THE SPIRITUAL SENSES IN WESTERN SPIRITUALITY AND THE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Abstract. Th e doctrine of the spiritual senses has played a signifi cant role in the history of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality. What has been largely unremarked is that the doctrine also played a signifi cant role in classical Protestant thought, and that analogous concepts can be found in Indian theism. In spite of the doctrine's signifi cance, however, the only analytic philosopher to consider it has been Nelson Pike. I will argue that his treatment is inadequate, show how the development of the doctrine in Puritan thought and spirituality fi lls a serious lacuna in Pike's treatment, and conclude with some suggestions as to where the discussion should go next.1 Th e concept of the spiritual senses has played a signifi cant role in the history of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality. It goes back at least as far as Origen, and fi gures prominently in the work of theologians as diverse as Bonaventure and Hans Urs von Balthasar. What is less well known (indeed almost totally unremarked) is that the doctrine also played an important role in some classical Protestant thought and spirituality. Th is is important for it suggests that the doctrine is (or at least should be) an important feature of Christian spiritual theology in general, and raises the question of whether similar concepts can be found in other theistic traditions. In spite of its importance, however, the concept has been almost totally neglected by analytic philosophers of religion. My essay will be divided into three parts. I will begin by 1 Substantial portions of this article are taken from my "Jonathan Edwards and His Puritan Predecessors on the Spiritual Senses," in Sarah Coakley and Paul Gavrilyuk, eds., Spiritual Senses: Th e Perception of God in the History of Western Christian Th eology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, and are reprinted with the kind permission of Cambridge University Press. EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 3 (2011), PP. 21–41 22 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT examining the only treatment of the doctrine by an analytic philosopher that I am aware of (namely, Nelson Pike's). I will then show how the development of the doctrine of the spiritual senses in Puritan thought and spirituality fi lls a serious lacuna in Pike's treatment, and conclude by saying a few words about where I think the discussion should now go. I. PIKE AND THE SPIRITUAL SENSES Th e fi rst two chapters of Nelson Pike's Mystic Union2 describe what are commonly regarded as the three principal forms of mystical prayer. Th e soul is directly aware of God in each but the degree of intimacy and the place of encounter diff er. In the Prayer of Quiet, "God and the soul are close to each other" (Pike 5). In Full Union and (the culmination of) Rapture, however, they penetrate each other; God and the soul are held in mutual embrace. In the Prayer of Quiet and Full Union, the encounter between self and God takes place within the soul of the mystic. In Rapture, it transpires outside it. Quiet and Union thus diff er with respect to the nature of the encounter but are alike with respect to its place or domain. In Full Union and Rapture, the nature of the encounter is the same but its place diff ers. Chapter 3 discusses the doctrine of the spiritual senses which asserts that there are "fi ve spiritual sense faculties" bearing "some likeness to the exterior senses" (Teresa of Avila) "by which God's presence in the various states of union is detected" (Pike 42). As Pike understands the doctrine, when the Christian mystic "claims to have 'seen' God, or to have 'smelled' or 'tasted'" him, she "means to be affi rming that God was detected in the encounter via actual sensations that are at least similar . . . to the bodily perceptions usually identifi ed with these terms" (Pike 44). Sight, hearing and smell are distance senses. (I not only see things at a distance, I hear what is going on in the next room, and smell what is cooking in the kitchen when I am in the hall. Touch typically requires contact but I can feel the fi re while standing at some distance from it.) 2 Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Th e descriptive portions of Mystic Union rely heavily on the earlier work of Augustin Poulain and Albert Farges. 23SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION In the Prayer of Quiet, God and the soul "are close but not so close as to preclude them coming closer . . . . In Full Union and . . . Rapture, God and the soul are in double embrace" (Pike 49). One would therefore expect that God would be detected by analogues of the distance senses in the Prayer of Quiet, and by analogues of taste and touch in Full Union and Rapture. According to Pike this is exactly what we fi nd. In the Prayer of Quiet, God is "heard,"3 "smelled," and "touched" "in the restricted sense appropriate when the object perceived is still at some distance from the perceiver" (Pike 51). (Th us "Teresa says that the soul feels the heat coming from the 'interior depths'" [Pike 50)].) In Full Union and Rapture, God is touched and tasted. Th ere are anomalies, though. First, although sight is the paradigmatic distance sense, spiritual sight is seldom if ever associated with the Prayer of Quiet. It is frequently mentioned in connection with Full Union,4 however, and is especially associated with Rapture. Second, Pike thinks that the objects of spiritual hearing, touch, taste and smell bear some comparison (if only remote) to their ordinary counterparts. Th e object of spiritual taste, for example, is God's "sweetness," and the object of spiritual touch is his "caress" or "touch." Th e exception is spiritual sight whose typical objects are "power, will, justice, goodness," and the like, that is, properties whose ordinary counterparts cannot "be apprehended in simple acts of [visual] perception." It thus seems "that if we are to retain a parallel between spiritual sight and bodily sight, we shall have to introduce an analogue of 'bodily form' that can be spiritually seen" (Pike 60-61, my emphasis.) Th e trouble is that references to anything like this 3 Pike quotes Ambrose who claims to "hear God's voice" in this state (the Prayer of Quiet) (Pike 51). Given Pike's schema, this is of course appropriate since hearing is a distance sense. But how oft en is "hearing" referred to at this stage? And when it is, how oft en does it refer to nothing more than a so-called "interior locution" (words or thoughts suddenly occurring to one) and not to a direct perception of God himself? (Question: Are the words or thoughts in these locutions perceived as coming from God himself. [Cf. My hearing my wife speak], or does one instead infer that they do, or simply form the conviction that they do. [Cf. I receive a letter from my wife without her signature or address.]) 