Feminism, constructivism and numinous experience.

In Europe and America, Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy remains the most widely known attempt to isolate and distil the essentially religious, perennial and immediate quality of the numinous event in which a person encounters a divine presence. However, since Steven Katz(1) made persuasive constructivist arguments against the possibility of an immediate, ineffable and perennial religious experience, the validity of any such enterprise must be considered highly questionable. From a feminist point of view, this article will endorse, Katz's largely phenomenological argument that `there is a clear causal connection between the religious and social structure one brings to experience and the nature of one's actual religious experience'.(2) Katzian constructivism questions the possibility that religious experience can have a universal defining essence. In the case of the numinous Otto calls this essence a sui generis numinous `overplus of meaning' which precedes its various rationalizations in the theologies of the world's religions. But for Katz, experiences of the divine are mediated and organized by conceptual structures which help the subject to identify, remember and value the experience as numinous in the first place. Katz is not saying that random beliefs are projected onto random experiences rendering the sensus numinis illusory. Instead, there is a `two-directional symmetry' in which divine reality and beliefs might be reciprocally related.(3) As such, the intentional object of mystical experiences would not encompass one unitary reality in all cases, but remain a (possibly disguised) description `and carry a meaning relative to some ontological structure'.(4)

There are significant connections between Katz's argument and the feminist critique of the systemic effect of patriarchal power. Feminism, using the term patriarchy as an heuristic category, refines Katz's pluralistic point that a mystic (or any religious subject) participates in a whole system of values, images and beliefs which `define, in advance, what the experience he wants to have, and which he does then have, will be like'.(5) In the context of traditional Western monotheism feminism would name these mediating values, images and beliefs as patriarchal, namely as belonging to `a male pyramid of graded subordinations and exploitations [which] specifies women's oppression in terms of the class, race, country, or religion of the men to whom we "belong'".(6) Certainly, feminism insists that the basic forms of patriarchy are more or less global and that therefore all religious experience is comparable in so far as it is determined to some degree by unequal, gender relations. But this is not to give a neo-essentialist account of religious experience. Postmodern feminism recognizes that patriarchy is historically variable in the context of geography, ethnicity and class. It is a defining characteristic of feminist theory that gender relations are a variant but constituent element of all experience, but that does not mean that all religious experiences in patriarchal societies are essentially the same.

Using two of Otto's texts, The Idea of the Holy and the Religious Essays,(7) I shall support and supplement Katz's argument with postmodernist feminist theory and with feminist criticism of androcentrism in the history of religions. The choice of these two texts is not random: Otto's concept of holiness -- a unique fusion of Lutheran theology, phenomenological research (of sorts) and his own spiritual aesthetic -- has been more influential in the history of religions than any other. Van der Leeuw, Eliade and, to some extent, Tillich, have all depended on Otto's account of the numinous as the defining essence of religious consciousness.

Throughout The Idea of the Holy Otto repeats that the purely spiritual capacity for numinous emotion `implies the first application of a category of valuation which has no place in the everyday natural world of ordinary experience'.(8) The intuition of religious significance is underivable since the holy is immediate on two counts: as a function of an a priori category of mind and as a self-manifestation of the divine.(9) In an attempt to protect the religious integrity of the holy, Otto refuses any adulteration or limitation by finite thought. The numinous is precisely the experiential awareness of the divine which eludes comprehension and hence domestication in rational or ethical terms. `Divination' of the meaning of the numinous appearance is `the unrestrained recognition and inward acknowledgement that comes from deep within the soul, stirred spontaneously, apart from all conceptual theory'.(10) Whilst there is no space here to unravel the idiosyncrasies of Otto's ontological and epistemological scheme, I shall use feminist criticism to provide phenomenological evidence which would suggest that numinous consciousness is not the immediate or `pure' religious experience that Otto believed it to be. The concepts and language he used to evoke, categorize and value numinous experience reveal that this kind of experience (that is, the combined event in which the numinous object makes itself manifest and the subject's interpretation of that appearance) is mediated and constituted by the androcentrism of Otto's own world-view and by that of the history of religions itself. There is, therefore, more than a contingent relation between the supposedly transhistorical numinous experience and the historically particular formula set out in The Idea of the Holy for identifying and evoking a numinous experience. This summarizing formula is well known as the feeling of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Otto contends that it is through recalling the psychological processes of our `purest' religious experience that we can begin to delineate its divine object. Anyone who cannot recall a religious experience `as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness', is `requested to read no further'.(11) Here Otto forcefully rejects the notion that true religious experience has anything to do with its social context. Rather, religion begins with the arousal of numinous awareness in the uncanny feeling that something `wholly other' (and hence mysterious) is present and which is tremendous in its awe-inspiring power. The `ideogram' or analogy of majestas unites the tremendum and the fascinosum in a two-fold reaction in which a person is both entranced and horrified by the numen -- the as yet un-named deity.

By contrast, feminist criticism argues that religious experience is conditioned from the outset by patriarchal conceptualizations of ultimate value, and by sex-role differentiation in the practice of religion. Assuming this, constitutive relation between patriarchal ideology and religious experience, I shall suggest that patriarchal ideology provides the primary epistemological and axiological structures that underpin the mysterium tremendum et fascinans so making numinous experience intelligible and worthy of recall. Accordingly, Steven Katz's argument against the existence of any pre-conceptual essence of religious experience can be combined with the feminist argument that androcentrism provides an a priori set of values which has historically conditioned the form and content of religious experience. These combined arguments leave Otto's contention that numinous consciousness was the `innermost essence' of all religious experience in serious…