The Varieties of Religious Experience (Book Review)

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1997, pp. 416, $8.

The book contains a series of lectures James delivered at the University of Edinburgh, famously called the “Gifford Lectures”. They proved to be a milestone in religious thought at the time and carry over some of their splendour to our day. James’ approach to the study was one of pragmatism and experimental psychology. Over the course of the book, he draws reference from diverse religious perspectives. He categorizes the wide varieties of religious experiences into empirical categories rather than by the traditional historical categories, and this is brilliant.

The twenty lectures are concised into 14 chapters. They are: Religion and Neurology, Circumscription of the Topic, The Reality of the Unseen, The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness, The Sick Soul, The Divided Self and the Process of its Unification, Conversion, Saintliness, The Value of Saintliness, Mysticism, Philosophy, Other Characteristics and Conclusions. Each chapter reveals James’ rigourous empiricism and pragmatism. They contain his findings and reflections besides giving texts, sometimes very voluminous ones, from different sources. These help clarify the point and are sometimes used to make a point.

The book is interesting. The regular quotations may cause one to lose interest and give in to the temptation to skip over these passages but doing so will only leave one the worse for it. The chapters on Conversion, Saintliness and Mysticism were my favourites. The conclusions James arrives at are sometimes startling and at other times prosaic. The book, I would think is best suited for those interested in studying the religious life from a rational perspective. Religious-minded people may find in it some sort of explanation but may not be wholly satisfied. In a letter to a friend James described his aim: “to defend... ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life... and to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd, yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function.”