Medjugorje and the Supernatural: Science, Mysticism, and Extraordinary Religious Experience by Daniel Maria Klimek (review)

Initially I was a bit hesitant to review this book, as the promotional materials gave me the impression of it being an apologetic, rather than scholarly work. In its very first line the book starts with a comparison between the storytelling of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and Medjugorje, asserting that the latter is different because the site of the appearance of the Virgin Mary is not about storytelling but about truth. Yet Medjugorje itself presents an extremely ambiguous continuing story, especially with the incessant visionary narratives that have attracted millions of people, while also creating intra-ecclesiastical discord and a multibillion apparition industry in Bosnia Herzegovina’s Middle-earth.

However, the book proved to be, for the most part, a very well written monograph about the apparitions, placing them in the phenomenological contexts of public and private revelations, mysticism, medicine and science, and within the debate between perennialists and constructivist thinkers on those issues. But at some point, when Daniel Klimek begins to defend his methodological approach and anticipate the critical reviews that might result, things started to shift again. The Catholic theologian points out that such reviews would be, in his eyes, another example of “erroneous” and “uncritical materialism” (272), or a “cynical” interpretation in “material rationalism” (339). Such interpretations would thus reveal the “reductive and absolutist” reasoning of the reviewers. But what does that all mean?

Klimek’s book addresses the Marian apparitions of Medjugorje, which started in 1981 and are ongoing to the present day. In relation to those apparitions, the author wants to challenge “reductive interpretations,” which are, to him, the sole perspective still applied in scholarly research. His main point is that a natural explanation does not necessarily fit everything in the world. Klimek claims that, especially in the case of Medjugorje (but a fortiori to a lesser extent for many other miraculous apparitions past and present), an abundant amount of data is acquired that points at the supernatural character of “Medjugorje.” He asks for a “courageous” holistic approach that “humbly and openly considers the multidimensional potential that may be present in the extraordinary experiences of mystics, including the supernatural and paranormal alongside the natural” (119–20).

In an interesting chapter on the philosophy of science, Klimek discusses the relevant epistemological and hermeneutical considerations applied to religious experience, starting with William James and others, via Ann Taves, and ending with his “hero” Robert Orsi. The whole effort comes down to overcoming the opposition between the physical and the metaphysical in order to address “the myth of secular neutrality.” He criticizes the heritage of Enlightenment thinking and skepticism—its “monopoly on the truth”—and condemns what he calls present day neurological and psychiatric reductionism. Moreover, in a type of conspiracy thinking, Klimek perceives underlying ideological agendas and censorship, and claims that “scholars refuse . . . other modes of thinking” (279). My guess is that the conspirators are religious studies scholars, anthropologists, and historians who do not accept theological claims as scientific.

Klimek wants neuroscientific and neurotheological thinking to be applied to the Medjugorje visions (168–70) in order to realize the reconciliation of religion and science. For him it is obvious that there is “more”—“the non-existence of the Virgin Mary has not been proven” (248). He proposes a transition from an “approach of absence” to an “approach of presence” of supernatural forces (247). With Medjugorje as a source of scientific data, he calls for an inductive research approach (instead of a deductive approach) and a more interdisciplinary type of investigation. For an ethnologist such as myself, the inductive approach sounds like music to my ears, and I am always in favor of interdisciplinary explorations. So far so good. Contrary to these methodologies, however, he mentions that only theologians can judge alleged mystical phenomena, and that it is ultimately an ecclesiastical decision to establish whether they are of supernatural origin (192).

At some point the book...