Page 283 - Contribution To Phenomenology

276 JAMES G. HART

the merely mythical-traditional framework as a residue of irrational
facticity. Husserl gives an intriguing intepretation of value experiences
which places what is usually regarded as "mystic experience" at the
foundation of all genuine religious experience and culture:

The unified intuition contains the character of a unity of original
religious experience, therefore also the character of an original
experienced relation to God in which the subject of this intuition knows
himself to be addressed not by an external God who stands over against
him and [in which the subject] knows himself determined to be the
bearer of a communicated revelation. Rather, he knows God as intuited
in himself and as originally one with him. Therefore he knows himself
as an embodiment of the divine light itself and so as a mediator of the
message of the divine being (Wesens) from out of a content of the
divine nature (Wesens) implanted in him (Hua XXVII, 65).

Husserl is claiming that this is a description of the experience of Jesus
and the experience of anyone who genuinely transcends religion
religiously. (The student of Husserl has to say that in order for Husserl
to make these claims either Husserl himself genuinely transcended religion
religiously or that this is his interpretation of his experience of one such
as Jesus.) Husserl further observes that when such an authentic religious
experience happens there is a transformation of religion or, indeed, the
creation of a new religious type who presents religion from out of
sources which in a good sense are rational and yet are genuinely and
originally religious experience (Hua XXVII, 66). And this transformation
happens through the power of original intuited values and norms. These
authentically experienced values and norms are evident in the world as
the basis of the meaning of the world's salvation. And in the intuitive
experience of these values and norms is the evidence that a world
pervaded by such values would make blessed the one who would live in
this world with such a belief and with such an understanding of this
sense of the world. Note that "faith" here is tied to a filled intention or
intuition of values as well as the empty intention of the relevance of the
intuited value to all of life. This gets filled in living faith-fully. Thus he
adds,

it is this evidence which gives faith its power and which grounds faith.
Faith makes blessed and it is true because it makes blessed, because it
proves the meaning of the world in the living of a meaningful life (Hua
XXVII, 65-66).