서강대학교

초록/요약 도움말

The purpose of this thesis is to find a balanced approach to religious feeling and religious phenomenon through the works of William James and Bernard Lonergan. Our investigation on the history of religious studies in the past two centuries revealed that there has been an over-emphasis on religious experience and feeling. By seeing religious experience and feeling as primary while religious reasoning as merely derivative, this approach provides an understanding of religious phenomenon as a mystical, unilateral process. Therefore, it cannot assess adequately the role of reason in human religious process and fails to embrace the diversity of religious traditions. For William James and Bernard Lonergan, religious experience and feeling are diverse, and the relationship between religious feeling and religious reasoning is reciprocal. The universality of religion is found in empirical moments of human experience where the inner contact with reality is made. To live at and for that authentic moment is to be religious. However, human authenticity can only be possible by moving beyond the dualism of empiricists and rationalists to the realm of interiority. On this common ground of James and Lonergan, we have synthesized a more balanced approach to religious phenomenon which can be named as the James-Lonergan Synthetic Approach of Interiority and Authenticity. This approach sets its focus on the interrelationship between religious feeling and reason within human interiority. In the realm of interiority, feeling and reason need each other to be truly authentic and to transcend human subject as a whole towards authenticity and to be religious. The James-Lonergan Synthetic Approach can be used to investigate the phenomena of religious plurality and religious conversion. Our application in the case of the Vietnamese Confucian Ngô Thì Nhậm showed that there is interconnection between reason and feeling in conversion as well as between intellectual conversion and religious conversion. His conversion without any mystical experience therefore can be considered religious from the perspective of James and Lonergan.