The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience was first presented as a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901. To prepare for the talks, Harvard psychologist William ... (More) The Varieties of Religious Experience was first presented as a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901. To prepare for the talks, Harvard psychologist William James had read widely in the religious classics, including the personal accounts of various saints and mystics.

His decision to look at spiritual experience from a psychological point of view seemed very new at the time, even blasphemous. Mountains of books were still being churned out on the finer points of dogma and theology, but James was more interested in individual experience. His purpose in writinlg the book was to convince the reader that although religion itself often seemed absurd, the spiritual impulse was what made us human. James wanted to know why man was a religious animal, and what practical benefits spirituality brought us, assuming that we would not engage in it if it did not do us some good.

The book's insights are wrapped in prose as elegant and forceful as anything written by his novelist brother Henry James, and it was recognized as a classic virtually from the day of publication. The book's great service was to make the religious reader see spiritual matters from a more rational, objective perspective, and to persuade the scientifically-minded that religious experience had its value and was a 'fact'.

The science of spirituality

James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience at the end of a century of scientific advance that reacted against the unthinking faith of earlier times. In this milieu, the Bible was newly appreciated as just a collection of stories, and in the new science of psychology, religious experience could be explained away as a creation of the mind. Yet James was skeptical of the idea that all religious experience could be reduced to states of the brain, what he calls the 'Nothing-but' view of spirituality.

James wrote that spiritual ideas should be judged on three criteria: 1) Immediate luminousness; 2) Philosophical reasonableness; and 3) Moral helpfulness. Put simply, do they enlighten us, do they make sense, are they a good guide to living?

He quotes a passage from St Teresa of Avila's autobiography, in which she talks about her visions. At the time some suspected she was seeing the devil, not God, but she protested that what she saw could not be just the work of the imagination, since it had made her a much better person ("uprooting my vices, and filling me with a masculine courage") - and her confessors confirmed it. Teresa also made a distinction between imaginings and spiritual reality, pointing out that while pure imagination weakens the mind and soul, 'genuine heavenly vision' revitalizes and strengthens the subject. In Teresa's case, she felt that her visitations guided her towards the reform of the Carmelite order, of which she was a member.

This was the practical effect of religious experience that James was so fascinated by. These 'visitations' may have come from inside a saint's own mind, or they may indeed have been from God. But as the cases such as St Paul's, St Augustine's or Teresa's demonstrated, what was sure was that they could transform a life.

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Source: 50 Spiritual Classics: 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose,Tom Butler-Bowdon, 2005 (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey)

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