Lecture IX William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

Conversion is particularly important in certain religious traditions such as Pietism (followed by Kant and Schleiermacher), Methodism (John Wesley describes how in March 1834 he found ‘his heart strangely warmed ‘ by the presence of God), and in the evangelical tradition (including Southern Baptist America). In this extract from Varieties (published in 1902) he shows his debt to his own student, Edwin Starbuck, whose fieldwork provides empirical evidence to back up claims to experience God. Following E. D. Starbuck, James makes a distinction between volitional conversion, wherein a convert consciously chooses to convert, and self-surrender conversion, which involves a convert letting go and allowing themselves to be converted.

The Conversion of Saul by Caravaggio depicts the moment in Acts 9 when Paul sees a blinding light and falls down on the road to Damascus. In an article in 1987, David Landsborough describes this as evidence of “an attack of temporal lobe epilepsy’.

Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man’s consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works, call it the habitual centre of his personal energy. It makes a great difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or another, be the centre of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set of ideas which he may possess, whether they become central or remain peripheral in him. To say that a man is ‘converted’ means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his energy.

Now if you ask of psychology just how the excitement shifts in a man’s mental system, and why aims that were peripheral become at a certain moment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give a general description of what happens, she is unable in agiven case to account accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how particular experiences are able to change one’s centre of energy so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have a thought, or we perform an act, of time’ has an enormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work subconsciously or half unconsciously.  And when you get a Subject in whom the subconscious life — of which I must speak more fully soon — is largely developed, and in whom motives habitually ripen in silence, you get a case of which you can never give a full account, and in which, both to the Subject and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel. Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love,jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions characteristic of conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.

In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor E.D. Starbuck of California has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in its manifestations the ordinary ‘conversion’ which occurs in young people brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of human beings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and seventeen. The symptoms are the same, — sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of sin ; anxiety about the hereafter ; distress over doubts, and the like. And the result is the same, —a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider outlook…Starbuck’s conclusion as to these ordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one : Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.

“Theology,” says Dr. Starbuck, “takes the adolescent tendencies and builds upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and personal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will intensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration of storm and stress.” The conversion phenomena of ‘conviction of sin’ last, by this investigator’s statistics, about one fifth as long as the periods of adolescent storm and stress phenomena of which he also got statistics, but they are very much more intense.

Bodily accompaniments, loss of sleep and appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them. ” The essential distinction appears to be that conversion intensifies but shortens the period by bringing the person to a definite crisis.” 

The conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has in mind are of course mainly those of very commonplace persons, kept true to a pre-appointed type by instruction, appeal, and example. The particular form which they affect is the result of suggestion and imitation. If they went through their growth-crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of the change would be the same (since it is one in the main so inevitable), its accidents would be different. In Catholic lands, for example, and in our own Episcopalian sects, no such anxiety and conviction of sin is usual as in sects that encourage revivals. The sacraments being more relied on in these more strictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual’s personal acceptance of salvation needs less to be accentuated and led up to.

But every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I propose that forthe future we keep as close as may be to the more first-hand and original forms ofexperience. These are more likely to be found in sporadic adult cases.

Professor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of conversion, subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life almost entirely to its moral aspect. The religioussense he defines as ” the feeling of unwholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, to use thetechnical word, accompanied by the yearning after the peace of unity.” ” The word’religion,’ ” he says, ” is getting more and more to signify the conglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and its release”; and he gives a large number of examples, in which the sin ranges from drunkenness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of it may beset one and crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of the sickened flesh or any form of physical misery.

Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could   be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the centre of their spiritual energy. They maybe excellent persons, servants of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible ; or else, in the language of devotion, they are life-long subjects of ‘barrenness ‘ and ‘dryness.’ Such inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in its origin. Their religious faculties maybe checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious propensities,find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen ; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us to-day lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many persons such inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they refuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious centre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.

In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anæsthetic on the religious side,deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill,attain to the reckless ‘animal spirits’ enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament ; so the nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others, but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are tempera‐ mentally qualified for faith enjoy. All this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man’s hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes.

Now there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which Professor Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for it, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were jammed, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was started in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously.

A certain music teacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thing to be done has been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: ” Stop trying and it will do itself ! ” 

There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and we find both ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two types, which Starbuck calls the volitional type and the type by self-surrender respectively.

In the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual, and consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact is abundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practical accomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts, just as the growth ofour physical bodies does.

Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give examples, but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the self-surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant and often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so because the difference between the two types is after all not radical. Even in the most voluntarily built-up sort of regeneration there are passages of partial self-surrender interposed ; and in the great majority of all cases, when the will has done its uttermost towards bringing one close to the complete unification aspired after, it seems that the very last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of its activity. In other words, self‐ surrender becomes then indispensable. “The personal will,” says Dr. Starbuck, “must be given up. In many cases relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in the direction he desires to go.”

Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account — so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all — of the reasons why self-surrender at thelast moment should be so indispensable. To begin with, there are two things in the mind ofthe candidate for conversion : first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the ‘sin’which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the ‘sin’ almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is ” a process of struggling away from, sin rather than of striving towards righteousness.”  A man’s conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with (jammed, as it were, like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.

Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasised. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self in posse which directs the’ operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organising centre. What then must the person do ? “He must relax,” says Dr. Starbuck, —”that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finishing its own way the work it has begun…. The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one’s self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed objectively.”

” Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity ” is the theological way of putting this fact of the need of self-surrender ; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, “Let one do all in one’s power, and one’s nervous system will do the rest.” Both statements acknowledge the same fact. 

To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, ‘hands off ‘is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided!

We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning-point of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development ofChristianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure’ liberalism’ or transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking in the mediaeval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.