4 But see Poulain's Graces of Interior Prayer (St. Louis: Herder, 1950), page 56, where he says that "as a rule, spiritual visual perceptions are absent in Full Union as they are in the Prayer of Quiet." 24 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT seldom (if ever) occur in descriptions of the Prayer of Quiet, Full Union, or Rapture.5 Th e fact that the paradigmatic distance sense (sight) normally comes into play only in Rapture, in which God and the soul indwell one anotherr and are therefore not at a distance, and that there are no divine analogues of the objects of ordinary visual experience (color, shape, etc.) suggests to me that the doctrine of the spiritual senses imposes an overly rigid conceptual scheme on a comparatively unsystematic and fl uid use of perceptual metaphors. A number of additional considerations reinforce this suspicion. Let me mention two of the most important. (1) Pike claims that since God and the soul remain at some distance from one another in the Prayer of Quiet, the spiritual senses most appropriate to this form of union will be distance senses. Touch is involved but "only in the restricted sense appropriate when the object perceived is still at some distance from the perceiver." And Pike quotes Teresa who "says that the soul feels the heat coming from the 'interior depths,'" that is "(we can assume) . . . the most interior of the Seven Mansions." (Th e analogy is with, e.g., "feeling the heat of a stove which is at some distance from oneself " [Pike 50-51].) But while a feeling of interior warmth oft en is referred to in connection with the Prayer of Quiet, is it a feeling of something at a distance as Pike thinks, or instead just a less intense experience of the burning oft en felt in Full Union or Rapture?6 Augustin Poulain (whom Pike largely follows) implies that the answer is the latter. "Th at which constitutes the common basis of all the degrees of mystic union," including the Prayer of Quiet and Full Union "is that of the spiritual impression by which God makes known his presence . . . in the manner . . . of something interior which penetrates the soul; it is a sensation of . . . saturation, of immersion," and can be called "spiritual 5 Th ough a careful examination of Christocentric mystics like Pierre de Berulle might force one to qualify this claim. See also the Shri Vaishnava theistic mystics' visions of the celestial body of Vishnu. 6 "Since God is an infi nite fi re of love, when therefore he is pleased to touch the soul with some severity, the heat of the soul rises to such a degree that the soul believes it is burned with a heat greater than any other in the world. For this reason it speaks of this touch as a burn." Th e heat in this case is not felt at a distance. Rather, the soul is not only "conscious of the burn, but it has itself become one burn of vehement fi re." (John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, trans. E. Allison Peers, Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1962, p. 59.) 25SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION touch" (Poulain 90-91, my emphases). Because "it is a question . . . here of a spiritual object which is not remote" but "manifests itself by uniting itself with us, dissolving into us as it were," the appropriate analogy is bodily touch (Poulain 94, my emphasis). (2) Is the systematic use of all fi ve perceptual terms typical of Christian mystics generally? Pike's discussion of the spiritual senses refl ects his heavy reliance on John of the Cross and especially Teresa. Th e weight he assigns them isn't unreasonable given the fullness and clarity of their descriptions, their standing in the Roman Catholic community and their importance in the history of Christian mysticism. Th eir paradigmatic status in Pike's book also has important precedents in the work of Poulain, Albert Farges, Jacques Maritain and others.7 Th ese mystics and theologians of mysticism aren't fully representative of the Christian mystical tradition as a whole, however. Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor "do not mention the concept of the 'spiritual senses' at all."8 Moreover, whereas Karl Rahner and others think we should speak of a doctrine of the spiritual senses "only when these partly fi gurative, partly literal expressions such as to touch God, the eyes of the heart, etc. are found" integrated in a "complete system" of the "fi ve instruments . . . involved in the spiritual perception of immaterial [religious] realities,"9 this is much too restrictive. Many ancient authorities who had important things to say about spiritual perception, did not develop anything amounting to a "complete system" or a body of doctrine of the spiritual senses. In fact most if not all patristic authors, including Origen whom Rahner regards as "the 'founding father' of the spiritual senses tradition, treat the matter casually rather than systematically" (Gavrilyuk, Introduction). Furthermore, there are signifi cant diff erences between them. "Some ancient authorities" (as well as the 20th century theologian Balthasar) "regard the spiritual senses as purifi ed or transformed versions of the physical senses. Others [e.g., Origen] contrast [them] sharply, emphasizing that the physical senses need to be non-operational in order for the spiritual senses to function 7 Poulain and Farges, too, stress the doctrine of the spiritual senses. 8 Paul Gavrilyuk, "Introduction," Spiritual Senses: Th e Perception of God in the History of Western Christian Th eology, op. cit. 9 Karl Rahner, "Th e 'Spiritual Senses' according to Origen," in Karl Rahner, Th eological Investigations, vol. 16. New York: Seabury Press, 1979, p. 82. 