More Varieties of Religious Experience

I like to give credit where credit is due, and therefore I will point out a place that I agree with William James.  He writes,

When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be?

I appreciate that, because many people who study religion try to reduce it to something easily explainable, something where they do not have to grapple with the question of divinity, and here James shows how little sense it makes to ignore divinity, or to add it in only as something inescapable but not really tangible.

On the other hand, James himself reduces the mystical union with God to a person's union with his own unconscious, which seems to be going in the same directionl.  He says,

Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its _farther_ side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its _hither_ side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.

And proceeds to elaborate on how religious sentiments are simply derived from the subconscious.  He is as kind as he can be to religion, saying that theologians are right that a religious feeling is a sense of something "other" insofar as the unconscious is unknown to our conscious minds; but, to rephrase his own question, which people would be willing to die for the glory of having made contact with their own unconsciousness?

Elsewhere, James tries to sum up religious feeling, and comes up with this:

The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a "sthenic" affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, "dynamogenic" order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.

To which I can only ask:  really?  Yes, many of his examples show people taking enormous new appreciation for life and the things in it, but many others show people trying to separate themselves from this world and this life.  One of the lectures on saintliness gives many examples of mortification of the flesh, to the point that it turned my stomach to listen to some of it.  Here is a particularly striking paragraph (one of many) about a German mystic:

to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord, he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and night. "The first time that he stretched out this cross upon his back his tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted the sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it was as if a hedgehog-skin were on him. If any one touched him unawares, or pushed against his clothes, it tore him."

How in the world could James conclude that this fits in the category of "cheerful" or "expansive" emotions?  And it comes in a lecture on saintliness, which he particularly calls out as a place for examples that fit his case?

I feel like James is trying to make sense of religion, but he is trying to make it into a psychological phenomenon and to avoid all relationship to the supernatural.  In doing so, he contradicts his own earlier examples and leaves me to conclude that he was not at all a very thorough thinker.

I would add that the examples of the saints who took mortification of the flesh to extremes I also find unappealling.  I understand that part of being religious is setting one's mind on the next world rather than this, and that self-denial plays a role in that.  On the other hand, I have a hard time believing that God put us in this world with the intention that we should enjoy nothing that He provided us, and I want no part of a religion where the greatest sanctity consists in the greatest infliction of self-mortification.

[Postscript:  I wrote this entry when I was almost done with the book, but not quite.  At the very end, James surprised me by going in completely the opposite direction.  He had been discussing religion purely from psychological perspective, but at the end he allowed himself to speculate on whether there was anything beyond psychology -- i.e., whether God actually exists, or is just a word that we use to describe certain phenomena.  This is a pet peeve of mine, so I was interested to see him call it out and actually say that he thinks God does exist; or rather,

What is this but to say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new _facts_ as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expression, _a natural constitution_ different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have.

 "It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians," he goes on to say, "who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it stands."  This is precisely my position, but it seems so incongruous coming at the end of his book, when he has spoken so favourably of transcendentalism over against any other kind of theology.  "You will readily admit," he asserts, "that no description of the phenomena of the religious consciousness could be better than these words" which he has just quoted from a transcendentalist philosopher.  It is true that James addresses the limitations of this philosophy, but not to refute any of it, merely to say that it is unable to prove religion logically, something which James believe a prior impossible.]