CHARLES TAYLOR

VARIETIES OF
RELIGION
TODAY

1
It's almost a hundred years since William James delivered his celebrated Gifford Lectures in
Edinburgh on The Varieties of Religious Experience) I want in these pages to look again at
this remarkable book, reflecting on what it has to say to us at the turn of a new century. In
fact, it turns out to have a lot to say. It is astonishing how little dated it is. Some of the detail
may be strange, but you easily think of examples in our world that fit the themes James is
developing. You can even find yourself forgetting that these lectures were delivered a
hundred years ago.
Which is not to say that there aren't questions one can raise about the way in which James
conceives his subject. On the contrary; but this is not so much because of .the difference
between his time and ours; rather, these questions arise out of different ways of understanding
religion that confronted each other then, and still do: To put it slightly more polemically: one
could argue that James has certain blind spots in his view of religion, But these blind spots
are wide spread in the modern world. They are just as operative in our age as in his.
I want first to discuss these limitations in James's concept of religious experience. Then I will
try to engage what moved him in this whole domain, which is the issue of the "twice born,"
the center of religious experience that you feel throbbing not only in the lives that James
writes about, but also in his own life. Finally, I make a few reflections on religion today, in
relation to James's discussion. People have pointed out the relative narrowness of the
Jamesian perspective before. James sees religion primarily as something that individuals
experience. He makes a distinction between living religious experience, which is that of the
individual, and religious life, which is derivative because it is taken over from a community
or church. For James, -"your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional
observances of his country has a religion that "has been made for him by others: It would
profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the
original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and
imitated conduct. These experiences we can find only in individuals for whom religion exists
not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are 'geniuses' in the
religious line".
We see here the Jamesian view of religious life, its origins and continuance: there are people
who have an original, powerful religious experience, which then gets communicated through
some kind of institution; it gets handed on to others, and they tend to live it in a kind of
second hand way. In the transmission, the force and intensity of the original tends to get lost,
until all that remains is "dull habit." Later on, also toward the beginning of the book, James
attempts to define religion as "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". This is what is primary; it is out of religion in this sense that "theologies,
philosophies and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow." So, churches play at
best a secondary role, in transmitting and communicating the original inspiration.
I say, "at best," because their effect can also be highly negative, stifling and distorting
personal faith. James is not enamored of churches: The word "religion" as ordinarily used, is
equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples,
and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to ‘: organize"
themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own.
The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate
the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word "religion" nowadays, we think
inevitably of some "church" or other; and to some persons the word "church" suggests so
much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale
undiscerning way they glory in saying that they are "down" on religion altogether.
No wonder that "first-hand religious experience…has always appeared as a heretical sort of
innovation." So that "when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its days of inwardness are
over; the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in
their turn. The new church . . . can be henceforth counted as a staunch ally in every attempt
to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all the later bubbling’s of the fountain
from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration' People who are against
"religion," therefore, are of-ten mistaken in their target. "The baseness’s so commonly
charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable to religion proper,
but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the
bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner,
the spirit of dogmatic dominion." So, the real locus of religion is in individual experience,
and not in corporate life. That is one facet of the Jamesian thesis)But the other is that the real
locus is in experience, that is, in feeling, as against the formulations by, which people define,
justify, rationalize their feelings (operations that are, of course, frequently undertaken by
churches).
These two are clearly connected in James's mind. Feelings occur, he holds, in individuals;
and in turn "individuality is founded in feeling". The importance of feeling explains "why I
have been so individualistic throughout these lectures." Now "compared with this world of
living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect
contemplates is without solidity or life" Part of what gives feelings their primacy is that they
determine conduct. One's feelings make a difference to one's action, a crucial point to a
"pragmatist." But don't ideas as well? James thinks they don't, or. Not all to the same degree.
Feelings generally determine conduct, without being inflected by the rationalizations.
We can find a great variety of cases in which feeling, and conduct are the same, while theories
differ.
