Yes. This is how I see what I study, pretty much:

“Finally and most controversially, I believe that religious experience reveals the traces, however opaquely filtered, of a real and transcendent object. This is not to exclude the possibilities of self-deception and deliberate fraud, both common in medieval Christendom as in all societies where religion is a hegemonic force. Nor is it to deny what I have just asserted: the presence of innumerable and rarely translucent filter, both psychological and social, that serve to veil the transcendent object. In fact, my essays deal explicitly with these “filters” and not with what lies beyond them. I write as a historian and literary critic, not as a theologian. Nevertheless, I assert this conviction to clarify my theoretical stance and to overthrow the last bastion of reductionism, To leave a space for transcendence means to allow for the possibility that, when historical subjects assert religious belief or experience as the motive of their actions, they may at times be telling the truth. it also means to accept the irreducibility of the phenomena, and thereby to reject all totalizing explanations. The complexity of human experience, but especially of the divine, is such that no historical reconstruction can be more than partial and provisional. Where not trace of uncertainty remains, there bias and illusion hold triumphant sway.”

Newman, Barbara. 1995. From Virile Woman to womanChrist: Studies in medieval religion and literature. Philidelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 16-17.

I've been avoiding reading this for a while, because the title just about gave me hives (not the ideas, the typography), but it's very good, and the passage I've quoted above gave me a strong feeling of recognition. It's freeing to hear respected scholars talking like that (the only other historian I've heard insist on the validity of the religious experience is Dinzelbacher, who has never got that even geniune experience must be literised and therefore is legitimately subject to literary analysis, which is a very unhelpful attitude).

It also clarifies why I've been feeling fraustared with the course of my research: examinig the 'filters' feels increasingly like missing the point, interesting and valid and important though it is. Maybe I am in the wrong line of country, after all. Or rather: maybe I need to find a way from here to there?