The Varieties of Religious Experience

William James (1842 - 1910) was the founder of American psychology. His classic book, The Varieties of Religious Experience1, examines a wide range of religious phenomena, mainly from a sympathetic psychological point of view. James provides numerous first-hand accounts that illustrate the points he tries to make in the chapters of the book.2

James is not interested in religious institutions. He focuses instead on religious feelings and impulses, on personal religion. Although he explores possible psychological origins of the phenomena that interest him, his main concern is on the nature and consequences of personal religious experiences. He mocks what he calls “medical materialism,” which seeks to undermine the spiritual authority of religious personages:

Medical materialism finishes up St. Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh.3

In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to try to refute opinions by showing up their author’s neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author’s neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions.4

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.5

The core of religion is “that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”6 This unseen order generates

in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.7

Here are two reports that James shares, one dwelling on dreamlike feelings, the other an expansive Christian experience from Professor Starbuck’s collection8:

When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of the heavens,” says Madame Ackermann; “when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, “I have been dreaming.”9

God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often his words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually, a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.10

James writes about two general types of religious experience: the healthy-minded and the sick soul. The healthy-minded tend to be congenitally happy, optimistic, and loving. James provides many reports of the religious experience of the healthy-minded, delineating the variety through which this cheerful attitude expresses itself. I cannot go into all of these. But here is part of a description of the poet Walt Whitman, whom James presents as a supreme example:

“His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr. Bucks, “seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond what they give to ordinary people. . . . Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men, women, and children he saw.11

The healthy-minded soul minimizes evil and sees good in the world. The sick soul, on the other hand, acts as though “the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence.”12 James suggests that as the healthy-minded soul may reflect a congenitally based attitude, so might the sick soul suffer from varieties of pathological depression, or spiritual melancholia. Tolstoy’s book, My Confessions, for example, is “a wonderful account of the attack of melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions.”13

“I felt,” says Tolstoy, “that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life. . . All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy.14

An account from the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline presents us with feelings that are opposite to Dr. Bucks’s portrayal of Walt Whitman:

Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that every one I saw knew them. . . I had now so great a sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And when I laid down, would say, I shall be perhaps in hell before morning.15

In the religious sphere the sick soul seeks relief and searches for a reconciliation that puts him right with God. For John Bunyan that process was prolonged. “For years together he was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of Christ.”16

James also examines the conversion experiences of formerly normal people whose life track is altered by some spiritual illumination.

To say that a man is “converted” means in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his energy. . . . All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystalize about it.17

After his conversion, Mr. S. H. Hadley devoted himself to rescuing drunkards:

One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless, friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that could bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I had not eaten for days, and for four nights preceding I had suffered with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight till morning. I had often said, “I will never be a tramp. I will never be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever it comes, I will find a home in the bottom of the river.” But the Lord so ordered it that when that time did come I was not able to walk one quarter of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I did learn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner’s friend. I walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen before morning. Something said, “If you want to keep this promise, go and have yourself locked up.” I went to the nearest station-house and myself locked up. . . “Dear Jesus, can you help me?” Never with mortal tongue can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed away and all things had become new.18

In discussing the psychological vs. the theological view of conversion, James opens a question that he will answer at the end of his book:

Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point, since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology, defining these forces as “subconscious,” and speaking of their effects, as due to “incubation,” or “cerebration,” implies that they do not transcend the individual’s personality; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity.19

James distinguishes between what he calls “the volitional type of conversion” and the “type by self-surrender.” In the former, change is gradual “and consists in the building up piece by piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits.”20 The more interesting type is self-surrender, which is often sudden and which, at least on its surface, underscores the difference between religious conversion and psychological reordering. James quotes John Wesley, writing shortly before his death:

In London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (without a single exception) has declared that his deliverance from sin was instantaneous; that the change was wrought in a moment. Had half of these, or one third, or one in twenty, declared it was gradually wrought in them, I should have believed this, with regard to them, and thought that some were gradually sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found, in so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an instantaneous work.21

