Classics and the Western Canon discussion

We now move from the general overview of the first two lectures to what James called "our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts." [42]*

Lecture 3 contains a number of examples of "the reality of the unseen." James characterizes the "life of religion" (as distinct from the structure of specific religions?) as "the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto," and claims that "This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul." [43]

He goes on to give us some examples of what he intends to be concrete experiences of people who have indeed experienced the reality of the unseen. What struck me, and may have struck others, is that in several cases those having the experiences don't seem, at least in the passages quoted, to have defined them as specifically religious experiences. But they did seem closer to his definition of an unseen order and an attempt to harmonize with it.

After several of these examples he contends that "We may now lay it down as certain that in the distinctively religious sphere of experience, many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief, not in the form of mere conceptions which their intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended." [51]

Quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. Is this the same thing as a direct experience of divine existence? Is he stating that a genuine religious experience requires not only belief in but the actuality of some reality that can be apprehended?

Later in the lecture he talks about the attitudes that the sense of the reality of the religious objects characteristically awakens. They are solemn, there is a sort of joy, and some times a sense of self-sacrifice. [59] To what extent did these feelings appear present in the examples given in the chapter?

There is much more to discuss in this lecture, but I'll talk about lectures 4&5 (which are presented together in my volume, and also in the on-line text I cite below). But responses to this post aren't limited to lecture 3 but can address all three lectures.


* Page numbers from https://csrs.nd.edu/assets/59930/will...

Lectures 4&5. Healthy-Mindedness. Religious Optimism. James asks his listeners in these lectures to “consider the simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complex sorts to be treated on a later day.” [63] This struck me as different from, perhaps even opposite to, his earlier assertion that he was only going to look at extreme examples of religious experience. But okay.

He then has a very interesting series of comments on the transition of Christian belief from a religion focused on sin and salvation to one becoming more focused on happiness. I found myself a bit dubious about this contention. I think there are ebbs and flows in the role of sin in Christian belief. Cotton Mather certainly believed in sin with a vengeance. I think James was accurate in writing about a liberalizing trend in his day, but he didn’t perhaps then know that Billy Sunday was soon to bring an evangelical revival back into the church. And while liberalism is again a strong force in much of Christian belief, evangelical Christianity is also seemingly gaining strength. So we may want to be careful about going with James too strongly on this view. But at least for James, “The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man.” [71] (He seems temporarily to have left the realm of the purely personal religion and delved somewhat into institutional religion, and Christian institutional religion specifically. I hope he finds his way out of this fairly soon.)

And he had what I though was a fascinating point in quoting with apparent approval Parker in writing “Orthodox scholars say: `In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.' It is very true-God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmity against God,’ [65]

Then there is his reference to Walt Whitman (who may not have been familiar to many of the Scottish students he was addressing). It’s a side of Whitman I haven’t recognized before, and need to think about and go back to Leaves of Grass to look for. Do we have Whitman readers here who can comment on James’s view?

His advocacy of liberalism in religious thinking goes so far as to suggest that the ground is laid
“for a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthyminded so well that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use. Accordingly we find “evolutionism” interpreted thus optimistically and embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme.” [72]

He writes of further of “Mind-cure,” (a phrase which I can’t really understand – can others expound?) including Emerson and the transcendentalists (what goes around in this group eventually comes around!), and winds up coming to “closer quarters” with their creed, contending that “The fundamental pillar on which it rests is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually.” [76] Is it really fair to say that this is the general basis of all religion? Discuss?

There is more in these lectures, but I’ve already gone on far too long. Time to hear your thoughts.

In the thread title, you mean week 2, yes?

I haven't made it through the latter two lectures, but I really enjoyed this quote from lecture 3:

The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.

Some of his descriptions of an irrefutable "consciousness of a presence" certainly resonate with the way the devout Protestants of my upbringing talked about God, though it's not something I personally have ever felt in a significant way. I shared on the James background thread an anthropological study that explored this phenomenon among evangelicals. On the other hand, I appreciate that James cites a diversity of manifestations of this "spiritual sensitivity," including among nonreligious people--though his sampling of everyday mystics seems to be composed primarily of intellectuals, judging from the way they describe their experiences.