The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish
to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more
constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she
carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions
form loop lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day .all be
united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an
indispensable function, necessary at all times for religion to go on.
Now one can certainly criticize this take on religion. But before doing so, I should like to try
to place it; that is, trace its origins and its place in our history and culture. It should be clear
that this take is very much at in modern culture.
We can trace its origins through a series of developments in our history. First, the emphasis
on religion as personal is consonant with a major direction of change through the last several
centuries in Latin Christendom. From the high Middle Ages, we can see a steadily increasing
emphasis on a religion of personal commitment and devotion over forms centered on
collective ritual. We can see this both in devotional movements and associations, like the
Brethren of the Common Life in the fifteenth century, and in the de-mands made by church
hierarchies and leaders on their members. An early example of the latter is the decision of
the Lateran Council in 1215 to require all the faithful to confess to a priest and be shriven, to
receive communion at least once a year.
From that point on, the pressure to adopt a more personal, committed, inward form of religion
continued, through the preaching of the mendicant friars and others, through the devotional
movements mentioned above, reaching a new stage with the Reformation. The point of
declaring that salvation comes through faith was radically to devalue ritual and external
practice in favor of inward adherence to Christ as Savior. It was not just that external ritual
was of no effect, but that relying on it was tantamount to a: presumption that we could control
God. The Reformation also tended to delegitimate the distinction between fully committed
believers and other, less devoted ones. As against a view of the church in which people
operating at many different "speeds" coexisted, with religious "virtuosi," to use Max Weber's
term, on one end, and ordinary intermittent practitioners on the other, all Christians were
expected to be fully committed.
But this movement toward the personal, committed, inward didn’t exist only in the Protestant
churches. There was a parallel development in the Counter Reformation, with the spread of
different devotional movements, and the attempts to regulate the; It lives of the laity
according to more and more stringent models of practice. The. clergy were reformed, their
training was upgraded; they were expected in turn to reach out and demand a higher level of
personal practice from their flocks. A striking figure illustrates this
whole movement: in the history of Catholic France, the moment at, which the level of
practice, as measured by baptisms and Easter communions; reaches its
highest has been estimated to fall around 1870.1 This was well after the anticlericalism of
the Revolution and its attempts at dechristianization, and after a definite movement toward
unbelief had set in among the educated classes. In spite of this incipient loss, the apogee of
practice came this late because it stood at the end of a long process in which ordinary
believers had been preached at, organized, sometimes bullied, into patterns of practice that
reflected more personal commitment.
They had been pressed, we might be tempted to say, into "taking their religion seriously";
and this expression reflects how much James's take on religion, at least in one facet, is in line
with our modern understanding. To take my religion seriously is to take it personally, more
devotionally, inwardly, more committedly. Just taking part in external rituals, those that don't
require the kind of personal engagement which, say, auricular confession, with its self-
examination and promises of amendment, entails, is devalued on this understanding. This
isn't what religion is about. This kind of understanding has deep roots, of course, in our
religious tradition. When the psalmist, speaking for God, tells us to set aside our offerings of
bulls and sheep and to offer instead a contrite heart (e.g., Psalm 51), we are already on the
road to our contemporary notion of personal religion. But there were many stages along the
way, and not every culture has pressed as single mindedly toward this ultimate point as that
of the Latin Christendom to which we are heirs in the West. There are other religious
traditions in which devotional movements are important and admired, such as Hinduism with
its modes of bhakti, but in which this devaluing of the life of collective ritual hasn't taken
place. And there were earlier phases of our history in which the relation between those who
were more personally devout and committed, and those whose main participation was in
collective ritual, was thought of in terms of complementarity rather than ranked as more and
less real; in which these two facets were understood to. Complete each other, be it in the life
of an individual or in the religious life of the community. Moreover, there are certainly parts
of the Catholic world where this is true today; only they tend to be distant from the North
Atlantic regions, where the movement toward cornmitted inwardness has gone the farthest.
