| Popis: |
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. |
