Varieties of Religious Experience
by Peter Tim (May 2018)
The annual Scottish Gifford Lectures were established by the estate of Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), a Scottish lawyer and judge, “to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term.” An appointment to deliver them is among the most prestigious of Scottish academic honors. American physician, psychologist and philosopher William James gave the lectures in 1901–2 and his addresses were collected in his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature. It remains required reading in many college courses and should be read by anyone seriously interested in religion, in “spirituality” as the search for and encounter with meaning and purpose, and in how these appetites and their satisfaction relate to and inform us about the human condition.
Not only is this work interesting itself but it sheds light on where matters stood in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries with respect to supernaturalism. The idea that the human body could be understood as a kind of soul-less machine had been around since the middle of the 18th Century.(1) Chemists showed that there was no “vital force” needed to synthesize organic substances beginning in 1828. And, of course, Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 which showed that no supernatural intervention was needed to explain the vast diversity of living organisms on earth.
James undertook to consider the “religious experiences” that he argued lie at the roots of all organized religions. He acknowledged that such experiences can be explained by physical processes with no need to invoke the supernatural. Although psychotherapy pioneer Sigmund Freud’s 1927 book on religion, The Future of an Illusion, lay decades in the future, James even refers to “the sexual theory.” But James points out that one could assert — and find support for — many physiological (we would say today “neurological”) explanations for religion. But none of them would adequately explain the subjective meaning of and the impact upon the lives of people who have had such “religious experiences.” Moreover, any states of mind can be discredited in this way, scientific as well as religious and beliefs as well as disbeliefs. Yet we may still judge states of mind, writes James, according to their “character of inner happiness”and their “consistency with our other opinions and their serviceability for our needs.” The difficulty is that, as James says:
“Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most ‘good’ is not always most ‘true,’ when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience. … If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. But its revelations, however acutely satisfying at the moment, are inserted into an environment which refuses to bear them out for any length of time. The consequence of this discrepancy of the two criteria is the uncertainty which still prevails over so many of our spiritual judgments. There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience … that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings.”
James does not consider theology and the ecclesiastical aspects of religion, other than to say that he will not consider them. Indeed, he indicates that these things are only the secondary products of religious experiences. Moreover, he notes, as many Freethinkers today realize:
“The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then, indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling systems, like that of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up. Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow. … I do not yet say that it is better [emphasis in the original] that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact.”
James says that what makes experiences “religious” is that they are interpreted as encounters with whatever those having the experiences consider to be “the divine.” By this he does not mean supernatural personal being(s) but what is “most primal and enveloping and deeply true.” He adds that the quality of the experience or one’s feeling about it is “solemn.” James gives the example of reported feelings of “a presence.” Anyone may have this, of course, and it need not be interpreted as feeling the presence of “God” or another supernatural being. But when it is so interpreted, it is a “religious experience.”
James presents many accounts of such experiences and finds “mystical” experiences are usually spontaneous, unpredictable and involuntary, as well as transient, “ineffable” in the sense of being difficult or impossible to express in words, and “noetic.” By this last James means “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, … and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.” This fits well with the descriptions of visions said to have been experienced by Moses, Paul of Tarsus, Mohamed and others.
James then spends a good deal of time considering the effects of temperament — of innate, natural, seemingly personality-determined optimism or melancholy — on how religious experiences are interpreted and their impact on people. He describes the “mind-cure” movement in his day, also then referred to as “The New Thought” which bears many similarities to what today goes by the terms “New Age,” positive thinking and “The Law of Attraction.” James contrasts the “healthy-minded” and the “sick-souled” or “morbid-minded.” The first sort of person, the “once born” hardly has need of a transformation brought about by a religious experience. But the latter, the “twice-born,” seem to need what they take to be an encounter with the supernatural to find a sense of hope and meaning.
James expresses little skepticism of supernatural claims and refers to himself and his readers — once — as “us Christians.” Towards the end he “gets into the weeds” of supernaturalism and what he calls “over-beliefs” concerning them. But he is no fundamentalist and does not proselytize. On the contrary, he approvingly quotes the Unitarian-Transcendentalist quasi-atheist Ralph Waldo Emerson early on and uses it as an example of how broadly “religion” and “the divine” should be understood There are many good ideas here for Freethinkers as James is mostly interested in the various ways in which religious experiences affect different sorts of people. Many of these ideas are easily adapted to the stance of Freethinkers. For it is this subjective dimension of the human condition that Freethinkers, too, take to be what is essentially religion.