Wesley may, of course, have overlooked a self-selection process among the members of his Society. Revivals are known for their emotion, and social expectations may prime some attendees for conversion. Indeed, J. B. Pratt, a contemporary of James, claimed that the born-again experiences in American fundamentalism were largely a result of social expectations: Adolescents were “born again” because their social world expected them to be “born again.”22 Moreover, though conversions at revivals may be striking, they usually only constitute a small percentage of attendees. At Billy Graham crusades, for example, “2% to 5% of the attendees ‘make a decision for Christ’ and only about half of these converts are active a year later. About 15% remain permanently converted.”23

As a psychologist, James tries to abstract the characteristics of conversion experiences. The central one is

the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony. . . . The certainty of God’s ‘grace,’ of ‘justification,’ ‘salvation,’ is an objective belief that usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remains the same.”24

The second feature is a conviction that a new truth has been revealed, and a third characteristic is that the world appears to change. “‘An appearance of newness beautifies every object,’ the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which is experienced by melancholy patients.”25 James quotes Jonathan Edwards as an example of the third characteristic:

After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a sweet calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me.26

The last conversion characteristic of which James writes is ecstasy, or supreme happiness. He quotes at length from Charles G. Finney, a leader in the Second Great Awakening, a portion of which I share here:

All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the utterance of my heart was “I want to pour my whole soul out to God.” The rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back room of the front office, to pray. There was no fire and no light in the room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. . . the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul. . . No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, “I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.” I said, “Lord, I cannot bear any more;” yet I had no fear of death. . . . He then said, “Are you in pain?” I gathered myself up as best I could, and replied, “No, but so happy that I cannot live.”27

James devotes two long chapters to saintliness. The first focuses on the fruits of religious life; the second on the value of those fruits. Regarding the general nature of the fruits, James says:

. . . there is veritably a single fundamental and identical spirit of piety and charity, common to those who have received grace; an inner state which before all things is one of love and humility, of infinite confidence in God, and of severity for one’s self, accompanied with tenderness for others. The fruits peculiar to this condition of the soul have the same savor in all, under distant suns and in different surroundings, in Saint Teresa of Avila just as in any Moravian brother of Herrnhut.28

James gives examples of reformed drunkards and a sex addict. He points to the psychological dimension of these conversions from depravity to virtue, but he remains open to the supernatural:

Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in hypnotism. . . . If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door, then.29

He defines the “saintly character” as one in which “spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy.”30 The saintly character includes a feeling that connects the person to an ideal power, personified as God, a willingness to surrender to the benevolence of the ideal power, an elation and freedom that seems to melt the self, and a movement of the emotional center towards love for all. The practical consequences of this character are asceticism, strength of soul, purity, and charity.

Because the sense of presence is central to the spiritual life, James begins his illustrations with a selection from Thoreau:

To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.31

For Christians, the sense of benevolent presence becomes personal and brings with it a feeling of security:

“The compensation,” writes a German author, “for the loss of that sense of personal independence which man so unwillingly gives up, is the disappearance of all fear from one’s lie, the quite indescribable and inexplicable feeling of an inner security, which one can only experience, but which, once it has been experienced, one can never forget.32

Charity, or brotherly love, is accompanied by joyousness and tenderness, as evidenced in this selection from Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:

When. . . I arose on the morning of the Sabbath, I felt a love to all mankind, wholly peculiar in the strength and sweetness far beyond all that I had ever felt before. The power of that love seemed inexpressible. I thought, if I were surrounded by enemies, who were venting their malice and cruelty upon me, in tormenting me, it would still be impossible that I should cherish any feelings towards them but those of love, and pity, and ardent desires for their happiness. I never before felt so far from a disposition to judge and censure others, as I did that morning.33

James devotes considerable space to asceticism. He views this impulse sympathetically as a consequence of “the craving for moral consistency and purity,”34 noting that scrupulosity to share Christ’s sufferings may carry the desire to extremes. Sometimes psychopathology may color the conscious desire for spirituality. He quotes at length, for example, from an account on the life of John Suso, a fourteenth century German mystic. A few selections from that long quote:

. . . he sought by many devices how he might bring his body into subjection. He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron chain, until the blood ran from him, so that he was obliged to leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to be made for him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp, were driven, and, the points of the nails were always turned towards the flesh. . . . and then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused a brazier to fit them all over with sharp-pointed brass tacks, and he used to put them on at night, in order that if he should try while asleep to throw off the hair undergarment, or relieve himself from the gnawings of the vile insects, the tacks might then stick into his body.35

James discusses at some length the excesses of saintly persons, who, in some cases, may actually be mentally ill. Nevertheless, when he looks at the grand picture across the centuries, he affirms the value of saintliness to human progress:

Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of every one expresses itself today in all sorts of human customs and reformatory institutions, and in a growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but for them would be forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another, and without that overtrust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnation.36

In his concluding chapter,37 James sums up the characteristics of the religious life:

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

2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end;

3. 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.

