Taking William James Seriously

This essay was presented to the Eric Voegelin Society on 26 September, 2022.

The Hidden God has chosen to speak. Or, to put it more abstractly, the divine reality has manifested itself. It manifests itself on specific occasions and also in our hearts and in the depths of our being, at all times, in the tension toward the divine that is never absent.

We are all, like Dante, in a dark wood, but through the trees, the stars still flicker, and we can glimpse the North Star. We can know in what direction the tension draws us. The teleological thrust is built into our very constitution. Even what we call the Hidden God is never fully hidden. If God were, we would not only lack answers but also be unable to frame the questions.

When, some years ago, I read the sacred writings of multiple cultures, I was struck by how much we know or at least have strong inklings of. Even the most primitive cultures have a sense, expressed in many different ways, of divine presence, of the divine auspices of the universe, of its right ordering, of a mysterious power beyond ourselves, of the need to live in harmony with the divine.[1]

The Hidden God has chosen to speak, not just in one culture, but in many, perhaps in all, and not just at one time, but repeatedly, perhaps in our hearts and in our conscience every day, and most dramatically in those divine irruptions that found religions, frame meaningful history, and move our spiritual journey forward.

In those irruptions, those dramatic events of divine self-manifestation, Eric Voegelin points out, the Hidden God “acquires predicates,” for God “is what he reveals himself to be in the event.”[2]

“In the Beginning, the word of the hidden god creates the cosmos; when the word moves from the Beyond into man’s consciousness, it reveals itself through language. And in this revelatory language, the I-am becomes a subject that acquires predicates.”[3]

 “Critical doubts” about the concrete and vivid language of divine manifestations presume, Voegelin says, that “the critic knows how God has a right to let himself be seen” and heard. God chooses to use our words. More precisely: the language itself lives in the In-between. It does not belong solely to us. It is a divine-human medium. When God uses it, it behooves us to accept it.

Referring to his childhood experiences recounted in Anamnesis; Eric Voegelin tells the young Ellis Sandoz, “These experiences of participation in various areas of reality constitute the horizon of existence in the world. The stress lies on experiences of reality in the plural, being open to all of them and keeping them in balance. . . To restore this openness of reality appeared to me to be the principal task of philosophy,” that is, to restore “the reality of being in contact with a reality outside myself.”[4] It is in this connection that Voegelin mentions the importance of William James.[5]

In the context of understanding history, Voegelin emphasizes those experiences – noetic and pneumatic – that constitute major spiritual irruptions, events that shape civilizations and their movement toward order. And he provides a diagnostic of those misunderstandings and spiritual pathologies that bring about disorder. So far as I know, he pays little attention to the pneumatic experiences of ordinary people, except to trace the fundamental aspects of life in relation to the divine.

However, in his very first book, On the Form of the American Mind, Voegelin celebrated the development among American thinkers of the “personal category” of the “open self,” in contrast to the “closed self” of Hegel and other European thinkers, each expressing “the outlook on life” that lies at their heart.[6] Such thinking, he says, may appear “raw and primitive” to a European who wields an elaborate intellectual apparatus.[7] This, however, is “not a defect in thinking but a reduction of the construction to simple strong lines . . . .”[8] In this mode of philosophizing, “seekers of God report in sparse formulations what they have seen.”[9] William James’ “writing style has such an extraordinary clarity, simplicity, and sincerity that the critical points stand out starkly, and it takes no great skill to find them.”[10]

It is this style that makes James so extraordinarily contemporary. He speaks to us today, directly in his own voice. “It is astonishing how little dated it is,” writes Charles Taylor. “You can even find yourself forgetting that these lectures were delivered a hundred years ago.”[11] If we take James seriously in the present tense, we have much to learn from: James the psychologist, achieving decisive breakthroughs beyond the associational psychology of his day; James, the phenomenologist, a more acute observer of the field of consciousness than Edmund Husserl; and James the theologian, understanding the vital function of such thinking for all of us, not just seminarians. I am using “theology” in a broad, non-sectarian sense, nicely defined by Paul Knitter as “spiritual experience trying to make sense of itself.”[12]

James takes in the divine reality through a sensitive appreciation of its manifestations in human experience, or, as Voegelin emphasizes, “experiences of reality in the plural.”[13] Moreover, James has a keen sense of the methodological requirements of thinking through what Voegelin calls “the open soul” and doing so directly, even “naively,” which, as Goethe used it, can be an honorific. “The original teachers are still conscious of the insoluble core of their project, and attempt to approach it in a naïve and flexible manner.”[14]

What Can We Learn From William James?

First, in contrast to what he calls the “conventional observances,” James recommends that we pay attention to “first-hand” experiences.[15] “It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must search rather for the original experiences . . . .” This first-hand approach may seem naïve and unreliable. What does James see as its benefit? 

