The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

First published: 1902

Type of work: Religious philosophy

The Work:

Philosopher William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is based on a series of twenty Gifford lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, beginning in May, 1901. James was asked to discuss natural religion, which traditionally had been conceived as a discipline on the border between philosophy and theology. As such, natural religion was thought to exclude both the notion of divine revelation and any claim of tangible religious experience. James’s own concept differed in looking not at God as an object of devotion but at human attitudes toward God, including belief, supplication, direct experience, and doubt and disbelief. The word “varieties” in the book’s title indicates James’s intention to catalog and evaluate the range of religious experiences accessible to different human faculties. Indeed, James denies that there is only one “religious sentiment.”

The invitation to lecture in Edinburgh left James both exultant and humbled, as he admitted in his first address: “It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience.” James’s characteristic modesty aside, the magnitude of the subject, even in a twenty-lecture format, was daunting. His initial plan was to devote ten lectures to descriptive, or psychological, examination and the remaining ten lectures to metaphysical considerations based on his philosophical studies. Though a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, James had studied psychology and had also earned a medical degree. He had spent so much time on the psychological aspects of religious experience that he had little time left for the metaphysical, aside from his brief conclusions about the distinctive qualities of the religious life.

James begins his study by examining testimony about religious experience. He thinks his investigation would be most fruitful if confined to religious pioneers rather than to those who have followed their teachings. James identifies two different questions one must ask about the articulation of religious experience: What is its origin, and what is its significance or value? For example, while affirming that the Bible has great spiritual value, one might ask under what “biographic conditions” and states of mind its authors contributed to it. James attacks the common failure to make this distinction, a failure that can lead some to dismiss the value of religious thinking because of a thinker’s flaws. Similarly, he notes that Quakerism is a highly admirable faith, but quotes at length from the journal of its founder, George Fox, to show “pathological aspects” in Fox’s thinking. However, declares James, Fox’s mental instability should not negate the significance of the Quaker faith, which, indeed, “is impossible to overpraise.” James also points out that one can just as readily find mental and physical defects among atheists and agnostics, for example.

James then questions the meaning of the divine, as conceived by human beings, and asks what constitutes a religious experience. He wishes to avoid an excessively narrow definition, for “There are systems of thought which the world usually calls religious, and yet which do not positively assume a God.” Buddhism, for example, has been called a “hopeless” or “atheistic” religion; and the Transcendental philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson “seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality.” For James, the divine is “the first and last thing in the way of power and truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true.”

On the question of what makes a religious experience, James asserts that the religious attitude is a “solemn and serious reaction” to the divine as he defines it. The religious attitude can engender a happy state of mind that does not, however, represent an escape from the pain of life but embraces and overmatches the sense of tragedy. Moreover, the religious attitude is far stronger than any “moral” determination to resist the pain of mortality through sheer willpower.

Further delineating his subject, James says the life of religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good consists in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude.” James notes that philosopher Immanuel Kant had believed that objects of belief such as god, the design of freedom, the soul, and the afterlife are concepts and not capable of sensory apprehension; thus, they are not properly objects of knowledge at all. “Yet strangely enough,” James writes, these objects of belief “have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God.”

The major portion of James’s study concerns personal testimony of religious experience, culled from literature and from correspondence with friends or acquaintances. He augments the huge volume and range of examples with a balanced perspective and eloquent commentary. The “varieties of religious experience” reported in these lectures lead James to conclude—in keeping with his own pluralistic philosophy—that “Men’s religions need not be identical.” Thus, he devotes lectures (and pages) to such religious qualities as “healthy-mindedness,” “the sick soul” (which can be healed by spiritual conversion), saintliness, mysticism, and the philosophical approach.

In contrasting healthy-minded people with sick souls, James notes that even in hardship, some individuals—Walt Whitman, for example—appear to have an innate sense of life’s goodness and to believe in a beneficent God rather than a God of wrath. Sick souls, on the other hand, harbor profound depression and a sense of evil. However, James sees sick souls as potentially deriving the greatest benefit from religious conversion, in that they have the greatest capacity for a fully balanced view of good and evil.

