanly intelligible proportion between the
nature of creatures and the divine nature, then it would seem to
follow that, insofar as he can be apprehended at all, God is bound
to be presented to the understanding as ‘darkness’. John’s procedure
on this point could be read as a solution to a neglected problem in
epistemology of more general significance: what are we to do if we
want to understand some new subject matter when there is no route
which will lead incrementally from our existing understanding of the
world into this further subject matter, because of the disproportion
between the two cases, or because our established understanding is
infected with a radical error? In such cases, the best starting point for
enquiry is, presumably, to set aside whatever we might take ourselves
to understand, and to entrust ourselves to ignorance, or ‘darkness’.
John’s account echoes that of Aquinas once again when he turns
his attention to the faculty of the will. As we have seen, Thomas
thinks that the person is properly oriented towards God insofar as the
theological virtues and the infused moral virtues have been commu-
nicated to them directly by God. Here again, there is no incremental
route leading from the patterns of activity to which we are accus-
tomed simply as human to those patterns which fit a person for
relationship to God; to make this transition, a radically new, divinely
infused spring of action is required, rather than simply the further
exercise of established habits of willing and action. In John’s scheme,
something like this idea appears in an experiential idiom, in his
suggestion that in the later phases of the spiritual life, the person’s
20
As Peter Tyler notes, there is some dispute over the question of the extent to
which John’s work reflects the influence of Aquinas: Tyler, Saint John of the Cross
(London: Continuum, 2010), p. 17. But that there is some influence is surely undeni-
able.
21
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a. 3.
experience is increasingly one of passivity. Old attachments and habits
fall away, he notes, and in their place there emerges, gradually, a new
centre of personal energy; and so far as it persists at all, the old self
registers these developments in the felt recognition of its own passiv-
ity. Here again, a theme which is developed in theoretical terms in
Aquinas finds a phenomenological counterpart in the work of John.
Allowing for these points of overlap between Thomas and John, it
remains true that John is more inclined to understand the relation-
ship between creaturely- and God-directed forms of life in antithet-
ical terms. Hence he can say that ‘the Divine fire of contemplative
love . . . before it unites and transforms the soul in itself, first purges it
of all contrary accidents’.22 And as he says elsewhere: ‘God makes [the
soul] to die to all that is not naturally God, so that, once it is stripped
and denuded of its former skin, He may begin to clothe it anew . . .’23
So John’s perspective has a two-step structure: attachments to worldly
things must first of all be surrendered, and the understanding must
first of all be emptied of imagistic and other forms of discursive
thought—and only then is it possible for a new, God-directed mode
of willing and understanding to take shape. And the horrors of the
‘night’ arise when the person finds herself in the middle ground
between these phases: in this intermediate state it is necessary to
endure the disorientation which follows from the uprooting of the
natural affections and the bewildering of the understanding and the
break-down of imagistic thinking, and to suffer all these things
without being able, as yet, to enjoy the consolation of finding in
oneself a new, divinely focused orientation of intellect and will.
JOHN AND THE APPRECIATION OF THE

