James The Greater
I was ambling along Gnostic Alley the other night when I spied an aged sign under a high arch: “William James, Psychologist.” I seemed to remember that he’d written something back awhile about religion. Maybe I should stop in for a bit of a chat….
It’s hard to give proper praise for one of the towering figures of American thought at the turn of the 20th century – or any other time. I’m staking this claim so far on a single work by James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, but it’s more than enough. How often do you encounter a perfect combination of style, thought and presentation, of science, philosophy and the deepest realm of the human mind?
In this 1902 enhancement of a series of lectures given in Scotland, you find a superb intellect at work presenting objectivity in the best sense – careful elucidation underpinned by an open mind and respect for personal difference.
If you crossed the forthright clarity of Brian Greene – today’s finest explicator of popular science – with Anthony Trollope’s love of comedy and delicious sense of appropriate beauty, you’d have something like James.
(For some ungodly reason, William has been largely overshadowed by brother Henry, whose turgid eloquence as a novelist could turn a fish inside out. William, by contrast, speaks with shimmering precision while still revolving his phrases on a slow spit over a very hot fire.)
Like Bertrand Russell in England, he came along at a time when respect for the embellished phrase still solidly underpinned most major writing, even as naturalism and scientific objectivity settled down from the top.
Russell generally gets the nod as the writer/philosopher most typifying the application of rigor and logic to intellectual pursuits during the era when modern rigorous science took shape. Yet there’s always the unsettling assumption with Russell that he has looked deeply into the reader’s brain and found it wanting. James expresses no false humility, but neither does he position himself as ultimate teacher, with you as wayward student.
James is determined to look at every aspect of religion with both rigor and sympathy, but his ability to separate the wheat from the chaff may be what sets him above others who have tried to define and examine the value of “religion”: He unerringly zeros in on the significant.
He focuses on the extremes of belief and mysticism, because he feels that in the extremes we see most clearly the basic outlines of the subject. He passes relatively quickly through the crabbed attempts of Church philosophers to place Christianity on a supposedly rational basis; in the process he presents a succinct and focused summation of God’s attributes as taken from scholastic and medieval philosophy: Over a thousand years of Western philosophical hedge-trimming summarized incisively in roughly a page.
I could quote something from almost any page of Religious Experience and it would ring like a bell – which makes it almost impossible to quote anything, especially out of context. Still, here’s an example I particularly like where James, a “non-believer” in the conventional sense, contemplates the place of “god” as a general concept related to the self: “It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression….”
And here’s his take on why a certain type of convinced religious mind sees the need to create an elaborate, bureaucratic institutional system. That approach, he says, is basically aesthetic: “The inner need is … of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from state to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system.” From the stuffed-full mind of the lone monk at his vellum to the proliferation of Vatican curia.
90% of what James talks about is still fully relevant, because it is based on the workings of human thought and human belief, rather than a frozen snapshot of then-current knowledge.
The few places where it comes a cropper has to do with the sense of optimism pervading his time. He saw science, knowledge and human destiny as balanced on the cusp of positive change. He also shared the common assumption of the “new scientists” that organized religion was on its way out. This quote sums up much of that feeling: “"I do not see why a critical Science of Religions … might not eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a physical science.”
It’s hard to imagine what a hellish toll the two world wars, one already on the horizon, must have taken not only in loss of life and physical destruction, but in the demolition of this view of intellectual progress. I think, too, that he would have been horrified to see psychology split between the idolatry of psychoanalysis on the one hand and the sterile connect-the-dots of Skinnerism.
As for institutional religion, it has returned over and over, like ragweed.
So what has all this to do with Gnosticism, which is the supposed rationale for this burble I’ve been writing? Certainly James had nothing to say of the Gnostics, since their texts had not yet been recovered. But the Gnostics, more than any modern successors, merged mysticism with abstruse philosophy. They combined a stunning variety of religious experiences that support James’ approach to his study.
Also, James saw the true importance of religion lying in the fact that belief has a practical effect in the world. I think this outlook, without my realizing it, may lie behind my study of systems of thought that don’t, in their particulars, reflect how I look at existence.
by Derek Davis