Introduction to the Special Issue “Imagining Ultimacy: Religious and Spiritual Experience in Literature”

Scholars who study religious and spiritual experiences often describe them as full, profound, meaningful, and enlightening: “special” experiences, Ann Taves calls them; for Paul Tillich, they are matters of “ultimate concern.” (See Taves 2009, pp. 28–45; Tillich 2001, pp. 1–4). In neurocognitive terms, spiritual experiences are intensified states of heightened attention involving feelings of vitality, transcendence, and purpose, and they inspire in us aspirations toward wholeness and flourishing (see, for example, Wildman 2011, pp. 104–5; Sheldrake 2013, pp. 3–4). Additionally, for many people, religious and spiritual experiences serve as both a sign of and vehicle for what is sacred; they are a medium through which we commune with the divine.

Literature accords powerful expression to such experiences. This is to be expected given literature’s attention to virtually all things human, including peak experiences that inspire, motivate, transform, and invite reflection on the meaning of existence. Literature shares this quality with religion; indeed, it is a virtual truism that literature emerged in its modern form at the turn of the nineteenth century as a partner to—in some ways, even, a descendant of—religion, according literary texts a quality described as “secular scripture” by William Franke (see Franke 2016). To be sure, the historical narrative of literature’s cultivation from the compost of religion is problematic. Tracy Fessenden labels it a “supersessionary tale”:

The legitimating narrative of literary scholarship … assumes that it once was religious, became less and less so (with the march of “knowledge”) and is now decidedly secular, but also that, as the replacement for religion as a failing enterprise, the professional study of literature exists and has always existed not to be religious, that it was birthed by, for, and as the secular, from which the traces of religion even in its own institutional genealogy or the objects of its attention must continually be expunged.

(Fessenden 2007, p. 632)

According to the rationale that Fessenden criticizes, literature emerges in historical tension with, but not as a straightforward replacement for, religion. In place of religious doctrine, literature imparts an inclination to suspend disbelief.1

But if we try to hold religion and literature together without pitting them against each other—if we imagine them as longtime partners rather than as modern rivals—then we widen the range of each, especially at the level of experience. By attending to the breadth and intensity of human experience, literature gives form and context to diverse religious and spiritual experiences, exploring their wide range of individual and social effects. George Herbert on prayer, Gerard Manley Hopkins gazing up at an airborne kestrel, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay following the beam of a distant lighthouse, Toni Morrison’s Sethe reckoning with the ghosts of slavery’s traumatic past: all these and countless other examples of “peak experience” not only illustrate the panorama of spiritual life but lend it substance, bringing it more deeply to our awareness and even cultivating in us new spiritual sensibilities. Literature is a natural home, in some ways a seedbed, for religious and spiritual experiences.

Religious and spiritual experiences, meanwhile, direct our attention in a different direction than literature does. This was one of the subtexts of the phenomenon of postcritique, Rita Felski’s referendum in the 2010s on the tendency of academic literary study to devolve to the level of critique. Postcritique is mostly remembered for its self-reflexive (and partly self-undoing) critique of critique and for disclosing suspicion as the dominant affect in contemporary literary studies. It identifies suspicion as an ideological reflex, less an interrogation of dominant patterns of thought than as their perpetuation by (un)critical means. However, postcritique also attempted to depart from this norm by employing the language of spiritual experience, the language of “wonder, reverence, exaltation, epiphany, hope, [and] joy.” Appealing to Paul Ricoeur’s diagnosis of the different approaches to interpretation, Felski remarks that “the difference between a hermeneutics of restoration and a hermeneutics of suspicion … lies in the difference between unveiling and unmasking.” (Felski 2015, p. 32; Cf. Ricoeur 1970, pp. 20–36). The act of unveiling implicitly evokes the Greek word apokálypsis, “apocalypse,” meaning to uncover or unveil and translated in many Christian Bible versions as “revelation,” the concluding book of the scriptural record.

