what is a christian experience essay

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The Christian Life

Other essays.

The Christian life is the life of repentance, faith, and good works lived through the power of the Spirit and with the help of the means of grace as the Christian is conformed to the image of Christ to the glory of God.

The Christian life is based upon the work of God in the new birth, justification, the gift of the Spirit, the forgiveness of sins, and our union to Christ. The goal of the Christian life is to be conformed into the image of Christ and, as a result, to share in God’s rule on the earth to the glory of God. Using various means of grace, such as Scripture, prayer, the Church, and the sacraments, God conforms the Christian into the image of Christ by the Spirit. The healthy Christian life is shown in faith and obedience, good works, sacrificial living and giving, and participation in the worldwide mission of the Church.

There is no better life to live than the Christian life. We shall consider this tremendous subject under five main headings. We begin with the basis of the Christian life: on what is it founded? Second, before addressing the daily realities of the Christian life, we take a look ahead to the end and ask: what is the goal of the Christian life? To what is it heading? Then, we consider the heart of the Christian life: that it is a matter of the heart. Fourth, we take a look at the means by which the Christian life is led, what are sometimes called “means of grace.” Then, in our final section, we trace out some of the salient features of the Christian life.

The Basis of the Christian Life

We shall only understand the Christian life in the present if we grasp the foundation upon which it is built. The Bible speaks of this in at least the following seven ways.

Repentance and Faith

God commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30–31). Peter gives this command on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:38) and it is the consistent teaching of the New Testament. We are to turn from our sin and to trust in Jesus Christ the Savior and Lord. Without this repentance and faith, there is no Christian life. Indeed, repentance and faith are not simply the shape of the beginning of the Christian life; they are the shape of all of the Christian life, day after day after day.

But there is a problem; we are neither willing nor able to repent and believe in Christ unless God works in us, for repentance and faith are ultimately the gift of God (cf. 2 Tim. 2:25). The remaining six ways of speaking about the basis of the Christian life all focus on the sovereign action of God. Although we experience the beginnings of the Christian life in terms of our own repentance and faith, we come to understand that none of that would have happened unless God had first worked in us in his kindness.

By nature, we are spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1). We can do nothing to save ourselves. God must give us birth from above, or new birth (John 3:1-8).

The Gift of the Spirit

This birth comes to us by the Holy Spirit who enters our hearts to give us life. By faith we receive the promised Holy Spirit (Gal. 3:14).

Adoption as God’s children

In giving us new birth, the Holy Spirit brings us into the family of God by adoption (Rom. 8:15). We become children of God. Sometimes the Bible uses the phrase “sons of God” for both men and women. This is not sexist; it expresses the wonderful truth that each of us, male or female, enters by grace into the privilege of the sonship of Jesus. It is a wonderful thing to be a child of God (1 John 3:1–2). All who are adopted into God’s family may share the assurance that God has predestined us for this in his love (Eph. 1:5).

The forgiveness of our sins

Right from the first day of the Christian life we may be sure that all our sins have been forgiven; the forgiveness of sins is a core part of the gospel message and a foundational element in the start of the Christian life (e.g. Matt. 26:28; Luke 24:47; Acts 10:43; Eph. 1:7).

Justification

The righteousness of Christ is reckoned, or imputed, to us by grace, because our sin has been reckoned to Christ’s account on the cross. We are therefore “justified” or “declared righteous” in God’s sight because of the atoning death of Jesus as the propitiation for our sins (Rom. 3:21–26; 5:1–2).

Being incorporated “in Christ”

All these privileges—adoption, forgiveness, justification, the gift of the Spirit, new birth—are summed up in the New Testament by the important phrase “in Christ.” This does not mean that we are physically inside of Christ; it means we are in union with Christ. This is a deep union. It means that his death is accounted as our death, his resurrection as our (present spiritual and future bodily) resurrection, and his ascension as our certain future ascension (e.g. Rom. 6; 8:1; Gal. 3:26; Eph. 2:5–6; Col. 3:3).

The Goal of the Christian Life

To what end is the Christian life heading? What is its goal? The Bible gives at least four answers.

To be made like Jesus in the image of God

We begin with an individual answer: we are “predestined to be conformed to the image of (God’s) Son” (Rom. 8:29). The Son of God is the flawless image of God, what humankind was meant to be (e.g. Col. 1:15). God is making each believer like Jesus. This is his great project in you and in me, if we are in Christ.

To be a part of a worldwide completed church

Next, there is a corporate answer: we are destined to be a part of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9). The Christian life is lived individually, one by one; but it is not, in its essence, a matter for the individual alone. God is bringing to completion the worldwide church of Christ through all the ages; and we are a part of that.

To share in ruling the new creation

The promise to Abraham is that in his seed (Christ and all who are in Christ) he will inherit the world (Rom. 4:13). The “saints” (believers) “will judge” (that is, govern) “the world” (1 Cor. 6:2). Although our inheritance is “kept in heaven for” us (1 Pet. 1:4), it will be enjoyed, in resurrection bodies, in the new creation, the heavens and earth made new (Rev. 21:5; cf. Rom. 8:18–25; 2 Pet. 3:10–13).

To shine to the glory of God

Most deeply, our destiny is to shine to the glory of God (e.g. Eph. 1:6). The universe will unite in wonder at the astonishing and glorious grace of God in the completed church of Christ. This is the greatest goal of the Christian life.

The Heart of the Christian Life

The Christian life is a matter of the heart before it concerns our words and deeds. From the heart flow the springs of all of life (Prov. 4:23). The corruption of the heart is at the root of all our problems (e.g. Mark 7:6, 7, 14–23). The healing of the desires and affections of the heart is the most significant affair of the Christian life. What passes for the “Christian life” but by-passes the desires of the heart can never be more than rank hypocrisy.

The Means of the Christian Life

The Christian life begins, continues, and ends entirely by the free unmerited grace of God, yet God has chosen to use instruments through which to bring his grace into our lives. The old-fashioned expression for these is “the means of grace.” We shall consider four.

The Scriptures

Psalm 1 declares a blessing on the one whose “delight is in the law of the Lord” and who “meditates” on that law “day and night” (Ps. 1:2). The “law” of the Lord means his instruction, that is, the Scriptures. Jesus supremely is the man whose delight was in these Scriptures, during his life on earth (cf. Luke 2:41-51). These Scriptures, the Old Testament as read in the light of the New, and the New as prepared for by the Old, make us “wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ” (2 Tim. 3:15); that is, they lead us in the way that leads to our final rescue. The Christian life is nurtured by the Bible, both read privately and in the life of the home, and heard publicly, especially in the preaching of the Scriptures to the local church.

In the fellowship of a local church, we stir one another up to love and good works. We encourage one another to wait for Jesus’ return, to repent and believe day by day (cf. Heb. 10:24–25). Every Christian needs to belong to the fellowship of a local church.

It is a very great privilege of the Christian life that “through (Jesus Christ) we both (Jew and Gentile) have access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18). We pray to the Father; we can have this access because by his sin-bearing death the Lord Jesus has opened the way; the Holy Spirit works in our hearts and enables us to use this privilege in prayer (Rom. 8:26). And so, “in everything” – all the trials and joys of the Christian life – “by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving” we may bring our requests to God (Phil. 4:6).

The Sacraments

Jesus gave his church two visible sacraments, or signs of the gospel: baptism (Matt. 28:19) and the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion (e.g. Matt. 26:26–28; 1 Cor. 11:23–26). Baptism is the sign of entry into the Christian life and the Lord’s Supper signifies a continuing participation in the benefits of Christ’s death for us. By these outward signs we are reassured of the trustworthiness of the gospel of Christ.

The Outworking of the Christian Life

The spirit-enabled life.

Paul writes to the Philippian church: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12). God works in us, but he does not pull the strings as if we were puppets; he works in us by his Spirit so that we begin to “will” (to desire or want) and then to “work” in ways that please God. We “work out” (in the sense of “outworking” or putting into practice) what God first “works in” us.

In Romans 8:1–14 the apostle Paul sketches out for us, in broad strokes, the difference Christ makes in terms of practical living. Life without God, before salvation, was dominated by sin and “the flesh.” We lived not with godward aims but for ourselves. But in Christ a new controlling factor has taken over; we are no longer “in the flesh” but “in the Spirit”, “led by the Spirit” (v. 14) into righteousness. This is the “gift of the Spirit” mentioned above. With his enablement, we are now free to live unto God as the following paragraphs describe.

We consider five aspects of this each of which characterizes a healthy Christian life.

Faith and Obedience

Faith in Scripture is more than a cognitive assent or agreement that certain things are true. Authentic faith is inseparable from obedience. Paul writes of “the obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5; 16:26). James agrees with Paul and insists that a so-called “faith” that does not involve obedience to the law of God is not a true faith (James 2:14-26). The outworking of the life of faith will be shaped by the law of God, and especially the grand moral principles summarized in the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:1-17).

The Christian life takes seriously the commandment to love God and love neighbor (e.g. Matt. 22:37-39). This is at heart one commandment, not two distinct commandments: we love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength; and the outworking of genuine love for God will be a love for the neighbor whom God sets before us. This includes our close family and those who live in our locality, but also many others, in the workplace, in our nations, and in the world.

Godliness and Good Works

Closely allied to “the obedience of faith” is a life of practical godliness, of good works. The letter to Titus emphasizes this aspect of the Christian life. Titus himself is to be “a model of good works” while teaching that Jesus Christ our Savior “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:7, 14). This is not legalism, which is the attempt to gain a righteous standing before God through our good works; it is the out-working of the redemption that is given us entirely by grace.

Self-denial and Sacrifice

Another way of speaking of the outworking of the Christian life is that it involves denial of self. “If anyone would come after me,” says the Lord Jesus immediately after speaking of his sufferings and crucifixion, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Jesus speaks first of his own sacrifice; by his death he bears much fruit. But he speaks also to every man and woman who will follow him.

A beautiful outworking of the grace of God in the Christian is the grace of giving. This is entirely a willing and cheerful response to the grace God has given us in Jesus (2 Cor. 8–9).

The service of the gospel in Christian mission

When Jesus speaks of the denial of self, he goes on to promise that “whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:35). It is important to take seriously the Bible’s emphasis on the priority of the gospel of Christ. It is not enough for a Christian to read the Scriptures, to belong to a church, to pray, to live a life of godly piety, and to do good works. The highest form of love for neighbor will involve doing all he or she can to bring them the message of the gospel. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” says the risen Jesus. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” (Matt 28:18–19). Not every Christian will be a particularly gifted evangelist, but each Christian ought to be committed to evangelism and the work of Christian mission, both in their locality and throughout the world.

To live the Christian life, we do well to remember its gracious basis and its glorious goal. We rejoice daily in all that God has done for us in Jesus. In giving us his Son, God has, with the Son, given us all that we need for life and godliness (Rom. 8:32; 2 Pet. 1:3). We remember that, in its core, the Christian life is an affair of the heart. We gratefully make use of all the means God has given us to press home his grace to our hearts. And we gladly live out what God has first worked in us by his Spirit.

University of St Andrews

St andrews encyclopaedia of theology, christian experience: a catholic view.

Antonio López

Building on the philosophical groundwork regarding experience, this article examines the meaning of Christian experience from a Catholic perspective. Christian experience of God is here understood as a graced act through which a person becomes affectively aware of the meaning of the event of Christ and of the encounter with him. As participation in the divine life that Christ makes available through the Holy Spirit, Christian experience is also the gradual entering into the mystery of Christ and his mission to glorify the Father by means of the Spirit of both. After examining the biblical terminology for ‘experience’, the entry approaches the meaning of Christian experience by discussing some foundational experiences of God as portrayed in scripture and offers a synthetic account of what could be considered the basic structure of Christian experience. The entry deepens this account in three steps: it first presents the knowledge of God that is available to the transformed human sensorium, the so-called ‘spiritual senses’; it then examines the dynamic aspect of Christian experience through an account of ‘mystical life’ within which basic criteria for assessing ‘mystical experiences’ are offered; finally, it elucidates the knowledge of God available to the baptized within the school of charity one is called to live – the church, the family, and the religious community. The article concludes by describing the reasons for the positive appreciation of experience in the Roman Catholic Church that took place in the last century and presenting some of the most significant theological reflections on it.