In these regions, James's stress on personal religion, even his insistence that this is what
religion really is, as against collective practice, can seem entirely understandable, even
axiomatic, to lots of people. Indeed, this is so central to Western modernity that a variant of
this take is shared by highly secular. people. It may take the form of their devaluing religion,
because they think it is inseparable from mindless or unreflective external conformity; in
other words, because they think that an inward commitment would have to free us from
religion. That is exactly what James fears and is trying to argue against in the passage quoted
above where he warns us against defining "religion" in terms of "church," and thereby
dismissing it too quickly, and missing the value of the real thing. In fact, a striking feature of
the Western march to ward secularity is that it has been interwoven from the start with this
drive toward personal religion, as has frequently been remarked.' The connections are
multiple. It is not just that the falling off religious belief and practice has forced a greater
degree of reflection and commitment on those who remain. This has per haps been evident
in more recent times. It is much more that the drive to personal religion has itself been part
of the impetus toward different facets of secularization. It was this drive, for instance, which
power-fully contributed to the disenchantment of the world of spirits and higher forces in
which our ancestors lived. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation repressed magical
practices, and then those facets of traditional Christian sacramental ritual that they began to
deem magical; for Calvinists this even included the Mass. Later, at the time of the early
American republic, a separation of church and state was brought about, mainly to give space
for, and avoid the contamination of, personal religion, which itself had been given a further
impetus through the Great Awakening.
Later again, the same stress on inwardness and serious. commitment gave strength to the
view that one should break with a religion in some of whose tenets one had difficulty
believing. There is an "ethics of belief," and it should drive us into religious unbelief if we
find that the evidence points that way. Moreover, many of the secular moralities that have
taken the place of religion place the same stress on inner commitment. We have only to think
of the hold of various forms of Kantianism on secular ethics. In this sense, James's take on
religion is well adapted to a confrontation between religion and secular views.
It can seem the ground on which this confrontation can take place which is most favorable to
religion: it operates within common assumptions about the importance of personal
commitment, and within these it presents religion in the most favorable light by
defining it in terms of intense experience that can galvanize conduct. This is not an accident.
James's discussion of religious experience was not unconnected with his own profound
commitments in this area, however the stance of psychological observer he assumes in this
book might mislead us. In a sense, it articulates his own resistance to the agnostic intellectual
culture of his day. I shall return to this below.
James's position thus emerges from the main sweep of Latin Christendom over recent
centuries. But we still must place it more exactly than that, because it clearly belongs to some
rather than others of the subbranches that this development has thrown up. I want to relate it
here to some of these crucial branching points.
There are modes of devotion in which we try to come closer to God, or center our lives on
him, where we proceed in a fashion that trusts' and builds on our own inner élan, our own
desire to approach God. We see examples, on the Catholic side, in some of the major figures
in what Henri Bremond has called "l'humanisme devot" in the French seventeenth century,
such as St. Francois de Sales;5 or in Jesuit spirituality, which follows the inner guidance of
consolation
and desolation. On the Protestant side, we have the Cambridge Platonists, for instance, or
Wesley (who himself was influenced by French Catholic spirituality). This can be contrasted
with a religious practice that stresses the demands made by God on his "unprofitable
servants," which consists in following the Law, or God's commands, as these are prescribed
in the tradition or Revelation, without necessarily relying for guidance on one's own inner
sense of these things. it should be clear that this kind of practice can be as personal,
committed, and "inward" as the devotional one, and it has been very prominent in the
development of modern personal religion. Of course, nothing prevents these two from
combining in one religious’ life. One might even claim that they ought ideally to complement
each other. I myself certainly lean in this direction, if I may step for a minute beyond the role
of neutral commentator but the fact is that they have frequently been polarized; and opposed
to each other. Thus, in the remarkable spiritual flourishing of the French seventeenth century,
de our humanism was strongly opposed by thinkers of the Jansenist persuasion, like Arnoult
and Nicole.' One can understand why. The hyper-Augustinian sense of our own sinfulness,
even depravity, which was central to Jansenus' message, made it seem not only dangerous
but presumptuous to trust the élan toward God that one (believes one) finds within. And
famously, the later years of the century saw the epic battle between Bossuet and Fenelon on
this very issue: dare one aspire to an "amour pur" for God, or must one be actuated by fear
of him? We can perhaps see something of the same polarization in various periods of Islamic
history, including to-day. There is a facet of Islamic practice that emphasizes full compliance
with the shar'ia, and another that has been carried, for instance, by traditions of Sufism,
and that build on the longing of the soul for unity with God, as in Rumi's famous image of
the reed flute. These have often been united, but there have also been times in which the first
stream has turned with suspicion on the second. The hostility to Sufism among
some contemporary Islamist movements is a case in point!
