A Critical Study of C.F.Davis's Views on Revelatory Religious Experiences

Revelatory experiences which are regarded as a major type of religious experiences comprise what their subjects may call sudden convictions, inspiration, revelation, enlightenment, the mystical vision and flashes of insight. In Davis's point of view, these experiences have distinctive features: (i) They are usually sudden and of short duration; (ii) the alleged new knowledge seems to the subject to have been acquired not through reasoning or sense perception; (iii) the alleged new knowledge usually seems to the subject to have been ' poured into ' or ' showered upon ' him her by an external agency; (iv) the revelations carry with them utter convicition; (v) the gained insights are often claimed to be impossible to put into words. This paper is to present how Davis describes religious experiences of this category from a Christian philosophical approach to religion. It also studies her point of views from a critical Islamic mystical vision. Through this critical and comparative study, it would be revealed that what Davis claimed to be known as revelatory religious experiences has close relationship with what is called "Kashfe Malanavi" (spiritual intuition) in Islamic mysticism. These are examined closely in Muslim's mystical sources. Distinction between Prophet's revelation and other instances of revelatory religious experiences and exploring their main differences were of close attention for Muslim mystics (Orafa).