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Experience Christian experience Mystical life Mystical experience Spiritual senses Person Church Holy Spirit Trinity Sacraments Encounter Mediation States of life

1 introduction, 2 biblical terminology, 3 foundational christian experiences, 3.1 abraham, 3.4 jesus’ archetypal experience of god, 3.6 john and paul, 3.7 christ and the holy spirit, 4 structure of christian experience, 5 experience and the spiritual senses, 6 experience and the following of christ: the mystical life, 6.1 preliminary clarifications on mystical life, 6.2 the unfolding of mystical life, 6.3 mystical experiences, 7 experience of god at the school of charity, 8 experience reconsidered, 9 conclusion, how to cite this article.

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Regardless of its complex and troubled philosophical and theological history, experience is an indispensable concept for understanding the Christian faith – especially if one understands Christianity as the unforeseeable and gratuitous encounter of the whole human person with Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the Father, who by the Holy Spirit became flesh in Mary, died on the cross, and rose to offer every human being the possibility of enjoying life with God both in history and in the eschaton. In this context, Christian experience may be seen as the graced act through which a person becomes affectively aware of the meaning of the event of Christ and of the encounter with him. If we take Christian life as the unconditional and total following of Christ and the participation in his mission to glorify the Father, Christian experience is the gradual entering into the mystery of Christ – that is, into his relationship with the Father, every human being, and the world, by means of the Holy Spirit. Both as an act and a life, Christian experience has a personal form. It regards the person as a whole (bodily senses, spirit, will, social existence) and engaged in the relationship with the tripersonal God, others, and the world. Whereas the affective dimension of experience emphasizes the emotional echo of the encounter with God (consolations, enthusiasm, and every kind of feeling), and the epistemological dimension focuses on the knowledge of God, oneself, and creation granted in the incarnate Son through the Spirit, the moral dimension emphasizes the dramatic engagement of human freedom with God, and the social dimension speaks of the person as a being-in-communion. All these dimensions are intrinsically connected as, within history, the human person exists in a personal relationship with the eternal. Thus, when the personal form of Christian experience is kept in mind, it is possible to correct – among others – the ambiguities that emerge from an isolated emotive contact with God, the gnostic tendencies to turn Christianity into a product of the human subject, the reduction of Christian life to a moral and immanent exercise, the technocratic transformation of experience into an applicable method to obtain various degrees of union with God, or the individualistic and static account of Christian existence.

The following reflection seeks to offer an account of the structure of Christian experience in its twofold connotation of act and life lived as the gradual introduction into the mystery of Christ’s existence. Three brief methodological remarks will clarify the scope of the entry. (1) Given our goal and the personal form of Christian experience, the reader should not expect a phenomenological narrative where different instantiations of lived Christianity are described – although some will be present. While valuable, this approach runs the risk of assuming that the empirical (which views the content of experience as objects and the role of the subject as passive reception) or the affective dimensions of Christian experience, not the personal one, are what grant it its meaning. The profound fragmentation and abstraction of contemporary Western thought requires a retrieval of a wholistic account of experience. (2) This theological study presupposes the philosophical elucidation of the meaning of experience (discussed in the SAET entry, Experience: A Philosophical View ) and ponders Christian experience from the point of view of the Catholic tradition while remaining aware that Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics share centuries of common tradition, and that differences between them have brought much suffering but also illuminating questions to each other. (3) This article builds on a scriptural view of the experience of God and offers a speculative elucidation that is mindful of the historical development of the concept of Christian experience. Yet, the reader should be aware that the entry does not seek, nor is it needed, to present every single author, theme, and religious or Christian tradition – let alone the whole of the Catholic tradition itself.

Although the Greek term for experience ( empeiria ) does not appear in Christian scripture, there are four other terms that cover some areas of the semantic range of experience: peira ( πεῖρα , πεῖραω , πειράζω ), geuomai ( γεύομαι ), dokimazo ( δοκιμάζω ), and pascho ( πάσχω ).

The first word, peira ( πεῖρα , πεῖραω ), means a trial, experience; to attempt, to test, to know by experience. The noun is used twice (Heb 11:29; 11:36) but its verbal form appears numerous times and regards all those moments in which God puts man to the test to prove his faithfulness ( Theological Dictionary of the New Testament [ TDNT ] 6: 23–36; Thayer 1995 : 4117 ). Unlike Satan, who tempts humans to make them believe that God is a jealous and ungenerous father (Gen 3:1–19) or that God is not righteous (Job 1:12–22; 10:17), God does not cause humans to do evil – humanity’s disordered desires do (Jas 1:13–14). Most frequently, in the New Testament, ‘desire’ ( epithemia , ἐπιθυμία ) regards an evil desire, i.e. a mysterious impulse of the will that inclines one to grasp a good in a disordered way. Yet, it is also the case that ‘desire’ has a positive meaning and indicates longing (Luke 22:15; 1 Thess 2:17), desire for food (Luke 15:16), for the divine mysteries (Matt 13:17), or for whatever is good (Phil 1:23) ( TDNT 3: 167–72; Thayer 1995 : 1937 ).

As happened with Abraham (Gen 22:1–19), God tests human beings so that they may recognize God for who he is, receive his blessing (Isa 60:16; Ps 107), and accept to live in obedience to him – thus avoiding his wrath (Lev 26:14–20). In this sense, experience also has a pedagogical character: through suffering (Heb 11:36) God educates all (Sir 4:17; Wis 3:5) into the truth of his ever greater being and the truth of the human being. ‘An inexperienced person knows few things, but he that has travelled acquires much cleverness’ (Sir 34:10–11). Through numerous trials, Israel learns that God is the Lord (Gen 12:1–4; 15:1–6), that he is other from human beings (Hos 11:9), and that human beings are themselves only in their relationship with God (Exod 3:1–12; 4:11). Yet, men and women also saw that they ‘went after worthless things and became worthless’ (Jer 2:4). Even more: they deny both their betrayal (Jer 2:23) and its outcome (Ps 14:1). In this sense, experience teaches that one fails the test: ‘It is hopeless, for I have loved strangers, and after them I will go’ (Jer 2:25). Nevertheless, experience also witnesses to the mysterious fact that one does not fully forget that it is always possible to turn to God (Jer 2:27). Since relations know certain reciprocity, God, by establishing a covenant with his chosen people, also exposes himself to the possibility that one may not recognize his power, as it happened at Meribah (Exod 17:1–7) – an act which like every disobedient deed did not pass unjudged (Deut 32:48–52) – or may even put him to the test (Deut 6:16; Matt 4:7).

The New Testament also speaks of this testing of faith (1 Pet 4:12), although now it is of the faith in Christ, and the testing rests on the certainty of God’s proven and unmerited faithfulness (1 Cor 10:13). More precisely, the Christian’s sufferings and trials are a participation in those of Christ, which – since Christ is the incarnate Son of the Father – are infinitely deeper than those of human beings. Christ was tempted at the beginning of his mission (Luke 4:1–13), throughout his life (Matt 16:23; John 8:6), and at Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–42; Heb 5:7–9) so that he may attest to his unconditional obedience, that is, his perfect love for the Father and for human beings. Christ, who taught us to pray not to be led into temptation (Matt 6:13), was tested in every respect, and thus is able to sympathize with all (Heb 4:15), help everyone (Heb 2:18), and intercede for all (Rom 8:34; Heb 7:25).

Geuomai ( γεύομαι ) means to ‘cause to taste’ (Matt 27:34) and ‘to feel, to make trial of, to experience’ ( TDNT 1: 675–677; Thayer 1995 : 1089 ). The reality tasted is ‘the heavenly gift’, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer (Heb 6:4). Indeed, the Christian, as follower of Christ, receives his Holy Spirit (John 20:22; Acts 2:1–13) who communicates Christ’s liberation from evil (Rom 8), grants knowledge of God’s wisdom (1 Cor 2:10–16), enables filial yearning (Rom 8:14–17), and sustains hope of future glory (Rom 8:18–27). The Christian also tastes the ‘goodness of the word of God’ (Heb 6:5), the Lord’s goodness (1 Pet 2:3), and, more generally, the things of God (John 1:39; 13:23). Besides these, one also experiences the human reality of death, understood either as a suffering to embrace (1 Pet 4:13; Heb 2:9) or as the reality from which Christ will free the obedient and faithful servant (Matt 16:28; John 8:52). Christ thus moves the faithful towards the future realities of which one has already a foretaste (Mark 10:30; Heb 9:28).

Dokimazo ( δοκιμάζω ) means to test, to examine ( TDNT 2: 255–260; Thayer 1995 : 1381 ). From this point of view, experience is to judge and to submit to the test. God tests and judges the human heart to see whether he can entrust to someone his gospel (1 Thess 2:4). The Christian therefore lives in the expectation of the final judgment and eternal dwelling with God (1 Cor 9:27). To reach this destiny, one must prove that one can keep faith under difficult circumstances until the final day of judgment (Rom 5:3–5; 2 Cor 8:2; Jas 1:2; 1 Pet 1:6–7). The outcome of the judgment will depend on whether the Christian remained faithful, endured the trial, and did not break the unity of the community (1 Cor 11:19). Furthermore, Christians are to test themselves to see whether they are faithful (2 Cor 13:5). They must endeavour to attest that, with God’s grace, they have not adopted the world’s mentality (Rom 12:2). They thus will present themselves to God as those who have been ‘approved’ by him (2 Tim 2:15) and who are ‘approved in Christ’ (Rom 16:10). Christians are ‘children of light’, live under God’s loving eye, and are ‘to try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord’ (Eph 5:8–10).

The scriptural term pascho ( πάσχω ) means to be affected, to feel, to have a sensible experience, to suffer ( TDNT 5: 904–939; Thayer 1995 : 3958 ). It thus specifies further the foregoing connotations of trying and testing. Most of the times it refers to the sufferings of Christ and to those of the Christian for his sake. When it regards Christ’s, pascho , according to the Synoptic Gospels, could name either his death (Luke 22:15; also 1 Pet 2:21) or the events that preceded it (Mark 8:31; also 1 Pet 4:1). The uniqueness of his sufferings is signalled by not using the verb ‘to suffer’ ( pathein , παθεῖν ) to name the sufferings of the prophets (Matt 5:12) or the disciples (Mark 8:34). Christians, who can have a positive experience of suffering (‘Did you experience so many things in vain? – if it really is in vain’, Gal 3:4), are called to participate in Christ’s sufferings (Acts 9:16). In fact, the Apostle Paul witnesses to the authenticity of his calling by bearing Christ’s sufferings (2 Cor 11:23). With this term, we see that Christian experience, as the calling to grow in a full participation in Christ’s life, brings about the growth of the person through suffering.

According to Christian scripture, therefore, the Christian experience of God regards the dramatic playing out of the relationship between God, who gratuitously reveals, speaks, and gives himself, and the human person from whom he seeks a gratuitous and total response. Christian experience is the trying/tempting, testing/judging, suffering/learning, and tasting of divine realities and life.

This section examines the experience of God of those people who remain the source and type of every Christian experience – both because they enable the actual occurring of Christianity and because they represent indispensable dimensions of each Christian experience.

Abraham was asked to believe that God could extend to him, at his old age and married to a barren elderly wife, part of his own overabundant fruitfulness and make him ‘father of all who believe’ (Rom 4:11) and ‘father of many nations’ (Gen 17:5; Rom 4:17). In hope and against hope (Rom 4:18), Abraham believed in God’s truth and almighty faithfulness to his promise. When he was asked to sacrifice his ‘only son’ (Gen 22:2), Abraham was called to offer the gift of fatherhood in return so that God may give it back overabundantly once it was fully offered (Gen 22:1–18; Wénin 1999 ). Abraham is asked to recognize that God is the God ‘not of the dead but of the living’ (Matt 22:32) by accepting and offering the gift of his own fruitfulness. His experience of God lays in learning that it is God, not him, who is the generous giver of life and its ultimate meaning. Since God, as giver of life, is most properly called ‘father’ (John 5:26), we could describe Abraham’s experience of God as the request to believe in God’s faithful and overabundant fatherhood through the test of sacrificing Isaac. This trial, to which the obedient departure from his own land readied him, is not arbitrary. God created human beings to be like him, and thus they needed to learn that human fruitfulness, the communication of life and meaning, is a sharing in God’s endless gratuity and its goal in the service of his glory. In this reading, through the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham was granted to recognize God’s paternal justice, to be a childlike recipient of God’s life, and to become the father in faith of many.

