A Philosophical Examination of the Nigerian Religious Experience in the Light of Andre Godin’s Ideas
Chapter One
Purpose Of The Study
The fact of the existence of religion is so obvious that any rational being can hardly ignore it. Its effects in the society are so conspicuous that it becomes odd and irrational to question its pervading presence. History is replete with the impact of religion in the life of people and the society at large. This fact is reiterated by Omoregbe when he affirmed that, “there is no other phenomenon which moulds and controls man’s life as much as religion does.” It has both sociological and psychological implications such that religious belief can have such a firm grip on people’s life as to impart a permanent change on them.
This is what Godin took up and explored. In his book The Dynamics Of Religious Experience, he tried to bring out clearly, from a psychological point of view, the motive behind those impacts and changes, which religion could have on people’s lives.
The concern of this study is to examine the dynamics of religious experience as posited by Andre Godin. Then we take a look at the nature of the Nigerian Christian religious experience so as to see how it can enhance the worship of God by Christians in Nigeria.
CHAPTER TWO
Religious Experience
The study of religious experience could be tiresome because of the ambiguous nature of the meaning of the word, experience. However we shall try to elicit a more objective notion of it in a way that will facilitate our study.
Experience is not action or behavior, thought or belief; it is not emotions or feelings, not even meeting or encounter, even though all these are involved when we use the word, experience. Hence “experience refers to a total way of reacting or being, and cannot be reduced to its parts”.1 The word experience is so universal that defining it in relation to an event, encounter or emotion will be limiting it. Hence to experience is to identify some totalizing aspect of life – of an episode or event that is experienced.2
More so, the word experience can have different meanings when used in different contexts. In one context, it would be referring to a person who has acquired some skills in a field for instance, an electrician, a surgeon, etc. hence you can hear people say ‘a man of experience’. In another it would refer to a situation such as an accident, a journey, a conference. Hence you come across such exclamations as ‘what a wonderful experience?’ Nevertheless, one thing that is in all the cases is that it refers to something all-inclusive, which mobilizes or affects the whole personality.
But since our concern here is about religious experience, many questions at this point plague our minds. Having seen what it means to experience, we then wonder, “What makes an experience religious?” What makes our aspects of life as regards certain things, episodes or events religious?
Many thinkers have dealt with this question in many ways. Some psychologists define religious experience as “an experience, which is identified within faith traditions as religious”3. This definition appears to be tautological. It tends to explain an idea with some concepts with which it was named. It must be noted that the word “faith” is controversial such that what is religious for one may be nonsense for another. Hence this definition is not clear enough to be upheld in a critical situation as this.
It was the great thinker William James that gave a definition that is widely accepted. He defined religious experience as:
The feelings, acts and experiences of individual men, in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand, in relation to whatever they may consider divine4.
In the view of Alistair Kee this “something divine” is God5. But can we rightly equate it with God? After all, there are religions that do not have God or a supernatural being at the root of their faith tradition such as Buddhism. However, any religion has a faith tradition and every faith is a faith in something (an object) – a being. For Christianity and a number of other religions, it is a supernatural being – God – whose name may vary in respect to language. Consequently, in the view of James, for an experience to be religious it must be in relation to something divine, and in the solitude of a person’s individuality. This makes religious experience something that is quite personal.
CHAPTER THREE
Nigerian Religious Experience
Nigeria, and indeed Africa, is a place of high religious density. There are various religious groups in the country but we have about three major institutionalized religions: African traditional religion, Christian religion and Islamic religion.
But before the advent of Christianity and Islam, the African Traditional Religion (ATR) had existed in its multifarious forms among our people and dominated their culture, ideas and values. It formed the root of our people’s spiritual and religious encounter, understanding and relationship.
However it was in the course of our trade contacts with traders/missionaries from North African Arabs and Portugal that both Islam and Christianity (respectively) were implanted in Nigeria to stay side by side with the various forms of the ATR.1 The first wave of contact our people had with Christianity was between the 15th and 18th centuries with mainly Capuchin missionaries and Augustinians from Portugal, Spain and Italy. The extent of Christian conversion was tremendous that today, in an estimated Nigerian population of over one hundred million, the whole Christian body may be close to 50%.2
CHAPTER FOUR
EVALUATION AND CONCLUTION
All the while we have been exploring and exposing the ideas of André Godin as well as the Nigerian religious experience. It is pertinent, now, to make some evaluation so as to be able to take a stand. First of all, I will critically evaluate Godin’s view with what I have already mentioned about the Nigerian religious experience. Secondly, I will establish a standpoint in form of a conclusion of all I have been writing.
Evaluation
Having examined André Godin’s dynamics of religious experience, we found out that he posited experience of the ‘other’ in the arena of faith, as the peak of all religious experiences. This is not disputable. However, the confusion lies in his qualification of it as the experience of God. Now the question is, which God? When you talk about God you must know that different peoples conceive the concept of God differently; the Christians have their own conception of God, the Moslems have their own as well as the Confucians. There are even some religions, like Hinduism, which are said to have no god as their reference point. This is the more reason why William James’ definition is very important. He used ‘something divine’ instead of God, considering the controversial nature of the word ‘God’.