SENSORY APPEARANCES
In sum, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the
Soul, John is mostly occupied with the various forms of
22
Dark Night, Book II, Chapter X, p. 433.
23
Dark Night, Book II, Chapter XIII, p. 445. Elsewhere, John develops the point by
noting that the palate must first be cleansed before it can properly appreciate some
new taste. See for example Dark Night, Book I, Chapter IX, p. 392, and Book II,
Chapter IX, p. 430.
disengagement from the world which are, in his judgement, a pre-
requisite for the emergence of a new, divinely oriented teleology of the
person. However, when we turn to other works, it is evident that once
this new orientation has taken root, once the person has moved
beyond the intermediate ground which lies in between the old self
and the new, then they can re-engage with the world of sensory forms,
and derive new fulfilment from them. (It is worth remembering that
in The Ascent and The Dark Night, John is considering only the first
two or three verses of his poem The Dark Night, and not the later
verses which speak of the enjoyment which the person can find in
God.) In The Living Flame of Love, for example, he describes the
‘awakened’ person’s experience of the sensory world in these terms:
Though it is true that the soul here sees that all these things are distinct
from God, in that they have a created existence . . . it knows also that
God in His own essence is, in an infinitely preeminent way, all these
things, so that it understands them better in Him, their first cause, than
in themselves. This is the great joy of this awakening, namely to know
creatures in God, and not God in His creatures: this is to know effects in
their cause, and not the cause by its effects.24
Here John notes the familiar distinction between God’s uncreated
mode of life and the ‘created existence’ of the sensory world. But at
the same time he affirms that the person of spiritual maturity can take
pleasure in sensory things by ‘knowing creatures in God’. The same
sort of theme is evident in this passage in The Dark Night:
It now remains to be said that although this happy night brings dark-
ness to the spirit, it does so only to give it light in everything . . . and,
although it impoverishes it and empties it of all natural affection, it does
so only that it may enable it to stretch forward, divinely, and thus to
have fruition and experience of all things, both above and below . . .25
Here again, John speaks of how the person who has emerged from
‘the night’ can take pleasure in ‘things below’. For such a person, the
enjoyment of sensory forms can be folded into an enjoyment of God.
In his preamble to the Five Ways, Aquinas famously distinguishes
between a demonstration ‘propter quid’ and a demonstration ‘quia’,
24
The Living Flame of Love by Saint John of the Cross with his Letters, Poems, and
Minor Writings, tr. D. Lewis (London: Thomas Baker, 1919), Commentary on Stanza
IV, p. 121.
25
Dark Night, Book II, Chapter IX, p. 429.
where the first proceeds from cause to effect, and the second tracks in
the other direction.26 Thomas is, of course, of the view that a purely
philosophical approach to the question of God must start from
observation of the world, and move from there to the idea that
there is a God by establishing that the world stands in need of a
cause. This is to take the route of a ‘demonstratio quia’. Since we ‘do
not know what God is’, we have no capacity, when we are reasoning
in purely philosophical terms, to proceed in the other direction, by
starting from a knowledge of God’s essence, and arriving at a concep-
tion of God’s effects on that basis. In the passages I have just cited,
John is in effect saying that where the spiritual life is concerned, we
can live according to the ideal of ‘proper quid’: that is, we can start
from the divine perspective on things, and move out from there to an
appreciation of the realm of creatures, so that we ‘know effects in their
cause’. But he also acknowledges, of course, that this is not the natural
human condition, and that arriving at such a perspective will be a
costly process.
When we consider the theme of love, we might say that by contrast
it is, at times, Aquinas who begins from the divine perspective, by
starting with the nature of the divine love and understanding the
condition of creatures on that basis, while John’s tendency is to begin
with the human perspective. When developing his ‘co-naturality’
thesis, Aquinas is concerned fundamentally, we might suppose, with
the nature of divine love: God’s love for creatures, like forms of love
with which we are familiar from the human domain, seeks to affirm
and extend rather than to deny or contradict the qualities of the
beloved; and accordingly, Thomas maintains, the teleology which
belongs to creatures simply by virtue of their natures is not so
much suspended or overturned by the divine love, as released into a
larger, more encompassing set of possibilities. By contrast, John’s
experiential starting point means that his treatment of the theme of
love is developed in the first instance from the vantage point of the
human person: his focus is upon the creature’s experience of an
emerging love for God. And from this perspective, love may appear
to be not so much a matter of consolidation or extension, as of
overturning or even eradication. A rough analogy might be a
mother’s love for her new-born child. As we all know, a woman can
26
Summa Theologiae 1a. 2. 2.
experience the emergence of such love, at least for a time, as pro-
foundly disorienting, not least because it can seem to require a
fundamental reordering of her established attachments, and even an
uprooting of those attachments, so that her sense of herself is radic-
ally redefined. So a woman’s emerging relationship to her child can
sometimes be registered in experience as bewildering and even as
‘dark’ in something like John’s sense. Here, then, is another way of
understanding how the approaches of Aquinas and John are at root
consistent, despite the more antithetical cast of John’s thought.
Clearly, for John, it is love, rather than clarity of understanding,
which acts both as motive and as guide in the spiritual life. Aquinas is
broadly in agreement on this point, but characteristically he records
this thought in a more austerely conceptual form. To put the same
sort of point in his terms, the believing that is characteristic of faith is
not so much the product of a compelling inference, as ‘an act of the
intellect under the impetus of the will’—where the will is moved by
‘the divine good [which is] the proper object of charity’ or love.27 So
for Aquinas too, even in the matter of believing, the life of the
Christian is defined not so much by any kind of intellectual accom-
plishment, as by a love for God. So Thomas and John are occupied
fundamentally with the same questions: what is the relationship
between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of creatures?
And what is the role of love in the spiritual life? But they treat these
themes from rather different vantage points, or in terms of their
rather different idioms.
THE RENEWAL OF THE SENSORY WORLD

