Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited

Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series

by Charles Margrave Taylor

A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience , one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterpiece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place. Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Spirituality, Nonfiction

142 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

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Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic

Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the book's subtitle, Varieties of Religion Today is not so much a piece of William James scholarship as it is a work of sociology of religion in its own right. Delivered on the centenary anniversary of the Gilford Lectures that became James's classic Varieties of Religious Experience, the lectures collected here explore how James's work can help us to understand religion in contemporary societies.

Taylor proceeds in four steps. His first step is to outline the conception of religion presupposed by James's analysis. On James's view, religion is primarily a matter of religious experience, i.e. of the "feelings of individual men in solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to the divine" (p. 5). From this perspective, institutionalized religion is secondary; it amounts to a routinization of personal religious experiences that make them available second-hand to the masses. For James, the true locus of religion is therefore in the individual—and more specifically in individual feeling—not in communal life. Following other commentators, Taylor stresses the limits of this typically late 19th century outlook: not only is it is markedly Protestant in orientation, but it fails to account for the propositional content of religious belief.

Despite these shortcomings, Taylor argues that James's understanding of religious belief is illuminating in the modern context. He sheds light on James' analysis in Varieties of Religious Experience by relating it to his apologia for religious belief in "The Will to Believe" (1896). In that essay, James characterizes scepticism as well as religious faith as matters of "gut feeling": the choice between belief and nonbelief is not a choice not between feeling and reason, but between two feelings, namely: hope that something is true and the fear that it might not be. For Taylor's, James's argument is particularly relevant in the contemporary context insofar as it is oriented to individuals standing on the cusp between belief and unbelief, with nothing more than "gut feeling" to guide them.

Taylor's third step consists in describing the relevance of this orientation of James'. In his view, the collapse of religion as public ethos in the modern period and the concomitant worldview- and value-pluralism has had the effect of pushing more and more people out of comfortable niches and onto the cusp between belief and unbelief. The result is that the contemporary spiritual landscape depends more and more on personal choice. Taylor characterizes this state as "post-Durkheimian." The rise of "expressive" individualism in the 1960s and the resulting trend toward "soft relativism" have severed the link between the sacred and the broader collective framework. Under these circumstances, which are our own, conformity to an external authority independent of personal feeling becomes incomprehensible. As Taylor points out, "Only accept what rings true to your inner self" has practically become axiomatic for modern spirituality (p. 101).

This leads to Taylor's fourth and last step, which is simply to affirm the thoroughly Jamesian character of this new religious constellation. Individuals make what they can of their "religious experience" without much concern for how it all fits together at the level of church and society. Of course, James has some shortcomings in this respect: first, even in a post-Durkheimian world, religious allegiance may still involve collective connection; second, remnants of Durkheimian identities (e.g. in Catholicism) retain relevance as agonistic groups in political deliberation, as witnessed by the renewed political influence of religion from the 1980s onward; and third, the individual experiences that characterize modern spirituality may give rise to new formal spiritual practices unconsidered by James.

Varieties of Religion Today presents an interesting spin on a classic work and does a good job of describing and contextualizing the modern conditions of faith. However, the lecture format in which it is delivered means that it is very short in length and exceedingly narrow in focus. Despite appearances, it is not quite to A Secular Age (2007) what The Malaise of Modernity (1991) is to Sources of the Self (1989). Malaise is a crash course in Taylor's moral phenomenology. It condenses a 500+ page book into an eminently readable short lecture series. In contrast, Varieties is more of a preliminary study for A Secular Age. Not only are many of the insights here repeated in the first chapter of A Secular Age, but the totality (or near totality) of the lectures on James are reprinted under the title "Religion Today" near the end of the book. Readers already familiar with A Secular Age will therefore find nothing new here. For those new to Taylor's work on modern religion, however, the book functions as an accessible and concise introduction.

[Ray LaManna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taylor updates and expands upon the seminal work of William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. He makes a good case that James was correct that religious experience for many people throughout the world has moved to a more personal relationship with a Higher Power rather than membership in a doctrinal formal church. He also adds some new ideas about the current 21st-century approaches to religion.
This book should be read in conjunction with William James' work...while both books require some concentration and close reading... it is well worth the effort.