4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life. . .

5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.38

James summarizes the intellectual content of religious experience as consisting of an uneasiness followed by a solution that includes connection with a higher power.

Unlike the materialists who were gaining the upper hand in James’s day, he throws his lot in with those who view the supernatural dimension as real:

God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God. We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.39

One-hundred-twenty-three years have passed since William James completed the Gifford Lectures that gave rise to The Varieties of Religious Experience. James’s book remains a classic that resonates through the generations. This review has humbly offered a few tastes from a grand banquet of deep thought and affection.

1 James’s book is based on his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland between 1901 and 1902. The edition I use is: James, W. (1961, 1968). The varieties of religious experience. New York: MacMillan.

2 The writing style of these accounts leads me to believe that something seriously deteriorated in our culture and educational system since the early decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the abandonment of classical education led to an impoverished vocabulary and diminished facility with language. Maybe literary fashions - most notably Hemingway’s predilection for short sentences, limited vocabulary, and a focus on the concrete - steered elites away from nuanced, abstract thought. I don’t know. All I know is that when I read James and so many of the people he quotes from the nineteenth century, I encounter again and again unexpected and unfamiliar conjunctions of words that are surprisingly and delightfully “just right.” Even though, according to contemporary standards, I had a good education, I feel like virtually everybody James cites is better educated than I.

3 James, p. 29.

4 James, pp. 32-33.

5 James, p. 42.

6 James, p. 59.

7 James, p. 62.

8 James quotes numerous times from “Professor Starbuck’s collection.” He refers to: Starbuck, Edwin Diller. (1889). The psychology of religion: An empirical study of the growth of religious consciousness. Available online: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/g2h63nys

9 James, p. 67 - from Pensées d’un Solitaire, p. 66. (I use James’s formatting system for sources taken from James’s footnotes.)

10 James, P. 72.

11 James, p. 82. From: R.M. Bucke: Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.

12 James, p. 116.

13 James, p. 130.

14 James, p. 132.

15 James, p. 137. From: The Life and Journal of the Rev. Mr. Henry Alline, Boston, 1806, pp. 25, 26.

16 James, p. 158.

17 James, pp. 165-166.

18 James, pp. 169-170. James says about this source: “I have abridged Mr. Hadley’s account. For other conversions of drunkards, see his pamphlet, Rescue Mission Work, published at the Old Jerry M’Auley Water Street Mission, New York City.”

19 James, p. 176.

20 James, p. 172.

21 James, p. 187. From Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, i. 463.

22 Pratt, J.B. (1920). The religious consciousness. New York: Macmillan.

23 Frank, J. (1974). Persuasion and healing. New York: Schocken Books, p 82.

24 James, p. 202.

25 James, pp. 202-203.

26 James, p. 203. From Dwight: Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged.

27 James, p. 207-208. This quote is not footnoted, but presumably it comes from: Finney, C. G. Memoirs written by Himself, 1876.

28 James, p. 212.

29 James, p. 218 - 219.

30 James, p. 220.

31 James, p. 222: from H. Thoreau: Walden, Riverside edition, p. 206, abridged.

32 James, pp. 222-223: from C. H. Hilty: Bluck, vol. I, p. 85.

33 James, pp. 226-227: from Edward’s Narrative of the Revival in New England.

34 James, p. 238.

35 James, pp. 246 - 247: from The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by T. F. Knox, London,1865, pp. 56-80, abridged.

36 James, pp. 238 - 284.

37 I here ignore James’s chapter on mysticism, which will be discussed at length in a future post.

38 James, p. 377.

39 James, p. 399.