Here follows the transcript of a religious experience recently shared with me. (Perhaps that phrase causes your eyes to glaze over. What experience do you anticipate being disclosed? Something along the vertical axis – a face in the clouds, a distortion of light? Or something received aurally – a cry like thunder, a still small voice, the tone in which God spoke to the Prophet Elijah in the Hebrew Bible?)
That evening I headed out alone to a late showing of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. Afterwards I felt weird: feverish, euphoric, but also like I might burst into tears. The protagonist has visions, or, at least, access to a mode of consciousness beyond ordinary human perception. He is a dowser, using his divining rod to detect where Etruscan graves lurk beneath the earth for his associate grave robbers to plunder. When he reaches a grave, the camera performs a 360° loop, to show sky and leaf and eventually the protagonist again, now inverted. On meeting a bright disc of moon right outside the cinema, I thought, “Of course the moon is full: everything is being laid out for me.” I tried to take a photograph and my phone died. I doubt what came next would have happened if I could still plug into my phone and disappear from the material fact of the night, like everybody else.
It began as I reached the station. With new clarity, I could hear the soughing of each tree, every word spoken by the teenagers by the station entrance. I could hear a piano symphony playing through the phone of a woman on the platform opposite, a TV show in Turkish from the phone of the man next to her. More people arrived: one person singing, one crying on the phone. None of them was silent; none of us was separate, but our experiences were interleaved, related to one another by some unseen connective fibre. I felt a rushing of emotion, my heart beating very fast. I knew in that moment the world was good, animated by an inherent friendliness, which I suppose now, because of my recent experiences in church, I might call God. By the time I arrived home, much of the potency of the encounter had leaked away – just the faint glow of it remaining in my mind’s sky, the feeling that I now understood something which I hadn’t before.
Do you believe the above counts as a religious experience? Do you consider it significant enough to have provoked a wholesale change in the recipient, or do you imagine every trace of its meaning soon faded out like a firework display into the night?
I have spent much of the last three years listening to accounts of religious experience and conversion, my research focused especially on the sudden revolutions in a person’s life associated with, or drawing them into, the Christian faith. Sometimes these experiences were prompted by an address from an invisible divinity, sometimes by lines of scripture or the texts of medieval mystics, sometimes by meaningful encounters with the natural world or their fellow man (as above). Sometimes they were triggered by nothing external to them at all. Each religious experience narrated to me seemed both unique unto itself and a member of some continuous scheme, like an infinite string of unusually bright beads.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the American psychologist-turned-philosopher William James (eldest brother of the diarist Alice and the novelist Henry James) identified four attributes which would justify an experience being termed “mystical”. These are “ineffability” (unhelpfully, a mystical experience necessarily defies concrete expression, inarticulable to anyone else); a “noetic quality” (it must offer us some deeper truth we could not have received by other means); “transiency” (the ecstatic state of a mystical encounter cannot last – we can only bear so much light); and “passivity” (while under their influence, it is as if our “own will were in abeyance”).
To illustrate something of the internal dimensions of a religious experience, James offers an array of images. One is this: when “the new ardour which burns in his breast” makes him immune against infection from the “grovelling portion of his nature”, governed by his fears and inhibitions, then “the stone wall inside of him has fallen”. He goes on, “The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary ‘melting moods’ into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us.” Or the cinema. But the first feature-length film was still some years off when James made this pronouncement during his enormously popular Gifford lecture series held in Edinburgh between 1901 and 1902. All 20 lectures were published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, an immediate bestseller whose “incomparable style and freshness”, the Nation suggested at the time, would be “epoch-making”.
The subjects of the lectures range from conversion to saintliness to mysticism. They cover the reality of the unseen (from a recognisable God to unnameable presences sensed in hallucinations); the relationship between psychological illness and religious epiphany; and James’s theory that there exist two kinds of human mind: “sick souls” who are only saved from their bottomless melancholy through religious experience and, as such, “must be twice-born in order to be happy”, and the “healthy minded” – those who “seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit”. (Personally, I am yet to meet a truly “healthy souled” person.) There is a verve and quick originality to James’s style that carries through the lectures, but above all Varieties feels like a choral piece, replete with a multitude of first-hand descriptions of religious encounters from across the centuries. James treats his case studies with generosity and curiosity: it is as if he has allowed each experience to soliloquise, never contesting their authority.
