The Varieties of Religious Experience

Summary

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires. He defines religion, for his purposes, 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. The first lecture, 'Religion and Neurology', confronts 'medical materialism', the view that explains away Saint Paul's vision as epilepsy or Saint Teresa's raptures as hysteria. James grants that religious geniuses often had unstable nervous systems, but insists that origins do not settle value: religious states must be judged by their fruits, not their roots. After lectures on the reality of the unseen, James sets out his central contrast between two temperaments. The religion of healthy-mindedness, illustrated by Walt Whitman, liberal Christianity and the American mind-cure movement, refuses to dwell on evil and finds the world fundamentally good; its adherents are the 'once-born'. The sick soul cannot ignore evil, death and failure. Its melancholy is documented through Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's tormented conscience, and an anonymous French sufferer, later revealed to be James himself, who was seized by a horrible fear of his own existence after recalling an epileptic patient in an asylum. The sick soul must be 'twice-born'. The lectures on the divided self and conversion describe how a discordant personality becomes unified, often suddenly, and James explains sudden conversion through the 'subconscious self', a hidden region of the mind where new centres of energy incubate before breaking into consciousness. The lectures on saintliness catalogue its fruits: asceticism, strength of soul, purity and charity, and then weigh their value, criticising excesses of devoutness and fanaticism while defending the saint against Nietzsche's contempt. The lectures on mysticism propose four marks of mystical states, ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity, and range from ordinary déjà vu and the effects of alcohol and nitrous oxide to Hindu, Sufi and Christian mystics. James rejects philosophy's attempts to prove religious truths by pure reason, and in his conclusions suggests that the conscious self is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come. In a postscript he describes his own position as 'piecemeal supernaturalism'. The book became a classic of the psychology of religion and has remained in print since 1902.

Plot or Argument

• Lecture I: Religion and neurology

  James rejects 'medical materialism': the physiological origin of a state cannot decide its truth or worth. He proposes the empirical criterion of immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness, summed up as judging by fruits rather than roots.

• Lectures II–III: Defining the field; the unseen

  Religion is restricted to personal experience rather than institutions. Belief in an unseen order is shown to have the force of a sense of reality, illustrated by testimonies of felt presences.

• Lectures IV–V: Healthy-mindedness

  The once-born temperament, cheerful and optimistic, from Whitman to the mind-cure and New Thought movements, whose therapeutic successes James takes seriously as practical evidence.

• Lectures VI–VII: The sick soul

  Melancholy temperaments who find evil essential to the world: anhedonia, Tolstoy's arrest of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic fear.

• Lectures VIII–X: The divided self and conversion

  Heterogeneous personalities seek unification. Conversion, gradual or sudden, is explained as the shift of a habitual centre of personal energy, often prepared in the subconscious. Cases include Augustine, Alline, Bradley and S. H. Hadley's rescue from drunkenness.

• Lectures XI–XV: Saintliness and its value

  The characteristic fruits of the saintly life, asceticism, charity, equanimity and purity, are described and then judged, with criticism of excesses and a defence against the charge of weakness.

• Lectures XVI–XVII: Mysticism

  Four marks of mystical states and a ladder of examples from déjà vu, alcohol and anaesthetic revelation to cosmic consciousness, yoga, Sufism and Saint Teresa, with the question of whether mystical states have authority for others.

• Lectures XVIII–XX and Postscript

  Philosophy cannot establish religious truth by logic alone. Other features such as prayer and sacrifice are reviewed. The conclusion proposes the subconscious as the doorway to a 'more' with which the self feels continuous, and a pluralistic 'piecemeal supernaturalism'.

Characters

• Leo Tolstoy, case of the sick soul

  Novelist whose crisis around the age of fifty, recorded in A Confession, exemplifies the loss of life's meaning and recovery through faith.

• John Bunyan, case of religious melancholy

  Puritan author of Grace Abounding whose obsessions and verbal automatisms James calls a typical case of the psychopathic temperament.

• The French correspondent, anonymous case

  Sufferer of a sudden panic fear on recalling an epileptic asylum patient; James later acknowledged that the account was his own.

• Walt Whitman, exemplar of healthy-mindedness

  Poet presented as the supreme contemporary example of the once-born temperament.

• Saint Augustine, case of the divided self

  His struggle of two wills and conversion in the Milan garden illustrate the unification of a divided personality.