Nevertheless, one could not fail to see the Christian stand point from which he (Godin) wrote. But using the Christian God to mark the dynamics, which underlie every religious experience, makes useless and irrelevant the experience of those who conceive God differently, especially those who do not conceive him metaphysically. The Christian God is a metaphysical God. So what it means is that if one does not encounter the metaphysical being, one does not have the meaning, which is sought in the religious encounter of God. However, this is not the case because even the Hindus (who are said not have a metaphysical God as their reference point) derive meaning in their religion.
Again the way Godin painted the whole picture of functional religiosity appears to be keeping the institutional religions, somehow, in the black. It was as if the issue of animism or functionality in religion only arises as a result of their teachings. That may be part of the cause but not the whole truth, especially in the case of Nigeria. That is why I dedicated the second part of the 3rd chapter of this work to eliciting some of the reasons why there is the tendency towards interventionism.
This will also help in understanding the purpose of this work, which is to examine the nature of Nigeria’s religious experience so as to make for a genuine, more authentic experience of God in our religious worship. It is often said that the knowledge of the cause of a problem is about half of its solution. So I believe as well that the awareness of the above enumerated existential, cultural and psychological reasons or causes will go a long way in enhancing the solution to interventionism, which I see as the bedrock of all the mischief found in our religious worship today.
Another point that needs to be redressed is the functionality of region. He seems to disagree with the fact that religion is intrinsically functional. For the fact that religion is a conscious search for meaning in the metaphysical being brigs out the functional background of religion. The search for meaning is a search for something, a quest for self-fulfillment. In other words, the very foundation of religion is functional – a quest for some satisfaction in man. Hence Omoregbe puts it that ‘theology itself is also basically anthropocentric, for… it talks about God only in so far as he relates to man, his well-being and salvation”.1
On this standpoint, it then means that the experience of some people in Nigeria can be genuinely called experience of God. Whether they seek for personal fulfillment or not does not matter. What matters is that they seek such in a being that transcends space and time and this realization is capable of making a permanent change in their lives, giving it both meaning and direction.
Conclusion
The experience of God is the end of religion. Man is in constant quest for meaning, but the mundane things under the limits of time and space cannot proffer the satisfaction required in this quest. Therefore man transcends himself, transcends his environment to embrace the metaphysical. However, this recourse to the metaphysical is what Andre Godin refers to as the “experience of God”.
As a religious experience, it is always had in relation to faith, faith in the metaphysical God. But this metaphysical being, God, as it were, cannot be encountered directly and immediately. There is always a mediator. There is always a pre-history to it. Before you can talk of the experience of God, you must have conceived that God, somewhere, somehow. In other words, this experience has a long prehistory and this pre-history must be found in the context of faith. This is where the institutional religions come in. Every individual is born into one context of religious faith or the other. It is in this context that he will have his experience and his ability to experience God there depends on the solution of self-transcendence available to him there. If the religion is applying the egocentric horizontal solution, then that person’s experience remains on the functional level, and his experience remains immature. But if the individual is able to cultivate, from his religious background, the metaphysical theocentric solution, he is more likely to arrive at a full experience of God.
However, in this write up, in order to arrive at a full experience of God, we are not trying, to paint the institutional religions black, neither are we trying to cancel religious experiences not even to reject completely the issue of functionality of religion. The experience of God cannot be had in a vacuum; it must be had in the context of faith, and in the way we have conceived God in our experience in that context. More so, every religion is intrinsically functional to the extent that it is a quest for some fulfilment. C. Okeke also expressed this view on this particular point when he wrote:
In Nigeria, from one account of conversion to the other, we hear the same thing: “God did this for me, and he can do the same for you” which should not be discredited…2.
Therefore, the functional aspect of religion is not to be entirely rejected and obliterated. What we are establishing here is a case for a re-direction and re-channeling of our religious objectives in such a way that they, though anthropocentric, do not anchor on the mundane, the finite, but on the metaphysical, the infinite – on God. Consequently, the experience of God would be readily available in Nigeria when our (religious) leaders channel their own goals of self-transcendence towards the metaphysical, and then, lead others to do so.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- ACHUNIKE, H., The Influence Of Pentecostalism On Catholic Priests And Seminarians, In Nigeria, Onitsha: Africana First Pub. Ltd, 2004.
- ALLPORT, G., The Individual and His Religion, New York: Macmillian Company, 1950.
- ARINZE, F., Sacrifice in Ibo religion, Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1970.
- ARINZE, R. N., African Traditional Religion, Nigeria, Rabboni Nig. Ltd., 2001.
- CAMUS, A., The Myth of Sisyphus, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955.
- COPLESTON, F., A History Of Philosophy, London: Continuum publications, 2003, vol. 11.
- EHUSANI, G., An Afro Christian Vision: ‘Ozovehe’, New York: University Press Lf America, 1992.
- GODIN, A., Psychologie des experiences religieuses: la desir et la realite, Eng. Trans. The psychological Dynamics of Religious Experience by M. Turton, Birmingham, Alabama: Religious Education Press, 1985.
- JAMES, W., Varieties Of Religious Experience, New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
- KEE, A., The Way of Transcendence, England: Penguin books Ltd., 1971.