The phrase "ontological imagination" which James uses is also intriguing. Though to James it seems to principally involve making abstract concepts sensible or "real," it reminds me of the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, who believed that the human imagination was the organ by which we access the deeper, truer layers of reality, and rationalism a means of suppressing this awareness.

I also find this insightful, perhaps more than James himself realizes:

That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for.

Rex wrote: "I also find this insightful, perhaps more than James himself realizes:
That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for."

Have people just lost the will to believe (hmm...sounds like a book title), or has the type of God being argued for changed?

Everyman wrote: "We now move from the general overview of the first two lectures to what James called "our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts." [42]*

Lecture 3 contains a number ..."

I just finished Lecture 3. The majority seems to be focused on examples of individuals who feel a presence of God without a physical manifestation. While he uses these examples to bolster his view that individuals may directly experience the object of their religion, sight unseen, to me they seem more to be a recitation of individuals who may just be hallucinating. I understand his view that religious belief may primarily lie in the realm of the 'non-rational', but I'm not certain that these examples really bolster, but rather undermine, the concept of the direct experience of the divine.

Until now all religions seemed to be equally good due to their utility with hints that some are more equal than others. I wonder what James is referring to as Sinister theologies? Is this an admission that some religions are actually bad?

We find such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which they may be born.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (p. 67). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Rex wrote: "In the thread title, you mean week 2, yes?."

OOps, yes. thanks.

David wrote: "Have people just lost the will to believe (hmm...sounds like a book title), or has the type of God being argued for changed?."

Perhaps both, but I think more the latter. The anthropomorphic God sitting on a throne in a physical Heaven somewhere with Jesus sitting at his right hand has largely been displaced by our increased knowledge of the universe. For most of us, I think, there simply isn't a place for such a God, any more than there is a place underground for the realm of Tartarus visited by Odysseus through a passage somewhere in Italy.

But how James's Unseen Reality is perceived or explained over time has nothing to do with its actual existence or non-existence.

David wrote: "Until now all religions seemed to be equally good due to their utility with hints that some are more equal than others. I wonder what James is referring to as Sinister theologies? Is this an admiss..."

I have overlooked that. It's a really great question.

Everyman wrote: "The anthropomorphic God sitting on a throne in a physical Heaven somewhere with Jesus sitting at his right hand has largely been displaced by our increased knowledge of the universe. For most of us, I think, there simply isn't a place for such a God, any more than there is a place underground for the realm of Tartarus visited by Odysseus through a passage somewhere in Italy. "

I think you're partly right, but the opposite is true as well, in some ways. The classical proofs James speaks of do not prove an anthropological God in a physical heaven, and those who discovered them would argue against the possibility of such a God; while, on the contrary, most of the proofs commonly employed by the ID movement and popular Christian apologists today do presume an anthropological deity (albeit an immaterial one).

The shift as I interpret it was (1) a scientific-philosophical movement to a cosmos operating "mechanically" or automatically according to immutable natural laws, (2) a subsequent theological movement to a deity whose role is to impose these laws on an ontologically separate creation, and finally (3) the increasing ability of science to explain these laws and the order they produce without recourse to God. The ancient proofs were not intended for the semi-deistic creator God of modernity, and hence have fallen into obscurity; the "new" proofs, which correspond better to the popular perception of the way the cosmos works and hence God's relationship with it, have been critically undermined in secular culture and are no longer persuasive to many people. Most modern Christians and atheists both do not conceive God in the way Aquinas did.

As I am reading through the section on Mind Cures and positive thoughts and the entire focus on self of these "Mind Curers", I believe that these experiences have very little or nothing to do with religion because of their narrow focus. They are miraculously healed, which is good, but is the disease cured, or only symptoms?

I have to be honest and admit that it tries my patience somewhat to read James' examples of experiences, religious or otherwise. My thoughts go instantly to "ghost stores, really?" which I relate to other similar stories and "testimonies" I have heard myself from others. Then the flags go up and the skeptic in me can't help but wonder what they are selling besides mind-cures. In most cases, especially when the experience is on a mountaintop it is very difficult to ignore the possible origins of the experience (due to altitude, etc) to focus on any subjectively perceived value alone. I see more clearly now how critical it was for James to spend so much time trying disconnect the origin of the experience from the utility of the experience in the previous lectures. I see "origins" as less of the straw man argument James suggested earlier and more of a valid and critical part of the experience that must be considered, even if it is considered separately.

