Carol Palfrey revisits The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
I was introduced to The Varieties of Religious Experience at my very first SOF Conference. Richard Hall, a long-standing member, took me under his wing and, during our conversations over the next three days, we got round to discussing William James and his book. Richard kindly offered to give me the copy he had acquired when the school where he was teaching offloaded it during a library clear-out. A few days after my return from the Conference, a parcel arrived at my home and I began what I found to be a fascinating read. Many SOF members will probably be familiar with James – the Norwich Group certainly are – but, for those who are not, I begin with a brief biography.
James was a philosopher, a psychologist and a leading thinker of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was born into a wealthy and intellectual New York family on January 11, 1842. The wealth was inherited from his paternal grandfather, also named William, who started as a poor Irish immigrant and ended his life one of the richest men in America. William was the eldest son of Henry James Senior and Mary Robertson Walsh. One of his four siblings was Henry who would find fame as a novelist and writer and is probably the better known of the brothers. William’s father had somewhat eccentric ideas about education. For example, he did not believe in sending his sons to the American public schools but preferred them to be educated by private tutors in New York City and around Europe, where they travelled extensively. It was during a trip to London that Henry James Senior had what he described as a ‘frightening religious experience’ but eventually found solace in the theology of the 18th century Swedish theologian, Emmanuel Swedenborg, which influenced him for the rest of his life.
Initially, William James aspired to be either an artist or a scientist. He studied painting but then changed direction and enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School, where he studied chemistry and physiology. In 1864 he went on to Harvard Medical School and the following year took a break from education to join a scientific expedition to the Amazon basin. He also spent some time in Germany recuperating from various health problems, including depression. After obtaining his medical degree in 1869, he decided not to practise medicine but became a lecturer at Harvard and ultimately Professor of Psychology and Philosophy. In the States he is known as ‘the Father of Psychology’, as he was the first academic to offer a course in psychology. His masterwork on the subject was The Principles of Psychology. He later became known for The Will to Believe and Essays in Popular Philosophy.
James married Alice Howe Gibbens in 1878 and had five children, including two who bore the traditional family names of William and Henry. In 1900 William James crossed the Atlantic from America to Edinburgh to deliver twenty lectures as part of the annual Gifford Lectures series founded by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887). Gifford was a wealthy Edinburgh lawyer and Senator of the Scottish College of Justice. He had attended a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution and, despite being a practical, down-to-earth Scottish Presbyterian, he was blown away by Emerson’s ideas about a personal theology and beliefs about God. Emerson proposed an idealistic conception of the universe in which all its interrelated parts, including the natural world and the human mind, mirrored each other: ‘A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.’ In his will Gifford left a bequest to the four ancient universities of Scotland – Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Aberdeen – to sponsor a series of annual lectures to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term.’ Since the first lectures in 1888, Gifford Lecturers have been recognised as pre-eminent thinkers in their respective fields. They can be from any religious persuasion or none.
Among the many distinguished figures who have presented Gifford Lectures – which include Niels Bohr, Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton, Jonathan Sacks, Rowan Williams and Iris Murdoch – you will find Don Cupitt, who was part of a team of six lecturers each addressing the topic ‘Humanity, Environment and God.’ It is interesting to note that Richard Dawkins was a member of the team.
The twenty lectures which William James delivered at weekly intervals in 1900–1901 were very well received and attracted an increasing number of listeners as the weeks went by; they have been heralded by some as the greatest lectures ever to be presented in the series. The lectures were later published as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, which became an unexpected best seller. It is still in print, as well as being available in Kindle and audiobook formats. It has been argued that it is one of the most important books ever written on the topic of religious experience.
As case studies he uses first-hand accounts of experiences identified by the subjects as ‘religious’, in the words of the people who told him their stories. James surveys these experiences from the point of view of a psychologist and considers the implications of his findings for philosophy. For the purpose of the study, the definition James proposes for religion is ‘the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.’
The descriptions of religious experiences include such expressions as: ‘I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is and felt the consciousness of unity with all that is.’ And: ‘On the way back into the town, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven – an inward state of peace and joy and assurance, indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light.’
