Religion Can Be an Aesthetic Experience of Potentially Infinite Intensity

Let’s define spirituality as the relationship a person can have with Ultimate Reality as they understand it.

Then let’s define religion as the way people can gather to have experiences of Ultimate Reality more powerful than they can achieve alone.

Under that definition, religion can be an aesthetic experience of potentially infinite intensity.

(Notice I said *can be.* This function is operative under the definition of religion I've provided; it may not be under whatever definition you use.)

By this I mean a specialized mode of perception focused on the contents of a ritual activity designed to induce an experience of the sacred. Such an activity can produce intense emotion, and as the amplitude of that emotion increases toward the overwhelming, the experience begins to resemble and may ultimately become identical with Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the numinous, an experience of the Holy.

This can be true of any emotion: love, hate, desire, shame, despair, exultation, damnation, salvific joy. Any emotion can be experienced so intensely that it can be productively interpreted, in terms that reify the meaning of what is happening, as possession by a god or goddess.

The first of these descriptions is phenomenological: it describes what the experience feels like. The second is hermeneutic: it describes what the experience means. This is where religion truly comes into its own. Religion provides the interpretive lens that determines the lived meaning of an experience.

And this is why religion is important: shared experiences of lived meaning create the social bond of communitas. That bond, in turn, reifies the reality of the experience after the peak has passed and the participants have returned to the frame of the mundane world, which by its nature tends to smother the transcendent.

I suggest that this idea opens a new design space; call it numinal engineering (from Otto's "numinous" and Kant's "noumenal").* Such experiences can be constructed, and this opens new ways to investigate the Mystery that confronts us.

What do you think?

*Pace, philosophy nerds: I know Kant’s noumenon is precisely not something phenomenal experience straightforwardly reveals. But that doesn’t mean we don’t emotionally react to the felt presence of what exceeds phenomenal representation.