Cliff Notes: Conclusions

James begins his ultimate major lecture of the series by reducing religious experience to what he sees as its base and primal elements. These take the form of three core beliefs and their two primary effects:

1. The material world is part of a spiritual universe from which it draws significance.
2. Union or harmony with spiritual reality is our true end.
3. Prayer or communion with the spiritual does real work through spiritual energies in this world.

A. A new energy resides in life as a gift and allows us enchantment or heroism.
B. Assurance in the form of safety, peace, and a abundance of loving affection toward others.

That he has garnered these, James reminds us, from religion's extreme examples does not threaten their value but increases it as an appeal to spiritual experts thoroughly acquainted with religion's core experiential elements.

Moreover, we should not be discouraged by the variety of religious experiences, as their diversity points not to their futility, but to the varying needs of humankind. This does not make all religions equal, but does make them responsive to diverse human need. We are reminded of his comparison with horses and their courses.

Nor does the diversity of religion make them immune to scientific inquiry. Rather, the world's great number of faiths only make scientific study of them more rewarding, and more difficult, as detachment cannot be the best way to understand a realm so dependent on incommunicable experience.

Rather, the scientific study of religions can sort out the errors of fact prevalent in many of the religions that came before and to make stronger claims to truth in the present. Being primarily about the personal, religion can never be anachronistic, but it may be occasionally corrected.

This correction does not destroy religion because religion is always primarily about feeling and only secondarily about thought. More crucially, religion is about a sense of unease, of wrongness, and its concomitant ineluctable salve; it is not about anything to do with unspooling the proper adjectives for God.

That individuals can perceive this cure is scientific support for the value of religious experience: "Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life."

That is to say that James sees the religious correlation with the unconscious as one of its central claims to truth. Whatever else it does, religion correctly perceives our relation to a most elusive form of alterity, of otherness. Whether that is the Ultimate alterity, from a practical and scientific point of view, is quite beside the point.

The supernatural, posits James, is quite real enough for anyone. Its effects make it so.

This concludes this Cliff Notes series. The next discussion will concern, in some form, Thomas Merton's Book of Hours. Many thanks to Emory University for their helpful links, information, and analyses.