Psychology of Religion

Compiled by: 

By Professor Jim Roane, Ph.D.

Empiricism we have already discussed previously under "World Religions and the Christian Witness," so I shall not belabor that procedure. Let us, however, consider the psychology of religion for a moment to better understand the nature of what we are about to discover in the Psychology of Religion

The Psychology of Religion

William James is an excellent starting point in understanding the psychology of religion, and we start with the mind because this is where religious belief begins and ends. James, known as the father of modern psychology, prepared a series of lectures which he delivered at the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-1902.[i]

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature was first presented as a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901. To prepare for the talks, Harvard psychologist William James had read widely in the religious classics, including the personal accounts of various saints and mystics.  

His decision to look at spiritual experience from a psychological point of view seemed very new at the time, even blasphemous. Mountains of books were still being churned out on the finer points of dogma and theology, but James was more interested in individual experience. His purpose in writing the book was to convince the reader that although religion itself often seemed absurd, the spiritual impulse was what made us human. James wanted to know why man was a religious animal, and what practical benefits spirituality brought us, assuming that we would not engage in it if it did not do us some good.

The book's insights are wrapped in prose as elegant and forceful as anything written by his novelist brother Henry James, and it was recognized as a classic virtually from the day of publication. The book's great service was to make the religious reader see spiritual matters from a more rational, objective perspective, and to persuade the scientifically-minded that religious experience had its value and was a 'fact'.

The Science of Spirituality

James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience at the end of a century of scientific advance that reacted against the unthinking faith of earlier times. In this milieu, the Bible was newly appreciated as just a collection of stories, and in the new science of psychology, religious experience could be explained away as a creation of the mind. Yet James was skeptical of the idea that all religious experience could be reduced to states of the brain, what he calls the 'Nothing-but' view of spirituality.

James wrote that spiritual ideas should be judged on three criteria: 1) Immediate luminousness; 2) Philosophical reasonableness; and 3) Moral helpfulness. Put simply, do they enlighten us, do they make sense, and are they a good guide to living?

He quotes a passage from St Teresa of Avila's autobiography in which she talks about her visions. At the time some suspected she was seeing the devil, not God, but she protested that what she saw could not be just the work of the imagination, since it had made her a much better person ("uprooting my vices, and filling me with a masculine courage") - and her confessors confirmed it. Teresa also made a distinction between imaginings and spiritual reality, pointing out that while pure imagination weakens the mind and soul, 'genuine heavenly vision' revitalizes and strengthens the subject. In Teresa's case, she felt that her visitations guided her towards the reform of the Carmelite order, of which she was a member.

This was the practical effect of religious experience that James was so fascinated by. These 'visitations' may have come from inside a saint's own mind, or they may indeed have been from God. But as the cases such as St Paul's, St Augustine's or Teresa's demonstrated, what was sure was that they could transform a life.

The Motivation of the Convert

Both psychology and religion, James observes, agree that a person can be transformed by forces apparently beyond their normal consciousness. But while psychology defines these forces as 'unconscious' i.e. within the self, in religion redemption comes from outside the person, is a gift from God.

To the rational or scientific frame of mind, the 'born again' person or garden-variety religious convert may seem imbalanced, a nut even. Conversion can be sudden, James points out, but it does not mean it is pathological. To the onlooker, it may look like the patching on of a holy outlook to a person's existing life, but to him or her experiencing it, it is a total transformation. Suddenly, it is other people who are in the dark.

James recognized a pattern in conversion experiences. It tended to happen when people were so low that they just 'gave up', the vacuum of hope providing space for revelation. The religious literature is full of stories along these lines, in which the constrictions and negative aspects of the ego are finally discarded; one begins to live only for others or for some higher goal. The compensation for becoming dependent upon God is a letting go of fear, and it is this that makes conversion such a liberating experience. It is the fearlessness and sense of absolute security in God that gives the convert their breathtaking motivation. An apparently perfectly normal person will give up everything and become a missionary in the jungle, or found a monastery in the desert, because of a belief. Yet this invisible thing will drastically change their outward circumstances, which led James to the unavoidable conclusion that for such a person, their conversion or spiritual experience was a fact, indeed more real than anything which had so far happened in their lives.

