mystical experience

The article traces the formation of the mystical experience of Nikolai Sergeevich Arseniev (1888–1977) on the basis of the memoir book “Gifts and Encounters of the Life Path” (1974), and the stages of his consideration of biblical studies. The analysis of Arseniev’s exegetical work “The Religious Experience of the Apostle Paul” (1935) is proposed. He was one of the Russian thinkers in whose writings the Holy Scripture occupied a central place, and almost all of his religious ideas grew out of New Testament books, and biblical concepts.

Introduction. The common version that mystical experience reveals the deep unity of religious traditions, hiding behind the external facade of their diff erences, seems controversial. Theoretical analysis. It is justifi ed that the similarity between diff erent traditions of mysticism does not express the quintessence of religiosity, as such, but onlyconvergence in a certain phase of the evolution of religions. Mysticism is compared with the entry of religion into the phenomenological phase of development.

It is proved that the superrationality of Christian mystical experience qualitatively diff ers from the superrationality of other mystical traditions. In addition to the superrationality of Eternity as an invariant of all sacred traditions, Christian experience is superrational in the aspect of the Coming state of adoration, which is a task, not a given. This aspect is unique as an attribute of Christian mystical experience only. In the aspect of Eternity, mystical unity with the God is understood in metaphors of rotation, fusion and dissolution.

Trajectories of intersection and divergence between philosophical and religiously mystical versions of the ontology of being-in-time are studied in the article. It is concluded that the soul is constituted in qualitatively different time than “I”. If the soul is the junction of times, then “I” lives in the place of time breaking. The exit from time to eternity is preceded by the transformation of temporality by the junction of time in the modus of the present.