Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life

Abstract

In The Republic, Plato suggests that the enlightened person will find himself disoriented on his return to the realm of the shadows. So at the very beginning of the Western philosophical tradition there is a clear recognition that the condition of enlightenment can make for a difference in the phenomenology of a person’s experience of the sensory world. This book develops the idea that ‘enlightenment’ or spiritual maturity may result in, and may partly consist in, not so much a state of confusion or bewilderment in our experience of sensory things, but in a renewal of the realm of the senses. On this view, the ‘shadows’, as they feature in the seer’s experience, can bear the imprint of religious thoughts and attitudes, and can therefore serve as a proper focus for the spiritual life. And if that is so, then one standard objection to Christian, and broadly Platonic, conceptions of the spiritual life will have been removed: attending to the divine world need not after all imply any neglect of the world of sensory forms; and it may even be that it is in our encounter with the realm of sensory forms that certain religious insights are presented to us most vividly.