Henry James Sr was the son of Calvinist Irish immigrants to the East Coast. His five children – all born in the 1840s – were formed by way of an unsettled, uncommon childhood. Their youths were spent pinballing between schools and continents (from America to all over Europe, back to America, back to Europe) at their father’s whim, as he vacillated over where he thought they ought to grow up to gain the widest experience of life. Theirs was an “unusually loving” kind of family, the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote. Their father doted on them and the siblings remained close so long as they lived. William and Henry’s regular correspondences over 50 years is testament to this, their letters filled with brilliant observation and anecdotal detail from wherever their travels took them, as well as occasional reference to the other’s writing. Of The Wings of the Dove (1902), William told Henry that he had “created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages, and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean)”. In 1909, the year before William’s death, Henry described his brother’s philosophical thought as “more interesting & living than any one has ever made it before”.
And yet, Hardwick also writes that the James bloodline was “shot through with neurasthenia”. As a young man, William suffered periods of depression. The fourth son, Robertson, struggled with alcoholism. Alice had her first nervous breakdown at 19, her life marred by recurring episodes of darkness. It affected their father first of all. In 1844, when William was just two, their father had a breakdown in which he was confronted by “some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me”.
After Henry James Sr’s breakdown, he turned to the theological texts of the Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who in mid-life had suddenly begun to encounter angelic and prophetic visions. Both Swedenborg’s writing and “Swedenborgianism”, or “the New Church”, the Christian denomination named after him, were particularly in vogue in the US in the 19th century, a time simultaneously marked by a flare-up in interest in “hypnotism and psychic healing and related spiritual phenomena”, as Louis Menand writes in his Pulitzer-winning The Metaphysical Club, a study of the American intellectuals, including James, associated with the philosophical movement pragmatism.
Swedenborg’s personal conception of faith was a strange blend, catalysed by a spiritual awakening on a visit to London in 1745 during which he had a direct revelation from Jesus Christ. But what James Sr drew from it was a belief in the absolute reality of the spiritual world beyond our own and a distrust in all forms of institutionalised or organised religion – the children were not taken to church. After his breakdown, Menand wrote, James Sr became a “convert to a religion largely of his own invention”.
The idiosyncratic definition of religion which William James offers in Varieties seems carved from his father’s ecumenical, anti-institutional rendering of faith: “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 divine”. But William’s theological and philosophical thinking channelled far deeper and grew far more elastic and pluralistic than his father’s, which retained a Protestant bias and an intolerance to other religions, especially Judaism.
In a letter from 1904, William James suggested that, though he himself had “no living sense of commerce with a God”, still “there is something in me which makes response when I hear utterances from that quarter made by others. I recognise the deeper voice. Something tells me: ‘thither lies truth’.” Through Varieties, I came to understand that with religious experiences the useful question was not “How can you believe that happened?” but “What has such belief done to you?”. “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots,” James explains in the first lecture, reappropriating a line spoken by Christ in Matthew’s Gospel. His approach is that of an empiricist, a pragmatist (the movement “he largely created”, Menand suggests, together with the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce). “I might multiply cases almost indefinitely,” he informs his audience, “but these will suffice to show you how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion may be to him who has the experience”.
Many of the religious experiences James includes are attributed to figures he describes as “geniuses”: the Nonconformist preacher John Bunyan, Leo Tolstoy (both “sick souls”, the former afflicted by frequently malign photisms during his long, dark night of the soul in the period of the English civil wars, the latter by a sudden draining of colour and meaning from the novelist’s world at the age of 50, only returned to him via faith), Saint Teresa and Walt Whitman (whom James believed was the ultimate example of a “healthy minded” person and in whose poetry could be found a numinous quality). But these illustrious figures are afforded no greater attention than James’s patients and those of his colleagues in the emergent field of the psychology of religion, his correspondences from friends, examples from those who practise yoga, the “mind-cure” or New Thought movement (a collection of 19th-century American spiritualist sects that practised positive thinking – a form of spirituality which feels entirely contemporary), and those produced by “intoxicants and anaesthetics”. James himself openly engaged in many of these shortcuts to mystical encounters. In 1893 he had 18 sessions with a mind-curer, who improved his sleeping. In Varieties, he writes about his brush with nitrous oxide, which revealed to him a fundamental truth which outlasted the mind-loosening conditions of the trip, “that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different”.
The lecture series is testament to the porosity of James’s thought, his enthusiasm for every form of spiritual knowledge and treatment available to him in his time. He delights in folding found material into his writing, paying little heed to any hierarchy of reliability. “Without his gaiety, his spooks, his nuts and frauds, his credulity and his incongruous longings for something more than life,” Hardwick wrote, James “would not be the captivating splendid spirit he is.”
Varieties retains the liveness of its original circumstances. Throughout the text, James regularly addresses his audience (whose numbers did not shrink over the course of the series, he noted with some pride, which retained a strong – “very silent and attentive” – contingent of around 400 attendees). He predicts their (and our) trepidations when he wanders into unexpected territories – “I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and that fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen among some of you” – or anticipates raised eyebrows at his choice of case studies.
