A Philosophical Psychologist's Plea for Spirituality in a Scientific Age
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" is a justly famous classic that has inspired and delighted generations of readers with its charm, wisdom, and open-mindedness since its original publication in 1902. So, why should it still need a review now, over a century later?
William James pioneered a now familiar approach to religion that was still quite novel a century ago. Until then, the literature of religion consisted either of the theologies of particular religions, evangelistic arguments for one religion against others, or "freethinking" attacks on religion by atheists, materialists, or skeptics. James' "Varieties," however, did not argue either for or against religion, for Protestantism against Catholicism (or vice versa), or for Christianity against Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism (or vice versa). He equally avoided the late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century irreligious inverse dogmatism of Freud forecasting "The Future of an Illusion," James Frazer's "Golden Bough" anthropologizing religion into barbaric rituals and pre-scientific myths, Emile Durkheim reducing religion to a reflection of the social structure, or the "medical materialism" of psychologists and psychiatrists explaining religion as a product of nervous disorder or sexual, digestive, or glandular disturbance. Indeed, his opening lecture, "Religion and Neurology," was a critique of such "medical materialism."
Instead, James' Varieties staked out a new third position, distinct both from the supporters of particular religions and from typical Victorian and fin de siècle skeptics and materialists. Its very sub-title, "A Study in Human Nature," expressed James' view of religion as a fundamental human trait, not easily to be explained away and unlikely to vanish with improved education, scientific knowledge, or control of Nature. It "cannot be a mere anachronism and survival" of a primitive past, he concluded, but "must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content...true or false." James was thus an early precursor of later impartially sympathetic investigators of religion like Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Ninian Smart, Huston Smith, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Harvey Cox, Karen Armstrong, and Tanya Marie Luhrmann, all equally critical like him of the twin dogmatisms of fundamentalist sectarian exclusivity and of "freethinking" positivistic "Enlightenment."
Called "that adorable genius" by Alfred North Whitehead, noted for his kindness and courtesy, James had a small-c catholic sympathy for all sincere religious expressions with fruits of spiritual peace. He rarely condemned or ridiculed, always preferring to gently, politely disagree, to emphasize the positive aspects of every belief or experience. Still, he sometimes did betray his inherited 19th century New England WASP "Brahmin" prejudices in criticizing of what he considered the ascetic and devotional excesses of some Catholic saints--e.g., the obsessive super-chastity ("Purity...is NOT the only thing needful") and extreme penances of Aloysius Gonzaga (whose "intellect" was "no larger than a pin's head"), Teresa of Ávila's "shrewish bustle" and supposed view of religious devotion as an "amatory flirtation" with God, or Catherine of Siena's advocacy of a crusade against the Turks to unify Christendom (though he equally condemned Luther's and Cromwell's bloodthirsty bellicosity). His Brahmin prejudices may have also led him to deplore 16th century Catholicism's supposed neglect of "social righteousness" and "helpfulness in general human affairs," though he also admired early Jesuit missionaries like Francis Xavier, Jean de Brébeuf , and Isaac Jogues as "objective minds" who "fought in their way for the world's welfare," so that "their lives to-day inspire us." However, I also suspect many liberal contemporary Catholics would sympathize with some of James' criticisms. James himself felt that to "educated Catholics," many of the Church's "antiquated beliefs and practices, if taken literally," seem "as childish as they are to Protestants--but childish in the pleasing sense of 'childlike'--innocent, amiable, and worthy to be smiled upon--but 'idiotic falsehoods' to Protestants." This was QUITE generous for an upper-crust WASP of James' day! He was just as critical of the vagaries of some evangelical Protestants, as in a censorious woman he interviewed who self-righteously withdrew from her "worldly" and "hypocritical" church and from society to live alone in a boarding-house solipsistically writing pamphlets of endless "dreamy rhapsody" on "crucifixion" as the ultimate step in salvation beyond conversion and sanctification.
James' focus throughout the "Varieties" is always on the ways individuals have personally experienced God, the spiritual, or the supernatural, in prayer, conversion, or mysticism--rarely on organized religion or on theology. The book abounds in countless individual case histories of profound personal experiences, largely in the form of excerpts from memoirs and autobiographies, from men and women both within and outside organized religion (e.g., "unchurched" mystics like Whitman, Tolstoy, and R.M. Bucke). His most justly celebrated lectures describe "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," "The Sick Soul," "The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification," and "Conversion," but he also presents very interesting discussions of "Mysticism," "Saintliness," "The Value of Saintliness," and prayer. Without the "nothing more than" reductivism of the "medical materialism" he decried, James compared the process of religious conversion, as an experience of spiritual crisis followed by release, peace, and certainty, to the natural process of adolescence. James gave much emphasis on the "unconscious," popularized at the time by investigators like Freud, describing it as the source of profound religious experiences and not merely a sub-basement of anarchical sexual and aggressive impulses as Freud did. With his stress on their subconscious source, James did not deny the divine origin of religious experiences, but allowed our subconscious selves to be our connection to God. He left it an open question as to whether such experiences simply connected us to a wider self than our usual mundane everyday waking selves, or to an actual supernatural reality outside ourselves, neither dogmatically asserting nor denying the existence of such a reality.