Three aspects of Moses’ experience of God are key for our reflection. First, God reveals himself to Moses on Mount Horeb and permits Moses to learn his name (Exod 3:14) so that he may be invoked. God thus reveals that the human being is called to be a person – someone who can be in relationship with God. The Lord talks to Moses, whom he knows ‘by name’ (Exod 33:17), ‘as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exod 33:11). The unique friendship granted to Moses, the mediator of the Law , is also a prophecy of what Christ will overfulfill and extend to all (John 15:15). Friendship is a fundamental form of the experience of God. Second, God’s predilection allows Moses to express the desire that most deeply constitutes the human being – ‘I beg you, show me your glory’ (Exod 33:18) – and resist the unsurmountable temptation to grasp at the divine and encapsulate it in a manageable image (Exod 32). The experience of God disappears when the transcendence proper to his proximity is not recognized, that is, when one does not acknowledge that God remains greater than what one experiences. Third, Moses also shows that the sacrifice proper to the experience of God is embracing the unbearable tension between a total love for God and a total love for his sinful people (Exod 32:32). Moses can only rest on his friendship with God and offer himself, although his offering remains ultimately ineffective. Moses’ sacrifice – which becomes clearer in the Suffering Servant (Isa 53:12) – is a type of Christ in whom alone there is the perfect coincidence of an immaculate victim (Eph 1:4) and a holy priest that allows his death to reconcile every human being with God and give to everyone a heart of flesh (Ezek 32:36–37). Resting in Christ, everyone can experience that suffering and self-offering to a certain degree (Rom 9:3).

Mary’s experience of God – her tasting of God’s life and trial of faith – was unique. She was asked to accept God’s unforeseeable and unfathomable decision for the Son of the Father to take flesh in her while she remained a virgin (Luke 1:34–37). Recognizing herself as the servant of the Lord, she, the ‘most favoured one’ ( keharitomene ; Luke 1:28; Potterie 1987a ; 1987b ), conceived through faith (Luke 1:38) and became the mother of the beloved Son of the Father (Matt 3:17). Indeed, ‘all generations will call [her] blessed’ (Luke 1:48). From then on, Mary’s experience of God passed through the obedience to that son, whom she followed in faith and learned to recognize ever more deeply as the Son of the Father (Luke 2:49–50). Her union with Christ in faith and love faced an unprecedented test on Golgotha. Actively standing at the foot of the cross (John 19:25), Mary shares through faith in Christ’s kenosis (self-emptying; Phil 2:8). ‘This’, writes John Paul II, ‘is perhaps the deepest “kenosis” of faith in human history’ ( 1987 : 79, section 18 ). At the painful death of Jesus on Calvary, Mary not only saw that the prophet Simeon’s prophecy had become true (Luke 2:34–35), but she was also asked to believe that her son’s ignominious crucifixion was not a denial of the angel’s promise (Luke 1:32–34) but rather an affirmation of the goodness of the Father. In the darkness of faith, she was called to accept love’s greatest sacrifice: to let her son die the death the Father allotted him (Rom 8:32) and to hope against hope that, in a way known to the Father alone, the Father will fulfil his promise.

If Abraham’s sacrifice was to recognize God as the origin and destiny of all the living, Mary’s was to let be and not grasp. She was asked to sacrifice her own motherhood. God bestowed her graced acceptance with a gift incommensurably greater than Abraham’s. Letting God’s will be done, Mary’s virginal motherhood was extended, through the Spirit of Christ, to all those who after his resurrection will be one with Christ (John 19:27). Mary’s incomparable sacrifice and unmerited fruit were not random. Mary’s experience of faith teaches that God’s gift of himself is the communication of his Son in the Spirit of both. For the Father to give his Son is to allow him to be born in a creature. Mary’s virginal motherhood, accepted in faith, discloses the greatness that God had in mind when he created the human being (Gen 1:27; 2:7–25; Ps 8:4): she gave birth to the one who is eternally born from the Father, and allowed her virginal motherhood to be opened up to include all the Christians who, through baptism , are one with her only child (John 17:22).

In Mary, we also see that, in a mysterious way, the Christian’s life of faith, hope, and charity (that is, the experience of God) is a way of allowing the Son to be born through and in oneself and of bearing fruit for the glory of the Father (Gal 4:19; Eph 4:13; Rahner 1961 ). Mary’s test of faith further reveals what may be called the nuptial dimension of the experience of God, that is, the total and free gift of oneself to God in response to his preceding, unmerited, and ever-greater gift of himself. According to the letter to the Ephesians, Christ’s redemption is a nuptial gift (Eph 5:25–27) that fulfils Isaiah’s prophecy (‘[f]or your Maker is your husband’, Isa 54:5). Representing the church standing at the foot of the cross, Mary was asked to give herself completely in response to Christ’s bottomless and definitive gift of himself to her (John 19:25). The obedience of faith as a free, total, and irrevocable gift of oneself in response to God’s gift of himself, is a nuptial act.

Jesus’ archetypal experience of God clarifies and grounds all others because he is both ‘the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being’ (Heb 1:3) and, as Mary’s son (Matt 13:55), he is the perfect man who alone can make those who follow after him become more human ( Denzinger 2012 : DH 4341). Jesus is ‘the pioneer and perfector of our faith’ (Heb 12:2). He is the only one who has seen the Father (John 1:18; 6:46; 1 John 4:12), who speaks what the Father commanded him (John 12:49), and who does what he sees the Father doing (John 5:19). Christ’s self-awareness is that of being not another prophet but the One sent by the Father (John 6:29) who comes from the Father (John 3:13; 6:38) and returns to him (John 16:28; 20:17). He was sent to give his life ‘as a ransom for all’ (1 Tim 2:6), ‘to redeem us from all iniquity’ (Titus 2:14) so that each (Gal 2:20), with purified hearts (Matt 5:8), may see the Father (John 14:9) in him (John 10:30) and receive the Spirit he sends from the Father (John 15:26) to bring human beings to the fullness of truth (John 16:13). Jesus, in his incomparable humility and suffering (a human being in the person of the Logos), embraces the Father’s command to glorify him by dying on the Cross for the world and to bear fruit that lasts eternally.

Christ’s experience of God – his relationship with the Father in the Spirit (Luke 4:1) – was lived humanly. Christ’s full humanity is seen first in that he expressed through human feelings the divine perception of people’s response to his revelation of the Father’s merciful love (compassion: Matt 18:22, Luke 15:20; anger and grief: Mark 3:5; amazement: Matt 8:10; indignation: Mark 1:41–42; sorrow: Matt 26:38, John 11:33; tears: Luke 19:41, John 11:35; joy: John 15:11; etc.). Second, Christ’s knowledge of his own divinity is neither simply an anticipated beatific vision (as if he were not a historical human being) nor just a humane growth (as if he acquired his divinity at some point in his life). It is a mysterious personal knowledge in which he lets the Father disclose how his mission will bear fruit (Mark 14:33–36). Finally, his utter obedience, learnt through suffering (Heb 5:8), represents the fullness of human freedom which is to say ‘yes’ to the Father and to his love for mankind (2 Cor 1:20; Gal 5:1; Maximus the Confessor 1996 ).

The paschal mystery is the apex of the revelation of the Father’s love in history. Throughout his life, Christ lived in utter obedience and affirmed the absolute centrality of the Father – thus embodying in history his being the eternal beloved Son of the Father. At the cross, Christ embraced the unique sacrifice of himself (Heb 7:27; Rom 6:10) in which he, in complete darkness (Matt 27:46), entrusted himself to the hands of the Father (Luke 23:46). Christ’s sacrifice of himself was not random: both his internal (Mark 14:36) and external passion (John 18–19) were to satisfy the Father’s love, his eternal fatherhood. Christ’s sacrifice was the greatest not simply because he was the ‘innocent Lamb’ (1 Pet 1:19) but also because he was asked to remain a son – to not deny the Father at the moment when he appears to have been forsaken (Matt 27:46). As God incarnate, he was asked to live his sonship , to be for the Father, by letting his own sacrificial death be used by the Father to fulfil the promise of humanity’s salvation in a way that he, as man, was not given to know. In an unparalleled way, Christ let the Father’s will be done, and offered his own body so that death could be overturned.

Christ’s experience of God, his living his own sonship to the end, proves that the ongoing sacrifice of obedience to which every human being is called is to enter into childhood. Rather than growing out of it, human maturity is to grow childlike (Matt 18:3). What saves the world from evil and annuls death (1 Cor 15:55) is childlikeness, and not spiritual craftiness or ingenuity. Divine love shows its omnipotence in the defenceless, un-self-regarding filiality of the incarnate Son. Through the test of his own sonship and the affirmation of the Father’s goodness, Christ shows that filiality is the primordial constitutive relation from which all the other human ones (marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, friendship) grow as a participation in the trinitarian relations. Since he ascends to the Father with his own glorified body (Acts 1:9; Heb 5:5), his glorified body remains as the permanent place where one can see, hear, and touch him. Jesus communicates an experience of God that is neither static nor closed off in itself. Rather, it is dynamic – it is a coming from and going to the Father – and open to everyone.

Peter’s experience of Christ is foundational because it shows us that to grow in faith (John 1:41; Matt 8:26; John 20:8) is to learn not to think in the world’s terms but to embrace Christ’s obedience to the Father (Matt 16:23; John 13:9–11) until the very end (John 21:18) and to love like him (John 15:12). Peter’s experience is foundational in five respects: (1) it witnesses to the difference of every Christian experience from a religious experience while preserving what is authentic in every human search for God: When Christ, acting like a slave, knelt before Peter to wash Peter’s feet, Peter overcame the scandal that the incarnation elicits in every authentic religious soul that is aware of the infinite distance between itself and God (John 13:5–10) and learnt not determine a priori what is feasible in one’s relationship with God . (2) Peter let Christ’s love elicit true compunction for his own betrayal (Luke 22:61–62). (3) He learned that to love means first and foremost to accept to be loved (John 21:15–17). (4) He witnessed Christ’s resurrection (Acts 2:32) and thus was tasked with the mission to announce the kerygma (proclamation of the gospel ) to those who did not see Christ (1 Pet 1:18). (5) Finally, since he represents the unity of those who belong to Christ, he is asked to confirm all in the true faith (Matt 16:15–20; Luke 22:32; John 21:15–17).

Perhaps the best expression of Paul’s experience of Christ is 2 Cor 5:14–15:

the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

Realizing this love of Christ, Paul turns away from his old self and gradually become himself in Christ (Gal 2:20). This conversion is a gift of the Spirit who is poured in the heart (Rom 5:5) and which one needs to make one’s own through participating in Christ’s sufferings. For Paul, the certainty of this hope-filled faith in Christ’s love – which remains the measure of all the charisms one may receive (1 Cor 13) – is grasped not statically, but, so to say, in flight (Phil 3: 1–16). This race towards Christ is not a private affair. Paul is called to witness to the resurrection of Christ that comes to him directly (Acts 22:6; Gal 1:1) and to preach to the Gentiles a teaching recognized as true by Peter (Gal 2:9; 2 Pet 3:15–16). In this way, and similarly to John (John 13:23; 20:4), Paul represents the charismatic dimension of the church’s experience of God, according to which the Holy Spirit bestows particular gifts (1 Cor 12) and fruits (Gal 5:22–23) for the sake of the growth of the whole body (1 Cor 12; Eph 4:1–16) and under the fatherly guidance of one who was asked to represent Christ as the pastor of his flock.

Along with the interplay of charismatic and hierarchical dimensions of Christian experience, Paul and John also reveal a key element for every Christian experience: the continuity of Christ’s presence in history in the church, which is his mystical body. Paul tasted this sacramental unity between Christ and his followers (Luke 10:16) first-hand at the moment of his conversion (Acts 9:3–6). John spoke of it eloquently in his first epistle (1 John 1:1–4) where he accounts for Christian experience as a participation in the ecclesial fellowship that is a participation in the trinitarian communion. Analogically to God’s triune love, the ecclesial communion is one movement of love characterized by a reciprocal immanence – God in the believer (1 John 2:23) and the believer in God (1 John 2:6) – in which God remains greater (1 John 3:20) and hence cannot be encompassed by the believer’s ecclesial and personal experience of triune charity. The ecclesial experience of God, similarly to Christ’s, is a life that is on the way to the Father. Only with Christ would one be able to know the Father and become in a definitive way what by grace Christians are given to be: his children (1 John 3:2).

