The Varieties of Religious Experience

Character Guide

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William James (the Lecturer)

The author-narrator, a psychologist and philosopher who delivers these Gifford Lectures, examining personal religious experience empirically rather than theologically.

Stephen H. Bradley

An 'unlettered man' whose layered conversion experience—first at fourteen, then again years later—is offered as a case study of sudden religious change.

S. H. Hadley

A reformed drunkard whose dramatic conversion and subsequent work rescuing other alcoholics in New York is presented as an example of release from the sense of sin.

Jonathan Edwards

The Puritan theologian whose 'Treatise on Religious Affections' is used as a rich, detailed description of supposedly supernatural conversion.

Saint Teresa of Ávila (Saint Teresa)

A Spanish mystic referenced for her vivid autobiographical accounts of ecstatic states and their transformative emotional effects.

Saint John of the Cross

A mystic quoted on the enriching 'touches' of God upon the soul during contemplative states.

Saint Ignatius (of Loyola)

Described as a mystic whose visionary experiences coexisted with, and fueled, immense practical and organizational energy.

Margaret Mary Alacoque

A French visionary nun cited as an example of a mystic whose ecstatic absorption left her helplessly impractical in daily life.

Jouffroy

A French philosopher whose eloquent account of losing his religious faith is used as an example of 'counter-conversion,' the mirror image of religious conversion.

Catherine of Siena

Referenced as an example of the saintly temperament's capacity for fierce partisan zeal, even proposing violence in the name of unifying believers.

An anonymous convert's daughter (the writer's daughter account)

An unnamed woman, daughter of a writer against Christianity, whose sudden and joyous sense of God's presence is quoted at length as an example of instantaneous, unforced faith.

Glossary

Healthy-mindedness

James's term for a religious temperament that focuses on goodness and happiness while minimizing or ignoring the reality of evil and sin.

Sick soul

The opposite temperament to healthy-mindedness: one for whom evil and suffering are essential, inescapable elements of existence that must be confronted.

Once-born / Twice-born

James's categories for, respectively, people whose religious life is simple and untroubled, versus those who must undergo a crisis of despair and rebirth to find peace.

Subliminal self

James's psychological concept of a region of consciousness below ordinary awareness from which sudden religious experiences, visions, and conversions may erupt.

Mystical states (the four marks)

James's proposed criteria (ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity) for classifying an experience as genuinely 'mystical.'

Orison

An archaic term for prayer or contemplative devotion, especially the wordless contemplation prized by mystics.

Theopathic

A term James coins for an excessive, all-consuming devotional love of God that crowds out ordinary human relationships and interests.

Sanctification

The theological term for the state of holiness or moral transformation said to follow a genuine religious conversion.

Aseity

A scholastic theological term meaning self-existence or self-derived being, one of God's traditional metaphysical attributes that James questions as practically meaningless.

Over-belief

James's term for the personal, non-provable interpretive framework (theological or philosophical) that individuals add on top of raw religious experience.

Pragmatism

The philosophical method, credited to Peirce, of judging the meaning of an idea by its practical consequences—used by James to evaluate religious doctrines.

Counter-conversion

Term (via Starbuck) for the mirror process of losing religious faith, structurally similar to gaining it.

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