Religion can take many different forms of expression and shapes human life in a variety of ways. The seven types examined here surely do not constitute the only ways of living religion, but they are ones especially prominent within the Christian tradition, even if some emerge more forcefully at certain points of its history and recede at other times. The present investigation has sought to show that despite all continuities and overlaps, these different types constitute distinct ways of living religion that all have their own phenomenality, as visible in their specific structures and their manner of negotiating fundamental human modes of being in the world in spatial, temporal, corporeal, and affective fashion.

Ascetic experience is characterized by a phenomenality of abnegation. Through processes of withdrawal from the world and removal from temptations, including those of thought and affect, the ascetic practices penitence in an intense fashion. Through a careful examination of consciousness and various modes of discernment, ascetic experience is honed to be constantly and diligently attentive to itself. This intense focus on the self is both a denial of the self or of aspects of the self, as well as an attempt to renew and heal the self, to establish a new self oriented toward the divine in constant prayer. The ascetic is often a kind of religious “superstar” in the intensity of effort expended, but this is not an experience of abundance, but rather one of denial and abnegation. At the same time, ascetic experience grapples in a heightened fashion with the fundamental human sense of failure and inadequacy that surely strikes most people at various points of their lives.

Liturgical experience operates a phenomenality of belonging and integration by making space for its participants in a larger whole that precedes them and is prepared for them. The fundamental liturgical structures of repetition and predictability enable people to enter the liturgical experience in a prepared and expectant fashion. Liturgical experience forms identity within community through cycles of confession and celebration, in which the liturgical participants can express contrition, grief, and sorrow, but also forgiveness, joy, and exultation. Liturgy provides ways of coping with various affects and desires through ritualized practices that allow for and channel their expression. In this manner, liturgical experience heightens ordinary experience and enables it to be processed and integrated, showing how ritual more broadly gives meaning to human experience.

Monastic experience is characterized by a phenomenality of communal life that absorbs the individual into the community. Through the structures of the Rule, its regular order, and the overall stability, the monk or nun is absorbed into a synchronized life and cohesive whole. This life is characterized by prayer and labor, in which ideally the two become one: prayer as work and labor as prayer. Monastic experience, especially in its emphasis on humility and mutual love, shapes a communal identity, in which a plural self emerges that each monk or nun takes on and represents. Monastic experience can thus, in an extended and more permanent mode, serve as a lens for the phenomenality of plural experience that occurs in human life more broadly, such as participation in sports, music, dance, and other phenomena that require the joint action of a group of people.

Mystical experience is often excessive in its phenomenality, rich and overwhelming, especially in terms of affect. Mystical experience comes as a gift, as something one is unable to produce oneself, and frequently in great abundance. Yet the mystics always insist that stages of such experience can be discerned, that the experience requires preparation, and that it can serve as a pattern for others. Such writings thus negotiate the tension between uniqueness and exemplarity. Mystical experience is also not wholly without intentionality, but may serve paradigmatically for other experiences of intense joy or ecstasy. Although mystical experience is excessive and often feels extraordinary, it does not take the person out of the human condition. Even when mystics experience themselves as absorbed into the divine and removed from the community, they ultimately always return to themselves and seek to communicate their experience to others.

Devotional experience, like mystical experience, is also highly individual in its search for friendship with the divine. It does so, however, on far more mundane levels than either the mystic or the monastic. Devotional experience is lived in everyday and ordinary life, in a day-to-day prayerful existence, in which prayer accompanies regular activities rather than replacing or suspending them. The devotional self knows itself loved regardless of its failures and shortcomings, experiences these as forgiven and healed, and tries to achieve a likeness to the divine in the most mundane of activities. In many ways it has parallels to less explicitly religious attempts at affirming, integrating, and improving the self.