While James seems willing to class these experiences as hallucinogenic or hallucination-like I am at least willing to call them facts, but obviously I have a lot of trouble with some of the conclusions being drawn from them.

. . .the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Russell, Bertrand. Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript (Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell)

On a positive note I must also say the most realistic and "teetotally" inspiring example of persevering optimism presented so far is the interview with the atheist. The descriptions of Walt Whitman were also endearing.

Is this a definition of or justification for confirmation bais?

Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (p. 62). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

My thoughts.

I think Russell's view of hallucinations is neither here nor there regarding what James is attempting. I'm not interested, and I don't think James is interested, in whether an hallucination is fact or not or error or not. What I'm interested in, and what I think James is getting at, is that these experiences are very powerful and personal and real precisely because they have no objective reference or explanation, and absent a real world explanation, the explanation must be other-worldly, thus the religious interpretations (varieties), which James examines chapter by chapter.

The many examples are presented by James to his audience to get them to understand just how mystical such experiences can be to the mind. James is trying to be as analytical as he can be examining a subject that defies objective analysis.

Xan Shadowflutter wrote: "The many examples are presented by James to his audience to get them to understand just how mystical such experiences can be to the mind. James is trying to be as analytical as he can be examining a subject that defies objective analysis. ."

Good post overall. The passage I included above is, I think, particularly valuable.

It helps me to keep in mind that James is working his way into a fairly new field of inquiry in psychology. Of course humans have always done some form of psychological thinking about themselves and each other, but the field is, I believe, just starting to get organized and systematized as an area of scientific inquiry as James is writing. He is looking at religious experiences in a structured way that I don't had ever been tried before.

Xan Shadowflutter wrote: ". . .absent a real world explanation, the explanation must be other-worldly, thus the religious interpretations (varieties), which James examines chapter by chapter."

Your point is well taken and within the spirit of giving the work full attention. These experiences are certainly very powerful and personal and real. They are facts. However, discounting the real world explanation or possible real world explanation (the origin) and presuming the experiences are other-worldly religious experiences betrays any serious attempt at analytical examination and is precisely the erroneous judgement Russell refers to.

However, in order to grant James as much leeway as possible it does seem to fit his definition of religion for these lectures: The feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation (morally, physical, or ritually) to whatever they may consider such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest whether it be a concrete diety or not [i.e., the Divine]

Do you think the persons in his examples would agree to that definition?

David wrote: "I have to be honest and admit that it tries my patience somewhat to read James' examples of experiences, religious or otherwise. My thoughts go instantly to "ghost stores, really?" which I relate t..."

I, too, find myself daunted, exasperated, and sometimes bored by this talented, febrile, convoluted, grasping mind. I just about give up, and then listen or read again, and say, "oh, maybe that is what he is getting at." He tells us he is not concerned with the ordinary, then produces ordinary people examples. Many of the example experiences seem more secular than religious.

He alludes to the "sinister" and it reminds me of a recently encountered passage in a book that includes how to meditate -- the book advocates saying a prayer asking protection before meditating, seemingly of the view that the opening of self in meditation may make one vulnerable to evil forces as well as to divine (good) forces. All a bit alien to a mind born this many years after Faust and after the seances of James's day. But perhaps not to the poetic seduction that the world may have "thin spots" -- places where the self may become especially aware of something greater than the self.

Everyman wrote: "Quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended. Is this the same thing as a direct experience of divine existence? Is he stating that a genuine religious experience requires not only belief in but the actuality of some reality that can be apprehended? ..."

Some of the examples that James gave could be read as a direct experience. (Page 72, the man who wrote regarding his feeling of God, "I feel him in the sunshine or rain." --- Or page 73, the young man, "Sometimes as I go to church, I sit down, join in the service, and before I go out I feel as if God was with me..."

I can understand and relate to those two sentiments. I can "feel"... a connection with "something more"at times when walking at night when the stars are out and it's so cold that I can hear the hoar frost crunch beneath my feet.

I tried various churches ... I had wanted to attend the church closest to me... but for me, God wasn't there. Not once did I "feel" him there.

James writes in Lecture 3 of "the convincingness of ... feelings of reality... They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, as the are, as a rule, much more convincing that results established by mere logic ever are (73-74).

