Yes – existing itself! That is the problem to be
addressed, and before this mysterious existence man is astonished and fallen to
his knees. Yes, the human astonishment before the mysteries of being is the
root of all religious conceptualization, of all philosophizing and of all
theologizing – and what is the core phenomenological component of all religion,
of all philosophy and of all theology? Ultimately, it is faith. That
unnegotiable, unredeemable, undeniable state of being concerned with being. Of seeking faith in the darkness,
the human universal! And how responds a hero to the call of such existential
concerns? He is moved by it into action, for the definitional criterion for the
religious experience is that it must incite action―therefore war is religious, and therefore love is,
because it forces its subjects to muster action. I shall illustrate: you can go
to a movie theater and enjoy a beautiful film; you may go to the gallery and
awe at the paintings with profundity, but what does it leave you with? If you
go to a movie theater, and, afterwards you become so imbued with the spirit of
it that you begin writing your own manuscript, or if you go to the gallery and
become so infatuated by the beauty of a painting that you instantly purchase
the appropriate materiel and starts painting your own masterpiece―those are religious
experiences. If you are not driven into a profound and meaningful action, we
may call them aesthetic experiences, and these are very important as well for
the warrior mystic poet, but none so profound as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans itself. A religious experience is
an experience of the Holy, it is a state of being, and it can be colored with a
myriad different emotions, moods, and passions; its canvas too is large and
mysterious. I think a religious experience might be the experience of being
taken hostage by a feeling of an ultimate concern, a concern which downgrades
every other concern you know about; it is an experience which qualifies all
other experiences as preliminary―for
the religious experience reveals bits and pieces, or sometimes way more than
that, to the meaning of our lives. It is undeniable once it happens, and as it
happens, you cannot evade it.
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