Compassionate experience is almost wholly focused on the suffering of others. Unlike the other types of religious experiences it is not primarily concerned with the self, although the compassionate person is certainly deeply engaged in life. Compassionate experience is rooted in a fundamental recognition of the precariousness of the other’s condition, a genuine seeing of the plight of others and hearing their call. Compassion responds to this with care for the other that is not simply pity but genuine identification and entering into the experience. This often leads to sharing the life of the poor or indigent one serves. Such experience is marked by a hospitality of accompaniment, solidarity, and living with others, albeit in a far less permanent fashion than the monastic experience, inasmuch as the others with whom one lives and empathizes may well come and go, depending on their need and situation. The compassionate person is moved by the other and forgets the self in an outpouring of care and hospitality to others.

Fundamentalist experience arises out of the fear of a loss of identity and the possibility of existence. In order to combat such loss and find assurance or security, it builds alternative spaces and communities with tightly restricted borders and rigorous rules of conduct. Unlike liturgical and compassionate experience, which both live far more firmly in the present (even as liturgical experience draws past and future into the present), fundamentalist experience is almost entirely projected toward the future, toward a potential end of the world or an end to all possibilities. Through a heavily regulated life in enclave communities, the fundamentalist is separated from the mundane life of the rest of the world, typically perceived as threatening or defiling, and creates an alternate communal identity in a new world, a world no longer shared with others.

These different ways of living religion can thus be distinguished in their phenomenality. Each features a unique manner of living out religion, although transitions and combinations are certainly possible, and individuals often participate in several forms of such life, either successively or simultaneously. The different types of religious experience negotiate the fundamental human structures of temporality, spatiality, corporeality, and affectivity in various ways, and some of these structures are far more important and figure more prominently in some types of experience than in others. It would be worth examining further to what extent such differences can also be observed in other religious traditions, not just in forms of Christianity. Although the focus in this examination has been entirely on Christianity, some very preliminary suggestions about generalizing its insights can perhaps be hazarded in conclusion, in the hope that others with far more expertise will carry this much further.

First, different types of religious experience have differing relationships to space. Spatiality matters profoundly to the ascetic and liturgical experience, but is practically irrelevant to mystical, devotional, and compassionate experience. The devotional and compassionate life can be undertaken anywhere and location only matters insofar as all human experience is spatially located. Mystical experience often explicitly suspends relations to normal space and time, feeling itself “outside” of space in the heights of ecstatic experience. By contrast, the spatiality of the desert serves an important function for ascetic experience, both literally and metaphorically, as a space of withdrawal, a rejection of the urban spaces full of temptation. The desert figures as an abnegation of normal human spatiality. Such removal from “regular” or “ordinary” space seems characteristic of ascetic experience in many religious traditions, where ascetics often live a simple life, stripped of luxuries and sometimes even apparent necessities.

In monastic experience, space is not as radically negated, but also to some extent removed from ordinary life. It becomes a highly organized space and intensely structured time to enable the focused communal living in the monastery. In this regard, it can both imitate ordinary space – to deal with the needs of the body, from growing food to negotiating waste water runoff – and set a counterpoint to it in church and cloister walk, sometimes overlapping with ordinary space in feudal arrangements and in sharing ecclesial space with the surrounding worshiping communities. Fundamentalist space, by contrast, is almost always experienced as a deliberate alternative to ordinary space, as creating its own polis, imitating but separating from that of the society it opposes or by which it feels threatened. Liturgical experience also arranges space but in a quite different manner from monastic spatiality. Here ordinary space is taken and weighted with significance. The boundaries and thresholds between liturgical and ordinary space are far more permeable than those of monastic or fundamentalist spaces. Rather, everyday space is made meaningful by the liturgical experience; some spaces begin to matter more profoundly than others.