AS A WHOLE
I have been suggesting that when the believer emerges from the
‘night’, she can find new fulfilment in the sensory world. In the
passage I cited above, it is notable that John speaks in particular of
27
See respectively Summa Theologiae 2a2ae. 4. 3 and 4. 2, in Summa Theologiae,
Vol. 31, Faith, tr. T. C. O’Brien (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1974). Compare
Eleonore Stump’s observation that the under-evidencing of the propositions believed
in faith ensures that commitment to God can be grounded in a love of goodness rather
than of power: Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 373–4.
how the spirit can enjoy ‘fruition and experience of all things, both
above and below . . .’ This comment recalls our earlier discussion of
the world-encompassing reach of conversion experience: in both
cases, it seems, it is the sensory world as a whole that is newly
experienced. John makes the same sort of point in rather different
terms when describing the effects of what he calls ‘the spiritual light’.
He comments:
. . . since this spiritual light is so simple, pure and general, not appro-
priated or restricted to any particular thing that can be understood,
whether natural or Divine (since with respect to all these apprehensions
the faculties of the soul are empty and annihilated), it follows that with
great comprehensiveness and readiness the soul discerns and penetrates
whatsoever thing presents itself to it, whether it come from above or
from below.28
We might read this passage as an affirmation of the idea that once our
desires and understanding have been purged of the attachments that
in the normal case define our experience of sensory forms, then we
can enter into a new perceptual world, in which the sensory order in
general is differently experienced.29
John suggests that the progression towards this new perceptual
condition will sometimes involve a new experience of the body. He
notes, for example, that ‘when this Divine contemplation assails the
soul with a certain force . . . it suffers such pain in its weakness that it
nearly swoons away. This is especially so at certain times when it is
assailed with somewhat greater force; for sense and spirit, as if
beneath some immense and dark load, are in such great pain and
agony that the soul would find advantage and relief in death’.30 When
he says that ‘sense’ is ‘in great pain’, John is alluding, I take it, to a felt
condition of the body. And if that is right, then we might suppose that
he is referring to an experiential state which is rather like an ‘existen-
tial feeling’, in Matthew Ratcliffe’s sense; in other words, this state
28
Dark Night, Book II, Chapter VIII, pp. 427–8.
29
Compare Rowan Williams’ assessment of the later stanzas of John’s poem the
Spiritual Canticle. He comments that the change which the Canticle is documenting is
‘described not at all in terms of revelations granted in ecstasy, but in terms of a general
disposition or attitude of the soul, a regular daily mode of seeing and understanding, a
new light on things’: The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New
Testament to Saint John of the Cross (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1991),
pp. 187–8.
30
Dark Night, Book II, Chapter V, p. 417.
seems to involve a felt condition of the body which is woven into a
correlative mode of perception, so that sensory forms in general are
differently experienced. Given our interest in this book in the rela-
tionship between a person’s spiritual condition and their perceptual
condition, it is also noteworthy that in this text John associates ‘spirit’
and ‘sense’: these two domains are not, then, to be sharply distin-
guished, since renewal of one will imply a renewal of the other, just as
corruption in one will imply corruption in the other.
BACK TO THE CAVE: THE ENDURING NATURE OF

THE TRANSFORMATION IN THE SENSORY
APPEARANCES
In the passage I cited above, John speaks of a ‘spiritual light’. And in

