James' Varieties of Religious Experience is awesome! For our first session (of six) going through the twenty lectures of the book, we read I-III, stage-setting. The first defines and defends an "empiricist" approach to religion, which seeks material everywhere but finds most illuminating extreme cases psychologists might deem neurotic if not pathological. He distinguishes "spiritual' "judgments of value" from the observable data he will concern himself with, and (not quite consistently) defers these value questions. The second lecture delimits his inquiry to "personal" as opposed to "institutional" religion, and (not quite consistently) argues that religion has no single essence. Varieties are to come, but here it seems preeminently one thing, the somberly joyful acceptance of the universe. The third lecture brings us to experience, a "sense of reality" that goes beyond the senses that sometimes, for some people, produces an entirely convincing encounter with the "reality of the unseen."
We spent a lot of time on questions of voice: how James brings the voices of others into his lectures (starting in earnest in the third), something I've stressed in classes before, and how he establishes his own voice, a new question for me. The first few pages - corresponding to the first few minutes of his first lecture - are a bravura performance. He flatters is Scots hosts then owns his American voice as a harbinger of a transatlantic future, announces that he has not training in theology or anthropology but will show psychology to have valuable contributions to make. That I'd noticed and remembered. I'd forgotten that, buy the fifth page, he has dismissed the Bible as a historically flawed text and reclaimed it as a testimonial of personal religion. And by page 7 he's dismissed the whole history of the English Church and then unleashed a testimonial by the Quaker George Fox - introduced as someone of undoubted "spiritual sagacity and capacity" who is as incontrovertibly "a psychopath or détraqué of the deepest style."
And that testimonial is long. It would take several minutes to read. Later in the lectures (starting in III) there will be many such cameos, but this is the first, and it will have come to its audience out of the blue. I imagine they were taken aback that this cheeky psychologist from across the seas was giving voice to a religious nut who felt the blood of Christian martyrs flowing over his feet in an British market (he later learned they had died under the Emperor Diocletian) and loudly told the people there so... and then giving more voice, on and on. As for many of his quotations, this is long enough that you can get lost in it.
How did James deliver George Fox's words, or the words of so many others in later lectures? How did he mark their start and end? In the book version they're inset, but in delivering the lectures James must have signaled the shift in some other way. For that matter, what tone did he use - passionate, detached, sympathetic? It would undermine James' intent to seem in any way critical or ironic, even as he repeatedly insisted every case he was considering was in its way excessive. But he mustn't sound credulous either... I really don't know how he did it, but doing it effectively will have been crucial to the success of the lectures.
And for us as readers of these published lectures (I leave aside the fact that all the passages he read aloud were originally written), allowing ourselves to get drawn into each of these testimonies, even at the price of losing sight of James' argument, seems necessary. When you're hurrying through the book, you (well, I) skim these long inset passages, never dwelling long enough in them for James' voice to be eclipsed by another's - and, so, not long enough to feel James allowing his voice to be so eclipsed: giving these people voice, his voice. I'm very glad to have a chance to hear it all anew - not just Fox and all the other inspired crazies, but James, who manages the circus of religious experience without (most of the time) harming the animals.
We spent a lot of time on questions of voice: how James brings the voices of others into his lectures (starting in earnest in the third), something I've stressed in classes before, and how he establishes his own voice, a new question for me. The first few pages - corresponding to the first few minutes of his first lecture - are a bravura performance. He flatters is Scots hosts then owns his American voice as a harbinger of a transatlantic future, announces that he has not training in theology or anthropology but will show psychology to have valuable contributions to make. That I'd noticed and remembered. I'd forgotten that, buy the fifth page, he has dismissed the Bible as a historically flawed text and reclaimed it as a testimonial of personal religion. And by page 7 he's dismissed the whole history of the English Church and then unleashed a testimonial by the Quaker George Fox - introduced as someone of undoubted "spiritual sagacity and capacity" who is as incontrovertibly "a psychopath or détraqué of the deepest style."
And that testimonial is long. It would take several minutes to read. Later in the lectures (starting in III) there will be many such cameos, but this is the first, and it will have come to its audience out of the blue. I imagine they were taken aback that this cheeky psychologist from across the seas was giving voice to a religious nut who felt the blood of Christian martyrs flowing over his feet in an British market (he later learned they had died under the Emperor Diocletian) and loudly told the people there so... and then giving more voice, on and on. As for many of his quotations, this is long enough that you can get lost in it.
How did James deliver George Fox's words, or the words of so many others in later lectures? How did he mark their start and end? In the book version they're inset, but in delivering the lectures James must have signaled the shift in some other way. For that matter, what tone did he use - passionate, detached, sympathetic? It would undermine James' intent to seem in any way critical or ironic, even as he repeatedly insisted every case he was considering was in its way excessive. But he mustn't sound credulous either... I really don't know how he did it, but doing it effectively will have been crucial to the success of the lectures.
And for us as readers of these published lectures (I leave aside the fact that all the passages he read aloud were originally written), allowing ourselves to get drawn into each of these testimonies, even at the price of losing sight of James' argument, seems necessary. When you're hurrying through the book, you (well, I) skim these long inset passages, never dwelling long enough in them for James' voice to be eclipsed by another's - and, so, not long enough to feel James allowing his voice to be so eclipsed: giving these people voice, his voice. I'm very glad to have a chance to hear it all anew - not just Fox and all the other inspired crazies, but James, who manages the circus of religious experience without (most of the time) harming the animals.