It may well be that all ritual spaces constitute such a heightening or deepening of ordinary spatiality, presumably to different degrees depending on the type of ritual. Certainly this seems true of Islamic ritual spaces in Mecca, Medina, and elsewhere, of the site of the Jewish temple, and of many mountains, groves, and springs sacred to indigenous cultures. Here what otherwise seems ordinary achieves a heightened meaning, and space is experienced differently, as more important, as set apart, as “sacred” or holy, without wholly losing its “ordinary” nature (it remains a mountain or river or dwelling place). Similarly, an Indian ashram or a Buddhist monastery organizes space deliberately for communal living in ways that parallel Christian monasticism. At least in some Asian traditions, such spaces do appear somewhat more permeable, however, as monks often leave the monastery for a time to go begging and wandering around the countryside. In this respect, there may well be parallels worth exploring in Christian mendicant orders or the Irish peregrino pro deo, for whom pilgrimage became an important dimension of their spirituality. For such pilgrim monks, the monastic space is extended beyond the monastery: The whole world becomes a cloister walk. These various parallels and differences to other religious traditions, or to the spatiality of other forms of (even secular) ritual, are certainly worth exploring further.

Temporality, too, is figured quite differently in various types of religious experience. Again, it matters not at all in mystical experience, where time can feel suspended for hours while seeming like mere instants. In this regard, Hasidic, Islamic, and Christian mysticism appear to experience temporality quite similarly. The lack of regard for temporality, aside from a general orientation toward and increased awareness of one’s death and the perishability of existence, in ascetic experience also appears to have parallels in various religious traditions, even if the meaning of death is figured differently in them. Like spatiality, temporality plays an important role in liturgical experience, one that has clear parallels to other ritual traditions. Almost all rituals – religious and nonreligious – involve cycles of repetition, recurrences of celebratory occasions that achieve their importance precisely through their repeated regularity, with its dimensions of anticipation and preparation that extend the experienced temporality of the feast beyond the occasion itself. There are seasons in ritual, and ritual hallows the seasons, often including in agricultural senses, especially in many indigenous traditions, where people are usually more aware of their dependence on the agricultural cycles for survival.

It is perhaps less evident that other fundamentalist religious approaches share the Christian fundamentalist orientation to the future or the end times, including its visions of violent conflagration, although heavenly recompense or fear of hell seems to figure in at least some of them. This certainly calls for further examination. As is the case for space, temporality seems comparatively insignificant for devotional and compassionate experience, except to the extent that a sudden disaster or emerging need calls for immediate action, where time grows short to help people. Temporality, then, seems most significant for liturgical experience and, in a quite different sense, for fundamentalist experience, and to matter far less or not at all for the other types of religious experience.

The embodied nature of the human condition is important for almost all forms of religious life in most religious traditions. The ascetic subdues his or her body through rigorous exercises in order to control the mind, thoughts, and emotions and to discipline them firmly. The mystic finds his or her body flooded by emotion and often wracked by illness and pain, a body transformed into flesh by its intense pathos. Liturgical experience is marked in bodily movement, special postures and gestures, and the experience of bodies gathering together in the ecclesial space and moving together in contrition and celebration. This clearly seems to be the case in other forms of religious ritual as well, although the particular forms of such corporeal expression obviously differ and deserve much further examination. Devotional experience is at times less attentive to the body, but more focused on the emotions and on internal experiences. By contrast, in many fundamentalist circles around the world bodies are strictly constrained and require special dress and abstention from many sorts of adornment. Differing from all the other types of religious expression in this regard, compassionate experience cares most profoundly about the bodies of others: the bodies of the poor and suffering, the bodies of neglected children, the bodies of lepers and other outcasts. This, too, has parallels not only in the compassionate work of other religious traditions, but also in the social engagements of nonreligious organizations.

The experiences of affect in various religious ways of life can be almost diametrically opposed to each other. Asceticism combats pathos on all levels and strong affect is usually seen as a threat. This may be more heavily the case in the Christian tradition than in other religious experiences, although at least some strains of Buddhist asceticism clearly also eschew pathos in various ways. Monasticism is not usually quite as firmly opposed to pathos, but affect has at the very least an ambivalent status. Liturgical experience channels affect in particular ways. It calls forth and even enjoins certain kinds of affects and emotions, like sorrow over failings or rejoicing on feast days, but also tries to regulate or at least cope with other sorts of emotions, like grief and despair. Again, the parallels to other forms of religious and nonreligious ritual are suggestive, but need to be explored in more detail.

