I just got back from an excellent and honest conversation with a gentleman at the church I used to attend here in the city. I am very thankful for the conversation we were able to have, and that not all Christians are fundamentalists (thank God!). That is one way to abate the stem of thoughts flowing in my head. But there are still more, flooding my consciousness. Perhaps a Sunday-installation, given that I’ve blogged more lightly, may also alleviate the explosive tension of my thoughts. And perhaps not.

‘Numinous’ is a term that was coined by the German theologian Rudolph Otto in an attempt to categorize and define human sentiment and reaction to perceived or imagined spiritual forces. The numinous is something that is ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ – mysterious in that it is wholly Other, stupefyingly different and beyond comprehension; tremendous in the size and scope of its power, mighty and awful and unapproachable; and fascinating in that despite the previous two qualities it draws the human viewer in, possessing a strangely attractive quality.

The experience of the numinous is not constrained to a particular religion or belief set, but is something universally experienced, Otto maintains, and different in quality from other feelings. One may feel a sense of dread and terror and awe and attraction to a tiger, for instance, but this is an entirely different emotion from that experienced when telling ghost stories around a dim campfire late at night and deep in the woods; and in the same way the sense of awe at the tiger is distinct from the religious experience of acknowledging, witnessing, or even participating in divine processes.

I, for example, when I was very young, was for a time filled with the sensation of the numinous when I considered the skeletons that, after my parents had gone to bed, would inevitably inhabit the half-bathroom in our house next to the home office. This would lead to my, when for some reason I needed to wake my parents (usually because of bad dreams), running past the office as quickly as possible, not stopping or slowing until I launched myself cannonball-style into my parents’ bed. Sometimes in my haste I tripped while in the hallway, adding to my terror of That Awful Something that might come and get me. But the numinous, while remaining on the verge of presence, is always just out of reach.

This is also the emotion evoked in suspense or thriller movies, at least when they are successful. I thought there was much good about Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds for this precise reason. The aliens were discovered to have buried giant machines deep underground, which were always there as we were building our cities and going about our business. We are never told the whys of the aliens’ actions, or what their motives are, but only shown what it is that they do, while we are powerless to do anything in return. (The brief disclosure of the aliens’ physical form later in the movie does much to spoil this.) But their presence, just out of direct human knowledge, and their inexplicable actions, made the aliens very numinous indeed. Other films evoke the same reaction in different ways; Hitchcock was of course pretty darn good at it.

But the existence of this emotion does not mean that its object really exists. The skeletons in the half-bathroom of the house of my childhood were not real. But neither does the existence of this emotion mean that its object does not exist. I imagine it could have been felt as the Plague ravaged Europe, or as the Native Americans on the east coast of the continents first encountered white Europeans. Both of those were very real things. The experience of the numinous does not confirm or deny its object but only confirms that the experience itself (to be a good existentialist), simply Is. What else besides this emotion Is remains to be discovered.

I wonder sometimes whether religion depends wholly on this experience. It may be that religion is not so much about the object of its worship as it is about the state of the worshiper. And certainly some spiritual realm, in whatever shape, filled with whatever kind or kinds of spiritual being more powerful than we, unknowable and incomprehensible, at once attractive to us and dangerous, fits neatly with the numinous experience. But does that mean it truly exists?

Experiments in human sensory deprivation in the past century have demonstrated how much we rely on our connection to the physical world for the functioning of consciousness. While brief periods of sensory deprivation may result in relaxation, extended periods of time cause hallucination and psychological damage. It seems like our physical senses ground us in reality – or as a professor of mine in artificial intelligence put it, they ‘keep the hallucinations away.’ Our senses allow us to gather information about the world around us, but since we are finite beings with a finite number of ways of experiencing the world, there is always to some extent a ‘sensory deprivation’ that we experience – that is, the things we don’t know. As a child it may be what is behind the closet door when it closes. As an adult, and throughout life, it may be the closed door of Death, or the myriad possible futures we could possibly experience, or the purpose behind strange circumstances, or any one of a thousand ‘grown-up’ things. One wonders if it is here, among the Unknown Things that our sense of the numinous originates, those vague hallucinations and ponderings that dance at the edge of knowledge yielding in us a sensation of awe, perhaps congealed into a somewhat familiar form by our cultural conditioning. And perhaps this is where spirituality and religion begins, and comes into our lives through all the things we can’t know or explain. This experience requires a lack of knowledge on the part of the beholder, and in that sense, science truly is religion’s enemy, for it takes what once may have qualified as the object of our numinous experiences and demystifies it, pushing our spiritual experience further out into the realm of what is still unknown.

But yet again, what if the numinous is a reflection of something that actually exists? Is it a vague, as-yet undirected but real emotion toward Some Thing which does exist, of which we have some degree of awareness but are not adequate enough to grasp its source? Or is it just the experience we have as human beings of living with finite knowledge? But if it exists, then like H.G. Wells’ (and Steven Spielberg’s) aliens, however incomprehensible and numinous That Thing may be, to know of its existence it must intrude somehow into the physical and knowable realm of human knowledge, so that while it may not be possible to fully demystify it or strip it of its awe-full-ness or curious fascination, it may be possible to know That Thing really Is, and it is not just our experience, but an object and perhaps even subject of it.