15 - William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany

Summary

THE IDEAS AND personal accounts of mystical phenomena contained in the American philosopher and psychologist William James’s massively influential The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) – which he first shared as part of his 1901–02 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh – stimulated literary, scholarly and popular debates during his own lifetime, and have continued to do so long after his death in 1910. Still, despite a recent surge of interest in James’s literary legacy, and despite David H. Evans’s contention that James was ‘closer perhaps than any other single figure to the center of the confluence of intellectual currents that defined the culture of modernism’, James is still championed by literary critics primarily as the pragmatist who coined the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’. Such assessments grossly underplay his impact on modern literature and society as a whole. Indeed, Varieties, specifically, came to serve as a touchstone for prominent writers across multiple generations, religious orientations and literary movements; its notion of ‘personal’ as opposed to ‘institutional’ religion in particular seems to have anticipated, and even helped spur, the widespread privatisation of religion that sociologists have routinely associated with the mid twentieth century.

Varieties provides not only prophetic commentary on broader socio-religious changes – such as the rise of liberal theology in Protestant churches and seminaries, or the increase in interfaith dialogue and awareness in the decades following the inaugural World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago (1893) – but also an interpretive framework through which critics can better understand the heterogeneous forms of mystical experience that would continue to populate modernist, postmodernist and contemporary literatures. In a 2018 essay, Valeria Taddei made important inroads in this latter, largely unexplored area of inquiry. She demonstrates that the language of mystical experience and conversion narratives deployed in the numerous textual fragments excerpted in James’s book is in many ways indistinguishable from the language of epiphanies so central to literary modernism. However, Varieties did not just inspire modernist writers by providing them with compelling, ready-made templates of what Sharon Kim, in a similarly groundbreaking study, calls spirituality’s ‘discursive form[s]’.