Mystical and devotional experiences are both drenched in pathos, albeit in quite different ways. The strong expressions of affectivity in mystical experience are often experienced as given, as falling upon the mystic from elsewhere, taking him or her up into the divine. This, too, has parallels in other mystical traditions, such as Sufism and Hasidism. In devotional experience, affect is instead claimed or produced; the affirmation that God loves me intimately and wants to be my friend has to be accepted and is experienced via emotional types of worship and personal devotional exercises. It remains to be seen whether such personal and individualized appropriation of religious spirituality occurs in other traditions as well, but it is at least worth noting that in many places, especially in immigrant contexts, people “mix and match” aspects of various religious provenance according to their personal taste and need in a syncretistic fashion (especially bringing together those of the community of origin with dimensions of the newly adopted environment). This probably goes further than Christian devotional experience, but it seems quite similar in its fundamental phenomenality of enriching mundane experience with individualized significance and meaning.

Personal and communal identity are also negotiated or created in quite a different fashion in different types of religious experience, in a way that at least at first glance has parallels in other religious traditions. The ascetic pursuit is almost exclusively solitary, both in the Christian tradition and in some others, although it can also be practiced more communally in some Asian cultures. Although guidance is counseled at least in the initial stages and ascetics usually come together for worship on regular occasions, generally ascetic experience, at least in the early Christian experience, is a removal from society and human community. It involves a rigorous focus on the self. Such a focus is meant to minimize or reform the self in order to reshape a new kind of self in solitary work on the self. Such work on the self, at least at first glance, has parallels in other ascetic traditions and forms of behavior, even outside a strictly religious context.

Mystical experience is also usually solitary, although it frequently begins in community, from which the mystic becomes removed for a time through the intense experience. Such experience is then shared with others as much as possible, and at times it is even posited as exemplary or as possible to be imitated. While ascetics are also on occasion imitated by others and presented as exemplary by the literature, they themselves usually refuse any sort of adulation and describe themselves as entirely unworthy to be imitated. The monk, in stark contrast to the mystic, is almost entirely absorbed into the community. The monastic self is posited and practiced as a communal self, a self that loses its individuality and takes on the identity of the monastic community. This, too, seems to be the case in monastic communities in other cultures and traditions. Liturgical experience similarly only functions within community, but the participants in liturgical worship are not as completely and permanently absorbed into the community as is the monk or nun. Public ritual, in all human cultures, requires communal participation, although there are obviously also many more personal and private rituals in most religious traditions. These are regulated by the respective communities to a smaller or larger extent. When they are not regulated at all but purely personally designed, they probably cross over into devotional experience.

Almost diametrically opposite to the monastic experience, devotional experience uses the community primarily as a form of finding and affirming the self. The self is experienced as beloved by God, seeks close connection with the divine, and pursues friendship with God on a very personal level. While the particulars may differ and are probably far less focused on sacred scriptures, such personal pursuit of the religious life in terms of piety or devotion is characteristic of many religious traditions. Terms for devotion and possibilities for personal appropriation of religion exist in most religious traditions. The immense appeal of the devotional life around the world – especially in its evangelical and charismatic iterations – also seems to speak to a need for such personal appropriation of religious messages and affirmations.

By contrast, the sort of companionship, solidarity, and hospitality pursued in compassionate experience is focused almost entirely on the other rather than the self. One does not merge with the other or take on a community’s identity entirely as in monastic experience, but one makes one’s own the world and the concerns of the suffering and destitute by participating in their plight, and also by seeking to change the destructive structures of this environment. At least at first glance, such compassionate work takes on similar characteristics in other religious traditions: Helping the poor is central to Judaism and Islam; several groups, such as the Jains, practice nonviolence; and many religious traditions stress the importance of compassion. Fundamentalist experience, instead, often absorbs people and erases their individuality by insisting on complete conformity and forbidding any leaving of the tightly constricted community it has erected. It is dominated by desire for assurance and fear of the other. These aspects, too, have parallels in other forms of fundamentalism around the world, which are often characterized by intense forms of xenophobia and hostility, perhaps capitalizing on deep-seated human fears of the other and desire to protect one’s own identity and resources.

