William James and Religious Feelings

In the northern spring of 1901, the noted Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James packed his bags and sailed for Europe to deliver the esteemed Gifford Lectures. For several years prior to this, James had been furiously collecting, clipping and filing the data – usually personal testimonies - that would become the basis for his study. He had overcome bouts of severe ill-health which led to him writing a good deal of his text in bed and had postponed the delivery of the lectures for a year. The lectures were finally delivered in Edinburgh to great acclaim. When it was published, in 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience would both baffle and intrigue its reviewers as being ‘too biological for the religious, too religious for the biological’. Nevertheless, Varieties would run to some thirty-eight impressions by 1935.

James attempted, by means of an exhaustive empirical study, to peer behind the dogma and creedal aspects of religion and discern the real core of individual religious experience. His concern was what he called ‘personal religion’, namely
…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
James was keenly aware of the sceptism of his audience that his study could really be considered properly scientific. He argued that religion presented to the psychologist a set of distinct phenomena that were available to be analysed with due rigour. In James’ view, the experiences that he described could only be classified as ‘religious’. They certainly could not be explained away by reference to sickness or the displacement of the erotic.

It was the feeling generated by religious experience that enabled an analysis of religion that overcame the diversity of religious opinions. As he explained, ‘I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.’ The divergences between theological systems are irreconcilable. These differences only appear because ‘[F]eeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself.’ Theology and institutional forms of religion appear as expressions of this inner experience.

When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives.

The feelings that generate these systems of thought are marked by ‘an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, ‘dynamogenic’ order which like any tonic, freshens our vital powers.’ This remarkable zest, James concludes, results in the first instance from a profound sense that something is wrong with us in our natural condition; and that re-establishing one’s connection with the divine is an antidote to the wrongness.

James was not about to build a proof for the existence of God in the traditional sense on the basis of the filing cabinet full of testimony to religious experiences that he had collected and collated. He was confident to conclude that this wealth of data exposed something anthropological in the sense that ‘the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come’. That is to say, there is always more to the self than the self is aware of; and this subconscious self is evidence that there is more life in us than we even know ourselves. For James, these outer limits of the personality point to a ‘mystical’ or even ‘supernatural’ dimension in which the human being shares – a dimension which is no less real in being unseen, because it produces real effects. Why is it, theologically speaking, that human beings are so pervasively given to immortal longings? Why is that they speak so often of experiences that give a sense of resolution to those longings?


Whereas James deliberately eschewed the traditional discourses of theology and claimed that his achievement rested only on empirical data, it is my task to essay a theological anthropology of feelings. James attempted to sift through the soil of Christian doctrine to uncover the core realities he wanted to analyse. For the Christian theologian that is not a desirable or even possible strategy. Yet it seems that James’ foray into the philosophy of religion offers an account of human experience and feeling that a theological anthropology can scarcely avoid if it is to be persuasive. What