26 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT properly" (Gavrilyuk, Introduction). Nor is there a uniform list of the objects of the spiritual senses. "God, the eternal Word," the incarnate Word, "spiritual beings such as angels . . . , transcendentals (the good, the true and the beautiful) and other divine attributes," and God's "presence in creation, in the sacraments, in the church, and in scripture" have all been suggested at one time or another (Gavrilyuk, Introduction). All this suggests that Christian accounts of the spiritual senses are too rich and too varied to be usefully reduced to any system. Moreover, in spite of his insistence on the existence of fi ve spiritual senses, Farges himself notes that not all of the spiritual senses are equally prominent10 in each mystic. Which ones play the leading role in any given case varies "according to the degree of union of each contemplative, and perhaps also with the temperament and character of each" (Farges 284). Take Bonaventure, for instance, who, according to Rahner, has the most fully developed version of the doctrine among the medievals. Sight and hearing relate to the intellect; smell, touch and taste to the will and aff ections. "Th e number fi ve" is a bit "arbitrary," however, since "the sense of smell and hearing" are "more or less superfl uous for [Bonaventure's] account of spiritual contemplation and its various levels" (Rahner 127). Th e important concepts for his analysis are spiritual sight, touch, and taste. Sight is a "simple vision (simplex contuitus)" whose object is "the immutable fi rst truth" and "its eternal ideas which form the ultimate principles of all creation" (Rahner 116). Taste is "the appreciation by the aff ections" of the operations of grace in the soul, and is less perfect than feeling or touch which is identifi ed with the ecstatic union of love. While "a direct clear vision of God" is essentially reserved for the aft erlife, he can be directly apprehended by a loving will, and the term "touch" is appropriately used to indicate both the directness and the darkness11 of this aff ective union (Rahner 117, 127, my emphasis).12 13 10 Or indeed always even evident. 11 To the intellect. 12 Th e accuracy of Rahner's interpretation of Bonaventure has been questioned. For example Mark McInroy argues that Bonaventure thinks that activities of the spiritual senses help make "one ready for ecstasy" but do "not function in ecstasy itself." (Mark McInroy, from his chapter on Bonaventure in Spiritual Senses: Th e Perception of God in Western Christian Th eology, op cit.) 13 Th e fact that Poulain, who insists on the existence of fi ve distinct spiritual senses, assimilates (without explicitly identifying) "spiritual taste and a spiritual sense of smell" 27SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION In my view, Rahner was correct in concluding that "if one assumes fi ve diff erent faculties which correspond analogically to the bodily powers of sensation, then one is going quite a long way beyond the empirical data [of mysticism]" (Rahner 133). Th e core of the analogy with bodily perception is the direct "experimental" awareness of a concrete (i.e., non-abstract) and present reality. Our "exterior senses" don't "perceive the essences of the objects around us, but only their presence and their physical eff ect upon our organs, and perceive these directly." Similarly, the "holy mystics" perceive the presence of God through his eff ects upon their souls. "Here on earth, the intelligence, except as regards itself and its operation, only apprehends directly the abstract and ideal; the senses alone are able to apprehend concrete and present reality, and" do so "directly." In an analogous way, the spiritual senses directly apprehend God's "concrete and present reality . . . . here is the same fi rmness and certainty of personal grip, the same ardent fullness of contact, of envelopment and penetration."14 Note that in this respect, the spiritual senses are not only analogous to the exterior senses, they are analogous to each other. But to justify the claim that talk of distinct spiritual senses of seeing, hearing, smell, touch and taste is not merely "metaphorical and symbolic" but properly analogical, one would have to show that the sort of direct contact involved in each is properly distinct from that involved in the others and that the kind of contact involved in spiritual seeing, for example, is more like that involved in physical seeing than that involved in physical hearing, smell, touch, or taste. To the best of my knowledge no one has come close to doing this.15 to spiritual touch on the grounds that they too "are interpretations of certain shades of union" (Poulain 90) suggests that these categories are more open and fl uid than he, Farges and Pike think. At the very least his remarks suggest that spiritual touch, taste, and smell aren't as sharply diff erentiated from one another as spiritual sight and spiritual hearing are from each other, and as both are from all three forms of the sensation of spiritual contiguity. 14 Albert Farges, Mystical Phenomena, trans. S. P, Jacques from the 2nd French edition. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago: Benziger Bros., 1925, pp. 279-81. 15 For all of his insistence on the existence of fi ve spiritual senses, for example, Farges has not even tried to do this. Poulain does but his discussion is less than fully satisfactory. He says, for example, that spiritual sight is a "mode of [experimental] knowledge . . . that we are instinctively led to compare . . . with bodily sight," (Poulain 89) but he does not say 28 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT In my opinion, then, the notion of the spiritual senses shouldn't be taken too literally. Th e metaphors may only have been designed to express intimacy (touch, taste), delight (sweetness, fragrance) and varying degrees of perceptual clarity. (Note that we could then explain why the paradigmatic distance sense, sight, isn't used in association with the Prayer of Quiet. Vision has been traditionally regarded as the most intellectual [and hence clearest] of the senses and one's awareness of God at this stage is relatively obscure.) One should consider the possibility, in other words, that expressions like "sight," "smell," taste" and so forth refer to only a few phenomenal qualities (the ones I have mentioned perhaps) each of which can be indiff erently picked out by more than one perceptual metaphor. What is oft en analogical, however, and not merely metaphorical, is the comparison of spiritual perception in general to bodily perception in general.16 I conclude that Pike's analysis of the spiritual senses fails because it attempts to fi t the language and experiences he discusses into a Procrustean bed which is ill suited to accommodate them.17 Its biggest lacuna, however, is its failure to address the relevant epistemological issues. Poulain and Farges do, however inadequately. Poulain says, for example, that we have "an experimental knowledge of the presence of God . . . that is the result of an impression, a spiritual sensation of a certain kind" that bears "some resemblance" of an analogous kind to the sensations of the "bodily senses" (Poulain 88). And Farges says something similar. Th e theory both gesture at is developed most carefully by Jacques Maritain in Distinguish to Unite, or the Degrees of Knowledge.18 Since I have argued elsewhere that the theory in question is inadequate,19 I would like to turn just how they are alike. "Spiritual hearing" is said to refer to the direct communication of God's thoughts to the mystic. But (as we have seen in note 13) spiritual smell, taste, and touch are more or less run together. 