If we see this contrast as an important branching point between two streams, then plainly
James stands in that of devout humanism. But we need to situate him more precisely within
this line. He plainly belongs to that strand of it which is ready to challenge the traditionally
mediated revelation in the name of one's inner inspiration. His model is more George Fox the
Quaker than it is St. Francois de Sales. Indeed, he quotes Fox at length in the continuation of
the passage I cited above. We can situate him further in another branching: he sides with the
religion of the heart over that of the head. This was plain in the passage I quoted above about
the irrelevance of theories to real religious life. He stands in the succession of that late
seventeenth and eighteenth-century revolt against intellectualism in religion, following the
Pietists and John Wesley in Christianity, the Hassidim in Judaism, which sees the fullness of
religious commitment as lying in powerful emotions and their expression, rather than in the
nuances of doctrine or the perfections of scholarship.
Now this whole stream of devout humanism, in its anarchic and emotive branches, passed
through a number of transpositions en route to James in the late nineteenth century One of
these was Romanticism, wherein the inspired initiator of a new inward spirituality is thought
of as the "genius"—a term that figured in my earlier quote about the "pattern-setters" of
religion (6). And along with this comes the notion that the genius cannot really be fully
followed by ordinary people. The full intensity of the experience is always. to some extent
blunted as the pattern of spirituality comes to be adopted by large groups. The intense heat
of the original feeling cools; what was "acute fever" becomes "dull habit."
We are reminded of the contemporary theological teaching of Harnack in Germany, who
depicted the white-hot charisma of the New Testament period as cooling into routine under
the constraints of institutionalization. This whole understanding of moral/spiritual life, in
which routinization of inspiration is understood as a quasi-inevitable fate, like entropy in the
physical universe, was secularized and diffused by Weber, who even borrowed the New
Testament term "charisma" from Harnack. Charismatic interventions in history suffer
unavoidably from "banalization" ("Veralltaglichung," usually translated "routinization").
Weber even uses entropy as a master image here. Charisma is the specifically "revolutionary
creative power of history," but all existing charismatic force is somewhere on its way "from
the original storm to a slow death by suffocation."
This picture of the interplay of inspiration and banalization, so widespread in the post
Romantic but secular world, also shapes the outlook of William James.
IN WHAT WAYS does this situation within these different branchings limit the scope of
James's study? How are the phenomena of religion distorted or narrowed through being
conceived in terms of religious "experience"?
Well, obviously, we can't expect too much fit with religious life that is far away from the
modern North Atlantic norms, which put such an emphasis on personal religion. But it would
be churlish, even absurd, to hold against him that his discussion didn't relate very closely to
the practice of Hindus in contemporary India. That wasn't his main focus, which was re-ally
about religion as we know it on our culture (al-though there is the occasional reference
outside, to, e.g., the Buddha and al-Ghazzali), a limitation that was quite understandable a
century ago. In order to focus the discussion, I intend to follow James and concentrate on the
North Atlantic world (although I, too, find it hard to resist the occasional glance sideways to
other regions).
