Back to the Classics 2021 #13

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

20th Century Classic: My theme for this challenge has been to read well-known classics that I’ve been hearing about my entire adult lifetime. William James’ classic works still survive among hardcore readers and intellectuals. He is the subject of more academic papers than any other American philosopher. Plus, perhaps because of his interest in scientifically studying the afterlife, he appears to more psychics than anybody except Elvis.

The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James

This early modern work of psychology from 1902 focuses on the individual experience of religion and the fruits of religion in a person’s life. This is a study of subjectivity and individuality, not organized religion, whose hash he settles thusly.

A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to “organize” themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word “religion” nowadays, we think inevitably of some “church” or other; and to some persons the word “church” suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are “down” on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation.

James defines the intrinsic nature of 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 divine.”  James quotes a believer, on the personal feeling:

Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much a habitation, an association, as a sort of fusion. Oh, new and blessed life! life which becomes each day more luminous.... The wall before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a conflagration of glory; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each grain of sand emits fire; even so there is a royal song of triumph in my heart because the Lord is there.

That James relies on testimony is the strongest attraction of this book. For example, in the lectures that define the religion of “healthy-mindedness” and the “sick soul,” James analyzes reports of a wide variety of witnesses Some, constitutionally optimistic, cheerily ignore the reality of evil and angst in the world. God loves them, they love God, they know they are forgiven when they screw up, they be rockin' in the tree tops all day long, hoppin' and a-boppin' and a-singin’ their song.

For the sick souls, they are overwhelmed by a sense of sin, feel inner conflict and need to be redeemed by some dramatic personal experience from the outside (conversion). Gosh, I wonder what category hardcore readers fall into. For case studies of sick souls, see the short existential thrillers of Simenon. 

James’ searching analysis of Tolstoy’s years-long depression and the intense guilt and self-doubt of John “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan shows examples of the “divided self.” In this chapter, he also touches on the stoic ideas that were to influence Dr. Albert Ellis in the development of cognitive behavior therapy:

Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

In other lectures, James covers the process of conversion and the nature and role of saintliness. Mercifully, he does not detail the more fantastic rigors some saints subjected themselves to, but the stories he does tell and testimonies he does summarize will cause us to set the book down and go take a walk.

The lectures on mystical experiences cover number of incredible people such as George Fox, Saint Teresa and the German mystic Suso.  To my mind, this report of a gifted woman about her ether dream is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever read:

A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should probably have died.

James summarizes from that great mass of amazing stories what is common to all, what truly defines a religious / mystical experience, as it is felt and what are the practical effects on the lives of the people who feel them.

The material becomes very hard near the end when James explores the technical aspects of Newman’s rationalist theology and Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy. I work at a university by moving papers around and humbly teaching ESL but I’m not an academic. My sense from working with academics, however, is that James is attempting to establish a scholarly territory. He’s arguing that it is academically valid to be speaking about subjecting personal experience to rational analysis. He trying to distinguish psychology from philosophy by staking out concepts such as “emotions” and “subconscious.” He is making an argument that his field, psychology, is really a field worthy of study, writing, publishing, conventions, professional standards, grad students, and heated offices in habitable buildings.

Anyway, the book is a keeper, something to return to when one feels like re-reading something with heft. I mean, I like the first-hand stories from eyewitnesses that remind me of myself.