For James religious experience is true religion, and what lies at the heart of religion, whereas religious teachings, practices and dogma are what he calls ‘second hand’ religion. He suggests that the phenomenon of religious experience points to a higher order of reality, which some people might choose to call God. James himself did not belong to any religious denomination and does not speak directly of God. He prefers terms such as ‘the spiritual’ and ‘the higher aspects of the world and the self’.
Based on his study, James identifies two types of people. First there are those whom he calls the ‘healthy minded’. These are people who don’t have to struggle to find happiness in life. He refers to them as ‘the once-born’. Among these are such figures as St Francis, Rousseau, Diderot and Spinoza. Above all, he cites Walt Whitman as the supreme example of the person whose ‘soul is of a sky blue’ and who finds happiness in Nature. In contrast are the second type whom he calls the ‘sick souls’. These he divides into two categories. Those in the first category believe there is evil in the world which makes us commit evil deeds. The way to deal with this and be absolved of guilt is to pray and to hold on to hope. Some of these, particularly those with religious roots in the southern countries of Europe and in Roman Catholicism, may find salvation through confession and absolution. Those in the second category, who are more likely to have their religious origins in northern European Protestantism, believe that sin is with us from birth and is inescapable. However, they can find hope through religious experience. One example of this type is Tolstoy, who concluded that because it was finite, life had no meaning and reason alone could not solve the puzzle of existence; only faith in an infinite spiritual life, found through religious experience, could provide salvation.
James coined the term ‘the divided self’ to describe these sick souls and suggests that religious experience can bridge the gap. If these sick souls can do this, they can undergo conversion and can thus be ‘twice-born’. The most famous conversion experiences are those of St Paul and St Augustine. Sceptics may view many of the religious experiences described as examples of psychological disorders. But James saw them as central to understanding of any religion. His aim was to be an objective observer and to take seriously accounts of what people describe as ‘religious experiences’ and to make observations about them.
James was particularly interested in the effects of religious experience on people’s lives and believed that the validity of an experience could be judged by the effect it produced: are lives changed by it? This was his way of testing them. He was more concerned with ‘does it work?’ than ‘is it true?’. He wanted to examine the experiences objectively and was not interested in proving if they were true or false. ‘Judge religion by its fruits, not its roots’, he says.
James acknowledged the difficulty of defining religious experiences, so he proposed four criteria that he considered to be characteristic of all religious and mystical experiences. Ineffable: no adequate description can be given in words; language limitations prevent description. Noetic: not ‘just feelings’ but a deep and direct knowledge of God which could not have been achieved through reason alone — experiences which reveal ‘truth’. Transient: the experience is temporary and cannot be sustained, although its effects may last a long time; it can develop and deepen with subsequent experiences. Passive: not initiated by the mystic but rather by the sense that something is acting upon them; the experience is controlled from outside themselves.
To summarise the main arguments which James makes in The Varieties: (1) The spiritual value of religious experience is not undone, even if a psychological explanation for it can be found. Religious experience is not the result of a repressed or perverted sexuality (Freud’s theory) — such an approach is an attempt to discredit religion by those who start out with an antipathy towards it. (2) There is no one single feature of a religious experience which defines it as such. (3) The experiences of great religious figures can set patterns for the conventional believer to study. Saintly people such as St Teresa of Avila, by their example, can show Christians how to be strong and how to help others to make progress in their spiritual lives. (4) Religious experience is more important than focussing on a study of religious institutions, as these are examples of secondary religion.
From his extensive study of personal accounts of religious experience James concludes: religious experience does not give proof of anything; however, it is reasonable for individuals to believe that there is a personal God who is interested in the world and individuals. It is not reasonable for anyone to reject evidence of religious experience just because they start from a position of scepticism. There are, of course, numerous sceptics, including Bertrand Russell, who argue against James’s thesis.
Carol Palfrey is Secretary to SOF Trustees and the convenor of the Norwich SOF Group.