But one might counterattack and say that after all, he's talking about religious experience;
he's not claiming anything about all the other forms that figure on the other branches I
mentioned above, the ones he is not situated within. This answer, however, won't wash,
because the issue is very much whether, in taking his stand where he does, he doesn't severely
distort the other branches. And indeed, it is difficult to imagine not doing so. I have situated
James in various branchings of our religious culture, and these branchings were the sites of
vigorous polemic. A Fox, a Wesley didn't only take one branch; they condemned the other.
Condemnations may of course be totally justified, but more often than not they are at-tended
with some distortion; the question is, to what extent the ones that James falls heir to give him
a mangled and partial view of some of the important phenomena of modern religious life.
Nothing is farther from my intention than to indulge in point scoring here. The aim is not to
show that James's sympathies were narrow. Indeed, exactly the opposite is the case. One of
the things that make his book so remarkable is the wide sympathy, coupled with unparalleled
phenomenological insight, which mark James as the exceptional figure that he is. That's why
we go on reading this book and will go on finding ideas of extraordinary value in it well after
its centenary has passed. As to the unfortunate fact that James is neglected by contemporary
academic philosophers, with a few honorable exceptions, this may just show that, alas, wide
sympathy and powers of phenomenological description are not qualities for which the
discipline has much place at present.
But in spite of all this, it seems to me that James got certain things wrong; or saw some
important phenomena less undistortively than others. And any assessment of his work has to
come to grips with this. The more so, in that just because of the dose fit between James's take
on religion and certain aspects of modern culture, one might easily run away with the idea
that what James describes as religious experience is the only form religion can assume today.
As we shall see below, especially in the third chapter, there are important developments that
might make this appear so, but it is not so.
So, what did James get wrong, or at least less right? One good place to start is with something
that he sees himself he stands within a Protestant tradition of understanding. So, one thing he
has trouble getting his mind around is Catholicism. His wide sympathies fail him, for
instance, when it comes to St. Theresa of Avila. She is one of his sources, and he quotes her
at length, but at another point he says in some exasperation that "in the main her idea of
religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation—if one may say so without
irreverence—between the devotee and the deity".
More important, he has trouble getting beyond a certain individualism. Churches are
necessary, he dearly concedes. How else can the set of insights around a certain intense
experience be handed on? How else can others be inducted into them? How else can believers
be organized to take the action that flows from their faith? Of course, something is inevitably
lost as religion thus becomes "second-hand," but the alternative would be no transmission at
all.
What doesn't figure here is the way what one might call the religious connection, the link
between the believer and the. divine (or whatever), may be essentially mediated by corporate,
ecclesial life. Thus, let us imagine taking up the other branch to which I contrasted devout
humanism, so that we think of religion (also) as living out the demands made by God, or the
ways we are called upon to follow by some higher source. Let us imagine further that these
ways are in some respect inherently social: say, that we are called upon to live together in
brotherly love, and to radiate outward such love as a community. Then the locus of the
relation with God is (also) through the community, and not simply in the individual. But this
is the way that the life of the Christian church has been conceived, among many Protestants
as well as Catholics; and the way Israel and the Islamic umma have been conceived.
Moreover, this is far from being a thing of the past; this is still the way in which many today
under-stand their religious life. What James can't seem to accommodate is the phenomenon
of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections,
but which in some way constitutes or is that connection. In other words, he hasn't got place
for a collective connection through a common way of being.

There is also another kind of collective connection, which is even farther off his maps,
perhaps because it is quintessentially "Catholic." This is the connection that consists in the
fact that the church is a sacramental communion; some of the force is carried in an expression
like "mystical body" From one point of view, this is just a facet of the connection through
the church's common way of being. But it raises more explicitly the idea of God's life
interpenetrating ours, and of this interpenetration being made fuller, more intense and
immediate through our own practices. These practices cover the whole range, including those
we might call ethical, or more generally the practices of charity; but the connection gains a
certain intensity in the signs instituted to manifest it, which are called sacrament. It goes
without saying that this sacramental connection is also essentially collective; in fact, it
participates in the collective nature of the other kind of connection, which turns on a common
way of life.