In “the more personal branch of religion,” James says, “The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between man and his maker.”[16] Still, James can rightly be criticized for drawing the contrast too sharply, as when he says, “Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.”[17] The valid aspects of this comment align with Voegelin’s commitment to originating experiences, but James is too harsh in disdaining ordinary church-going, which he calls “imitative,” though one certainly knows that, for many attending, it is little more than a social convention, thin on spiritual meaning.[18]

Conventional religiosity may even be hostile to fresh irruptions of the spirit. Human institutions, especially those whose task is to preserve the revelations entrusted to them, understandably resist relatively unfiltered spiritual experiences. People find it disturbing, Voegelin says, to confront “a plurality of centers of meaning in the field of history . . . . A horror, not vacui, but pleni, seems at work, a shudder at the richness of the spirit as it reveals itself all over the earth in a multitude of hierophanies . . . .”[19] The observer is “loath to admit that the spirit listeth where it will . . . .”[20] Existing authorities view “spiritual outbursts and insights” as “disorder,” even when they provide a potential foundation for a new and higher order.[21]

As new truths challenge the old, new symbols are engendered that are more penetrating than the old. The old truths are not lost, but they are no longer seen as sufficient and final. Priests and prophets, the faithful and the seekers contend in creative spiritual tension, with God, no doubt, as a partner on both sides, together enacting what Voegelin calls “the ongoing drama of theophany.”[22]

James had anticipated this insight: “First-hand religious experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innovation to those who witnessed its birth. Naked it comes into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go.”[23]

Here too, James draws the contrast sharply: “… When a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over; the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn.”[24] One thinks of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who can have Jesus convicted of heresy in a minute.  

Still, James surely overdraws the contrast since it is religions that not only preserve the records of the originating experiences but also deepen their meaning (often at least), perpetuate their spiritual practices, sort out and extend their insights, and articulate the relation of those insights to the rest of human thought and experience. Moreover, they provide venues and methods for individuals to continue to have meaningful religious experiences. In my view, the purpose of the open soul is not to critique institutional religion but to probe and explore, sometimes beyond the official precincts, spiritual experiences and what they might reveal about the divine reality.

Second, if theology in the broad sense is all spiritual experience seeking understanding, how is it to proceed? How is one going about it? In contrast to the closed soul of European systems, James advises the following:

“We have merely to collect things together without any special a priori theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value of this and that experience – judgments in which our general philosophical prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides – decide that on the whole one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned.”[25]

James recommends piecemeal judgments of “this and that experience,” basing judgments on the equipment we bring to them – our theoretical outlook, our instincts or intuitions (our inner Geiger counter that detects traces of truth), and our common sense, which is a collation of our and others’ inquiries and understandings. While James often speaks of the fruits or consequences of different sorts of religiosity, he never undertakes or even suggests a systematic effort to calculate consequences, as a utilitarian might. Despite the title of his Gifford lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James does not provide an a priori structure of religious experiences, instead probes each with empathetic understanding to discover whatever truths, or glimmers of truth, might reveal. While some readers find this piecemeal approach liberating and promising, others have found it deracinating and a likely dead end. James understands this discomfort: “I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard and to adopt caprice as our pilot. Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of such a formless method as I have taken up.”[26]

Sometimes an approach may seem formless merely because it does not match some previously conceived idea of form or method. It is tempting to hold fast to some established set of doctrines, methods, texts, or techniques, either ancient or those most fashionable in our times. James is well aware of this temptation. Much like Voegelin in Anamnesis and elsewhere, James insists on going straight to the originating experiences.

For this reason, James does not attempt to provide a conceptual map of the “domain” of something called “religion.” While the kinds of experiences we are talking about are often called, including James himself, “religious” experiences, he makes no effort to develop a definition or “essence” of religion. Nor does he define the subject matter or organize his discussion in terms of the world’s religions. That kind of division, so common among scholarly books on religion, including works on comparative theology, is nowhere to be found in Varieties. Instead, with novelistic precision, he draws forth the data of experience and gives them a voice to speak for themselves.

Third, James is pointing toward a theology of divine presence. The divine reality and the human experience of it are in reciprocity. James is a thorough-going empiricist – if the table (or God) is real, it is their presence to experience that count. That is where we will find them. That is where we will discover their role and meaning in and for our lives.

It is here that James’ talent as a phenomenologist with a keen sense of how the world presents itself comes to the fore. Experience does not consist of sensations of the sort Hume called “impressions,” and Kant called “intuitions,” little pictures the mind collects and organizes. On the contrary, “It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.”[27]

Paradoxically, what we experience always suggests something more than we experience. Even Husserl noticed that when we see the table from this side, we see it as having another side. It is presented to experience as a three-dimensional object. But James’ exquisite sensitivity enables him to go farther. We sense, he says, that “there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”[28] In those cases, it is “belief in an object we cannot see.” We encounter the divine reality in experience, but not as an object perceived.

James notices that there are subliminal and soft hues to experiences, intimations that do not declare themselves loudly, and music one can sense but barely hear. Noticing these subtle aspects of experience require quiet, patience, and disarmed attentiveness. My teacher, Philip Wheelwright, a man of similar sensitivity, noted that heightened discernment sometimes calls for a “soft focus.”[29]

Are religious experiences all extraordinary? Or all “peak experiences” or miraculous moments? On the contrary, according to James, “Apart from anything acutely religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us round with friendliness.”[30] He agrees with James Martineau:

“. . . If we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laughter and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane . . . wherever God’s hand is, THERE is miracle; and it is simply an in devoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God.”[31]

Fourth, the aim of theology in the broad sense is not to construct a correct “theory” of the divine reality but to live it with all one’s heart, mind, and body. James cites Al-Ghazzali: “If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’s cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”[32] Encounters with the divine do not require arguments or general theories of reality to back them up.