[W]

aaaaamen

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Varieties of Religion Today was compiled by Charles Taylor from a series of lectures he delivered at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 2000, and briskly presents several of his core ideas, like the history of secularism, the ethics of authenticity, and the hermeneutics of selfhood and subjectivity, detailed in his other books. Most basically, Taylor is interested in the role of religion in individual and collective life in a secular, North Atlantic context, and he uses William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience as a launch-pad to explore this theme. His aim is to learn what Varieties “has to say to us at the turn of a new century” (3).

In the first chapter, Taylor underscores two aspects of James’s theory of religion. First, he notes that James understands religion in primarily individualistic terms: for James, “the real locus of religion is in individual experience, and not in corporate life” (7). Yet he also observes that James centers experience in his definition of religion, as opposed to the doctrinal formulations by which people express, justify, and rationalize their faith commitments. For James, religion is (and should be) a matter of inward devotion rather than outward conformity with the heteronomous norms of orthodoxy. He therefore views “churches” with relative disdain, as they tend to dilute the vitality of first-order religious experience felt by the individual in their vain efforts to translate these experiences into propositional doctrinal content. As Taylor succinctly puts it, James “sides with the religion of the heart over that of the head” (18).

Taylor observes that James’s theory of religion “is very much at home in modern culture” and “can seem entirely understandable, even axiomatic, to lots of people” (9, 13). As a hermeneutical thinker, Taylor therefore strives to show how James’s widely shared notion of individual, private religion can be understood as the product of historical and social forces as well as philosophical developments that date back to medieval Christendom. He claims that “the Western march toward secularity . . . has been interwoven from the start with this drive toward personal religion,” and cites the Lateran Council of 1215, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, Jesuit spirituality, the Methodist revival, American republicanism, and nineteenth-century Romanticism as key moments in the evolution of private religion. With this historical perspective in hand, Taylor contends that James’s conception of religion nevertheless misses, and potentially distorts, other important aspects of religion, and religious experience in particular. First, James overlooks how the connection between the believer and the divine may be mediated by collective ecclesial life. Second, his theory of religion cannot make sense of sacramental practice, most notably prevalent in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and certain forms of Protestant Christianity, which necessarily presupposes a collective connection and by which the divine life interpenetrates the communal life of believers. Finally, James underestimates the centrality of formulated doctrine to religious experience: it is not just that “the very idea of an experience that is no way formulated is impossible,” but also that doctrines inevitably shape the kinds of religious experiences we have—they provide us with a vocabulary, handed down to us by our communities (religious or otherwise), without which religious experiences would be impossible (26-8). Thus, while James’s theory of religion resonates deeply with our unreflective modern conception of religious life, it cannot account for crucial religious phenomena.

Still, Taylor insists, James’s narrow focus on individual religious experience helpfully discloses two other phenomena that are especially salient in our contemporary context. The first is the idea of the twice-born or sick soul and its hardship, contrasted with the once-born or healthy soul. Whereas the once-born “have the sense that all is well with the world,” the twice-born cannot help but see the pain and misery in the world (33). Only after an experience of conversion or deliverance, equivalent to a kind of second birth, can these sick souls feel that all will be well or that goodness will ultimately triumph (36-7). Taylor is especially interested in three experiences of the twice-born identified by James: melancholy, evil, and a sense of personal sin. In an earlier era, Taylor explains, melancholy was experienced as a kind of self-exclusion from a realm of meaning that was beyond doubt: God was there, or good and evil defined, but the melancholic could not feel these realities. In the modern context, Taylor claims, meaning has simply disappeared, and the melancholic faces “the intimation of what may be a definitive emptiness” (40). Next, James characterizes the fear of evil as another kind of melancholy that centers the horrors of the world; here, too, the context has shifted, since in the face of ultimate meaninglessness, the sense of evil “faces no obvious defenses. It cannot but deeply disturb us,” and indeed we sometimes flee into the meaninglessness of the universe to avoid a direct encounter with the evil before us (42). Finally, James examines the personal sense of sin from which the twice-born hope to be delivered. Prima facie, this phenomenon seems least at home in the modern context, yet Taylor notes how the rapid spread of evangelical Christianity, not only in the United States but also in Latin America, Africa, and certain parts of Asia, means that “the experience of personal evil and deliverance . . . is alive and in full expansion in our day” (38).

