4

PSYCHOLOGY
OF
RELIGION

James’s theory of religion was, as R. B. Perry has remarked, “an act of filial piety.” Immediately after his father’s death in 1882, James wrote his wife that she must help him to fulfill an obligation he then felt toward his father, to understand, as he said, “the value and meaning of religion in my father’s sense, in the mental life and destiny of man.”¹ James’s preparation of his father’s Literary Remains for publication three years later seemed to furnish an opportunity to meet this obligation. But, in order to perform better the duty of paying homage to his father’s system of philosophy, he let the opportunity pass by. Consequently, his long introduction to this volume consists mainly of excerpts from his father’s other writings to provide the reader a sympathetic and synoptic sketch of the main lines of the elder James’s thought. And though religious themes were to occupy James’s mind in such writings as The Will to Believe, it was not until he was unofficially approached for appointment to a Gifford lectureship at Edinburgh in 1896, the invitation being formally confirmed in 1898, that he undertook the laborious investigation and systematic collection of the data of religious experiences. With the presentation of the lectures in 1901 and 1902, and their publication in the latter year under the title, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James had acquitted himself at last of the duty he felt toward his father’s work.

James approached religion from the standpoint of psychology. He had originally intended to examine in the first series of his lectures the subjective phenomena of religious feelings and impulses as recorded in the human documents of piety and autobiography, and to formulate in the second series a metaphysical account of their satisfaction. However, he became so absorbed in the case histories of the psychology of religion that he reduced philosophy proper to the concluding lecture and the postscript. The positive result of James’s study of religion was to win for the psychological examination of experience the central place formerly reserved for theological speculation. After James no student of religion could be at ease in the presence of abstract theological concepts unless he made the effort to explain their meaning in human experience. The mystics have, of course, always sought God in human experience; but unlike James, they allowed for little philosophy and less science. Whereas before James the philosophically-minded had searched for God in nature or history, after James they looked to experience first.

In the psychology of religion James attempted to adhere to a “purely existential point of view” to examine religious experiences without passing judgment on their value. Investigating the constitution, origin, and history of religious experiences, the existential method is, in James’s hand, also the scientific one. Still James never once supposed that this method could answer the crucial question concerning the ultimate significance, the authentic values of religion. Vehemently he denounced as invalid the “medical materialism” which, because it discovers religious experiences to be similar to abnormal psychological states, dismisses them as pathological. The value of religious experience, he insisted, has nothing to do with causal origin, but rather with its quality and its consequences. The justification of religious experience as to value resides in its immediate luminousness, its philosophical reasonableness, and its moral helpfulness. Thus James was a pioneer in the scientific study of religion. Overcoming the initial hostile stance of science toward religious values, he opened a new door to the study of religion. Yet his achievement must be counted as transitional rather than final. Had James furnished a total description of religious experience inclusive of its values, he would also have been a founder of the phenomenology of religion.

James defined religion as “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what-ever they may consider divine.”² This definition served to circumscribe the subject-matter of James’s study. It strikingly excludes institutional religion. Although this exclusion may be deemed a defect in James’s general theory, it yet points up the emotional foundations of religion in man and the creative source of religious affection and insight within the individual. Having neglected the social dimension of religion, James focused on the inwardness and the privacy of religious experience, and he directed attention to the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. However repugnant these various religious experiences may be to the academic mind, they should not be ignored. Two types of religious experience illustrate James’s openminded approach: the religion of the healthy-minded and that of the sick soul.

James designated as healthy-minded the optimistic tendency to see all things as good. This tendency may be involuntary, as a way of feeling happy about all things immediately, or, assuming the form of religious experience, it may be a deliberate attitude which conceives the essential nature of the world to be good and intentionally excludes evil from its field of vision. The practical merits of healthy-mindedness are palpable. Imbued with the hopeful conviction that obstacles and troubles are not as real as they seem to be, positive thinking either unleashes the energy to overcome them or consoles the individual to adjust to them. If the way of the healthy-minded was not James’s way in religion, he could still pause in its presence, and despite its leading to fraudulent mind-cure panaceas in medicine, urge that it be tolerated. According to James, the belief in a higher power caring for us better than we can care for ourselves, if whole-heartedly embraced, is verified in the experiences of well-being it affords.

Standing at the end of the spectrum of religious experience away from healthy-mindedness, the sick soul maximizes evil. Indeed, the sick soul apprehends the evil aspects of its life as its very essence. James himself was no stranger to the melancholy of the sick soul. To illusträte its condition he cited his own spiritual crisis of 1868 or 1870 when he was overwhelmed with morbid despair and panic fear.³ Alone in his dressing room one evening James, like Roquentin in La Nausée, had been seized with the horrible fear of his own existence. Haunted by the image of an idiot youth whom he had once seen in an asylum (reminding one of the strange old man, staring at his foot, whom Roquentin recalls from his childhood games in the public garden), James felt the physical presence of this madman in his room, and overwrought emotionally, he identified himself potentially with that awful being. Psychologically the experience shattered James, as it did Roquentin. Nothing saved him from utter breakdown and insanity, James later held, except religious conversion. Only by clinging to such scriptural texts as “The eternal God is my refuge” did James cure his mental sickness.

James’s remarks on the psychology of conversion were inspired, no doubt, by meditation on his own crisis and its resolution. If the healthy-minded is the fortunate once-born, the sick soul when converted undergoes a second birth. As one of the twice-born James spoke eloquently of the psychological ingredients in conversion. The hour of conversion is filled with feelings of control by a higher power, a power that redeems the self from its melancholy. Faith supplants fear, anxiety passes, and regardless of what the external situation contains or portends, the self is persuaded that all is ultimately right. A sense of perceiving truths hitherto unknown pervades the consciousness of the converted individual, and the world itself changes appearance, as the unreality and strangeness of things give way before a clean and beautiful newness.

