William James in Focus: Willing to Believe

4. The Varieties of Religious Experience: Mysticism as a Vague “Exemplar”

4 The Varieties of Religious Experience Mysticism as a Vague “Exemplar” The very title The Varieties of Religious Experience gives us a clue to James’s intent. The book itself is one long plea that religious experience is pervasive. Taking his examples from all areas of organized religion, James again and again ostensively makes this point—there is simply no ignoring the amount of “evidence” for religious experience. For the same reason, that is, the pervasiveness of religion, no finished formula is available. “The word ‘religion’ cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name.”1 This plea for the richness of religious experience is negatively expressed in James’s harsh critiques against vicious intellectualism in religion: “The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit . . . assumes to construct religious objects out of . . . logical reason alone. . . . It reaches [its conclusions] in an a priori way” (VRE, 342–43). And again, “In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless” (ibid., 359). There was, in James’s opinion, no one formula that could contain the whole of religious experience. Any such dogmatic statement would have been diametrically opposed to his unfinished universe. On the other hand, James, at least in the final chapters of this work, does attempt some sort of justification as to why one should opt for religious experience. However, that summation, which stresses the richness and intensity of the religious experience, is tempered by the “latent” 28 William James in Focus realization that all summations are suspect, to the extent that they surrender uniqueness and originality. The pervasiveness of religious experience is evident early in VRE, as can be seen in the following attempt to define religion: “Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion?” (ibid., 36). And again, religion is “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” (ibid., 34). Here we can observe clearly the “extensity” of religious experience. One must react for the same reason that one is forced to make moral decisions—there is no possibility of being neutral. In the beginning of the text, James argues against the attempts of “medical materialism” to explain religious experience by explaining it away, that is, deriving religious experience from a more ultimate neurological base. Melancholy, for example, should not be explained as due to nothing but bad digestion. Rather “by their fruits you shall know them.” Or, religion is what religion does. One can detect a nascent form of pragmatism in this plea. The emphasis should be not on “root causes” but rather on the future effects of undergoing a religious experience. In opposition to reductive accounts or to those that stress one specific feature as “essential” to religion, James’s outlook stresses pluralism and personal over institutional experience. Any total reaction, for James, would be “religious.” And the criteria used to measure total reactions are richness and intensity. Let us first look at the richness of the religious life. Acting as a psychologist interested in the religious experience of a person rather than in any organized religion, James continually connects this religious experience with the subliminal area of consciousness: we cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the trans-marginal or subliminal region. . . . [The subliminal region] . . . is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent and the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. . . . [E]xperiences making their entrance through . . . [this] door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history. (VRE, 381) We are reminded here of the development of the stream of consciousness in terms of an ongoing focus/fringe continuum and also of James’s metaphysical position that experience always comes to us “fringed by a more.” His interest in religion is partially based on the fact that the religious person is constantly striving to acknowledge this peripheral aspect of his or her consciousness. In religion, a person becomes conscious that this The Varieties of Religious Experience 29 higher part is coterminous and...