Open verdict: Neil Morgan on the doors of perception

‘This is the religious experience in a picture.’

What is religion all about? The secular view says it is like living in an enclosure with thick walls and fake doors. People push and pull on the dummy doors, but they do not open. They cannot find a way to look out. Other people say that when they pull hard on these doors for a long time, they glimpse a chink of light. But nobody can agree on what is seen. ‘I saw a dragon,’ says one. ‘I saw a beautiful woman with a veil,’ says another. ‘I saw a high mountain’, offers a third. The theory goes that, when you keep pushing and pulling, you get exhausted and desperate, and then you get an illusion of a chink. But it’s not real. There is nothing there. This is the way for all pushers and pullers, they finally agree.

In the religious perspective, however, there are not only dummy doors, but at least one real door. This door does not open from inside the enclosure, but from outside. Perhaps the door does not even show from inside. When it opens, however, something is revealed and one is awakened. Rather than asking how we could possibly imagine God, some people speak of having God revealed to them. This is the religious experience in a picture.

This, I would say, is how we discover the transcendent – a word we no longer seem to use or recognise, along with a whole dictionary of other religious words. We are strictly inside the enclosure now, for sure. Words like ‘mystical and ‘grace’ are being deleted from the Quaker vocabulary.

Don Cupitt, the philosopher of religion, outlined a somewhat similar parable. He wasn’t suggesting that the transcendent is revealed, but that people could be sensitised to it, as a possibility, by a change of heart.

When asked ‘What is it like to see God?’ Simone Weil had a more direct answer: ‘There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing that is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.’

This is a bold statement. Is it childish pixie dust? Fantasy? A ‘spooky’ fairy tale? Or a real awareness? The term ‘outside’ only has a meaning, people say, within the categories of space and time. But that is a view from inside the enclosure. Despite difficulties of expression, isn’t Weil telling us what it means to be religious?

To give up these intimations of the transcendent, these revelations from outside the enclosure, is to return to the fake doors of the secular.

Neil is indebted to OK Bouwsma’s Without Proof or Evidence for the allegory.

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