16 And note that a number of Christian authors speak of spiritual perception in the singular without implying a specifi c likeness to any particular one of the bodily senses. 17 In fairness to Pike, I should note that the fault in question primarily lies with the authors (especially Poulain and Farges) he is relying on. 18 Jacques Maritain, Distinguish to Unite, or the Degrees of Knowledge, trans. from the 4th French Edition under the supervision of Gerald B. Phelan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959. See especially 247-470. 19 William J. Wainwright, "Two Th eories of Mysticism: Gilson and Maritain," Th e Modern Schoolman 52 (1975): 405-26. Reprinted in William J. Wainwright, Mysticism: 29SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION to a couple of other models of spiritual sensation which at least at fi rst glance might seem initially more promising. II. PURITANS AND THE SPIRITUAL SENSES Th at conversion involved the bestowal of a new spiritual sense was a Puritan commonplace. In what follows I shall argue that Puritans employ "a sense of the heart" in three diff erent ways. It is oft en used for a feelingful conviction of gospel truths without any implication of direct or immediate cognitive contact with the divine. But its use more frequently refl ects the conviction that a converted heart involves a direct or immediate awareness of God or "holy things." Th ere were at least two models for this. Th e fi rst is a "Platonic" model which construes the contact as the immediate intuition of a reason thought of as essentially possessing an aff ective dimension. Th e second model is sense perception. While it is oft en diffi cult to determine just which of these three senses is intended, I shall argue that the Cambridge Platonist, John Smith A Study of its Nature, Cognitive Value, and Moral Implications. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981, pp. 166-84. I continue to stand by the majority of the criticisms of Maritain that I made at that time. For example, Maritain (apparently) presupposes that all perceptual experience involves the presence of a quasi-sensible medium through which we apprehend that experience's object. He also appears to presuppose that perception can only occur when the perceived object causally acts upon the perceiver. Neither presupposition is self-evident. Th e fi rst is clearly false if we grant that our immediate awareness of sense impressions and other mental states is a kind of perception. And if occasionalism is logically possible, then the second presupposition is false as well since, on that view, the presence of a physical object provides the occasion on which God produces appropriate sensory eff ects in the perceiver but isn't their cause. Even so, I am now less inclined to fl atly dismiss Maritain's theory than I was in 1975 and 1981. His account of sense perception is at least as plausible as Edwards's Lockean account which I will discuss in section II, and if the Christian mystic does become experimentally aware of God's presence through the medium of the eff ects which God produces in her soul, it is plausible to identify those eff ects with the consciously experienced eff ects of infused charity. (For one thing, Christian mysticism is a love mysticism: love is the means of attaining union with God and the union itself is a form of love. For another, the higher stages of contemplation are attained by burying all creatures beneath a "cloud of forgetting." All that remains is the mystic's loving awareness of God. If this awareness involves a medium, it seems that we must identify it with love since love is the only thing other than the awareness itself which hasn't been excluded from her consciousness). 30 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT (1616-1652), rather clearly intended the second (a Platonic aff ect-laden intellectual intuition) while the great American theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), intended the third (a direct cognition modeled on sense perception). Th e Puritan's talk of spiritual senses should be placed in the context of devotional practices that were strikingly similar to those of contemporary sixteenth and seventeenth century Roman Catholics. Th ey "knew and used classic Catholic devotional works." Among "the most popular, judging from the number of editions, were the works of St. Augustine, St. Bernard of Clairvaux," and "Th omas a Kempis's Th e Imitation of Christ . . . To a large extent, the Puritan devotional literature that blossomed in the early seventeenth century was modeled on earlier Roman Catholic devotional literature." "Continuity" also "existed in the area of techniques . . . Most important was the use of the imagination and the senses in the exercise known as composition of place," i.e., placing oneself within the scenes of the salvation story on which one is meditating.20 For Richard Baxter (1615-1691), meditation involved (1) using the sensory images of scripture to visualize (as well as to imaginatively hear, smell, and touch) divine things while at the same time recognizing the images' inadequacy, together with (2) a single minded concentration on the excellences of heaven or other objects of meditation, with the penultimate aim of eliciting and strengthening holy thoughts, desires and feelings, and (like other Puritans) the ultimate aim of achieving "union with Christ, a union that was [typically] expressed in mystically erotic imagery from the Song of Songs and Jesus' parable of the ten virgins" (HS 189).21 Regular times were set aside for meditation in a place "free from company and noise," and from other distractions (HS 163). Baxter, for instance, admonishes his reader to "Get thy heart as clear from the world as thou canst. Wholly lay by the thoughts of thy business, troubles, enjoyments, and everything that may take up any room in the soul. Get it as empty as thou possibly canst, that it may be the more capable of being 20 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Th e Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, pp. 28-33, 36. Henceforth HS. 21 Th e fi ve foolish virgins were sometimes interpreted in the wider tradition as the fi ve bodily senses, and the fi ve wise virgins as the fi ve spiritual senses. 31SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION fi lled with God . . . say to thy worldly business and thoughts, as Christ to his disciples, 'Sit ye here while I go and pray yonder.'"22 It is diffi cult to overemphasize the importance which Puritans placed on these spiritual practices. "Regular secret prayer" was regarded as "the primary and most necessary means" of grace. John Cotton (1584-1652), for example, argued that "the end of preaching" was that one "may learn to pray" (HS 177). Richard Baxter urged that meditation on heaven, i.e., on "the ravishing glory of saints, and the unspeakable excellencies of the God of glory, and the beams that stream from the face of his son" is the "duty by which all other duties are improved, and by which the soul digests truth for its nourishment and comfort." Meditation of this sort involves "the acting of all the powers of the soul," the will and the aff ections as well as the understanding. For "what the better had we been for odoriferous fl owers, if we had no smell . . . or what pleasure should we have found in meats and drinks, without the sense of taste? So what good could all the glory of heaven have done us, or what pleasure should we have had in the perfection of God himself, if we had been without the aff ections of love and joy?" (Baxter xiii, pp. 1-2). Prayer brings us to communion with God. Th omas Shepard (16051649) said, "I have seen God by reason and never been amazed at God . . . I have seen God himself [in prayer] and have been ravished to behold him" (HS 179). Cotton Mather (1663-1728) spoke of being "inexpressibly irradiated from on high," of being "exceedingly ravished," "raised up into Heaven," of "delights and raptures," and reported an experience in which he was transported "into the Suburbs of Heaven" where he was fi lled with a "Joy unspeakable and Full of glory. I cannot utter, I may not utter, the Communications of Heaven, whereto I have been this Day admitted: but this I will say, I have tasted that the Lord is gracious" (HS 285f). But while talk of spiritual senses is common, even pervasive, it is unclear how literally it was intended. Sometimes our authors' language rather strongly suggests that the most appropriate model of spiritual perception is ordinary sense knowledge. Th us Richard Sibbes (15771635) asserts that "the spiritual life of a Christian is furnished with spiritual senses. He hath a spiritual eye and a spiritual taste to relish 22 Richard Baxter, Th e Saint's Everlasting Rest (abridged), New York: American Tract Society, 1850?; reproduced online by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1999, chapter xiii, p. 6. Henceforth Baxter. 32 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT spiritual things, and a spiritual ear to judge of holy things, and a spiritual feeling. As everyday life, so this excellent life hath senses and motions suitable to it."23 Or consider the Puritan mystic Francis Rous (15791659): "Aft er we have tasted those heavenly things . . . from this taste there ariseth a new, but a true, lively, and experimental knowledge of the things so tasted . . . For even in natural fruits there are certain relishes . . . which nothing but the taste itself can truly represent and shew to us. Th e West-Indian Piney [pineapple] cannot be so expressed in words, even by him that hath tasted it, that he can deliver over the true shape and character of that taste to another that hath not tasted it."24 John Owen (1616-1683) also employs the language of the senses. But when placed in the context of his thought as a whole, his talk of the spiritual senses is arguably a metaphor for an aff ect-laden intellectual insight or intuition: "the true nature of saving illumination consists in this, that it gives the mind such a direct intuitive insight and prospect into spiritual things as that, in their own spiritual nature, they suit, please and satisfy it, so that it is transformed into them, cast in the mould of them, and rests in them" (Walton 202). More detailed models of these two ways of understanding spiritual perception are developed by Jonathan Edwards and John Smith, respectively. Consider, fi rst, Edwards. Because their hearts have been regenerated by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the saints love "being in general" (i.e., God and the things that depend on him). Th eir love of being in general is the basis of a new "spiritual sense" whose "immediate object" is "the beauty of holiness"– a "new simple idea" that can't "be produced by exalting, varying or compounding" ideas "which they had before," and that truly "represents" divine reality.25 23 Brad Walton, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Aff ections, and the Puritan Analysis of True Piety, Spiritual Sensation, and Heart Religion. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Th e Edward Mellon Press, 2002, p. 198. Henceforth Walton. 24 Quoted in Geoff rey Nuttall, Th e Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (originally published by Basil Blackwell, 1946, 2nd ed., 1947), p. 139. Henceforth Nuttall. 25 Jonathan Edwards, Treatise on the Religious Aff ections, 1746: Th e Nature of True Virtue, 1765, in Th e Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press, 19572006., vol. 2, pp. 205, 260; vol. 8, p. 622. Henceforth RA and TV, respectively. 33SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Edwards sometimes identifi ed true beauty with the pleasure that holy things evoke in people with spiritual "frames" or "tempers" or with the tendency they have to evoke it. At other times he variously identifi ed it with what he called the "consent of being to being," or the "love of being in general," or "true benevolence" or holiness. His view on the whole appears to be this. True beauty is identical with benevolence or agreement ("consent") in somewhat the same way in which water is identical with H2O or heat with molecular motion. But benevolence is also the objective basis of a dispositional property, namely, a tendency to produce a new simple idea in the savingly converted. Th is idea is a delight or pleasure in being's consent to being which somehow "represents" or is a "perception" of it. Edwards's account of true beauty thus resembles contemporary Lockean accounts of color or extension. Spiritual delight is a simple idea or sensation like our ideas of color or extension. Th e dispositional property is a power objects have to produce these ideas in our understandings. Benevolence or the consent of being to being is the objective confi guration underlying this power and corresponds to the microstructure of bodies that underlies their tendency to excite ideas of color or extension in minds like ours. Like simple ideas of redness, say, or extension, the new spiritual sensation "represents" or is a "perception" of its object. Just as "red" or "extension" can refer to the idea, the power, or the physical