Varieties of Religious Experience
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William James' Varieties of Religious Experience is a series of lectures the great psychologist delivered in 1901-1902 on the subject of the existential phenomena of religious experience. James notes that as a psychologist he is not prepared to investigate religion from an anthropological or historical perspective. He comes to it instead as one who is interested in everything that pertains to man's "mental constitution" and assumes that "the religious propensities" would not be any less interesting than other phenomena of that type (4). James' source material for his investigation is the writings of individuals whose spiritual lives have been recorded. These exceptional religious people are those for whom, unlike the "ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country," religion is not habitual but exists "as an acute fever" (9). The religious propensities of these people have a directness and intensity that offer the observer of these phenomena a clearer view of what makes up the religious experience. But these states of religious involvement are often extreme and include many features--hearing voices, obsessiveness, trances--that, ordinarily, "are classed as pathological" (9). James does not, however, subscribe to what he calls "medical materialism," a reductive approach which holds that since every phenomenon of the mind has "some organic process as its condition," these phenomena have no meaning beyond their status as manifestati
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vice of the highest" and it is intrinsically joyous. In religious experience "dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place" (48).
But what is the full nature of a religious experience? Religion, in the sense, which James defines it, is the addition of a degree of emotion and enthusiastic espousal to the acknowledgment of the divine that produce a freedom that cannot be attained in any other way. This is the heart of the religious experience. The individual consents to the solemn state of happiness that comes with access to "the absolute and everlasting" and this is a phenomenon that "we find nowhere but in religion" (55-6).
There must also, however, be a certain degree of helplessness and self-sacrifice involved in the experience. As James notes, "we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed" (590). These sacrifices and surrenders are required because life's imperatives include pain, suffering and death. As with the grudging acceptance of morality, of course, there can also be
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Approximate Word count = 2338
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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