Mesoscope's Reviews > The Varieties of Religious Experience

It's impressive how well this book has withstood the passage of time. More than a century after its publication, it continues, on the whole, to feel extremely fresh and insightful, compared with the works of some other psychologists whom I could name. Like ... people whose name rhymes with "Kroid." But I digress.

Unlike the dogmatic theoretic architectonics that would increasingly dominate the field of psychology in the twentieth century, James subscribed to an empirical pragmatism that is quite current. On the basis of his minimal overt theoretical commitments, he uses this book as an opportunity to reflect systematically on the nature and import of religious experience in its various expressions, in the service of beginning to lay the foundation for a theoretical science of religion, by which we may empirically examine the roll religion plays in people's lives.

He has thus unapologetically advanced his model of religion as primarily a matter of individual experience, and these two words, of course, carry an enormous amount of baggage. Religion is for James, first and foremost, a system of sentiments and beliefs operating in counterplay with various kinds of experience, including prayer, conversion, and, most importantly, rare mystical experiences of ineffable union with the absolute, howsoever that may be conceived.

It is without a doubt the book's primary limitation that he sticks to that model, which works very well with the liberal Protestant theology and Transcendentalist philosophy which saturated his zeitgeist, but the farther we travel out from that center, the less universal his model of religion may seem. There's a case to made that it is applicable to many forms of Buddhism and some Hindu philosophies such as Advaita Vedanta, but by the time we get to Confucianism, his focus on the individual relationship with the divine starts to lose touch. And when we leave the high civilizations behind and apply his model to the Tlingit, the Navajo, the Mayans, or the Hawaiians, we're on very shaky ground indeed.

What endures is a thorough and thoughtful of examination of the religious traditions that were nearest to hand, and a still-valuable analysis of their basic patterns of expression. That may form the basis, at least, of more diverse comparative work.

Some modern readers may be put off at times by its grand style and the sometimes-homilistic tone of the book, but they may do so at their peril, as it's easy to mistakenly infer a certain intellectual complacency that is regularly contradicted by the sophistication of his analysis. James's book remains a classic in the field of the psychology of religion, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.