Taylor reminds his readers that James very much identifies with the sick souls he describes, and in fact much of his characterization of the fear of evil probably derives from his personal experience. James’s fascination and sympathy with the twice-born, Taylor claims, is part and parcel of his broader defense of the admissibility of belief, which is the second phenomenon Taylor calls attention to in the second chapter. Taylor here draws heavily from James’s “The Will to Believe,” where James confronts William Clifford’s ethics of belief, which states that one should never turn one’s hypotheses into accepted theories until the evidence is sufficient. Clifford’s basic presupposition is that many of our cherished hypotheses serve to console or comfort us, and hence we are tempted to believe them even when they are not borne out by the evidence. We should, therefore, meticulously submit our beliefs to skeptical inquiry to suss out which of them are justified. James finds Clifford’s position unpersuasive on several fronts. For starters, he asserts that there are some truths which will be hidden to us unless we first open ourselves to the possibility of their truthfulness before we have much evidence. For example, I will never know whether you love me if I adopt a stance “of maximum distance and suspicion.” The same may be said about whether God exists: “I forfeit the chance of a positive answer” if I approach this question with the scientific skepticism espoused by Clifford (46). James observes that Clifford presents his ethics of belief as if reason demands his skeptical approach, when in fact Clifford simply thinks that it is better to risk loss of truth than to be mistaken in one’s beliefs. Yet this is a passional conclusion, James insists, not an indubitable rational principle, and indeed the religious hypothesis presents us with a passional decision about whether it is best to submit to our fear that our belief in God is mistaken or to submit to our hope that our faith is true.

Taylor clearly finds this analysis persuasive and adds that, in our contemporary context, both positions speak to us, even if we ultimately must decide in favor of one over the other. On the one hand, believers must not only confront the fact that many smart and respectable people are atheists, but also the fact that they can see themselves as their atheist peers see them—i.e. as duped by a belief that functions to console rather than reflect the nature of reality. On the other hand, non-believers feel the call to faith “as an understood temptation” that attracts others, equally smart and respectable. Without this temptation, Clifford’s ethics of belief “would be incomprehensible” (57). In the end, Taylor commends James as “a philosopher of the cusp” who tells us what it feels like to sit on the precipice of decision and feel the pull of one side, then another. James, he writes, “describes a crucial site of modernity and articulates the decisive drama enacted there” (59).

In the book’s third chapter, James is mostly absent. Here Taylor offers his own account of the contemporary religious situation with an emphasis on the secularization of the public sphere and the individualization of religion. In typical Taylorian fashion, he describes how we arrived at this unique historical moment in which religion is so heavily privatized and subject to individual choice. To describe this process, he delineates three idealized religious “dispensations”: first, the “paleo-Durkheimian” dispensation, prevalent in baroque Catholic societies of the early modern period, which “corresponds to a situation in which a sense of the ontic dependence of the state on God . . . is still alive,” even if it “may be weakened by disenchantment and an instrumental spirit” (76). Throne and altar are closely united in this dispensation and religion is imposed on the monarch’s subjects from above. Consequently, one’s connection to the sacred is mediated by a church that is more or less coextensive with society. The second is the “neo-Durkheimian” dispensation, which characterizes societies in which God is present as a providential force that binds a religiously plural society “under God.” In this dispensation, one can enter the religious denomination of one’s choice, which in turn connects one to “a broader, more elusive ‘church,’ and, more important, to a political entity with a providential role to play” (93). The neo-Durkheimian dispensation aptly captures the religious situation in the United States until the post-war period.

Finally, there is the “post-Durkheimian” dispensation associated with our contemporary era, characterized by an expressivist individualism coupled with an ethics of authenticity, which states that each person can only realize their humanity in their own way, and that one should strive to be true to oneself rather than conform with moral, religious, and political values imposed from outside (83). This soft moral relativism, of course, presupposes the moral importance of mutual respect and toleration: “one shouldn’t criticize others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do” (89). Religion, if it appears at all, is not just a matter of my choice, “but must speak to me; it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this,” and thus “my place in the broader ‘church’ may not be that relevant for me,” nor my sense of connection with other citizens “under God” (94-5). In short, one’s connection to the sacred in the post-Durkheimian dispensation need not be wedded to a broader framework, be it church or state. With this last dispensation, religion has been effectively shunned from the public sphere as a private affair, and while there are forces in post-Durkheimian societies that actively resist this secularization and privatization (Taylor cites the Christian right), “the very embattled nature of these attempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation” (98).