so doing he is picking up, of course, a well-known biblical motif, and
notably the thought, voiced paradigmatically in the Prologue to
John’s Gospel, that God is light. But he is also evoking, whether or
not by design, the Greek philosophical tradition which provided the
starting point for our enquiry. Following the pattern laid down in
Plato’s story of the cave, this tradition also understands the spiritual
life in terms of progressive exposure to light. Indeed, the detail of
Plato’s account is called to mind by John’s remark that ‘because the
light and wisdom of this contemplation is most bright and pure . . . it
follows that the soul suffers great pain when it receives it in itself . . .’31
Here as in Plato, we find the idea that exposure to light, in the
spiritual sense, can be not only dazzling but painful. But for our
purposes, what is most significant is that in the passage I cited
above (see p. 188), John appears to pick up the invitation which
I have suggested we can associate with Plato in his discussion of the
cave in the Republic—namely, the invitation to suppose that the
person whose sight has been irradiated by the spiritual light will
find themselves in a different perceptual condition, once their gaze
is trained again on the realm of sensory things.
When John says that the soul which has been exposed to the
‘spiritual light’ will be able to ‘discern and penetrate whatsoever
31
Ibid.
thing presents itself to it’, including things ‘from below’—that is,
sensory things—he is suggesting, I take it, that for such a person,
sensory objects are not just differently understood, but differently
experienced. If this is the right way to read him, then to know sensory
things ‘in God’, to borrow John’s turn of phrase, is to stand in a
different perceptual relation to them—a relation in which the percep-
tual field is no longer organized according to appetitive concerns, or
according to the idea that creatures are in some way self-sustaining.
In support of this reading we can cite other passages which have a
more decidedly phenomenological feel. John notes, for example, that
in the dark night of the spirit there are times when ‘the soul’
wonders if it is under a charm or a spell, and it goes about marvelling
at the things that it sees and hears, which seem to it very strange
and rare, though they are the same that it was accustomed to
experience aforetime. The reason for this is that the soul is now becom-
ing alien and remote from common sense and knowledge of things, in
order that, being annihilated in this respect, it may be informed with the
Divine . . .32
The focus of the experience which John describes here is, evidently,
the sensory world, which seems in general to have taken on a different
appearance, so that its contents now look ‘strange and rare’. If this is
the right way to read this passage, then we have reason to suppose
that the person who is irradiated by the ‘spiritual light’ will perceive
the sensory world differently. In the experience of such a person, the
world will participate in the new ordering of desires, and the new
understanding, that is characteristic of the later phases of the spiritual
life.
While the person who is still in the ‘night’ will be able to enjoy this
condition only sporadically, it seems to follow from John’s account
that the person who emerges from the night will find that their
experience of the sensory world is now enduringly different. In this
respect, John presses beyond Plato: it is not just that the spiritual
adept’s experience of the sensory world is different from that of his
fellows insofar as he finds the realm of the ‘shadows’ bewildering; and
it is not that his distinctive mode of experience will cease once his eyes
have adjusted to conditions in the cave. On John’s account, we should
say that the adept’s vision of the sensory world is not so much
32
Dark Night, Book II, Chapter IX, p. 431.
confused or obscured as transfigured; and on his view, this trans-
formation will be as enduring as the condition of spiritual renewal
which is the product of the dark night.33
Allowing that this is the right way to read John, we might ask: why
does he take this step beyond Plato? Why does he suppose that this
change in spiritual state will effect an enduring transformation in the
quality of the sensory appearances? First of all, his fundamental
metaphors press him in this direction of course. Caves, as long as
they remain caves, are never going to be exposed to sunlight. But
unlike Plato, John does not think of the realm of the senses as a ‘cave’.
And while he does speak of ‘darkness’, in his usage this term refers to
a condition of the soul which is being purified, rather than to some
intrinsic condition of the sensory world. And accordingly, once this
process of purification is complete, we need no longer speak of
‘darkness’; and all things—things ‘from below’ as well as ‘from
above’—will now be able to participate in this new state of spiritual
‘enlightenment’. His willingness to use the language of ‘darkness’ in
these ways reflects, I take it, various doctrinal commitments: since he
believes that the sensory world was created ‘from nothing’, and since
he believes that the Word became flesh, John cannot consider the
domain of the senses to be in and of itself a realm of darkness, albeit
that it might appear thus to the person whose vision is darkened.
Lastly, his account is also to be read straightforwardly as an experien-
tial report, which aims to capture the phenomenological feel of
various experiences which he and others in his circle had undergone:
it is above all the quality of these experiences which leads him to
suppose that the spiritual adept’s perception of the sensory world can
be enduringly transformed, although it is also true for John that not
many are called to the rigours of the dark night, and that the night
must last for some years if it is to be fully efficacious.34
In sum, by drawing on the works of John of the Cross, we can
provide a phenomenological rendering of certain themes in Aquinas;
we can understand how the experience of ‘darkness’ may be integral
33
Sarah Coakley has explored some related themes in her discussion of John’s
fellow Carmelite Teresa of Avila. See, for example, her suggestion that Teresa’s later
work points towards ‘a breakthrough over time into new levels of perception and
sensation’: ‘Dark Contemplation and Epistemic Transformation: the Analytic Theo-
logian Re-Meets Teresa of Ávila’, in O. D. Crisp and M. C. Rea (eds), Analytic
Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, p. 304.
34
Dark Night, Book II, Chapter VII, p. 423.
to the spiritual life, without concluding that this life is in no way
concerned with a regeneration of the senses; and we can return to the
question which I posed at the very outset of our discussion, when
considering Plato’s story of the cave, and affirm that the condition of
spiritual renewal can effect an enduring renewal in the appearance of
the sensory world.
THE TRUE WORLD AND THE TRUE SELF
The authors we have been examining in the last two chapters—

