I will also undertake to answer various objections to the claim that it is possible for human beings to perceive God. That is, if God does really exist, there is in principle no bar to this. I will not argue in this chapter that the possibility is realized, that some human beings do genuinely perceive God. For one thing, ‘perceive’ is a “success” term, entailing the existence of its object, and I will not argue that God exists. Such argument for this as will be found in the book is indirect; if beliefs “about God”, entailing or presupposing that God exists, are justified by being based on putative experiential awareness of God, then so is the belief that God exists. Nor will I try to show in this chapter that, even assuming that God does exist, anyone is ever in the right relation to Him to be perceiving Him. If we are working within an established doxastic (belief-forming) practice of forming perceptual beliefs, we can make use of standard ways of determining whether a particular subject, S, is genuinely perceiving a given object, X, at a certain time. But in working within that practice we are assuming that such perceptions do actually occur; that is a fundamental presupposition of the practice. From within the practice of forming perceptual beliefs on the basis of sense perception we have ways of determining whether S saw a bird. But these ways have been built up by taking a number of perceptions as genuine and accepting the beliefs about the environment based on those perceptions.

And so it is with a practice of forming beliefs about God on the basis of experience. This book does not start by assuming that such a practice is what it purports to be; on the contrary, the book argues for that thesis. I don’t want to assume that people really perceive God and that (some of the) beliefs based on those perceptions are true. I want to address people who antecedently reject those assumptions as well as those who accept them. Thus I am conducting the discussion from a standpoint outside any practice of forming beliefs on the basis of those alleged perceptions. And so far as I can see, the only way of arguing, from that standpoint, that people do genuinely perceive God is to argue for the epistemological position that beliefs formed on the basis of such (putative) perceptions are (prima facie) justified. If that is the case, we have a good reason for regarding many of the putative perceptions as genuine; for if the subject were not often really perceiving X why should the experience involved provide justification for beliefs about X? This reverses the usual order of procedure in which we first seek to show that S really did perceive X and then go on to consider what beliefs about X, if any, are justified by being based on that perception. But we can proceed in that order only if we are working from within a perceptual belief-forming practice. The question of the genuineness of the alleged perception can be tackled from the outside only by defending the epistemological assumptions embedded in the practice in question.1 Thus the case for the reality of perception of God will emerge from the book as a whole, most of which (Chaps. 2–7) is one long argument for the thesis that certain kinds of beliefs about God can be justified by being based on putative perception of God. This chapter will be a phenomenological examination of awareness of God. We will be seeking to display its phenomenological structure, how it “comes to” the subject, as well as considering its varieties and its extent, and asking whether it is possible that it should satisfy other requirements for being a genuine perception of God.

The qualifications in the above should make it clear that I have no intention of claiming that every time someone supposes himself to perceive God he is actually doing so. I take it to be tolerably obvious that not every such supposition is correct, any more than that every supposed sense perception of, for example, a lake is the genuine article. (Sometimes the supposed lake is a mirage.) The most I will be seeking to support (indirectly) is that sometimes people who suppose themselves to be perceiving God are actually doing so.

Here are some terminological stipulations. As is implicit in the above, ‘awareness of X’ and ‘perception of X’ are “success” terms. Whatever my state of consciousness, so far as that is wholly within my head, I can’t be truly said to be aware of an external object, X, or to have perceived X, unless X exists and unless I stand in whatever relation to X is required for this. Since I didn’t want to assume at the outset that these conditions obtain for the experiential awareness of God I have been appending the qualifier ‘putative’ to ‘awareness of God’ and ‘perception of God’. But from now on, in order to avoid intolerable circumlocutions, I hereby cancel the “success” character of ‘awareness’ and ‘perception’ until further notice. From now on ‘awareness (perception) of God’ is to be understood as ‘what the subject takes (or would take if the question arose) to be an awareness (perception) of God’. When I want the success implication I will say something like ‘genuine perception of God’. Second, in order to have a term parallel to sense perception, one that is more compact than ‘perception (awareness) of God’, I will, with some trepidation, speak of mystical perception; ‘mystical experience’ will be used for the mode of experience involved in that sort of perception (just as sense experience is the mode of experience involved in sense perception). The trepidation is due to the fact that, as will be made explicit later, the range of our category by no means coincides with that of “mystical experience” on any of the most common understandings of that term.

I have just been trading on the obvious point that not all putative direct awareness (perception) of God need be the genuine article. But we must recognize a discrepancy in the other direction as well. There can be genuine awarenesses of God that the subject does not take as such. First, no such taking may occur because the subject is not attending to the matter, though she would so construe the experience if the question arose.2 A second possibility is that one may actually be experiencing God without even being disposed to identify the object of the experience as God if the question arose, just as one can see a cyclotron without realizing that what one sees is a cyclotron.3 I may be aware of God’s sustaining me in being, while I suppose that I am merely feeling particularly fit and chipper at the moment; or I may be “hearing” God speak to me (not with audible words), while I take this to be just thoughts floating through my mind. Perception of God can be genuine without being putative as well as vice versa. Our direct concern here is with the putative perceptions, and that for two reasons. First, our only access to the subject matter is through the reports of persons who take themselves to be experientially aware of God. Second, we are centrally concerned with the epistemological question of whether certain kinds of beliefs about God can be based on experience in such a way as to be justified by being so based. And where one bases a belief about God on an experience (in the most direct fashion), one is obviously taking that experience to be an awareness of God. And, on the other side, a belief that X is present can be justified by an experience even if that experience is not a veridical experience of X. I might be justified by my visual experience in supposing that there is a lake in the distance, even though it is only a mirage. Hence, the category we need for our epistemological purposes is that of those experiences that seem to the subject to be direct awarenesses of God. Nevertheless, we are concerned with this category only because of the possibility that some of its members are genuine perceptions of God.

Although in this book I am centrally concerned with the epistemological value of mystical perception, I certainly don’t want to suggest either that this is its only theoretical interest, or that this is its main importance for the religious life. I certainly don’t think that God presents Himself to our experience primarily to render certain beliefs justified. On the contrary, according to the Christian tradition the main significance of mystical perception is that it is an integral part of that personal relationship with God that is the fundamental aim and consummation of human life. Without God and me being aware of each other in a way that, on my side, is properly called ‘perception’, there could be no intimate relationship of love, devotion, and dialogue that, according to Christianity, constitutes our highest good.