He goes on to write of how such feelings won't satisfy the requirements of rationalism: "Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system." "Nevertheless, [...] the part of it which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial " (74).

James then speaks of how today (1900+) the order of nature no longer convinces.

I had to pause and think about that.

Someone earlier had posted regarding Charles Taylor. Taylor himself delivered a set of Gifford Lectures and was later awarded the Templeton Prize for the book he wrote on the subject.

I don't have it handy to look up a quote, but he wrote about how, following more and more explanations of events through science, people saw the world... without enchantment. I think Taylor used the phrase that we live in a world of dis-enchantment.
(The Secular Age).

To bring James back in, I think he's saying that people who have closely embraced strict rationalism may have closed their minds to any experience that doesn't fit, but that those people who can experience that "feeling" are more open to the belief.

If you feel/know/experience that there are things/events that can't be explained by strict rationalism... if you feel/know/experience such... then one would be more open to God/Spiritual/the Unexplained.

Personal tangents. No spoilers. (view spoiler)[When my grandmother died, my mother was washing dishes in the sink and looking through the window in front of the sink. She suddenly said, "My mother just passed." She said she saw her mother walking past the house. Shortly afterwards, we got the phone call that she had died. (She'd had a heart attack while driving.)

My father, one summer, started actively putting his affairs in order. He had said that there was "a gray cast" over the world and that he felt/knew someone was dying. He thought it himself. But it was the neighbor.... He had been doing drugs... heroin, if I remember correctly.... and he had OD towards the end of that week.

The event that really stays with me was my grandfather, my mother's father. He and my grandmother were asleep one night when he suddenly woke up, waking my grandmother up in the process. He told her that his brother was standing at the foot of the bed. She told him to go back to sleep. He said, no. He said his brother was hurt. Said his brother had broken his leg. Against the common sense of my grandmother, my grandfather got up, harnessed the horses, drove to some little back country road, and found his brother with a broken leg.

These are not "religious" experiences. But as they can't be explained rationally, it seems to me that they open one's mind to the fact that there is more than science can explain.


(hide spoiler)]

A Secular Age

Rex wrote: "Most modern Christians and atheists both do not conceive God in the way Aquinas did."

I think you are on to something here. Didn't Aquinas have five ways of defining 'God'? I only know the argument from contingency, which is incredibly sophisticated.
One has to wonder whether with the onset of the Reformation and the subsequent myriad of ways and interpetations of being a Christian had something to do with "domesticating" God. Bringing him down to a lower level of existence, so to speak, making him an entity within the universe as a sort of supernatural being -- as opposed to being totally other and outside of time and space -- which in turn becomes wholly insufficient as our knowledge of the world keeps increasing.

I find this to be the most revealing and honest statement in these lectures:

With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true—such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the "immediate inferences" of the religious logic used by ordinary men.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (p. 66). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

I am both surprised and pleased that he acknowledged this reasoning could be wrong, and I am both amazed and a little amused he called it, "religious logic".

David wrote: "I find this to be the most revealing and honest statement in these lectures:With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness wh..."

When I read this passage I wondered, is truth contingent on happiness? I have my difficulties with this reasoning.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Because something is believed to be true it has the potential within the right context to make a person happy.

Kerstin wrote: "Rex wrote: "Most modern Christians and atheists both do not conceive God in the way Aquinas did."

I think you are on to something here. Didn't Aquinas have five ways of defining 'God'? I only know..."

James offered two possible explanations for it, which have more to do with human nature itself than the Protestant notion of God.

First, the irrational part of human nature takes precendence over the rational. “Articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion." In other words, nobody can be converted or deconverted by logic alone.

Second, the logical proofs of God are too abstract and impractical for ordinary men, who are more amenable to "sensible realities". One direct experience, or lack thereof, is stronger than a thousand arguments.

Kerstin wrote: "I think you are on to something here. Didn't Aquinas have five ways of defining 'God'? I only know..."

Aquinas summarized five classical arguments for God (and dismissed one other, the ontological argument). I wouldn't blame the Reformation per se of "bringing God down." There are theological movements in both Catholicism and Protestantism (nouvelle theologie and Radical Orthodoxy respectively) which try to address this problem and how they believe it has crept into western Christianity.

