OCR special
William James The Varieties of Religious Experience
While OCR candidates need to be prepared to write specifically about William James’ work, his contribution to the study of religious experience is valuable to any student of this fascinating area
William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who had initially trained as a physician. His brother was the novelist Henry James and his sister Alice James, the diarist. His father was a wellknown Swedenborgian theologian (Box 1).
Varieties of religious experience
James’ most famous book was The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. The book contains an edited version of his Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. These lectures concerned the nature of religion and James’ view that science was neglected in the academic study of religion. The book is still in print more than a century later.
James had investigated a large number of accounts of religious experiences. He was particularly interested in exploring the nature of the wide variety of religious experiences people have. He worked on the assumption that religious experience was the source of religious institutions such as churches. He believed that churches were secondary to the individual religious experiences that each person had. He went on to suggest that religious experiences were events that were ‘solitary’ and that in them people experienced the divine or God. He did not believe that the religious tradition to which the person belonged was important — some people who had religious experiences might not belong to any traditional religion at all.
James observed that religious experiences could have a great influence on the person who has them and often had a marked effect on a person’s life. He also noted that conversion experiences are often characterised by religious beliefs becoming central to a person’s life. A well-known example of this is Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus, following which Paul changes from being a persecutor of Christians to becoming one of the most important Christian preachers and missionaries.
Box 1 The New Church (Swedenborgianism)
The New Church (or Swedenborgianism) is a new religious movement (NRM) based on the writings of a Swedish scientist and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedenborg claimed to have received a new revelation from Jesus Christ through heavenly visions which he experienced over a period of at least 25 years. He predicted that God would replace the traditional Christian Church, establishing a ‘New Church’, which would worship God in one person: Jesus Christ. Swedenborg claimed divine inspiration for his writings and followers believe that he witnessed the Last Judgement in the spiritual world.
Characteristics of religious experience
One of James’ achievements was to identify some of the characteristics of religious experiences, ranging from visions to feelings of God’s presence. James noted, for example, that many people’s religious experiences were marked by a loss of anxiety, the gaining of new knowledge and a changed understanding of the world. Four characteristics were found to be particularly prominent in mystical religious experiences of God:
■ ineffability
■ noetic quality
■ transiency
■ passivity
Usually we tend to read James in a secondary source, but The Varieties of Religious Experience is itself accessible and often humorous.
The following is an extract from the book:
‘I…simply propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way we shall save verbal disputation, and the recriminations that generally go therewith.
1. Ineffability — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.
2. Noetic quality — Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time. These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. These are:—
3. Transiency — Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.
4. Passivity — Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance for the subject’s usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so-called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures.
Lectures XVI and XVII — Mysticism
You can see an e-book version of the text at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/621
James argues that the only possible sign that religious experiences are from God is a ‘good disposition’ that is the result of the experience. James accepted the reality of mystical experiences and suggested that they were ways in which individuals could gain knowledge of God, which would not otherwise be possible. However, he also looked at the similarities with other types of experiences such as hallucinations and dreams and suggested that religious experiences could be linked to subconscious ideas.
His conclusion was that religious experiences on their own did not demonstrate God’s existence, although they might suggest the existence of ‘something larger’:
‘I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.’
He regarded religious experiences as ‘psychological phenomena’ which could perhaps be seen as part of a person’s psychological make-up.
The value of religious experience
It is important to remember that James did not develop the so-called Experiential Argument or Argument from Religious Experience for the existence of God. However, he did not believe that describing religious experiences as psychological phenomena was an argument against belief in God. He was simply saying that a religious experience could be natural to a person in the same way as other psychological experiences such as selfawareness or thinking are. In The Varieties of Religious Experience he is clear that religious experience is central to religious belief. The possibility of God’s existence is therefore left open.
Other views
There are many other views about religious experiences:
■ People have suggested that religious experiences are, in fact, similar to the hallucinations caused by drugs such as LSD. Even if this were the case it would be difficult to assert that people such as St Paul, St Teresa of Ávila, St Julian of Norwich or St John of the Cross took LSD. Later psychologists have claimed that the only people who have religious experiences are already members of a religious tradition. This is clearly not the case, as many nonreligious people have reported such experiences.
■ J. L. Mackie argued that if, as James said, mystical experiences are explainable psychologically, they can have no authority for the person who has the experience or for anyone else. Mackie suggested that these people who believe such experiences are authoritative are insufficiently critical.
■ Durkheim largely agreed with James but he also said that society is the reality that causes religious experiences. Belief in the totem came from people interacting socially together.
■ Famously, in The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto said that the central element of religious experiences was an ‘apprehension of the wholly other’, which he called the numinous. Otto sees religious experiences as an encounter with the ‘wholly other’ and therefore completely outside and beyond our possible experience.