To grasp the foregoing scriptural exploration adequately, it is key to realize three aspects of the relationship between Christ and the Holy Spirit. First, the eternal Son became flesh and died on the cross so that he could bestow the Holy Spirit to us (John 19:30) and thus communicate his love to all. Christ’s mission is inseparable from the Holy Spirit. Christ breathed the Spirit ‘in’ the Apostles (John 20:22), so that those who receive the Spirit may see and freely assent to the Father’s love revealed through the incarnate Son. Only God knows God, and only when the Spirit of love is ‘poured into our hearts’ (Rom 5:5) can one realize the gifts bestowed by God (1 Cor 2:11–12). Christ’s archetypal experience of the Father’s love in the Spirit is extended to humanity through his Spirit.

Second, the mission of the Holy Spirit is inseparable from Christ’s. With this, we do not simply mean the traditional understanding that the Trinity’s economic action is one and carried out by the three persons. Although in ways that we cannot fully grasp, just as what everything Christ does is carried out in the Holy Spirit, so what the Holy Spirit does in the economy is incarnational – that is, it is at the service of the full humanization of the Son of the Father made flesh. The Spirit co-achieves the incarnation of the eternal Son, works with him throughout his historical existence, co-works with him the glorification of Christ’s flesh, and enables human beings to receive and respond to God’s glory. The Holy Spirit, in a way known to the Father of the Son, grants to all humanity – even beyond the visible boundaries of the church – the possibility of participating in the paschal mystery. The Holy Spirit who, as Augustine said, is the one in whom the Father and the Son are united ( The Trinity , 6.5.7; 2015 : 210–211 ), acts in history according to what he is eternally. As the eternal bond of love of the Father and the Son, the Spirit unites mankind to the Father through the Son. The tremendous significance of Pentecost consists in that it enables the definitive discovery of ‘the true light, which enlightens everyone coming into the world’ (John 1:9). The Holy Spirit, as Irenaeus calls him, is ‘communion with Christ’ ( Against the Heresies 3.24.1; 2015 : 458 ).

Finally, the relationship between pneumatology and Christology challenges our modern understanding of time as history (indefinite and immanent progress) in two respects. On the one hand, ensuring the enfleshing of the Father’s beloved Son, the Holy Spirit makes Christ present in every moment of history (Matt 18:20; John 17:22–26; Acts 9:4). Through the Spirit, the ‘past’ event of Christ takes place in every ‘present’ of history. On the other hand, Christ, who is ‘the beginning ( arché ) and the end ( telos )’ (Rev 22:13) and the one for whom and in whom everything has been created (Col 1:16; John 1:3), is the centre of history. As such, through the Spirit of Father and Son, all the time preceding Christ moves towards him (1 Cor 10:4; 1 Pet 1:10–12) and all the time following him flows into him. Just as the grace our forefathers enjoyed is a grace of Christ, so the forgiveness that every Christian experiences is a communication of Christ’s love. From this second point of view – as the Church’s liturgy and the Christian’s spiritual life witness – time is the introduction into the event of Christ in whom the Father has given and said all (Rom 8:32). The eschaton in this regard is the definitive indwelling in the love that has been given already and that draws everything into him so that nothing may be lost.

The semantic range of the scriptural vocabulary for the concept of experience and the foundational experiences examined above allow us now to express more formally the distinctive elements of Christian experience.

Christian experience is concerned with the affective and lived, graced awareness of the meaning that the unforeseeable and unmerited encounter with Christ has for the knowledge of oneself, of God, the world, and others. One discovers oneself as a sinner, the undeserved object of God’s merciful affirmation, and a member of Christ’s sacramental communion called to participate in his mission. The Christian is freed to recognize God for who he is and surrender with all of oneself to God in the ‘yes’ to humankind that is Christ’s salvific deed. Since it is God who gives himself, Christian experience cannot encompass its object and thus it can always deepen. Further, Christian experience always begins with God’s initiative and thus lies beyond the human disposal and cannot be repeated at will. It is not an experiment; it can only be received. The priority of the receptive dimension is not to be taken as mere passivity. The offering of grace enables – and requires – the ongoing engagement of the whole human person with the event of Christ. Receptivity is thus an ‘active passivity’ and, in fact, the greatest sacrifice of which a person can be asked.

Because the form of Christian experience is personal and person is always comprised of being within a communion, Christian experience possesses a mediated character. Even a so-called ‘direct’ contact with God is given through the church and leads to Christ’s paschal mystery. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit is always and only the Spirit of the Father of the Son, and as such brings humankind to the Father through the Son. Rather than an obstacle, the mediated character of Christian experience is precisely what enables the person to avoid reducing the ever greaterness of God’s love and light to what one can understand, feel, or do with it. The insurmountable ecclesial and sacramental mediation enables the Christian to see, feel, and act in God in ever deeper ways. Moreover, the mediated character secures the full involvement of the human person: reason, freedom, affection, and time. Rather than considering the person and the ecclesial community dialectically, it is the ecclesial mediation which affirms and calls for the personal dimension of Christian experience. The singularity of the person is preserved in a hierarchical community, the role of whose head is to affirm each one and uphold the unity of all. Within this communion, personal singularity is never abstract. As shown through the foundational experiences in scripture ( section 3 ), the experience of God always takes the form of the living relations of sonship , fatherhood, motherhood, nuptiality, and friendship. The Christian experience is the living out of adoptive sonship of the Father in the Spirit of Christ; the growing into the friendship with Christ; and the living out the fruitfulness of God’s love through a specific state of life. We will return to this personal concreteness of Christian experience in section 7 .

Christian experience is dynamic, not static. The human person is constantly put to the test to see whether the divine life, which one has gratuitously been given to taste, truly gives form to one’s existence. It thus entails the sacrifice of obediently dying to oneself to enter into life’s real centre, the God of Jesus Christ, in order to enjoy, as child of God, the hundredfold of Christ’s life and God’s gratuitous fruitfulness. Christian experience is thus a dynamic state: it remains in time and introduces the believer into a certainty that is not the immediate possession of salvation but the hope-filled path towards the Father that, through the Spirit, guides the believer in the way that Christ is towards the definitive possession of salvation. The ‘already but not yet’ character of Christian experience corrects both the interpretation of the Christ event as a fulfilled eschatology and of the Christian life as an ongoing moral effort whose fruit is to achieve one’s salvation. Christian experience neither absorbs the future fulfilment in an isolated present nor empties the present of its rootedness in the past that enabled it. Rather, Christian experience is the entering into the event of Christ which enables one to taste the unity of eternity and time without collapsing one into the other.

Christian experience, as the following of Christ, is the witness to the unity of the singularity and universality proper to him. The certainty about this truth is disclosed by Christ himself who, through the Spirit, enables the Christian to discover from the inside that he indeed is the one sent by the Father. Christ shows that he is the one who unforeseeably, gratuitously, and overabundantly corresponds to our truest desires to see God’s glory and dwell in it eternally. Although one yearns to see and be with God, human desires neither measure nor predetermine Christ’s revelation and universally salvific mission. Thus, whoever encounters Christ experiences that his divine truth is both totally for oneself, as it endows one with a mission that no one else can carry out, and, at the same time, it is true for everyone. The Christian’s expropriation therefore moves in two directions: towards the world and towards Christ, the world’s very centre, who, in the Spirit, brings us to the Father. Christian experience participates in Christ’s constitutive twofold being-for the Father and the world and, in Christ, learns to bear the suffering entailed in the keeping together a total love for God and for sinful mankind.

In light of the preceding scriptural elucidation and the structure of Christian experience, it is now possible to deepen this understanding by addressing three intrinsically related aspects of Christian experience: the role that the senses play in it; the unfolding of the dynamic character of Christian experience (mystical life) as a following of Christ; and the experience of God in the community of love where Christians are called to live their vocation.

Christian experience, as the believer’s response to the encounter with the incarnate Son of the Father in the Spirit, entails a sensorium able to perceive the person of Christ whose flesh radiates his glory. Eyes, ears, hands, mouth, and nose are needed to perceive the spiritual and material form of Christ. Certainly, corporeal senses can only discern the material form and need healing, that is, the restoration of the possibility to carry out their function of allowing the person to relate to the world, others, and God in a wholesome way. In this sense, Christ’s miraculous healings – such as those of the man born blind (John 9:1–12), the deaf and mute (Mark 7:31–37), and the lepers (Luke 17:11–19) – witness to the constitutive relational nature of sense knowledge, the place of the senses in the person’s path to recognize and receive the sent one by the Father, and the physical senses’ intrinsic ordering to the way in which God reveals himself to humankind. The life of faith, hope, and charity granted by the Spirit of Christ gradually allows a spiritual transformation of the bodily senses that enables one to see Christ’s glory (John 1:14; Heb 1:3), hear his loving word (Matt 13:16–17), touch (Mark 5:28; John 13:23) and taste his life-giving body (John 6; Matt 26:26), and smell the fragrance of his offering (Eph 5:2). This suprasensory perception, simultaneous with the sensible, is the beginning of what the blessed will be able to experience superabundantly in heaven with their risen, spiritual bodies (1 Cor 15:44).

Several recent authors have brought back to the Church’s attention the significance that the complex term ‘spiritual senses’ has for an adequate understanding of Christian experience. The works of Augustin-François Poulain on prayer (1922; see 1950 : 88–113 ), Karl Rahner on Origen and Bonaventure ( 1932 ; 1933 ), Jean Daniélou on Gregory of Nyssa ( 1944 ), Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics (1961; see 1982 : 365–425 ), Mariette Canévet’s essay on the spiritual senses ( 1990 ), the volume on the spiritual senses edited by Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley ( 2012 ), and Coakley’s lecture on Nyssa ( 2022 ), among others, help us to grapple with the meaning of the spiritual senses, that graced sensorial activity required by Christ’s revelation. For our purposes, it suffices to indicate some of the key contributions of the tradition of the Christian Church while being mindful that there is no univocal account of the spiritual senses and that not every author deals with the same elements and questions.

Origen, interpreting Heb 4:5 (‘those who have their senses trained’, Septuagint [LXX]) and an idiosyncratic translation of Prov 2:5(‘you shall find a divine sense’, LXX; Against Celsum 7.34; 1985 : 624–625 ), was the first to propose an articulated theory of the spiritual senses ( Against Celsum 1.48; 1985 : 416–417 ). Origen claims that, through grace, the Christian receives a sensory capacity for the divine that enables the experience of God. As Mark McInroy ( 2012 : 20–35 ) explains, Origen’s employment of a vast range of sensory terms (eyes of the mind, spiritual ears, bodiless voice, etc.) has both a metaphorical and an analogical sense. The spiritual sensorium, in other terms, is not simply a helpful but superfluous image to describe the merely spiritual relationship a human being has with God. Rather, following Rahner to a certain extent, McInroy affirms that the analogical meaning refers to the Christian’s perception of the presence of the divine. Thus, the paradoxical term ‘spiritual sense’ does not suggest that the senses grant a direct perception of God’s essence or that they are reducible to the intellectual realm. They are faith’s transformation of the senses that remain and accompany the act of faith. Balthasar explains further that, for Origen, spiritual hearing is a listening attitude for the soundless inner dialogue of the soul with God that happens in prayer; spiritual seeing is a looking that leads to God and not the sinful searching for oneself in whatever is seen; spiritual touching, whose highest form is the kiss of the soul, is the sacramental salutary contact with Christ (as the one taking place in baptism and the Eucharist); spiritual smell is the perception of God’s fragrance bestowed on the church when Christ’s body was pierced on the cross; and spiritual taste is the savouring of Christ’s presence that obedience grants. Although the ambiguities of Alexandrian dogmatics remain, it is still the case that for Origen the spiritual senses are the grace-given perception of God and of the things of God. Grace, purifying the senses from their sinful use, restores them to their truth, and allows the Christian to perceive matter according to its intrinsic capacity to point to the realm of the divine ( Origen of Alexandria 2001 : 218–267 ).