While Felski downplays the direct connection between postcritique and spiritual experience—“my emphasis,” she affirms, “is squarely on aesthetic, rather than religious, enchantment” (Felski 2016, p. 190)—the spiritual proximity of postcritique to religion is widely apparent. Some dismiss postcritique on this basis. Bruce Robbins disparages it as a return to “supernaturalism” and “natural hierarchy,” with the text reinstalled above the critic as a magic nimbus of pyrotechnical effects. If postcritique smells like religion, Robbins warns, this is because it germinates in the ethos of religion. “Belief, unscrutinized belief, is of course where the collapse of critical distance leads.” (Robbins 2017, pp. 372, 374). And yet, this “of course” is precisely what Felski and others identify as the problem with “critique,” or at least a certain version of it, in present-day scholarship. The contempt for religion blinds critics not only to the complexity of religion, which takes a multitude of forms far removed from the fundamentalist disposition with which Robbins associates it, but also to critics’ own implication in vast networks of belief. For belief underwrites understanding in virtually any domain of knowledge in which experience is at issue. Such is our modern—or, for Fredric Jameson, our postmodern—condition. “The phenomenological experience of the individual subject … becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed-camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or [wherever]. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong” or as wide as the supply chain extends (Jameson 1991, p. 411). The same generally holds true for the sciences, with theories directing understanding without exhausting possibilities for alternative arrangements. Belief as the necessary supplement to full understanding becomes virtually axiomatic.

As Kevin Hart also shows us, there is yet another reason to inquire into our modern (or postmodern) critical methods, and that is the presence there of traditionally religious allegorical schemas. As Hart sees it, critique belongs to a long history of religious allegory in which “we pass from a textual surface, which we are enjoined not to trust, until we find a satisfactory level far beneath that will manifest a hidden truth that affects the surface conditions.” In the suspicious hermeneutics of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, nothing is ever as it appears; as in allegory, one thing always equals something else. However, unlike in traditional religious application—think of The Pilgrim’s Progress as an allegory of the life that leads to heaven—critique in the school of suspicious hermeneutics does not seek God as much as it seeks all that “hides from us in the darkness beneath texts, [all that] is truly monstrous: hysteria, illusion, neurosis, oppression, weakness,” and so on. Critique, obsessed with these bogeymen of the human condition, “rejects contemplation” or exalted reflection on the better angels of our (or any other) nature; the “watchword [of critique] is mystification, but it allows no room for genuine mystery.” (Hart 2023, pp. 125, 126). Hence, Hart concludes that where contemplative religion invites an approach of what he calls “transascendence” (after the philosopher Jean Wahl), taking surfaces of texts as screens for reflecting on what surpasses them in divine realms of transcendent possibility, the demystification of critique inclines instead toward “transdescendence,” diverting our gaze to the ground and prompting us to revert, always, to the same “‘bad infinity’ of meaning,” the same spinning of empty signifiers (Hart 2017, p. 259).

