The Varieties of Religious Experience

Overview

About five hundred pages, James’s Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, published in 1902, which study religion not as doctrine or institution but as the feelings and experiences of individuals. Drawing on hundreds of first-person accounts, he describes the religion of healthy-mindedness and of the sick soul, the divided self and conversion, saintliness and its value, and mysticism.

He concludes that religious experience is real and consequential whatever its ultimate cause, and offers his own over-belief in a wider self.

What happens

Religion and neurology. James opens by refusing to explain religious experience away by its origins in the nervous system, and proposes instead to judge it by its fruits, and then defines his subject as the experiences of individuals in their solitude.

Healthy-mindedness and the sick soul. He describes the once-born, who see the world as good and refuse to dwell on evil, with the mind-cure movement as their modern form, and the twice-born, for whom evil is the essential fact, drawing on Tolstoy, Bunyan and a case of panic fear he later admitted was his own.

The divided self and conversion. The sick soul is a self at war with itself, and conversion is its unification, sudden or gradual, which James describes through dozens of accounts and explains by the subconscious incubation of a new centre of energy.

Saintliness and its value. The fruits of conversion, asceticism, strength of soul, purity and charity, are described and then tested: are they useful? James finds the saint, even in excess, the most valuable of human types.

Mysticism. Mystical states are ineffable, noetic, transient and passive; James surveys them from drunkenness to Teresa of Ávila, and concludes that they are authoritative for those who have them and not for anyone else.

Philosophy and conclusions. James finds theology unable to prove its claims, proposes a science of religions instead, and concludes that religious experience is real and works, and that his own over-belief is in a wider self continuous with the subconscious, from which saving experiences come.

How to read it

Read the definition of religion as the experiences of individuals in their solitude as the book’s founding move, and notice everything about religion it sets aside.

Pay close attention to the typology of healthy-mindedness and the sick soul, and to James’s preference for the second, and apply it to yourself.

Notice the method, hundreds of first-person accounts treated as data rather than testimony, and ask whether a science of religion can take its subjects seriously without believing them.

Consider the conclusions, in which James lets himself an over-belief and no more, and decide whether the book keeps religion or dissolves it.

Read these lectures alongside Augustine’s Confessions to compare the psychologist’s account of conversion with the most famous conversion narrative in the tradition, which James himself uses.

Questions it raises

• Can religion be studied as individual experience without losing what makes it religion, its doctrines, communities and practices?
• Is the sick soul’s view really more complete than the healthy-minded, or does James’s preference reflect his own melancholy more than the evidence?
• What does it mean to judge religious experiences by their fruits, and does the test smuggle in a standard of usefulness that religion might reject?
• Are mystical states authoritative for those who have them, and if so, what should those who have not had them do with the reports?
• What is James’s over-belief, and is the wider self continuous with the subconscious a religious hypothesis or a psychological one dressed as religion?
• Why has this book been the modern educated person’s way of keeping religion without doctrine, and is what it keeps enough?