Kohák, Cooper, Alexander, and John—all subscribe to the idea that
there is a tight connection between certain changes in a person’s self-
understanding and an associated change in the appearance of the
sensory world. But none of these authors favours fundamentally a
projectivist account of this relationship: they are not suggesting that
the change in self-conception is simply ‘read into’ the world with the
result that it now appears differently. For each of them, it is, rather,
that a deeper understanding of the world reveals both that the self as
standardly construed is in some sense a constructed self, and that the
world as standardly experienced is a projection of this constructed
self. So the change which they are describing is, if anything, from their
point of view, a movement away from a projectivist relation between
the self and the world.
For Kohák, this insight into the insubstantiality of the world as
standardly experienced, and of the self as normally conceived, is
grounded in an appreciation of the natural order as intrinsically
and fundamentally important. The person who understands the
natural order in these terms is able to grasp that in her former
experience, the sensory world was organized according to patterns
of interest which were largely the product of the egocentric self.
Moreover, the projects of such a person will now be attuned to values
which are intrinsic in the world, so that in this respect it is now the
world which defines her, rather than her defining the world. For
Cooper, the same kind of insight is realized in the recognition that
self and world ‘co-arise’. Someone who has understood this much can
experience the world as a ‘gift’, and can appreciate that the meaning
of her projects, and to this extent her true self, is therefore fixed, in
large part, by reference to an existential context which is not of her
making. For Alexander the same kind of understanding arises
through an apprehension of the ‘I’ as shining forth in the sensory
appearances, and through the recognition that this ‘I’ is my true self:
here again, a new sense of the world, as revealed in the sensory
appearances, is bound up with a new, ego-transcendent sense of the
self. And for John, and also for Aquinas, the same kind of insight is
communicated in the recognition that our true end lies in God, and in
the realization that the old self, which was constructed around an
appetitive relation to the world, must therefore give way to a self
whose directedness is defined according to a new, divinely focused
teleology. So the transformation in the sensory appearances which is
postulated in the work of these authors is in each case to be under-
stood as part of a movement into a deeper attentiveness to reality,
where this movement implies a renewal in our sense of the world, and
a correlative renewal in our sense of self.
7
The Human Form of Life and the

Experience of Value
On one longstanding view, which can be found in Plato as well as in