By these latter accounts—Felski’s, Hart’s, and others’—serious engagement of literature, even by way of “critique,” is always something of an evocatively religious and spiritual enterprise, even when it clings to a dogmatically anti-religious position (a religion of no religion). Religious and spiritual experiences thus remain implicit subtexts in much literary study. Today, these subtexts appear to be coming more fully to light. In a recent volume, Matthew J. Smith and Caleb D. Spencer gathered essays that underscore the evolving historical connection between literature and spiritual experience. As Smith and Spencer see it, the well-documented “religious turn” in literary studies at the turn of the twenty-first century was really a turn toward religious and spiritual experience. But this turn itself was hardly new, they remark, as the investment of literature in religious experience goes back at least as far as T. S. Eliot’s notion of a “dissociation of sensibility” between thought and feeling or between subjective experience and objective representation. For Eliot and many a present-day scholar, “religion helps to mend a kind of ‘schizophrenia’ that severs the mind from its life in body and world.” (Smith and Spencer 2022, p. 1). Drawing implicitly on ideas that span from Bergson’s creative evolution and imagism to phenomenology, Smith and Spencer shed light on how our experience helps shape the world we perceive.2 This in turn indicates a departure from “the materialism of religion,” an avenue of thought that investigates such topics as “heresy, vernacular theology, political theology, iconoclasm, and sectarianism,” which is to say, the workings of “bad” or “weird” religions. In refusing such (objective) distinctions, “earlier interests of the religious turn in material history” have largely “evolved into new emphases on the body, ethnicity, conversion, doubt, affect, sacrament, and poetics,” all of which emphasize experience. At the same time, widespread interest in the experience of the body, of ethnicity, of conversion (indeed, transformation), etc. means that these and related aspects of everyday life themselves acquire a religious or spiritual aura, an air of ultimacy, of what it means to be fully human.

This dual implication of religion in experience and of experience in ultimacy accords the religious turn a postsecular quality, that is to say, an evocation of the effects of religious enchantment but not necessarily a “return to full-blown religious commitment.” (Smith and Spencer 2022, pp. 4–5). Hence, in taking up religious experience rather than religious institutions, Smith, Spencer, and their contributors highlight how religious experience and literature shape each other.

In addition to the cultural and historical aspects of this relationship, there is an empirical dimension to it as well. So argue David B. Yaden and Andrew B. Newberg in a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary new study of spiritual experience. Their capacious survey attends to spiritual experience as a biological and empirical phenomenon as well as a religious and social one, and it takes up sub-facets of these experiences: the numinous, revelatory, synchronic, mystical, paranormal, and more. One such sub-facet involves “awe and the sublime,” which they associate with “aesthetic experiences.” While literature spans the full range of spiritual experiences, Yaden and Newberg open their chapter on awe and the sublime by invoking the influential (and famously lapsed Catholic) novelist James Joyce, for whom “true art triggers a kind of spiritual experience—a state of ‘aesthetic arrest’” or heightened clarity (Yaden and Newberg 2022, p. 249). For Yaden and Newberg, there is a direct correlation between esthetic and religious or spiritual experiences: “People tend to report more agreement with religious and spiritual beliefs after aesthetic experiences—even in cases where there is no explicitly religious or spiritual content surrounding the trigger for the experience.” At the same time, religion influences how we interpret these motivating esthetic experiences: “a person’s prevailing belief system measurably affects the way the brain processes primary incoming sensory stimuli, and hence, aesthetics are influenced by our existing beliefs.” (Yaden and Newberg 2022, pp. 260, 264). Literature inclines us toward religion and spirituality, and religion and spirituality shape how we receive literature.

Yaden and Newberg trace their study back to the pioneering work of William James. Something they do not address but that proves relevant to this Special Issue of Religions is the profoundly literary quality that James implicitly ascribes to religious experience. James’s landmark set of lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), diverted attention away from religious institutions to religious experience. For James, such experiences could only be held as valid for those who underwent them directly; in this way, James drove a wedge between religious experiences and truth. By rupturing religious experiences from religious institutions and making such unverifiable experiences objects of scientific examination, James qualified such experiences primarily as psychological phenomena. However, he remained deeply intrigued by spiritual experiences, effectively suspending judgment about their veracity. And in that suspension of judgment—really, a suspension of disbelief—spiritual experiences for James acquired an evocatively literary quality (Yaden and Newberg 2022, pp. 14–32). Though partitioned off from empirical truth, religious and spiritual experiences became vehicles of meaning—compelling possibilities presenting themselves as if they were true. To experience religious and spiritual life, for James, was thus to live in the world as though it were otherwise or as though it offered more than it outwardly would seem to afford. Unsurprisingly, then, James concluded that spiritual experiences bear a host of good and healthy effects on those who undergo them. In addition to arriving at the convictions that “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe” and that “union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our chief end,” individuals who enjoy spiritual experiences report “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life” and feel “an assurance of safety and a temper of peace” as well as “a preponderance of loving affections.” Hence, while religious and spiritual experiences are not literature as a generic body of writing, they are literary in their transportive effects; James even describes them as a form of “lyrical enchantment.” (James 2002, pp. 528–29).