Gregory of Nyssa’s complex and subtle account of the spiritual senses unfolds within his larger understanding of the progress of the Christian’s path to the eschatological union with God in Christ by the Holy Spirit. This spiritual path is examined more carefully in the following section. For now, it suffices to say that, taking his whole written work into account, it is possible to see that Christian life proceeds in three stages, as Coakley suggests ( 2012 ; 2022 ). Christians first need to sever their sympathies with evil, that is, with the worldly passions, and gain freedom from them ( apatheia ). They are to learn to relinquish the passions of the flesh (Num 11:5), and to live with faith. Second, their progression in faith helps them to contemplate the divine beauty and order in the world, and to gain the experience through which they learn that the meaning of the world is to know and to live for God. They thus reach the contemplation of the invisible things. Differently from Origen, for Nyssa, this gnosis of the intelligible world (things pertaining to God) is the second stage in the knowledge of God, not the apex of the union with him. The third and final step comes when both the sensible and the comprehensible are left behind to embrace in pure faith him who remains beyond our grasp ( 1978 ). God responds to faith’s thrust by granting a ‘feeling of his presence’ ( Gregory of Nyssa 1858 : 1001B ; 1987 : 203 ). The presence of God in the soul, confirming the created truth of human finitude as infinite progress ( epektasis ), spurs on the Christian to always keep looking for him who dwells in the baptized. The Christian is, in a certain sense, to overcome this feeling of presence and enter into God. Thus, for Nyssa, Christian life is, on the one hand, an experience of the presence of the Logos in the soul ( enstasis ) obtained through the spiritual senses and, on the other hand, it is the tension for the love of the Word as it is in itself ( ectasis ) and as it gives itself in Christ ( Daniélou 1944 : 273 ). This framework shows that the purification of the corporeal senses so that they become ‘spiritual’ is a path of progressive union with Christ. Yet, it bears emphasizing that the growth in virtue, sensual purification, and deeper understanding of doctrinal truths does not entail an elimination of the physical. Rather, the union with Christ grants a greater humanization of the Christian which depends on the response to the preceding grace granted by God. To the difficult question of the relationship between the bodily and the spiritual sensorium, it seems that Nyssa ends up proposing one that is both of discontinuity – since it requires grace – and continuity – since it is an innovation and confirmation of the entirety of human life ( Coakley 2022 : 43–48 ).

Augustine also develops an account of the experience of God that includes the spiritual senses, understood as the transformation by grace of the bodily senses and as part of the Christian’s path towards the eschatological beatific vision (see Confessions , 10; 2018 : 237–283 , and Sermon 169 ; 1993 : 222–237 ). Further, as Jean Mouroux rightly argues ( 1954 : 284–288 ), Augustine develops in this context the important doctrine of the delight ( delectatio ) elicited and guided by God that the Christian experiences in the knowledge of God ( Homilies on the Gospel of John , 26; 2009 : 449–465 ). Guided by the Spirit, this non-sinful delight expresses affectively the loving possession of the good alone in which the human spirit finds its proper rest.

Along with the indispensable affective resonance of Christian experience, a central and commonly recognized element of the spiritual sense is the awareness that the purification of the senses takes place through the sacraments. Gavrilyuk, for example, speaking of the spiritual senses in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, observes that it is ‘in the sacrament of baptism [that] a gift of vision ( ἐπωψία ), or a new capacity to see ( ἰδεῖν ) the divine things, is granted to the initiated [...][for Dionysius] one of the purposes of baptism is “to dispose our souls to hear the sacred words as receptively as possible”’ ( Gavrilyuk and Coakley 2012 : 92 ).

Among the medieval authors, Bonaventure offers a profound and beautiful christocentric account of the spiritual senses ( Rahner 1932 ; Balthasar 1984 : 315–326 ; LaNave 2012 : 159–173 ). For him, too, the spiritual senses are the fruit of the sanctifying grace in the believer but, according to Balthasar,

their dwelling place [...] is not the lowest stage, the world of mere faith, nor the highest, the ecstasy, but the wide middle area of sapiential contemplation, which has as its object the total form of revelation that is the threefold Logos. ( Balthasar 1984 : 325, 315–326 )

More clearly than in the work of other authors, for Bonaventure the spiritual senses are not so much human potencies that can be actualized but the acts of those sensorial faculties. This passage from the Itinerarium synthesizes well Bonaventure’s thought:

When the soul believes in Christ as the uncreated Word and Resplendence of the Father, she recovers the spiritual senses of hearing and sight: hearing in order to listen to the teachings of Christ; and sight in order to behold the splendor of His Light. When, through hope, the soul longs to breath in the inspired Word, by this aspiration and affection it recovers spiritual olfaction. When, through charity, she embraces the Incarnate Word, by receiving delight from Him and passing into Him in ecstatic love, she recovers taste and touch. Once it has regained the use of the spiritual senses, when the soul sees, hears, smells, tastes, and embraces the Spouse, the soul can sing with the bride the Song of Songs. ( Itinerarium 4.3; Bonaventure 1960 : 37 )

Gregory LaNave aptly recalls that for Bonaventure, the life of St Francis of Assisi is a wonderful example of an experience of God in which the spiritual senses are fully developed ( LaNave 2012 : 169–171 ).

In modern times, within Protestantism, the contribution of two eighteenth-century authors cannot pass unmentioned. Spiritual sensation is a central category for the Puritan American theologian Jonathan Edwards and also for founder of Methodism , John Wesley. The latter defines the doctrines of faith, new birth, and witness in the Spirit by using that category and develops it as an elenchos , ‘the supernatural evidence of things unseen’ (Heb 11:1; Mealey 2012 : 241–256 ). In the Catholic field, Balthasar’s original theological aesthetics deepens the trinitarian and christocentric approach to the spiritual senses and accounts for them as part of faith’s subjective evidence which is correlative to the objective form of Christ’s revelation ( 1982 : 365–425 ). Among the many wonderful insights of Balthasar’s reflection, two merit mention here. The first regards the transition from the material to the spiritual senses:

Our senses, together with images and thoughts, must die with Christ and descend to the underworld in order then to rise unto the Father in an unspeakable manner that is both sensory and suprasensory. ( Balthasar 1982 : 425 )

The spiritual senses, indispensable for a faithful account of the experience of the encounter with Christ, transform and preserve the natural senses.

Second, whereas the bodily senses perceive the material form of Christ and the church, the spiritual ones behold the suprasensible glory that is contained in this materiality. Balthasar’s aesthetics offers a cogent argument to realize that the corporeal and the spiritual are two inseparable aspects of the form of Christ (or, instead of form, ‘the revelation-body’, since in Christ’s body is contained the whole of the godhead [ 1982 : 433 ]) that are grasped simultaneously.

Two concluding considerations: first, the key role that the body has in Christian revelation requires that the believer’s experience of God includes and preserves an understanding of the so called ‘spiritual senses’. Christ’s form is to be seen, heard, touched, and tasted. Yet, the spiritual senses are not to be cultivated for the sake of their own delight – as important as this is. Rather, they are to be measured against their object, the crucified-risen Lord, and thus be conceived as acts within the ongoing path of conversion that concludes only with the end of one’s life. This path, the mystical life, is studied in the following section. Second, Plotinus’ insight that the human soul expresses itself through the body and also ‘receives something from it in return’ may help us see why there must be a spiritual sensorium ( Ennead 4.8.7.7–9; 1984a : 419 ). The soul becomes even more itself by its embodiment. It acquires history ( ἱστορἰαν ) and thus learns better what eternity is ( Ennead 4.8.7.12–15; 1984a : 419 ). Similarly, one could say that through the body and the spiritual sensorium, the glory of the crucified, risen Christ acquires a finite expression of its ever-greater goodness, eternity, and beauty that it would not have otherwise. The spiritual senses, from this point of view, are not only the human sensorial perception of the uncreated, incarnate, and risen Son as well as of ‘his body; the fullness of him who fills all in all’ (Eph 1:23). They also are the gratuitous, delightful, and limited human revelation of Christ’s glory that, in a mysterious way, grounds and enables every human expression of it (Rom 8:29–30).

After examining the role that the natural senses play in Christian experience, we now can study its dynamic aspect, that is, the existential and ongoing engagement with God and his revealed design for humankind. In this relationship – where one can taste, be tested, and put divine life to the test – each person gradually participates in Christ’s form and mission that overabundantly fulfils one’s humanity. This dynamic dimension of the Christian experience of God has also been called spiritual or mystical life. After a few brief methodological remarks, this section will explore some constitutive traits of the mystical life and then the criteria by which to recognize mystical experiences. This elucidation develops the above scriptural analysis of the experiences of God and is mindful of the historical development of the perception of mystical life. Nonetheless, it neither seeks to be comprehensive nor does it claim that there is a univocal, overarching, and tension-free account of it.

If one wishes to perceive the nature of Christian mystical life adequately, it is indispensable to become aware of the complexity of the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘mysticism’. Forgetting the ontological dimension of spirit (as many do in the contemporary Western world) imposes a dualistic worldview that pits matter against spirit and thus changes the meaning of both. When this modern perspective favours matter (i.e. reality deprived of intrinsic meaning), spiritual life is reduced to a secondary, unscientific, and ultimately irrelevant dimension of life. Where the modern worldview does privilege spirit, spiritual life is construed in terms of modern experimentation whereby the employment of appropriate techniques help the pursuit of prayer and union with divine realities (an approach known as technological rationality). If, instead, one understands spirit as both pneuma (spirit, breath, life’s movement) and nous (spirit, mind) then it will be possible to see that spirit, ontologically understood, is what accounts for the unity of whatever exists – that is, the unity of being and its manifestations, of matter and form, of reflection and expression, of act and potency ( López 2006 : 83–113 ). In this sense, ‘spirit’ is not an addition to a material reality but being in its subsistence. ‘Spiritual life’, therefore, regards not just a dimension of life or a specific religious technique but life’s substance, the very possibility for human life to be itself in its existential and speculative movement towards God and itself.

In the contemporary world, it is not unusual to approach ‘mysticism’ from the point of view of the psychology of religion which William James ( 1987 ), among others, popularized. This perspective leads one to emphasize the subjective dimension of Christian mysticism over and against its objective content. The subject thus becomes the measure of the mystery. Prioritizing the subject jeopardizes the organic unity of the content of the experience and the person who experiences it, renders the individual extrinsic to and independent from the community, exacerbates the ineffability and incommunicability of what is experienced, and makes it more difficult to grasp what distinguishes Christian mysticism from other non-Christian forms and what it shares with them.

Besides the modern preconceptions, one also needs to be mindful that the Christian account of mystical life differs from the early Greek one, even though the latter has been decisive for the Christian elucidation of God’s revelation. There are three fundamental distinctions. (1) According to Christianity, the world does not emanate or fall from the first principle (the Platonic Good or the Plotinian One). Rather, it is created from nothing by the triune God; hence the human being, made in the image of Christ, is in relationship with God, as witnessed by the existence of one’s conscience (Rom 2:14–16). (2) The triune God creates out of his goodness because he so wants to and – differently from the Greek first principle that is a-personal and insurmountably indifferent to what moves towards it by need or desire – gratuitously calls humankind to participate in his eternal life. (3) For Christianity, the spiritual life is not the process of return to the place from which the human soul has fallen, as the Greeks claimed, but the gradual participation in the redemptive mystery of Christ that rescues humankind from sin and death and leads it on the path towards life in the divine communion (Rom 8; Eph 1).

When turning to scripture to find a definition of mystical life, it becomes apparent that the words ‘mystical’ and ‘mysticism’ are not used in the Bible – only the Septuagint employs the term twice to refer to the ‘initiate’ (Wis 8:4; 12:6). Nevertheless, the tradition, especially the fathers of the church, uses frequently the adjective mystical ( mystikos ) and refers its meaning to the noun ‘mystery’ ( mysterion ). Louis Bouyer ( 1986 ), Andrew Louth ( 2007 : 200–206 ), and others have shown that mystery has three related connotations. First, the mystery that determines the content of the believer’s experience and in which all of creation is immersed is one: it is, as St Paul said, the mystery of Christ (Eph 3:4) that God the Father has predestined before the foundation of the world, has kept hidden, and which has been made known through his apostle (1 Cor 2:6–16) now when the final time, the time of the church, has come (Eph 3; Col 1). ‘This mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Col 1:27). ‘There is no other mystery of God, except for Christ’s’, wrote Augustine ( Letter 187: 11.34; 2004 : 246–247 ). In Christ, Maximus the Confessor argued, God reveals himself as ‘hidden in his manifestation’ ( Maximus the Confessor 2014 : 37 ). By revealing himself as love in the kenosis of the Son, God’s mystery appears even more ungraspable to us.

Second, mystery refers to ‘sacrament’ – which in fact is the Latin word for the Greek mysterion . The sacraments are the way in which Christ’s mystery reaches and transfigures the believer and which as such are never to be separated from their liturgical celebration ( Schmemann 2002 : 23–46 ). The Eucharist was seen as the ‘mystical body of Christ’ until the twelfth century, when this term began to be used to name the militant (earthly), suffering (purgatorial), and triumphant (eschatological) church (De Lubac 2007 ). The third sense of mystery is the fullness of divine life communicated in the crucified, risen Lord through his Word and sacraments and embraced by the believer.