Christian sources, the spiritual life, properly conceived, consists fun-
damentally in the contemplation of an immaterial realm. Some ren-
derings of this idea imply that the realm of the senses is of merely
negative import for the person of spiritual maturity: a person’s
spiritual development can be measured by the extent to which he
has succeeded in disengaging his attention from the sensory world,
and training his gaze instead upon a higher, non-material realm. In
this discussion we have been concerned with a rather different possi-
bility. Perhaps the spiritual life is indeed to be understood in contem-
plative terms. And perhaps what is contemplated is indeed, in large
part, a set of ideals concerning God or some transcendent realm.
But—and here is a key point of distinction—perhaps these ideals can
be apprehended in the sensory appearances. In other words, perhaps
the appearance of the sensory world can be saturated with the very
insights which are characteristic of ‘enlightenment’ or spiritual ma-
turity, so that our engagement with the sensory world need be no
‘distraction’ from the concerns which are proper to the spiritual life,
but instead a way of acknowledging and being addressed by those
very concerns. If that is so, then the contemplative ideal of the
spiritual life can be realized in and through our perception of the
sensory world, or in and through our reckoning with the sensory
appearances.
This account suggests that human fulfilment consists in important
part in a certain kind of thought-infused experience of the sensory
world. In a somewhat similar vein, Anthony O’Hear has argued that
the special significance of human life, within the broader economy of
The Human Form of Life and the Experience of Value 195
reality, consists in the fact that we are, uniquely, both intellectual and
sensory beings. Unlike God and the angels, if such there be, we can
experience sensory things; and unlike the non-human animals, we
can understand these things by locating them within a conceptually
articulated interpretive scheme. As he says:
Because of our status as sensory and intellectual, we alone are in a
position to enjoy particular perceptions of the world, and to evaluate the
fruits of those perceptions. A merely sensory consciousness could not
reflect on what it perceives, while a purely intellectual being . . . would
perceive or experience nothing.1
Famously, Aristotle proposed that the distinguishing human cap-
acity—the capacity which sets us apart from non-human animals—
is our reason; and he infers that it is excellence in respect of reasoning
which constitutes the fundamental excellence in a human life. In the
same way, Aristotle comments, it is excellence in respect of harp-
playing which constitutes success in the life of the harpist considered
as a harpist, because harp-playing is the distinguishing capacity of the
harpist considered as a harpist.2 O’Hear’s account shares the struc-
ture of Aristotle’s proposal: to understand the special significance of
human life, we need to identify the distinguishing capacities of
human beings, and to see that it is excellence in respect of the exercise
of those capacities which is the mark of the truly successful human
life. But O’Hear conceives these capacities rather differently from
Aristotle: for him, what distinguishes us from the non-human
animals and also from any non-material intelligence is a conjunction
of capacities—namely, our capacity to experience the sensory world
and also to evaluate that experience.
Reading some of our reflections into O’Hear’s remarks, we might
attribute to him the view that what matters most fundamentally in a
human life, or what we should celebrate above all when we think
about human life, is the distinctively human mode of experience,
which is at once sensory and intellectual. The enquiry we have
undertaken in this book could be read as a kind of commentary on
this thought. How, more exactly, is it possible for human beings to
1
Anthony O’Hear, ‘The real or the Real? Chardin or Rothko?’, in M. McGhee
(ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), p. 53.
2
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics in The Ethics of Aristotle: the Nichomachean
Ethics, tr. J. A. K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), Book I.
take up this calling, to participate in a mode of experience that is at
once sensory and intellectual, and to make thereby a distinctively
human contribution to the wider economy of reality? I have been
suggesting that the distinctively human capacity is not simply the
capacity to ‘evaluate the fruits of our perceptions’. It also matters that
we can organize our perceptions according to certain values, so that
the relevant value scheme enters into our experience. Of course,
animals too can enjoy intellectually organized and normatively struc-
tured experience of the sensory world: the perceptual field of a non-
human animal will typically be ordered according to its recognition
that certain features of its environment constitute, for example, a
potential threat or food source or mate. So we might say that what
is truly distinctive of human beings is our capacity to inscribe in the
sensory appearances not simply a set of survival values, or a set of
thoughts concerning the character of our immediate environment,
but a conception of reality, and an associated scheme of values, which
is of metaphysical reach.3
If all of this is so, then the subject matter with which we have been
occupied in this book has a particular significance. The experience
whose nature and possibility we have been considering is not just one
experience among others. It is, rather, an experience which is of
fundamental importance for an understanding of what the special
worth of a human life might be, when our mode of life is laid
alongside that of the non-human animals and that of whatever
non-material intelligences there may be.
If it is possible for human beings to experience the world in these
thought-infused terms, then our bodily lives are good not simply
insofar as they provide an opportunity for the enjoyment of aesthetic
forms, or an opportunity to engage in various feats of physical
discipline or to exercise a certain kind of interpersonal sensitivity,
for example. They are also good because in our bodily experience we
can encounter religious or spiritual ideals within the sensory appear-
ances of things. The monotheistic faiths are typically committed to
the fundamental goodness of human life from a bodily point of view.
3
I do not find this emphasis in O’Hear. It is notable that he upholds Chardin’s
paintings as an aesthetic ideal because of their success in recording everyday appear-
ances in their everydayness. In our discussion of Velazquez we noted that the same
aesthetic values can be found in his work. But much of our discussion has been
concerned with forms of experience which bear more clearly the imprint of various
metaphysical commitments.
The Human Form of Life and the Experience of Value 197
And the account we have been developing could be read as an
extended defence of that view. Human beings’ lives are good in bodily
terms, we can say, because our sensory perceptions can participate in
an appreciation of the nature of reality as such. And drawing on
O’Hear’s reflections, we might add: the goodness of a human life in
this respect consists in part in the fact that this is (so far as we can tell)
a uniquely human contribution to the wider economy of reality.
At the very beginning of this discussion I set down various quota-
tions which have some bearing upon our theme. I hope we are now in a
position to understand those observations more fully, and to venture a
view about the sense in which they may be affirmed. So let me
conclude by returning, very briefly, to those citations. With Hume,
we can allow that we have a capacity ‘to find human faces in the moon’
and ‘armies in the clouds’, and in general, a capacity to organize our
experience of the sensory world so that we can find it religiously
meaningful. And with Hume, we can agree that an understanding of
this capacity is fundamental for an appreciation of the nature of
religion. But we do not need to adopt Hume’s projectivist account
of these matters. Instead, we should allow that when we find that a
religiously significant thought or image can be inscribed in the sensory
appearances, this can, on occasion, be a reason for supposing that the
world really, and not just in the imagination, conforms to that thought
or image. On this account, the material world bears the impress of a
divine thought; and through our thought-infused appreciation of the
sensory appearances we can think that same thought in bodily terms.
This was the burden of the case that I developed in Chapter 4, and the
body of spiritual writing which we have been examining in Chapters 5
and 6 can be cited in support of the same conclusion.
If this much can be granted, then we can follow Henry Vaughan in
supposing that it is possible to encounter traces of a transcendent
order in the sensory appearances. And accordingly, we can allow that
it makes sense to ask of God: ‘That in these masques and shadows
I may see / Thy sacred way.’ However, in our discussion the accent
has been upon the capacity of religious thoughts and values to enliven
the appearance of the sensory world, so that we enjoy a heightened
appreciation of its reality. And to this extent, the tone at least of our
account has been rather different from that which is struck by
Vaughan’s allusions to ‘shadows’ and ‘masques’.
If all of this is so, then we can also follow William James in
supposing that the ‘saint’, or the person who has achieved a degree
of spiritual maturity, has ‘a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as
it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power’. But we might add
that the phrase ‘as it were’ takes back rather more than is necessary.
On the view we have been considering here, religious convictions can
indeed take sensible form, insofar as they are capable of inhabiting the
sensory appearances of things, so that their content is then displayed
in those appearances. It is an implication of this view that the body’s
contribution to the spiritual life is not to be contrasted with that of the
‘intellect’: rather, it may be by virtue of the fact that I am in a certain
bodily, perceptual state that I am in the state of contemplating certain
religious thoughts.
The life of St Francis of Assisi presents a particularly uncomprom-
ising example of how the body might bear the imprint of a set of
religious thoughts. In his body, he even took on the appearance of the
crucified Christ. Without supposing that this kind of bodily trans-
formation is an ideal for all, we can find Francis’s spiritual practice
intelligible to the extent that it can be summarized in these terms:
Jesus in his heart, in his ears, in his eyes, in his hands, and indeed
‘always in his whole body’. For such a person, religious conviction is
not a purely intellectual commitment, nor is it fundamentally a
matter of forming some conception of the character of another
world. It is, rather, a way of taking hold of this sensory world, so
that what is of ultimate value is not far off, but presented to us here
and now in the sensory appearances.
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Index
Abram, D. 34–5, 37 and sensory experience 21–6