In his lecture on "Mysticism," James cited the "extremer examples" of his "theopathic" characters as yielding the most interesting and suggestive insights on the nature of the phenomenon, but drew an open-mindedly, sympathetically cautious lesson. "Mystical states," he argued, "usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come." Still, he then added, "No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside them to accept their revelations uncritically." Mystics, James continued, have "no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto." Rather, the "utmost they can ask of us" is "to admit that they establish a presumption" of the strong but not absolutely certain possibility of wider or higher orders of reality than those normally accessible to our ordinary everyday non-mystical consciousness. In other words, a mystic's experiences cannot be taken as an infallible guarantee of the absolute truth of his theology, metaphysics, or moral code, of her beliefs on Heaven, Hell, the Last Judgment, angelic hierarchies. evolution and creation, abortion, gay marriage, or women clergy. At best, we can "combine what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently."
James ardently defended the value of a wide variety of types of religious devotion and experience, suitable to individual temperaments and social circumstances, emphatically rejecting a "one size fits all" insistence on uniformity. "If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman," he declared in his concluding lecture, "the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer." In his lecture on "The Value of Saintliness," he compared saints, mystics, earnest social reformers, and dedicated patriots to artists and differing artistic schools, observing that "We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind of indulgence." We are "glad they existed to show us that way but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life." So, too, with regard to saints and mystics, we are "proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example." Rather, "the conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort." It is "less dependent on particular beliefs and doctrines," and "wears well in different ages." We who have "no vocation for the extremer ranges of sanctity," he felt, "will surely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive sort," as "much that it is legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated," and "religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are subject to the law of the golden mean."
James' section on "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" included an overview of the "Mind-cure movement," his preferred name for "New Thought," the late 19th and early 20th century forerunner of today's New Age and positive thinking. He listed its sources as the Gospels, New England Transcendentalism, Berkeleyan Idealism, Spiritualism, and popular-science optimistic evolutionism. James cautiously commended what he saw as its wholesome effects in encouraging a healthy optimism and discouraging querulous complaining and self-pity. However, he criticized it for ignoring the inevitability of failure and tragedy in human life. He also found the "verbiage" of some of the "mind-cure" literature "so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it all." Here James anticipated today's "academically trained" late 20th and early 21st century "cultural elites" who still find contemporary positive thinking and popular self-help ("psychobabble") literature so "moonstruck with optimism" and willfully blind to the very real physical and socio-economic obstacles to human personal fulfillment as to be almost unreadable!
James saw religion as ultimately resting not on theology, philosophy, or formal creeds but on feeling--on the yearning for deliverance from suffering, and on mystical experience. Feeling was the "deeper source" of religion, while "philosophic and theological formulas" were "secondary products." Religious experience "spontaneously and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of those by the adherents of another." In "a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed," he doubted "whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed." A "dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe" apart from religious feeling would have led to "animistic explanations of natural fact," and "criticized these away into scientific ones" as in our own world, as well as "a certain amount of 'psychical research,'" just as our own scientists "now will probably have to re-admit a certain amount." Here James obliquely alluded to his own active interest in investigating the paranormal, as a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research.
The ultimate core of all religion for James was the sense of release, salvation, or redemption from a sense of fundamental lack or wrongness in one's life through the self's identification with or surrender to a higher, wider self in turn felt to be "continuous with a More of the same quality...operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with," leading to "feelings of security and joy" in our union or communication with it. James did not absolutely "know," but was willing to "venture," that there was an "actual inflow of energy in the faith state and the prayer state." He believed that "the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist," as against the "sectarian scientist's" denial of anything outside "the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects"--thus anticipating the later 20th century interest in "altered states of consciousness." His studies of religious experience convinced James that "we can experience union with SOMETHING larger than ourselves and in that union find peace," that "beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals." This might well be the one unique infinite God of monotheist religion and philosophy, the Judaeo-Christian Jehovah or metaphysical Absolute. However, he added, it might also be "only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression." The "universe" might then be "a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity," in a return to "polytheism" which James did not necessarily defend, but only mentioned as a possibility. In any case, the phenomenon of "prayerful communion" did strongly suggest that in "certain kinds of incursions from the subconscious region" of our personalities "something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves," from "a wider world of being than our every-day consciousness," "actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways." Years later, by the way, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson cited this section of James' "Varieties" as his inspiration for the AA "Higher Power," which the individual recovering alcoholic is free to identify either with God, with his or her own higher self, or with the AA fellowship itself.
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A living force in spiritual literature - for believer and non-believer alike
It is both as philosopher and experimental psychologist that William James approached the study of religious phenomena. Conversion, repentence, mysticism, hopes of reward and fears of punishment in the hereafter are studied with boldness, sympathy and the unbiased common sense of science. The result is a book that has stood the test of time and continues to stimulate readers more than a century after it was conceived. It represents a living force in religious/spiritual literature, for believer and non-believer alike.
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2013
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maria teresa moscatoReviewed in Italy on October 5, 2023
Studio psicologico e filosofico (1902) alle origini degli studi moderni sull'esperienza religiosa
- GregReviewed in Japan on June 29, 2020
Classic Work, Well Produced, Good Introduction
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- Coscob QuakerReviewed in Canada on January 18, 2014
Classic Description of the personal religious experiences