To overcome the confusion between Christian and non-Christian mysticism, the modern separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the reduction of mystery to unknowability, and the current oblivion of the first two meanings of mystery, it is crucial to retrieve the threefold sense of ‘mystery’: christological, mystagogical, and shared and embraced divine life. The unity of these three elements gives us the full meaning of what we here mean by Christian mystical life: to live the mystery of Christ. Mystical life is nothing other than Christian life brought to its free and conscious development graciously granted by God and accepted by the believer.

For most of the church fathers, the ‘mystical life’ is the historical unfolding of baptism, the life we receive when we ‘have put on Christ’ (Gal 3:27) by being baptized in water and the Holy Spirit (John 3:5). Being ‘in Christ’, the baptized are ‘a new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15; Col 3:9–10), and as such are free to be no longer for themselves only but for the one who for our sake died and was raised (2 Cor 5:14–15). Having become a part of the body of Christ, which is the church (Eph 1:23), they are free to grow ever more like God (Eph 4:24), and to become in time merciful like the Father (Luke 6:36). Using spatial imagery, one may say that the baptized person’s mystical life unfolds in three simultaneous directions. The first and basic one is the following of Christ (John 14:6). This walking forward in the truth after Christ (2 John 1:4), enabled by the Spirit of truth (John 16:13), consists in living out the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. Second, being for Christ is a movement upwards to the Father (John 14:2–3) that, going through the world and history, is fulfilled in the eschatological participation in the new Jerusalem (Rev 21:2–4). Rather than a denial of the world, the growth in adoptive sonship until the eschatological rest in the Father’s embrace is the carrying out of the command to exercise a true dominion over creation for the glory of the Father (Gen 1:26). Finally, the movement upwards in the following of Christ is simultaneous with a movement inwards, as Augustine ( Confessions , 7.10.16; 2018 : 172–173 ) and Denys the Areopagite, similarly to Plotinus ( Ennead 5.1.4), consistently claimed. Made in the image of God (Gen 1:27), to know God is inseparable from entering into our true self. Further, since sin is a distancing of oneself from God (Gen 3:23–24; 4:16; Jer 2:25) and from oneself (Jer 2:23; John 8:44; Rom 7:14–25), the salvific knowledge of God’s merciful love entails a return to oneself (Hos 6:6; Matt 7:3–5; 9:13).

Starting with Origen, the tangible living-out of this mystical life has been described as a growth that unfolds in three stages. In time, they came to be called purification, illumination, and union. What they are, how they are related, and what their final goal may be varies according to the author. It is well known that this threefold characterization borrows from the Platonic and Neoplatonic mysticism for which the soul, in order to regain its kinship with the world of the ideas, needs to undergo a moral and intellectual purification. Whereas the first aims at the soul’s liberation from the body, the latter seeks the education into speculative thought by means of dialectics – so that the soul may be suddenly rapt out of itself and contemplate the Beautiful, the Good, or be inexpressibly present to the One. For Christianity, by contrast, the possibility of moving towards God is rooted in the baptismal belonging; its distinct labour is a synergy, a co-working of God’s grace and the human being where divine grace has a priority. For Origen, then, the soul must learn virtue ( ethike ), learn to see and deal with the world for what it is ( physike ), and ascend to the contemplation of God ( enoptike ) ( Louth 2007 : 56–57 ). Although one cannot know all things concerning the infinite, Origen’s mysticism, unlike Philo’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s, is a mysticism of light. For Nyssa, the last stage of spiritual life is not contemplation but union with the God expressed through the images of luminous darkness and marriage; for Origen, the last stage is seeing and knowing God, that is, the soul’s divine transformation. In the tenth century, the Byzantine monk Symeon the New Theologian proposed a formidable christological and pneumatological mysticism of light which unites the two seemingly opposed Eastern teachings of Origen and Nyssa ( Symeon the New Theologian 1980 ).

Similarly to Origen, Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) also speaks of three stages in his Gnostic Trilogy ( 2024 ): The Praktikos , The Gnostikos , and Kephalaia Gnostica . (1) The monk begins the practical, active life by fighting against the demons and the eight evil thoughts ( logismoi ). Evagrius is the first to name and describe the logismoi and provide remedies for them: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride. Overcoming these thoughts aims at the acquisition of apatheia , i.e. the state where the soul is no longer disturbed by worldly passions and that enables a life of charity and constant, genuine prayer. (2) The second stage is the natural contemplation of the world in its creaturely character and of the incorporeal realities. (3) The last one is gnosis, or knowledge of the triune God. Evagrius, too, offers a mysticism of light in which God, although indescribable, can be known. The Christian, trained through the battle with the demons and acquainted with true contemplation, can become prayer, know God, and speak about him. The Neoplatonic influence, that weighs heavily in Evagrius, can be seen above all in his openness to an abstract theology (contemplation of God in himself, in his essence) whereas scripture and dogma seem to play secondary roles, baptism passes unmentioned, and faith ‘is an innate good that exists naturally even in those who have not yet believed in God’ ( Praktikos 81; 2024 : 85 ). In his immensely important Institutes ( 2000 ) and Conferences ( 1997 ), John Cassian (d. c.435), who learnt coenobitic and anchoretic monastic life (that is, the communal and solitary religious life) at the feet of the Egyptian Fathers of the desert, introduced the West to his experience of the practical life and of prayer ( Conferences 10.7.2, 1997: 375–376; Stewart 1998 ). While taking much from Evagrius, Cassian purified his reflections of its erroneous excesses.

The spirituality of the heart and the mysticism of light in the Fifty Spiritual Homilies (1921) – falsely attributed to Macarius the Egyptian and condemned by the council of Ephesus (431) – contrast Evagrius’ excessive intellectual emphasis and bring to life the importance of the affective dimension in the Christian experience of God. This extremely influential work, written for monks committed to living the ascetical life, places great emphasis on the physical experience of God’s grace that is felt in various ways ( Spiritual Homilies 8; 1921 : 65–68 ) and that brings the taste of the ‘assurance of the Spirit’ (15.20; 1921 : 115 ). The preferred image to express this experience of God is ‘light’ (1:12; 1921 : 10 ) – a light that can be seen by the purified mind (17.4; 1921: 144). For Pseudo-Macarius, the monk needs to let Christ’s light guard his heart (14.2; 1921 : 102 ). The experience of the light – the beginning of the spiritual path – instils in the soul a taste for God’s glory and a longing for him that is best expressed through prayer, the only thing that matters. The constant prayer in a state of quietude ( hesychia ) restores to the soul its likeness to God (6.1; 1921 : 56 ).

Diadochus of Photice’s Century of Gnostic Chapters [ CGC ] educates Christians into an experience that draws much from Evagrius (the pursuit of apatheia that leads to charity; the contemplative gnosis of God) and Macarius (emphasis on experience; the mysticism of light) while correcting the Alexandrian dogmatics that influenced these two authors with the Chalcedonian one. For the bishop of Photice (d. c.486), baptism is at the very centre of Christian experience ( CGC 76–77; 1955 : 134–135 ). Baptism is the start of the experience of the vision of God, and places grace in the heart of the believer – a grace that cannot be felt or seen. When one converts with all of oneself to the Lord, grace manifests itself to the heart by means of an ineffable feeling. Yet, unlike Pseudo-Macarius – and without ever forgetting that the devil can never reach where only God’s presence can dwell (grace is deeper than sin) – for Diadochus, God allows the devil to challenge the baptized person’s sensibilities so that the Christian may grow in humility, learn to pray in truth, and live in the constant memory of God. Once the Christian passes the test, grace extends out to the external senses and, while temptations never disappear, grace continues to guide the believer to Christ ( CGC 85; 1955 : 144–145 ). The celestial, eschatological vision will include the transfigured body which receives the ineffable feeling of the divine goodness from the soul ( CGC 24–25; 1955 : 96–97 ).

Along with these works that more specifically regard the foundations of the ordering of mystical and spiritual life, a broader account of what it means to live the mystery of Christ is presented in the first great rules of Basil ( 2013 ), Augustine ( 1986 ), Benedict ( 1980 ), and the Rule of the Master ( 1977 ). Among other things, they specify what it means to live the radical commandment to love God and neighbour (Matt 22:37–40) and how to pray without ceasing (Luke 18:1; 1 Thess 5:17). The foundational works of Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153) and of his friend William of St Thierry (d. 1148) are likewise worthy of mention here, given their tremendous influence for the Christian tradition. Bernard’s On the Love of God ( 1995 ), The Steps of Humility and Pride ( 2010 ), and particularly the eighty-six homilies that form his masterpiece Commentary on the Song of Songs ( CSS ) speak of his Christian experience of God ( CSS 22:2, 1971 : 15 ; and 51:3, 1971 : 42–43 ), of the progress in spiritual life ( CSS 23, 1971 : 25–41 ), and offer an elucidation of the relationship with God that has love as its centre. The love that orders and illumines life is the heart of relationship with Christ that takes place within the church. Bernard, for whom mystical experience and doctrine belong together, boldly speaks of Christ’s love for the church and the human soul within it in nuptial terms ( CSS 73, 83–85; 1980 : 75–84, 180–210 ).

For William of St Thierry, too, ordering love is the kernel of his reflections. His so-called Golden Epistle ( 1971 ), in speaking admirably of the nature of monastic life within the Benedictine tradition, also details the three different steps that the life of following Christ is to take ( 1971 : 40 ; see also Enigma of Faith , 1974 : 40 ). Arguably the greatest speculative spirit of his time, he offered an account of the theological virtues that pays special attention to the relationship between faith and reason. Unique to William is his Spirit-centred, trinitarian mysticism. The Holy Spirit, communion of both Father and Son, is communicated to humanity as the unity of the absolute spirit and allows man to ascend to the Father through Christ ( Mirror of Faith , 1979 : 105–110 ). The Holy Spirit gratuitously communicates to the soul the reciprocal charity of Father and Son thanks to which it becomes like the triune God. For William, this is not simply a psychological reality, but an ontological one. The Spirit of the Father and Son unites the believer to God and allows him to begin to taste his infinite goodness, granting at the same time sure certainty of it while he is still in via (lives life as a path towards the Father). For William, the experiential taste of God that flows out from scripture and the liturgical and sacramental life as it is lived in the monastery has as its goal to love God and to serve him through loving others.

There are many other saints and theologians both in the West (such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great) and in the East (such as Basil, Cyril of Alexandria, Denys the Areopagite), as well as within Orthodoxy (such as Seraphim of Sarov, Gregory Palamas) and Protestantism (such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley) that have written fundamental works that articulate the meaning of mystical and spiritual life. The scope of this entry precludes treatment of them here. For those interested in delving deeply into the theology of the Christian mystical life, the multivolume works of Bernard McGinn ( 1991–2021 ) and Louis Bouyer ( 2011 ) are magnificent treatises deserving of exploration.

Three concluding observations are needed. First, the ordering of mystical life in the three stages of purification, illumination, and union is proper to every baptized person, and not simply for those called to live a consecrated life. Just as every Christian is called to fight against the vices that contradict the love for God and neighbour that Christ commanded (purification), so is every baptized individual given the grace to participate in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that inform Christian life and guide one in wisdom (illumination). At the same time, the desire to see God – with its alternating rhythm of presence and absence, light and darkness – and hence the yearning of being united with him defines every human spirit most profoundly. The union with God begins with one’s own baptism, is sustained and deepened through the participation in sacramental life, is expressed through both private and liturgical prayer and love-informed works, and is guided in the common belonging to the Christian people.

Second, hardening the three stages into a sequential process where each stage is neatly separated from the other two contradicts the concrete experience of God. The fight against sin and ‘the father of lies’ (John 8:44) ends with death. The illumination granted by the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) begins with baptism and not after years of catechetical and moral training. Finally, as every Christian knows from experience, moments of intense union with God tend to be followed by those of abandonment. In addition, it neglects the fact that Christ seeks not simply to remove moral and intellectual impurities from the human person, as the Neoplatonists understood it, but bringing each person into his mission to redeem the world and glorify the Father.

Third, the key criterion for recognizing the truth of the unfolding of mystical life is not so much the degree of union with God (which begins with baptism) nor the emotional intensity or clarity of subjective experience but rather obedience to God – that is, the listening to God’s loving word and the radical posture of being for him who revealed himself to be unconditionally for us (Gal 2:20). As Christ’s kenosis revealed, obedience binds the Christian to God – both in the experience of union one may have as well as in those experiences of forsakenness.

