Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Charles Taylor - Varieties of Religion Today - William James Revisited (2002) PDF
Charles Taylor - Varieties of Religion Today - William James Revisited (2002) PDF
VARIETIES
OF
RELIGION
TODAY
William James
Revisited
and l o n d o n , e n g l a n d
Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
1
James: Varieties 1
2
The “Twice-Born” 31
3
Religion Today 61
4
So Was James Right? 109
Notes 119
VARIETIES OF RELIGION TODAY
1
JAMES:
VARIETIES
1
It’s almost a hundred years since William James deliv-
ered his celebrated Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh on
The Varieties of Religious Experience.1 I want in these
pages to look again at this remarkable book, reºect-
ing on what it has to say to us at the turn of a new
century.
In fact it turns out to have a lot to say. It is astonish-
ing how little dated it is. Some of the detail may be
strange, but you easily think of examples in our world
that ªt the themes James is developing. You can even
ªnd yourself forgetting that these lectures were deliv-
ered a hundred years ago.
Which is not to say that there aren’t questions one
can raise about the way in which James conceives his
subject. On the contrary; but this is not so much be-
cause of the difference between his time and ours;
rather, these questions arise out of different ways of
understanding religion that confronted each other
then, and still do. To put it slightly more polemically:
one could argue that James has certain blind spots in
his view of religion. But these blind spots are wide-
3
Varieties of Religion Today
4
Here are, then, cases, where a fact cannot come at all unless
a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a
fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic
which should say that faith running ahead of scientiªc evi-
dence is the “lowest kind of immorality” into which a
thinking being can fall. (WB 28–29)
1. JAMES: VARIETIES
6. Ibid., vol 4.
7. The way in which shar’ia compliance articulates with a
strong, personal, committed religious life is well illus-
trated in the study discussed by Clifford Geertz in his
“William James” lecture, published as “The Pinch of
Destiny: Religion as Experience, Meaning, Identity,
Power,” in his recent collected essays Available Light
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), espe-
cially pp. 179 ff. I have greatly beneªted from Geertz’s
lecture in my discussion of James here.
8. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1922), pp. 759, 762.
9. Thus Robert Wuthnow, in his After Heaven: Spirituality
in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1998), in discussing the increasing reports
people give of meeting angels, and other similar expe-
riences in recent years, notes that these tend to corre-
late with a religious upbringing in which realities of
this kind had a place. See his chap. 5, especially pp. 125–
126.
10. My discussion here has been much helped by Nicholas
Lash’s critique of James in his Easter in Ordinary (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).
2. THE “TWICE-BORN”
3. RELIGION TODAY