It is this open, undiscriminating approach to religious experience that has prevented Varieties from becoming unserviceably dated or lost to time like so many other early works of psychology. Its value transcends its academic objectives, showing us a mirror to ourselves: like the case studies in Varieties, our days remain eclipsed (when we deign to admit it to ourselves) by the search for meaning and hope within the brief drift of our lives.
There is one case study in Varieties referred to more routinely than any other in considerations of William James. It is the first-person account (translated “freely” from the French, so we are told) of a certain “sick soul”: a man who, in a dressing room at twilight, was overcome by sudden terror at his own existence. This dreadful existential dawning caused a particular image to swim into his mind: “an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin” who sat still as a corpse all day, “looking absolutely inhuman”. The young man felt the figure might be the creature he would become if he failed to escape the god-awful feeling of petrified stasis that had seized him – “That shape am I, I felt, potentially.” That shape am I. It is a beautiful and strange grammatical construction. But what I like most of all is the humanising function of the word “potentially”, which follows his grand statement like an embarrassed shrug. After this revelation, the young man could not believe he had ever lived “so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life”. Like James’s nitrous oxide trip, it irreversibly opened up the ground to a second consciousness below – if it were presented on a cinema screen, I imagine the camera would perform a 360° loop to represent this new way of seeing, as in La Chimera. When the man said the experience had a religious bearing, James asked him to elaborate. “I mean that the fear was so invasive that if I had not clung to scripture-texts like ‘The eternal God is my refuge’… I think I should have grown really insane.”
The young man’s true identity was not unmasked until Varieties was translated into French in 1904. When the translator asked for a copy of the letter in its original French, James admitted the story was in fact his own youthful experience of an “acute neurasthenic attack with phobia”: “I naturally disguised the provenance!” This has become a beloved Jamesian anecdote because it reveals something further of his elusive, tricksy character, the “certain unwillingness to take form” which Hardwick detected in him: a desire both to feature within the chorus, and yet to hide in plain sight.
While the precise date of James’s traumatic vision remains a mystery, most of his biographers have assumed it occurred between 1869 and 1870, during a particularly anguished period when he contemplated suicide. His tremendous unhappiness was exacerbated by occupational uncertainty, a sense of purposelessness with regards to his future. Initially he planned to become a painter, then he decided to study chemistry and anatomy. Though he received a degree in medicine from Harvard in 1869 (as his period of melancholy reached its heights), he never went on to practise, instead becoming an instructor in physiology, then a psychology lecturer in 1876, before settling as a professor of philosophy in 1880 (the varieties of William James: his sister Alice described him as a “blob of mercury”, for “you cannot put a mental finger on him”). All of this is suggestive of James’s indecisive or procrastinatory character, a state of mind which might have felt crippling in his youth, but which became the igniting principle of his power as a writer by the time it came to Varieties (though, even then, the writing process played out as a battle between his enormous intellectual energy and his poor health – a heart problem and nervous condition forcing him to delay the lectures by a year, the majority of them written from bed).
In the New York Review of Books, Menand probes the possible meanings of this story. “It can be interpreted as a precipitating crisis, as a psychological breakthrough, as simply one among many crises, most of which are now unrecoverable – or as a partial invention, a little work of semi-fiction.” I am most interested in the final interpretation. How could the description of a religious experience be anything other than a work of “semi-fiction”, if a chief feature is ineffability, arriving from an estranging, unworded region of the universe? To return to my opening case study, while I asked my correspondent to write as truthfully as she could, doubtless there were “semi-fictions”: misrememberings; embellishments; a desire to express herself with style.
It is no surprise that William James endured a religious experience himself. He believed that our capacity to experience spiritual phenomena relates to the type of mind with which we are born. Some of us have conscious fields with “a hard rind of a margin”, others with “a leaky or pervious margin”. It is the leakiness, or rather the wide aperture of James’s mind, capable of capturing so many forms of religious experience at once, which makes Varieties such an extraordinary book, just as valuable to our time as it was to his own, perhaps even more so. In a letter written two years before his death, James surveyed the state of the times. “The world is getting democratic and socialistic faster and faster, and out of it all a new civilisation will emerge,” he wrote. “Will it ever simplify or solidify again? Or will it get more and more like an infinite pack of firecrackers exploding?” Here we are in our discordant, endlessly varied moment. And yet, this does not mean we have to live as if cut off from those around us. Though criticism has been levelled against the non-communal, largely diminished definition of religion James offers in Varieties (“the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude”), still every page of the text demonstrates how James was convinced that our separate encounters with the mystical were meant to speak to and merge with one another, all together to light up the sky.
[See also: There is no such thing as the self]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024