These parallels and differences obviously require far more exploration than is possible here. Both the continuities to broader human experience, even in a nonreligious sense, and the similarities to other religious and spiritual traditions must be worked out far more fully than the brief suggestions given in this exploration of types of Christian ways of living. At the same time, more detailed and deeper examinations of the particular phenomenalities of ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist, or other types of religious experiences would provide increased understanding of their manifestations in human ways of living religion, of their particularities, differences, and areas of overlap. In that regard, these short examinations of a variety of approaches certainly must be expanded and deepened by fuller and more detailed explorations of many different religious traditions in order to confirm and perhaps correct the structures or features highlighted here.

Does all this give us a sense of what “religion” means? What makes the described experiences “religious” rather than everyday, mundane, or ordinary human experience? Phenomenologists – among many other scholars – have attempted to answer that question in a variety of ways. For Marion, an experience is religious (or, more precisely, an experience of “revelation”) if it is so excessive and overwhelming that it could not possibly have been produced or predicted by the recipient. The present examination has shown that this is at best true of the mystical experience, but even then only in qualified fashion. Lacoste describes an experience before “the Absolute” as overturning everyday ways of being in the world through its kenotic nature of total abnegation, a removal from time and space, an undoing of ordinary human relations. This, too, is only the case for some of the types of religious experience explored here, such as most clearly the ascetic, to a lesser extent the monastic, and possibly the fundamentalist experience. It is not an adequate description of liturgical, devotional, or compassionate experience. Henry does not even attempt to distinguish religious from nonreligious experience, but simply claims that Christianity best shows the truth of all human experience as rooted via self-affectivity in the divine life. This is perhaps an adequate description of mystical experience, though only of aspects of this experience, but not of most other types of religious experience.

The various forms of living out religion do not provide a final or definitive answer to what makes all of them religious or would distinguish them from life that is not religious. Rather, their variety might suggest that a search for a single definition is futile and that instead of speaking of different “religions” in the traditional sense, it might be more fitting to speak of a spectrum of different types of religious experience or practice that cut across traditions. Furthermore, for many ways of living religion there are significant continuities to ordinary or mundane ways of living that are true of human life more generally. Ascetic and ritual behaviors can be found also in nonreligious settings. Compassion and care for others are characteristic of many people not associated with religious organizations. Even more intense experiences like mystical ecstasy or certain forms of devotion can appear in more “secular” contexts. In these regards, their religious forms of expression seem to constitute heightened or specialized versions of fundamental aspects of human ways of living in the world.

Religion, one might say, grapples in intense fashion with the human condition in all its varied aspects, especially those that are most difficult or distressing, and thus is never wholly separate from it, nor does it remove the human from the world. It confronts especially the heights and depths of the human condition, with its most intense sorrows, its deepest fears, its strongest desires, its highest joys. Religious experiences can give meaning and significance to these “ultimate” moments of human life. Religious ways of life can shape and even create both personal and communal identity, provide a sense of belonging and assurance. Religion heightens and intensifies certain experiences or enables them to be processed and integrated. It can help to shape and form the self, achieve certain kinds of subjectivity and community, deal with insecurities and inadequacies, enable transformation, authenticity, and integration. Surely, other aspects of the human condition at times serve similar functions. Yet religious practices and traditions that have emerged and developed over long periods of time perhaps do so especially intensively and successfully, particularly when they are integrated into communal ways of belonging that achieve shared meaning. Religion thus confronts the fears and struggles of human existence and provides a variety of ways for living human finitude in meaningful ways.