The Varieties of Religious Experience

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 show more 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. show less

Undoubtedly William James most popular book, I found this to be, as it always is with James, a joy to read. His style kept me going when both the combination strange ideas and impenetrable prose of his cited examples retarded my progress. His focus on the individuality of experience was what struck me as central and certainly most important to me - the mature individualist that I am. While I was not convinced by the mysticism surveyed or the various rationalizations of religious pondering, I came away with a better sense of this type of thought. Unlike Santayana I was not bothered by the focus on "religious disease" or "sick souls", but my perspective, unlike his, is a bit more rational, if not more reasonable. On the whole a very good show more book about a subject that is spiritual in many ways. show less

I was first introduced to William James while earning my degree in psychology. His essay "Habit" struck me as one of the most practical writings of early psychology and the physiological background he grounded his studies in led me to view him as the golden needle hidden in the haystack of psychoanalytic thought that dominates historical discussion.

I had often wondered why he did not receive the attention he deserved while Freud, Jung, etc. get the limelight of history. So, feeling cheated, this was the first psychology book that I read after graduating. It was his masterpiece after all, so what if it is about religion. I quickly found out why he was not given more space in the standard curriculum. This was speaking positively about show more mystical and religious experiences, not simply categorizing and attempting to control them. Without control (power), then "why bother?" seems to be the modus operandi of current psychology.

It wasn't until nearly a decade later that I came across this title from Aleister Crowley's reading list in his Liber E instructions. I had already changed my personal prejudices about mystical experiences, having earned a few, so I gave this work another try. Reading from a mystical to psychological instead of vice versa provides a much more illuminating and interesting read of this book.

The book is organized from lectures that he presented, and as such I decided to read no more than a lecture a day, as if I was going to a class. Allowing the content of each lecture to sink in throughout the day instead of being replaced by the next lecture. I highly encourage such a reading of this book to anyone who performed well in an academic setting. Some lectures are appropriately dense and may appear simple until you repeat a phrase later on in the day and realize that it has deeper meaning.

The token pragmatism of James shows in the way he focuses on qualitative understanding with each topic, with a phenomenological perspective. This pragmatism is also the source of criticism for James. He does not travel too far away from the Protestant Christian framework that he is most familiar with. I consider this critique unfounded. Had James talked at length about Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religion we would probably criticize him speaking with an ignorance of those belief systems. Instead we criticize him for wisely avoiding subjects he knew nothing about. A catch-22 many critics seem to be oddly unaware of.

While psychology students may be barking up the wrong tree with this book (but would benefit from other writings of James), I feel that the religious scholar and religious practitioner can gain quite a bit of insight. There are of course dense passages and due to the age of the material, a trip or two to an appropriately dated dictionary. (Online definitions are unlikely to be the same as the ones James was using and intending.)

Varieties is not without other critiques and deserves a critical reading from anyone, but like most of William James, it is still useful. show less

_The Varieties of Religious Experience_ builds to the climax of James explaining his philosophy of Pragmatism. What I think is important here to the religion vs. rationalism debate is that James has no time for established religion, dogma, or theology. Rather, he focuses on the mystical, individual life-changing experiences people have in sensing the presence of a higher power. These experiences are as real as falling in love - they are a psychological phenomenon that, according to James, bubble up from the subconscious and have direct, pragmatic, positive effects on a person's life. What is missing here is a discussion of cultural influence on these experiences - why do people in Christian culture only frame these experiences in terms show more of Christianity? Do people lack a language outside of their culture to describe these mystical experiences? show less

This is a classic text intersecting religion and psychology and what I found most intriguing was the relevance of James's insights on religion that still resonate today. Debates in the merit, barbarity, utility, and experience of religion are all addressed. In this way I believe it could be a helpful resource to depolarize what I find is a dead-end debate between fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalists Christians because both points of view are seriously engaged without the assertion of a big T truth.

Compiled in 1901 from a series of lectures its author gave at the University of Edinburgh, The Varieties of Religious Experience is a seminal book in the study of comparative religions. It may have been a classic in its time, but it has not aged well, ironically due in part to the advances in the study of comparative religions that it helped to shepherd in.

Whether it be his belief in the superiority of Christianity over non-Christian belief systems (of which even the author admits he knows little), the superiority of Protestantism over Roman Catholicism, or his adherence to the socioeconomic, political, and gender biases of the early 20th century, James's prejudices shine like beacons throughout the text. The technical aspects of his show more writing (noting of sources, research methods, and the like) are also antiquated. James relies heavily on personal conjecture to build his case, often using select quotations and anecdotes to shore up his arguments instead of the other way around.

That said, there are some true gems of insight in this volume, which are made more stunning in light of the fact that James was so obviously not working from a position of rigorous scholarly objectivity. A good volume on comparative religions this sure ain't, but it is certainly still of interest as a relic of contemporary religious thought and interpretation. show less

An interestingly objective viewpoint on religious philosophy, at least as restricted to personal, uniquely religious mindsets. The author includes a plethora of genuinely interesting excerpts from individual monologues related to the topic that do serve to illustrate his eventual position. However, given the date of the material (1902), most of the tools necessary for hard exploration of the topic in the fashion that the author's position necessitates have yet to be developed.