Alexander, C. 153–66, 179–80, 192–3 and the phenomenal feel of objects 33–6
Alston, W. 86–9, 97–100, 142 n. 12 see also existential feelings
Anderson, P.S. 14 n. 14 Existential feelings:
Andrejč, G. 70 n. 21 and experience of God 65–71
Aquinas, T. 34 n. 17, 66–8, 70, 109–110, and experience of reality 61–5, 188–9
113, 165 n. 35, 169–74, 180–7, 193 and relation of subject and object 72
Aristotle 155 n. 28, 195 Experience:
existential 145–51
Balthasar, H.U. von 34 n. 17 and doctrine 167–79
Barrie, T. 76 n. 25 of nature 129–44, 156–8, 160–1
Bayne, T. 73 n. 22 of mystery 144–52
Bell, C. 133–4 of unity 153–65
Blum, L. 74 n. 23, 124 n. 27 see also conversion experience; dark
Brown, D. 8 n. 9, 75 n. 24 night of the soul
Budd, M. 27 n. 13
Buddhism 153 Francis of Assisi, St xii, 198
Capra, F. 49–54 Garrigan, S. vii n. 1

Coakley, S. 3 n. 3, 177 n. 13, 191 n. 33 Goldie, P. 28–30
Comte-Sponville, A. 10–12, 26, 41 Gorringe, T. 167 n. 2
Concepts: Graham, G. 122 n. 23
and experience of God in nature 140–4 Gregory of Nyssa 6, 176–7
and the appearance of things as real or
unreal 58–61, 173–4 Harvey, S. A. 3 n. 3
and relation to emotions 42–4, 46 Hedley, D. 4 n. 4
and the sensory appearances 44–57, Hick, J. 123 n. 25
195–7 Hume, D. xii, 111 n. 17, 197
and the sensory appearances as
images 47–57, 113–17 Incarnation 167–9, 174–9
Conversion experience 16–21, 48–9, 188 Inglis, J. 171–2 n. 7
Cooper, D. 144–52, 154, 158–66, 172–3,
178–80, 192–3 James, W. xii, 7–8, 16–25, 27, 29,
Cottingham, J. 14 n. 14 32–4, 38, 40–1, 43, 57–8, 63–4,
79, 91–2, 197–8
Dark night of the soul 179–81 and the ‘will to believe’ 100–107
and renewal of the senses 184–6, 187–92 Jantzen, G. 9–12, 26, 66, 83
Davis, C.F. 111 n. 16 John of the Cross 8 n. 9, 180–93
Drury, J. 167–8 John Paul II 61 n. 9
Jones, L. 76 n. 25
Edwards, J. 48–9, 51–4, 94, 98, 109, 127 n. 29 Justification of religious belief:
Emotions: in pragmatic terms 81–107
and appearance of the world as a and aesthetic goods 83–6, 92–100,
whole 36–9 103–105
and feelings 27–33 and reasons for action 89–91
206 Index
Justification of religious belief: (cont.) Plato:
and self-interest 95–6 Republic 1–5, 10, 14–15, 25–6, 133,
in epistemic terms 107–128 189–92, 194
and the idea of design 107–113, Symposium 4–5, 133, 158, 194
117–125 Polanyi, M. 32 n. 15
and phenomenological Primal religious traditions 113–116,
confirmation 126–7 157–8
Kohák, E. 129–44, 151–2, 154, 158–66, Ratcliffe, M. 32 n. 16, 58–9, 62–4, 66–8,
179–80, 192–3 173 n. 9, 188–9
Roberts, R. 32 n. 15
LePoidevin, R. 111 n. 17, 112 n. 18
Lowe, E.D. 143 n. 13 Schellenberg, J. 87 n. 3
Luz, U. 176 n. 11, 177 n. 13 Sacraments 169–74
Schleiermacher, F. 69–70
McCabe, H. 66, 162 Schopenhauer, A. 96, 160 n. 30
McGhee, M. 4 n. 4 Scruton, R. 44–7, 51, 54–7, 83–6, 92,
Miles, M. 3 n. 3 107–109, 175 n. 10
Moore, G. 13–14, 66 Scrutton, A. 24 n. 11
Monti, A. 61 n. 10 Shuttlecock, the rabbit vi, 34
Murdoch, I. 132–3, 158 Smith, Q. 37–9
Solomon, R. 32 n. 16
Newman, J.H. 77–8 Soskice, J.M. 123–4
New Testament: Stump, E. 38 n. 20, 187 n. 27
Matthew Ch. 25 176–9
Nietzsche, F. 9, 11 Tennant, F.R. 125 n. 28
Nussbaum, M. C., 6–7, 9 Tolstoy, L. 16–17, 22, 58–60
Tyler, P. 183 n. 20
O’Hear, A. 194–7
Vaughan, H. xii, 197
Paley, W. 138 Velazquez 167–8
Pappas, N. 2 n. 2 Virtues, acquired and infused 171–2
Pickard, H. 32 n. 16
Place Ward, K. 114
as a focus for spiritual practice 75–80 Williams, R. 66, 71, 188 n. 29
Plantinga, A. 112 n. 19 Wolterstorff, N. 85 n. 2, 134 n. 5

