Books that have changed my thinking (1): The Varieties of Religious Experience
Nov 19th, 2009 by Bill
Books that have changed my thinking (1): The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James –
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Reading: Matthew 7:15-28
Children’s Story: The Red-Blossom Tree
Once upon a time four young princes were having a violent argument about a tree called the red-blossom tree. The red-blossom tree was very rare and very beautiful and could be found only in the deepest forest, well away from the main roadway. Each of the brothers had seen it just once when the coach driver happened to have a spare seat in the king’s coach and had invited one or other of the brothers to come along for a ride.
One prince said, ‘I don’t know why it’s called a red-blossom tree. It has no blossom on it at all. In fact it didn’t look much like a tree. The branches were bare and it looked as if it was dead.’
Another replied, ‘You’re wrong! It may not have any red blossom, but it certainly has plenty of green leaves. Maybe it should be called the green-leaf tree!’
A third brother joined in: ‘Oh, but it does have red blossom! It’s covered in it! It’s the most beautiful tree I’ve ever … … ’
‘Well,’ interrupted the fourth brother, ‘it’s not bare and it’s not covered in red blossom, but in brown leaves! I think it should be called the brown-leaf tree!’
The argument was getting nowhere, but their father had overheard it all. ‘My sons,’ he said, ‘you’ve all seen the same tree, but each of you saw it at different times of the year!’
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I was given a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience over forty years ago, by a woman who told me that it was her favourite book. I was grateful for the gift, but I didn’t read it. I took it home, flicked through it, read the introduction and then put it on the shelf and forgot about it.
The reason for my indifference, I now realise, was that religious experience didn’t interest me when I was twenty-four. I was interested in religious truth. I wanted to know which religion was the religion approved by God, the one which would guarantee my eternal salvation. So, I concerned myself with apologetic matters, looking at the evidence that different religious groups brought forward to prove that their system was the divinely inspired one.
I had been brought up in just such an apologetic atmosphere. Catholic religious education in the 1950s and 60s consisted in large part in proving that Catholicism was true and that every other religion was false. The only bits of the Bible I knew were those which seemed to imply that St. Peter was the preeminent apostle, and that Jesus had conferred upon him and his successors authority to teach in his name. Catholicism had impeccable intellectual and historical credentials, I was taught, and every other religious system was in error, some of them abominably so. Even the Church of England – so close to Romanism in so many ways – was heretical. Its priests weren’t real priests, its sacraments were invalid, and its offer of salvation was bogus. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus was the cry; ‘outside the church there is no salvation’.
Arguments interested me. I liked nothing better than to engage someone in religious debate, so I would always invite the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons in for a discussion, pointing out the inconsistencies of their theology, the implausibilities of their story. I enjoyed debating with atheists, too, attempting to prove the existence of God, or the reliability of the New Testament, or the cogency of Catholic theology
I was never fanatical about these things. I simply enjoyed the intellectual exercise. I never believed that religions other than Catholicism were totally false and that their adherents would burn in hell. In fact, I never really believed in hell. Catholicism began to lose its grip on me because I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with its dogmatism and its authoritarianism, and so much of its theology seemed based on the flimsiest of premises that the rationalist in me moved further and further towards the pure rationalism of Unitarianism. When I discovered it in the eighties, I was attracted by its reasonableness; by its refusal to claim any supernatural foundation for its convictions. Here, I thought, is a religious system that doesn’t ask me to surrender my intelligence; which doesn’t force me to believe the incredible, and which is more concerned with the realities of the present life than with conjectures about some future one.
When I came to Dublin in 1996, this was still my mind-set, and I remember that the very first sermon I gave, my ‘candidating’ sermon, was on the book Dead Man Walking by Sr. Helen Préjean, which had just been made into a film. The sermon was really an attack on capital punishment, the kind of attack which everyone in the congregation would have heard before and would undoubtedly have agreed with. This kind of ‘worthy’ stuff characterised the first two years of my ministry here, but sometime in 1998, for reasons which I cannot completely fathom, the emphasis changed somewhat and I began to move away from dealing with liberal political themes in my sermons, and to consider what, for want of a better term, might be called ‘the mystical’. I began to consider afresh such things as prayer, self-transformation, self-analysis, and to move the focus from outside to inside, from the body to the soul. I wasn’t content just to ask what was wrong with society and how could we put it right; I found myself asking what was wrong with me, and what could I do about that.
It was then that I rediscovered William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. I don’t know how it happened, but I felt compelled to read the book. Perhaps I’d seen it referred to in something else I was reading; perhaps it was just one of those unfathomable impulses or inspirations which come out of the blue. I don’t know
When I began to read it I couldn’t stop. What had seemed like a chore thirty years earlier was now a delight. Every chapter, every page even, seemed to speak to me, and my copy is full of underlinings, asterisks, and exclamation marks; and I can remember thinking that here is material for numerous sermons.
The author, William James, was the brother of the famous novelist Henry James. He was born in 1842 in New York City, and educated at Harvard, and although he was never a Unitarian – in fact, he never formally espoused any religion – he was undoubtedly influenced by the liberal Unitarian thinkers who dominated the intellectual climate of the American East Coast. In 1901, he was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen University, and the text of these lectures constitutes the book.