• Saint Teresa of Avila, mystic

  Carmelite reformer whose visions medical materialism dismisses as hysteria and whom James treats as a powerful, practical mystic.

• S. H. Hadley, convert

  New York drunkard whose sudden conversion ended his drinking and led him to run a rescue mission.

• George Fox, religious genius

  Founder of the Quakers, cited as an example of an unstable nervous temperament producing spiritual originality.

Lessons

• Fruits, not roots

  James answers 'medical materialism' by separating questions of origin from questions of value. Even if every religious genius had a nervous disorder, the worth of their insights must be judged by their effects on life. The argument remains useful wherever a diagnosis is used to dismiss a person's experience or ideas.

  • Does knowing that an experience has a physiological cause change its meaning for the person who had it?
  • Where in modern psychiatry or popular culture is 'medical materialism' still used to dismiss ideas?

• Two temperaments facing evil

  The contrast between healthy-minded and sick souls is temperamental before it is theological. James respects the optimism of the once-born but finds the sick soul's vision deeper because it takes suffering seriously. The book thus treats melancholy not only as a disorder but also as a form of insight.

  • Is the twice-born view really more complete, as James suggests, or only more painful?
  • How does the mind-cure movement James describes resemble modern positive psychology?

• Conversion as reorganisation of the self

  James describes conversion as a shift in the 'habitual centre of personal energy', prepared by subconscious processes and experienced as given from outside. This psychological account is neutral about whether anything divine is involved, which allows him to compare religious conversion with recoveries from addiction and despair.

  • What does the case of S. H. Hadley suggest about the relationship between conversion and recovery from alcoholism?
  • Can a psychological explanation of conversion leave room for a religious one?

• Other forms of consciousness

  From his own experiments with nitrous oxide James concludes that ordinary waking consciousness is only one type, separated by the filmiest of screens from others. Mystical states may not prove anything to outsiders, but they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

  • Do James's four marks of mysticism fit experiences reported with modern psychedelics?
  • What does James mean when he says such states 'open a region though they fail to give a map'?

Context

The Varieties appeared at a moment when psychology was claiming religion as a subject of science. Edwin Starbuck's questionnaire studies of conversion (1899) supplied James with data, French psychopathology (Charcot, Janet) and degeneration theory supplied the medical materialism he resisted, and Frederic Myers's idea of the 'subliminal self' shaped his concept of the subconscious. The American mind-cure movement, Christian Science and New Thought were growing rapidly, and James had defended mental healers against medical licensing laws in Massachusetts.

Composition

James was appointed Gifford Lecturer at Edinburgh in 1897 and planned ten lectures on religious experience and ten on philosophy. Serious heart trouble, brought on by an exhausting climb in the Adirondacks in 1898, forced him to postpone. He delivered the first series in May–June 1901 and the second in May–June 1902, and the book was published in June 1902 by Longmans, Green. The philosophical half was largely absorbed into a single lecture, and James's planned systematic metaphysics was never completed.

Reception

The book sold well and has never gone out of print. It founded the psychology of religion as a field and influenced theologians, philosophers and psychologists alike. Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, read it after his own conversion experience in 1934, and its ideas about deflation at depth and surrender shaped AA's spirituality. Critics have faulted its individualism, its neglect of community and ritual, and its reliance on exceptional cases, while scholars of mysticism and psychedelic research continue to use its four marks.

Comparisons

• the-principles-of-psychology

  The Principles builds the account of habit, attention and split consciousness that the Varieties uses; the subconscious self, cautiously treated in 1890, becomes in 1902 the probable gateway of religious experience.

• confessions

  James quotes Augustine's account of two wills at war as the classic description of the divided self, and the garden scene in Milan as a model of sudden unification.

• pensees

  Pascal, whom James discusses in The Will to Believe, is a sick soul in James's sense: anguished by the human condition and finding peace only in faith, with his own night of fire as a mystical experience.

• the-death-of-ivan-ilyich

  Tolstoy's novella dramatises the same crisis of meaning that James documents from Tolstoy's Confession: a conventional life suddenly revealed as empty in the face of death.

• the-anatomy-of-melancholy

  Burton's section on religious melancholy is the earlier, humoral account of the despairing conscience that James reinterprets psychologically through Bunyan and others.