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RENEWING THE SENSES

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This discussion has its origins in a familiar truth. Sitting upstairs in

I am grateful to many friends and colleagues without whom I would

1. The World of Sunlight and the World of Shadows 1

Grant that I may so

There is in the saint ‘a conviction, not merely intellectual,

He was always with Jesus:

The World of Sunlight and the

In the western intellectual tradition, Plato’s story of the cave, as

Emotional Feelings and the Appearance

If religious thoughts and feelings and practices can structure or

THE CASE OF CONVERSION EXPERIENCE

This general thesis, concerning the relationship between a person’s

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE EMOTIONS

James himself provides one theoretical vantage point on the phenom-

TOWARDS AN ASSESSMENT OF J AMES’

This understanding of conversion experience, and its relationship to a

EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE AND THE

Along with these allusions to ﬂatness or salience, there is a further

EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE AND THE

As well as ﬁtting with these two dimensions of James’ account of the

In this chapter we have been examining one way of explicating the

Concept Application and the Appearance

We have been exploring some of the ways in which a transformation

THE CONTRIBUTION OF RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

Let us begin with a particular example of how a religious concept may

FURTHER REFLECTION ON THE ROLE OF

We have been considering the idea that concepts, including religious

THE CASE OF ‘EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS’

We have been considering some of the ways in which feelings of the

SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

It seems clear from neuroscientiﬁc and phenomenological studies that a

The Spiritual Life and the Justiﬁcation

A great deal of recent philosophy of religion has been concerned with

THE SENSORY APPEARANCES AND THE

In general terms, it is clear enough how the considerations which we

ENRICHING THE APPEARANCES

INCORPORATING WILLIAM ALSTON’S

William Alston has addressed these matters by supposing that for

INCORPORATING ALSTON’S REMAINING

To return to the main thread of our discussion, we have been trying to

WILLIAM J AMES’ PRAGMATIC CASE FOR

The drift of James’ pragmatic argument for religious belief is helpfully

JAMES’ CASE AND THE ARGUMENT FROM

The case which we have been developing, by appeal to the relation-

THE SENSORY APPEARANCES AND THE

Let me venture a speculation: many believers take their tradition to be

APPLYING SCRUTON’S EXAMPLE TO THE

We might wonder next whether something similar might be said

EXTENDING THE ACCOUNT: THE CASE

EXTENDING THE ACCOUNT: PURPOSES OTHER

FORM AND FUNCTION

Why might the possibility of such a gestalt count as evidence in

BACK TO THE CASE OF DIVINE DESIGN

THE CASE OF NON-THEISTIC TRADITIONS

World-Directed Spiritual Experience

So far, we have been considering relatively formally the possibility of a

EXPERIENCING THE PRESENCE OF

THE EXPERIENCE OF MYSTERY IN THE

Kohák’s discussion of the epiphanic experience is to be read, I think,

EXPERIENCE OF UNITY IN THE SENSORY WORLD

Cooper and Kohák are both writing as philosophers, and each of