With all of this as a backdrop, contributors to this Special Issue of Religions were invited to consider how literature both expresses and reflects religious and spiritual experiences, an invitation made more urgent by the fact that few serious discussions of religious and spiritual experience exist within literary studies. I use the phrase “religious and spiritual experiences” to refer to these phenomena; while significant differences exist between the religious and the spiritual, I link them here as a way of drawing on their similarity as terms evocative of things of ultimate value. Mindful of the benefits we may derive from considering spiritual experiences and literature alongside rather than against one another, the authors in this collection explore the relationship between spiritual experience and literature with questions such as the following in mind: How might openness to religious and spiritual experiences increase our understanding of literature and help us engage with it more creatively? How might literature help us discern the diversity and implications of intense, ultimate experiences? And how might literature, in Felski’s words, bring to our attention “things as we know them to be, yet reordered and redescribed, shimmering in a transformed light”? (Felski 2008, p. 102).

Denae Dyck, addressing William James’s landmark study, takes up one of the latter implications, namely that poetry can evoke mystical experiences. Dyck situates James’s work in a wider frame of contemporary postsecular and postcritical scholarship, attaches James’s Varieties to the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and explores three nineteenth-century poems by Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dollie Radford, respectively. Ultimately, these poems, alongside James’s insights, help us reimagine such topics as hope and revelation, opening us to the kind of surprise that is one of the hallmarks of spiritual experience. The question Dyck raises of whether reading can truly inspire spiritual experience is also the one posed by Dennis Kinlaw in his essay, and he addresses it from a variety of historical periods and methods. Engaging Teresa of Avila, William James, and modern Christian writers like Jessica Hooten Wilson—and drawing upon methods rooted in empiricism, affect theory, and postcritique (and from scholars ranging from Tanya Luhrmann and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht to David B. Yaden, Andrew B. Newberg, and Rita Felski)—Kinlaw concludes that there are, indeed, conditions in which texts become not just descriptive but productive of spiritual experiences.

The reasons for this are what George Faithful examines in a test case of the early modern Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, best known for his poem and treatise The Dark Night of the Soul. Faithful analyzes John’s use of metaphor in his early poems and attendant spiritual commentaries. There, Faithful argues that figures such as doves, flames, and knights help readers reimagine their circumstances and identities and draw closer to union with the divine. For John of the Cross, Faithful argues, metaphor serves as a medium of approximation. The fact that such metaphors may also repel is the subject of Mary Frohlich’s essay. How deeply, she asks, may we identify with or even understand the mystical tradition that generates so many of the paradigms (like John of the Cross’s) that continue to structure our understanding of spiritual experience? Frohlich explores this question through the case of The Autobiography of Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, a mystical narrative written in 1685 that avowedly achieves a special connection with God through such repellant means as images of self-abuse, imagined enslavement, and pathological perception of otherworldly beings. However, as Frohlich shows, we may still find spiritual meaning and even inspiration in such narratives. She proposes a three-fold approach of employing a variety of theories of self-construction, engaging in a eucharistic theology of self-giving, and employing eco-theological and -psychological theories of vision. Collectively, this approach helps us understand how selfhood emerges, the vast networks that help us orient ourselves in the world, and the mechanisms by which we come to “see” what is before us in the first place. To understand spiritual experiences in this way is to grasp what they may portend for healing a broken world.