He begins by telling us that he’s not going to concern himself with religious truth, or with religious organisations, or religious doctrines, or with religious ceremonies. He is concerned with the perceived effects religions have on their adherents. ‘By their fruits, not their roots,’ is how we should judge any religious system. In this, of course, he was in perfect agreement with Jesus, who said much the same thing. As an example, he mentions the Quaker religion. Quakerism, he says, is probably the most respected branch of Christianity, and yet its founder George Fox, was a man much given to what we might call ‘delusions’. James quotes at length from Fox’s Journal, in which he gives an account of his being called by God to give his shoes to some shepherds and wander through the town of Lichfield crying, ‘Wo to the bloody city of Lichfield’. He goes on:
As I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market place appeared like a pool of blood. When I had declared what was upon me and felt myself clear, I went out of the town in peace; and returning to the shepherds gave them some money, and took my shoes of them again. But the fire of the Lord was so on my feet, and all over me, that I did not matter to put on my shoes again, and was at a stand whether I should or no, till I felt freedom from the Lord to do so: then, after I had washed my feet, I put on my shoes again.
He later finds out that in the third century CE, in the Emperor Diocletian’s time, a thousand Christians were martyred in Lichfield, and he reckoned that this was the reason why God had called him to the city, and why he had ‘seen’ rivers of blood flowing through it.
James does not hold Fox up to ridicule – as we modern rationalists might – nor does he explain his strange experiences by means of what he calls ‘medical materialism’, that is as neurotic or psychotic disposition brought on by physiological or mental defects, which is something we moderns tend to do all the time. St. Paul had a vision on the road to Damascus? No. He was an epileptic. St. Teresa of Avila had ecstatic visions of Christ? No. She was just sexually frustrated. Joseph Smith encountered angels? No. He was just a charlatan. That’s our sophisticated, dismissive, contemporary response. The response, says James, of those with a ‘robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition.’ Perhaps, instead, we should consider that if there is such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be the so-called neurotic temperament which provides the requisite degree of receptivity.
In an episode of the American cartoon South Park called All About the Mormons, a Mormon boy called Gary explains his religious commitment in a way that we rationalists would do well to ponder:
Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy.
I once knew a tailor in my home town of Pontefract who would only employ Jehovah’s Witness pioneers in his shop. When I asked him why, he said, ‘Because I know they will never cheat me.’
Maybe we’ve all got a lot of growing up to do!
One of the most significant themes of James’ book is the distinction the author makes between what he calls ‘the religion of healthy-mindedness’ and the religion of ‘the sick soul’. The religion of healthy-mindedness is quite simple to define and to understand. It is the religion of those whom we might call optimists, people who ‘look on the bright side’, who have generally happy temperaments, and who tend to view human history as a gradual climb from barbarism to civilisation. It is undoubtedly the religion of the vast majority of Unitarians, as James makes clear by the number of examples he gives from the works of prominent Unitarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Everett Hale; and it is the assumption behind many of the hymns in our hymn book – These things shall be; Hail the Glorious Golden City; Now is the time approaching; Soon the Day will Arrive, etc.
Garrison Keilor parodies this aspect of Unitarianism in a little ‘hymn’ sung to the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers:
Onward stalwart persons,
Fighting for a cause,
Marching down to Washington,
To change our nation’s laws.
But, says James, there are others, not so stalwart. These are the ‘sick souls’, who do not come at life with such optimistic assumptions, and who are very cautious about predicting a coming Golden Age. These are the people who are well aware that ‘our civilisation is founded on the shambles – on the slaughterhouse’, and that the line between civilisation and barbarism is a thin one indeed. They also recognise that the line between civilisation and barbarism doesn’t just run through society, it runs through the self. In one telling little anecdote – the book is full of these anecdotes; James was a great collector and ‘clipper’ – he quotes the French writer Alphonse Daudet who, when his brother died, heard his father exclaim, ‘He is dead, he is dead!’ Daudet’s response was twofold:
While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.’ This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or to put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks.
Who can deny having had similar experiences? I recently read an article by Will Self about the novelist J. G. Ballard, whose work explores the darker side of human existence and who, says Self, ‘during the Japanese occupation of his natal city, Shanghai, had learned the vital lesson that anyone can descend effortlessly into barbarism.’ Ballard, like Self himself, was a ‘sick soul’, and when sick souls turn to religion they don’t want the kind of ‘shoulders to the wheel, let’s change society by our enlightened efforts’ type of religion. I can remember many years ago when the playwright Tennessee Williams was asked why he had converted late in life to Catholicism, his response was, ‘To get some goodness back.’ Unitarianism doesn’t offer a path towards ‘goodness’. Like most liberal Protestant groups, it attracts those who, by and large, consider themselves reasonably good already. As Rory made plain to our new members a few weeks ago, ‘We don’t even offer you eternal salvation’. Anyone looking for deeper things will have to look elsewhere.
By showing that different people come to religion with different needs, James demolishes the idea that there is, or that there could ever be, a ‘true’ religion, i.e. one that offers consolation and support to every single person; that ‘one size fits all’. He demonstrates that an individual’s choice of religion has more to do with temperament than conviction; and, as our children’s story today suggests, that although we may all be looking at the same tree, we are all seeing it differently.
In his final chapter he writes this, which I have quoted so often that I know it by heart, and which has informed my whole religious outlook ever since I read it a decade ago:
Ought it … to be assumed that the lives of all people should show identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable?
To these questions I answer ‘No’ emphatically. And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties…..The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different people may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely……..for each man to stay in his own experience, whate’er it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.
Two questions suggest themselves. First, what is the value of ecumenism, when we cease talking about ‘true’ and ‘false’ religion? And second, and perhaps more pertinent for us Unitarians, should we remain a religion for the healthy-minded, or should we try to be more understanding of and accommodating towards the sick souls, the ones who seek more intangible things than an earthly Utopia? I’m not going to try to answer these questions. At least I’m not going to do so today. Read James’ book yourself and come to your own conclusions.
15th November, 2009