James next catalogs aspects of conversion, drawing from many personal descriptions. Conversion may be “sudden,” “prolonged,” “unconscious and involuntary,” or “conscious and voluntary.” He finds that truly converted people relinquish all worries and adopt the belief that all is well, have a sense of truths they were not previously aware of, and perceive the world as if it were completely new.

Turning to mystical states, James describes the characteristics that give these states an unassailable validity: Mystical states defy rational explanation, provide a sense of luminous insight, have only fleeting duration, and cause the mystic to feel “as if his own will were in abeyance.” The nonmystic is not in any way subject to the mystical experience.

Nearing the end of the work, James addresses the function of philosophy with respect to religion. Although he notes that some people are temperamentally inclined to consider religion from a philosophical perspective, he warns against attempting philosophical proofs of religion’s validity. Philosophy must not encourage inappropriate endeavors to escape the perfectly valid “subjective standards” of religious experience or lead to “dogmatic theology.” In James’s view, God’s metaphysical attributes can have “no practical validity.”

James does, however, see a use for philosophy in religion if transformed into a science of religions. This could include eliminating “doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous” and “[s]ifting out unworthy formulations.” This methodological enterprise would put the philosophy of religion on a par with the objective physical sciences. Just as the physical science of optics, for example, is based on observable facts that are continually verified, so too would a science of religions “depend for its original material on facts of personal experience, and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its critical reconstructions.”

In “Conclusions,” James broadly summarizes the distinctive qualities of the religious life, finding that it includes the following beliefs:

That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance;

That [a] union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end;

That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof—be that spirit “God” or “law”—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.

James’s lecture transcription has a distinctive literary quality. His science of religions had barely begun to develop a vocabulary of its own, leaving the author, a brother of novelist Henry James, relatively free to employ his own characteristic mode of expression. Religious scholar Jarosłav Pelikan remarked,

The old cliché that Henry James wrote novels as though they were philosophical treatises whereas William James wrote philosophical treatises as though they were novels, while unfair to Henry, [well] describes William, including the William James of Varieties of Religious Experience.

James’s wide range of informants, including literary sources, and his generous presentation of anecdotal evidence sometimes make the book read like a sprawling novel. James himself, acting as a sort of moral guide, can deliver observations like the following to deflate the vainly ambitious in a manner worthy of the ending of, for example, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925):

Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.

Bibliography

Carmody, Denise Lardner, et al. The Republic of Many Mansions: Foundations of American Religious Thought. St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon House, 1998. A study of American religious thought from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Centers on the ideas of William James as a philosophical pragmatist, Jonathan Edwards as a Puritan thinker, and Thomas Jefferson as an Enlightenment secularist.

Carrette, Jeremy, ed. William James and “The Varieties of Religious Experience”: A Centenary Celebration. New York: Routledge, 2004. Designed as a companion book, this volume collects essays that examine The Varieties of Religious Experience in the context of James’s other works, describe contemporary responses to James’s book, and assess its historical importance and significance to the twenty-first century.

Gale, Richard M. The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Considers James’s theory of belief in the context of his ethics, metaphysics, logic, and pragmatism. Also examines his theory of belief as it relates to mysticism, selfhood, and the wider issues of religious experience and philosophical inquiry.

James, William. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. 1956. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1990. A collection of essays by James that first appeared between 1896 and 1903. The first several chapters defend the legitimacy of religious faith, thus constituting a supplement, in a way, to The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. An exhaustive 622-page biography of James as a prominent member of an extraordinary family. Several chapters address James’s religious thought, with a particular focus on the psychology of faith—balanced with philosophical pragmatism—in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Taylor, Charles: Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Transcript of lectures by scholar Charles Taylor in Vienna in 2000. Taylor assesses the religious thought of James as he considers the place of religion in the present secular age.