James, Taylor notes, anticipated the post-Durkheimian dispensation with his focus on the individualistic and experiential nature of religion in Varieties. Yet while “James is very close to the spirit of contemporary society,” he nevertheless overlooks three “key phenomena” Taylor briefly canvasses in the final chapter of the book. First, even in a post-Durkheimian world, “many people will find their spiritual home in churches,” even if their access to the sacred is not mediated by “a sacralized society (paleo style) or some national identity (neo style)” (112). Consequently, we cannot, like James, dismiss the collective dimension of religious experience. Second, Taylor insists that neo-Durkheimian identities continue to persist, not just in the United States (where the Christian right operates within a neo-Durkheimian dispensation), but also in countries whose national identities have been suppressed or threatened, like Poland and Ireland. In these nations, collective identity is indexed to a specific religious marker (in both cases Roman Catholicism), and an individualist theory of religion cannot make sense of this phenomenon. Finally, James’s emphasis on experience overlooks the way in which religious experience often motivates believers to adopt spiritual disciplines like meditation or prayer. “Many people are not satisfied with a momentary sense of wow,” Taylor writes, and so we need a theory of religion that appreciates its embodied, ritualistic character, even in our post-Durkheimian era (116).

[Kaleb]

Short but insightful. Charles Taylor's commentary on William James (the psychologist famous for his book about religion and religious experience, The Varieties of Religious Experience). James had a particular conception of religion: it forms through intense, passionate religious experiences, then it "cools" or gets diluted as it becomes formalized and dispersed by a church("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 secondhand way. In the transmission, the force and intensity of the original tends to get lost, until all that remains is 'dull habit.'")

For James (like it was for Augustine), religious belief takes faith first. Instead of taking a skeptical, almost scientific approach—doubt religion intensely until you see overwhelming evidence for it—believing in religion might require a leap of faith first, so you can actually see the truth in its claims. Think of a relationship: if you start assuming the other person hates you and need overwhelming evidence to prove otherwise, it’s probably not gonna go well.

Taylor uses these ideas as a jumping-off point to dig into how humans view religion, especially the relationship between the individual and broader society. He lays out three main dispesnations: paleo-Durkheimian, neo-Durkheimian, and post-Durkheimian. Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist, had this theory about a "sacred–profane dichotomy" in religions: the sacred was set apart, profane was ordinary. The paleo-Durkheimian era is where religion is baked into every part of life and the state—no "secular" space like we’d recognize today. EX: Medieval Europe. The neo-Durkheimian era is looser: people freely join denominations, see them as part of their identity, and see themselves as part of a broader "church" and a greater national project. EX: Protestant denominations for most of American history. Finally, the post-Durkheimian era, where we are now, is all about expressive individualism. Here, we’re looking for a faith that works for us personally, that fits our own spiritual needs, with way less focus on dogma or specific doctrines. James’s description of religious faith lines up pretty well with the post-Durkheimian model, though there are some differences.

I liked the analysis in this book. Taylor got dangerously close to "old man yells at cloud" territory when he got to the post-Durkheimian stuff, but I was pleasantly surprised that he didn’t go full curmudgeon. He (like I) gets that (1) there’s no turning back the clock and (2) a lot of the old ways required people to violate their consciences and conform to orthodoxies in ways that were pretty harmful


Quote

"First, is it conceivable that one could return to a paleo- or even neo-Durkheimian dispensation? Second, andmore profoundly, doesn’t every dispensation have its own favored forms of deviation? If ours tends to mul- tiply somewhat shallow and undemanding spiritual options, we shouldn’t forget the spiritual costs of vari- ous kinds of forced conformity: hypocrisy, spiritual stultiacation, inner revolt against the Gospel, the con- fusion of faith and power, and even worse. Even if we had a choice, I’m not sure we wouldn’t be wiser to stick with the present dispensation."

