Sensing Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual Perception Frederick D. Aquino and Paul L. Gavrilyuk, editors Introduction Sensory language is commonly used to describe human encounters with the divine. In scripture, believers are enjoined to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good’ (Ps 34:9), prophets ‘hear the word of the Lord’ (Isa 1:10), and the beatitude promises that ‘the pure in heart will see God’ (Mt 5:8). These biblical passages seem to point to certain features of human cognition that make perception-like contact with divine things possible. But how precisely should these statements be construed? What implications do such statements have for theological anthropology and the philosophy of perception? Can the elusive notion of ‘spiritual perception’ survive a rigorous theological and philosophical scrutiny and receive a constructive articulation? Rationale and Methodology Sensing Things Divine seeks to make theological and philosophical sense of spiritual perception. The constructive vision of the volume builds on the historical groundwork provided in the collection of essays, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). This volume surveyed the theme of spiritual perception throughout Christian history, beginning with Origen of Alexandria and ending with the twentieth-century theologians, such as Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and William Alston. Diachronically arranged, the study was largely descriptive and highly selective and thus focused primarily on the Christian authors who gave a theoretical articulation of the notion of spiritual perception. One such articulation was made by Karl Rahner, who wrote: ‘It seems prudent to speak of a doctrine of the spiritual senses only when these partly