Why Religion Has a Transforming Power

James offered the idea that religion does not have to be worship of a God. It can be simply the belief in an unseen order, to which our task was to 'harmoniously adjust ourselves'. He notes that, "Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion?" Under this appreciation, atheism could be a religion. The fervor with which some atheists attack Christianity, he noted, is religious in nature. People take on religion for personal reasons, James argues - it must serve them in some way. He quotes J H Leuba, an early psychologist of religion: "God is not known, he is not understood; he is used."

The religious attitude, though, is normally associated with a willingness to leave the self behind in the cause of something greater e.g. God, country. This denial of the self is what makes the religious impulse different from all other types of happiness, and so uniquely uplifting. A religious feeling can be distinguished from other feelings because it ennobles the feeler, giving them the sense that they live according to larger forces, laws or designs.

We all want to connect with something 'more', whether that is something great inside us or an external Higher Power, and religion provides a framework for people to experience the better things which come from living by faith instead of our more natural state of fear. "Not God", James states, "but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion."

The Final Word

Inserted into the text of The Varieties of Religious Experience is the mention of a man who managed to save himself from insanity by anchoring his mind to powerful statements from the Bible. It so happens that this person, referred to as a 'French correspondent', was the author himself.

James' conclusion was that a state of faith could transform a life utterly, even though what is believed strictly speaking may not exist. Religion can genuinely heal a person, integrating what before was fragmented. For the author, who fell in and out of depression and endured a sense of alienation for many of his years, this alone justified religious activity. While he admitted to being far from spiritually advanced himself, it was clear to him that belief in the Unseen had unleashed in many the great forces of individuality and purpose.

James acknowledged that science would be forever trying to blow away the obscuring mists of religion, but in doing so it would totally miss the point. Science could only ever talk in the abstract, but personal spiritual experience was the more powerful precisely because it is subjective. Spirituality is about the emotions and the imagination and the soul - and to a human being these are everything.[ii]

In essence James does a very good job, indeed, of demonstrating the commonalities in all religions. [iii] [iv]We can note for instance that each of the major religions has a guru or prophet that shares his or her enlightenment with others, disciples or the public in general or both.

So, it is clear to any serious student of the theology of religions that we are dealing with man’s opinion of what most of us consider to be our ultimate concern; namely, God.

Now, in this regard let us take a closer look at what James taught and thereby help us to understand the commonality of religious phenomenon.[v]

Salient Points

The Ineffability of Mystical Experience

 Ineffability is meant to convey the fact that the individual of the experience “says that it defies expression, [and] that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” Consequently, a mystical experience must be experienced for anyone to understand the reasons for ineffability. It is not enough to attempt a description of the experience, because all descriptions fall short of their goal.

A jazz musician, for example, cannot explain precisely how it feels to get lost in spontaneous improvisation. He will hint by way of pseudo-description, paradox or poetry, but he will most emphatically exclaim that you must experience it to understand it. In a like manner James argues that the mystic feels herself to be in the same position, and often feels “that most of us accord to [her] experiences an …incompetent treatment.”

The Noetic Quality of Mystical Experience

The noetic quality of a mystical experience is the fact that the mystic feels the experience to impute a kind of knowledge by way of “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” This claim emphasizes James’ insistent appeal to mystical states being the source of an intuitive, non-conceptual knowledge that does not require concepts in order to ‘know’ the knowledge it instills.

This complex idea can be understood as such: non-mystical knowledge of a tree can be thought of as “this tree is tall,” where concepts and their connections are a web of knowledge that support the experience. Mystical states, on the other hand, cannot be articulated in a conceptual manner. These states, James contends, are “inarticulate, [although] they remain,” and they always leave a lingering feeling that they did in fact mean something.

In an essay titled "The Tigers of India," James discusses conceptual knowledge and immediate knowledge, distinguishing the latter from the former in this way: “Thought-stuff and thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature…and there is no context of intermediaries…to stand between and separate the thought and thing.” This notion of “no context of intermediaries” is important for James’ concern with the noetic quality of mystical experiences because it focuses on the central problem of understanding knowledge as it relates to the mystic.