Nouvelle theologie's usual target is William of Ockham's nominalism, which placed God at a metaphysical remove from the cosmos rather than necessarily sacramentally present. Radical Orthodoxy develops the critique of Duns Scotus's philosophical legacy. The simplified version is that while Aquinas and his tradition held that God is altogether beyond being, and related to creation by analogy only, Duns Scotus argued that being is univocal, i.e., that God's being must be predicated in the same sense that created being is predicated. God exists like we exist, though in a different mode than created beings. To put it in another way, in Scotism, Being is a genus that includes both God and man. These late medieval developments in philosophy, combined with a looming Protestant willingness to shed metaphysics in favor of pure Biblical exegesis, plus the shift toward empirical styles of rationalism, utterly transformed our view of God.

James is apparently sympathetic toward the "mind-cure" movement, the "Secret" to health and wealth. Much of what is written in these lectures reminds me of Emerson's idea of 'deity of man', ... and a story about Muhammad Ali.

Ali was once flying on a plane. When a stewardess reminded Ali to fasten his seat belt. He replied, "Superman don't need no seat belt," The stewardess looked him straight in the face, and said, "Superman don't need no airplane either".

If a "mind-curer" were to say to me, "I don't get sick, because I'm one with God". I would reply, "Gods don't die either. Can you keep yourself alive like a god?" I think the same regard for reality kept James from embracing the "healthy-minded" religion fully.

Who has contrasted the "happiness" perspective outlined by James (which to me seems to so parallel the U.S. emphasis on "pursuit of happiness -- the Civil War had ended in 1865, James's two youngest brothers had fought in that war, William and James had not.) with the Buddhist concepts of the primacy of sorrow? I had hoped James might touch the contrasts in perspective and focus more than I perceive he has.

I also wanted more on the contrasts between "happiness" and "joy," insofar as religious experience is concerned.

Ref: "The other brothers" by Donna Rifkind
https://www.newcriterion.com/articles...

Lily wrote: ".I also wanted more on the contrasts between "happiness" and "joy," insofar as religious experience is concerned."

James seems to be aiming at a Hegelian synthesis of happiness and sorrow into a higher joy, but doing it in a rather haphazard, and superficial manner.

Nemo wrote: "Adelle wrote: "Regarding "the pursuit of happiness" as used in the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by t..."

Regarding "the pursuit of happiness" as used in the Declaration of Independence. Edit added: Simply pointing out that it doesn't mean "I am feeling happy" or "Such and such makes me happy."

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclus...

http://historynewsnetwork.org/

Adelle wrote: "Regarding "the pursuit of happiness" as used in the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

If there is no Creator, are those "Rights" still valid?

Nemo wrote: "Adelle wrote: "Regarding "the pursuit of happiness" as used in the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by t..."

If there is no Creator, then there are no unalienable Rights.

If the Laws are only from man, they are only laws and can be revoked.

Nemo wrote: "Second, the logical proofs of God are too abstract and impractical for ordinary men, who are more amenable to "sensible realities". One direct experience, or lack thereof, is stronger than a thousand arguments. "

Very true! I get myself in "trouble" like this all the time :)
I recall a workshop for ministry leaders at our parish years ago, where the presenter started out with anchoring her talk in the Trinity, when the guy sitting next to me mumbles, "this is too deep for me." It made an impression on me and vividly brought to the forefront that the direct experience, as you say, is the more powerful one for most people.

What fascinates me about Christianity is that it has room for all levels of practice. It satisfies those naturally inclined to practical application and at the same time some of the deepest thinkers who ever lived like Aquinas.

Adelle wrote: "If there is no Creator, then there are no unalienable Rights. If the Laws are only from man, they are only laws and can be revoked...."

And if humans declare that existence of unalienable Rights, the practical difference for life on earth is?

Nemo wrote: "James seems to be aiming at a Hegelian synthesis of happiness and sorrow into a higher joy, but doing it in a rather haphazard, and superficial manner...."

Would you say more? My knowledge of Hegelian synthesis is pretty shallow (non-existent is probably closer to honest, unless I recognize it when I see it [g]).

Rex wrote: "Kerstin wrote: "I think you are on to something here. Didn't Aquinas have five ways of defining 'God'? I only know..."

Aquinas summarized five classical arguments for God (and dismissed one other,..."