The world’s brokenness—perhaps its necessary brokenness, the porosity that allows light to break through—is the subject of Yue Wu’s essay. Is there such a thing, she wonders, as downward transcendence, a flattening of so-called “peak” spiritual experiences? Wu believes so, reflecting on such deflating affects as absurdity, anxiety, and meaninglessness. Engaging Slavoj Žižek, and taking Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical novel Nausea as an exemplary case, Wu rejects narratives of spiritual ascent and instead redefines the sacred around situations of disruption and rupture, discerning in such experiences a departure from norms that opens possibilities of freedom. James Bryant Reeves shows how complicated such purported ruptures can be by exploring the very different case of the eighteenth-century English poet Williiam Cowper, whose 1779 Olney Hymns recast conventional wisdom concerning faith and doubt. Though Cowper crafted lyrics to these hymns for devotional purposes, he also laced them with expressions of doubt, unbelief, and feelings of spiritual exile—in effect, as Wu might describe it, downward transcendence. However, Cowper’s work brings these tokens of faith crisis into the fabric of communal worship, normalizing such crises and thus transforming doubt into a token of belief and spiritual alienation into a form of solidarity. As Reeves (2025) puts it, belief becomes “inextricably tied to a sense of belonging with those who do not belong.”

Belonging on a grand scale is a backdrop for Jacob Sherman’s essay on “the book of nature,” life’s all-inclusive template. The book of nature traditionally portrays nature as a legible text with spiritual meaning. Beginning with the emergence of the new science in the late seventeenth century, modernity mostly reduced this concept to a mere trope. However, Sherman shows how such key Romantic figures as Novalis, William Wordsworth, and especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge revived this concept and reinvested it with meaning, perceiving in it an imaginative, metaphysical, and theological remedy for a world falling into disenchantment. Amber Bird, meanwhile, shows how spiritual experience can proceed not only from what is grand and transcendent but also from what is self-consciously constrained and modest. She takes up the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, specifically his famous shape poem “The Altar” and a series of sonnets, showing how the rules of formal constraint in these poems illustrate the discipline of poetry as a catechizing of mind and behavior. Collectively, these formal, poetic practices bring the poet and spiritual supplicant closer to ultimate spiritual fulfillment in Christ.

Seungjun Lee and Do-Hyung Kim round out the Special Issue, examining how the Japanese writer Furui Yoshikichi understands and engages with Western mystical experiences, particularly through his engagement of the Jewish thinker Martin Buber and the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. Given Furui’s work as a translator of German literature, Lee and Kim attend especially to the paradox of verbalization—the fact that the mystical experiences that supposedly transcend language nevertheless must find expression in language for us to grasp them in their purported ineffability. For Furui, this paradox sheds special light on the role of the literary imagination in rendering the inexpressible expressible; furthermore, Lee and Kim argue, Furui’s work of translation further underscores an important relationship between Eastern Buddhist and Western Judeo-Christian spirituality.

Religious and spiritual experiences—experiences of ultimacy—are simultaneously virtually universal and utterly unique. And to the extent that literature explores with special intent the full range of our human experience, literature and ultimacy seem to belong together. Mary Frohlich, one of the contributors to this Special Issue, elsewhere implicitly suggests how this may be so by elucidating six patterns of spiritual experiences one finds across individual accounts and traditions: such experiences (1) are “singular, supremely memorable event[s]”; (2) represent “turning point[s]” in individual life stories; (3) contribute to “self-knowledge in the presence of the sacred that frees a person to be himself or herself in a more authentic way”; (4) take us “by surprise”; (5) are those in which “the dominant feelings and moods of spiritual experiences are those of peace, joy, love, light, and liberation”; and (6) change our way of relating to the world, making us “more aware of belonging to realities bigger than the self.” (Frohlich 2019, pp. 35–39). So many of these qualities—involving “turning points,” “self-knowledge,” “surprise,” “joy,” and so on—are essential to literature. Indeed, literature speaks to what makes us most human. And what makes us most human, the “peak” of our humanity, is our capacity for spiritual life and experience.