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. . . . If definite perceptions of fact like [those described] cannot stand upon their own feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need. . . .”[33]

James hammers away at the dismissive distinction between objective facts and how one feels about them. Most of us immediately sort things into objective and subjective and emphasize the distance between the two. James constantly challenges this dichotomy, as does Voegelin, taking his influence. The feeling is itself essential to discerning the reality encountered. “There is always a PLUS, a THISNESS, which feeling alone can answer for.”[34] Concepts do not outrank feelings. Feelings are concrete responses to things; concepts are abstractions. Conceptual processes can “class facts, define them, interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality.” It is not concepts that disclose reality; experience, including feelings, are the means and locus of encounter.  

Fifth, divine presence invites a relationship. “We and God have business together.”[35] We do not just gaze at what reveals itself; we interact.” Between it and ourselves, relations of give and take are actual.”[36] In prayer, James says, one puts oneself in a personal connection with the divine. It is the movement of the soul, “putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence . . . .”

“Prayer is religion in act . . . putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence.”[37]

Here we see the open soul’s emphasis on the personal. These experiences have something to do with one’s life, not just generically, but in particular. Someone taking an objective attitude can readily dismiss the effort to find clues within the experience to the meaning and purpose of one’s life. James responds with his acute sense of what it is to live a human life to the full:

• “However particular questions connected with our individual destinies maybe answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious . . . .”[38]

• In fact, “the divine meets [us] on the basis of [our] personal concerns.”[39]

• By “being religious,” by trusting the divine encounter, “we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard.”[40]

This is the truth vouchsafed to us, perhaps even designed for us. God has met us where we are. Responding to how ultimate reality presents itself to us shapes our “private destiny” or personal calling. 

In light of experiences and epiphanies that involve encountering or interacting with the divine reality in multiple ways, spiritual-intellectual testimony should have a larger part in theology or religious philosophy than is invited by discourse devoted to issues defined generically or to debates within established traditions. If our experiences and epiphanies are genuine, then they should be explored in the same way we explore the insights and encounters of Jeremiah, St. Paul, Gautama, and Ramakrishna. Their spiritual lives are evidential; so are ours.

REFERENCES:

Cracknell, Kenneth. 1995. Justice, Courtesy, and Love: Theologians and Missionaries Encountering World Religions, 1846-1914. London: Epworth Press.

Gebhardt, Jurgen, and Barry Cooper, eds. 1995. Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Translated by Ruth Hein. Vol. 1. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Martin, Jerry L, ed. 2020. Theology without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. London: Routledge.

Taylor, Charles. 2002. Varieties of Religion Today : William James Revisited. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press.

Voegelin, Eric. 1989. Autobiographical Reflections. Edited by Ellis Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

———. 1990. Collected Works, Vol 12: Published Essays, 1966-1985. Edited by Ellis Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

———. 2000. Order and History, Volume IV: The Ecumenic Age. Edited by Michael Franz. Vol. Collected Works, vol. 17. University of Missouri Press.

Von Goethe, J. W. 1958. Werke. Translated by Hans Meyerhoff. 53rd ed. Vol. I, 19. New York: Harper & Row.

Wheelwright, Philip. 1954. The Burning Fountain, a Study in the Language of Symbolism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

NOTES:

[1] Cracknell 1995.

[2] Voegelin 2000, 61.

[3] Voegelin 2000, 61.

[4] Voegelin 1989, 72.

[5] We will be discussing here only The Varieties of Religious Experience, not James’ earlier Principles of Psychology or his later radical empiricism. Page references are to the Touchstone edition. (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1997)

[6] Gebhardt 1995, 9.

[7]  Ibid., 36.

[8] Ibid., 38.

[9] Ibid., 39.

[10] Ibid., 52.

[11] Taylor 2002, 3.

[12] Martin 2020, 66.

[13] Voegelin 1989, 72.

[14] von Goethe 1958, 40.

[15] Taylor 2002, 24.

[16] Ibid., 41.

[17] Ibid., 42.

[18] Ibid., 168.

[19] Voegelin 2000, 47-48.

[20] Ibid., 49.

[21] Voegelin 1990, 111-112.

[22] Voegelin 2000, 290.

[23] Taylor 2002, 267, 269.

[24] Taylor 2002, 267, 269.

[25] Ibid., 261-262.

[26] Ibid., 261-262.

[27] Ibid., 62.

[28] Ibid., 59.

[29] Wheelwright 1954, 62-64.

[30] Taylor 2002, 222.

[31] Ibid., 369.

[32] Ibid., 379.

[33] Ibid., 354-356.

[34] Ibid., 354-356

[35] Ibid., 399.

[36] Ibid., 354-356.

[37] Ibid., 361.

[38] Ibid., 388.

[39] Ibid., 381.

[40] Ibid., 388.

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