Wow! this was fabulous Rex.
You really bring to the forefront how many things have to come together in the centuries leading up to major historical changes such as the Reformation to take place. And we've only touched upon the philosophical side. Historically, you also had the mess of the Avignon Papacies and the resulting power vacuum within the Church's leadership on top of it. ...and the Black Death...

Question: can you recommend a book or books that deal with these theological movements in the Middle Ages? It is easy to see these have had monumental ramifications down to our own time.

The more James is digging into the mind-curer perspective, the more I kept thinking, this is the fore-runner of the 1960s. Has anyone else made this connection?

@18Adelle wrote: "Personal tangents. No spoilersl..."

I know that messages such as you share abound. And thank you for sharing.

The following is an example of perhaps more tangible spiritual presence appealing to my rather scientifically trained and oriented mind. Joy Carol is a special acquaintance who has had several major health issues in recent years -- and some years ago, a car jumped a sidewalk in NYC, toppled a roof on her and, when treated for those injuries, a deadly brain tumor was discovered in time to be successfully treated. This first blog entry she aptly titles "Overwhelmed by Angels." http://joycarol.com/blog/

Lily wrote: "Nemo wrote: "James seems to be aiming at a Hegelian synthesis of happiness and sorrow into a higher joy, but doing it in a rather haphazard, and superficial manner...."

Would you say more? My know..."

I recognized it in the last chapters of Lecture 2:

“The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs," occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice—inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... a higher happiness holds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK. ... for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view. ...There are saints who have literally fed on the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death—their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. ”

Here is a link to the painting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_Reni

Kerstin wrote: "Question: can you recommend a book or books that deal with these theological movements in the Middle Ages?"

The go-to accessible book for nouvelle theologie would be, I think, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. Étienne Gilson wrote a fine chronicle called History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, as well as an essay collected titled The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Remi Brague's The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam has been on my to-read list for a while.

Kerstin wrote: "What fascinates me about Christianity is that it has room for all levels of practice. It satisfies those naturally inclined to practical application and at the same time some of the deepest thinkers who ever lived like Aquinas. "

Well said. :)

Lily wrote:

And if humans declare that existence of unali..."


:-) Humans can declare whatever they please. And a different set of humans, and humans in another time will declare something different. ;-)

Concerning lecture 3.

James opens this lecture with yet another definition: "…one might say that (the life of religion) consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul." This is very open-ended - it is a belief I actually seem to share, in a vague way. Evidently James glosses over something essential in his enthusiasm to start a discussion of the reality people sense in abstract ideas.

However, I never heard of someone talking to 'freedom', 'the renaissance' or 'the big bang'. In so far as abstract concepts convey as sense of reality at all, this must be of a completely different order from religious realities. God simply is not an abstract concept (in the religious mind). Elsewhere James states that the divine is to be conceived as an active and personal force, and it would make sense to add that to the definition above.

James next step, consideration of the awareness of unseen personal presences in non-religious contexts is more appropriate and this is always fascinating psychological stuff. But his material is meagre considering the fact that the 'reality of the unseen' is central to religious experience. Also, as usual, James is more concerned with the anecdotal than with the how and why. And yet, I begin the appreciate the importance of his book in the development from theological rationalizations towards a recognition of the emotional core of religion.

Concerning lecture 4/5.

The common man, says James, thinks religion must be true because it makes him happy. He seems to consider this to be the lowest stage on a hierarchy of religious experience. But are there really people who define their religious feelings this way?

James would look for them among those of the 'once-born' psychological type (F.W. Newman), unable or unwilling to see the darker side of life, people 'without metaphysical tendencies'. These are the 'healthy-minded' - a category to which James certainly did not count himself.

Typical for his lower stage of religion are the North-American 'mind-curers'. They are clearly related to the present day preachers of 'positive thinking' (I was not aware of this religious background, but I can’t say I’m surprised), convinced that everything is possible if one's belief is strong enough (Luther!).

James has considerable sympathy for the mind-curers, filling a void left by the one-sided stress on sin in orthodox Christianity ('sinister tendencies') and representing the meliorism of evolutionism. James accepts the claims of the mind-curers at face-value, reasoning that they would not be so popular if their results had not been so impressive.

In fact, these results put mind-cure on a par with science, says James: "Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons."

But apparently James himself does not belong to that class of persons, and I cannot help feeling that for all his praise of mind-cure he essentially looks down upon it as something suitable for a lower class of spiritual beings only.

