Books: The Waterspouts of God

THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James. 626 pages. University. $10.

“One evening there fell upon me without warning a horrible fear of my own existence. There arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, looking absolutely nonhuman. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. I became a mass of quivering fear. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.”

So Philosopher William James recalled the worst crisis in his life—a terrible depression in his late 20s that nearly drove him to suicide. Eventually James recovered by deciding that he must have “the will to believe” in a higher good even though he had no proof of it. Though he remained an agnostic because he felt that no religion had a corner on the truth, he became passionately interested in the religious experience itself—on the ground that the experience of religious conversion was a vital one for the human being. James ransacked history and searched among his contemporaries for examples; ultimately he collected these individual histories in a massive volume, first published in 1902, that has become a classic of American literature: The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Help! Help! Reissued now in a volume that includes all of James’s subsequent musings on religion, The Varieties reads like a steady stream of confessions. “I am almost appalled at the amount of emotionality in it,” James admits in his concluding chapter. In copious detail, James records the soul-searchings of religious figures like Luther and St. Theresa and Bunyan, and of not so obviously religious ones like Tolstoy and Walt Whitman and Carlyle. No type of religious experience, however humble or bizarre, is excluded; James treats them all with tender indulgence. The majestic agonies of Augustine are followed by the fussy gropings of an alcoholic. The founder of the Quakers, George Fox, has a vision of blood flowing through the streets of Lichfield (where Diocletian slaughtered 1,000 Christians), and strides barefoot through the city, crying: “Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!” The doughty little evangelist Billy Bray hears the Lord speaking to him. “Worship me with clean lips,” the Lord thunders. In ecstasy, Billy stomps on his favorite pipe, muttering solemnly: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

The Varieties seems to mix the ridiculous with the sublime. But that is exactly James’s point: all religious experiences are equally valid. It is the experience that counts, not the quality of the discovered belief.

The basis of religion, James argues in his commentary on religious seers, is the anguished cry of “Help! Help!” Not the “healthy-minded,” but the “sick souls” of the world are the founders of religion; those who have a “pathological melancholy” and turn in their despair to a higher power for help—to God or to nature or to an “ideal essence.” Once converted, they “attain an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level in which impossible things have become possible and new energies and endurances are shown.”

Vicious Creeds. James does not bother to choose among the various creeds he catalogues because he considers them all unprovable. “Instinct leads,” he writes. “Intelligence does but follow.” The act of conversion is, in fact, a complete surrender of human reason: “The will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. The time for tension in the soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.”

James relaxed too much. In making little allowance for the fact that people can also be converted to vicious creeds, he acquired admirers he would have deplored Mussolini, for instance, hailed James as a preceptor who had showed him that “an action should be judged by its result rather than by its doctrinary basis.”

James, who taught philosophy at Harvard for most of his career, had no intention of giving comfort to latter-day totalitarians. He was simply impatient with his fellow academicians and their endless hairsplitting over matters that had no relation to life. A vibrant, generous person, he hoped to show that religious emotions, even those of the deranged, were crucial to human life. The great virtue of The Varieties, noted Pragmatist Philosopher Charles Peirce, is its “penetration into the hearts of people.” Its great weakness, retorted George Santayana, is its “tendency to disintegrate the idea of truth, to recommend belief without reason and to encourage superstition.”