path's Reviews > The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

This book is a study of religious experiences that treats them with both sincerity and critical scientific discernment. William James, the pragmatist philosopher and Harvard psychologist, concludes that religious experience is psychologically meaningful. Whether those experiences actually reflect connection to the divine, in a spiritual sense, is ultimately beside the point. What make religious experiences meaningful is that they describe a reaching out, a desire to engage with the divine, to feel its immensity, and to formulate belief about its nature so as to fix a course of action through which we attempt to understand or put to use our understanding of the world.

Religious belief (broadly defined, see below), in other words, is part of the enterprise of knowing, and not only is it not to be stood apart and in diminished light from other ways of knowing, but it should be seen as both comparable to other forms of inquiry and perhaps as an essential part of that inquiry insofar as we grapple with the unknown, form beliefs, and act upon those beliefs across many forms of inquiry (secular and religious). The broader intellectual exercise that James wants to situate religious experience against is the heart of what Charles Sanders Peirce (another pragmatist) called “abductive reasoning” or the forward progress of thought made through leaps of reasoning based on belief.

The book is pretty remarkable considering what James was trying to accomplish and where. This book is a collection of twenty lectures given as part of the Gifford Lecture series, an ongoing lecture series intended “to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term” by inviting a variety of different viewpoints on the topic. James’ account is grounded in psychology through which he attempted to understand the religious mindset without emptying it of its religious significance by reducing it to classification of mental states or mental aberrations (9, 13). Instead, he offers a descriptive account of religious experience based on first hand accounts as evidence of developing understanding.

Defining the Subject

James defines religion as “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 the divine” (31). Notably, religion by this definition is inclusive of secular manifestations, including the scientific. He says “we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity of not” (34). It is “a primal reality” that the individual “feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely” (38). One can imagine particle physicists, anatomists, biologists, chemists all peering into the divine through their work and seeing a hint of something grander than what their awareness and knowledge currently allows them to apprehend. What that beyond is … is unknown but it is felt as a gap, something missing that we strive to understand the truth of.

James picks up the point that people acting on behalf of a religious belief do so out of respect for what is unseen but that they understand to be consistent with the divine. Importantly, this belief in what is unseen forms the basis for action. “Many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which the intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of the quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended” (64).

The Healthy-Minded and Sick Souls

The religious experiences that James wants to understand, ultimately, pertain to our engagement with the divine and the impediments toward that engagement/understanding. To this point, James describes the healthy-minded and the sick souls. The healthy-minded are attracted to the ineffability of the divine, seek to understand it through their deeds (121). Sick souls are those who have a troubled engagement with the world that prevents their engagement with the divine. This might be conventionally understood as vice or sin or some other obstruction that may be removed through repentance (128).

Conversion and Saintliness

It is in this context of the sick soul that James discusses accounts of conversion, a working through the psychological state of the divided self whose connection to the divine is impeded. A conversion is the expulsion of one state (e.g., ignorance) via transformation (194). Here, too, we can see this kind of mental state in a secular way. A religious convert is one who can see “the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works […] the habitual centre of his personal energy” (196) and when one is converted, those ideas which had been obscured, unfocused, our in the periphery move to the center and come into focus (196). James pursues this understanding through stories of transformations whereby people claim to be cured of drunkenness, wrath, etc., enabling them to adopt normative moral standards and catch some glimpse of the divine.

He also describes saintliness as a state of perfected being in which people of a religious inclination feel that they are participating in a world that is wider and more significant than that of self-based interests (272). They have given themselves to the ideal and feel a sense of freedom to pursue that knowledge (273), accompanied by great devotion to a god or a more extra-individual pursuit (290). Quite a bit follows on this subject and on mysticism as a form of inaccessible knowing.

Religious Experience, Knowing, and Belief

Religion is founded on beliefs that 1) the visible world is part of a spiritual or ideal world 2) to which we want to align our understanding and thinking and we do so through 3) commune or interaction with the ideal (485). Religious experience taps into our subconscious awareness of the world.

“If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’s cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much” (489). Virtue is in knowledge through action. Religious experience, understood more broadly as the formation and fixation of belief is a kind of knowledgable engagement with the world through which we 1) grasp our imperfect understanding, 2) develop the desire to strive toward a perfection, and 3) form the beliefs (sometimes subconsciously) upon which to act and bring about that perfection or develop knowledge of it that is 4) testable by reason and experiences, and 5) subject to such verification, understanding that the realm of experience must also include other individuals similarly striving (498-501; 508)

James also attempts to understand whether philosophical approaches can help us understand the significance of religious experience but concludes that it is of limited value because it does not easily get at feelings or beliefs, which are the grounds from which we seek rational or empirical confirmation. “Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our notion on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits” (444). And because beliefs are born from feelings from connection to the divine, we must do away with dogmatic theology, which substitutes inquiry and feeling with ritual and observance (448). Belief becomes the basis for acting and acting is the testbed from which we gather experience that we can rationalize about and form the basis of new beliefs (450). Religious mindset is the willingness to engage in that feeling and to develop those beliefs.