These kinds of things don't find a place in James's conceptual grid, and this fact partly
accounts for the highly negative view about churches. Not that they aren't also full of the two
"spirits of dominion" he cites. This is especially true of the Catholic church in Western
Christendom, whose life in recent centuries has frequently been marred by a drive to
dominate. But if a church is also a locus of collective connection, then one will not be able
to think of it so exclusively in the negative terms that James displays.
A parallel point could be made about James's exclusion of theology from the center of
religious life. This is particularly difficult for Christianity to accommodate. Not that there
hasn't frequently been over theologization, in the sense of an insistence on fine distinctions,
even to the point of splitting churches on these issues, where a greater sense of what is
essential, less ego invested in one's formulations, and a more abundant charity, might have
averted schism. But the devotional, practical, and (if any) sacramental way of life needs some
minimum articulation of what it is all about: some propositional formulations are
unavoidable—about God, creation, Christ, and the like. Just as the life can't be separated
from its collective expression, so it can't be isolated from a minimum of express formulation.
The faith, the hope is in something
But here we push against the bounds of another criticism of James. Up to now, I've been
pleading that there are important, widespread religious forms that cannot be undistortively
understood within his concept of religious experience. This is in a sense an empirical point.
But one might make the more radical conceptual or transcendental point, that the very idea
of an experience that is in no way formulated is impossible. The familiar arguments of Hegel
(say, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter 1), or of Wittgenstein (say, in the Philosophical
Investigations, I @261) come to mind. The experience can have no content at all if you can't
say anything about it. Of course, James was well cognizant of Hegel, albeit resistant to being
recruited into the neo Hegelianism of his day. He would have seen the point of this objection,
and carried on with the reply that having some description is not the same as being theorized,
and particularly not the same as being authoritatively theorized by some official magisterium
that can lean on you for the heterodoxy of your experience.
The point is well taken, but it ought to force us to-wards a more adequate account of the
implicit distinction here between ordinary unavoidable description and theorizing. Where
does one More to the point: do certain "experiences” —St. Theresa's, for instance—require
rather more in the way of propositional background than others? If there are some that require
quite a lot, what becomes in such cases of the supposed short circuit whereby feeling
bypasses theory on its way to influencing conduct?
A similar set of considerations might be deployed to question the sense in which one can
really have an individual experience. All experiences require some vocabulary, and these are
inevitably in large part handed to us in the first place by our society, whatever trans-
formations we may ring on them later. The ideas, the understanding with which we live our
lives, shape directly what we could call religious experience; and these languages, these
vocabularies, are never those simply of an individual.
Does this make James's main thesis, about real religion being individual experience,
unstatable? Not at all. We can make the point in the terms I mentioned above, where the
question reposes on whether the religious connection is individual or collective. But once we
fully appreciate the social nature of language, it does open another series of questions for
James. There are (what are in one sense) individual experiences that are immensely enhanced
by the sense that they are shared. I am sitting at home watching the local hockey team win
the Stanley Cup. I rejoice in this. But the sense of my joy here is framed by my understanding
that thousands of fans all over the city; some gathered at the rinkside, others also in their
living rooms, are sharing in this moment of exultation. There are certain emotions you can
have in solidarity that you can't have alone; the experience mutates into something else by
the fact that it is shared. How much of what James ‘thinks of as individual experience is
socially enhanced or affected in this way? We could imagine a sect in which the individual's
relation to God is everything; and yet people are brought into contact with God through
revival meetings. They come to conversion at that climactic moment of decision when the
preacher calls on people to come forward and declare their faith. This can be a white-hot
experience, but in what sense is it individual? There are a number of questions here that need
to be resolved.
All that I have said above is meant to try to situate James's focus in the map of modern
religious phenomena. He doesn't cover the whole field, but his vision is proportionately more
intense of the realities he does fix his gaze on. It is these that I want to turn to next.