confi guration that is the basis of this power, so "true beauty" can refer to the spiritual sensation, to the relevant dispositional property, or to true benevolence. Edwards called the new mode of spiritual understanding a "sense" because the apprehension of spiritual beauty is (1) non-inferential and (2) involuntary, and Edwards, like Francis Hutcheson, associated sensation with immediacy and passivity. (3) It involves relish or delight, and Edwards followed Locke and Hutcheson in thinking that, like a feeling of tactual pressure or an impression of redness, being pleased or pained is a kind of sensation or perception. Finally, (4) the new mode of understanding is the source of a new simple idea, and Edwards shared Locke's and Hutcheson's conviction that simple ideas come "from experience." John Smith's model of spiritual perception is rather diff erent. He is no more averse to employing the language of the spiritual senses than Owen. He speaks, for example, of "the senses of the soul," with Plotinus 34 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT of an "intellectual touch" of God, and says that "the soul it self hath its sense as well as the body."26 "Th ere is," he says, "an inward sweetness and deliciousness in divine truth which no sensual mind can taste or relish . . . Divinity is not so well perceived by subtle wit . . . as by a purifi ed sense, as Plotinus phraseth it" (SD 15). Smith's spiritual sensation is best thought of as an intellectual intuition, however, an act of "that reason that is within us" (SD 15). "We must shut the eyes of sense, and open that brighter eye of the understanding, that other eye of the soul, as the philosopher calls our intellectual faculty . . . the light of the divine world will then begin to fall upon us . . . and in God's own light shall we behold him. Th e fruit of this knowledge will be sweet to our taste, and pleasant to our palates . . . When reason once is raised by the mighty force of the Divine Spirit into a converse with God, it is turned into sense . . . [W]hereas before we conversed with him only. . . with our discursive faculty . . . combating with diffi culties, and sharp contests of divers opinions, and laboring . . . in its deductions of one thing from another; we shall then fasten our minds on him . . . with a serene understanding . . . such an intellectual calmness and serenity, as will present us with a blissful, steady and invariable sight of him." What "before was only faith . . . now becomes vision" (SD 15-16, my emphases). Yet if Smith's "spiritual sensation" is best thought of as an intellectual intuition or perception, why employ the language of the bodily senses? Partly because it was traditional. But primarily, I think, because our familiar senses are apt metaphors for the intuition's directness or immediacy and for its aff ective overtones. III. PROSPECTS FOR THE TWO PURITAN MODELS OF SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION How should Edwards's and Smith's models be assessed? Note fi rst that both are models of spiritual perception as such, not of spiritual seeing or hearing or touch or tasting or smell, in particular. I shall argue 26 John Smith, Select Discourses, London: Printed by F. Flesher for W. Morden, 1660; New York and London: Garland, 1978 (reprint), pp. 5, 3. 35SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION that Edwards's model, while more fully developed than Smith's, is less adequate than his. In the fi rst place, although it is clear why Edwards speaks of the new spiritual cognition as a perception or sensation, it is not clear that he should have done so. His fi rst two reasons for construing it on the model of bodily sensation are far from conclusive. Our sensations (and the beliefs directly based on them) appear involuntary and immediate, but so too does our recognition of the fact that 2+2=4. Passivity and immediacy aren't peculiar to ideas derived from (internal or external) sensation. Th e other two considerations carry more weight. Locke and Hutcheson identifi ed reason with reasoning. Reason is sharply distinguished from the will and its aff ections and from the senses. Its sole function is to manipulate ideas received from other sources. Edwards sometimes indicates that he shares these views. Reason does not have an aff ective dimension and is not the source of new simple ideas. Th e cognition of true beauty, on the other hand, has an aff ective dimension since it involves relish or delight, and its object is a new simple idea. If these considerations are sound, then it seems that spiritual cognition should be construed as a kind of sensation or perception. Edwards's account of spiritual perception is subject to some of the same diffi culties as Locke's account of sense perception.27 But it is also subject to a diffi culty of its own. If I am right, the idea of true beauty is both a kind of delight or relish and an apparent cognition. Can something be both? It isn't suffi cient to argue that perceptions of objectively real value properties can be inherently aff ective (and thus pleasurable or painful), for Edwards doesn't think of pleasure and pain in this way. Pleasures and pains in his (and Locke's and Hutcheson's) view aren't qualities or aff ective dimensions of more complex experiences. Th ey are discrete internal sensations. But if pleasure is a kind of internal thrill or delight, how can it also be a true "representation" of something existing "without" (TV 622-23)? Ordinary pleasures and pains diff er from visual or auditory impressions in lacking what Berkeley called "outness;" they don't seem to point beyond themselves. Either spiritual pleasure is radically unlike ordinary pleasure in this respect or it isn't an apparent cognition. 