[Mohammed Kotb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Religious Experience Revisited By Charles Taylor
This book serves not only as a complementary to William James' mammoth work, it was also laced with the Taylor's vision on religion and its place in our contemporary world.
The author illustrates the essence of James' philosophy and in the same time dissects his views in relation to our modern world.
He is inflecting on the role of religion in conceiving the modern secular definition of state which is contrary to my belief in the total dichotomy between these two concepts.
He shed light on the concept of individuality and its necessity for dependence on the collective consciousness and the enclosing culture of the society. Individual experience cannot be conceived without being immersed in a collective connections to the society and its values.
There was a lot of talking about the Durkheimian era and its classifications which I wasn't totally able to grasp its meaning, however what I can infer from all these complex philosophical ideas is that the author has used the ideas of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in digesting the entire human society progression in the context of both religion and polity. According to Taylor, and following his own coined terminology he classified the entire spectrum into three main sections, the first one is the pre-Durkheim age, which is corresponding – in my own understanding- to the enchanted era in which people looked into the clerical institutions in a sacred way together with total immersion in rituals without any reflection on the inner spiritual meaning. The second one the neo Durkheim age, corresponds to the disenchanted period in which people start (in parallel to the amendment movements in both Catholicism and protestants and the French revolution) to uphold the outstanding value to inner experience and the inside meaning over the outside facade and the institutional rituals.
The third one the post Darkheiman era corresponds to the industrialized western societies and its new concepts of secularism. In this era there is emphatic believe in the sacred inner experience with total disregard to the outer community. However the author refuses to reject the role of the society as a whole in both triggering this experience and in being affected by this individualistic experience.
Humans after all are social animals.
The book is difficult to be understood by someone not trained on philosophy like me. However it was a nice journey and worth every hour spent on it.

[BJ Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

They say Varieties of Religious Experience was one of the most influential books written for the twentieth century. I agree. But how much influence does it still carry today? Does it still have the same impact and applicability today as it did for the many decades after it was first written in 1902? This book by Charles Taylor is a review/critique of James' Varieties of Religious Experience with these questions specifically in mind.

Smart people can understand complex ideas. Smarter people can create and express complex ideas. Brilliant people can express complex ideas in such a way that anybody can understand. Taylor definitely falls into the second category. I believe his critique of Varieties is an excellent one but his writing style, as usual, is unnecessarily verbose. If you enjoy the philosophy of religion you will certainly enjoy this book... but you will likely find it quite dry.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sir or Madam: are you appreciative of the works of William James? You should be, according to Charles Taylor:

"James is our great philosopher of the cusp. He tells us more than anyone else about what it's like to stand in that open space and feel the winds pulling you now here, now there. He describes a crucial site of modernity and articulates the decisive drama enacted there."

Sir or Madam: are we appreciative of the work of Charles Taylor? This short book and a book length hint from Jamie Smith suggests that we should be:

"...the call to faith is still there as an understood temptation. Even if we think that it no longer applies to us, we see it as drawing others. Otherwise the ethics of belief [not to believe what you don't have evidence for] would be incomprehensible."

-the world is so full of such a number of writers, I'm sure we should all be the happiest blighters-

[Wilson Gautreaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! After reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, brilliant but so wordy, the brevity of this insightful book was much appreciated. I highly recommend it!

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't agree with all aspects of Charles Taylor's Varieties of Religion Today but it's useful for its rereading of William James's lectures Varieties of Religious Experience, given a 100-and-some-odd years ago, and for its addressing some areas that James might have missed or gotten wrong. You might say the upshot of Taylor's book is that James was both neglecting and continuing a tradition of religious thought neglected the importance community and public ritual play in forming a religious character. Taylor also writes about some of the conflicting cross-currents in society that make it difficult for people to be comfortable coming to terms with religious or social identities. Good find; glad I read it.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four essays appreciating, critiquing and departing from William James' classic Gifford Lectures on religion. I love James so much (especially that book), it was good for me to see how a French Canadian Catholic reacts to him, particularly against the North Atlantic Protestant preoccupation with individual experience and belief. It's also good for me, a committed secularist, to read such a well-informed critique of secularism.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taylor makes some warranted criticisms of James' view of religious experience--in particular that James ignores communal aspects of religion and the possibility of communal religious experiences.

[Borum · Rating 3 out of 5]

This answered some of my questions regarding the modern society's application of James' thoughts. I have to read Durkheim one day, though.