Wendel wrote: "And yet, I begin the appreciate the importance of his book in the development from theological rationalizations towards a recognition of the emotional core of religion."

I can see where James' argument form the emotional state makes sense to many. Personally, I have real difficulties with this. Emotions are fickle, and without solid theological and philosophical underpinnings religion loses its relevance. And I would argue this is also true for those who have a deeply intuitive approach to religion, which could easily be confused with emotion. This is not to say that emotions don't play a role. They do. What I am saying, is that emotions alone cannot carry the day.

Wendel wrote: "...I cannot help feeling that for all his praise of mind-cure he essentially looks down upon it..."

I haven't figured James out on mind-cure yet. So far I have come away with a sense of ambiguity, but that may be a projection of my own experiences with some of the '60's - '70's positive thinking seminars and with some friends drawn to spiritual leaders today -- a ping-pong feeling of inability to deny some of the positive aspects while at the same time a horror (maybe too strong a word, but not really) at the extremes. In James's case, I think some of the clues may lie in the Swedenborgianism of his father, a philosophy/religion I have only bumped into and have not looked at closely.

Kerstin wrote: "The more James is digging into the mind-curer perspective, the more I kept thinking, this is the fore-runner of the 1960s. Has anyone else made this connection?"

Yes! It seems we go in cycles with various trends in either philosophy and/or practice. The 60's rebelled against a fairly rigid society at the time in the U.S. and included personal liberty and definitely the pursuit of happiness. In medicine, great advances were starting to occur and in the western world, we were dismissing the mind-body-spirit practice of pre-antibiotics and technology . Now it seems we've come full-circle with much of western medicine embracing & exploring the mind-body-spirit connection. After the "wild" 60's & 70's, the 80's & 90's seemed more sedate & conservative, and now the discussion of Happiness is all the rage again. Seek your bliss. The Dali Lama saying that seeking happiness is the most important thing etc..The theme song should be "Don't worry, be Happy". Except it is SO unpractical!!! Don't we need a balance.

Kerstin wrote: "... without solid theological and philosophical underpinnings religion loses its relevance..."

Yes, from my position it is easy to underrate orthodoxy. Among my religious friends and family few are closely connected to this or that denomination. A high degree of religious individualism seems to be the norm in my country (excepting the fast growing Islamic denominations).

Lily wrote: "... a ping-pong feeling of inability to deny some of the positive aspects while at the same time a horror..."

Positive thinking seems a typical North-American habit :-), but it is introduced world-wide by 'prozac leaders'. It also comes in handy when suppressing all forms of criticism: "Think positively or (rather) don't think at all!" See: http://lea.sagepub.com/content/8/2/87...

Here is a summing up of pro's and cons: http://io9.gizmodo.com/does-positive-....

There's also: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

Kerstin wrote: "...What I am saying, is that emotions alone cannot carry the day. ..."

The interplay of "emotion" (feeling?) and "thinking" is one of the areas that fascinates me, although I have lost track of what is being discovered on the front edge of the physiological knowledge. I am also intrigued by the work of people like Marshall B. Rosenberg, founder of the Center for Nonviolent Communication, which teaches techniques used in the resolution of conflict, from domestic to community rebuilding after ethnic cleansing events. Rosenberg's work includes the identification and acknowledgement of feelings in working through issues.

Wendel wrote:

Here is a summing up of pro's and cons:http://io9.gizmodo.com/does-positive-.... 


This article spoke of how sometimes the "positive thinking" ... resulted in people not taking the actions / doing the hard work they needed to do...and so was a "negative" experience.

Another aspect, it seems to me, would be people who repeat the positive messages --- but who know deep down that they don't believe the message. They'd have to know on some level that they were lying to themselves. I would think that would be a negative.

Rex wrote: "Kerstin wrote: "Question: can you recommend a book or books that deal with these theological movements in the Middle Ages?"

The go-to accessible book for nouvelle theologie would be, I think, [boo..."

Thank you :)

Kerstin wrote: "When I read this passage I wondered, is truth contingent on happiness? I have my difficulties with this reasoning.
Shouldn't it be the other way around?"

For me it prompts the question, "would a person adopt a creed that makes him or her feel unhappy?"

If not, does that mean the happiest creed wins? If so, does that mean there is more than feelings of happiness that go into the adoption of a religious creed?