Typically, knowledge is understood as an intermediate function where, as in the tree example, ideas of “tree” and “brown” act as intermediaries that allow one to say “this tree is brown.” But in the unmediated knowledge of the mystic James is trying to emphasize that the thought of “what is experienced” and the “thing that is experienced,” come together as a singularity that instills knowledge.

Since no intermediate function takes place, conceptualizing the experience forces separateness onto an experience that in its original state was non-mediated. As a singularity the experienced thing and the experiencing of the thing “are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is…the phenomenon, or the experience.”

The Transiency of Mystical Experience

The notion of transiency emphasizes the quality of mystical experiences being short and difficult to sustain. Importantly, though, the qualities of the experience can be brought back to the mind afterwards.

As James says, “when they recur it is recognized,” and the significance of such qualities are prone to being developed and built up. In short, the experiences are brief, but they when they recur they mystic knows indubitably that it is the same type of experience, and so implants a deepening of its significance.

The Passivity of Mystical Experience

The notion of passivity is meant to convey that when in a mystical state “[the] mystic feels as if [her] own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if [she] were grasped and held by a superior power.” Even when the mystic induces this state through meditative, intentional acts, it remains that when she enters the state she in effect loses self-control.

James parallels this loss of self-control with prophetic speech or automatic writing, in which the individual feels compelled to act by a force other than him or herself. These moments of passivity are meant to communicate the important fact that the mystic feels as if something else moves her, has a hold of her, and guides her actions, making the deterioration of the self-crucial to the significance of the experience.

Thus, as we see the theology of religion must include the commonality of psychological processes which leads into the formation of religious concepts.

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[i] “The Varieties of Religious Experience” is considered the seminal work in the field of religious psychology. As such, it is, in my opinion, a must read [yes all 500 plus pages] for any serious student of religious thought.

[ii] Source: 50 Spiritual Classics: 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose, Tom Butler-Bowdon (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey)

[iii] 50 SPIRITUAL CLASSICS FROM VARIOUS RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES

·         Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)

·         St Augustine Confessions (400)

·         Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

·         Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)

·         Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)

·         Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)

·         Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)

·         GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)

·         Pema Chödrön - The Places That Scare You (2001)

·         Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)

·         Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)

·         Epictetus - The Enchiridion (1st century)

·         Mohandas Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)

·         Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)

·         Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)

·         GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)

·         Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)

·         Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)

·         Herman Hesse -  Siddartha (1922)

·         Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)

·         William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

·         Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)

·         Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)

·         J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)

·         CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)

·         Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)

·         Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)

·         Dan Millman The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)

·         W Somerset Maugham The Razor's Edge (1944)

·         Thich Nhat Hanh The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)

·         Michael Newton Journey of Souls (1994)

·         John O'Donohue Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)

·         Robert M Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

·         James Redfield The Celestine Prophecy (1994)

·         Miguel Ruiz The Four Agreements (1997)

·         Helen Schucman & William Thetford A Course in Miracles (1976)

·         Idries Shah The Way of the Sufi (1968)

·         Starhawk The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)

·         Shunryu Suzuki Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)

·         Emanuel Swedenborg Heaven and Hell (1758)

·         Teresa of Avila Interior Castle (1570)

·         Mother Teresa A Simple Path (1994)

·         Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1998)

·         Chögyam Trungpa Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)

·         Neale Donald Walsch Conversations With God (1998)

·         Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)

·         Simone Weil Waiting For God (1979)

·         Ken Wilber A Theory of Everything (2000)

·         Paramahansa Yogananda Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)

Gary Zukav The Seat of the Soul (1990)

·        

[iv] Note the following commonalities of a:

·         Prophet Figure/Religion/Body Of Sacred Text, etc.:

·         Buddha—Buddhism--Tipitaka--the 3 baskets

·         Jesus—Christianity—Old and New Testament

·         Moses—Judaism—Old Testament

·         Muhammad—Islam—Koran

·         Bahá'u'lláh-- Bahá'í— The Kitáb-I-Aqdas

[v] Sources: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (New York: Simon and Schuster: 1997).

William James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA: 1975, 2000 tenth printing) p. [35] 201. As posted on: http://suite101.com/a/william-james-and-mysticsm-a168156