By IHE Graduate Fellow Father Gilbrian Stoy, C.S.C.
In contemporary moral debates, personal experience has risen to be a supreme source for moral discernment. In order for a doctrinal teaching, interpretation of scripture, or logical conclusion to be valid, it must ultimately ring true to a person’s lived experience.
Christians shouldn’t be too alarmed by referring to an experience as a source for theology. In a certain sense, it merely formalizes what has often been included in hagiographies and spiritual biography since the Paschal Mystery. We can note how Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus caused a similar reimagination of his understanding of scripture and reason. Also, take Saint Augustine’s hearing of the call to “take and read” and his experience with Monica in Ostia as they experienced a foretaste of the joys of heaven. More recently, Thomas Merton experienced on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, a unity between himself and all peoples that broke beyond reason and tradition into an existential form of knowing. There are many such examples throughout the Christian Tradition. What makes the above examples important is that each represents a particular moment in the life of Christian thinkers that would shape and inform those thinkers’ understandings of themselves, others, and God.
Clearly, these mystical experiences make significant contributions to their subjects’ deliberations. They provide data and authoritative weight that appears independent of the other categories, such as scripture or tradition. These realities reveal a distinct category of data.
However, modernity has introduced a major shift in how experience itself is understood. Traced at least back to Descartes, the conscious and thinking “I” became the grounding and guarantor of certitude. Seeking a foundation for all rational discourse, Descartes found security in the self-evident experience of thinking. From this evidence of self-existence, Descartes could then test all reality and determine its meaning and place. This foundation acted as the horizon that gave meaning and place to all other reality. The subject, and its sense of reality, assumed the role of determining what is or is not real. Ultimately, what bears the weight of reality is what “rings true” to each individual subject.
The danger, however, is how vulnerable this form of experience is to external influences that then shape and inform the meaning of that experience. The process of interpreting experiences is liable to illusion and distortion, which endangers the authority experience apparently wields. We do not interpret the world as a blank slate; rather, our preferences, interests, and understandings of the world are shaped by a continual and complicated interaction between our particular individuality, the formation we received from our family, and cultural influences that shape how we understand the world. Because of these influences, we need some means to distinguish the distorted influences of cultural conditioning from “genuine” experience.
What we need, then, is some means by which an individual can ask if they have a justified reason for how they understand their experience. But if I as a subject begin to ask that question, I begin to realize that I need something beyond myself that can help me to realize when I have made a mistake in my reasoning. I need a community that can help me discern what influences have shaped my experience—a community that has a shared vision of what it means to flourish as a person, and so can discern what experiences resonate with that flourishing. But I also require a community that is capable of critiquing itself, naming ways in which cultural influences have distorted its own reasoning, and can step outside of itself enough so as to correct itself.
And this is exactly what we discover in the examples of Christian experience mentioned above. Paul brought his experience of the Risen Christ to the Christian community, who together processed their Paschal experiences in light of scripture and God’s promise. Likewise, Augustine and Thomas Merton also reflected upon their experiences not as a supreme sources that rose above the others, but as instances requiring interpretation and that could only be understood in light of the Christian community of which they were a part.