27 It isn't clear that the mind's immediate objects are ideas, how these ideas represent or resemble their objects, and so on. 36 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT Edwards implicitly addresses this issue by attempting to show that "the frame of mind, or inward sense . . . whereby the mind is disposed to" relish true benevolence for its spiritual beauty agrees "with the necessary nature of things" (TV 620). Th e "frame of mind" in question, however, is benevolence itself. Hence, if we can show that benevolence has a foundation in the nature of things, we can conclude that the spiritual sense, too, is aligned with reality. Edwards has several arguments to show that it does,28 but his most interesting is perhaps this. In Edwards's view, "the Spirit of God . . . communicates and exerts itself in the soul [of the saints] in those acts which are its [God's] proper, natural, and essential acts in itself ad intra." "Th e act which is [the Deity's] nature, and wherein its being consists in . . . is divine love," however.29 Th is explains how the saints' benevolence is grounded in the nature of things. If the love of the saints just is God's love, and God's love is the Holy Spirit, then the benevolence of the saints is an act of the infi nite and omnipotent benevolence which lies at the heart of reality.30 Another problem isn't so easily overcome, though. Th at spiritual cognition is best thought of as a kind of sensation or perception on the model of bodily seeing, hearing, tasting and the like, seems inconsistent with other aspects of Edwards's position. A number of Hutcheson's critics took exception to his moral sense theory because they believed that (1) at least some moral propositions are necessarily true, and that (2) necessary truths are discerned by reason.31 Hutcheson maintained that the moral sense grasps the goodness of benevolent actions and dispositions, that is, perceives that benevolence is (morally) good. His critics objected that "Benevolence is good" is necessarily true, and that 28 Four of them are off ered in the fi nal chapter of Th e Nature of True Virtue. For a discussion of them, see my Reason and the Heart, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 34-38. 29 Jonathan Edwards, "Miscellany 471," in Th e Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, p. 513. 30 While Edwards normally insists on identity or something close to it, a suffi ciently close resemblance relation might itself be enough to explain why true benevolence is grounded in the nature of things. If the saints' loving actions and temper mirror God's action and temper, then their benevolence is appropriately related to objective reality because it resembles or is an image of it. Nature's activity on Edwards's occasionalist view is really God's activity. Love is thus "natural" because it imitates the action of nature itself. 31 See, for example, the correspondence between Hutcheson and Gilbert Burnet. 37SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION necessary truths are apprehended by reason, not sense. It is therefore signifi cant that Edwards, too, apparently believed that basic moral truths are necessary.32 Nor is he likely to have thought that the connection between benevolent actions and dispositions and spiritual beauty is only contingent – that holiness or benevolence might not have been truly beautiful. But if "holiness is beautiful" is necessarily true, Edwards seems committed to the implausible view that our knowledge of at least some necessary truths is derived from a sense, i.e., that some necessary truths are perceived by a kind of sensation. It is important to note that the problem here does not arise from Edwards's use of a peculiarly neoLockean model of bodily perception. Because the physical senses can't apprehend necessary truths, it would arise from any use of models of bodily perception.33 One could avoid this problem as well as the one raised earlier by interpreting spiritual cognition as an intellectual intuition with aff ective 32 Edwards clearly thought that at least some moral truths are necessary. See his Freedom of the Will (Th e Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 153. His example is, "It is . . . fi t and suitable, that men should do to others, as they would that they should do to them." It is worth observing that Locke, too, thought that basic moral truths are necessary. 33 Including those of Poulain, Farges and Maritain. One might protest that the objection cuts against Maritain only if "experimental knowledge" of God, on his view, incorporates a belief in necessary truths, and that it does so is doubtful. For, in the fi rst place, it isn't clear that the experimental knowledge of God incorporates propositional knowing, and even if it does, it is far from obvious that the propositions known are necessary truths. Th is doubt is reinforced by the fact that the medium through which the mystic apprehends God, on Maritain's view, (namely, the consciously experienced eff ects of infused charity) are more closely analogous to the sensory eff ects of physical objects on our bodily senses than to the concepts through which we grasp abstract objects and which we incorporate in propositions. But while the passive reception of the sensory eff ects of physical objects may be a necessary condition of perceptual knowledge, it isn't suffi cient. For example, perceptual knowledge of the table I am looking at requires my recognition that the object I am experiencing is a table. Similarly here. Th e knowledge in question is an experimental knowledge of God only if the subject is at least implicitly aware that "the Divine Reality" is "present within us" in virtue of its action upon the soul (Maritain, op. cit., p. 272). Th e mystic's experience thus does incorporate propositional knowledge. Moreover, if the propositions known entail that God exists (as they surely must for Maritain, since "God is present in my soul" entails "God exists"), and "God exists" is a necessary truth as the tradition arguably maintains, then Maritain's account of the mystic's experimental knowledge of God is exposed to the same sort of objection as Edwards's. 38 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT overtones in the manner of Smith. A view like Smith's sidesteps the two most pressing problems confronting Edwards – how a feeling of delight can also be an apparent cognition, and how a necessary truth can be grasped by a kind of sensation. It sidesteps them because (1) on Smith's view, the "sensation" or "feeling" isn't the cognition itself but, rather, its accompaniment or (better) its aff ective dimension or resonance, and because (2) there is no mystery34 in necessary truths and "platonic" entities such as numbers, universals, archetypes and values, being objects of intellectual intuition. But while I fi nd Smith's model more promising, it clearly needs further development. If I am right, Smith employed the language of the spiritual senses because it was familiar and because ordinary sense perception provides an apt metaphor for the intuition's directness or immediacy and aff ective overtones. Other analogies are at least as apt, however, and should be explored further. Th e spiritual cognition's directness, for example, is strikingly similar to our immediate recognition of the prima facie rightness of an instance of justice or kindness on a view like W. D. Ross's, or our immediate acquaintance with numbers, universals, values and other so-called "platonic" entities on the views of a number of contemporary epistemologists. Nor are intellectual intuitions always aff ectless. Kant's respect for the moral law is the aff ective resonance of the recognition