Out of his infinite love, God grants to very few persons the grace of transient and intense moments of unique union with him. The fruits and varieties of these experiences – provided the mystic has been able to find words to convey, always poorly and inadequately, some of the wealth received – defy any attempt at recounting them. This much, however, can be said: besides what they can mean for those who receive them, these rare experiences witness to the absolute priority of God’s love and to his desire to enlighten humankind further with his glory. They also confirm the truth of the revealed knowledge of the triune God offered in Christ. The spiritual gifts (Isa 11:2; Rom 12:6–11; Eph 4:4–16), charisms (1 Cor 12:30–13:13), and other specific graces like dialogues, visions, and ruptures (2 Cor 12:1–6) are given for the sake of all and ‘for the common good’ (1 Cor 12:7). While the eschatological life with the triune God in the communion of saints is humankind’s destiny – and, as John of the Cross showed, passive purifications also have the goal to prepare the soul for the beatific vision ( The Dark Night , 1991 : 358–457 ) – mystical experiences are neither the (esteemed or despised) archetype of Christian experience, nor the criterion to assess the nature and depth of the Christian’s mystical life. The obedience to Christ’s command to love God and neighbour, and the acceptance of the way in which God determines a person, should participate in Christ’s mission – which, as mentioned, is the heart of mystical life, constitute the adequate context to understand the meaning of mystical experiences. Pursuing Christ’s love for its own sake (Phil 2:5–11; 2 Cor 5:14–15) generates in the Christian the openness to receive the graces and sacrifices that may be granted and to live them truly. For our purposes, it suffices here to suggest three fundamental elements whose presence, for the Catholic view, signal the authentic character of a mystical experience: the dogmatic content, the intrinsic relationship with scripture, and the link with the Church’s sacraments. Realizing the character of these features also entails seeing the place that these specific experiences keep with the whole mystical life.

(1) The mystical experiences of union with God rest on the two essential Christian mysteries, the incarnation and the Trinity, and lead to them. The incarnation of the Logos – as the reciprocal indwelling of human and divine natures in the person of the Son ‘without confusion or change, division or separation’ (DH 302) – reveals not only the place that redeemed human flesh is granted in God’s glory, but is also what makes it possible for every human being to be one with God. Jesus Christ’s revelation of the one God as a tripersonal being – trinity and unity, like being and love, are equiprimordial in God – discloses that union with God takes the form of a personal relation. One, so to say, enters in God’s communion by means of the subsisting relations that constitute the divine persons. Being created in and for Christ (Col 1:16), our union with God the Father takes places through the Son in the Holy Spirit. In the Son we receive the Father’s love by means of the Spirit of both; we reciprocate the Father’s love in the Son’s eucharistic love in return to the Father and, in an ineffable way, in the Son’s co-breathing of the Holy Spirit with the Father (John of the Cross, Spiritual Cantico B 39:3–4; 1991 : 622–623 ). It is this christocentric and trinitarian form of God’s relationship with the human being that ultimately justifies the opening claim that the personal form is the fullest way to account for the nature of Christian experience.

Three things are to be noted here: first, since each divine person is eternally correlative to the other two, the relation with one of them always entails the other two. Second, that our relationship with God is through the second person does not mean that no dialogue with the other two is possible. Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue with God the Father ( 1980 ), the works on the Holy Spirit by Seraphim of Sarov or Symeon the New Theologian, or Teresa of Avila’s dialogue with each of the persons of the Trinity (Teresa de Jesús, Cuentas de conciencia 14.2 and 28; 1989 : 600, 605 ) witness to the pluriformity of the mystic’s encounter with the triune God. Regardless of how the relationship with God takes place, we cannot lose sight of the fact that God himself is the subject of knowledge. The mystic knows and loves God in and through the triune knowledge and love that God has of himself. God is and remains other than humankind. He is thrice holy (Isa 6:3) and, as such, it is only as a participation of his own wisdom and love that one can know and love him. To think otherwise would be to confuse mystical life with the natural knowledge of God. Third, the dogmatic, objective content of the mystical experience – the believer’s unity with the triune God revealed by Jesus Christ – separates Christian mysticism from any other kind of religious mysticism, such as those known by Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, or New Age movements. Further, this objective content renders untenable the opposition of dogma (or theology) to spiritual life, as if each could exist without the other.

In the history of the church, we find two forms of mysticism: a mysticism of union and a trinitarian mysticism within which the church’s and the soul’s nuptial relationship with Christ takes place. Whereas the mysticism of union can be seen in, e.g. Origen, Denys the Areopagite, and Meister Echkart, the latter is that of, among others, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila ( 2008 ), Mechthild of Magdeburg ( 1998 ), John of the Cross, or Julian of Norwich ( 1978 ). While the union of essence of the three divine persons may ground a mysticism of union, given that God revealed himself in Christ to be one as tripersonal and that person ‘signifies what is most perfect in all nature’ (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, q.29 a. 2; 1920 : 158 ), the knowledge of God and the Christian’s life of grace are not an abstract relationship with the divine essence. They are an experiential and living relation with the trinitarian persons that Christ enables. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the rediscovered works of the Flemish Beguine Hadewijch of Antwerp (d. 1260) represent an instance of a mysticism in which these two forms come together ( 1980 ). Her understanding of Christian experience, inheriting William of St Thierry’s trinitarian mysticism and of Richard of St Victor’s reflections on love, is indispensable to grasp adequately John Ruusbroec’s (d. 1381) mysticism ( 1985 ) as well as that of Eckart ( McGinn 1994 ).

(2) Christian mystical experience is related to scripture and does not grant a (so to say) supplemental knowledge of God not made available in Christ. In Christ, the Father has given us all (Rom 8:32). As we see in the great mystics, mystical experience is a spiritual exegesis of the Holy Scriptures made possible by the Holy Spirit. Mystical experience flows from scripture and it leads back to it, while granting to those who have the experience or are exposed to it a deeper knowledge of the Incarnate Word and the eternal triune life he brought. It is not by chance that Origen and Nyssa, among others, used the biblical historical books of Genesis and Exodus to describe mystical life and that John of the Cross offers a spiritual exegesis of the wisdom books ( 1991 : 213–219 ). Above all, the Song of Songs is the book most frequently and profoundly commented upon to describe mystical life and the nuptial relationship between Christ and the church and Christ and the human person. The commentaries of Origen ( 1957 ), Nyssa, Bernard, and William of St Thierry ( 2008 ), among many others, are indispensable reference points in this regard.

(3) Along with the dogmatic and scriptural dimensions, true mystical experiences also possess a sacramental character. They draw their life from the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, and enable a richer experience of them. Sacramental participation in divine life prevents arbitrariness and abstraction from holding sway over mysticism. This is what Gregory of Nyssa did with Origen’s work, and John of Ruysbroeck and Henry Suso with Meister Eckhart’s. In Christian mysticism, scripture, dogma (or theology), and mystagogical life are inseparable. Seeing these three elements in unity helps realize the indispensable ecclesial dimension of mystical experiences. Love generates an objective dwelling place, the church, in which the Christian can subjectively experience it – that is, encounter it, follow it, live it, and taste it. Understandably, the extraordinary phenomena given to some – such as the transverberations, ecstasies, and visions of Teresa of Jesus; the stigmata of Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Catherine Emmerich, Gemma Galgani, or Padre Pio da Pietralcina; or the more typically Eastern phenomenon of transfiguration of Seraphim of Sarov – tend to attract attention. All these events indeed fill the mystics with much delight, wisdom, and also suffering . They widen their souls, so that they become even more ‘ecclesial souls’ at the service of God’s glory and the growth of the church. Yet, all these instances, along with the dialogues had with God and that have been recorded, cannot distract us from the primacy of the mystery and the obedient response of the faithful to God’s love. Personal experience is enabled and sustained by the priority of God’s love and is the gratuitous outcome of the surrender of the baptized to Christ’s love and mission.

In the foregoing reflections, one may have perceived that a twofold polarity forms part of the Christian experience of God. The first one consists in the relationship between the content of that experience, the Mystery of Christ, and the human person’s appropriation of it, that is, the person’s affective and lived awareness of that mystery as it grows in time. The second polarity is the relationship between the person who has that experience and the communion within which it is lived. Examining now the second polarity can help us realize more fully the richness of every Christian experience and correct an individualistic reduction of the experience of God – one which would consider the spiritual senses and the mystical life just private matters extrinsically related to the church and humankind.

As with the first polarity, also here the relationship between the two terms involved is dialogical and asymmetric rather than dialectic. Person and communion are two irreducible wholes. On the one hand, the human person exists within a communion that enables the person to be and respond to God. In this sense, communion has a relative priority over the person. On the other hand, the person is an irreducible being whose unique experience of and response to God contributes to the building of that communion. In this sense, the person has a relative priority to the communion. The dialectic between the person and the communion is overcome only when we realize that the uniqueness of the person derives from its constitutive relationship with God (Gen 1:27). Moreover, it is because the relationship with God is foundational for the person, that communion, not solitude, is primordial to him ( Giussani 1997 : 5 ). Put differently, the relationship with God articulates itself both in the person’s being-for God and the communal being-for other human beings. It is this relationship with God that, while grounding the different forms of human communion, prevents the person from being absorbed in it, just as it ensures that communion not be a mere human product but a sign of God and his life.

Given the present concern to ponder the nature and structure of Christian experience (a goal that necessarily has to keep the sexually differentiated body in view) rather than exploring the relationship between person and communion ecclesiologically, it would be helpful to approach it from the perspective of some of the basic human forms of love that are normally called the Christian’s states of life. Within the communion of the church, that sets the primordial and permanent dwelling place to live in communion with God (‘we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another’, Rom 12:5), the baptized person tends to participate in Christ’s love in the forms of marriage, consecrated life, or ordained priesthood. The God who has revealed himself as a tripersonal communion of love is at the very centre of these fundamental forms of human love. Because of the intrinsic relationship between God’s triune love and the concrete forms of love, the experience of love a human being is given are concrete places where one is called to experience God – this is so above all for the Christian, but also in an analogical way for non-sacramental marriages and human friendships. Of course, this does not mean that all one may experience of God is enclosed in these states of life, or that communion and family are coextensive terms, or that there is only a communal and not a personal relationship with God. The following remarks, which focus on the married and virginal states, wish to bring attention to the fact that there is no isolated experience of God, as Augustine said ( City of God 19.5; 2012 : 359–360 ), and that personal relationships are not random. Communion has an intrinsic order. Person and communion are correlative realities that indwell within each other through concrete forms of life.

The foundation for the bond between God and the states of life is christological and pneumatological. The states of life are different ways to participate in Christ’s redemptive love for the church. This love may be described as gratuitous (Rom 5:8), nuptial (Eph 5:25–27), total (John 13:1), universal (2 Cor 5:15), personal (Gal 2:20), and permanent (Matt 28:20). It is through Christ that married, virginal, and priestly love are made part of Christ’s love for the Father and humankind, reach in it their proper depth, and can reciprocate the Father’s love and live for his glory. This participation is mediated by the Holy Spirit who, as the person-love, is both the objective bond and the one who grants the human person the capacity to see and the freedom to surrender. The Spirit’s mission has a twofold dimension. First, he is to bring people from inside to see and surrender to Christ’s love. Analogically to the third person in God, for Christians, ‘our love for [God] is the Holy Spirit whom he gives us’ (William of St Thierry, Romans 5:7–11; 1980 : 98 ). At the same time, as creator Spiritus (creator Spirit), the Holy Spirit gives rise to a dwelling place where God’s love can be met and not be distorted. The insurmountable incapacity to bend the embodied love to one’s own ideas or whims is precisely what reflects the priority of Christ’s love for humankind who loved us first (Rom 5:8). At the same time, it is also what enables the person to enter freely into the divine measure of God’s love and to go back to it after a betrayal.

