Cliff Notes: Philosophy

Rejoining the inimitable William James as he lectures his way through the Varieties of Religious Experience (now in written form), we pick up where he left off: with the limitations of mysticism. Because mysticism relies so much on individual sentiment, its authority cannot surpass that of the individual.

At the apparent opposite end of the authoritative spectrum, then, would be philosophy, which through its appeals to universal and transcendental reason, would seem the source for a more broad-based argument for the value of religious experience. Yet immediately philosophy encounters problems.

For even the most strident of its supporters, the dogmatic theology which brilliant thinkers like Cardinal Newman (and he quotes liberally from him) espouse fails actually to benefit religious experience at all; there is a sharp disconnect. And James also cites here the traditional four proofs of God from Thomas Aquinas, and notes, while these arguments endure through centuries of opposition and reformulation, they only ever seem able to reinforce pre-existing belief. They can never remove serious doubts.

Because all this pre-existing belief comes not from logical argument but from mystical experience, philosophy must assume a sub-ordinate role for the religious individual. Not only can abstract arguments not prove the existence of God to any overwhelming degree, they cannot even describe God adequately.

James cunningly notes the ever-flowering scholastic adjectives for the noun of God, and rightly states that knowing that God is omniscient, say, does not help us, say, to be more omniscient. The more prescient analogy for this is James' contemporary biologist who suffer disdain for the closet-naturalists who only collect dead specimens and never study the living thing.

Scholastic theologians, James wryly asserts, must surely be the closet-naturalists of religion.

Thus, of philosophy James famously pronounces, "we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless."

What use, then, can philosophy be, if we are not to be condemned to the individualist excesses and errors of mystical religious experience?

From the then-contemporary theologian Principal Caird James takes Kant's recognition that self and consciousness are necessary for the perception of truth and transforms this into God being present in all truth through our consciousness. In other words, just because religion describes a this-ness, an extra, and over-abundance present in experience does not mean it is divorced from intellectually expressible experience entirely.

Rather, by confronting religion directly philosophy can "also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous...Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of conceptions that at least are possible....She can perhaps become the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable. ... She can offer mediation between different believers, and help bring about consensus of opinion."

In other words, James is ultimately saying, though religious experience lays ultimately beyond the bounds of intellectual reason, there is a large difference between passion and irrationality, between conviction and insanity. And intellectual distinctions can help us negotiate this otherwise difficult terrain.