• thus-spoke-zarathustra

  In the lectures on the value of saintliness James sets Nietzsche's contempt for the saint as sick and servile against his own view that the saint's virtues are adaptive in a better social world.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Lecture I, Religion and Neurology, where James mocks medical materialism for explaining away Saint Paul and Saint Teresa and proposes instead to judge religious states by their fruits rather than their roots.
• The definition of religion in Lecture II, limited to the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in their solitude. Notice everything this definition leaves out, such as churches, creeds, and sacraments, and ask what that choice does to the rest of the book.
• The contrast between the healthy-minded and the sick soul in Lectures IV through VII, with Whitman and the mind-cure movement on one side and Tolstoy, Bunyan, and the anonymous French sufferer on the other.
• The case of the French correspondent in Lecture VII, who is seized by horror on recalling an epileptic patient in an asylum and feels that he too could become that shape. James later admitted the case was his own.
• The four marks of mystical states in Lectures XVI and XVII, and James's conclusion that such states may open a region though they give no map.

Key terms and names

Medical materialism

James's name for the view that explaining a religious experience by bodily or nervous causes refutes it. He answers that every state of mind, including the scientist's, has bodily conditions, so origins cannot settle truth or worth.

Fruits, not roots

James's test for religious experience, adapted from the Sermon on the Mount. A state should be judged by its immediate luminousness, its reasonableness, and its moral helpfulness in life, not by the nervous condition from which it arose.

Healthy-mindedness

The temperament that looks on all things and sees that they are good, refusing to dwell on evil. James finds it in Whitman, liberal Christianity, and the mind-cure movement, and calls its adherents once-born.

The sick soul

The temperament for which evil, death, and failure are essential facts that no optimism can remove. Such a soul must be twice-born, finding peace only through a second birth that passes through despair.

The divided self

A personality at war with itself, like Augustine's two wills in the Confessions. James treats conversion as the process by which such a self becomes unified around a new center.

Conversion

In Lectures IX and X, the shift by which religious ideas, once peripheral, become the habitual center of a person's energy. James argues that sudden conversions are often prepared in the subconscious before they break into awareness.

Saintliness

The collective name James gives to the fruits of religion in character: asceticism, strength of soul, purity, and charity. In Lectures XI through XV he describes them with admiration and then weighs their excesses.

Four marks of mysticism

Ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity, which James proposes in Lectures XVI and XVII as the signs by which a mystical state can be recognized.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What is medical materialism, according to Lecture I, and what three criteria does James propose instead for judging a religious experience?
2. Comprehension How does James distinguish the once-born from the twice-born, and which examples does he give of each?
3. Interpretation James limits religion to individual experience in solitude and sets aside churches, creeds, and theology. What does this definition allow him to see, and what might it cause him to miss?
4. Interpretation James presents his own panic fear as a case from an anonymous French correspondent. Why might he have hidden his authorship, and does knowing the truth change how you read Lecture VII?
5. Interpretation James respects the healthy-minded but calls the sick soul's view the more complete. What reasons does he give, and do you find them persuasive?
6. Interpretation James treats S. H. Hadley's rescue from drunkenness and Augustine's conversion in the Milan garden as cases of the same psychological process. What is gained and what is lost by placing them side by side?
7. Big Question If a religious experience can be fully described in psychological terms, does that leave room for it to be truly from God, or does a complete natural explanation exclude a supernatural one?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 7:15-20 (Scripture)

  Jesus warns against false prophets and says that by their fruits you shall know them. James builds his whole method on this saying, adding that religious states should be known by their fruits and not their roots.

• Romans 7:15-25 (Scripture)

  Paul describes doing what he hates and failing to do what he wills, and cries out for deliverance from the body of this death. This passage, together with Augustine's reading of it, stands behind James's account of the divided self and its need for unification.

• Acts 9:1-19 (Scripture)

  Saul's encounter on the road to Damascus is the first case James names in Lecture I, as the experience medical materialism dismisses as an epileptic seizure. It is also the classic model of the sudden conversion James studies in Lectures IX and X.

• Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) (Great Conversation)

  After the Great Awakening, Edwards sought marks that distinguish gracious affections from counterfeit ones and concluded that Christian practice is the chief sign. James cites Edwards and shares his test of fruits, but Edwards judges the fruits as signs of grace given by God, while James judges them by their value for life.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Every state of mind, religious or scientific, has bodily conditions, so the physical origin of an experience cannot decide whether it is true or valuable. Experiences must therefore be judged by their fruits: their inner clarity, their consistency with what else we know, and their effect on life. Judged this way, religious experiences, especially those of the twice-born, produce unifications of the self and saintly lives of real worth. Therefore religion cannot be dismissed as neurosis, and the self may be continuous with a wider reality from which such experiences come.