Celibate, virginal love is lived within a religious community. Anchoretic life, considered by some the highest form of monasticism, nonetheless grows out from coenobitic life and generates community life (Cassian, Conferences 18.4–10; 1997 : 637–643 ; Benedict, Rule , 1.1–5; 1980 : 168 ). Keeping the proper differences in mind, the communal dimension of ordained priesthood may be approximated to the religious one. It is in the monastery or religious house, with its ordered life, where the celibate person permanently encounters the concrete love of Christ, is reminded of it, and can reciprocate it. Celibate or, better, virginal love is not to be understood negatively, as the state of being unmarried, but positively, as the nuptial response to Christ’s love and love for others that expresses one dimension of Christ’s love – i.e. gift of oneself to everyone else, or, as Giussani put it, ‘possession with a detachment’ ( 2008 ; López 2014 : 184–190 ). While, of course, the subjective obedience of its members renders love more transparent, it is the community’s sacramental dimension that makes objectively present Christ’s love. It is the Spirit of the Father and the Son who makes the community a sacramental sign of Christ’s love and enables the members to experience it. A compelling expression of this trinitarian and sacramental dimension is treatise 15 On The Common Life by Baldwin of Ford (d. 1190). The religious community, he claims, is best described as amor communionis (love of communion) and communio amoris (communion of love) ( Baldwin of Ford 1986 ). The community, as reflective of God’s triune communion of love, is the place where the famous passage of Augustine becomes true: ‘you see the Trinity, if you see love ( caritatem )’ ( The Trinity 8.8.12; 2015 : 255 ). When one neglects this sacramental and trinitarian dimension and forgets that the monastery is a ‘school of charity’, as the Cistercian tradition describes it, the celibate person is left with the impossible task of having to build the relationship with Christ ever anew. When the spousal relationship with Christ falls into oblivion one easily gives up poverty to embrace wealth, love to pursue worldly power, and virginity to chase distorted forms of love. Bernard’s critique of corrupt monastic life is a profound and balanced correction to keep always in view.

A similar interplay between the personal and the communal dimensions of the experience of God takes place in marriage. As recent theologians have shown deepening the Christian tradition ( Pope John Paul II 2006 ; Ouellet 2015 ), married love participates in Christ’s love for the church. While it is contested by many, the Catholic Church believes that the sacramental married bond, rather than be characterized as a moral union that remains at the disposal of the spouses’ inclinations and historical circumstances, is sealed by the Spirit of Christ, the Son of the Father ( Catechism of the Catholic Church , 1624) and hence it becomes greater than the spouses. In other words, sacramental married love participates in and expresses Christ’s redeeming and nuptial love for the church. Just as Christ’s love lasts through time (it is indissoluble), is given once and for all (it is irrevocable) to each person, so is sacramental married love whose ‘one flesh’ character (Gen 2:24) reveals the exclusive personal dimension of Christ’s love – complementing the universal dimension more proper to virginal love.

While much would need to be said to justify this Catholic understanding of marriage (see Granados 2014 ; Scola 2005 ), what should be considered here is that marriage’s indissolubility (Matt 19:1–9) reveals that sacramental married love is an objective sign of Christ’s love for the church that spouses can follow. The pneumatological character of the marriage bond functions also as the memory of the ultimately divine origin and destiny of human love and helps spouses to encounter and respond to God. The christological dimension of sacramental married love also clarifies and grounds the mystery that the fundamental human relationships that constitute family life (sonship, marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood) are an analogy (similarity in greater dissimilarity) of the triune God ( López 2015 ). The experience of God passes through the family, not simply because parents may seek to communicate their faith to their child, but because the very structure of family bonds is an icon of it. This, to repeat, is neither a moral nor a sociological affirmation, but a theological and ontological one. As Augustine and Aquinas argued ( The Trinity , 12.5.5 and 12.6.8; 2015 : 324–325 and 327–328 ; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, q. 93, aa. 5–6; 1920 : 472–474 ), while it is inadequate to identify a human person or familial relationship with one of the persons of the Trinity, after Christ’s revelation it is possible to state that the ordering of family relationships does convey in a certain way God’s triune being-love ( Pope John Paul II 1994 ).

A final aspect needs to be mentioned. As the foundational experiences of God showed, the person’s experience of God is inseparable from one’s own fruitfulness. In virginal love, this fruitfulness takes the form of a communication of the life that will not end; in married love, it occurs in the form of the children a couple may receive from God (Gen 4:1). For both, fruitfulness is also the participation in the radiation of God’s glory through their specific work. For both also, there is a purification and a deepening of the relationships of parenthood and sonship so that the birth of Christ – of which all other births and novelty take part – may also take place in the believer.

The states of life are the dwelling places where, on an ongoing basis, God’s redeeming love can be met, followed, and expressed anew. In the states of life, the subjective and objective as well as the personal and communal dimensions of the experience of God acquire a concrete unity. This is because their specific forms convey in different ways the priority and gratuity of God’s love for each person, which alone can free the human being to surrender to God and thus grow ever more deeply human.

The very difficult and long centuries of debate with the Reformed theologians on, among other things, the nature of salvation, grace, and the church helped the Catholic Church to gain clarity on what it considers the certainty proper to faith and the role that emotions and the Holy Spirit play in the experience of Christianity (Council of Trent, DH 1533, 1563–1583). Subsequently, the nineteenth-century controversy with modernist philosophers asked the Catholic Church to grapple with the claim that Christian experience can be reduced to the subject’s interiority (DH 3481, 3401–3466) – that is, to ‘an intuition of the heart that puts man in immediate contact with the very reality of God’ (DH 3484). Along with these debates, as the several documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) show, during the twentieth century the Roman Catholic Church became keenly aware of the significance of the radical changes that recent philosophical and scientific developments have brought about. The Second Vatican Council expressed the Catholic Church’s consciousness that contemporary Western culture is shaped by different forms of atheism (DH 4320), promotes a separation of faith from life (DH 4343), and, at times, curtails religious freedom (DH 4240–4245). Unlike the preceding church councils, the Second Vatican Council sought to present in a positive light a deeper understanding of the church, the liturgy , divine revelation, the human person, and the Christian’s calling in the world. It also defended religious freedom; encouraged the role of the laity, the renewal of religious orders, and adequate formation of the clergy; and fostered ecumenism and the relation with Eastern churches. If to this we add the liturgical reform, the emergence of the so-called ecclesial movements – the most important ecclesial novelty after the council itself ( Ratzinger 2007 ) – along with the effort to move away from a fragmented conception of theology, the rediscovery of the fathers of the church, and a closer theological appropriation of scripture, it will be easier to understand why the Catholic Church, both in the official magisterium and the theological reflection , embraced a renewed understanding of ‘experience’. Still opposing its subjectivistic and empiricist reductions, but without disregarding the role that emotions and the human subject have in the knowledge of God, the Catholic Church saw in the concept of experience a way to affirm the unity of faith and life, the person, and God, and to live a more profound awareness of the liberating Christian message.

It is not possible to present here all the reasons and insights of this profound shift, nor to discuss the developments within Eastern Orthodox theology (see Gschwandtner 2017 ; 2021 ) and Protestantism (see Zahl 2020 ). For our purposes, it suffices to indicate the most significant contributions and the questions they seek to answer. It is important to note, however, that in different ways they embrace the modern preoccupation to discern the role of human beings in the access to truth and their participation in the unfolding of the meaning of existence (as elaborated in the SAET entry, Experience: A Philosophical View ).

Preceding the Second Vatican Council, and in a certain way opening the Catholic Church to the new appreciation of experience, is the seminal work of Jean Mouroux, The Christian Experience ( 1954 ). Along with the clarification of the proper structure of experience, Mouroux proposes a conception of Christian experience as an act of the whole person in one’s relationship with God, others, and the world that takes place in Christ and is made possible by the person’s ecclesial belonging and grasped through the veil of faith ( 1954 : 335 ). The person determines the full form of human and Christian experience. Karol Wojtyła, who later became Pope John Paul II, also sees experience as an indispensable category to approach the ontological mystery of the human person. Experience, he says in his main philosophical work Person and Act , is what grants access to what is irreducible in man ( Wojtyła 2021 : 103 ). His original reflection – that thinks at the crossroads of Thomistic metaphysics and Scheler’s phenomenology without being either one of them – recognizes that experience is what grants us cognitive contact with ourselves as ‘selves’. The crucial significance of experience continues to be emphasized in the Magisterial reflections during the years of his papacy. He deepens the previous account by making explicit the role that the sexually differentiated body has in the person’s experience of self ( Pope John Paul II 2006 ), and the importance of experience for an authentically lived faith ( Redeemer of Man 1979 : section 10).

The epistemological character of Christian experience is developed by Karl Rahner, S.J. ( 1996 ; 1975 ), one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, who also tackled the important question of the human experience of grace in two important essays ( 1979 : 35–51 ; 1974 : 86–90 ). Bernard Lonergan, S.J. also argues that our epistemological structure is the most proper place to locate experience and understand its meaning as the first of the three inseparable levels of knowledge (experience, understanding, and judgement, 1985 : 29 ). Understood as religious experience, it is the fourth level of consciousness – the one that accompanies free and responsible deliberation ( 1996 : 106 ) – and is best conceived in terms of love ( 2005 : 229 ). Edward Schillebeeckx adopted a concept of Christian experience at the service of articulating the novelty of Christian revelation in the aftermath of the two world wars ( 1979 ; 1980 ; 1981 ). His account is informed by both the hermeneutical method – according to which experience is always interpreted and its content is mediated through language – and the dialectic method that emphasizes experience’s practical dimension.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, S.J. claims that experience is ‘indispensable when faith is understood as the encounter of the whole person with God’ ( 1982 : 219 ). He places experience within a comprehensive trinitarian aesthetics grounded in the symbolic structure of Christian revelation – and of the created world ( Balthasar 2000 ) – which is understood as the unity of form and event, the synthesis of the greatest concreteness and universality ( Schindler 2004 : 163–254 ). The aesthetic approach brings together the subjective and the objective dimensions of experience.

Finally, Luigi Giussani’s original understanding of experience is arguably the most profound and original contemporary Catholic reflection, elaborated with a keen pedagogical concern to help the person discover both the pertinence of faith to human existence and to help the Christian enter into a life-transfiguring knowledge of Christ ( 1997 ; 2019 ). In the encounter between reality and the human being, in which neither one is the measure of the other, emerges what Giussani calls the elementary, original experience that is at the root of all the other human and religious experiences:

Elementary experience tends to indicate totally the original impetus with which the human being reaches out to reality, seeking to become one with it. He does this by fulfilling a project that dictates to reality itself the ideal image that stimulates it from within. ( Giussani 1997 : 9 )

Ultimately, authentic human experience is religious inasmuch as it is the living affirmation of God as that ‘holistic meaning to which nature, in its objective organicity, beckons the human mind’ ( Giussani 2019 : 85 ). Giussani offers an account of Christian experience as the encounter with the event of Christ that, unexpectedly and unforeseeably overfulfilling them, brings to light the authentic and full proportions of human religiosity ( 1998 ). Through the mediation of the Holy Spirit, Christian experience, in its dynamic dimension, is the living out of the human glory of Christ by transfiguring the world in which every Christian is given to live through their fruitful engagement in work, culture, justice, art, and political life ( Giussani, Alberto and Prades 2010 ).

Christ’s revelation of God’s tripersonal being-love and unfathomable mercy makes possible – and calls for – its reception by the human being, who structurally awaits the unforeseeable and unmerited disclosure of the meaning of existence and of the dwelling place where it can be lived. Christian experience regards both the human affective awareness of this revelation and gratuitous bestowal of divine life as well as the path through which the person becomes ever more one with the mystery of Christ. A balanced elucidation of Christian experience therefore requires paying close attention to the scriptural foundational experiences of God and the structure of experience there evinced.

As an experience of the person, the knowledge of God includes the transformation of the human sensorium so that one may see, hear, taste, touch, and smell Christ’s life and divine things. It also comprises the gradual and graced insertion in the Mystery of Christ and the obedient and fruitful living for him alone known as mystical life. Far from being a solitary effort, the Spirit of Christ and the Father generates a dwelling place where the Christian can encounter, taste, be tested by God and thus grow in the truth of love. Thus, ‘experience’, besides being an epistemological and methodological category, understood as the Word ( logos ) that opens up a path and leads the person through it ( met-hodos ), is also a pedagogical term that indicates the growth into the truth of oneself, of God, and the world. This entry, which approaches Christian experience from a Catholic perspective, builds on the philosophical view of experience and deals with some key themes and questions that can help accounts in the other Christian and Orthodox traditions, which could not be presented here, to carry out the task of thinking and deepening this immensely rich and complex term.

Attributions

Bibliography

Works cited

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López, Antonio. 2024. 'Christian Experience: A Catholic View', St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology . Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/ChristianExperienceACatholicView

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