Religious experience as experience of repentance

how phenomenology increases our knowledge of religious experiences

Bianca Bellini

pp. 287-312

in: Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (ed), The problem of religious experience, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

What are the essential traits of religious experiences? Should we account for them, or could we confine such experiences to a merely subjective dimension, which does not call for justification before others? This paper relies on descriptive phenomenology to argue that the dimension of religious experiences is not immune from justification. Indeed, it is the effort of justification that spurs us to identify the essential traits of religious experiences. An appeal to descriptive phenomenology will enable us to regard repentance as the core of such experiences and to grasp other phenomena essentially related to it. So, this paper intends to appeal to phenomenology as a descriptive philosophical method and tries to relate it to the dimension of religious experiences. This means that we will delve into the nature of phenomenology itself so as to understand what our main goal entails: Are there specific phenomenological issues that we should appeal to in our effort of accounting for religious experiences from a phenomenological perspective? Our phenomenological reflections upon repentance will show how its role exceeds the religious dimension, since it will turn out to be an essential keystone of the process of self-shaping too.