of its obligatoriness in rational beings with inclinations, while classical Platonists thought that reason itself has an aff ective dimension. Knowing the good involves loving it, delighting in it and putting it into practice – a view which Smith shared. ("Intellectual life, as [the Platonists] phrase it" is a non-discursive "knowledge . . . [that] is always pregnant with divine virtue, which ariseth out of an happy union of souls with God, and is nothing else but a living imitation of a Godlike perfection drawn out by a strong fervent love of it. Th is divine knowledge . . . makes us amorous of Divine beauty . . . and this divine love and purity, reciprocally exalts divine knowledge" [SD 20].) Th e immediate task for those interested in Smith's model of spiritual perception is thus a close examination of the classical Platonists' account of our knowledge of the forms, the Good and the One, and contemporary literature on the epistemology of intuition in (e.g.) logic and mathematics, 34 Or at least, less mystery. 39SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ethics and philosophy. If one or more of these accounts is defensible, so too, I suspect, will be Smith's. It may also be useful to examine similar conceptions in other theistic traditions such as Vaishnavism.35 Nammalvar sings of the Lord swallowing him, for example: "Th e Lord abides in [his] heart, and when it melts, swallows it."36 "He who seized me came, the other day/ and ate my life./ Day aft er day, he comes, and devours me so fully./ Was that the day that I became his servant?" (9.6.8). Or again, "He ate my life fully and was fi lled./ He became all worlds and all life/ . . . and he then became just for me, honey, milk, syrup, [and] nectar" (10.7.2) (CN 168f., 172f.). But then, as the last line implies, the poet also swallows the Lord "who is beyond all senses and thought" (CN 160). He "entered my heart fi lling it./ I have obtained my love ["and contain him"]. I ate the nectar, and rejoiced" (10.8.6) (CN 173). "Th e Tamil word for 'nectar' . . . is amutu (from the Sanskrit amrta, the substance that gives immortality) and the phrase 'nectar of the mouth' is used to mean kissing." Th us the poet, speaking as one of the god's female lovers (gopis) exclaims "Embrace my beautiful breasts/ with the fragrance of the wild jasmine/ on your radiant chest./ Give me the nectar of your mouth" (10.3.5). "Amutu also means 'food' and enjoyment" (CN 170-71). Th e upshot is that the poet and the Lord include one another. And as in the West, this mutual union or embrace between God and his devotee is expressed by images of taste, touch and smell. Another interesting example is the following. Th e Gaudiya Vaishnavas who identify ultimate reality with Krishna37 believe it is revealed "in the form of a cosmic drama," known as the Krishna-lila. Th e heart of this drama is the love play between Krishna and the female cowherds (gopis) whose story is told in the Bhagavata Purana. Th e purpose of this revelation "is to provide humans with a model of, and for, perfection."38 Th is model centrally includes passion which Jiva 35 Vaishnavas are monotheists, and describe God (Vishnu) as omniscient, omnipotent, and all loving. 36 John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan, Th e Tamil Veda: Pillan's Interpretation of the Tiruvaymoli. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 166. Henceforth CN. 37 For many Vaishnavas, Krishna is the principle avatara („descent" or „bodily" manifestation) of Vishnu. 38 David L. Haberman, Action as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Raganuga Bhakti 40 WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT Gosvamin (fl . 1555-1600) defi nes as an instance of "that love which consists of an immense desire of a subject for union with the object of its desire," and which Rupa (fl . 1495-1550) claims provides the "highest access" to Krishna (Haberman 70). Th e devotee internalizes the stories of Krishna by identifying with one of Krishna's companions, thereby attempting to transform his or her identity. Th e anubhavas are the "spontaneous and natural [external] expressions" of the characters' "inner emotions." By imitating, or taking on, the actions of one of the characters in the story, the devotee hopes to "obtain the salvifi c emotions of that character and [thus] come to inhabit the world [namely, Vraja] in which that character resides" (Haberman 69f). To explain more fully: According to Gaudiya Vaishnavism, "the body . . . is the house of the soul or self (atman). Identity is what locates the self in a particular body which resides in a particular world. To participate in the world of Vraja," for example, "one must occupy a body located in that world. And to accomplish this one must develop an identity which connects one to such a body . . . Salvation in Gaudiya Vaishnavism" should therefore "be seen as the shift of identity from the external . . . body" of ordinary life "to [one's] true body which is similar" to that of the exemplary character whose actions one is imitating (Haberman 73). Since "amorous emotion [madhura-bhava) . . . contains the essence of all other emotions," it "is perfectly represented by . . . the female lovers of Krishna, . . . the gopis of Vraja." Imitation of amorous bhakti (i.e., loving devotion) is thus modeled on the gopis. It is "divided into two types." Th e fi rst involves "the desire for direct . . . enjoyment" and sexual union "with Krishna" (my emphasis), and therefore consists in identifying oneself with one of Krishna's female lovers. Th e second involves a "desire to share in the special emotions" of one of the female companions or attendants of his lovers (usually a companion of Radha, Krishna's favorite gopi), and thus to vicariously share in the latter's amorous passion (Haberman 81-85). What particularly interests me is that salvation, on this view, involves the acquisition of a "perfected body" whose characteristics mirror, while transcending and transforming, those of one's "earthly" body. If Sadhana. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 45. Henceforth Haberman. 41SPIRITUAL SENSES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION one's perfected body does mirror one's earthly body, however, it must possess analogues of our physical senses. What one would like, therefore, is a more detailed account of just how these analogues of our physical senses function, and the ways in which they resemble and diff er from the latter – models that play a role similar to those of Maritain or Jonathan Edwards or John Smith, for example. Doing so would potentially shed further light on the tradition of the spiritual senses which has been the subject of this article.