Rhetorical device: reductio ad absurdum. In Lecture I James carries medical materialism to its conclusion, showing it would finish off Saint Paul as an epileptic, Saint Teresa as a hysteric, and Saint Francis as a hereditary degenerate. He then points out that the same method would discredit the materialist's own scientific beliefs, which also arise from bodily states, so the argument refutes itself.

Debate: Resolved: The value of a religious experience can be judged entirely by its fruits, without asking whether its source is truly divine.

Memory Work

By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots

Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map

Writing Prompts

Essay: James argues that religious states must be judged by their fruits, not their roots. Using his treatment of the sick soul and of saintliness, argue whether James's test is sufficient for deciding whether a religious experience is genuine.

Comparison with Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative: Jonathan Edwards in A Faithful Narrative and William James in the lectures on conversion both collect case histories of people who passed through terror of soul into peace. Compare how each describes and evaluates these conversions, and argue what Edwards sees that James's psychology cannot, or what James sees that Edwards could not.

Medical Lens

The Varieties is a key text for the history of psychiatry and religion. Its first lecture is a critique of reductive retrospective diagnosis (Saint Paul as epileptic, Teresa as hysteric, Francis as degenerate) that remains a model of caution for anyone tempted to diagnose historical figures. The sick-soul lectures contain some of the most precise literary descriptions of depression, anhedonia and panic in English, including James's own disguised episode. The conversion lectures, especially the cases of rescued drunkards, became a source for Alcoholics Anonymous through Bill Wilson. The mysticism lectures discuss alcohol, nitrous oxide, ether and chloroform as triggers of mystical states, anticipating modern research on psychedelics and spiritual experience. The lectures on healthy-mindedness document the mind-cure movement as an early form of psychotherapy and auto-suggestion. James's vocabulary ('psychopathic temperament', 'degenerate') reflects 1900 usage and should not be read with modern meanings.

• Lecture I: Religion and Neurology

  Critique of medical materialism; acknowledgement that religious leaders often show nervous instability, and the argument that origin does not determine value.

  Epilepsy SeizuresHysteriaHeredity DegenerationMedical Ethics
• Lectures IV and V: The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness

  The mind-cure and New Thought movements, their therapeutic claims, testimonies of recovery from nervous and physical illness, and James's verdict that their results must be taken seriously.

  Philosophy AS TherapyQuackery CharlatansMind Body
• Lectures VI and VII: The Sick Soul

  Anhedonia, Tolstoy's crisis of meaning, Bunyan's obsessions and verbal automatisms, and the anonymous French sufferer's panic and lasting dread.

  Melancholia DepressionNeurosis AnxietyObsession MonomaniaSuicide
• Lectures IX and X: Conversion

  Sudden and gradual conversion explained through subconscious incubation, with cases of drunkards rescued by religious experience, including S. H. Hadley.

  AddictionAlcoholPsychology Unconscious
• Lectures XI–XV: Saintliness

  Extreme asceticism, self-mortification and fasting described and evaluated, including James's judgement on its pathological excesses.

  Starvation NutritionPainObsession Monomania
• Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism

  The four marks of mystical states; alcohol as the exciter of the 'Yes function'; nitrous oxide and ether revelations; epileptic auras and the darker 'diabolical mysticism' of insanity.

  Altered StatesAlcoholHallucinogensEpilepsy SeizuresMadness Psychosis

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the evening of the French correspondent's panic from the inside, then a second scene, decades later, in which James decides to publish it anonymously in the Varieties.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between William James and Bill Wilson in 1935 about whether recovery from alcoholism requires a conversion experience.

• Essay

  Apply James's 'fruits, not roots' criterion to a modern case: a patient whose religious experience began during a manic episode. How should a clinician respond?

• Classroom

  Ask students to sort a set of testimonies, from James and from modern sources, into 'once-born' and 'twice-born' types and discuss whether the categories still hold.

Further Reading

• The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, William James

• A Confession, Leo Tolstoy

  The source of James's Tolstoy case.

• Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan

• Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Charles Taylor

• The Psychology of Religion, Edwin Diller Starbuck

  1899 questionnaire study of conversion that James drew on.

• Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W.

  The 'Big Book' (1939), which acknowledges James's influence.