James was cognizant of the extent to which non-rational and even irrational elements and principles constituted his subject matter. In 1902 he confessed: “I regard the Varieties of Religious Experience as in a sense a study of morbid psychology ....”⁴ James’s concentration on psychological considerations was at one with his distrust of rationalism in religion and his disinterest in metaphysical theology. James denounced the intellectualist endeavor to construct religious entities from logical reason alone or from logical reason drawing rigorous inference from allegedly objective facts. Intellectualism in religion tends to conceive God as a being whose metaphysical attributes have little or nothing to do with the concrete experiences of men; such a God is but the worthless invention of the academic theologian.

As intellectualism in religion generates ideas and beliefs without experiential foundations and so divorces religion from life, outside religion it allies itself with agnosticism and challenges the human right to religious belief. In his famous essay, The Will to Believe, James took issue with the allegedly scientific mentality that prohibits belief unless there is supporting evidence. He eloquently argued in behalf of the right of the individual to hold religious, moral, and practical beliefs even in the absence of logical or factual evidence. Confronted by a live, forced, momentous option between two hypotheses, the individual need not refuse to decide because rational evidence is lacking. Rather, like Pascal, he has the right to consult his passional nature and to exercise his will to believe. This right does not imply that one may believe anything he wills, albeit in contradiction with the evidence. On the contrary, the will to believe is to be brought into play only when the option is genuine—i.e., live, forced, and momentous—and when there is no evidence against one side and for the other. Of course the agnostic might still claim that by suspending judgment in such cases he has avoided the possibility of error, but as James sharply remarked, the agnostic also misses an opportunity to win the truth. Belief in the existence of God, in the guarantee that despite the vicissitudes of change the ideals and values to which men aspire will persist and triumph, is, according to James, an hypothesis a man has a right to believe. Practically, such belief in God, unwarranted by reason alone, is justified by the lived values of religious experience.

Will, not reason, is the decisive faculty of religious belief. Experience, not reason, furnishes the contents and the test of religion. As James wrote in a letter in 1900, experience is “the real backbone of the world’s religious life—I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world’s meaning...⁵״

James’s conception of religious experience has little room for a purely metaphysical concept of God. God is, above all, a moral being intimately related to human experience. Rationalistic theology goes by the board, and all the divine qualities and faculties are reconstrued in terms of moral action and concrete experience. For example, the holiness of God is interpreted to signify that God is a moral being who wills only the good. At the least, this kind of reinterpretation of the attributes of God is what religious pragmatism requires. The “menial services” of God are needed “in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.”⁶ He “lives in the very dirt of private fact—if that should seem a likely place to find him.”⁷

Since God is understood to be a principle corresponding to the experiences of men, an agency answering to human needs, the experiences in which men relate to God are as various as the numerous human psychological constitutions and needs. The Varieties of Religious Experience is, in this sense, an apt description of James’s subject-matter. It examines the religious experiences of the healthy-minded, of the sick souls, of the divided souls that are integrated by conversion, and of the saints and the mystics. James refrained from denigrating any of these varieties of relating to the divine, although he was careful to note, particularly in the case of mysticism with its claims to an absolute but ineffable truth, that each type, while valid for those individuals who partake of its richness, has no universal authority over all men.

Is there, then, no essence or form common to all the varieties of religious experience? From his investigations James concluded that there is. Whatever the religious creed may be, the structure of religious experience is basically the same. It consists, first, in a feeling of uneasiness on the part of the individual, to the effect that something is wrong with him as he stands naturally, and second, in the dissolution of this uneasiness, the salvation of the individual through relation to higher powers.

After defining the common essence of religious experiences, James was prepared to face the crucial question of whether, in fact, such higher powers, or God, exist. In advance of Freud and Jung, James framed his answer in terms of depth psychology, hailing F. W. Myers’s discovery in 1886 of the subliminal consciousness, the subconsciousness, as “the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science.”⁸ In his famous Ingersoll lecture, Human Immortality, James had shown how it is possible that human consciousness, though dependent on brain physiology during natural life, may yet survive death. Consciousness, he held, is not produced, but is transmitted by the brain. Hence consciousness may endure after the individual brain transmitting it decomposes. Indeed, James went on to suggest that there is another world, separate from the world of physical processes and events, populated by consciousnesses, which filter into the natural world through physical media such as brains, but which possess, nonetheless, independent existences. That, beyond our own finite consciousnesses and conscious to them only in rare experiences, there is another world of consciousness, constituting a kind of unconsciousness for normal finite consciousness, was for James the cardinal principle in his metaphysical conception of God.

In essence, the unconsciousness, or at least a major part thereof, is the substance of the higher power to which the religious individual relates. Continuous with the individual finite consciousness, it yet operates in the universe outside the individual. In religious experience the individual repairs the shipwreck his finite conscious־ ness suffers, by relating himself to the creative unconsciousness which is the source and support of his psychical being. Existing beyond the individual, who is in a sense nothing more than a lower being, the unconsciousness is creative in function and cosmic in expanse. It is a vast reservoir of moral and physical energy which, when tapped, feeds without stint the spiritually hungry. Refueled by relating to the divine, the individual is, in James’s account, readied to cope once again with his life and the world and to grapple with the arduous moral tasks of human existence.