EXPERIENCE AND MAGISTERIUM

EXPERIENCE AND MAGISTERIUM

Experience, according to Aidan Nichols, is an aid to discernment in theology. Citing Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., Experience is the ability to assimilate perceptions. It is both objective and subjective. On the one hand, it is objective because in experience, we are confronted with something real and objective, existing independently of ourselves, our views and attitudes. On the other hand, it is subjective because we can never come at this independently existing reality neat, in a pure or raw form. We take in as much as we can manage of it within the preexisting framework we carry everywhere with us. Nevertheless, the objective element remains the controlling factor says Nichols.

According to Aidan Nichols, there are two essential components of experience: on the one hand, the interpretative element, what we bring to anything fresh and new, and on the other hand the refractory element, that which comes to us in its novelty, resistant of inappropriate ways in which we might wish to describe it. It is through this refractory element that experience can be said to have its own authority, and so can guide us in our theological activity.

But what forms of experience are relevant to theology? Nichols identifies four stages of experience which theology should take into account. First, there is the pre-Christian or secular human experience which prompts us to turn to religion for insight and illumination and for final redemption. We expect our faith to, as we say, make sense of our experience.

Second, there is the experience of conversion or of the difference there is between what is to be pre-Christian and what is to be Christian. In conversion, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are experienced as throwing light on my life. Here, the Christian gospel intersects with my ordinary human experience. From this meeting, my past and present look different from what they did before. Third, there is postconversion experience of life in the Church: an experience of life in faith, of sacramental life, of life within a specific fellowship of persons. Fourth, there is the mystical experience in which I begin to experience for myself the God who is the source of my faith. Here, Nichols makes a point clear. It is noteworthy that mystical experience, in its highest states or conditions, is not radically a different experience from the Christian experience at large. Rather, it is a prolongation of that experience which makes it purer, deeper, and more self-aware.

EXPERIENCE AND MAGISTERIUM

Hence, Aidan Nichols avers that if one has faith, hope, and charity, the subjectivity engaged in what one calls his/her experience is affected by revelation. As a result, when one comes to reflect on his/her experience, one finds it an aid to the discernment of the revealed truth as found in revelation’s sources, scripture and tradition (Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition make up the Magisterium).

What then is the implication of the above for the appeal to experience? Aidan Nichols answers this beautifully by saying that, “Though I am directly open to God by nature and by grace and so by the grace filled history in which nature is caught up in human living, nevertheless the reality of divine revelation and salvation does not come to me explicitly except as a member of Christ’s historic church. I can never appeal to Christian experience against that church in order to deny its common faith or disparage its common life. To appeal away from the church would be to cut off the branch on which I am sitting, to cut myself off from the source of the experience I am claiming, to commit epistemological suicide. Experience is only an aid to discernment; it is not itself the living source of enlightenment in Christian theology. Only scripture and tradition understood by the norms of the church herself can bring us to that source.”

On the whole, though the media presents experience and magisterium as competing forces in theology today, they are not. The magisterium is there to ensure that, so far as possible, the church and each person within it will not misconstrue their experience of divine salvation.